Dit is ons nieuw hondje Kira, een kruising van een waterhond en een Podenko. Ze is sinds 7 februari 2024 bij ons en druk bezig ons hart te veroveren. Het is een lief, aanhankelijk hondje, dat zich op een week snel aan ons heeft aangepast. Ze is heel vinnig en nieuwsgierig, een heel ander hondje dan Noleke.
This is our new dog Kira, a cross between a water dog and a Podenko. She has been with us since February 7, 2024 and is busy winning our hearts. She is a sweet, affectionate dog who quickly adapted to us within a week. She is very quick and curious, a very different dog than Noleke.
DEAR VISITOR,
MY BLOG EXISTS ALREADY 12 YEARS AND 10 MONTHS.
ON 06/04/2024 MORE THAN 1.951.050
VISITORS FROM 134 DIFFERENT NATIONS ALREADY FOUND THEIR WAY TO MY BLOG.
THAT IS AN AVERAGE OF 400GUESTS PER DAY.
THANK YOU FOR VISITING MY BLOG AND HOPE YOU ENJOY EACH TIME.
The purpose of this blog is the creation of an open, international, independent and free forum, where every UFO-researcher can publish the results of his/her research. The languagues, used for this blog, are Dutch, English and French.You can find the articles of a collegue by selecting his category. Each author stays resposable for the continue of his articles. As blogmaster I have the right to refuse an addition or an article, when it attacks other collegues or UFO-groupes.
Druk op onderstaande knop om te reageren in mijn forum
Zoeken in blog
Deze blog is opgedragen aan mijn overleden echtgenote Lucienne.
In 2012 verloor ze haar moedige strijd tegen kanker!
In 2011 startte ik deze blog, omdat ik niet mocht stoppen met mijn UFO-onderzoek.
BEDANKT!!!
Een interessant adres?
UFO'S of UAP'S, ASTRONOMIE, RUIMTEVAART, ARCHEOLOGIE, OUDHEIDKUNDE, SF-SNUFJES EN ANDERE ESOTERISCHE WETENSCHAPPEN - DE ALLERLAATSTE NIEUWTJES
UFO's of UAP'S in België en de rest van de wereld In België had je vooral BUFON of het Belgisch UFO-Netwerk, dat zich met UFO's bezighoudt. BEZOEK DUS ZEKER VOOR ALLE OBJECTIEVE INFORMATIE , enkel nog beschikbaar via Facebook en deze blog.
Verder heb je ook het Belgisch-Ufo-meldpunt en Caelestia, die prachtig, doch ZEER kritisch werk leveren, ja soms zelfs héél sceptisch...
Voor Nederland kan je de mooie site www.ufowijzer.nl bezoeken van Paul Harmans. Een mooie site met veel informatie en artikels.
MUFON of het Mutual UFO Network Inc is een Amerikaanse UFO-vereniging met afdelingen in alle USA-staten en diverse landen.
MUFON's mission is the analytical and scientific investigation of the UFO- Phenomenon for the benefit of humanity...
Je kan ook hun site bekijken onder www.mufon.com.
Ze geven een maandelijks tijdschrift uit, namelijk The MUFON UFO-Journal.
Since 02/01/2020 is Pieter ex-president (=voorzitter) of BUFON, but also ex-National Director MUFON / Flanders and the Netherlands. We work together with the French MUFON Reseau MUFON/EUROP.
ER IS EEN NIEUWE GROEPERING DIE ZICH BUFON NOEMT, MAAR DIE HEBBEN NIETS MET ONZE GROEP TE MAKEN. DEZE COLLEGA'S GEBRUIKEN DE NAAM BUFON VOOR HUN SITE... Ik wens hen veel succes met de verdere uitbouw van hun groep. Zij kunnen de naam BUFON wel geregistreerd hebben, maar het rijke verleden van BUFON kunnen ze niet wegnemen...
31-03-2020
What is dark matter?
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 that 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.
Dark energy is one of the great unsolved mysteries of cosmology. It’s now thought to make up 68% of everything in the universe.
Illustration showing snapshots from a simulation by astrophysicist Volker Springel of the Max Planck Institute in Germany. It represents the growth of cosmic structure (galaxies and voids) when the universe was 0.9 billion, 3.2 billion and 13.7 billion years old (now).
Dark energy is the name given to the mysterious force that’s causing the rate of expansion of our universe to accelerate over time, rather than to slow down. That’s contrary to what one might expect from a universe that began in a Big Bang. Astronomers in the 20th century learned the universe is expanding. They thought the expansion might continue forever, or eventually – if the universe had enough mass and therefore enough self-gravity – reverse and cause a Big Crunch. Now, in early 21st century cosmology, that idea has evolved. The universe is seen as expanding faster today than billions of years ago. What could be causing the rate of expansion to increase? Astronomers now sometimes speak of a repulsive force as a possible way to understand it.
Up until the late 1990s, most cosmologists believed the universe did not have enough mass to cause a Big Crunch. In particular, data acquired by the 2dF Galaxy Redshift Survey and the Sloan Digital Sky Survey seemed to confirm the universe would expand forever, albeit at an ever-slowing rate as the universe’s own mass and own gravity tried to pull it back.
The first indication of something revolutionary about to be discovered came in 1998 during a survey of Type 1A supernovae. These massive explosions of dying giant stars are extremely useful to astronomers because they always output the same amount of light, and can therefore be used as so-called “standard candles” to calculate distances in the cosmos. This is a very simple idea. Think of fireflies at night: they all shine with the same instrinsic brightness. By measuring how bright they are from where you are, you can calculate their distance.
The 1998 survey was being carried out by two international group of astronomers including Americans Adam Riess and Saul Perlmutter, and Brian Schmidt in Australia. Using eight telescopes worldwide, their aim was to use the distance of Type 1A supernovae to calculate the expansion rate of the universe, known as the Hubble Constant (although in reality, as the rate of expansion of the universe varies with time, it is technically not a constant).
The results of the survey were astonishing. Distant supernovae which exploded when the universe was only 2/3 of its current age were much fainter than they should have been, and were thus much further away. The implication of this was that the universe had expanded much faster than it should have done, if current ideas were correct.
This diagram reveals changes in the rate of expansion since the universe’s birth 15 billion years ago. The more shallow the curve, the faster the rate of expansion. The curve changes noticeably about 7.5 billion years ago, when objects in the universe began flying apart at a faster rate. Astronomers theorize that the faster expansion rate is due to a mysterious, dark force: dark energy.
Met with much skepticism in the astronomical community when these results were revealed, the observations were soon replicated by other teams and other methods. By the turn of the millennium, it was becoming clear that the expansion of the universe is not, as was commonly believed, slowing down. It is actually accelerating.
Even more strangely, the expansion had been deaccelerating, as one would expect, until seven or eight billion years after the Big Bang. But then, for reasons completely unknown, a mysterious “anti-gravity force” started to dominate, overcoming the brake that gravity was placing on the expansion, which then reversed its slowdown and started to accelerate.
You can imagine how shocking this revelation was to astronomers and cosmologists.
The force responsible for this acceleration was dubbed dark energy by scientists. In this case, dark means unknown rather than literally dark, as is the case with dark matter. It should be noted that dark energy and dark matter are completely unrelated phenomena. Read more: What is dark matter?
To add to the mystery, the properties of this strange dark energy seem to match Einstein’s cosmological constant, sometimes called his fudge factor and later described by Einstein himself as the greatest professional blunder of his life. Einstein detested the idea of an expanding universe, preferring the static one postulated by steady-state cosmology, which was popular in the early 20th century. He invented an anti-gravity force, of undefined origin, to counteract the observed expansion of the universe, which would result in a non-expanding universe. However, Einstein later retracted this idea, which was not supported by observations.
Dark energy is one of the great unsolved mysteries of cosmology. It is now thought to make up 68% of everything in the universe, with normal, so-called “baryonic” matter – every bit of matter we can actually see – comprising a mere 5%, with the rest consisting of dark matter, another huge cosmic mystery.
Dark energy does behave like Einstein’s anti-gravity force, but its nature and origin remain unknown. One of its greatest mysteries is why dark energy started to dominate the rate of expansion of the universe at a particular point in time billions of years after the Big Bang. If it exists now, why wasn’t it there all along?
The physics of dark energy are highly speculative. One idea which has gained ground in recent years is that dark energy resembles a force known as “quintessence,” which is a relative of the Higgs Field. But as yet there is no observational evidence to support or discount this.
Cosmologists also have no idea if dark energy will continue to accelerate the universe’s expansion forever, leading to a scenario, far in the future, where the acceleration will overcome the forces that hold the universe together and literally tear all matter in the cosmos apart, in a nightmare scenario known as the Big Rip.
There are several current and future space missions and ground-based surveys which will investigate the nature of dark energy, including NASA’s orbiting WFIRST telescope and the international Dark Energy Survey, based in Chile.
It is hoped that soon we will arrive at a greater understanding of this mysterious force, which is having such an influence over the future of the cosmos, but to gain that understanding we need to sketch out a far more complete history of the universe. However, the archaeology of 13.7 billion years is extremely difficult and time-consuming, with so many ancient strata in that history missing or indistinct, so we cannot expect any sudden revelations.
Bottom line: The universe is expanding faster than older theories predicted. Dark energy, one of the great unsolved mysteries of cosmology, may cause its accelerating expansion. Dark energy is now thought to make up 68% of everything in the universe.
An international team of scientists has identified three new species of toothed pterosaurs – flying reptiles of the Cretaceous period, some 100 million years ago – that lived in an ancient river ecosystem in the African Sahara.
The new pterosaurs, described in a study published in the February 19, 2020, in the journal Cretaceous Research, were identified from chunks of jaws and teeth found in a geological formation in Morocco called the Kem Kem Beds. University of Portsmouth paleontologist David Martill is a study co-author. He told The Guardian:
These flying predators soared above a world dominated by predators, including crocodile-like hunters and carnivorous dinosaurs. Interestingly, herbivores such as sauropods and ornithischian dinosaurs are rare.
Many of the predators, including the toothed pterosaurs, preyed on a superabundance of fish.
For such large animals, they would have weighed very little. Their wingspans were around 10 to 13 feet [3 to 4 meters], with their bones almost paper-thin and full of air, very similar to birds. This allowed these awesome creatures to reach incredible sizes and still be able to take off and soar the skies.
Pterosaurs hunted from the air, using a set of large spike-like teeth to grab their prey. Large pterosaurs such as these would have been able to forage over hundreds of miles, with fossil evidence suggesting they flew between South America and Africa, similar to present-day birds such as condors and albatrosses, the researchers said.
Bottom line: Three new species of pterosaurs – flying reptiles – discovered.
For decades, numerous nations, all around the world, have done their utmost to try and harness the mysterious powers of the mind and utilize them as tools of nothing less than espionage. Sometimes, as we shall soon see, digging into matters of the mind can get one killed. Extra-sensory perception (ESP), clairvoyance, precognition, and astral-projection have all been utilized by the CIA, the KGB, and British Intelligence on more than a few occasions. As astonishing as it may sound, the world of psychic 007’s is all too real. It’s a subject that has been researched, with varying degrees of success, for decades. The earliest indications of serious interest on the part of the U.S. Government in the field of psychic phenomena are described in a formerly classified CIA document written in 1977 by Dr. Kenneth A. Kress – then an engineer with the CIA’s Office of Technical Services – and titled Parapsychology in Intelligence.
According to Kress:
“Anecdotal reports of extrasensory perception capabilities have reached U.S. national security agencies at least since World War II, when Hitler was said to rely on astrologers and seers. Suggestions for military applications of ESP continued to be received after World War II. In 1952, the Department of Defense was lectured on the possible usefulness of extrasensory perception in psychological warfare. In 1961, the CIA’s Office of Technical Services became interested in the claims of ESP. Technical project officers soon contacted Stephen I. Abrams, the Director of the Parapsychological Laboratory, Oxford University, England. Under the auspices of Project ULTRA, Abrams prepared a review article which claimed ESP was demonstrated but not understood or controllable.” Kress added: “The report was read with interest but produced no further action for another decade.”
Indeed, it was in the early 1970s that the research began in earnest (although, the FBI got involved in a strange affair in the 1950s). In April 1972, Dr. Russell Targ, a laser physicist with a personal interest in parapsychology and the power of the human mind, met with CIA personnel from the Office of Strategic Intelligence, specifically to discuss paranormal phenomena. Of paramount concern to the CIA was the fact that Targ informed them that the Soviet Union was deeply involved in researching psychic phenomena, mental telepathy and ESP. It did not take the CIA long to realize that the purpose of the Soviet research was to determine if ESP could be used as a tool of espionage. It was this realization that galvanized the CIA into action. As the Kress report stated, in 1973: “The Office of Technical Services funded a $50,000 expanded effort in parapsychology.”
The initial studies utilized a variety of people who were carefully and secretly brought into the project, and who demonstrated a whole range of seemingly paranormal skills. Those same skills could not be reliably replicated on every occasion, however. As evidence of this, Kenneth Kress informed his superiors that, “One subject, by mental effort, apparently caused an increase in temperature; the action could not be duplicated by the second subject. The second subject was able to reproduce, with impressive accuracy, information inside sealed envelopes. Under identical conditions, the first subject could reproduce nothing.” Similarly, some government-sponsored psychics in the period from 1973 to 1974 located secret missile installations in the Soviet Union, found terrorist groups in the Middle East, and successfully remote viewed the interior of the Chinese Embassy in Washington, D.C. Others, meanwhile, provided data that was sketchy and, at times, simply wrong. And it was the continuing rate of success versus the frequency of failure that led to heated debate within the CIA about the overall relevancy and validity of the project.
In Parapsychology in Intelligence, Kenneth Kress confirmed this. After the CIA’s remote viewing team attempted to broaden the range of its operation and secure extra funding in mid-1973, said Kress: “I was told not to increase the scope of the project and not to anticipate any follow-on in this area. The project was too sensitive and potentially embarrassing.” Despite this, the CIA’s research continued, with many of its advances due to a skilled remote-viewer named Pat Price, who had achieved a number of extraordinary successes in the field of ESP, including successfully remotely viewing a sensitive installation that fell under the auspices of the National Security Agency and psychically penetrating missile sites in Libya. Price’s sudden and untimely death from a heart attack in 1975 indirectly led the CIA – according to the official story, at least – to minimize its research into psychic espionage.
Tim Rifat, who has deeply studied the world of top secret, governmental research into psychic spying, says of Pat Price’s death: “It was alleged at the time that the Soviets poisoned Price. It would have been a top priority for the KGB to eliminate Price as his phenomenal remote-viewing abilities would have posed a significant danger to the USSR’s paranormal warfare buildup. He may also have been the victim of an elite group of Russian psi-warriors trained to remotely kill enemies of the Soviet Union.” Murder or just a heart-attack? Who knows?
It gets weirder: In his 1997 book Remote Viewers, Jim Schnabel told the story of the U.S. Intelligence community’s involvement in the controversial issue of psychic spying that largely began in the early-to-mid 1970s. Commenting on the skills of a talented remote-viewer in relation to matters of a UFO nature, one Pat Price, Schnabel noted Price was of the opinion that “…Alaska’s Mount Hayes, the jewel of a glacial range northeast of Anchorage, housed one of the aliens’ largest bases.” According to Pat Price, the aliens that lived deep inside Mount Hayes were very human looking, differing only in their heart, lungs, blood, and eyes. Ominously, he added that the aliens use “thought transfer for motor control of us.” Price added: “The site has also been responsible for strange activity and malfunction of U.S. and Soviet space objects.”
They say that breaking up is hard to do (OK, Neil Sedaka said it) but apparently it’s not so for what was believed to be a hardy comet known as 2I/Borisov which traveled to our solar system all the way from another one and did a flyby of the Sun in December 2019. Polish astronomers tracking the interstellar comet noticed two unexpected bursts of light from 2I/Borisov this month and are afraid it means the little space rock that could may be on its last leg … or tail … and could break up soon. Was it something we said?
“The total brightness increase is thus about 0.7 mag in 5 days between UT 2020 March 4.3 and 9.3. This behavior is strongly indicative of an ongoing nucleus fragmentation.”
2I/Borisov in its better days.
(NASA)
Sounding like car mechanics trying to baffle you with BS when what they really mean is that your Buick is in a bad way, astronomers from the Jagiellonian University in Krakow and the University of Warsaw wrote in The Astronomer’s Telegram that they’re seeing evidence that 2I/Borisov is disintegrating and may not make it out of the solar system, let alone back home or to another star. They are part of the OGLE (Optical Gravitational Lensing Experiment) project which searches for extrasolar planets, dark matter and galactic anomalies and is considered to be Poland’s greatest contribution to the field of astronomy since Copernicus.
“For Solar System comets, it is known that dynamically new comets are 10 times more likely to disintegrate than short-period comets, presumably due to their pristine state and weaker structural strength.”
According to Science Alert, the breakup isn’t exactly a surprise. 2I/Borisov acts like long-period or dynamically new comets from the Oort cloud, which travel much farther than the short-period comets from the Kuiper belt. Apparently, making those short 200-year orbits around the Sun toughen up these short-term comets, allowing them to do a tight turn around the Sun and live to tell the other Kuiper belt comets about it. Of course, being astronomers, the Polish 2I/Borisov team sees a silver lining in this comet’s cloud of cosmic dust and melting ice.
“As the comet disintegrates, observations of its spectrum will reveal its internal chemistry, including its nucleus. It’s an excellent opportunity to study the comet’s guts, and compare it to our Solar System comets, to see how similar or different they are.”
One last look.
As with all relationships, there’s always something to learn from the breakup. It’s the comet’s fault, not ours. Even if there wasn’t a breakup, it’s still gone for good, so there’s no sense in being blue or begging for it to stay. There’s always another one coming soon.
Not much of an inspiration for a song, but Neil didn’t have many hits after “Breaking Up Is Hard To Do” either.
EUROPEAN Space Agency (ESA) researchers have discovered that urine could be key to creating liveable human habitats on the Moon.
If humans want to live on the lunar surface they'll need shelter but will likely rely on local resources to make it.
The substance relies on a component called urea, found in urineCredit: CNSA
Space agencies across the globe have their sights set on colonising the Moon.
Scientists at the ESA have found that urea, a component of urine, could help them do this.
They found that when urea is mixed with lunar material, a kind of 'Moon concrete' is formed.
The researchers used a 3D printer to create cylinders of the new substances.
Space agencies have their sights set on colonising the MoonCredit: CNSA
After several tests they found that their urea-based 'Moon concrete' could support heavy weight and even got stronger over time.
This meant that it was able to stay in the desired shape.
The samples also remained fairly stable once heated to 80°C (176.0 °F).
Resistance was tested during eight freeze-thaw cycles, similar to those that occur on the Moon.
3D printing
Study researcher Ramón Pamies, a professor at the Polytechnic University of Cartagena in Spain, said: "To make the geopolymer concrete that will be used on the Moon, the idea is to use what is there: regolith [loose material from the Moon’s surface] and the water from the ice present in some areas.
"But moreover, with this study we have seen that a waste product, such as the urine of the personnel who occupy the moon bases, could also be used.
"The two main components of this body fluid are water and urea, a molecule that allows the hydrogen bonds to be broken and, therefore, reduces the viscosities of many aqueous mixtures."
Researcher Lena Kjøniksen added: "We have not yet investigated how the urea would be extracted from the urine, as we are assessing whether this would really be necessary, because perhaps its other components could also be used to form the geopolymer concrete.
"The actual water in the urine could be used for the mixture, together with that which can be obtained on the Moon, or a combination of both."
Nasa plans to send its next astronauts to the Moon by 2024.
Earlier this year it was revealed that Nasa scientists are working on a bizarre mushroom Moon and Mars base project.
This could see lunar homes for astronauts being built onsite out of living fungi.
The researchers have been conducting tests to determine if they could successfully grow mycelia fungus in outer space soil.
If the research goes to plan, future astronauts may be growing their own out of this world homes without the need to carry heavy and expensive building materials.
This could make it much easier and cheaper to colonise the Moon and even Mars.
The scientists have listed other advantages of using mushroom for structures including the fact it can grow and repair itself, is fire retardant and a good insulator.
Nasa also said that the fungi has higher bend strength than reinforced concrete so would be good for moulding into solid designs.
The Moon – our closest neighbour explained
Here's what you need to know...
The Moon is a natural satellite – a space-faring body that orbits a planet
It's Earth's only natural satellite, and is the fifth biggest in the Solar System
The Moon measures 2,158 miles across, roughly 0.27 times the diameter of Earth
Temperatures on the Moon range from minus 173 degrees Celcius to 260 degrees Celcius
Experts assumed the Moon was another planet, until Nicolaus Copernicus outlined his theory about our Solar System in 1543
It was eventually assigned to a "class" after Galileo discovered four moons orbiting Jupiter in 1610
The Moon is believed to have formed around 4.51billion years ago
The strength of its gravitational field is about a sixth of Earth's gravity
Earth and the Moon have "synchronous rotation", which means we always see the same side of the Moon – hence the phrase "dark side of the Moon"
The Moon's surface is actually dark, but appears bright in the sky due to its reflective ground
During a solar eclipse, the Moon covers the Sun almost completely. Both objects appear a similar size in the sky because the Sun is both 400 times larger and farther
The first spacecraft to reach the Moon was in 1959, as part of the Soviet Union's Lunar program
The first manned orbital mission was Nasa's Apollo 8 in 1968
And the first manned lunar landing was in 1969, as part of the Apollo 11 mission
In other space news, Space Force has successfully launched its first mission since its establishment as a US military service.
The Hubble Space Telescope has revealed new data about what may be the most powerful cosmic storm in the universe.
Here is a cool photo from NASA of the asteroid Eros. On it is a rectangular structure. The funny thing about it is that even NASA noticed this alien structure on the asteroid, but still didnt have the realization of what it actually was...an alien structure. NASA states: The large, rectangular boulder at the upper right is 45 meters (148 feet) across. So you see, NASA saw it but just didn't realize what it was at the time. Not sure how this slipped past them, but sure it wont last long if they find out. Scott C. Waring - Taiwan
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- Gemiddelde waardering: 4/5 - (1 Stemmen) Categorie:Ruins, strange artifacts on other planets, moons, ed ( Fr, EN, NL )
Aliens Are Observing Us While They Pass The Earth
Aliens Are Observing Us While They Pass The Earth
From February through the first week of May, countless strange space anomalies and formations of UFOs appeared on the ISS live feed camera while passing the Earth.
Now, after three weeks, the ISS live feed has captured a second wave of these anomalies, clusters of UFOs and debris of unknown origin.
About these UFOs, the images show that these UFOs fly in large coordinated groups.
It is noteworthy that this second wave also follows the same flight path as the first wave, indicating that something is going on in deep space that forces all of these UFOs to flee to other locations.
You can watch this formation of UFOs live while they pass the earth (Starts at about 50 minutes into the video) at: http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/126204272
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- Gemiddelde waardering: 0/5 - (0 Stemmen) Categorie:ALIEN LIFE, UFO- CRASHES, ABDUCTIONS, MEN IN BLACK, ed ( FR. , NL; E )
The Hidden Russian “M-Triangle” UFO Hotspot Zone
The Hidden Russian “M-Triangle” UFO Hotspot Zone
There are 2 major places that report of UFO sightings in Russia. The first is the M-triangle. Located at a distance of 600 miles from Moscow, the place is also known as Russia’s Area 51. The second one is Sochi. Alien space crafts and flying saucers have been regularly spotted by the locals. According to some people the Bythka Mountain in the area is a UFO base that serves as an airport for aliens between worlds.
This place is said to be landing – spot of space ships, coming from other Galaxies. Nearly everyone who visited this place experienced something unknown, enigmatic, some presence of miracle forces. Nearly everyone felt a unique comfort of soul. After first trip to M-zone people come back again.
The coronavirus pandemic hasn’t caused UFOs to stay home and that’s good news for those going stir-crazy in areas where their businesses and schools are closed and just want to go outside for some fresh air and a look upward. There’s been an increased number of UFO encounters of the orb kind, whose numbers have been fewer lately because of the infatuation with the Tic Tac UFOs. These recent sightings are literally all over the globe and figuratively all over the map when it comes to descriptions.
The first comes from Seattle in Washington State where YouTube user Denispin captured three orbs moving, changing positions and changing colors as they crossed the sky on March 20th, eventually being joined by a fourth. The UFOs started out as white orbs, then changed to red before going white again over the three minute phone video. (Watch the video here.)
As some commenters pointed out, this was just three days after another similar sighting over El Paso, Texas. Those seemed to stay in the same relative position in the sky. El Paso is home to the enormous Fort Bliss U.S. Army base and those orbs were most likely flares. Similarly, Seattle and sister city Tacoma are home to a number of U.S. military bases, including a couple of Air Force bases, and is a strategic West Coast defense location. While these orbs could be military planes or helicopters, their slow movement suggests drones (especially with the changing colors) or flares. However, they’re still open for speculation since there have been no official explanations as of this writing.
Another cause of UFO sightings
“Airline Pilot with 29 years service filmed a ‘Tic Tac’ UFO over Mexico”
A UFO sighting that might have a connection to the El Paso sightings just by way of proximity is this one over Monterrey in the Northern Mexico state of Nuevo Leon, which is roughly equidistant from both El Paso and San Antonio. (Watch it here.) Dated March 28th, most of the YouTube descriptions refer to the pilot’s experience and call it a “Tic Tic” UFO, although what appears to be the pilot’s description doesn’t make that connection.
“I have never in my life been witness to such phenomena however my first officer and i were in complete awe. i have multiple still photos and 4 videos that i would love to share with your network and with the world. forgive a slight delay in the submission as i had my doubts about reporting such occurrences but have no doubts as to what was witnessed. forgive some of the chatter and expletives but this was other worldly. i have still photos as well.”
Unfortunately, the identity of the pilot is not revealed so his claimed experience can’t be checked. Pilot sightings are generally given more credence that those ground-based, especially since they can better identify UFOs (which this one couldn’t) and pick them up on radar (which this one didn’t), leading the pilot to call it “an unidentified flying object, bro.” Based on the video and the comments, this doesn’t appear to be a ‘Tic Tac’ of the Nimitz kind since it’s not zipping around at unbelievable speeds and doesn’t appear on radar. Without any more to go on, this one is still an open-and-not-shut case of unidentified flying object … bro.
None of these UFO sightings appear to be lens flares like this one
The final video was alleged to have been taken on the evening of March 25 of one UFO flying over St. Petersburg in western Russia which then seemed to drop three more. (Watch it here.) The dropped orbs makes this appear to be a drone or plane dropping flares, and indeed those three objects eventually fall to the ground. At that point, the witness zooms in on the single orb and it appears to be three lights, which suggests it could be a triangular plane, although its slow movement still points to a drone. With St. Petersburg being such a strategic location in Western Russia, some military cause of these orbs is highly likely.
While the coronavirus shutdowns are obviously driving people outdoors to look at the sky, increasing their chances of seeing UFOs, are these orb sightings an indication of militaries stepping up their defenses (or offenses) in anticipation of things getting worse on an international scale?
There are some people in history who just seem to attract mysterious tales. Our story here revolves around a Russian scientist by the name of Genrikh Mavrikiyevich Ludvig, who was supposedly also an architect, philosopher, and a scholar of ancient languages. He was also apparently very at odds with the Stalin regime, which landed him in trouble on more than one occasion, and he was also known for his extensive knowledge of the occult and for his considerable esoteric knowledge. He had a vast knowledge of ancient Sumerian and Etruscan civilizations, and also of medicinal herbs. During World War II he was purportedly designer of military technology and also an invaluable pioneer of architectural plans for military bases in marshy environments. Yet, a very curious chapter of this mysterious man’s life was the time when he was allegedly allowed access to the secret Vatican archives and purportedly found all manner of evidence of ancient aliens within.
It is perhaps first important to understand just what the Vatican secret archives actually are. Comprised of approximately 53 miles of labyrinthine aisles of shelving harboring rows upon countless rows of texts, books, and scrolls ranging from the more modern to fragile, time-worn manuscripts reaching back 12 centuries into the shadows of time, the Vatican Archives, officially known as the Archivum Secretum Apostolicum Vaticanum, was originally constructed in 1612 by Pope Paul V and is a truly a huge treasure trove of information collected by the Church over hundreds of years. This vast repository of knowledge holds state papers, Holy See paperwork, papal correspondence and personal letters, and countless historical records, documents and texts accumulated by the Vatican from every corner of the known world that date back to the 8th century, all housed within a massive, carefully climate-controlled structure adjacent to the Vatican Library that is designed more like a fortress than a library, replete with impenetrable underground bunkers and with only one known heavily guarded entrance.
The list of known contents of the archives is far too long to completely cover here, but includes a wealth of historical documents including handwritten letters to the Pope from such important figures such as Mary Queen of Scotts asking for a pardon before her execution, King Henry VIII, Michelangelo asking to be paid for his work on the Sistine Chapel, Abraham Lincoln, Jefferson Davis, Grand Empress Dowager Helena Wang of China in the 17th century, one written on birch bark by the Canadian Ojibwe tribe in 1887, and many, many others. Here there are official edicts by Popes through the centuries, including excommunications such as that of German religious heretic and founder of Lutheranism Martin Luther, official papal decrees such as the one made in 1493 by Pope Alexander VI that split the entire known world among Spain and Portugal, as well as personal communications from popes throughout history. Here one can also find such gems as a nearly 200-foot long scroll containing details of the trials of the Knights Templar for heresy and blasphemy dating to 1307, as well as a handwritten transcript detailing the trial of astronomer Galileo Galilei in the 17th century, as well as the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception, which states that Mary was conceived without sin, scrawled out on a piece of parchment dating to 1854.
The Vatican Archives are often referred to as the Vatican Secret Archives, mostly due to a mistranslation of the Latin word secretum, which is actually closer in meaning to “personal” or “private” rather than “secret” or “confidential” as many think, but it could also have to do with the archive’s history of strict inaccessibility and reclusiveness from the outside world. They had been for centuries practically completely forbidden and closed off from nearly everyone, even Church officials, with not even Cardinals allowed access to their treasure trove of information, and it was not until 1881 that Pope Leo XIII allowed limited access to outsiders, yet this does little to dispel the secrecy surrounding the archives and it is still no small feat to enter this inner sanctum of all of the Vatican’s knowledge.
To gain access to these isolated archives and islands of knowledge one must be a qualified, recognized scholar or researcher who has been thoroughly vetted by the Holy See, a process which can take years. Amateur historians, journalists, students, or armchair researchers need not apply and are strictly forbidden. If one is lucky enough to be granted access they enter through the sole entrance, the well-guarded Porta Sant’Anna, after which they are required to state exactly what it is they are looking for among the voluminous collection. Once entering the rows of dusty old texts there is no browsing allowed, and you can only retrieve three documents listed in one of the thick, intimidatingly massive catalogs that are meticulously handwritten in Latin or Italian. If you cannot decide what you want to look at within a set amount of time under strict supervision you are ushered out of the archives and must wait until the following day to try again. Even if you do know what you want to look at there are still oppressive limitations on what is available for perusal. All materials in the archives are only released for public viewing after a full 75 years have passed, meaning newer documents are restricted, and even then there are large swaths of archived content that are totally off limits and probably forever will be.
In other words, this isn’t a library open to just anyone, yet in the 1920s, Ludvig was somehow granted access for reasons still left unclear. While there he supposedly was free to peruse the vast stores of manuscripts on offer, and came across some very bizarre things indeed. He would claim to have come across numerous texts on alchemy and ancient codes, and even stranger still manuscripts on UFOs and ancient aliens. According to Ludvig, there were texts outlining in detail how aliens had visited Earth many millennia ago and had managed to influence ancient civilizations such as the Egyptians, the Mayans, and the Mesopotamians. Some of the information he claimed to have gotten was about how the Egyptian pyramids were ancient energy machines, and he even said he had found historical records on nuclear weapons being used in ancient times, which had resulted in the melting of the fortress walls of Babylon, as well as plans for alien spacecraft.
None of this was allowed out of the Vatican archives, but Ludvig would apparently somehow get his hands on photographs of some of these documents, and the rest he would commit to memory and later write out as much as he could remember. He would show these too his own students, and apparently this was enough to get him accused of being a Vatican spy and imprisoned in a concentration camp in 1938. He would eventually be released and continue his work throughout World War II, keeping most of what he had seen in the Vatican to himself during these years, before taking most of it with him to his grave in 1973.
The story of Genrikh Mavrikiyevich Ludvig might have very well been forgotten and confined to the mists of time forever if it had not been discussed by Soviet mathematician Matest M. Agrest in the 1950s, and then later mentioned in the Russian publication Sovershenno Sekretno, in an article by writer and journalist Vladimir Kucharyants. It has since been picked up and much discussed among UFOlogists and ancient astronaut theorists, but one is left to wonder just how real any of this is. It is certain that he indeed was a real person, and was indeed an architect and occultist, but that is about all we know for sure. There is little corroborating evidence and very few sources available on his life, so who was Ludvig really, and did he really gain access to the secret Vatican archives and find all of this amazing information? If so, how did he manage to get photographs out of this veritable fortress of secrecy? One does not just waltz in to this place and take photographs of these secretive tomes. How much of this is true and how much is possibly urban legend? There has certainly been some skepticism of the claims, and skeptic Jason Colavito has said of it all:
Ludvig doesn’t seem to actually have been an ancient astronaut theorist in the 1920s and 1930s. Instead, the article talks about his belief in lost civilizations (the Sumerians, he said, were like a book whose first pages had been pulled out) and that ancient monuments had esoteric spiritual energy. The Pyramids, he said, could be activated with meditation. He spoke of astral projection and ascending to meet God in the spheres beyond earth. In other words, he sounds more like a Theosophist rather than a nuts-and-bolts ancient astronaut theorist, much like his contemporary, the émigré occultist Nicholas Roerich.
The only evidence that he believed in spacemen or that there was a nuclear bombing of Babylon comes from one of his former students, who recalled Ludvig talking of such issues much, much later—in the 1960s, the height of the Soviet ancient astronaut craze, when Matest M. Agrest, Alexander Kasantsev, and I. S. Shklovskii had popularized the idea. So, if I take the evidence at face value, it sounds like Ludvig had typical Theosophical-style esoteric ideas about ancient history in the 1930s and later converted to ancient astronaut beliefs in the 1960s, like many of his generation who saw parallels between the esoteric and ancient astronauts. As for the Vatican material, that is probably a combination of exaggeration, secondhand memory, and wishful thinking based on “interpretations” that the Russian scholar imposed on the source materials—source materials that are conveniently not cited by the only person to claim they existed, a student of his 50 years ago.
He does make a good point, and considering there are precious few sources for this story and it mostly revolves around the recollections of that one guy, it is left open to speculation as to whether Ludvig ever did make it into the catacombs of the Vatican archives and if so what he really found there. It is all rather mysterious, and although both the man and the archives are wreathed in myth and legend it is hard to know on this one where reality and fantasy lie and at what point they merge. It is all a rather interesting tale nevertheless, and with a lack of any further information will probably remain lost to history.
30 years later, we still don't know what really happened during the Belgian UFO wave
30 years later, we still don't know what really happened during the Belgian UFO wave
JevaLange
At first, the witnesses claimed, all you noticed were the lights.
They were so bright you could read by them, so brilliant that a policeman described them as "like lights on a huge football field." Only gradually did you notice the object they emitted from — a hulking triangular shape, with three enormous spotlights pointed toward the ground, and a red, flashing light at its center. "The whole thing," recalled the policeman, as if barely able to believe it himself, "was floating in the air."
It was a clear November night in 1989, near the town of Eupen, Belgium, which sits some seven miles from the German border. Heinrich Nicoll, the policeman, and his partner, Hubert Von Montigny, called their dispatcher to report the object they'd stumbled on while on a routine patrol. "Suddenly, they told me they were seeing a strange object in the sky," Albert Creutz, who was on the receiving end, told Unsolved Mysteries in a 1992 episode. "It made no noise. We joked about it and said it might be Santa Claus trying to land."
But by the time the evening was over, at least 30 different groups and three separate pairs of police officers would allege to have seen the unidentified flying object. And they wouldn't be the last. Belgium's months-long "UFO wave" culminated 30 years ago today — on March 30, 1990 — in a physics-defying chase through the skies over Europe as two Belgian Air Force F-16s pursued mysterious objects on their radars that they couldn't even see.
But, okay okay, did aliens really visit Belgium? It certainly seems deeply, deeply unlikely. Yet three decades later, it's still hard to entirely dismiss the 2,000-odd sightings that took place in the country between November 1989 and April 1990. As Patrick Ferryn, the president of the Belgian committee for the study of space phenomena, SOBEPS, told The Telegraph, "You must know that most of these sightings will have the most banal explanation but there is a residue, which we simply can't explain. And of those, there may be two or three where we may have questions over where they came from."
Lots can be ruled out, though. For example, a classic photograph of the triangle-shaped aircraft, known as the "Petit-Rechain picture," is without a doubt a hoax — the forger admitted as much when he came forward in 2011. "We made the model with polystyrene, we painted it, and then we started sticking things to it, then we suspended it in the air ... then we took the photo," the prankster confessed to Reuters. Brian Dunning, the writer and producer of the podcast Skeptoid, also refutes a number of the sightings, arguing that the November apparitions were in fact a helicopter, and that the police officers were interviewed by a biased ufologist. Conflicting information, published by Reuters, claims instead that the lights over Eupen were from "a Soviet satellite breaking up."
Regardless, where things really start to get strange is in March 1990. At that point, there had been months of sporadic sightings throughout Belgium, including by an army colonel, André Amond, who claimed to have seen the lights while driving in his car with his wife in December. The Belgian military, needless to say, was well aware of the descriptions pouring in from across the country, and it had little in the way of answers.
Then-Chief of Operations of the Air Staff, General Wilfried De Brouwer — who offered his account to investigative reporter Leslie Kean for her 2010 book UFOs: Generals, Pilots, and Government Officials Go on the Record — said that his initial belief was that the American military must have been testing some sort of experimental aircraft over his country. He went as far as to file inquiries with the U.S. Embassy in Brussels, prompting the Americans to create a memo, dryly titled "Belgium and the UFO Issue," which confirmed that "no USAF stealth aircrafts were operating in the... area during the periods in question."
The reports were credible enough, though, that Belgium's Air Force, federal aviation authorities, and police devised a plan to try to catch one of the unidentified intruders in action by preparing F-16s to quickly take off if a sighting was ever reported by both the police and a radar station at the same time. Sure enough, as De Brouwer recounts in UFOs, that night came on March 30, when "several policemen" and "two military radar stations" spotted an unknown object. "Once aloft, the [Belgian] pilots tried to intercept the alleged crafts, and at one point recorded targets on their radar with unusual behavior, such as jumping huge distances in seconds and accelerating beyond human capacity," De Brouwer writes.
But frustratingly, the pilots never managed to see the object they were pursuing. After analysis of the aircraft's readings, "the Air Force's decision was that the evidence was insufficient to prove that there were real crafts in the air on that occasion," De Brouwer reports. Still, throughout 1990, the Air Force was asked — and could never specifically account for — the sightings, which, all told, numbered in the thousands by the time they quietly started going away again in April.
Three decades later, explanations are still in short supply, although some scientists now consider the event to be an example of mass hysteria. Dunning, quoting UFO skeptic Philip Klass, writes, "Once news coverage leads the public to believe that UFOs may be in the vicinity, there are numerous natural and man-made objects which, especially when seen at night, can take on unusual characteristics in the minds of hopeful viewers. Their UFO reports in turn add to the mass excitement, which encourages still more observers to watch for UFOs."
But De Brouwer still believes otherwise. "I can conclude with confidence that the observations during what is now known as the Belgian wave were not caused by mass hysteria," he says in UFOs. "The witnesses interviewed by investigators were sincere and honest. They did not previously know each other. Many were surprised by what they saw and today ... they are still prepared to confirm their unusual experience."
What we do know for certain is that there is a lot we don't yet understand about our universe. Even the U.S. Army has multiple stories of chasing strange, impossible objects through the sky. While the Belgian UFO wave likely wasn't a visitation by little green men, it remains without a satisfying answer even all these decades and technological advances later. "Today there is not yet any explanation!" Amond, the colonel who saw the lights with his wife, told Kean. "That is a pity, because I want to know before dying. Give me a correct explanation of my sighting; that is all I can ask."
And now, the object has been seen above Seguin in possibly the clearest video yet.
The clip shows a collection of seven lights moving in a triangle formation across the night sky.
A stunned man behind the camera can be heard exclaiming: “What the f***?”
The lights continue on their path and after just a few moments disappear out of sight.
(Image: YOUTUBE/DISCLOSE SCREEN)
YouTube conspiracy channel Disclose Screen posted the video in a round-up of UFO sightings on March 28.
One viewer suggested: “I think one or two of these are the army and the police playing with their new toys.”
Another ridiculously claimed the coronavirus quarantine was part of the conspiracy, saying: “So I guess I'm not the only one questioning why they are keeping people in.”
In the past, conspiracy theorists have come up with numerous outlandish suggestions for what triangular UFOs are.
Some believe they are an example of a top-secret government fleet of craft known as the TR-3B.
The TR-3 Black Manta is the name of a supposed 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 although has never been officially confirmed.
But others have more realistic views, previously offering suggestions of Chinese lanterns, drones or simply passenger planes.
(Credit: Charles Carter/Keck Institute for Space Studies via NASA)
On October 31, 1936, six young tinkerers nicknamed the “Rocket Boys” nearly incinerated themselves in an effort to break free of Earth’s gravity. The group had huddled in a gully in the foothills of California’s San Gabriel Mountains to test a small alcohol-fueled jet engine. They wanted to prove that rocket engines could venture into space, at a time when such ideas were widely met with ridicule. That goal was disrupted when an oxygen line caught fire and thrashed around wildly, shooting flames.
The Rocket Boys’ audacity caught the attention of aerodynamicist Theodore von Karman, who already worked with two of them at Caltech. Not far from the location of their fiery mishap, he established a small test area where the Rocket Boys resumed their experiments. In 1943, the site became the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), and von Karman its first director. JPL has since grown into a sprawling NASA field center with thousands of employees, yet it has managed to retain its founding motivation: test the limits of exploration, convention be damned.
They’ve had many successes over the years. In the early 1970s, JPL engineers built Pioneer 10, the first spacecraft to reach escape velocity from the solar system. A few years later, they followed up with Voyagers 1 and 2, the fastest of the many objects aimed at interstellar space. From the beginning of the Space Age to the launch of the Voyager spacecrafts — a span of just two decades — rocket scientists more than doubled flight speeds. But in the decades since, only one more spacecraft has followed the Voyagers out of the solar system, and nothing has done so at such a high speed. Now JPL’s rocketeers are getting restless again, and quietly plotting the next great leap.
The consistent theme of the new efforts is that the solar system is not enough. It is time to venture beyond the known planets, on toward the stars. John Brophy, a flight engineer at JPL, is developing a novel engine that could accelerate space travel by another factor of 10. Leon Alkalai, a JPL mission architect, is plotting a distant journey that would begin with an improbable, Icarus-esque plunge toward the sun. And JPL research scientist Slava Turyshev has perhaps the wildest idea of all, a space telescope that could provide an intimate look at a far-off Earth-like planet — without actually going there.
These are all long shots (not entirely crazy, according to Brophy), but if even one succeeds, the implications will be huge. The Rocket Boys and their ilk helped launch humans as a space-faring species. The current generation at JPL could be the ones to take us interstellar.
NASA's Dawn spacecraft used ion propulsion to explore Ceres. Future missions could take the tech even further.
(Credit: NASA-JPL/Caltech)
Rocket Reactions
For Brophy, inspiration came from Breakthrough Starshot, an extravagantly bold project announced in 2016 by the late Stephen Hawking and Russian billionaire Yuri Milner. The ultimate aim of the project is to build a mile-wide laser array that could blast a miniature spacecraft to 20 percent the speed of light, allowing it to reach the Alpha Centauri star system (our closest stellar neighbor) in just two decades.
Brophy was skeptical but intrigued. Ambitious aspirations are nothing new for him. “JPL encourages people to think outside the box, and my wacky ideas are getting wackier in time,” he says. Even by that standard, the Starshot concept struck him as a little too far from technological reality. But he did begin to wonder if he could take the same concept but scale it down so that it might actually be feasible within our lifetimes.
What especially captivated Brophy was the idea of using a Starshot-style laser beam to help deal with the “rocket equation,” which links the motion of a spacecraft to the amount of propellant it carries. The rocket equation confronts every would-be space explorer with its cruel logic. If you want to go faster, you need more fuel, but more fuel adds mass. More mass means you need even more fuel to haul around that extra weight. That fuel makes the whole thing heavier still, and so on. That’s why it took a 1.4 million-pound rocket to launch the 1,800-pound Voyager probes: The starting weight was almost entirely fuel.
Since his graduate student days in the late 1970s, Brophy has been developing a vastly more efficient type of rocketry known as ion propulsion. An ion engine uses electric power to shoot positively charged atoms (called ions) out of a thruster at high velocity. Each atom provides just a tiny kick, but collectively they can push the rocket to a much greater velocity than a conventional chemical rocket. Better yet, the power needed to run the ion engine can come from solar panels — no heavy onboard fuel tanks or generators required. By squeezing more speed out of less propellant, ion propulsion goes a long way toward taming the rocket equation.
But ion engines come with drawbacks of their own. The farther they get from the sun, the more limited they are by how much electricity their solar panels can generate. You can make the panels huge, but then you add a lot of weight, and the rocket equation slams you again. And ion engines have such gentle thrust that they can’t leave the ground on their own; it then takes them a long time in space to accelerate to their record-breaking speeds. Brophy knows these issues well: He helped design the ion engine aboard NASA’s Dawn spacecraft, which just completed an 11-year mission to asteroid Vesta and dwarf planet Ceres. Even with its formidable 65-foot span of solar cells, Dawn went from zero to 60 in an unhurried four days.
An orbiting laser system could power an ion propulsion vehicle through the solar system, and prove reusable.
(Credit: Jay Smith/Discover)
Ion the Prize
While Brophy was pondering this impasse between efficient engines and insufficient solar power, the Breakthrough Starshot concept came out, and it got the gears turning in his head. He wondered: What if you replaced sunshine with a high-intensity laser beam pointed at your spacecraft? Powered by the more efficient laser, your ion engine could run much harder while still saving weight by not having to carry your power source on board.
Two years after his epiphany, Brophy is giving me a tour of an SUV-size test chamber at JPL, where he puts a high-performance ion engine through its paces. His prototype uses lithium ions, which are much lighter than the xenon ions Dawn used, and therefore need less energy to attain higher velocities. It also runs at 6,000 volts compared with Dawn’s 1,000 volts. “The performance of this thing would be very startling if you had the laser to power it up,” he says.
There’s just one minor issue: That laser does not exist. Although he drastically downsized the Starshot concept, Brophy still envisions a 100-megawatt space-based laser system, generating 1,000 times more power than the International Space Station, aimed precisely at a fast-receding spacecraft. “We’re not sure how to do that,” he concedes. It would be by far the biggest off-world engineering project ever undertaken. Once built, though, the array could be used over and over, with different missions, as an all-purpose rocket booster.
As an example, Brophy describes a lithium-ion-powered spacecraft with 300-foot wings of photovoltaic panels powering a full-size version of the engine he is developing at JPL. The laser would bathe the panels in light a hundred times as bright as sunshine, keeping the ion engine running from here to Pluto, about 4 billion miles away. The spacecraft could then coast along on its considerable velocity, racking up another 4 billion miles every year or two.
At that pace, a spacecraft could rapidly explore the dim areas where comets come from, or set off for the as-yet-undiscovered Planet 9, or go ... almost anywhere in the general vicinity of the solar system.
“It’s like we have this shiny new hammer, so I go around looking for new nails to pound in,” Brophy says dreamily. “We have a whole long list of missions that you could do if you could go fast.”
Only the Voyager probes have passed the heliopause, leaving the sun’s influence. New probes may one day study the interstellar medium lying beyond.
(Credit: NASA-JPL/Caltech)
Interstellar Medium Well
After Brophy’s genial giddiness, it is a shock to talk to Alkalai, in charge of formulating new missions at JPL’s Engineering and Science Directorate. Sitting in his large, glassy office, he seems every bit the no-nonsense administrator, but he, too, is a man with an exploratory vision.
Like Brophy, Alkalai thinks the Breakthrough Starshot people have the right vision, but not enough patience. “We’re nowhere near where we need to be technologically to design a mission to another star,” he says. “So we need to start by taking baby steps.”
Alkalai has a specific step in mind. Although we can’t yet visit another star, we can send a probe to sample the interstellar medium, the sparse gas and dust that flows between the stars.
“I’m very interested in understanding the material outside the solar system. Ultimately, we got created from that. Life originated from those primordial dust clouds,” Alkalai says. “We know that there’s organic materials in it, but what kind? What abundances? Are there water molecules in it? That would be huge to understand.”
The interstellar medium remains poorly understood because we can’t get our hands on it: A constant blast of particles from the sun — the solar wind — pushes it far from Earth. But if we could reach beyond the sun’s influence, to a distance of 20 billion miles (about 200 times Earth’s distance from the sun), we could finally examine, for the first time, pristine samples of our home galaxy.
Alkalai wants answers, and he wants to see the results firsthand. He’s 60, so that sets an aggressive schedule — no time to wait for giant space lasers. Instead, he proposes a simpler, albeit still unproven, technology known as a solar thermal rocket. It would carry a large cache of cold liquid hydrogen, protected somehow from the heat of the sun, and execute a shocking dive to within about 1 million miles of the solar surface. At closest approach, the rocket would let the intense solar heat come pouring in, perhaps by jettisoning a shield. The sun’s energy would rapidly vaporize the hydrogen, sending it racing out of a rocket nozzle. The combined push from the escaping hydrogen, and the assist from the sun’s own gravity, would let the ship start its interstellar journey at speeds up to 60 miles per second, faster than any human object yet —and it only gets faster from there.
“It’s very challenging, but we’re modeling the physics now,” Alkalai says. He hopes to begin testing elements of a thermal-rocket system this year, and then develop his concept into a realistic mission that could launch in the next decade or so. It would reach the interstellar medium another decade after that. In addition to sampling our galactic environment, such a probe could examine how the sun interacts with the interstellar medium, study the structure of dust in the solar system and perhaps visit a distant dwarf planet along the way.
It would be a journey, Alkalai says, “like nothing we’ve done in the past.”
How a solar gravitational lens works.
(Credits: Courtesy of Slava Turyshev; The Aerospace Corp.; Jim Deluca/Jimiticus via YouYube (2); Jay Smith)
Catch A Glimpse
Solar thermal rockets and laser-ion engines, impressive as they may be, are still absurdly inadequate for crossing the tremendous gulf between our solar system and exoplanets — planets orbiting other stars. In the spirit of the Rocket Boys, Turyshev is not letting absurdity stop him. He is developing a cunning workaround: a virtual mission to another star.
Turyshev tells me he wants to send a space telescope to a region known as the solar gravitational lens (SGL). The area begins a daunting 50 billion miles away, though that’s still hundreds of times closer than our closest stellar neighbors. Once you get far enough into the SGL, something marvelous happens. When you look back toward the sun, any object directly behind it appears stretched out, forming a ring, and hugely magnified. That ring is the result of our star’s intense gravity, which warps space like a lens, altering the appearance of the distant object’s light.
If you position yourself correctly within the SGL, the object being magnified from behind the sun could be an intriguing exoplanet. A space telescope floating at the SGL, Turyshev explains, could then maneuver around, sampling different parts of the light ring and reconstructing the snippets of bent light into megapixel snapshots of the planet in question.
I have to interrupt him here. Did he say megapixel, like the resolution you get on your camera phone? Yes, he really is talking about an image measuring 1,000 by 1,000 pixels, good enough to see details smaller than 10 miles wide on a planet up to 100 light-years (600 trillion miles!) away.
“We could peek under the clouds and see continents. We could see weather patterns and topography, which is very exciting,” Turyshev says. He doesn’t mention it, but he doesn’t need to: That kind of resolution could also reveal megacities or other giant artificial structures, should they exist.
Assuming the JPL boffins can solve the transportation issues of getting to the SGL, the mission itself is fairly straightforward, if enormously challenging. Turyshev and his collaborators (Alkalai among them) will need to develop a Hubble-size space telescope,
or a mini-fleet of smaller telescopes, that can survive the 30-year journey. They will need to perfect an onboard artificial intelligence capable of running operations without guidance from home. Above all, they will need a target — a planet so intriguing that people are willing to spend decades and billions of dollars studying it. NASA’s TESS space telescope is doing some of that reconnaissance work right now, scanning for Earth-size worlds around local stars.
“Ultimately, to see the life on an exoplanet, we will have to visit. But a gravity lens mission allows you to study potential targets many decades, if not centuries, earlier,” Turyshev says merrily.
A journey to the SGL would take us beyond Alkalai’s baby steps, well onto the path toward interstellar exploration. It’s another audacious goal, but at least the odds of catching fire are much lower this time around.
10 reasons why Aliens likely exist (however won’t visit us at any point in the near future)
10 reasons why Aliens likely exist (however won’t visit us at any point in the near future)
It’s a numbers game, and likelihood proposes outsiders are out there
Most researchers concur that outsider life in all likelihood exists known to mankind some place. Our universe contains in the locale of 300 billion stars, and we’re presently finding planets going around these stars. The more we look, and the more innovation we put out there, the a greater amount of these exoplanets we find. Until now, we have distinguished around 4,000 – and that is simply in our system. In the event that we take a gander at the universe overall, at that point there are roughly 200 billion cosmic systems. For what reason would life simply happen here? “We’re quite persuaded it’s out there,” says space researcher Maggie Aderin-Pocock. “It is absolutely a numbers game. It is likelihood.”
We definitely know about many conceivably livable planets
We can gauge the airs of these exoplanets utilizing a method called spectroscopy. This is the place starlight goes through the environment of the exoplanet, permitting us to do a concoction examination. On the off chance that we recognize the sort of substances we find in Earth’s climate, it wouldn’t really affirm such there’s reality out there – yet it’s a solid sign that it’s conceivable. “We are aware of many possibly tenable planets,” says Professor Tim O’Brien. “We’re in all likelihood – inside the following decade or somewhere in the vicinity – going to discover a planet that may well even show potential proof forever.”
We’ve discovered life on earth in places that we didn’t figure life might exist
At the point when we’re mulling over the presence of life past our planet, it merits thinking about that we’ve found organisms occupying spaces on Earth where the possibility of endurance was already incomprehensible. These lifeforms depend on well-known DNA – so it’s life as we probably am aware it – yet they exist in the profound channels of our seas, far away from daylight. Previously, we accepted life could just exist on a planet, a specific good ways from its neighborhood star (so it has the correct degrees of radiation). Discovering life on Earth flourishing where we didn’t think it potential has made us fully aware of the idea that there may be moons ready to help life as well.
The existence that is out there may not be canny life
Most researchers are certain about the odds of life existing known to mankind. What we don’t know is if there’s clever life. “For the greater part of the historical backdrop of life on Earth it was straightforward life. It was bacterial life for billions of years truth be told,” says Tim. Furthermore, it was a progression of chance occasions that prompted the advancement of even multicellular life on our planet. For outsider life to reach, it should be genuinely – and mechanically – progressed.
Insightful lifeforms might be living in conditions that make correspondence troublesome
With 300 billion stars in the Milky Way, numerous with heavenly bodies, and ten billion years or more in which a civilisation could have emerged right now, is hard to accept that no lifeform ever arrived at where it could traverse interstellar separations. As the incomparable Italian physicist Enrico Fermi stated, it’s difficult to clarify why outsiders haven’t made it to Earth. In any case, there are methods for clarifying why this hasn’t occurred, says Maggie: “Our most serious issue is we just have one case of life, and such is reality on this planet.”
We need to break new ground. For instance, she says, “In the event that you live by a star which is very dynamic, you may live beneath the ground… It doesn’t imply that shrewd life isn’t out there however you probably won’t have the methods for transmitting since you live underneath the surface.”
Or on the other hand we might be attempting to convey to one another utilizing contradicting techniques
When enormous telescopes like the one at Jodrell Bank Observatory were fabricated, researchers understood that if there was a civilisation out there with a comparable piece of innovation, we may have the option to get signals sent from one to the next. “We’ve currently utilized radio telescopes to tune in out for signals from extra-earthly civilisations since around 1960,” says Tim who is Director of Jodrell Bank. Be that as it may, there are such a significant number of various manners by which a lifeform may impart signs, we could spend our lives searching for them and get no place. It’s conceivable that we simply haven’t hit upon the correct strategy.
Stars are so far away, it could take a large number of years for an extra-earthbound message to contact us
Just as technique for correspondence, separation represents an enormous deterrent. For another undertaking called Breakthrough Listen, researchers are looking through a million of the closest stars, but at the same time they’re taking a gander at stars that are in our Milky Way, 25,000 light years away. A message sent from one of these stars would need to go in the area of 25,000 years before it even contacted us. On the off chance that outsider life is out there, it could take a huge number of years before we hear a peep from it.
To reach, our civilisation and an outsider civilisation need to exist simultaneously
An outsider civilisation additionally needs to exist simultaneously as people. It’s conceivable that extra-terrestrials have reached Earth – even visited – yet it was path back in the Jurassic time, when dinosaurs meandered the earth, thus we basically don’t think about it. “On the off chance that our civilisations don’t cover,” says Maggie, “at that point we will never meet the outsiders.” Perhaps they came quite a while prior, or they’ll come later on, long after human life has terminated.
Long separation space travel isn’t yet workable for us – and may not be for them
It’s at present past our capacities to send an enormous shuttle between the stars. As things stand, we can send radio waves at the speed of light – however that is only a radio wave, going through the vacuum of room. In the event that we need to send physical mass out into the ether, as tests or individuals, at that point it gets much all the more testing.
Leap forward Starshot, a task supported by Stephen Hawking before he kicked the bucket, is investigating the choice of utilizing a sun based sail – a sheet of metallised plastic that sits in space – to transmit objects into our nearby planetary group. It would include an immense bank of lasers shooting photons up to hit the sun based sail, move their force, and send the sun oriented sail quickening off at up to a fifth of the speed of light. As energizing as this may be, it would at present take a hundred years to arrive at a planet 20 light years away – and current innovation implies we can’t send anything heavier than one gram in weight. People unquestionably won’t get out there at any point in the near future! What’s more, it’s exceptionally conceivable that any outsiders haven’t broke intergalactic space travel either.
Extraterrestrials need to really need to visit us
Regardless of whether lifeforms with innovation unmistakably further developed than our own exist, they need to need to reach. Any outsiders out there may feel emotionless about us Earthlings! Also, they may not be excessively excited about going between the stars for a huge number of years so as to find a good pace individual. This could likewise clarify why we’ve never had extraterrestrial appearances – they’re essentially upbeat where they are.
Geologists say the worm-like creature – about the size of a grain of rice – is the 1st ancestor on the family tree that contains most animals today, including humans.
Geologists say they have discovered a fossil of the first ancestor on the family tree that contains most animals today, including humans. The fossil of the extinct worm-like creature was discovered in deposits in Nilpena in South Australia belonging to the Ediacaran Period, an interval of geological time ranging 635 to 541 million years ago.
The tiny creature, called Ikaria wariootia, lived about 555 million years ago and was about the size of a grain of rice. According to the study, published March 23, 2020, in the peer-reviewed journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, it is the earliest bilaterian, or organism with a front and back, two symmetrical sides, and openings at either end connected by a gut.
The development of bilateral symmetry, scientists say, was a critical step in the evolution of animal life, giving organisms the ability to move purposefully and a common, yet successful, way to organize their bodies. A multitude of animals, from worms to insects to dinosaurs to humans, are organized around this same basic bilaterian body plan.
For the new research, University of California/Riverside scientists Scott Evans and Mary Droser used a 3-D laser scanner to analyze miniscule oval impressions near fossilized burrows found in 555 million-year-old Ediacaran Period deposits in Nilpena, South Australia. Their research revealed the regular, consistent shape of a cylindrical body with a distinct head and tail and faintly grooved musculature. The animal ranged between 2-7 millimeters (up to about a quarter of an inch) long and about 1-2.5 millimeters (up to about a tenth of an inch) wide, just the right size to have made the burrows. Evans said in a statement:
We thought these animals should have existed during this interval, but always understood they would be difficult to recognize. Once we had the 3-D scans, we knew that we had made an important discovery.
A 3-D laser scan of an Ikaria wariootia impression.
In spite of its relatively simple shape, Ikaria was complex compared to other fossils from this period. It burrowed in thin layers of well-oxygenated sand on the ocean floor in search of organic matter, indicating rudimentary sensory abilities. The depth and curvature of Ikaria represent clearly distinct front and rear ends, supporting the directed movement found in the burrows.
The burrows also preserve crosswise, “V”-shaped ridges, suggesting Ikaria moved by contracting muscles across its body like a worm, known as peristaltic locomotion. Evidence of sediment displacement in the burrows and signs the organism fed on buried organic matter reveal Ikaria probably had a mouth, anus, and gut.
Bottom line: Geologists have discovered the fossil of a worm-like creature that they say is the first ancestor on the family tree that contains most animals today, including humans.
There are at least two bright spots in these strange times: Telescopes are still studying distant galaxies and penguins are still pooping across Antarctica. In both cases, if you're looking for new ways to pass the time while you stay home, you can help out scientists studying these phenomena.
Citizen science is nothing new, but it's a particularly appealing option as the spreading coronavirus prompts containment measures around the world. So if you'd like to take your mind off current events for a while, consider chipping in on a research project.
"I think where we can tap into people's enthusiasm through their computer, that kind of captures the zeitgeist of coronavirus: what can we do when we're all trapped at home," Heather Lynch, a statistical ecologist at Stony Brook University in New York, told Space.com.
Lynch is affiliated with two different citizen-science projects aimed at better understanding penguins, which, listen, we know are not in space. One of those projects, called Penguin Watch and accessible here, enlists people to identify the birds in photographs taken automatically near their colonies. But the other relies on satellite imagery to identify such colonies.
Penguins are so, hmm, productive, that biologists find the birds by combing through satellite imagery looking for swaths of their poop, which scientists call guano. "So we can map out how much area is covered in guano, and that gives us a really good estimate of how many penguins were actually at the colony at that particular location," Lynch said.
Such estimates are valuable data that's otherwise difficult to acquire, she said. "Even though penguins are the most charismatic and maybe the most obvious wildlife to survey in Antarctica, until recently, we knew relatively little about how many penguins there were in Antarctica and how their abundance was distributed because surveying Antarctica is so difficult."
That's where the satellites come into play. Lynch and her colleagues use data gathered by a few different types of orbital systems. Commercial satellites offer data that is quite detailed, NASA's Landsat program offers a 40-year perspective on penguin activities and Google Earth pulls in publicly accessible satellite data that citizen scientists can comb through.
Satellite imagery of the Danger Islands, where scientists discovered previously unknown Adelie penguin colonies. (Image credit: NASA)
It's that data that supports Lynch's Mapping Application for Penguin Populations and Projected Dynamics project. The main goal of the initiative is to provide Antarctic policymakers with more comprehensive data about penguin populations in one place. But the scientists need help locating all those birds, and for that, they enlist what they call penguin detectives.
"The citizen science part of this comes in because there's just so much of Antarctica," Lynch said. "The way that we find penguin colonies is by and large through manual searching of imagery: image after image, foot by foot, scanning the coastline for evidence of penguin guano."
And the uncooperative buggers sometimes relocate without bothering to tell the scientists looking for them. "Every time we think that we've found all the penguin colonies," Lynch said, "we soon discover that we find more, or that new colonies are being established over time, because of climate change, for example."
And maintaining an accurate map of penguin colonies is crucial if humans want to enact policies that keep the tuxedoed birds safe. For example, Lynch and her colleagues surveying Landsat imagery spotted some colonies of Adelie penguins on what's called the Danger Island archipelago.
When they visited the area to follow up on those observations, they found more penguins than they had ever imagined, even though they thought they'd found all the Adelie colonies in Antarctica. "In fact, these were some of the biggest Adelie penguins colonies in the world," Lynch said. "It was this sort of undiscovered hotspot of Adelie penguins."
That discovery has been passed along to policymakers who are deciding where to draw the borders of a marine protected area in the region. "It was exactly that kind of impact that we want to have," Lynch said.
But if penguin poop, even penguin poop from space, doesn't sound like your thing, here's an alternative: check out some weird-looking galaxies. You can do that through another citizen-science project, called Galaxy Zoo.
The program has been around for more than a decade, enlisting volunteers to classify the shapes of galaxies. That's the sort of task that anyone can do. "You don't even need to know what a galaxy is," Chris Lintott, an astrophysicist at the University of Oxford, told Space.com. And although the shape isn't difficult to determine, it is valuable information to have.
"The shape of a galaxy tells you about its history: it tells you about when it accreted material, when it collided with other galaxies, when it formed stars and all sorts of other things," Lintott said. "But astronomers are quite good at getting images of galaxies and less good at sorting through the data." Hence, turning to the public. After a brief training session, volunteers are turned loose on the scientists' supply of images.
"We don't need people to spend hours contemplating a particular system unless they want to, just a guess and you get another galaxy," Lintott said. "Many people describe it as a bit like eating a packet of chips. You take one, you take another, you take another, and you can surf your way through the universe that way."
And recently, the project instituted a new twist that ensures things stay interesting. Although the Galaxy Zoo project was born of the premise that humans were better at classifying galaxies than computers, 12 years has changed the game a bit. Now, the project has added an algorithm, which takes care of the galaxies that are easiest to classify and saves the stranger ones for participants.
Galaxies come in a host of shapes, which can tell scientists about the history of these structures. (Image credit: NASA, ESA, and G. Bacon, J. DePasquale, F. Summers, and Z. Levay (STScI))
Identifications made by Galaxy Zoo volunteers have recently allowed scientists to determine that black holes at the center of galaxies grow steadily, not through collisions of the structures around them.
Having humans involved in the process is valuable, Lintott said, because of their willingness to notice things an algorithm might not. "People get distracted, and they're distracted along the way by the unexpected and the unusual," Lintott said. "We've found new types of galaxy and new sorts of things in the sky because somebody who was taking part in the project did a very human thing and just said, 'This is unusual. I don't know what this is.'"
And because the program pulls data automatically from observatory programs, bringing fresh images to the site, there's always something new to see. "You might well be the first person ever to see that galaxy," Lintott said. "Just by logging onto the website, you can literally see something that no one has ever seen before."
A next-generation crew spacecraft that China is preparing for a flight test this spring appears to be capable of docking with the International Space Station (ISS).
An image posted by the Shanghai Academy of Spaceflight Technology (SAST) shows the new spacecraft’s docking system, which appears compatible with the International Docking System Standard (IDSS).
NASA, the European Space Agency and Russia's federal space agency, known as Roscosmos, use IDSS-compatible systems or adapters. These are in use on the ISS to facilitate rendezvous and docking with spacecraft.
The new spacecraft is designed to boost China's capabilities in sending humans into orbit, reduce costs through partial reusability and allow astronauts to survive the radiation environment and high-speed reentries of deep-space missions.
The as-yet-unnamed spacecraft is 28.9 feet (8.8 meters) long with a mass at liftoff of 23.8 tons (21.6 metric tons). It will be capable of carrying six astronauts, or three astronauts and 1,100 lbs. (500 kilograms) of cargo to China’s planned space station.
A prototype of the next-gen crewed spacecraft is being prepared for a test flight at the Wenchang Satellite Launch Center. Launch on a Long March 5B rocket is expected in mid- to late April.
The IDSS docking mechanism is androgynous. A first such system was developed and used for the 1975 Apollo-Soyuz Test Project, meaning neither the U.S. nor Soviet spacecraft had "male" or "female" mechanisms.
China has demonstrated rendezvous and docking capabilities with Shenzhou crewed spacecraft and the Tiangong-1 and Tiangong-2 space labs, as well as with the Tianzhou cargo spacecraft.
The rendezvous systems on spacecraft, which facilitate the maneuvering and matching of vectors and velocities for close approaches, may, however, need to be adapted to be compatible.
But even if the new Chinese crewed spacecraft can technically rendezvous and dock with the ISS, it is currently not possible politically.
While China cooperates with ESA and Russia, the United States has effectively excluded China from the ISS project. The US government in 2011 introduced text into legislation, referred to as the "Wolf Amendment," that severely restricts opportunities for NASA and other agencies from bilateral cooperation with entities linked to the Chinese government.
The test flight of the new spacecraft will also test China's Long March 5B launch vehicle. If successful, the new rocket will subsequently be used to launch the 20-metric-ton modules of the Chinese Space Station.
While looking through Sol 1448 of Mars, I noticed a strange creature on the hillside. The object seems to be a species of lizard, but unlike anything we have here on Earth. This create has massive hind legs and two front thinner legs. Six legs in total. The animal has a short reptile like tail that curls at its end. The head of the creature is more similar to that of a mammal than a reptile. Its tall ears bent forward like a dogs, its long snout area and thick mouth area also similar to that of a dog. Perhaps its living species of pet that people on Mars preferred to keep company with? Hard to say, but it would be nice if the rover drove a bit closer to see this animal in more detail.
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Mysterious bright UFO-like object suddenly appears on the surface of the Moon
Mysterious bright UFO-like object suddenly appears on the surface of the Moon
Amysterious bright UFO-like object suddenly appeared on the surface of the Moon captured in a live telescope footage on March 29, 2020.
Strange ‘lights’ have been seen on the moon before and often, this phenomenon is associated with UFOs or extraterrestrial activities on the moon.
A possible explanation for these lights is the so-called ‘Transient Lunar Phenomenon' which is a short-lived light, color, or change in appearance on the surface of the Moon.
Claims of short-lived lunar phenomena go back at least 1,000 years, with some having been observed independently by multiple witnesses or reputable scientists. Most lunar scientists will acknowledge that transient events such as outgassing and impact cratering do occur over geologic time: the controversy lies in the frequency of such events.
It has been suggested that effects related to either electrostatic charging or discharging might be able to account for some of the transient lunar phenomena.
It is possible that the strange light is such a 'transent Lunar Phenomenon', however we can not rule out that the object is of extraterrestrial origin.
Extraterrestrial researchers have claimed they spotted a sliver UFO during a livestream from one of the Starlink satellites of SpaceX.
The mysterious object was observed during the livestream on March 18.
Using Falcon 9 rockets, Space X successfully launched into orbit 60 Starlink satellites at the end of February, the fourth Starlink’s overall launch.
Alien hunters actually noticed two UFOs within 20 seconds, but the closer one was more visible. They observed its detail as a silver bowl with vast and fat domes on top and bottom. They also noticed the side disk edges were small and thin.
NASA scientists argued that all the reported strange UFO sightings were nothing more than “space dandruff” hovering in front of cameras.
According to former NASA engineer James Oberg, these spots of dandruff can be anything from flakes of ice, parts of chipped paint in zero gravity, or ISS insulation that has broken off.
However, some UFO hunters don’t believe these kinds of mundane explanations, saying that they only meant to push away the public from the truth.
The Starlink network currently composed of more than 200 satellites. The government plans to have 22 launches this year to form a constellation of hundreds of satellites for the creation of a global broadband internet network.
Acfer 086is one of a large collection of meteorites found in the Algerian Sahara desert.
The small space rock was found in Agemour, Algeria, in 1990 and weighed only 173 grams.
Acfer 086 is classified as a CV3 carbonaceous chondrite, and shows a low level of shock and a moderate degree of weathering.
In a new study, Dr. McGeoch and her colleagues from PLEX Corporation and Bruker Scientific LLC analyzed a sample of Acfer 086 from the Harvard Mineralogical and Geological Museum.
Using mass spectrometry, they detected the signal of an unusual iron- and lithium-containing protein.
Further analysis showed the new protein was mainly composed of glycine and hydroxyglycine amino acids.
“This is the first report of a protein from any extraterrestrial source,” the researchers wrote in their paper.
“Room temperature extracts from micron-sized meteorite particles contain polymers of amino acids with a definite chain length centered at 16 residues.”
“Analysis via iron and lithium isotope satellites in mass spectrometry reveals a novel protein motif with iron atoms closing out the ends of anti-parallel peptide chains composed of glycine.”
Model of the hemolithin molecule: space-filling mode (top), ball and stick (center), enlarged view of iron, oxygen and lithium termination (bottom). White = H; orange = Li; gray = C; blue = N; red = O and green = Fe. Hydrogen bonds are shown by dotted lines.
Image credit: McGeoch et al, arXiv: 2002.11688.
Dubbed hemolithin, the newly-discovered protein is believed to have been created approximately 4.6 billion years ago.
“The principal indicator of extraterrestrial origin is an extreme raised D/H (deuterium/hydrogen) ratio that is revealed by close quantitative fitting of isotopic satellite peaks,” the scientists wrote.
“The average molecular deuterium excess above terrestrial is (25,700 ± 3,500)%0, or a D/H ratio of (4.1 ± 0.5) x10-3, comparable to cometary levels, interstellar levels and also equal to the highest prior report in micrometeorites.”
“Very high deuterium content indicates proto-solar disk or molecular cloud origin,” they added.
The team’s paper was posted on the arXiv.org preprint server in February 2020.
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Malcolm W. McGeoch et al. 2020. Hemolithin: a Meteoritic Protein containing Iron and Lithium. arXiv: 2002.11688
Space Physicists Find Plasmoid in Magnetosphere of Uranus
Space Physicists Find Plasmoid in Magnetosphere of Uranus
Uranus possesses an intrinsic magnetic field that encircles the ice giant and influences the local space environment. The solar wind plasma, made up of charged particles, flows away from the Sun and interacts with Uranus’ magnetic field to form what is called a planetary magnetosphere. In a new study, a duo of space physicists at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center analyzed high-resolution magnetic field data collected by Voyager 2 during the Uranus flyby in 1986 and found that the spacecraft flew through a plasmoid— a giant bubble filled with planetary plasma — in the tail of Uranus’ magnetosphere.
Uranus in natural colors.
Image credit: NASA / ESA / Hubble Team / Erich Karkoschka, University of Arizona.
Little known at the time of Voyager 2’s flyby, plasmoids have since become recognized as an important way planets lose mass.
These giant bubbles of plasma pinch off from the end of a planet’s magnetotail, the part of its magnetic field blown back by the Sun like a windsock.
With enough time, escaping plasmoids can drain the ions from a planet’s atmosphere, fundamentally changing its composition.
They had been observed at Earth and other planets, but no one had detected plasmoids at Uranus — yet.
Dr. Gina DiBraccio, a space physicist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center and project scientist for the Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution (MAVEN) mission, and her colleague, Dr. Dan Gershman, analyzed data from Voyager 2’s magnetometer.
With no idea what they’d find, they zoomed in closer than previous studies, plotting a new datapoint every 1.92 seconds.
Smooth lines gave way to jagged spikes and dips. And that’s when they saw it: a tiny zigzag with a big story.
“Do you think that could be … a plasmoid?” Dr. Gershman asked Dr. DiBraccio, catching sight of the squiggle.
The plasmoid they found occupied a mere 60 seconds of Voyager 2’s 45-hour-long flight by Uranus. It appeared as a quick up-down blip in the magnetometer data.
“But if you plotted it in 3D, it would look like a cylinder,” Dr. Gershman said.
Comparing their results to plasmoids observed at Jupiter, Saturn and Mercury, they estimated a cylindrical shape at least 204,000 km (127,000 miles) long, and up to roughly 400,000 km (250,000 miles) across.
Like all planetary plasmoids, it was full of charged particles — mostly ionized hydrogen, the researchers believe.
Readings from inside the plasmoid — as Voyager 2 flew through it — hinted at its origins.
Whereas some plasmoids have a twisted internal magnetic field, Dr. DiBraccio and Dr. Gershman observed smooth, closed magnetic loops. Such loop-like plasmoids are typically formed as a spinning planet flings bits of its atmosphere to space.
“Centrifugal forces take over, and the plasmoid pinches off,” Dr. Gershman said.
According to their estimates, plasmoids like that one could account for between 15 and 55% of atmospheric mass loss at Uranus, a greater proportion than either Jupiter or Saturn. It may well be the dominant way Uranus sheds its atmosphere to space.
How has plasmoid escape changed Uranus over time? With only one set of observations, it’s hard to say.
“Imagine if one spacecraft just flew through this room and tried to characterize the entire Earth. Obviously it’s not going to show you anything about what the Sahara or Antarctica is like,” Dr. DiBraccio said.
But the findings help focus new questions about the planet. The remaining mystery is part of the draw.
“It’s why I love planetary science. You’re always going somewhere you don’t really know,” Dr. DiBraccio said.
The findings were published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.
Fossils of a new dromaeosaur date to the end of the Age of Dinosaurs
Fossils of a new dromaeosaur date to the end of the Age of Dinosaurs
Newly discovered species suggests these fierce predators were diversifying right up to the end
Dineobellator notohesperus (illustrated in foreground) was a fierce, feathered predator that lived about 68 million years ago, alongside horned dinosaurs like Ojoceratops and sauropods like Alamosaurus (background).
A wolf-sized warrior, kin to the fierce, feathered Velociraptor, prowled what is now New Mexico about 68 million years ago.
Dineobellator notohesperus was a dromaeosaur, a group of swift, agile predators that is distantly related to the much larger Tyrannosaurus rex. The discovery of this new species suggests that dromaeosaurs were still diversifying, and even becoming better at pursuing prey, right up to the end of the Age of Dinosaurs, researchers say March 26 in Scientific Reports.
That age came to an abrupt close at the end of the Cretaceous Period about 66 million years ago, when a mass extinction event wiped out all nonbird dinosaurs. A gap in the global fossil record for dromaeosaurs near the end of the Cretaceous had led some scientists to wonder whether the group was already in decline before the extinction, says Steven Jasinski, a paleontologist at the State Museum of Pennsylvania in Harrisburg (SN: 4/21/16). The new find suggests otherwise.
A skeletal reconstruction of D. notohesperus shows that the dromaeosaur, one of a group of agile predators, was about the size of a modern wolf. Analyses of over 20 fossil bits revealed that the dinosaur had feathers and was likely stronger than the closely related Velociraptor.S. JASINSKI
Since 2008, Jasinski and his colleagues have recovered more than 20 fossilized pieces of the new species from the Bisti/De-Na-Zin Wilderness, a rapidly eroding region of barren badlands in northwestern New Mexico. Analyses of muscle attachment sites on the fossilized forelimbs suggest the dinosaur was unusually strong for a dromaeosaur, with a very tight grip in its hands and feet. That grip, Jasinski says, was likely stronger than that of its famous kinfolk, Velociraptor and Utahraptor, giving the new species extra weaponry in its pursuit of prey.
Like many other dromaeosaurs, D. notohesperus had feathers, evidenced by the presence of quill nobs — bumps indicating where the feathers were attached — on its limbs (SN: 9/19/07). But, like Velociraptor, it probably used the feathers for purposes other than flight, Jasinski says, such as sexual selection, camouflage or added agility while on the hunt.
If Pluto has a subsurface ocean, it may be old and deep
If Pluto has a subsurface ocean, it may be old and deep
New research hints that liquid water might be common at the solar system’s edge
NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft revealed Pluto’s largest impact basin, Sputnik Planitia, which makes up part of the dwarf planet’s famous heart-shaped feature. The basin may hide a subsurface sea.
A suspected subsurface ocean on Pluto might be old and deep.
New analyses of images from NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft suggest that the dwarf planet has had an underground ocean since shortly after Pluto formed 4.5 billion years ago, and that the ocean may surround and interact with the rocky core.
If so, oceans could be common at the solar system’s edge — and may even be able to support life. That possibly “transforms the way we think about the Kuiper Belt,” the region of icy objects beyond the orbit of Neptune (SN: 3/27/19), says planetary scientist Adeene Denton of Purdue University in West Lafayette, Ind.
On its pass through the Kuiper Belt in 2015, New Horizons revealed that despite the dwarf planet’s location nearly 6 billion kilometers from the sun, Pluto showed signs of hosting an ocean of liquid water beneath an icy shell (SN: 9/23/16).
How much liquid may lie beneath Pluto’s ground, how long it’s been there, and how much the water may have partially frozen over time is hard to tell from the surface. The new research, which had been scheduled for presentation the week of March 16 at the canceled Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in The Woodlands, Texas, has dug into those questions.
Dark lines (circled) on the surface of Pluto, shown in this image from NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft, could mark ripples created when a large object probably slammed into the opposite side of the dwarf planet.NEW HORIZONS TEAM
“If there’s an ocean today, it raises the question of, when did that ocean get there?” says planetary scientist Carver Bierson of the University of California, Santa Cruz.
Bierson considered two possible histories for Pluto’s potential ocean. If the dwarf planet had a “cold start,” any subsurface water would first have been frozen before melting under heat from decaying radioactive elements in the dwarf planet’s core, only to partially freeze again over time. In that scenario, Bierson expected to see cracks and ripples across Pluto’s icy shell from the orb’s contraction as the ice melted and then expansion as water refroze. Contracting would make the ice crumple into mountainlike features, while expanding would stretch the ice and create faults and graben.
Bierson’s second scenario envisioned a “warm start” for Pluto, where the ocean would have been liquid for nearly all of Pluto’s 4.5-billion-year existence. In that case, the surface would show only cracks from the sea expanding as it partially froze. And that’s exactly what Bierson and colleagues found in New Horizon’s images, suggesting that Pluto’s liquid ocean is nearly as old as the dwarf planet itself.
“That means maybe Pluto did start off warm,” Bierson says. “Maybe it started with a liquid ocean really early on.”
In a separate study, Denton and colleagues considered the impact that formed Sputnik Planitia, the left lobe of Pluto’s distinctive heart-shaped basin. Because of how New Horizons flew past Pluto, scientists’ view of half the dwarf planet is fuzzy. But the team was able to see lines on Pluto’s surface on the exact opposite side of the globe from Sputnik Planitia, the researchers reported in October 2019 at arXiv.org. Those lines might be the imprints of shock waves from a massive impact that formed the enormous basin, Denton says.
“If the impact is large enough … the planet itself can act like a lens, and focus the wave energy at the exact opposite point on the planet from the impact,” she says.
Pluto’s internal structure would have controlled how those shock waves shuddered through the dwarf planet. Looking at the cracks in the surface ice could give clues to the thickness of the proposed ocean or the core’s chemical makeup. So Denton and her colleagues ran computer simulations of an impact to look for clues.
“We got the fun answer,” she says. To explain the lines seen on the dwarf planet, not only would Pluto need a large ocean, 150 kilometers or more in thickness, but the core must contain minerals, such as serpentine, that form through interactions between rock and water. Astrobiologists think that water-rock interactions could provide energy and nutrients for life (SN: 5/19/15). The possibility of a somewhat soggy core could let life get a toehold at the fringes of the solar system, Denton says.
“It’s certainly not exactly a smoking gun,” she says. “But it’s exciting.”
The possibility that Pluto has a habitable ocean raises the odds that other Kuiper Belt objects do too, says planetary scientist James Tuttle Keene of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., who is a member of the New Horizons team but was not involved in either study.
“This lays out one of the coolest hypotheses that a future Pluto mission could test,” he says. “If Pluto can have an ocean and potentially be habitable, it’s very likely that other bodies in the Kuiper Belt also are ocean worlds and also are potentially habitable.”
They’re called trans-Neptunian objects, or TNOs. Astronomers analyzed data from the Dark Energy Survey – which just completed 6 years of observations – to find over 100 new little worlds in the cold outer reaches of our solar system.
Computer-generated concept of the rotation of a trans-Neptunian object, in this case the small world we call Haumea. This little world is egg-shaped because of its fast rotation; its “day” is just under 4 hours long. Meanwhile, its “year” – or orbit around the sun – lasts about 285 Earth-years. Haumea is also known to have a ring and 2 tiny moons.
Objects like Haumea, depicted above, are minor planets, called trans-Neptunian objects, or TNOs. They orbit in the cold outer reaches of our solar system, out beyond Neptune, taking hundreds of years to orbit the sun once. There are estimated to be perhaps 70,000 TNOs, each at least 60 miles (100 km) across. This month, astronomers at the University of Pennsylvania announced that they’ve successfully pinpointed over 100 new TNOs. As with all known planets, moons and minor planets in our solar system, each one of these little worlds is sure to be unique. The new study also outlines a new approach for finding even more of these far-off worlds.
The updated peer-reviewed findings were published in The Astrophysical Journal Supplement Series on March 10, 2020.
The results come from data obtained by the Dark Energy Survey (DES), which just completed six years of observations this past January. DES’s focus, as the name implies, is to study dark energy, but it is also well-suited to finding TNOs and other smaller solar system objects beyond Neptune. DES typically looks at galaxies and supernovas, so the researchers needed to devise a new way to track movements of much smaller and closer objects. Grad student Pedro Bernardinelli, who led the study, said in a statement:
Dedicated TNO surveys have a way of seeing the object move, and it’s easy to track them down. One of the key things we did in this paper was figure out a way to recover those movements.
Locations of the new TNOs discovered in the DES dataset from the first four years. The outline shows DES’s search range and the color of each dot shows how far away the object is in astronomical units (one AU is the sun-Earth distance, 93 million miles or 150 million km). Two of the detections were more than 90 AU, over 8 billion miles (13 billion km) away.
The number of TNOs you can find depends on how much of the sky you look at and what’s the faintest thing you can find.
So how did the researchers find all of these TNOs?
Images from the first four years of DES data contained about 7 billion “dots” that are all of the possible objects able to be detected by the DES software. But many of those would be data errors or larger objects like stars, supernovas or galaxies, which are actually much farther away. Bernardinelli removed any objects that were visible in the same locations on multiple nights, narrowing down the list to about 22 million candidates. He then looked at those objects to see if any of them formed pairs or triplets. That would help the researchers see where those objects might appear on subsequent nights.
That process whittled down the list of candidates much further still, down to about 400 objects. Bernardinelli said:
We have this list of candidates, and then we have to make sure that our candidates are actually real things.
Size comparison of the largest TNOs, including Pluto.
Some of those candidates might still not be actual TNOs, however. So how to figure out which ones are, if any?
The researchers looked for additional images of the objects of interest. According to Bernstein:
Say we found something on six different nights. For TNOs that are there, we actually pointed at them for 25 different nights. That means there’s images where that object should be, but it didn’t make it through the first step of being called a dot.
Another method to ferret out any real TNOs was to stack the images, creating a sharper view. This helped to further sort out real objects from false ones. Bernardinelli said:
The most difficult part was trying to make sure that we were finding what we were supposed to find.
In the end, 316 confirmed TNOs were found in the DES data. Of those, 145 are new objects, not previously discovered. These TNOs range from 30 to 90 times the distance of Earth from the sun. By comparison, Pluto, the best-known TNO (and dwarf planet), is 40 times that distance.
The Blanco Telescope dome at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile. The telescope used the Dark Energy Camera (DECam) for the Dark Energy Survey.
Finding over 300 TNOs overall is impressive, especially for a survey that isn’t even intended to look for them as a primary goal. The researchers think that as many as 500 may be found in the DES data once they rerun their analysis on the entire dataset. Also, the same techniques can now be used in additional astronomical surveys, such as by the new Vera C. Rubin Observatory. Bernardinelli said:
Many of the programs we’ve developed can be easily applied to any other large datasets, such as what the Rubin Observatory will produce.
These kinds of datasets could even help scientists finally find the long-sought-after Planet Nine, a hypothetical giant planet about the size of Neptune that may orbit the sun in the extreme outer fringes of the star system, much farther than Pluto. By studying the orbits of additional newly-found TNOs, researchers might finally be able to determine Planet Nine’s location, if it does indeed exist. As Bernstein said:
There are lots of ideas about giant planets that used to be in the solar system and aren’t there anymore, or planets that are far away and massive but too faint for us to have noticed yet. Making the catalog is the fun discovery part. Then when you create this resource, you can compare what you did find to what somebody’s theory said you should find.
PedroBernardinelli at University of Pennsylvania, who led the new TNOs study.
Even if Planet Nine isn’t found, however, the datasets of these intriguing little worlds will provide a wealth of new information about how they – and other planets, moons, asteroids and comets – first formed in the early history of our solar system.
Bottom line: Researchers using the Dark Energy Survey have found over 100 new minor planets beyond Neptune. They’re called trans-Neptunian objects, or TNOs.
One Scientist’s Alternate Theory If The UFOs Weren’t Created By Aliens
One Scientist’s Alternate Theory If The UFOs Weren’t Created By Aliens
JAZZ SHAW
We haven’t touched on this topic in a while, but in my desperate search to find some news (any news!) not having to do with the you-know-what, I ran across this interesting item. A physicist from the University of Albany and a former scientist for NASA, Kevin Knuth, was interviewed about his recent work involving unidentified aerospace phenomena (UAPs, or UFOs as I still insist on calling them). He shares a number of his thoughts about the subject, including the work he’s been doing analyzing the performance data of the objects seen in the Navy UFO videos that
Given the data showing that the objects can accelerate almost instantly, at roughly 5,000 times the base acceleration rate of gravity, the idea that we’re observing some sort of conventional advancement of current human technology is highly unlikely. Knuth says he isn’t completely “married” to the idea that these are definitely extraterrestrial in nature. That’s one possibility, but there’s another one out there worth considering. These might have been built by humans after all, just not humans that most of us are aware of. (Altamont Enterprise, emphasis added)
Before the coronavirus hit, Knuth was scheduled to give a lecture at the Carey Institute for Global Good in Rensselaerville, where he would have presented the findings of his most recent study into the acceleration patterns of some of these unidentified crafts, which he says are up to 5,000 times the acceleration of gravity and indicate an unnatural, and inhuman, origin.
“That is the data,” Knuth said. “Now the trick is looking for an explanation.”
Knuth said that he’s not entirely married to the concept of these sightings as evidence of extraterrestrial life, acknowledging that there are two working hypotheses that he entertains while approaching each incident. One is that the encounters are perpetrated by extraterrestrials. The other, known as the “Wakanda hypothesis” in reference to the eponymous fictional kingdom in the Black Panther comic series, considers the possibility of an Earth-based civilization that has “extreme technology,” Knuth said.
“For me, it suggests that we missed some physics somewhere,” Knuth said on how he reconciles the still relatively unpopular field of UFO research with more mainstream branches of science.
Knuth isn’t just looking at the subject from his chalkboard at the university. He’s now a member of UAP eXpeditions, which we’ve discussed here previously. That means he’s working alongside the likes of Kevin Day (who was present at the USS Nimitz UFO incident) and quantum physicist Deep Prasad, who talked to us about UAP eXpeditions last year.
Later this spring, the group will be taking two ships out in the Pacific off the coast of southern California and Mexico and running tests to attempt to detect the presence of UFOs in the region. But how does the currently available data about the tic-tacs and orbs line up with the idea that these could be the property of human beings not associated with any terrestrial governments that we’re aware of?
This is the stuff of some real flights of fancy, but since everyone is on lockdown anyway, we might as well bat it around. Some of the folks in the ufology field are convinced of the realities of UFOs, but still believe that the vastness of space makes it unlikely that any other species would be able to reach us. I don’t tend to agree, but I suppose it’s still a plausible argument to put forward. So if the technology didn’t come from “somewhere else” but it also wasn’t cooked up by the United States, the Russians or the Chinese, who does that leave?
How about a conspiracy theory concept that’s been around for a long time? Maybe they were created by a breakaway civilization. It’s the idea that at some point in the past, a group of humans left the fold of humanity and went… somewhere else. (The most common proposition is that they went underground.) And there, they began developing amazing technologies in secret and raced ahead of the rest of us.
Before your eyes glaze over entirely, as I mentioned above, I’m not a proponent of this theory, though I find it highly entertaining. But here’s one thought to chew on that could tie the reports of the Nimitz encounters to this idea. If the UAPs keep showing up off the coast of southern California, is it possible that their owners have a base in the area? That would certainly be more convenient than having to commute back and forth between Earth and the Sirius star system, right? But how could there be such an advanced, technological base here on Earth without us having discovered it? Well… what if it’s underwater? Like way underwater.
It’s regularly been noted that we know more about the surface of Mars now than we do about the deeper bits of the ocean floor. And in the tale of David Fravor’s account of his encounter with the tic-tac, the full reports indicated that the craft (or one very like it) emerged from the water before it started flitting around in the sky. A second report claimed (I can’t verify this one yet) that one of our submarines operating in the area at the time, possible as part of the same training exercise, reported an underwater contact moving at unbelievable speeds on sonar. If we’re to accept that these things are real and they wanted to stay out of sight, a hole in the ocean floor might be a perfect choice, no?
As I said, this is mostly just a flight of fancy to entertain ourselves until UAP eXpedtiions finish their work and (hopefully) finds something. But if you don’t believe that these things were built by extraterrestrials and you don’t like the breakaway civilization theory, what’s left? I think at that point we’re down to time-traveling humans coming back to check on us from the distant future. Of course, if that’s the case, it’s still good news because it means that we eventually survive the thing I promised not to mention in this article. Stay safe out there, folks. (I mean, of course, safe from alien abductions.)
IMAGE: SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY - MEHAU KULYK VIA GETTY IMAGES
A weird, unidentified X-ray signal radiating out of nearby galaxies has perplexed scientists ever since it was first detected in 2014. Now, a promising study into its origins has come up empty-handed, meaning that whatever is causing the faint signature is currently unknown to us and more mysterious than ever.
The origins of the faint glow, which emits 3.5 kiloelectronvolts (keV) of energy, are especially intriguing because the signal matches key predictions about the nature of dark matter, a mysterious substance from which most of the universe is made. For years, scientists have debated whether the glow was long-sought evidence of a hypothetical particle that makes up dark matter. A clear answer to that question could finally unravel the true nature of dark matter, which is the “holy grail of astroparticle physics at the moment,” said Benjamin Safdi, an astrophysicist at the University of Michigan, in a call.
Well, Safdi and his colleagues have good and bad news on that front. The good news is that the researchers pioneered an innovative new method to search for dark matter around our home galaxy, the Milky Way, which is outlined in a study published on Thursday in Science.
The bad news is that the hunt came up empty, and that effectively rules out dark matter as the source of the signal. “On the one hand, this was not the outcome that we were hoping for,” Safdi said. “We were certainly hoping to discover dark matter.”
“On the other hand, we’re really excited that we now have this better method to look for dark matter,” he added. “We didn’t discover dark matter this time, but there's no reason to think that we won’t in the future.”
Scientists know that dark matter exists because they can see its gravitational pull on galaxies and other radiant objects. But because this form of matter does not emit light, researchers are literally left in the dark about most of its properties.
Many theoretical models have been proposed to explain dark matter, such as the existence of a particle called a sterile neutrino. Scientists have suggested that sterile neutrinos might slowly decay in a somewhat similar process to radioactive particles here on Earth.
“We know that dark matter is pretty stable because it was created at the Big Bang and it’s still around today billions of years later," Safdi explained. “If it decays, it must decay very slowly.”
REPRESENTATION OF X-RAY EMISSION LINE CONCENTRATED AROUND THE CENTER OF THE MILKY WAY (IN BLACK AND WHITE).
IMAGE: ZOSIA ROSTOMIAN AND NICHOLAS RODD/BERKELEY LAB; AND CHRISTOPHER DESSERT AND BENJAMIN SAFDI/UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
Even with a long half-life, this speculative decay of sterile neutrinos might produce a very small amount of light, which would mean that dark matter is not completely black. The 2014 study, which was published in The Astrophysical Journal, appeared to detect exactly this type of signature, causing a major splash in the dark matter research community.
“There was pretty intense debate, over the years following this paper, trying to understand whether or not this emission was coming from dark matter or ordinary matter within these galaxies,” Safdi said.
Safdi had assumed that the question would be cleared up by the slick observational capabilities of Japan’s Hitomi satellite, an X-ray observatory that launched in 2016. But due to multiple malfunctions, Hitomi fell apart after just six weeks in space, and no equivalent replacement for it has filled the gap in X-ray observations since.
Though the loss was disappointing, Safdi and his colleagues soon began ruminating on other ways to study the 3.5 keV emission line. “We asked the question: What can we do with the existing data?” he recalled. “We realized that there was a very natural analysis to do with the data from the XMM Newton space telescope, which has been in the sky for over 20 years.”
The team searched through every image and datasat captured by XMM Newton, launched in 1999 by the European Space Agency. By removing the portions of images that contained luminous objects, Safdi and his colleagues were able to analyze two decades of negative “blank” sky.
If sterile neutrinos were decaying around the Milky Way, the signature would have been extremely bright in this dataset. Alas, the search revealed only empty space.
“That tells us very definitively that this line that was observed in other galaxies is not coming from dark matter decay,” Safdi said. “But that doesn’t mean that the 3.5 keV line doesn’t exist. Likely what is causing that emission is some currently unknown process going on within those galaxies that has to do with the ordinary matter, not the dark matter.”
It’s possible that the 3.5 keV emission is caused by specific elements within the hot gases of the galaxy clusters, or interactions between hot plasmas and cold gas clouds, according to the study.
Ultimately, the new results leave scientists with two mysteries to solve: the origins of this eerie glow and the true identity of dark matter. Safdi and his colleagues are optimistic that novel techniques and next-generation observatories will be able to constrain both of these tantalizing questions.
“The exciting thing right now about the field of dark matter is that, from a data-driven perspective, we have absolutely no idea what dark matter is at a real microscopic level,” Safdi said. “Sterile neutrinos are one model, but there are many other models out there.”
For most of us around the world, our way of life has significantly changed in the last few weeks. Although America is only recently being confronted with the global reality that is the current coronavirus pandemic, with more than 82,000 U.S. citizens infected it now has more confirmed cases than Italy, and even China, where the outbreak first emerged.
“As the number of known cases reached into the hundreds, then the thousands, then the tens of thousands, life across the country has changed in swift, profound ways,” the New York Times reports alongside an updated map with numbers of infections per county across the country.
As the evolving coronavirus situation continues to keep us on edge, many industry leaders in virology, health care, technology, and the intelligence community say they were aware that such a pandemic was not only possible but that it was just a matter of time.
Business magnate and Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates has been talking about the threat of future pandemics for years. Back in 2015, as concerns about the possible outbreak of Ebola were still fresh on our minds, he was looking ahead at the possibility that a future outbreak could indeed be far worse.
Bill Gates meeting U.S. Secretary of Defense James Mattis
(public domain).
“As awful as this epidemic has been, the next one could be much worse,” Gates wrote about a TEDx talk he gave in 2015. “The world is simply not prepared to deal with a disease—an especially virulent flu, for example—that infects large numbers of people very quickly. Of all the things that could kill 10 million people or more, by far the most likely is an epidemic.”
It was recently reported that Gates also advised President Trump on pandemic preparedness two years ago, saying that “The president was kind enough to spend time with me, and one of the issues I brought up is this opportunity to build new tools that would help us deal with a pandemic.”
Gates isn’t the only person who had been expressing such concerns.
In his recent book Flu Hunter: Unlocking the secrets of a virus, Virologist Robert G. Webster, an authority on avian flu, said in December that the next pandemic was “just a matter of time.”
Webster’s thoughts on such an imminent threat are prescient, to say the least:
“It is sobering to realise that, after nearly 100 years of studying the 1918 influenza, we still do not know precisely why the virus was such a killer; nor are we significantly better prepared to deal with a repeat event.
“Nature will eventually again challenge mankind with an equivalent of the 1918 influenza virus. We need to be prepared.”
A particularly sobering view was offered byJeremy Konyndyk, former director of the Office of U.S. Foreign Disaster Assistance under USAID, in a Politico article from 2017, where he noted that every U.S. President since Ronald Reagan has faced a similar health crisis:
“A major new global health crisis is a question of when, not if. Every president dating back at least to Ronald Reagan has dealt with major and unexpected outbreaks—HIV/AIDS, SARS, bird flu, Ebola, Zika. In recent years the world has been fortunate that these outbreaks have been either highly contagious (the 2009 H1N1 “swine flu” pandemic infected up to 200 million people), or highly fatal (the H5N1 “bird flu” strain had a fatality rate of up to 60 percent)—but not both at once.”
However, it was what Konyndyk had to say about a future pandemic that was particularly sobering.
“At some point a highly fatal, highly contagious virus will emerge,” Konyndyk said, “like the 1918 ‘Spanish flu’ pandemic, which infected one third of the world’s population and killed between 50 and 100 million people.”
“We assess that the United States and the world will remain vulnerable to the next flu pandemic or large-scale outbreak of a contagious disease,” a 2019 Worldwide Threat Assessment stated, “that could lead to massive rates of death and disability, severely affect the world economy, strain international resources, and increase calls on the United States for support.”
The potential threat of such a virus has been an item of speculation and future forecasts for far longer than just the last decade, as other recentMUarticles have suggested. Many have even pointed out that in a 2008 book, the late psychic Sylvia Browne wrote that “In around 2020 a severe pneumonia-like illness will spread throughout the globe, attacking the lungs and the bronchial tubes and resisting all known treatments.”
It cannot be denied that Browne made such a prediction, although some take issue with the accuracy of the forecast, as Benjamin Radford recently noted:
Covid-19 is not “a severe pneumonia-like illness” (though it can in some cases lead to pneumonia)… Browne also says the disease she’s describing “resists all known treatments.” This does not describe Covid-19; in fact, doctors know how to treat the disease—it’s essentially the same for influenza or other similar respiratory infections.
However, the more fundamental takeaway here is that it didn’t require any psychic powers to see the threat potential of a future virus outbreak the likes of COVID-19. Experts from multiple areas of government and industry had warned us about it. Now that these concerns have become a reality, it is time to take action, and realize that things could certainly get worse before they get better.
Nonetheless, as with past pandemics like the 1918 Spanish Flu, it is also important to know that we, as humans, will get through this. We always do, and we should never underestimate human resilience in the face of a threat, no matter how bad things may be capable of getting. That, too, is important to remember in trying times like these.
There is probably no book of the Bible that annoys NASA more than the Book of Ezekiel. That’s the one with the flying chariot with a “wheel within a wheel” that has come to be known as Ezekiel’s wheel. This is the book which is stuck like glue to Erich von Däniken and the theory of ancient aliens – both of which inspired NASA engineer Josef F. Blumrich to write “The Spaceships of Ezekiel” while still employed by the agency, thus linking NASA to Ezekiel and his wheel – which Blumrich attempted to duplicate with his patented “Omnidirectional wheel.” Fans of ufology know that it’s a rare occasion when NASA acknowledges, let a lone addresses, a UFO sighting, yet that was the case this week when it gave an official explanation for a UFO which was being described as a – you guessed it – Ezekiel’s wheel. Was NASA just annoyed … or is it trying to hide something about this particular UFO?
Huge “Ezekiel’s Wheel” Type UFO Spotted In Our Solar System By STEREO A Camera. February 29, 2020
That’s the headline describing a video uploaded to YouTube by The Hidden Underbelly 2.0, who credits a “Vasco Fernandes” for spotting it on a video from the A camera of the STEREO Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatory (STEREO) pair. (Watch the video here.)
These satellite were launched in 2006 and positioned ahead of and behind Earth in the same orbit to give stereoscopic images of the Sun and solar phenomena … and UFOs? Contact was lost with STEREO B in 2014 but STEREO A continues to broadcast … except when it’s interrupted by … NASA? That’s the assumption in the video’s narration, which highlights the appearance of the so-called “Ezekiel’s wheel” for a few seconds before the video cuts out. When it returns, the anomaly is gone and the narrator says:
“NASA’s gonna have to have some explaining for this.”
“Some people have noticed an odd shape, sort of a cross inside a circle, entering the field-of-view of the HI2 telescope on STEREO Ahead around February 20,2020. Eventually there is a cone shape that appears next to it. You can see the feature in question in this movie moving from right-to-left, just below the trapezoidal occulter on the right side of the image.
The answer lies on the exact opposite side of the image. At the same time as this strange-looking feature starts being visible, the very bright planet Venus enters the HI2-A field-of-view from the left. Notice that Venus and the feature stay in step almost exactly opposite each other across the middle of the detector. This is not a coincidence. The strange looking geometrical “object” is actually an internal reflection of the planet Venus within the telescope optics. This effect has been seen many times before.”
The “UFO” with NASA’s captions
Well, that explains it for everyone except the true believers in Ezekiel’s wheel – it’s Venus being reflected inside the telescope. It should make sense to anyone who knows a little about cameras (remember those?), lenses and optics. However, rather than leaving it at that, NASA sees it necessary to bring up something else.
“We have also gotten some questions about why the images from the most recent few days are of lower quality and are sometimes incomplete. This is because our data comes in two streams – highly compressed and lower quality but fast space weather beacon data, which are replaced after a few days with better science-quality images.” (– is NASA’s weird character stream.)
Hmm. Why would NASA, so historically unwilling to address any sort of unusual space anomalies, bring one up on its own? For those who watch these video feeds for such anomalies or just out of scientific curiosity, the fact that NASA actually has two visual feeds of the same area must be puzzling. And why has it suddenly switched to what it admits is a lower quality feed right after the so-called “Ezekiel’s wheel” appeared? Is there something to hide?
Sorry, NASA, that annoying Ezekiel’s wheel is not going away and neither are the dedicated watchers who wonder what you’re up to.
Since the modern concept of UFOs first appeared on the cultural landscape in the late 1940s, a number of civilian and government studies have been conducted in order to try to study the phenomenon and assess what elements may characterize it.
Opinions remain divided more than 70 years later, and many researchers and theorists continue to argue about the nature of UFOs, and whether they represent a unified, unexplained phenomenon, or if there are many elements that contribute to a cultural idea that we collectively refer to as “UFOs”.
There are merits to both positions, and many people that take the UFO idea serious enough to study it acknowledge this. Within the broader body of UFO reports are undoubtedly countless claims of sightings of unusual things that can likely be ruled out as misperceptions, hoaxes, and other similar sources.
A NOAA weather balloon (public domain).
Here, the UFO advocate will assert that a distinction must be made: when we discuss truly unexplained aerial phenomena or, as longtime researcher Bruce Maccabee has called them, “TRUFOs”, we mean aircraft or objects that are not the result of hoaxes or misperceptions, and which bear genuinely anomalous characteristics.
Although making this distinction helps, it brings us to one of the most fundamental questions in all of UFO study and research: even if we can agree that there are “unknowns”, what are they, and what are their origins?
Many who take interest in the subject—both believers and skeptics—operate under a fundamental bias that discussion of UFOs is equivalent to speculations about extraterrestrial visitors. Critics may confidently proclaim things like, “a good UFO sighting or report still does nothing to prove that aliens are visiting,” while advocates may similarly argue that, “some areas of UFO research, while of merit, don’t help us prove that UFOs are spaceships.”
Such arguments illustrate the problem on both sides: whether they do or don’t believe the UFO reports in question, the extraterrestrial bias is fundamentally the same.
(Credit: Wikimedia Commons)
“The ETH is a strong claim,” wrote Allan Hendry in his 1979 book The UFO Handbook. During the 1970s, Hendry worked for a period at J. Allen Hynek’s Center for UFO Studies, and used the data he compiled during that period to author one of the most important, and yet often overlooked and underrated books on the subject.
“[S]trong claims require strong evidence,” Hendry wrote, “evidence of a kind that has not manifested itself in thirty years. The burden of proof is on the shoulders of the ETH claimants and the strain is starting to show. More and more UFOloglsts are seeking alternative (but equally extraordinary) explanations to the ETH for the high-strangeness UFOs.”
As an illustration of this, Hendry described a 1976 conference in Chicago where 53 participants were handed a questionnaire asking them to what they thought the UFO phenomenon was attributable. Hendry gave the results as follows:
An extraterrestrial source: 28
Other: 28
No Answer: 2
A civilization on earth: 1
“Just what does ‘Other’ include?” Hendry asked, noting the appearance of theories about UFOs ranging from inhabitants of parallel realities to interdimensionals, the “ultraterrestrials” favored by the late John Keel, “metaterrestrials,” hollow-earth inhabitants (with a nod back to the 1940s “Shaver Mystery” stories), and even remnants of the long-lost continent of Atlantis.
“None of these has made much impact,” Hendry noted, “since they constitute nothing more than wild speculation, but they do all reflect one common feature: the need to find an extraordinary solution for the UFO reports. This is necessary to account for the extraordinary observations… providing the observations are accepted at face value.”
Hendry, although too skeptical to the liking of many of his contemporaries, had a firm grasp on the problems that “UFO theorizing” often presented. Attempting to find commonality between UFO reports and then reducing them down to a single overarching theory about their origins may actually counterproductive.
Allan Hendry (Credit: Center for UFO Studies)
In Hendry’s view, “this leads to a blanket explanation for them all and strikes me as an error in judgment, as the different UFO subtypes all suggest different natures.”
“I do not believe that thee is a single UFO phenomenon,” Hendry argued, warning that the propensity among some researchers to toss seemingly unrelated anomalous occurrences into the mix of UFO studies was “directionless,” and may do more harm than good.
What Hendry illustrates here is that in our need to “know” what UFOs are, and where they come from, we may be setting ourselves up for failure as researchers. In other words, just like the believers (and skeptics) who presume that talk of UFOs and extraterrestrials are mutually exclusive, attributing UFO studies broadly to any single, overarching “theory” could be misleading.
However we look at it, there is a genuine phenomenon present with UFOs. Even if we could presume that all such observations are misperceptions, delusions, and the like, that alone would still constitute a social and psychological phenomenon worthy of study. For my own part, I feel that there is more than this to a number of the better UFO reports collected over the years, pointing to a physical reality behind many of them… whatever that reality may be.
Hence, there is something here worthy of studying, and doing so might even be beneficial for humankind. However, as we proceed with the study of all the things we call “UFOs,” it will actually help us in the long run not to leap to conclusions about what they might be, and instead keep an open, but discerning mindset as we proceed.
A former Wales football player captured a very interesting video of a mysterious glowing orb in the night sky. Simon Church was outside enjoying the starry night when he noticed a bright round object floating through the sky before completely disappearing.
He posted the video to his Twitter account with the caption, “Just seen the craziest thing whilst having a look at Venus tonight. It was way [too] high to be a drone and then just disappeared,” and with the hashtags #ufo, #ufosighting, #crazy, and #whatdoyouthink. He tried to make light of the situation, joking that he may have been going crazy after going into a national Coronavirus lockdown, “It was moving quickly then just disappeared surely can’t be going mad after day 2 of isolation…,” he wrote.
Simon Church
So far, more than 20,000 people have viewed the footage with several people giving their opinions on what Church captured on video. One user wrote, “That’s the real deal. Congratulations amazing capture,” while another posted, “Deffo ufo. If [you’re] in Wales near St Athan it is UK Area 51.”
Others weren’t so convinced that it was of extraterrestrial origin as some suggested that it was a Chinese lantern, the International Space Station, or satellites. Church even admitted that it was more than likely the ISS, “After watching it there it must [have] been the space station cool to watch but gutted it’s not Mars Attacks,” he wrote.
The footballer attempted to get a better view of the object by zooming in on it but unfortunately it just made the footage grainier. So, did Church actually capture a UFO on video or was it the ISS? You can decide for yourself as the video can be seen on his Twitter account as well as here.
This isn’t the first time in recent months that a professional football player has been linked with UFOs and aliens. Just a few months ago, Diego Maradona claimed that he had been abducted by aliens. In an interview with Argentine sports channel TyC Sports, he was asked if he believed in UFOs and that’s when he made the surprising claim. “Why make things up? Once, after a few too many drinks, I was missing from home for three days,” he stated, adding, “I got home and said that UFOs had taken me. I said, ‘They took me, I can’t tell you about it’.” While it’s not certain whether he just had a drunken three-day blackout or if he really was abducted by extraterrestrials, it’s definitely an interesting claim to say the least.
This bizarre object stunned footballer Simon Church
Mention the notorious MIB and most people will instantly think of Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones – such is the incredible success of the Men in Black movie franchise, which began back in the 1990s. Of course, those with an interest in the paranormal mysteries of our world will know that the movies were based upon real reports of encounters with mysterious, dangerous men dressed in black, ones who were intent on silencing people who had encountered UFOs, aliens, and even the likes of Bigfoot and the Mothman. There is, however, one big difference between Hollywood’s MIB and those of the real world. Smith and Jones characters – J and K – are the employees of a secret agency that oversees the alien presence on our planet. In other words, they are what we might accurately term ufological 007s. In reality, however, the Men in Black are clearly not government agents: they don’t even look human. That’s because they’re not.
“Pauline,” who I interviewed in 2013, had a very strange encounter with a Man in Black back in October 1973, when she was living in Pasadena, California. It’s notable, and probably relevant, for me to reveal that a major UFO wave was going on at that time, and all across the United States. While hiking in the California hills one Sunday morning, Pauline encountered a classic, silver-colored flying saucer-style UFO which, at first, at least, was high in the sky. Suddenly, it dropped to around fifty or sixty above her, hanging there in an odd, wobbling fashion. Amazed, Pauline could only stare as the silent craft bobbed around – like a boat on churning waters – and then shot away at high speed.
Pauline raced home and excitedly told her family of what had just taken place. They, apparently, weren’t the only ones who knew what had occurred on the fateful morning in 1973. Three days later, and after sunset, Pauline had a visitor. Not a welcome one, I should stress. It was a Man in Black, a skinny – almost emaciated – old man, dressed in a shabby black suit, looking pale and ill, and wearing an old, 1950s-style fedora hat. Pauline said that she felt her mind was briefly enslaved, as the MIB near-hypnotically asked her to invite him into her home. In a slight daze, and to her eternal cost, she did exactly that. She retreated to the couch, stumbling slightly and feeling ice-cold. The old man followed her, and stood in the living-room, looming over her, as he warned her – in no uncertain terms – never to discuss her close encounter again. Ever.
The MIB then turned around and headed to the door. At that exact same moment, Pauline felt her mental faculties return to normal and she raced after him, just as he exited the door and closed it behind him. Pauline threw the door open wide, only to find the old Man in Black gone. In his place, however, was something else: it was a large, black dog with bright red eyes. It snapped and snarled in Pauline’s direction and in what was clearly a deeply malevolent, dangerous fashion. She stared in horror as the glowing-eyed monster prowled around the yard, clearly intent on adding to the malevolent atmosphere that was already firmly in place. Suddenly, and as if out of nowhere, a black Cadillac – that looked decades-old in design – appeared and screeched to a halt outside of Pauline’s home. It should be noted, here, that the MIB almost always drive such cars of that particular type, age and color.
Pauline watched, shocked and scared, as the back door on the driver’s-side opened and the fiendish black hound bounded across the front yard and leapt into the back of the Cadillac, which shot away at high speed! Today, Pauline – now a grandmother and someone who is fairly comfortable about sharing her bizarre experience – is of a firm opinion that the aged MIB and the red-eyed beast were one and the same. As Pauline sees it, something unexplained, but also something which could take on “different disguises” as it saw fit. As controversial as that might sound, let’s not forget that we saw in a previous chapter how, in England of centuries ago, so-called phantom black dogs were said to possess the ability to shapeshift into human form and vice-versa.
Moving on, but still focused on Pasadena, California – interestingly enough – there is the very strange story of the “Maxwell” family, who I met and spoke with in 2014. In the summer of 1987, they spent a week vacationing in and around San Francisco, staying with friends in Menlo Park. On their way back home, they traveled along California’s famous Highway 101, which provides a panoramic view of the Pacific Ocean, and for mile upon mile. They chose to drive through the night, when the highway would be at its least busy; thinking that it would be to their benefit. How completely and utterly wrong they were. As fate would destine to have it, after a couple of hours of driving, the family of four spotted a strange light in the sky. It was described as a bright green ball of light, about the size of a beach-ball, one which paced their car and that stayed with them for a couple of miles, at a height of around sixty feet. There was nothing frightening about the encounter. Rather, they were all amazed and excited. It wasn’t long, however, before things got very disturbing.
The day after the Maxwell’s got home was a Sunday, meaning they had an extra day before returning to work and school. It was while one of the teenage children was sat on the porch and playing music on an old Walkman that she caught sight of a man on the other side of the road. He was dressed completely in black, aside from a white shirt. He even wore black gloves, on what was a bright, summery day. The girl was particularly disturbed by the fact that the man sported a weird grin and was staring right at her. So unsettled was she that she went back into the home and told her father of what had just happened. He quickly went to the door but – no surprise – the MIB was gone.
Later that same night, the girl had a frightening and graphic dream – if that is all it was – of the very same Man in Black standing next to her bed and staring at her in malevolent style. She woke suddenly, around 3:00 a.m., soaked in sweat. On the following night, the girl’s younger brother had a similar dream. And, two days later the husband and wife saw a pair of creepy, pale MIB clearly watching, and following, them in a local supermarket. Oddly, as the husband, angry and confused by what was going on, decided to confront them, they headed quickly to another aisle and vanished – as in literally. They were nowhere to be seen.
Matters reached their conclusion on the next night, when Mr. Maxwell was woken up by the sounds of loud scratching at the front-door; scratching which strongly suggested some form of wild animal was trying to get in the home. He decided to try and catch the beast off-guard and raced into the backyard and to a gate that gave access to a small alley between his and the house next door. He crept along, reached the front of the house, and peered at the front-door. To his horror, there was no monster, but a man – in black, it scarcely needs saying – crouched down and pawing at the door in deranged style.
Mr. Maxwell shouted in his direction, at which point the MIB stopped what it was doing, stood up to a height of around seven-feet, and stared directly at him. Then, in an instant, the figure dropped to the floor, took on a wolf-like appearance, and bounded off into the darkness, leaving a shell-shocked and trauma-filled witness behind it. The MIB that became a wolf was not seen again and the Maxwell’s did not experience anything else untoward. The strange series of events was finally at its end.
Many people may not realize it, but far above our heads, out in space in orbit around our planet away from where the eye can see is a giant junkyard. There, clogging our orbit is all manner of debris, including nonfunctional spacecraft, abandoned launch vehicle stages, mission-related debris, spent rocket stages, derelict satellites, and a hodgepodge of millions and millions of pieces of miscellaneous junk we have discarded into space. It spreads out in a vast sea of garbage which, although luckily invisible to us on the ground, creates a hazard for spacecraft and satellites. Yet, according to some wild stories, there is more than just garbage up there spinning about our planet past where the eye can see, and one of the strangest of these is a supposed broken alien spaceship complete with entombed alien bodies orbiting the earth.
In 1979, the Soviet astrophysicist Sergei Boshich came forward with the spectacular claim that he had found evidence of what he called a crippled alien spacecraft that had broken up into pieces and was hovering in orbit. By his estimates, he had thus far managed to track 10 pieces of wreckage from the spacecraft, several of which he estimated as being around 100 feet in length. Boshich said he had calculated the trajectories of the debris and come to the conclusion that they had scattered from some sort of space explosion on December 18, 1955, and even more bizarre was that it was his assertion that this mysterious derelict craft was likely now a tomb containing the bodies of the ship’s occupants. It sounds like the rantings of a conspiracy nutcase, but there were allegedly others who backed up these findings, including one Soviet astrophysicist and science fiction writer Aleksandr Kazantsev, who would say “Its size would suggest several floors, possibly five. We believe that alien bodies will still be on board.”
The scientists were quick to rule out the possibility that it could be space junk originating from Earth, as the purported explosion predated the first human object in space, which would have been the Sputnik 1 launched in 1957. They also denied that it could be a meteor, as it was maintaining a steady orbit rather than the falling of a meteor. According to Boshich and his team of scientists, all evidence pointed to an alien craft that had blown up in space, and one Moscow physicist, Dr Vladimir Azhazha, would say:
Meteors do not have orbits. They plummet aimlessly, hurtling erratically through space. And they do not explode spontaneously. All the evidence we have gathered over the past decade points to one thing — a crippled alien craft. It must hold secrets we have not even dreamed of. A rescue mission should be launched. The vessel, or what is left of it, should be reassembled here on Earth. The benefits to mankind could be stupendous.
Apparently the discovery generated interest from the Americans as well, and according to the story there was some degree of cooperation among them to come up with a plan to salvage the crippled spacecraft and possibly even board it. One problem was that the Soviets were being very secretive with the information they had, which generated skepticism from Britishscientists. One British scientist would say:
There are more than 4,000 pieces of wreckage orbiting the Earth. Each has a catalogue number to identify it. We would like to know the catalogue number of this wreck. It is possible to date wreckage after a considerable number of observations. Like the Americans, we would be interested to look at this if the Russians make the information available.
Quite interesting is what was pointed out in a 1969 article in the magazine Icarus, in which astronomer John Bagby claimed to have found 10 moonlets in orbit around the earth, which he had calculated had spread from a single source on the date December 18, 1955, the same day as was claimed by Boshich 10 years later. The story of what had gone on to be called “The Boshich Wreckage” was printed in various news sources at the time, and generated a fair amount of speculation and conspiracies. One was that, although there was no official confirmation that an actual salvage mission had actually been launched, the Americans and Soviets had secretly gone and done it. Another theory was that this was all a smokescreen put out by the Soviets to cause misinformation in the Cold War of the period, a total fabrication quite possibly based on the article in Icarus.
Of course there is also the possibility that the whole story is a big sham to begin with. Although the discovery was printed in a wide variety of publications, it all originated with an article in the British tabloid newspaper Reveille, which is in many ways sort of like The National Enquirer and not known for being a particularly trustworthy news source. It furthermore seems that there is no real confirmation that any of this ever happened at all, and so rather than some conspiracy maybe it was all just made up by some bored newspaper writer. What is going on with this all? Was it ever really real in any sense, and if so, how? Was this some conspiracy launched by the Russians to mess with the United States, a real crashed UFO floating around in space, a cover-up, or just an entertaining yarn? Whatever it may be, it is certainly a curious little account, and one wonders just what became of this all in the end.
A special thanks to Steve Baxter for the cover artwork on this article.
Although I’m not a fan of the History Channel’s show Project Blue Book, I had to watch the latest episode, as it was titled “Operation Mainbrace.” My dad, who was a U.K. Royal Air Force radar mechanic for three years, was directly involved in the radar aspects of several UFO events that occurred during the operation. For those who may not know, Mainbrace took place in September 1952 in the North Sea and the English Channel. It was a NATO operation designed to show the Russians what the West could do in the event that things threatened to turn bad. It was my dad’s decision to tell me – when I was a kid – about his UFO experiences and that’s what got me interested in the UFO mystery. As usual for Project Blue Book, the History Channel exaggerated the real story to a laughable degree. We are “treated” to (A) the sight of a gigantic UFO coming out of the raging, stormy waters, (B) a U.S. Navy cover-up, and (C) mysterious activity deep under the churning depths. We even see an appearance from none other than John F. Kennedy – not as president, of course, but when he was a senator. I gave my dad a call this morning (March 25) to tell him about the show. He thought it sounded hilarious, and we had a good laugh about it.
The big irony is that there was no point in altering the Mainbrace story in a crazy and convoluted fashion. There were plenty of genuine, weird aspects to the Mainbrace story that could have made for a very cool episode. The show, however, has its own approach. Of the episodes I’ve seen so far (which is around 6 or 7 episodes) the production company insists on chopping and changing history to an incredible degree. For example, there were the episodes on (A) the Flatwoods Monster and (B) the Kelly-Hopkinsville “goblins” saga, both of the 1950s. They were two episodes I watched. Just like the Mainbrace episode, those two stories also had enough real, fantastic aspects attached to them. But, distortion was the name of the game – even though it was clearly not needed. With that said, let me acquaint you with some of the genuine encounters that occurred during Mainbrace – and how they would have been perfect for the show.
One of the men who was involved in Mainbrace was Ken Dayman, who worked on radar during the NATO exercise. He told me: ““We would do shifts, and I would read out the plots and the girls would then plot them on a big map. Well, over the course of two days in 1952, something strange happened. On the first day, somebody said: ‘Look, there’s something happening on the screen!’ There were about three or four of us watching as something was speeding across the screen; and this was fast, very fast. It looked like there were actually two objects and they were approaching from the North Sea and flew across Lincolnshire, Peterborough and then up the country at about 2,000 miles per hour. Well, an officer was called and he made some comment. But then our commanding officer arrived and reminded us not to talk about this as we’d signed the Official Secrets Act. But this happened over a couple of days and the UFOs were tracked by several shifts – not just ours.”
Now, let’s take a look at the story of William Maguire, who I was also able to interview personally. As Bill told me: “From the early part of 1950, I did my basic training for a few months, and the rest of the year I did technical training and worked on radar and became an instructor. By 1951 I was operative at RAF Sennen, near Land’s End in Cornwall. I was a junior NCO [Author’s Note: Non-Commissioned Officer], a corporal; but at the time of this incident in 1952, I was a senior aircraftsman; I was on the sports committee and helped edit the station magazine. Most of my five years in the RAF was peace and quiet.”
Bill continued: “We would be called out to go to different RAF stations when they required an accurate reading of their radar instruments from experienced people. So, I was all over the damned place. Usually, it was made clear to us where we were going. You’d get a travel warrant and there’s a truck waiting and usually it’s got windows you can see out of; but in this case they were closed. Well, we were driven to a location which I believe was very close to RAF Sandwich in Kent and this was night-time. I’d been to Sandwich before, but the actual location was just a field – sort of nowhere. I have a feeling that this particular place is not in any book. It was very hush-hush. The machinery looked quite standard – all to do with detection and observation – but what did surprise me as an experienced radar operator was the extent of the machines. They were able to see right across to Eastern Europe and parts of Russia and way over to Sweden, which I hadn’t realized at that time we could do. My memory was that everything was in a complete flap. Normally, in a military situation everything is ordered, regular and set out. But here was a situation that was plainly out of control. Mechanics were flying about all over the place.”
Bill concluded: “The mechanics were being blamed for not calibrating the instruments properly; we were being blamed for not interpreting the readings properly. But the obvious answer staring us in the face, on every single instrument on the base, was the fact that there was sitting up at an unbelievable height, this enormous thing with the equivalent mass of a warship and it just stood there…and stood there…and stood there.”
Now, we come to another amazing story that occurred at the height of Mainbrace. It all went down at Royal Air Force Topcliffe in Yorkshire, U.K. Flight Lieutenant John Kilburn prepared a report on what happened for senior officers. It reads as follows: “Sir, I have the honor to report the following incident which I witnessed on Friday, 19th September, 1952. I was standing with four other aircrew personnel of No. 269 Squadron watching a Meteor fighter gradually descending. The Meteor was at approximately 5000 feet and approaching from the east. [Flight Officer R.N.] Paris suddenly noticed a white object in the sky at a height between ten and twenty thousand feet some five miles astern of the Meteor.”
Kilburn added: “The object was silver in color and circular in shape, it appeared to be traveling at a much slower speed than the Meteor but was on a similar course. It maintained the slow forward speed for a few seconds before commencing to descend, swinging in a pendular motion during descent similar to a falling sycamore leaf…After a few seconds, the object stopped its pendulous motion and its descent and began to rotate about its own axis. Suddenly it accelerated at an incredible speed towards the west turning onto a south-easterly heading before disappearing. All this occurred in a matter of fifteen to twenty seconds. The movements of the object were not identifiable with anything I have seen in the air and the rate of acceleration was unbelievable.”
So, what we have are multiple radar-based UFO incidents during Mainbrace. We have the words of Bill Maguire, who was involved in the tracking of a UFO “with the equivalent mass of a warship.” And, a group of military personnel at Topcliffe witnessed a UFO perform incredible maneuvers over a military base. And that was just the start of things: there are now dozens of Mainbrace-based cases on record. You may disagree with me, but as I see it, the reality of Mainbrace is far more intriguing than the History Channel’s version of events!
AMAZING: Triangle UFO over Minneapolis, MN 27-Mar-2020
AMAZING: Triangle UFO over Minneapolis, MN 27-Mar-2020
Another great UFO footage was just submitted to us through our Facebook page. This was filmed in the night sky above Minneapolis, Minnesota on Friday, 27th March 2020.
What do you think this was? Please leave your comment below!
Particles called axions could reveal how matter conquered the universe
Particles called axions could reveal how matter conquered the universe
The subatomic particles may already solve two important puzzles of particle physics
Axions, if they exist, may not only be the source of dark matter (blue) in galaxy clusters throughout the universe but could also explain why the universe consists mainly of matter, while antimatter is rare.
CXO/NASA, ESA, CFHT, M.J. JEE/UCD, A. MAHDAVI/SFSU
Chalk up a potential third win for hypothetical particles called axions.
If the subatomic particles exist, they could solve two pressing puzzles of particle physics: the source of the dark matter that fills galaxies with invisible mass, and the reason why interactions between quarks — the particles that make up protons and neutrons — adhere to a certain symmetry of nature, called CP symmetry, that other types of particle interactions eschew.
Now, two researchers say that axions could solve a third thorny problem: why the universe is made mostly of matter, while antimatter is rare. In the early universe, the axion could have behaved in a manner that produces an excess of matter, particle physicists Raymond Co and Keisuke Harigaya suggest in the March 20 Physical Review Letters.
“They have an idea which has all the right ingredients to do some interesting things,” says physicist Michael Dine of the University of California, Santa Cruz. But it remains to be seen whether the idea can fully reproduce the properties of the cosmos, he says. “This is one of those cases where the devil is in the details.”
Scientists think that 13.8 billion years ago, the Big Bang birthed equal parts matter and antimatter. Since matter and antimatter particles annihilate when they meet, that would have left a universe filled with pure energy. So, as the universe evolved, some process must have favored matter over antimatter, but scientists still don’t know for sure how it happened. Some researchers think, for example, that neutrinos played a role (SN: 11/25/19).
Now Co, of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, and Harigaya, of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J., propose a new idea for how matter gained the upper hand. It’s based on the evolution of the axion field, a hypothetical ethereal blanket that permeates space, similar to how an electric field extends around an electric charge.
Oscillations in the strength of the axion field correspond to axion particles. Picture a marble in the bottom of a plastic soda bottle: Jiggle the bottle, and the marble will wiggle back and forth within one of the divots at the bottle’s base. Similar wiggles in an axion field beget axions. In the early universe, the axion field would have had a lot of energy, before settling into the lowest energy state possible — akin to a marble high up the wall of the soda bottle sliding down into the divot.
What Co and Harigaya propose is that, instead of rolling straight down the bottle’s side, the axion field would have instead spiraled around the bottle to the bottom. Through a sequence of interactions involving the strong force, which binds quarks together, and the weak force, which produces certain radioactive decays, this spiraling, Co says, “is going to lead to a production of more matter than antimatter in the early universe.”
Scientists are currently searching for axions, for example with the Axion Dark Matter Experiment in Seattle (SN:3/6/20). Co and Harigaya’s theory predicts, however, that axions would be a bit more massive than what ADMX is searching for. Future experiments, such as the International Axion Observatory, could look for those bulkier particles.
However, the numbers don’t quite work out yet: The study predicts about 100 times as much dark matter as is needed to explain observations of the universe. But some additional considerations might be able to rectify that mismatch, Co and Harigaya say, for example, if another massive particle exists that scientists have yet to discover.
Last year the US Navy confirmed that UFOs exist, meaning someone has access to advanced technology to build them. Declassified government research into warp drives provides insight into how UFOs could theoretically bend spacetime as a means of propulsion.
Slowly but surely, the confirmed existence of UFOs is entering the public consciousness.
Leaked video footage depicts Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP) making seemingly impossible maneuvers while the Air Force pilots recording the craft looked on in wonder, literally shouting, “Wow! What is that, man? Look at that flying!”
We need to be talking about this more: "To the Stars Academy of Arts and Sciences, a group dedicated to pursuing research into UFOs and extraterrestrial life that was co-founded by rocker Tom DeLonge of Blink 182, helped bring attention to the videos."
More palatable, perhaps, than claiming these UFOs come from ETs, is the probability that they were built by humans as part of some black budget secret space program.
When you stop to think about the magnitude of what that actually means, you realize that there is advanced technology out there that is way beyond anything that is commercially available at present.
The Navy has confirmed that the UFOs seen in leaked video footage are real UAP, senators have been briefed on UFO sightings, and between 2007 and 2012 the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) spent $22 million dollars on research into warp drives, antigravity, wormholes, extra dimension manipulation, and whole lot more!
“The warp drive involves local manipulation of the fabric of space in the immediate vicinity of а spacecraft”
Therein it explains how an advanced technology could theoretically bend space and time around a craft as a form of propulsion called a warp drive — which doesn’t violate the cosmic speed limit.
“Physicists have discovered two loopholes to Einstein’s ultimate speed limit: the Einstein-Rosen bridge (commonly referred to as а ‘wormhole’) and the warp drive,” the paper reads.
“Fundamentally, both ideas involve manipulation of spacetime itself in some exotic way that allows for faster-than-light (FTL) travel.”
“A manipulation of spacetime itself in some exotic way that allows for faster-than-light travel”
— Declassified DIA-funded research
According to the paper’s authors, Dr. Richard Obousy and Dr. Eric Davis, “If one is to realistically entertain the notion of interstellar exploration in time frames of а human lifespan, а dramatic shift in the traditional approach to spacecraft propulsion is necessary.”
In the paper, the authors back up the claim made by Miguel Alcubierre in 1994 that by manipulating extra dimensions, a warp drive could bend space around a craft by contracting space in front of it while expanding space behind it.
More palatable, perhaps, than claiming these UFOs come from ETs, is the probability that they were built by humans as part of some black budget secret space program.
When you stop to think about the magnitude of what that actually means, you realize that there is advanced technology out there that is way beyond anything that is commercially available at present.
The Navy has confirmed that the UFOs seen in leaked video footage are real UAP, senators have been briefed on UFO sightings, and between 2007 and 2012 the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) spent $22 million dollars on research into warp drives, antigravity, wormholes, extra dimension manipulation, and whole lot more!
“The warp drive involves local manipulation of the fabric of space in the immediate vicinity of а spacecraft”
Therein it explains how an advanced technology could theoretically bend space and time around a craft as a form of propulsion called a warp drive — which doesn’t violate the cosmic speed limit.
“Physicists have discovered two loopholes to Einstein’s ultimate speed limit: the Einstein-Rosen bridge (commonly referred to as а ‘wormhole’) and the warp drive,” the paper reads.
“Fundamentally, both ideas involve manipulation of spacetime itself in some exotic way that allows for faster-than-light (FTL) travel.”
“A manipulation of spacetime itself in some exotic way that allows for faster-than-light travel” — Declassified DIA-funded research
According to the paper’s authors, Dr. Richard Obousy and Dr. Eric Davis, “If one is to realistically entertain the notion of interstellar exploration in time frames of а human lifespan, а dramatic shift in the traditional approach to spacecraft propulsion is necessary.”
In the paper, the authors back up the claim made by Miguel Alcubierre in 1994 that by manipulating extra dimensions, a warp drive could bend space around a craft by contracting space in front of it while expanding space behind it.
“The warp drive involves local manipulation of the fabric of space in the immediate vicinity of а spacecraft. The basic idea is to create an asymmetric bubble of space that is contracting in front of the spacecraft while expanding behind it,” the authors write.
By warping space and moving through time, the craft wouldn’t be in violation of the galactic speed limit — the speed of light.
“The ‘spacecraft ‘ remains stationary inside this ‘warp bubble’ and the movement of space itself facilitates the relative motion of the spacecraft”
— Declassified DIA-funded research
Accelerating too fast will crush you and your craft from the G-Force, but keeping your craft in a warp bubble would eliminate the need — the need for speed.
This is one explanation why UAP would a more accurate description because these things wouldn’t really “fly” at super speeds so much as they would be warping time and space.
“Using this form of locomotion, the ‘spacecraft ‘ remains stationary inside this ‘warp bubble’ and the movement of space itself facilitates the relative motion of the spacecraft.
“The most attractive feature of the Warp drive is that the theory of relativity places no known restrictions оn the motion of space itself, thus allowing for а convenient circumvention of the speed of light barrier,” according to the DIA-funded research.
But in order for any of this to happen, one must have access to, and know how to use, very advanced technology. The paper talks about this technology in a theoretical sense, but can you imagine if the theory has already been put to the test and proven?
“The most attractive feature of the Warp drive is that the theory of relativity places no known restrictions оn the motion of space itself”
— Declassified DIA-funded research
Remember, UFOs exist, and we don’t know what technologies they use. This is one possible explanation.
According to the authors, the technology involved in a warp drive would have be able to manipulate extra dimensions in order to gain control of dark energy.
“If an advanced technology was able to influence the radius of an extra dimension, then it would acquire direct control over dark energy, and hence the expansion and contraction of space itself,” according to the paper.
Interestingly, “If one were to adjust the radius of the extra dimension in the direct vicinity of а spacecraft, then the dark energy density would also change only in the vicinity of the spacecraft, as would the expansion of space.”
The authors point out, “It is important at this point to appreciate that globally, the universe would continue to expand at the гаtе we observe today, but that only in the proximity of the spacecraft would space bе “stimulated” to expand at some modified rate.”
The researchers concluded back in 2010 that “As tremendous а feat as this may sound, at this early stage in the research it is one of the only viable mechanisms to generate а warp drive.”
“UFOs are not in fact UFOs at all; they are time machines. And they aren’t made by aliens; they’re made by humans in the future — the very near future”
— Austin Steinbart
The seemingly impossible maneuvers of UFOs can be explained if you think of the UFO as a time machine instead of something being propelled at great speeds.
According to Austin Steinbart, who claims on his YouTube channel to have begun working for the DIA at the age of 17, “UFOs are not in fact UFOs at all; they are time machines. And they aren’t made by aliens; they’re made by humans in the future — the very near future.”
Steinbart says that the military has been ordered to ignore UFOs since the 1950s in order to avoid an “adverse Butterfly Effect.”
Whether you believe Steinbart or not, his assertion that UFOs are time machines has been made by others, and it correlates the theoretical research funded by the DIA — only Steinbart claims that the research is operational and has been for some time.
Michael Masters, professor of biological anthropology at Montana Tech, also made the claim in his book, “Identified Flying Objects: A Multidisciplinary Scientific Approach to the UFO Phenomenon,” that many UFOs are actually made by humans in the future, whom he calls “extratempestrials.”
Although scientists say that warp drives are theoretically possible, “further advances in quantum physics, quantum mechanics and metamaterials” are still needed to make them a reality, according to Joseph Agnew – an undergraduate engineer and research assistant from the University of Alabama in Huntsville’s Propulsion Research Center (PRC).
Whatever you want to call them, the existence of UAP has publicly been confirmed by the US Navy.
Somebody made them, and spacetime-bending warp drives are just one component of a whole slough of government research into the subject.
It gets even crazier when you start looking at government research into stargates, wormholes, and antigravity!
An engineer shares his independent forensic analysis of the Tic Tac shaped Nimitz UFO video with The Sociable, highlighting advanced technologies involving warp drives, altered spacetime, and vacuum energy.
Engineer, peer-reviewed author, and Lyft driver Michael Boyd has prepared an independent forensic analysis of the To The Stars Academy of Arts & Science (TTSA) video depicting Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP) taken off the coast of San Diego by US Navy pilots from the USS Nimitz in 2004.
Boyd, who patented a device and method to generate and capture gravito-magnetic energy, suspects that the video may have been altered prior to going public, and he is concerned that the Navy may have provoked the UAP into firing an electromagnetic pulse at a US Navy F/A-18 Super Hornet jet.
Before diving into the technical analysis of the Tic Tac shaped Nimitz UAP, aka FLIR1, here are some of Boyd’s forensic findings:
Infrared (IR) shows evidence of an alteration of spacetime in areas around the craft due to the presence of what appears to be dark balloon-shaped spots.
Empirical evidence suggests the craft is using advanced propulsion technologies that are capable of gravitational time dilation, drawing energy from the vacuum, and utilizing wormholes.
The UAP appears to be hitting the Nimitz aircraft with an electromagnetic pulse.
The video on YouTube may have been altered from its original version.
The forensic analysis by Boyd is based on his own “personal experience with infrared imaging technology and quantum gravitation phenomena,” as well as research by Dr. Hal Puthoff, with whom Boyd says he was in contact from January 3-13, 2020.
The following version of the report has been edited for brevity, but is otherwise verbatim what Boyd had written. Anything not written by Boyd will be in italics.
Report on independent forensic analysis of the official footage captured by a US Navy F/A-18 Super Hornet present at the 2004 Nimitz UAP incident off the coast of San Diego for metric effects on physical processes in an altered spacetime as interpreted by a remote (unaltered spacetime) observer
The TTSA website claims the “FLIR1” is the second of three US military videos of unidentified aerial phenomenon (UAP) that has been through the official declassification review process of the United States government and approved for public release.
The US Navy Media email address secnavpa.fct@navy.mil was used to send a copy of this report to the Navy through the Secretary’s Office. The President of the United States was sent a hard copy.
The YouTube video https://youtu.be/6rWOtrke0HY was accessed on January 19, 2020 for purposes of this report.
I am uncomfortable with the authenticity of claims that this is official footage and that it was unaltered prior to its release. I request a complete and unedited copy of the US Navy’s video be released for further research and analysis.
My analysis is limited therefore to the video data provided in that YouTube video [below].
“Propulsion systems that harness the power of gravitation and/or vacuum energy”
I observed a dark torus shaped balloon rotating counterclockwise above UAP that appears cooler on IR than the other regions. Also I observed a large dark region to left of the UAP and a small dark oval shaped balloon rotating to the right and below UAP.
A balloon shaped brighter region to right of the UAP appearing warmer on IR was observed. Also observed was a balloon shaped brighter region with moving darker regions to right of and under the UAP directly to the right of the small dark oval shaped balloon. See slides 14 –17, 28 — 29, and 31 – 35 [below].
Slide 17
“I have an unmet need for reassurance of future nonviolent interaction with UAPs”
In slide 19 the IR detector array appears to be saturated by heating in detector array fanout. The detector array is packaged and housed in cryogenic cooled vacuum chamber that would be expected to be impervious to electro-magnetic pulses. In slides 20 and 30 the IR detector array appears to blackout.
Slide 20
“These slides make me feel uncomfortable”
In slides 21 through 28 partial saturation of the detectors’ background signal was observed, significantly reducing the detector responsivity. These slides make me feel uncomfortable.
I have an unmet need for reassurance of future nonviolent interaction with UAPs. I request the support for further failure analysis and for development of protocols for remedial measures.
Slide 21
“Propulsion systems that harness the power of gravitation and/or vacuum energy”
In slides 31 through 40 high acceleration of the UAP is observed and the UAP appears to harness a loop de loop to increase its acceleration to sub-relativistic speed.
This makes me feel optimistic to met [sic] the unmet need for propulsion systems that harness the power of gravitation and/or vacuum energy for the wellbeing of humanity.
Slide 32
According to Boyd, it’s important to understand concepts such as time dilation and G force in order to understand this technology. He summarized to The Sociable:
“Greater G force means time dilates, length shrinks “gravitational” energy while lower G force means time shrinks, length dilates “anti-gravitational” energy. This is based on principals of General Relativity, Einstein’s theory of geometric gravitation and the data.”
“The dark balloon shaped region over the top of the UAP appears to be a region of expanded spacetime. The other balloon shaped regions on the right of the UAP are also regions of altered spacetime used to open a wormhole on the left of the UAP. These regions appear to be utilized to create a gravitational winding, spring-like force that propels the craft to the left at the entrance to the wormhole.”
“The UAP appears to be hitting the Nimitz aircraft with an electromagnetic pulse that charged the IR detector array fanout on the back of the array causing it to saturate. The image observed shows the fanout behind the array in that frame. I don’t know what the Nimitz aircraft did to the UAP that would be considered hostile by the UAP.”
“I observed a frame where there was two IR sensor display images on top of each other with one slightly askew from the other. I also feeling suspicious there is more footage they recorded during this event that was not released based on verbal hearsay evidence of former Navy personnel.”
For more background information, Boyd told The Sociable that Dr. Hal Puthoff, Co-founder and VP of TTSA, had provided him with a copy of Dr. Puthoff’s research paper, “Advanced space propulsion based on vacuum (spacetime metric) engineering,” and part of Dr. Puthoff’s paper was written into the introduction of Boyd’s forensic analysis.
When reached for comment, Dr. Puthoff told The Sociable, “I shared that paper with a number of individuals who requested it, but I don’t specifically recall whether Michael Boyd was one of them (though likely so). I’ve not seen his analysis.”
Editor’s note: Boyd said that he holds shares in TTSA and he provided documentation of his correspondence with Dr. Puthoff shortly after this article was published.
Slides 6-11 from Boyd’s analysis show mathematically how UAP technology may be possible:
Slide 10
If you are looking for another perspective on the Tic Tac UAP, Dr. Jack Sarfatti has contributed greatly to explaining the physics that go into it. You can check out his interview on the Stardrive Report here.
There is zero G-force inside Tic Tac at all times even when it appears to make a U turn at thousands of miles per hour. The apparent G-force seen by Commander David Fravor, Kevin Day et-al is a...
On Thursday (March 26), a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket launched the sixth and final Advanced Extremely High Frequency (AEHF-6) military communications satellite to Earth orbit, acing the first-ever mission for the U.S. Space Force.
The Atlas V was cleared to fly even though many activities around the nation and the world — including other rocket launches — have been grounded by the coronavirus pandemic. The launch was approved because the $1.4 billion AEHF-6 satellite is essential to national security, U.S. military officials said.
"Even in the face of a global pandemic, like the current COVID-19 crisis, we must continue to perform mission-essential tasks," Lt. Gen. John F. Thompson, commander of the Space and Missile Systems Center at Los Angeles Air Force Base, said in an interview with United Launch Alliance representatives that aired during the AEHF-6 launch webcast.
(COVID-19 is the disease caused by the new coronavirus. As of Friday, March 27, COVID-19 had killed more than 25,000 people worldwide, according to data compiled by Johns Hopkins University.)
AEHF-6 "is designated mission-essential, and it's because the AEHF constellation supports the president of the United States, other national leaders and the joint forces with critical strategic communications around the planet," Thompson said. "And this particular launch extends that capability out into the timeframe beyond 2030."
But Thompson also stressed that COVID-19 was very much on the minds of the AEHF-6 launch team, which took "every precaution to ensure our workforce is safe."
The six-satellite AEHF constellation circles Earth in geostationary orbit, about 22,200 miles (35,700 kilometers) above the planet. From that lofty perch, the spacecraft provide secure, jam-proof communications between government officials and warfighters on the ground.
Lockheed Martin is the prime contractor for the $15 billion AEHF network, which is a follow-on to the U.S. Air Force's Milstar communications constellation. The other five AEHF satellites launched in August 2010, May 2012, September 2013, October 2018 and August 2019. The spacecraft have a design lifetime of 14 years.
The AEHF satellites aren't the only space assets that have been deemed critical to U.S. national security. A variety of satellites meet that description, and the Space Force is committed to keeping all of them up and running despite the coronavirus outbreak, said Gen. John "Jay" Raymond, chief of space operations for the new military branch, which was officially established in December 2019. (The Space Force, by the way, resides within the U.S. Air Force, much as the Marine Corps is part of the Department of the Navy.)
Why is the US Space Force launching a rocket during the COVID-19 outbreak?
"I'm especially proud of our military professionals who continue to ensure that the vital space systems remain operational in support of our nation," Raymond said in a video tweeted out by the Space Force on Friday. "Thanks to their professionalism and dedication to duty, critical capabilities such as the Global Positioning System and satellite communications are available 24/7 to enable civil authorities and safeguard our national defense."
Thursday's launch provided some rare action for space fans in these strange lockdown days. The next high-profile liftoff firmly on the docket is the April 9 launch of three new International Space Station crewmembers, who will ride to orbit from Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. The coronavirus pandemic has delayed a number of other planned missions, resulting in a schedule littered with "TBDs."
Rocket Engineer Whistleblower Reveals Secret E.T. Technology at Area 51
Rocket Engineer Whistleblower Reveals Secret E.T. Technology at Area 51
Genius David Adair reveals his trip to Area 51 where he was asked to examin a huge engine that had come off an extraterrestrial craft. What he discovered shocked the scientists. This engine was conscious and directly communicated with the mind.
Presented by David Adair Filmed by Zohar Entertainment Group
Something Weird is Happening with the Interstellar Comet 2I/Borisov
Something Weird is Happening with the Interstellar Comet 2I/Borisov
When astronomers see something in the universe that at first glance seems like one-of-a-kind, it's bound to stir up a lot of excitement and attention. This mysterious visitor from the depths of space first caught skywatchers' attention in late August 2019 when it was officially discovered whizzing through the Solar System on a trajectory that indicated an interstellar origin.
After analyzing the object, astronomers identified it as a comet named Comet 21/Borisov which is the first identified comet and the second observed interstellar interloper after the infamousʻOumuamua to arrive here from another star.
NASA states that they don't know from where or when the comet started heading toward our Sun, but it won't hang around for long. The Sun's gravity is slightly deflecting its trajectory, but can't capture it because of the shape of its orbit and high velocity of about 100,000 miles per hour.
Hubble revealed that the heart of the comet, a loose agglomeration of ices and dust particles, is likely no more than about 3,200 feet across, about the length of nine football fields.
Now, this month, astronomers checking in on the object found that something weird was happening.
In the next video, nemesis maturity explains what going on with this mysterious interstellar visitor.
Studying the End of the World: The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse
Throughout the history of civilization, the concept of the apocalypse has been ever present, in one way or another. The envisioned revelation, the feared end of the world that will herald an age of purification through horrific and chaotic means, has been a part of every major religion and belief throughout the centuries. But one of the most interesting prophecies relates to the famous Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, which are described in the Bible’s Book of Revelation.
“…and behold, a black horse…”
Today we’re bringing you this concept in detail. Together we will envision this end of the world, this crumbling of civilizations at the hands of War, Famine, Pestilence, and Disease, and dissect this prophecy and its various interpretations throughout history.
Could there be a speck of truth in this vision? Did the Four Horsemen already thunder across the fields of the earth? Let’s find out.
When Seven Trumpets Shall Sound! The Origins of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse
In the New Testament – the second part of the Bible – and in its last book, which is called the Book of Revelation, written by John the Theologian of Patmos, there is a chapter which relates to us the story of a doomsday revelation, of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse which descend on the earth to decimate the population.
Each of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse represent different aspects of the cleansing of the earth, by Russian painter Viktor Vasnetsov.
The most straightforward and widely agreed interpretation of this chapter is the description of a period in history when a large part of earth’s population would perish through a combination of wars, diseases, and hunger. In the Bible, these hardships are described as horsemen, riding in succession at the behest of Jesus, in the form of the Lamb of God. This title comes from the Bible, John 1:29, when John the Baptist exclaims: “Behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world.”
The chapter begins by describing a divine scroll, held by God in his right hand, and sealed with seven seals. Their opening, and the subsequent apocalypse, would usher the second coming of Jesus.
Each one of these seven seals represent a different aspect of the apocalypse: the first four relate to the horsemen, the fifth releases the martyr’s cries for the God’s wrath , the sixth ushers a series of cataclysmic natural disasters, while the seventh calls forth the seven angelic trumpeters, who carry seven vials of plagues and divine wrath, which they pour out on the sinful and the wicked. The Lamb of God, being worthy to open the first four seals, does so, and summons forth, one after another, the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, setting in motion the ferocious cleansing of the earth.
“And I saw and behold a white horse: and he that sat on him had a bow; and a crown was given unto him: and he went forth conquering, and to conquer.”
– Revelation, 6:2
Throughout history, various sources often explained the first rider in various different ways, since his role is the only one not explicitly stated. While most interpreters agreed that the white rider symbolizes disease and pestilence, it wasn’t always the usual claim. There is a widely attested description that places this white horseman as a metaphor for righteousness.
In a world where sin is rampant, a righteous harbinger of justice and righteousness would seem a fitting purifier in an apocalypse. The crown that was “given unto him” could signify the rule of justice above all, or symbolize a truly just leader, if such a one can exist.
But the symbolism of disease and pestilence could still be the most plausible description. The aspect of a conqueror is cognate with the sweeping of a major plague (the Great Plague is a good example) and the crown would symbolize the ultimate rule of death above all else.
The first horseman, the White Rider, of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.
But as the time progressed, and by the time of the beginning of the 16th century, many have come to interpret the white rider as the personification of the Second Coming of Christ, or even Christ himself. At the time of the major crisis and the break of Western Christianity with the reforms of Martin Luther, this came as a most logical and accepted explanation.
The white color of the horse and the rider was quickly connected with divine purity and absence of sin, and the bow he carried as the tool of divine punishment. Likewise, the white rider was interpreted as the Holy Spirit – pure and just.
Another popular view is much simpler – the white horseman could just be the personification of mass conquest. The passage, relating to the rider that “went forth conquering, and to conquer” could simply be that – a descent of a prophesied conqueror that will enslave the populace of the earth.
The Red Horseman of the Apocalypse
“And there went out another horse that was red: and power was given to him that sat thereon to take peace from the earth, and that they should kill one another: and there was given unto him a great sword.”
– Revelation 6:4
The Red Horseman is widely connected with war. The translations often correlate in the descriptions: the horse is “fiery” red, and the rider bears an upright sword in preparation for battle. The red color is thought to symbolize the fire and blood of warfare, and the rider’s ability to make men kill one another clearly symbolizes constant and global warfare .
The second horseman, the Red Rider, of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.
War as an apocalyptic aspect was always present throughout time and is the most straightforward herald of death.
In Matthew, 24:6-7, Christ states:“And ye shall hear of wars and rumors of wars; For nation shall rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom…” This quote clearly relates to the ever-present aspect of warfare as a symbol of the final revelation.
Another interesting quote could also be adapted to the Red Horseman and warfare as the aspect of evil and the Antichrist:
“From the eternal sea he rises, creating armies on either shore, turning man against his brother, until man exists no more.”
The red horseman could also signify the sin of hatred and aggression as a contributing factor to the prophesized end of the world. And in a paradoxical turn of events, the Lamb of God releases that same aggression to smite the wicked with fire and sword. The prophecy of constant warfare that is supposed to descend on earth is clearly described with the red rider having divine authority to take peace from the earth .
The Black Horseman of the Apocalypse
“And I beheld, and lo a black horse; and he that sat on him had a pair of balances in his hand. And I heard a voice in the midst of the four beasts say, A measure of wheat for a penny, and three measures of barley for a penny; and see thou hurt not the oil and the wine.”
– Revelation 6:5-6
Another easily interpreted figure, the black horseman was almost always universally described as a personification of Famine. The horse’s black color was widely attributed to negative aspects – mourning, carrion ravens, night, desolation, and bleakness – all of which are aspects of famine as well. The rider is said to carry in his hands a pair of balances.
This is the chosen translation of the original word – the Greek zugón – which generally means a “yoke”, as in a burden and a yoke for oxen. Both description carry negative connotations. The yoke is synonymous with servitude and slavery, and the pair of scales signifies the rationing and measuring of food. This was the common ancient practice of ascribing value to things.
The passage states that a single penny (orig. denarius) would be sufficient to acquire only a meager ration of wheat, and even less of barley. This is clearly an ancient view of what a famine would look like, since wheat was a staple of the diet and without it bread was lost.
The final part of the passage states that while the prices of wheat and barley are affected, the ones of oil and wine are not to be changed. This was interpreted in several different ways, and could signify a paradoxical aspect, in which the staple foods are gone, while wine remains – furthering the famine while leaving the luxuries which cannot feed a man.
One popular interpretation states that the black horseman signifies the Imperial, ruling oppression of the lower class. The rich rulers hold the scales and dispense what meager rations they deem sufficient, while the luxuries remain abundant and out of reach for the poor. A growing divide between classes and fellow men could be a perfect aspect of an end time revelation.
The Pale Horseman of the Apocalypse
“And I looked and behold a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him. And power was given unto them over the fourth part of the earth, to kill with sword, and with hunger, and with death, and with the beasts of the earth.”
- Revelation 6:8
The final, fourth horseman serves as a sort of epilogue, a dramatic crescendo that culminates with the most powerful and feared rider – Death itself. In the entire chapter, he is the only rider who was named, and the only one without a weapon – for he himself is a weapon. The rider and the horse are depicted as pallid, bearing the sickly and lifeless color of a corpse, and the ability to extinguish all manner of earthly life through various natural means.
The pale rider contains elements of all preceding ones and could be termed the most significant of the four. In his wake follows hell, the final culmination of all things horrific, seemingly ready to swallow all the wicked that will perish in the apocalypse.
The fourth horseman, Death, of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.
The part that states that power was given unto them over the fourth of the earth could be interpreted in various ways. While it could be that all four riders would wreak havoc over a quarter of the planet, it could also signify that each of the four would have a single quarter of the earth.
The passage states that the rider would kill with the beasts of the earth . This could be a hint to the animals and the nature that promptly retake the regions which are depopulated, signifying the ultimate reign of wild nature over the man.
Death Rides a Pale Horse – Apocalypse in Art
The prophecy of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse has long been the subject of inspiration for many artists, who chose that influential and critical subject as the source for monumental artworks. Throughout time, many artists portrayed the horsemen in the way they interpreted them, which also provides good insight into the prophecy.
One of the more popular depictions was made in 1887, by the renowned Russian painter Viktor Vasnetsov. His large painting, “Воины Апокалипсиса” , is a colorful and detailed, contemporary depiction of Death, War, Conquest, and Famine. They are given modern attributes and were intended to reflect on the populace of the time.
Some of the earlier, medieval depictions are much more dramatic and almost unsettling, certainly aimed at putting fear into the more doubtful believers. One such depiction was made between 1496 and 1498, by Albrecht Dürer, the renowned artist of the German Renaissance. His dramatic woodcut represents the four horsemen as elderly, ghastly, and emaciated men, whose equally unsettling stallions are trampling the sinful and gluttonous people below.
Woodcut by Albrecht Dürer of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.
A similar woodcut was made between 1851 and 1860, by Julius Schnorr von Carolsfeld, a German painter, who portrayed a savage and merciless massacre of sinners by the four riders, all under the watchful eyes of the Lamb of God.
Until Man Exists No More
To date, the story of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse remains as a stark vision of the paradoxical, inherent nature of man. From its earliest forms it served as a warning for the wicked to change their ways, a plea for temperance and peace, for moderation and humility.
Yet we see that in the 21st century, much that was described in the Book of Revelation has come to pass. From countless famines, to plagues and pestilences, to endless wars and decadence – the apocalypse seems to have occurred several times over. Or is it yet to come?
Top image: 1796 painting "Death on a Pale Horse" artist depiction of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.
Soon The Pale Green Horse of The Four Horsemen Will Arrive
Soon The Pale Green Horse of The Four Horsemen Will Arrive
The Four Horsemen are figures in Christian theology, appearing in the New Testament's final book, Revelation, an apocalypse written by John of Patmos, as well as in the Old Testament's prophetic Book of Zechariah, and in the Book of Ezekiel, where they are named as punishments from God.
In John's revelation:
The first horseman is on a white horse, carrying a bow, and given a crown, riding forward as a figure of Conques perhaps invoking Pestilence, Deadly Epidemic.
The second carries a sword and rides a red horse and is the creator of War.
The third is a food merchant riding upon a black horse, symbolizing Famine.
The fourth and final horse is pale green, and upon it rides Death accompanied by Hades. They were given authority over a quarter of the earth, to kill with sword, famine, and plague, and by means of the beasts of the earth.
With the current corona (covid 19) virus, the fight against this invisible enemy, despite the attempts to stop the invisible enemy the rider on the red horse slays a great number of people.
Next the rider on the black horse arrives, with the world under lockdown and a looming recession, resulting in high unemployment and bankruptcy of many factories and stores which may lead to a shortage of food supplies ultimately resulting in anarchy then Death accompanied by Hades arrive upon the pale green horse.
Just for a moment, imagine a universe awash with life, where we humans are not the only intelligent beings around. What might these alien races look like? Could we communicate with them, or even recognise them as intelligent? And what would they make of our violent and dangerous species?
Might they take one look, and decide not to bother with such primitive beings? A planetary nursery filled with spiteful, galactic infants. On the other hand, in our imaginary scenario, they may enrich us with scientific knowledge beyond our imagination. Or could an encounter with aliens have a more destructive outcome? It could be a bad day for human kind.
But relax, it’s just make believe, it could never happen, could it? A mysterious crash in Roswell, New Mexico during the 1940s convinced many that our planet is being visited by space aliens. Crop circles in Britain have only added fuel to the fire. Few scientists doubt that life indeed exists elsewhere, but some believe we’re more likely to make contact via radio waves. Join the search for extra-terrestrials and hear from scientists who think we are on the verge of making contact.
Bizarre UFOs filmed releasing orbs over St. Petersburg, Russia 25-Mar-2020
Bizarre UFOs filmed releasing orbs over St. Petersburg, Russia 25-Mar-2020
This UFO video was taken over a period of time starting at 8:26PM over St. Petersburg, Russia. At first we see the object in a straight line but after some time the objects group together and begin to drop Orbs to the ground below, upon doing this the witness zooms in on the object and it is in the classic tight triangle formation and just stays there for a while.
Nilometers: Ancient Egypt’s Ingenious Invention Used Until Modern Times
Nilometers: Ancient Egypt’s Ingenious Invention Used Until Modern Times
For thousands of years, nilometers measured the water level of the Nile Riverduring the annual flood season. This, in turn, was used to predict the fortunes of the annual harvest, the taxes to be imposed (which determined the revenues of the state), as well as the prices of foodstuffs. Therefore, the nilometer was a vital instrument for the ancientEgyptiancivilization. The significance of the nilometer is evident in the fact that even after Egypt was conquered by foreign powers, nilometers continued to be utilized. As a matter of fact, the nilometer only became obsolete during the 20 th century, when the Aswan High Dam was completed.
The Nilometers of the Nile
It is well-known that the Nile was the lifeline of ancient Egypt. The Greek historian Herodotus, for instance, referred to Egypt as the “gift of the Nile.” The river not only enabled intensive cultivation along its banks but was also used as a means of transport. The annual flooding of the Nile was the river’s most important natural phenomenon, as it helped to fertilize the agricultural land in the delta by depositing millions of tons of silt each year. In addition, the inundation of the Nile also served to determine when certain religious and civil festivals were to be celebrated, thereby regulating the rhythm of life in ancient Egypt.
The annual flood season of the Nile lasted from July to October and was caused by the summer monsoon rains over the Ethiopian Plateau. The rainwater flows from the highlands into the Nile via its tributaries, including the Blue Nile and the Atbarah River. The water level of the Nile reaches its peak around the end of August, and this level is maintained till early October, after which it gradually goes down.
In addition to the timing of the annual flood, the amount of water brought by the floods was also a crucial aspect of this natural phenomenon. Too much or too little water would have had a negative impact on the lives of those who depended on the river. Therefore, the ancient Egyptians invented the nilometer, a device that measured the water level of the Nile during the annual flooding.
Drawing of a measuring shaft inside of a nilometer from page 88 of “Up the Nile, and home again. A handbook for travelers and a travel-book for the library,” 1862).
As the nilometer was such an extremely important instrument, it would be reasonable to expect that many of them were built by the ancient Egyptians. Today, however, there are not many examples of the device remaining. According to an article published by National Geographic in 2016, “fewer than two dozen of the devices are known to exist”. It seems likely that some nilometers were destroyed by natural disasters, and not rebuilt. Others were simply not maintained, and left to fall into ruin.
This is the case, for instance, of the nilometer of Helwan, a city to the south of Cairo, on the bank of the Nile opposite the ruins of Memphis. This nilometer is recorded to have been restored or built in 699 AD, about half a century after the Muslim conquest of Egypt. By 714 AD, however, the nilometer was in such a bad state that the Umayyad caliph, Al-Walid I, ordered the governor of Egypt to build a new nilometer.
The Roda Island Nilometer
The new nilometer was built on Roda (or Rhoda / Rawdah) Island, not far from Fustat, Egypt’s capital at that point in time. The island has been an important location since pharaonic times, and served many functions over its long history, including a port, an arsenal, a fortress and a rich garden.
The island’s nilometer, which may be referred to as the Roda nilometer, is located on the southern tip of the island, and is perhaps the most famous example of this ancient device. It may be mentioned the original 8 th century nilometer was destroyed by a flood around 850 AD. A new one, however, was built shortly after the disaster, and is the one that is still standing today.
The current Roda nilometer was designed by the astronomer Abu al-‘Abbas Ahmad ibn Muhammad ibn Kathir al-Farqhani (known also as Alfraganus in the West). The nilometer has been restored on various occasions, for instance, once between 872 and 873 AD, and again in 1092 AD. Restoration had also been carried out during the Ottoman period, as well as in more recent times.
Ceiling of the nilometer building, an Umayyad era Egyptian water measurement construction, used to measure the level of the Nile, located on Roda Island, River Nile, Cairo, Egypt.
The Roda nilometer consists of two main elements – a well and a column. The well is a 10 m (32.8 ft) wide and square-hole-dug to a depth of 13 m (42.7 ft). One of the challenges that faced the builders of this nilometer was the nature of the ground that they had to work with. In order to create the well, at least 1300 m 3 (4265 ft) of earth and clay had to be removed.
Having done that, the builders needed to stabilize the structure, and to prevent it from sinking into the clay. This was achieved by raising the structure on a foundation of thick tree trunks. The well is lined with stone, and is accessible via a staircase on its interior walls. The well, which is circular at the bottom, but rectangular at the top, has three stories, each having an opening turned towards a different direction. These openings are connected to the Nile through tunnels, and therefore allow water to enter the well during the annual flood season.
How Much was a Good Flood?
The octagonal column is the part of the nilometer that is used to measure the water level of the Nile during its inundation. This column is made of marble, and is set in the center of the well. It is topped with a Corinthian column, and held in place by a wooden beam on the top that spans the nilometer. The column is graded, and is divided into 19 Egyptian cubits, each cubit being about 50 m (164 ft). Therefore, this nilometer was able to measure floods up to about 9.5 m (31.2 ft).
19 cubits of water, however, meant that Egypt was facing severe flooding. When such a situation occurred, children wearing yellow turbans would run in the streets to alert the population of Cairo of the impending disaster. On the other hand, 12 cubits of water was too little, and was a sign that the country would be facing a famine that year. 16 cubits was the ideal amount of flood water that was needed for a bountiful harvest. The Nile’s flood level can also be read using the staircase on the well’s interior walls. The staircase consists of 45 steps, each of which is 24 cm (9.4 in) high. Therefore, the level of the flood waters can be easily calculated by this means.
It may be mentioned that the definition of a ‘good flood level’ was not the same through the ages. The Greek geographer Strabo, for example, wrote that before the time of Petronius (the Roman prefect of Egypt in the 20s BC), “the crop was the largest and the rise the highest when the Nile would rise to fourteen cubits, and when it would rise to only eight a famine would ensue;”. During the time of Petronius, however, “when the nilometer registered only twelve cubits, the crop was the largest, and once, when it registered only eight cubits, no one felt hunger.”
The Roda nilometer was once covered by a conical dome, which was unfortunately destroyed during the French occupation of Egypt. Fortunately, the scientific mission that accompanied the French expedition made careful and thorough descriptions of the Roda nilometer, including its architecture. Thanks to these records, it was possible to make a reconstruction of the dome. The current structure dates to the reign of Farouk I, the penultimate King of Egypt and the Sudan.
Reconstructed conical structure over the nilometer on the southern tip of Roda Island on the Nile River at Cairo.
One of the differences between the Roda nilometer and its predecessors from the pharaonic and Greco-Roman periods is that the former was not within the compound of a religious structure. Although there is a mosque near the Roda nilometer, this was only built later on, i.e. during the 11 th century.
On the other hand, pharaonic and Greco-Roman nilometers were commonly associated with temples, and were therefore under the control of priests. By accurately predicting the flood level of the Nile, the priests must have looked as though they were performing magic, and would have surely impressed the general population.
One of the temples in which a nilometer has been found is the Temple of Kom Ombo, located 48 km (30 mi) to the north of Aswan. This temple was built during the Ptolemaic period, and is unusual for being a double temple. This means that the temple was dedicated equally to two gods – Sobek and Horus, which is reflected in the temple’s perfect symmetry along its main axis. In any case, the nilometer is located within the compound of the temple, though not in the temple itself.
The Kom Ombo nilometer is noticeably different from its counterpart in Roda. Unlike the latter, the former does not have a column. Instead, the Kom Ombo nilometer consists only of a well. Like the well of the Roda nilometer, the one at Kom Ombo also has steps along the walls of its interior, which allowed the flood level of the Nile to be read. A tunnel with an opening in the well connects the nilometer to the Nile, which lies beyond the temple’s walls. At ground level, the nilometer is identified by a small cylindrical wall.
One of the most important nilometers in Egypt is the one in Elephantine, an island opposite the city of Aswan. For much of Egypt’s ancient history, Elephantine was the country’s southernmost city. Therefore, it was here that the first measurements of the Nile’s flood level for the season would be made. Although the current Elephantine nilometer dates to the Roman period, archaeologists believe that this is a restoration, and that the original pieces were replaced at some point in time. It has also been speculated that the original device may have been the oldest nilometer in Egypt.
Nilometer on the southeast side of Elephantine Island in Aswan, Egypt.
Strabo provides a detailed description of the Elephantine nilometer, which is as follows, “ the nilometer is a well on the bank of the Nile constructed with close-fitting stones, in which are marks showing the greatest, least, and mean rises of the Nile; for the water in the well rises and lowers with the river. Accordingly, there are marks on the wall of the well, measures of the complete rises and of the others. So when watchers inspect these, they give out word to the rest of the people, so that they may know; for long beforehand they know from such signs and the days what the future rise will be, and reveal it beforehand. This is useful, not only to the farmers with regard to the water-distribution, embankments, canals, and other things of this kind, but also to the prefects, with regard to the revenues; for the greater rises indicate that the revenues also will be greater.”
Whilst Egypt came to be ruled by different powers over the course of its long history, the nilometer continued to serve its function. In fact, the collection of taxes based on the level of the Nile’s flooding is recorded to have lasted until the middle of the 20 th century. The nilometer eventually became obsolete when the construction of the Aswan High Dam was completed in 1970 (and formally dedicated in the following year).
The building of the dam marked a big shift in the relationship between the Nile and the people who lived along its banks. For the first time in Egypt’s history, it was man who controlled the annual flooding of the Nile. The Aswan High Dam allowed the floodwaters to be stored in a reservoir, and released only when needed. On the other hand, one of the negative effects of the Aswan High Dam is that silt, which was brought by the annual floods, no longer reached Egypt’s agricultural lands, thereby gradually reducing their fertility.
Although nilometers no longer serve their original function, they have not been abandoned. Instead, they have found new life as both cultural heritage and tourist attractions. The Roda nilometer, for example, has been nominated by the Egyptian government as a UNESCO World Heritage Site , and is currently on its Tentative List.
Top image: The inside of measuring shaft of the Roda nilometer. (Baldiri / CC BY-SA 3.0 )
Ancient Egyptian Blue Pigment Revolutionizes Biomedicine
Ancient Egyptian Blue Pigment Revolutionizes Biomedicine
A German research team has produced new nanosheets for near infrared imaging from ancient ‘Egyptian blue pigment’.
In October 2018, I wrote an Ancient Origins article about Egyptian blue, a brilliant blue color first created in ancient Egypt over 4000 years ago and used to adorn the crown of the world famous bust of Nefertiti. A team of scientists from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California has now found the ancient color holds unique qualities that can not only reduce building energy consumption and boost solar energy output, but it also “increases the output of certain types of solar cells, through strong infra-red emissions.”
The international research team was led by Dr Sebastian Kruss from the Institute of Physical Chemistry at the University of Göttingen , and in a new paper published in the journal Nature Communications detailing their production of a new “nanomaterial” based on the Egyptian blue pigment. The researchers say Egyptian blue is ideally suited for applications in imaging using “near infrared (NIR) spectroscopy and microscopy,” which according to Zeiss is based on the absorption of electromagnetic (EM) radiation when light interacts with a sample and a detector measures its transmittance and absorbance.
The Science Of Egyptian Blue Pigment
Egyptian blue, or properly, “calcium copper silicate,” is one of the earliest artificial pigments created by humans and the oldest known sample is from about 5000 years old, discovered in a tomb painting dated to the reign of Ka-Sen, the last pharaoh of the First Dynasty.
By the time of the New Kingdom, Egyptian blue pigment was an extremely popular and painted onto statues, tomb paintings and sarcophagi. It was also used to produce a ceramic glaze known as ‘Egyptian faience’. And the manufacture of Egyptian blue spread beyond Egypt’s borders across Greece and Rome, leaving its trace on statues from the Parthenon in Athens, and according to an article in Art in Society , 19th century archaeologists discovered Egyptian blue pigment on wall paintings during excavations at Pompeii.
Egyptian blue pigment shabti figures on display in the Egyptian exhibit at the Louvre in France in 2006.
Dr. Kruss said microscopy and optical imaging are important tools in basic research and biomedicine, when light relating substances are excited and release “fluorophores” and these substances stain tiny structures in samples, enabling clear resolution using modern microscopes.
Most fluorophores shine in the range of light in the near infrared spectrum with a wavelength starting at “800 nanometers,” penetrating deep into tissue, therefore, fewer distortions are found in images. And so far, according to the new paper, there are only a few known fluorophores that work in the near infrared spectrum.
Ancient Egyptian Blue Nanosheets
The research team’s big achievement was in exfoliating extremely thin layers from grains of calcium copper silicate, Egyptian blue pigment, and these particular nanosheets are “100,000 times thinner than a human hair” and in the near infrared range, which according to Dr Sebastian Kruss, makes them “ideal for optical imaging.”
Near-infrared image of nanosheets taken from a plant.
Egyptian blue emits infrared light when red light is shone onto it, and while it’s an extraordinarily powerful and long-lived light, it cannot be seen by the naked eye, being too deep in the infrared range of the light spectrum.
The scientists followed the movement of individual nanosheets in order to visualize mechanical processes in the structure of animal and plant tissues, for example, in the cell nuclei of the fruit fly. Furthermore, the researchers integrated the nanosheets into plants and identified them without a microscope, which the paper says promises future applications in the agricultural industry. And Dr Kruss said the potential for state-of-the-art microscopy from this material means that new findings in biomedical research can be expected in the future.
Egyptian blue has a new role in advanced biomedical imaging with its near-infrared radiation being able to penetrate through tissue more effectively than other wavelengths, and for this same reason, because Egyptian blue splits into ‘nanosheets’ – a thousand times thinner than a human hair – if stirred in warm ater for several days, it might serve as a future communication system as its emissions are similar to those used in remote controls and telecommunication devices.
Top image: Egyptian blue pigment: the researchers obtained the nanosheets from this powder. ( University of Göttingen
One large object did not shelter in place over the weekend. NASA
Public health officials advise keeping 6 feet (2 meters) of distance from others during the coronavirus pandemic to avoid potential risks. Astronomers also have a standard distance at which an asteroid is considered "potentially hazardous," and on Sunday a space rock as wide as a football field whipped by us 50 times closer than that threshold.
We obviously have enough to worry about right now, so you can breathe easier knowing that despite coming very close by space standards, there was never any threat the asteroid known simply as 2020 FL2 was going to hit Earth. It passed by Sunday at a distance of 90,000 miles (145,000 kilometers).
Northolt Branch Obs@NBObservatories
Apollo-type asteroid 2020 FL2. Diamter 15-34m. First observed at Purple Mountain Observatory. Close approach, yesterday, 145,000km. 2020 FL2 was moving at a rapid 1,800 arc-minutes per hour. #SpotTheAsteroid@AsteroidDay@NEOShieldTeam@QHYCCD@RoyalAstroSoc
For a little context, NASA's Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) is located about 932,000 miles (1.5 million kilometers) from Earth, the moon is 239,000 miles (384,000 kilometers) away and many large satellites orbit at an altitude of 22,236 miles (35,786 kilometers). The threshold at which a large asteroid comes close enough to earn the label "potentially hazardous" and warrant monitoring by astronomers is about 4.5 million miles (7.2 million kilometers).
So 2020 FL2's close flyby is kind of like the solar system equivalent of tying a bunch of boats together for a spring break party during a time when everyone with a brain is calling for social distancing to stop the spread of a pandemic. The difference, I suppose, is that the huge asteroid flying above us at 45,000 mph (72,420 km/h) doesn't actually pose a threat to anyone.
John Huddy@JohnHuddyTV
Miami party boat and yacht charters still operating. Plenty of jam packed yachts on Biscayne Bay yesterday. Social distancing be damned indeed.
Social distancing be damned: Miami sandbar jampacked despite coronavirus orders
Social distancing be damned: Miami sandbar jampacked despite coronavirus orders
UPDATE: After this story published Saturday night, Miami-Dade County Mayor Carlos Gimenez announced the closure of all marinas and boat ramps countywide. He added that the Miami-Dade Police Departm...
2020 FL2 was significantly bigger than most asteroids that pass within the moon's orbit, measuring at between 49 and 112 feet (15-34 meters) across. Normally the space rocks that come close are more like the size of a house appliance or a small vehicle and would likely burn up in our atmosphere if they did impact Earth.
This asteroid, however, is more on par with the asteroid that wasn't detected until it was exploding in the sky over Russia in 2013, blowing out thousands of windows in the process.
But again, asteroid 2020 FL2 has already passed by us safely. So please go back to whatever you were doing, as long as you don't do it within 6 feet of me or anyone I know.
A newly-discovered asteroid designated 2020 FL2 flew past Earth at a distance of 0.38 LD / 0.00099 AU (148 101 km / 92 026 miles) on March 22, 2020. This is the 22nd known asteroid to flyby Earth within 1 lunar distance since the start of the year and the 3rd this month.
For the millionth time, NASA has issued a statement assuring UFO buffs that what they've seen in an image is not, in fact, an alien.
This time, it was a tiny, pinwheel-shaped smudge in an image snapped by the agency's STEREO camera that captured the interest of extraterrestrial enthusiasts.
"The answer lies on the exact opposite side of the image," the STEREO team wrote in the statement. "At the same time as this strange-looking feature starts being visible, the very bright planet Venus enters the HI2-A field-of-view from the left. Notice that Venus and the feature stay in step almost exactly opposite each other across the middle of the detector."
The object, the note continues, is actually a reflection of the planet within the telescope's optics and is a common occurrence. You can actually see the same shape crop up on otherreadings here and here.
Internal reflections of the planet Earth, as seen in the HI2-B telescope on May 5, 2007. Also visible are the Moon, and the planet Mars. Click on the image to see the full-sized version.
The group also released a graphic explaining what exactly you're seeing in the image.
NASA
Maybe you'll have better luck next time, Agent Mulder.
Astronomers using the Hubble Telescope found that the region around a quasar’s black hole pushes out material at a few percent the speed of light. These quasar tsunamis wreak havoc on the galaxies in which the quasars live.
Artist’s concept of a distant quasar. They’re thought to have supermassive black holes at their cores; they generate energy via infalling matter. Using the Hubble Space Telescope, astronomers have discovered that radiation pressure from a supermassive black hole pushes material away from its galaxy’s center at a fraction of the speed of light. The quasar winds are propelling hundreds of times our sun’s mass outward every year, affecting the whole galaxy as the material snowplows into surrounding gas and dust.
Using the Hubble Space Telescope, a team of astronomers has discovered the most energetic outflows ever witnessed in the universe. They emanate from quasars and tear across interstellar space like tsunamis, wreaking havoc on the galaxies in which the quasars live.
Quasars are extremely remote celestial objects, emitting exceptionally large amounts of energy. Quasars contain supermassive black holes fueled by infalling matter that can shine 1,000 times brighter than their host galaxies of hundreds of billions of stars.
As the black hole devours matter, hot gas encircles it and emits intense radiation, creating the quasar. Winds, driven by blistering radiation pressure from the vicinity of the black hole, push material away from the galaxy’s center. These outflows accelerate to breathtaking velocities that are a few percent of the speed of light. Principal investigator Nahum Arav of Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, Virginia, said:
No other phenomenon carries more mechanical energy. Over the lifetime of 10 million years, these outflows produce a million times more energy than a gamma-ray burst. The winds are pushing hundreds of solar masses of material each year. The amount of mechanical energy that these outflows carry is up to several hundreds of times higher than the luminosity of the entire Milky Way galaxy.
The quasar winds snowplow across the galaxy’s disk. Material that otherwise would have formed new stars is violently swept from the galaxy, causing star birth to cease. Radiation pushes the gas and dust to far greater distances than scientists previously thought, creating a galaxy-wide event.
As this cosmic tsunami slams into interstellar material, the temperature at the shock front spikes to billions of degrees, where material glows largely in X-rays, but also widely across the light spectrum. Anyone witnessing this event would see a brilliant celestial display. Arav said:
You’ll get lots of radiation first in X-rays and gamma rays, and afterwards it will percolate to visible and infrared light. You’d get a huge light show – like Christmas trees all over the galaxy.
Numerical simulations of galaxy evolution suggest that such outflows can explain some important cosmological puzzles, such as why astronomers observe so few large galaxies in the universe, and why there is a relationship between the mass of the galaxy and the mass of its central black hole. This study shows that such powerful quasar outflows should be prevalent in the early universe. Cosmologist Jeremiah P. Ostriker, of Columbia University in New York and Princeton University in New Jersey, commented:
Both theoreticians and observers have known for decades that there is some physical process that shuts off star formation in massive galaxies, but the nature of that process has been a mystery. Putting the observed outflows into our simulations solves these outstanding problems in galactic evolution.
Astronomers studied 13 quasar outflows, and they were able to clock the breakneck speed of gas being accelerated by the quasar wind by looking at spectral “fingerprints” of light from the glowing gas. The Hubble ultraviolet data show that these light absorption features created from material along the path of the light were shifted in the spectrum because of the fast motion of the gas across space. This is due to the Doppler effect, where the motion of an object compresses or stretches wavelengths of light depending on whether it is approaching or receding from us.
Aside from measuring the most energetic quasars ever observed, the team also discovered another outflow accelerating faster than any other. It increased from nearly 43 million miles per hour (70 million kilometers per hour) to roughly 46 million mph (74 million kph) in a three-year period. The scientists believe its acceleration will continue to increase over time. Team member Gerard Kriss of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Maryland, said:
Hubble’s ultraviolet observations allow us to follow the whole range of energy output from quasars, from cooler gas to the extremely hot, highly ionized gas in the more massive winds. These were previously only visible with much more difficult X-ray observations. Such powerful outflows may yield new insights into the link between the growth of a central supermassive black hole and the development of its entire host galaxy.
Bottom line: Astronomers using the Hubble Telescope found that the region around a quasar’s black hole pushes out material at a few percent the speed of light. These quasar tsunamis wreak havoc on the galaxies in which the quasars live.
The cosmological constant has plagued physicists for more than a century.
An illustration of galaxies bending the fabric of space-time (green), and the smooth effect of dark energy (purple), which dominates the effects of gravity.
A single number, called the cosmological constant, bridges the microscopic world of quantum mechanics and the macroscopic world of Einstein's theory of general relativity. But neither theory can agree on its value.
In fact, there's such a huge discrepancy between the observed value of this constant and what theory predicts that it is widely considered the worst prediction in the history of physics. Resolving the discrepancy may be the most important goal of theoretical physics this century.
Lucas Lombriser, an assistant professor of theoretical physics at the University of Geneva in Switzerland, has introduced a new way of evaluating Albert Einstein's equations of gravity to find a value for the cosmological constant that closely matches its observed value. He published his method online in the Oct. 10 issue of the journal Physics Letters B.
The story of the cosmological constant began more than a century ago when Einstein presented a set of equations, now known as the Einstein field equations, that became the framework of his theory of general relativity. The equations explain how matter and energy warp the fabric of space and time to create the force of gravity. At the time, both Einstein and astronomers agreed that the universe was fixed in size and that the overall space between galaxies did not change. However, when Einstein applied general relativity to the universe as a whole, his theory predicted an unstable universe that would either expand or contract. To force the universe to be static, Einstein tacked on the cosmological constant.
Nearly a decade later, another physicist, Edwin Hubble, discovered that our universe is not static, but expanding. The light from distant galaxies showed they were all moving away from each other. This revelation persuaded Einstein to abandon the cosmological constant from his field equations as it was no longer necessary to explain an expanding universe. Physics lore has it that Einstein later confessed that his introduction of the cosmological constant was perhaps his greatest blunder.
In 1998, observations of distant supernovas showed the universe wasn't just expanding, but the expansion was speeding up. Galaxies were accelerating away from each other as if some unknown force was overcoming gravity and shoving those galaxies apart. Physicists have named this enigmatic phenomenon dark energy, as its true nature remains a mystery.
In a twist of irony, physicists once again reintroduced the cosmological constant into Einstein's field equations to account for dark energy. In the current standard model of cosmology, known as ΛCDM (Lambda CDM), the cosmological constant is interchangeable with dark energy. Astronomers have even estimated its value based on observations of distant supernovas and fluctuations in the cosmic microwave background. Although the value is absurdly small (on the order of 10^-52 per square meter), over the scale of the universe, it is significant enough to explain the accelerated expansion of space.
"The cosmological constant [or dark energy] currently constitutes about 70% of the energy content in our universe, which is what we can infer from the observed accelerated expansion that our universe is presently undergoing. Yet this constant is not understood," Lombriser said. "Attempts to explain it have failed, and there seems to be something fundamental that we are missing in how we understand the cosmos. Unraveling this puzzle is one of the major research areas in modern physics. It is generally anticipated that resolving the issue may lead us to a more fundamental understanding of physics."
The worst theoretical prediction in the history of physics
The cosmological constant is thought to represent what physicists call "vacuum energy." Quantum-field theory states that even in a completely empty vacuum of space, virtual particles pop in and out of existence and create energy — a seemingly absurd idea, but one that has been observed experimentally. The problem arises when physicists attempt to calculate its contribution to the cosmological constant. Their result differs from observations by a mind-boggling factor of 10^121 (that's 10 followed by 120 zeroes), the largest discrepancy between theory and experiment in all of physics.
Such a disparity has caused some physicists to doubt Einstein's original equations of gravity; some have even suggested alternative models of gravity. However, further evidence of gravitational waves by the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) have only strengthened general relativity and dismissed many of these alternative theories. Which is why instead of rethinking gravity, Lombriser took a different approach to solve this cosmic puzzle.
"The mechanism I propose does not modify Einstein's field equations," Lombriser said. Instead, "it adds an additional equation on top of Einstein's field equations."
The gravitational constant, which was first used in Isaac Newton's laws of gravity and now an essential part of Einstein's field equations, describes the magnitude of the gravitational force between objects. It is considered one of the fundamental constants of physics, eternally unchanged since the beginning of the universe. Lombriser has made the dramatic assumption that this constant can change.
In Lombriser's modification of general relativity, the gravitational constant remains the same within our observable universe but may vary beyond it. He suggests a multiverse scenario where there may be patches of the universe invisible to us that have different values for the fundamental constants.
This variation of gravity gave Lombriser an additional equation that relates the cosmological constant to the average sum of matter across space-time. After he accounted for the estimated mass of all the galaxies, stars and dark matter of the universe, he could solve that new equation to obtain a new value for the cosmological constant — one that closely agrees with observations.
Using a new parameter, ΩΛ (omega lambda), that expresses the fraction of the universe made of dark matter, he found the universe is made up of about 74% dark energy. This number closely matches the value of 68.5% estimated from observations — a tremendous improvement over the huge disparity found by quantum field theory.
Although Lombriser's framework might solve the cosmological constant problem, there’s currently no way to test it. But in the future, if experiments from other theories validate his equations, it could mean a major leap in our understanding of dark energy and provide a tool to solve other cosmic mysteries.
The Atmosphere of Uranus Is Literally Leaking Gas Into Space
MICHELLE STARR
Poor old Uranus just can't seem to catch a break. Something already tipped the planet on its side, so its orbit is perpendicular to those of the other Solar System planets. It probably smells terrible. And now scientists have discovered that the atmosphere of Uranus is leaking out into space.
Hidden in the data from Voyager 2's historic 1986 encounter with the icy planet, and undiscovered until now, was the presence of a plasmoid - a pocket of atmospheric material being funnelled away from Uranus by the planet's magnetic field.
It's the first time a plasmoid has been spotted in connection with an ice giant, and it doesn't just show us that Uranus' atmosphere is leaking. It's also revealing some of the dynamics of this planet's peculiar, twisted magnetic field.
Actually, leaky atmospheres aren't that uncommon. It's called atmospheric escape, and it's how Mars, for example, turned from what we think was quite a damp planet into a dusty barren wasteland. Venus is leaking hydrogen. Jupiter's moon Io and Saturn's moon Titan are leaking. Even Earth is losing about 90 tonnes of atmospheric material a day (don't worry, we have around 5,140 trillion tonnes, it will take a long time to completely disappear).
There are several mechanisms whereby this can occur, and one of those is through plasmoids. These are large, cylindrical bubbles of plasma - ionised gas - bound by magnetic field lines streaming away from the Sun, the region known as the magnetotail. The image above shows what that looks like for Earth.
Ions from the atmosphere are channelled along the magnetic field into this region. When the solar wind causes the magnetic field to break at the side facing the Sun - the bow shock - they whip around and reconnect in the tail, pinching off spinning plasmoids. Some of the ions bounce back towards the planet (producing, on Earth, auroras), and the plasmoid hurtles off in the opposite direction, taking the atmospheric ions with it.
For Earth, that's pretty straightforward and well understood. And there's evidence solar wind tears plasmoids off Mars on a daily basis in a slightly different fashion, since Mars doesn't have a global magnetic field.
But Uranus is a tricky beast of a planet, and let's be honest, its magnetic field is a straight-up mess.
Where Earth's magnetic field is more or less consistent with the planet's orientation, Uranus' is all twisted sideways, with the magnetic poles angled 59 degrees away from the geographic poles. And it's not even centred. If you were to draw a line between those two poles, it would miss the centre of Uranus by quite a large distance.
It was this mess of a magnetic field that drew the attention of astronomers Gina DiBraccio and Dan Gershman of NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, who were planning potential planetary missions and thought this particular oddity would be a good starting point.
They were studying the data collected by Voyager 2's magnetometer in January 1986 in higher resolution than any previous research when they noticed a wiggle in the data, a blip in the magnetic field.
They processed the data and came to the conclusion that, yep. Even though Uranus has a weirdly skewed, wobbly magnetic field, that blip did indeed represent a plasmoid, roughly 204,000 kilometres in length and 400,000 kilometres across (127,000 by 250,000 miles), likely full of ionised hydrogen, moving away from the planet.
And this reveals some new information about that magnetic field. According to the researchers' analysis, it shows that Uranus' magnetic field reconnects at the tail, like Earth's. It also suggests that internal forces play a role in the planet's magnetic dynamics.
And, of course, it reveals a mechanism whereby Uranus could be losing a substantial amount of mass, transported away by plasmoids.
The Voyager data used for this analysis is over two decades old, so the researchers suggest the best way to find out more is to send another probe to check it all out.
"The nature of magnetospheric circulation and mass-loss processes remain outstanding and essential topics at both Uranus and Neptune," they wrote in their paper.
"In order to definitively determine the relative contributions of planetary rotation and solar wind forcing in driving global plasma dynamics, new in situ measurements will be necessary. Until then, the enigmatic ice giant magnetospheres await further exploration."
Navy Seal Whistleblower! Inside Intel - New Project Camelot Interview!
Navy Seal Whistleblower! Inside Intel - New Project Camelot Interview!
Robert has a fascinating life story that brought him face to face with the Committee of 300, the ET Controllers and more. He was a Navy Seal who ended up working for Bush Sr. and John McCain and has traveled in some very dark circles.
Ancient Acoustic Levitation is Evident in Egyptian, Mayan, Incan and Indian Cultures
Ancient Acoustic Levitation is Evident in Egyptian, Mayan, Incan and Indian Cultures
COAST TO COAST AM –
Douglas Stearns argued that the ancients had access to advanced sound technology, which is expressed in the similar architecture and building techniques seen in Egyptian, Mayan, Incan, Indian, and other cultures separated by time and distance.
The ancients were masters of resonance and vibration, changing sound frequencies to alter the atomic forms of matter, he hypothesized, and this was how they created levitation or antigravity technology such as when the Egyptians moved giant and numerous blocks of stone to build the pyramids.
Buried inside data that NASA's iconic Voyager 2 spacecraft gathered at Uranus more than 30 years ago is the signature of a massive bubble that may have stolen a blob of the planet's gassy atmosphere.
That's according to scientists who analyzed archived Voyager 2 observations of the magnetic field around Uranus. These measurements had been studied before, but only using a relatively coarse view. In the new research, scientists instead looked at those measurements every two seconds. That detail showed what had previously been missed: an abrupt zigzag in the magnetic field readings that lasted just one minute of the spacecraft's 45-hour journey past Uranus.
The tiny wobble in the Voyager 2 data represents something much larger since the spacecraft was flying so fast. Specifically, the scientists behind the new research believe the zigzag marks a plasmoid, a type of structure that wasn't understood particularly well at the time of the flyby in January 1986.
But by now, plasmoids have earned scientists' respect. A plasmoid is a massive bubble of plasma, which is a soup of charged particles. Plasmoids can break off from the tip of the sleeve of magnetism surrounding a planet like a teardrop.
Scientists have studied these structures at Earth and nearby planets, but never at Uranus or its neighbor Neptune, since Voyager 2 is the only spacecraft to date ever to visit those planets.
Scientists want to know about plasmoids because these structures can pull charged particles out of a planet's atmosphere and fling them into space. And if you change a planet's atmosphere, you change the planet itself. And Uranus' situation is particularly complicated because the planet rotates on its side and its magnetic field is skewed from both that axis and the plane all the planets lie in.
A Voyager 2 photo of Uranus taken on Jan. 14, 1986. (Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech)
Because Voyager 2 flew straight through this plasmoid, scientists could use the archived data to measure the structure, which they believe was about 250,000 miles (400,000 kilometers) across and could have stretched 127,000 miles (204,000 km) long, according to a NASA statement.
Ideally, scientists would piece together more observations of Uranus' magnetic field, enough to better understand how this phenomenon has shaped the planet over time. But that will require another spacecraft visit the strange sideways world.
The research is described in a paper published in August in the journal Geophysical Review Letters. NASA announced the finding on Wednesday (March 25).
Science fiction has always been a medium for futuristic imagination and while different colored aliens and intergalactic travel are yet to be discovered, there is an array of technologies that are no longer figments of the imagination thanks to the world of science fiction. Some of the creative inventions that have appeared in family-favorite movies like "Back to the Future" and "Total Recall," are now at the forefront of modern technology. Here are a few of our favorite technologies that went from science fiction to reality.
1. The mobile phone
The communicator was often used to communicate back to the USS Enterprise.
It's something that almost everyone has in their pockets. Mobile phones have become a necessity in modern life with a plethora of remarkable features. The first mobile phone was invented in 1973, the Motorola DynaTAC. It was a bulky thing that weighed 2.4 lbs. (1.1 kilograms) and had a talk time of about 35 minutes. It also cost thousands of dollars.
The Motorola DynaTAC was invented by Martin Cooper, who led a team that created the phone in just 90 days. A long-standing rumor was that Cooper got his inspiration from an episode of Star Trek where Captain Kirk used his hand-held communications device. However, Cooper stated in a 2015 interview that the original inspiration was from a comic strip called Dick Tracy, in which the character used a "wrist two-way radio."
2. The universal translator
Star Trek characters would often come across alien life with different languages. (Image credit: Paramount Pictures/CBS Studios) (Image credit: Paramount Pictures/CBS Studios)
From: "Star Trek: The Original Series"
While exploring space, characters such as Captain Kirk and Spock would come across alien life who spoke a different language. To understand the galactic foreigners, the Star Trek characters used a device that immediately translated the alien's unusual language. Star Trek's universal communicator was first seen on screen as Spock tampered with it in order to communicate with a non-biological entity (Series 2 Episode 9, Metamorphosis).
Although the idea in Star Trek was to communicate with intelligent alien life, a device capable of breaking down language barriers would revolutionize real-time communication. Now, products such as Sourcenext's Pocketalk and Skype's new voice translation service are capable of providing instantaneous translation between languages. Flawless real-time communication is far off, but the technological advancements over the last decade mean this feat is within reach.
3. Teleportation
The transporter is an iconic feature of the original Star Trek series. (Image credit: Paramount/AF archive/Alamy Stock Photo) (Image credit: Paramount/AF archive/Alamy Stock Photo)
From: "Star Trek: The Original Series"
The idea behind "beaming" someone up was that a person could be broken down into an energy form (dematerialization) and then converted back into matter at their destination (rematerialization). Transporting people this way on Star Trek's USS Enterprise had been around since the very beginning of the series, debuting in the pilot episode.
Scientists haven't figured out how to teleport humans yet, but they can teleport balls of energy known as photons. In this case, teleportation is based on a phenomenon known as quantum entanglement. This refers to a condition in quantum mechanics where two entangled particles may be very far from one another, yet remain connected so that actions performed on one affect the other, regardless of distance. The information exchange between the two photons occurs at least 10,000 times faster than the speed of light.
This hologram of Princess Leia features the iconic line, "Help me Obi-Wan Kenobi, you're my only hope." (Image credit: Lucasfilm/AF archive/Alamy Stock Photo) (Image credit: Lucasfilm/AF archive/Alamy Stock Photo)
From: "Star Wars: Episode IV — A New Hope"
Not long into the first Star Wars movie, Obi-Wan Kenobi receives a holographic message. By definition, a hologram is a 3D image created from the interference of light beams from a laser onto a 2D surface, and can only be seen in one angle.
In 2018, researchers from Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah, created a real hologram. Their technique, called volumetric display, works like an Etch-A-Sketch toy, but uses particles at high speeds. With lasers, researchers can trap particles and move them into a designated shape while another set of lasers emit red, green and blue light onto the particle and create an image. But so far, this can only happen on extremely small scales.
Even though using prosthetics had been common for a long time, Star Wars sparked an idea for bionic prosthetics. (Image credit: Disney/Lucasfilm) (Image credit: Disney/Lucasfilm)
From: "Star Wars: Episode V — The Empire Strikes Back"
Imagine getting your hand chopped off by your own father and falling to the bottom of a floating building to then have your long-lost sister come and pick you up. It's unlikely in reality, but not in the Star Wars movies. After losing his hand, Luke Skywalker receives a bionic version that has all the functions of a normal hand. This scenario is now more feasible than the previous one.
Researchers from the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, Georgia, have been developing a way for amputees to control each of their prosthetic fingers using an ultrasonic sensor. In the movie, Skywalker's prosthesis uses electromyogram sensors attached to his muscles. The sensors can be switched into different modes and are controlled by the flexing or contracting of his muscles. The prosthesis created by the Georgia Tech researchers, however, uses machine learning and ultrasound signals to detect fine finger-by-finger movement.
6. Digital Billboards
In Blade Runner, digital billboards were used to decorate the dystopian metropolis of Los Angeles. (Image credit: Warner Bros./courtesy Everett Collection/Alamy Stock Photo) (Image credit: Warner Bros./courtesy Everett Collection/Alamy Stock Photo)
From: "Blade Runner"
Director Ridley Scott presents a landscape shot of futuristic Los Angeles in the movie "Blade Runner." While scanning the skyscrapers, a huge, digital, almost-cinematic billboard appears on one of the buildings. This pre-internet concept sparked the imagination of Andrew Phipps Newman, the CEO of DOOH.com. DOOH — which stands for Digital Out Of Home — is a company dedicated to providing live, dynamic advertisements through the use of digital billboards. The company is now at the forefront of advertising as it offers a more enticing form; one that will make people stop and stare.
Digital billboards have come a long way since DOOH was founded in 2013. They have taken advantage of crowded cities, such as London and New York, to utilize this unique advertising tactic. Perhaps the more recent "Blade Runner 2049" will bring us even more new technologies.
The "Blade Runner" story heavily revolves around the idea of synthetic humans, which require artificial intelligence (AI). Some people might be worried about the potential fallout of giving computers intelligence, which has had disastrous consequences in many science-fiction works. But AI has some very useful applications in reality. For instance, astronomers have trained machines to find exoplanets using computer-based learning techniques. While sifting through copious amounts of data collected by missions such as NASA's Kepler and TESS missions, AI can identify the telltale signs of an exoplanet lurking in the data.
The inside design of the spacecraft in 2001: A Space Odyssey strikes an uncanny resemblance to the ISS. (Image credit: MGM/THE KOBAL COLLECTION) (Image credit: MGM/THE KOBAL COLLECTION)
From: "2001: A Space Odyssey"
Orbiting Earth in "2001: A Space Odyssey" is Space Station V, a large establishment located in low-Earth orbit where astronauts can bounce around in microgravity. Does this sound familiar?
The Space Station V provided inspiration for the International Space Station (ISS), which has been orbiting the Earth since 1998 and currently accommodates up to six astronauts at a time. Although Space Station V appears much more luxurious, the ISS has accomplished much more science. The ISS has been fundamental to microgravity research since the start of its construction in 1998.
The Space Station V wasn't just an out-of-this-world holiday experience, it was also employed as a pit-stop before traveling to the Moon and other long-duration space destinations. The proposed Deep Space Gateway would be a station orbiting the moon that would serve a similar purpose.
Tablets today are capable of recognizing fingerprints and even facial features of their owner for better security. (Image credit: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer/AF archive/Alamy Stock Photo) (Image credit: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer/AF archive/Alamy Stock Photo)
From: "2001: A Space Odyssey"
Tablets are wonderful handheld computers that can be controlled at the press of a finger. These handy devices are used by people across the globe, and even further upwards on the ISS. Apple claims to have invented the tablet with the release of its iPad. However, Samsung made an extremely interesting case in court that Apple was wrong: Stanley Kubrick and Sir Arthur C. Clarke did, by including the device in 2001: A Space Odyssey, released in 1968.
In the film, Dr. David Bowman and Dr. Frank Poole watch news updates from their flat-screen computers, which they called "newspads." Samsung claimed that these "newspads" were the original tablet, featured in a film over 40 years before the first iPad arrived in 2010. This argument was not successful though, as the judge ruled that Samsung could not utilize this particular piece of evidence.
10. Hoverboards
Marty McFly was able to hover over any surface, even water, with the hoverboard. (Image credit: Universal Pictures/AF archive/Alamy Stock Photo) (Image credit: Universal Pictures/AF archive/Alamy Stock Photo)
From: "Back to the Future Part II"
The Back to the Future trilogy is a highly enjoyable trio of time-traveling adventures, but it is Part II that presents the creators' vision of 2015. The film predicted a far more outlandish 2015 than what actually happened just five years ago, but it got one thing correct: hoverboards, just like the one Marty McFly "borrows" to make a quick escape.
Although they aren't as widespread as the film perceives, hoverboards now exist. The first real one was created in 2015 by Arx Pax, a company based in California. The company invented the Magnetic Field Architecture (MFA™) used to provide the levitation of a hoverboard. The board generates a magnetic field, which in turn creates an eddy current, which then creates another opposing magnetic field. These magnetic fields repel each other against a copper "hoverpark" that provides lift.
11. Driverless cars
Johnny Cab wasn't able to move unless he had the destination, ultimately leading to his demise. (Image credit: TriStar Pictures) (Image credit: TriStar Pictures)
From: "Total Recall"
In the 1990 film, set in 2084, Total Recall's main protagonist Douglas Quaid (played by Arnold Schwarzenegger) finds himself in the middle of a sci-fi showdown on Mars. In one scene Quaid is on the run from the bad guys and jumps into a driverless car. In the front is "Johnny Cab," which is the car's on-board computer system. All Johnny needs is an address to take the car to its intended destination.
Although the driverless car wasn't seen in action before the protagonist yells profanities and takes over the driving, the idea of having a car that takes you to your destination using its onboard satellite navigation has become increasingly popular. The company at the forefront of driverless cars is Waymo, as they want to eradicate the human error and inattention that results in dangerous and fatal accidents.
In 2017, NASA stated its intentions to help in the production of driverless cars, as they would improve the technologies of robotic vehicles on extraterrestrial surfaces such as the Moon or Mars.
You may want to plan to get a second Mother’s Day and Father’s Day card this year – scientists have discovered the single living creature that all living creatures on Earth descended from. And, in case you’re just filling out your U.S. census form, your original nationality is Australian, mate!
“This organism is consistent with predictions based on modern animal phylogenetics that the last ancestor of all bilaterians was simple and small and represents a rare link between the Ediacaran and the subsequent record of animal life.”
In a paper published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), Scott Evans, a recent doctoral graduate from University of California, Riverside, and Professor Mary Droser, a professor of geology at the school, describe leading a team of researchers to Nilpena, South Australia, where fossilized burrows found in 555 million-year-old Ediacaran Period deposits were believed to have been made by bilaterians – animals whose bodies have a bilateral symmetry — a left and a right side that are mirror images of each other – as well as a front, a back, a head and a gut. If this looks familiar, you’re probably looking in a mirror. Scientists believe bilaterians are the ancestors of all living creatures and this Ediacara Biota– the oldest known complex animal community — should contain the oldest evidence of them. The problem is, no one has found bilaterian fossils there.
Until Evans and Droser found Ikaria wariootia.
With funding from NASA, the team studied the burrows with a 3-D laser scanner and saw tiny grooves that would match a tiny (2-7 mm (.08-.27 in) long, 1-2.5 mm (.04-.1 in) wide – about the size of a grain of rice) cylindrical body with a distinct head and tail. The burrows showed that the creatures moved by contracting muscles like a worm (peristaltic locomotion) and contained evidence that they fed on buried organic matter with a mouth, digested it with a gut and excreted it out an anus. (TMI?) All of that adds up to this:
“Together, these suggest that Ikaria represents one of the oldest total group bilaterians identified from South Australia, with little deviation from the characters predicted for their last common ancestor.”
They named the creature Ikaria wariootia – Ikara means “meeting place” in the Adnyamathanha language, and warioota comes from the nearby Warioota Creek – to signify they are the original custodians of this land. More significantly, since this is the oldest known burrow of bilaterians, they are the “last common ancestor” of every symmetrical creature – basically all animals except sponges, jellyfish, anemones and some tiny multicell organisms. That includes the group at the other end of the bilaterians – humans … or at least those who believe in evolution.
There is significance to this discovery besides the obvious “last common ancestor” … which is why NASA was involved.
“We can also see that Ikaria specifically sought out oxygen rich environments and avoided oxygen poor ones. These indicate that having an appreciable amount of oxygen was really important for the evolution and success of these types of organisms and that we should be looking for exoplanets with similar, well-oxygenated conditions.”
NASA’s exobiology program gave Evans and his team a grant, and the investment paid off. The search for signs of oxygen on exoplanets should lead to signs of life resembling Ikaria wariootia – and its descendants.
If you can’t find an appropriate Mother’s Day or Father’s Day card for Ikaria wariootia, just draw a picture (here’s a photo) and sign your name. it’s the thought that counts.
Artist’s rendering of Ikaria wariootia.
Credit: Sohail Wasif/UCR
These are Ikaria wariootia impressions in stone.
Credit: Droser Lab/UCR
A 3D laser scan that showing the regular, consistent shape of a cylindrical body with a distinct head and tail and faintly grooved musculature.
Explorers have always sought to go past that next hill, that next horizon in their efforts to tame our planet and push out further past the boundaries of what we know. It is almost a given that they are going to come across the strange and the unusual along the way, and this has most certainly been shown again and again, and sometimes this lodges firmly into the world of the paranormal. One such case of an explorer coming across possible paranormal forces is a venerable mountaineer and explorer who had some very strange experiences up in the clouds that remain unexplained.
The whole odd tale revolves around the English mountaineer author, photographer and botanist, Francis Sydney Smythe, better known as Frank Smythe (1900-1949). He was an incredibly prolific and well respected mountaineer and adventurer of his era, traveling to exotic lands and climbing some of the highest peaks in some of the most inhospitable places around the world, including the Alps, Rocky Mountains, and the Himalayas, and he also wrote vast amounts of work on his adventures. In the 1930s his target was the then very enigmatic, mysterious Mt. Everest, which for many was so remote it might as well have been the face of the moon, and it was as he sought to conquer this treacherous beast of a mountain that he would allegedly have some very bizarre encounters.
Mt. Everest
1933 saw Smythe’s first attempt to climb Everest, and in June of that year he had managed to approach the summit, on the top of the world and at the time higher than anyone had ever climbed before. It was at this time when he was almost within reach of his goal, which beckoned to him yet remained unreachable, as it would for the next two decades, an inscrutable, evasive goal that would pull many to their deaths trying to achieve it. Looking upon that elusive summit Sythe would say:
It was only 1,000 feet above me, but an aeon of weariness separated me from it. Bastion on bastion and slab on slab, the rocks were piled in tremendous confusion, their light-yellow edges ghostlike against the deep-blue sky. From the crest, a white plume of mist flowed silently away. Those who have failed on Everest are unanimous in one thing: the relief of not having to go on. The last 1,000 feet of Everest are not for mere flesh and blood.
It was on this excursion that he would have his brushes with what could be called the paranormal. As he made his way alone up the frigid, wind scorched mountainside he would claim that he had felt as if someone were following him, watching him. This presence haunted him for quite sometime before he was able to make out against that vast sea of white the form of a person out there with him on that slope, standing amongst the snow and rock. This mysterious figure would approach to walk there alongside him, and Smythe would later explain that he seemed t be very real indeed. He was so real, in fact, that the mountaineer felt obligated to break off a piece of Kendal mint cake he kept in his pocket to offer to his unexpected companion. The figure then disappeared into thin air to leave the bewildered Smythe alone once again, and he would say “so near and so strong did this presence seem, that it was almost a shock to find no one to whom to give it.” The mountaineer would later write of this experience in his book Camp Six, and he never would be able to explain what he had experienced.
Frank Smythe
The strangeness would only continue on that same expedition. Defeated in his goal of mounting the actual summit, Smythe was on his way back down the harrowing terrain on his way too camp when he allegedly witnessed something very peculiar in the sky above. There moving about in the clear blue expanse were two odd objects that seemed at first almost like kites, but which pulsated and moving in odd ways. He at first tried to ignore them as he got his bearings straight and clear his head, but when he looked back to that spot the things were still there. As he looked on wondering what to make of it all, a mist apparently congealed out of nowhere to envelope them, and when it cleared they were gone. He would write of this strange sighting:
I was still some 200 feet above C6 and a considerable distance horizontally from it when, chancing to glance in the direction of the north ridge, I saw two curious looking objects floating in the sky. They strongly resembled kite balloons in shape, but one possessed what appeared to be squat underdeveloped wings, and the other a protuberance suggestive of a beak. They hovered motionless but seemed slowly to pulsate, a pulsation much slower than my own heart-beats, which is of interest supposing that it was an optical illusion. The two objects were very dark in colour and were silhouetted sharply against the sky, or possibly a background of cloud.
So interested was I that I stopped to observe them. My brain appeared to be working normally and I deliberately put myself through a series of tests. First of all I glanced away. The objects did not follow my vision but they were still there when I looked back again. Then I looked away again and this time identified by name a number of peaks, valleys and glaciers by way of a mental test. But when I looked back again, the objects confronted me. At this I gave them up as a bad job, but just as I was starting to move again a mist suddenly drifted across. Gradually they disappeared behind it; and when a minute or two later it had drifted clear, exposing the whole of the north ridge once more, they had vanished as mysteriously as they came.
What were these surreal objects? Were they UFOs, mysterious creatures, pure hallucination, something else? Did they have anything to do with that phantom figure he had encountered earlier? Who knows? Smythe would launch two other expeditions to Mt. Everest in the 1930s, but he never did get higher than he did on that first, and he never had any experiences quite as inexplicable either, nor would he never again until his death in 1949. Yet these accounts sit there amongst his journals and writings, evading any easy answers.
There has been a it of speculation as to what he might have encountered out there. Perhaps the most popular theory is that he was experiencing what is sometimes called “The Third Man,” which is a sort of ghostly presence that has been reported by many other explorers, usually in times of crisis. There have been other Everest explorers who have encountered something very similar, such as mountaineer Nick Estcourt, who in 1975 was climbing in approximately the same area where Smythe had had his own experience. Estcourt would explain:
I set off on my own at about 3.30 in the morning (from Camp IV) pulling up the fixed ropes leading up to Camp 5. It was a moonlit night and the shapes of the rocks were etched clearly against the brightness of the snow. I was about two hundred feet above the camp when I turned around. I can’t remember why but perhaps I had a feeling that someone was following me. Anyway I turned around and saw this figure behind me. He looked like an ordinary climber, far enough behind, so that I could not feel him moving up the fixed rope, but not all that far below. I could see his arms and legs and assumed that it was someone trying to catch me up. I stopped and waited for him.
He then seemed to stop or to be moving very, very slowly, he made no effort to signal or wave – I shouted down, but got no reply and so in the end I thought, ‘Sod it, I might as well press on!’ I carried on and turned round three or four times ___ and this figure was still behind me. It was definitely a human figure with arms and legs and at one stage I can remember seeing him behind a slight undulation in the slope, from the waist upwards as you would expect with the lower part of his body hidden in the slight dip. I turned again as I reached the old site of Camp 4 (six hundred above Camp IV in the current expedition) and there was no one there at all. It seemed very eerie. I wasn’t sure if anyone had fallen off or what. He couldn’t possibly have had time to have turned back and drop down the ropes out of sight, since I could see almost all the way back to Camp 4. The whole thing seemed very peculiar.
This seems very similar to what Smythe encountered, and is a good example of this particular phenomenon. Many other explorers have experienced the same thing, and it has been proposed that it could be anything from ghosts, to guardian angels, to the simple effect of stress, physical duress, and oxygen deprivation leading to hallucinations. The same could be said of the strange objects in the sky that Smythe claimed to have witnessed. How can we explain what this seasoned explorer saw? Was this all illusion and hallucination, or something more? It only adds to the vast number of accounts of people venturing to the ends of the earth and coming back with mysteries, ones which perhaps may be best left to the remote wildernesses from which they sprang.
There are perhaps more UFO crash reports than some people might realize. Far from being merely the realm of the famous Roswell, New Mexico crash there have been a plethora of such incidents reported throughout history, and these are not always recorded out in the middle of nowhere, either. One rather obscure supposed UFO crash, considering its location, is the time one apparently exploded and crashed right on the fringes of the neon studded gambling capital of the world, Las Vegas.
The whole odd affair actually began all the way across the country over in Oneida, New York, where on April 18, 1962 military radar stations began picking up an anomalous object that seemed to be moving west rapidly. As it did so, there began a series of reports marking its progress, as panicked witnesses from across the country saw what looked like a glowing red ball or “flaming sword” that was at times bright enough to make night seem like day. These reports came on from several states along its trajectory, including Colorado, Kansas, Arizona, and most remarkably of all in Eureka, Utah, where there would be a report that it had actually landed and caused massive electrical disruptions before taking to the sky again. Throughout all of this the object was reportedly as largely completely silent, and there was such a deluge of calls to authorities that fighter jets were even scrambled and put on alert at Luke Air Force Base, in Arizona. The object headed towards Nevada, where it continued to be seen by hundreds of people as it approached Reno, then was witnessed to make a turn to head in the direction of Las Vegas, and this is where things would get even stranger. There was reportedly heard an enormous rumbling and then a thunderous boom and blinding flash of light, after which the object vanished both visually and off of radar somewhere over Nellis Air Force Base, right out in the badlands just past the lights of Las Vegas.
Las Vegas
The sheriff’s office for Clark County, Nevada, was apparently so flooded by calls from terrified residents who had heard the boom that it was thought that there had been an explosion and that perhaps an aircraft had gone down. A sheriff’s search party was sent out to the area that the object was last seen, yet there could be found no sign of a downed aircraft and there were furthermore no reports of a missing aircraft from any airports in the region. Considering this, it was assumed that what had been seen was a meteor that had exploded in midair, and the military was quick to use this explanation as well. There was only a single newspaper article related to the odd incident at the time, which appeared the next day in The Las Vegas Sun with the headline “Brilliant Red Explosion Flares In Las Vegas Sky,” and for the most part everyone just sort of forgot about it. Despite the fact that thousands of people across the country had seen the mysterious object and several hundreds had heard the massive explosion, it seemed the meteor explanation was good enough. Case closed. Or so it seemed.
It would not be until decades later that anyone would blow the dust off the case, when UFO researcher Kevin Randle began snooping around for more information in military reports and declassified reports from the Air Force’s Project Blue Book UFO investigation, and he also went about interviewing numerous witnesses to the events in order to shed more light on what happened on that evening, which would all be covered in his book A History of UFO Crashes. What Randle would manage to uncover would begin to paint a picture of something perhaps quite a bit stranger than a meteor, and which the military quite possibly knows more about than it is letting on.
Even a casual look into the old reports began pointing out oddities. One declassified military report that was completely free to read by anyone who cared came from a Captain Herman Gordon Shields, who on the evening of the incident had been flying a C-119 aircraft near La Van, Utah. He would report that both he and his co-pilot had witnessed a very bright light, that continued to get brighter even as they maneuvered their plane to get away from it. Whatever it was, it was apparently “as bright as daylight,” completely illuminating the landscape, and as they tried to further evade and avoid what they felt might be an incoming collision they were able to get a clear look at the source of the light. According to pilot Shields, it was a long, cigar shaped object with a yellow top surface and the bottom of which was an extremely bright light. Shields would say in his report of the object:
And this object which I saw was illuminated. It had a long slender appearance comparable to a cigarette in size, that is, the diameter with respect to the length of the object. The fore part, or the lower part of the object was very bright, intense white such as a magnesium fire. The second half, the aft section, was a clearly distinguishable yellowish color. I would say the object was just about divided in half, the fore part being intensely white, the aft section having a more yellow color to it. There was no exhaust, no trail following after it. It was clearly defined. I saw it for a period of maybe one to two seconds.
Both the pilot and co-pilot were certain that this was no meteor. Another very curious report uncovered by Randle was that of witnesses Bob Robinson and Floyd Evans, who saw it fly low as they were driving along a highway near Eureka, Utah. The witnesses said it was clearly some sort of flaming cylinder with a “series of windows” along its side, and that its approach caused their vehicle to stall. They also claimed that it slowed to a stop to hover momentarily over them before continuing on its way, after which their engine promptly started up again. Other witness reports seemed to point towards something under intelligent control as well, including reports of the object making turns, speeding up or slowing down, reversing its course, and even landing, all things that you might realize meteors do not do. Another interesting eyewitness report uncovered by Randle comes from the declassified Blue Book files from a witness whose name had been redacted, and which reads:
As the object passed over Robinson [Utah), it slowed down in [the] air, and after, [a] gasping sound was heard, the object spurted ahead again. After this procedure was repeated three or four times, the object arched over and began descending to earth after which the object turned bluish color and then burned out or went dark. After the object began to slow down it began to wobble or “flshtail” in its path.
Military reports also showed some other intriguing details surrounding the case. It would turn out that not only had there been significant military activity in the area of Nellis Air Force Base after the explosion, including the scrambling of jets, but an investigator Douglas Crouch, from Hill Air Force base, would interview many witnesses and officially state that he did not believe the object seen to be a meteor. Crouch would also confirm that there had been no military tests in the area at the time, nor any unusual atmospheric phenomena on the night in question, and additionally no aircraft in the area that could have caused the disturbances. Far from the official government stance that this was a meteor, Crouch would clearly state that “no explanation has been developed for the brilliant illumination of the area, the object itself, or the explosion.”
Another detail that seems to not fully line up is that Air Force investigation reports state that an orange, glowing object in Eureka, Utah, was so low and bright that it actually knocked out photoelectric cells in the area. There was plenty of other evidence offered up by Randle that did not fit into the meteor theory either, such as that the directions of the various reports across states often described it going in a different direction, the speed was too slow to be that of a meteor, and on many occasions it was far too low to be a meteor, often wildly changing altitude in mid-course. Also, the official reports show that fighter jets had indeed been scrambled in response to the event, so would they do that for a simple meteor? Regardless, a follow-up investigation made by a J. Allen Hynek and Lieutenant Colonel Robert Friend would come to the conclusion that the object had been a rare type of bright meteor called a “bolide,” and Friend would say of this:
This investigation was completed in one full day and it was concluded that the object was a bolide. An attempt was made to locate the object but this effort failed due to the general nature of the data. Further study of this sighting indicates that the meteor probably struck in the area of the Wasatch National Forest; however, the Air Force has made no further at tempts to recover it.
One day to come up with that, and that seemed to be the end of it as far as the Air Force was concerned, but there were also some ominous hints of a cover-up found speckled throughout these files that did not add up. Randle noticed that Nellis air Force Base first labeled the object as “Unidentified,” but it was later changed to “Insufficient Data for a Scientific Analysis” without further explanation. Perhaps even weirder is the assertion in the report that “no visual” was made of the object captured on radar, despite the fact that there were literally thousands of reports made to police of people seeing this thing. It was also found that the Air Force reports were intentionally and deceptively dated to make it seem as if the Utah accounts and Nevada accounts had happened on different days, possibly to make them seem like two separate events and throw off anyone snooping around. Randle says of this:
The reports, as filed in Project Blue Book, were deceptively dated. The Utah case had the time logged in “Zulu,” or Greenwich Mean Time, which means it was advanced at that time of the year by six hours. Add six hours to the 8:15 time, and you advance it to early morning the next day. A quick glance at the file shows the Utah case dated April 19, and the Las Vegas case logged in local time as April 18. On paper it looks as if they take place on separate days when, in reality, they happened within minutes of each other on the same day.
There were also inconsistencies throughout, such as the files at differing points claiming that the object was a weather balloon or a U-2 spy plane, before coming back to meteors again, almost as if they couldn’t decide which explanation to go with. It must also be remembered that at the time U-2s and balloons were tracked very carefully and there were none scheduled to be in the area at the time of the events. Much of this suggested to Randle that the military was being misleading at best, and downright lying at worst in an effort to muddy the waters and promote a mundane, palatable explanation. Randle believes that this was no meteor or balloon or conventional aircraft, and that somewhere out there in the desert outside of Las Vegas an alien craft of some sort crashed and is being covered up. He says of this in his book:
It is a case that demonstrates the air force’s policy of explaining UFO sightings, even if they have to change dates to make the explanations work. It shows that the air force would lie to the public about the UFO situation. And it shows that air force investigators, when handed a solution, wouldn’t ask the basic questions. They accepted the solution quickly. This also reveals that the air force was not interested in investigation or solving riddles. They were interested in clearing cases, slapping a label on them and letting it go at that. They ignored the information that didn’t fit with the bolide theory. Something extremely extraordinary happened on the night of April 18, 1962. The air force offered a series of explanations ignoring the facts. But the witnesses who were there know the truth. They saw something from outer space, and it was not a meteor. It was a craft from another world.
We are ultimately left to wonder just what happened out there on that night back in 1962. Was this just a meteor or was something more mysterious going on? If so what could it have been? Did a UFO actually crash right outside of Las Vegas, perhaps, as some conspiracies say, because it was actually engaged and shot down by the fighter jets that had been scrambled? Did the government willingly cover it all up? In the end there is no evidence at all to fall back on either way, and that time a UFO supposedly exploded out into the Las Vegas desert will likely remain for some time to come.
Silver UFO Shoots Past SpaceX Rocket On Live Broadcast, Video, March 18, 2020, UFO Sighting News.
Silver UFO Shoots Past SpaceX Rocket On Live Broadcast, Video, March 18, 2020, UFO Sighting News.
Date of sighting: March 18, 2020 Location of sighting: Earths orbit at SpaceX starlink rocket Guys this was live streamed on March 18th and was reported to me by a friend on Facebook who noticed it. I went back to the original SpaceX live stream video and checked it out and yes it was there. There seems to be two of them within a 20 seconds, but the closer one is easier to see. Its detail is like a silver bowl...its domes on top and bottom are huge and fat, the side disk edges are small and thin. This UFO reminds me of the old Shuttle Atlantis UFOs that were silver orbs seen on live cam following the space shuttle near its payload bay doors long ago. I would be very interested in what Elon Musk thinks of this UFO and why he thinks its near his starlink rocket? I think the aliens are interested humanities latest and greatest technology. Aliens are constantly researching humanity, but not allowed to change things. Scott C. Waring - Taiwan
Daytime UFO & military helicopters over Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea – Marc 2020
Daytime UFO & military helicopters over Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea – Marc 2020
This really interesting daytime footage was just submitted to me through our Facebook page. It was recently recorded in Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea. It show some strange UFO craft that is escorted by military helicopters and planes.
What’s your opinion about this sighting? Please leave your comments below!
The car-size rover tilted 31 degrees to crest a hill earlier this month.
NASA's Curiosity Mars rover took this selfie on Feb. 26, 2020. The crumbling rock layer at the top of the image is the Greenheugh Pediment, which Curiosity crested on March 6. (Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS)
NASA's Mars rover Curiosityjust climbed its steepest Red Planet slope to date, after snapping a nice selfie that gives us a better appreciation of the achievement.
Curiosity crested a promontory called the Greenheugh Pediment on March 6, showing considerable perseverance in the process. (Perseverance, by the way, is the name of NASA's next Mars rover, a life-hunting robot that's scheduled to launch this July.)
"It took three drives to scale the hill, the second of which tilted the rover 31 degrees — the most the rover has ever tilted on Mars and just shy of the now-inactive Opportunity rover's 32-degree tilt record, set in 2016," NASA officials said in a statement Friday (March 20).
Opportunity holds several other records as well, including the greatest distance traveled on the surface of a world beyond Earth (28.06 miles, or 45.16 kilometers) and the longest-lived Mars rover. ("Oppy" landed a few weeks after its twin, Spirit, in January 2004 and was declared dead in February 2019, though it last communicated with Earth in June 2018, just before a huge dust storm engulfed the rover.)
Curiosity stopped to take some pictures on Feb. 26, shortly before concluding the historic climb. Mission team members stitched together 86 of these photos to make a mosaic selfie, which gives the lay of the Martian land and also shows a drill hole Curiosity made to sample and study some rock.
The Greenheugh Pediment is on the slopes of Mount Sharp, the 3.4-mile-high (5.5 km) mountain that Curiosity has been climbing since September 2014. The rover's handlers carefully plan out each drive to ensure that Curiosity stays safe.
-"The rover is never in danger of tilting so much that it would flip over — Curiosity's rocker-bogie wheel system enables it to tilt up to 45 degrees safely — but the steep drives do cause the wheels to spin in place," NASA officials said in the same statement.µ
Curiosity landed inside Mars' 96-mile-wide (154 km) Gale Crater in August 2012, on a $2.5 billion mission to determine if the area could ever have supported microbial life. The car-size robot quickly determined that Gale supported a potentially habitable lake-and-stream system in the ancient past and that this environment persisted for long stretches — perhaps millions of years at a time.
Curiosity is still going strong, reading Mount Sharp's rock layers for clues about how, why and when Mars transitioned from a relatively warm and wet world long ago to the cold, dry planet it is today.
Snatching a piece of asteroid Bennu was supposed to be — well, not easy, but certainly manageable: scope out the space rock, find some flat spots, swoop down at one, come back home.
But when NASA's OSIRIS-REx spacecraft arrived at Bennu in December 2018, the scientists and engineers on the mission realized that the asteroid was much, much rockier than they had expected. Like, boulders everywhere. Boulders as big as buildings. Boulders you do not want your fancy spacecraft to bang into.
OSIRIS-REx, which launched in 2016, has a lidar navigation system that would have allowed the spacecraft to recognize obstacles based on the echoes of a light beam the probe produced. But once the mission revealed Bennu's surface in all its rocky glory, scientists and engineers decided it was time to come up with something new.
An artist's depiction of how OSIRIS-REx will use Natural Feature Tracking to compare real-time images of the asteroid's surface to a bank of previous photos in order to steer itself to the sampling site. (Image credit: NASA/Goddard/University of Arizona)
"Boulders as big as buildings. Boulders you do not want your fancy spacecraft to bang into."
The result is a process the team is calling Natural Feature Tracking, which relies on the massive image database that OSIRIS-REx has built up in the months since it arrived at Bennu and began taking images of the space rock from every angle possible.
As the probe embarks on a sampling attempt, it will begin taking still more such photos, which its computer system will automatically compare to the archived images showing the path it should be following. If those views don't line up, the spacecraft will automatically retreat for another attempt, rather than risk damage on the perilous surface.
If the system works as planned, it should boost OSIRIS-REx's accuracy: Whereas its lidar system was only designed for accuracy within a site 164 feet (50 meters) across, Natural Feature Tracking will be accurate enough to tackle a target area just 10% that size, NASA officials said in a statement.
Scientists on the OSIRIS-REx mission have selected two target sampling sites on Bennu, dubbed Nightingale and Osprey. The mission's window for sampling opens in late August in order to ensure that the spacecraft can leave Bennu next year. If all goes well, scientists should have their space rock on Earth in 2023.
While we’re practicing social distancing due to the COVID-19 pandemic, EarthSky’s been posting your #SocialDistanceSelfies from places across Earth. But here’s one from quite a bit farther …
It’s the newest selfie from NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover, and it’s stunning.
NASA’s Curiosity rover recently joined in the activity, sending back a beautiful photo of itself at the base of a steep hill, just before it started climbing. NASA posted the selfie on its website on March 20, 2020.
Curiosity snapped the selfie on February 26, 2020, just before the rover crested the “Greenheugh Pediment,” a broad sheet of crumbling bedrock that sits on top of the hill. The image is a stunning 360 degree view of the landscape around the rover, with Curiosity itself the focus of attention. The entire panorama is composed of 86 individual images. At the time the selfie was taken, Curiosity was about 11 feet (3.4 meters) below the spot where it later climbed onto the pediment.
Also visible in the image is the latest drill hole made by the rover, in the bedrock target called “Hutton.”
A Navcam view of Greenheugh Pediment (left side of image), after Curiosity made it to the top of the steep hill.
Not only is the selfie itself impressive, but Curiosity also set a new record for the steepest terrain it has ever climbed so far in its mission, a challenging 31 degrees. This is only one degree of tilt less than that climbed by the Opportunity rover, which set the all-time record of any rover so far on Mars in 2016. That sounds like a potentially dangerous incline, and it could be, but Curiosity is designed to be able to tilt up to 45 degrees safely, thanks to its advanced rocker-bogie wheel system.
It took Curiosity three drives to make it to the crest of the hill, which it reached on March 6, 2020, also known as sol 2,696 of the mission. A sol is one Martian day, which is about one Earth day plus 37 minutes.
People often ask how the rover(s) can take selfies, especially when you don’t see the robotic arm holding the camera in the photos. The arm acts as the “selfie stick” for the rover. Curiosity uses its Mars Hand Lens Camera (MAHLI), which is in the turret at the end of the arm. Since each image only shows a small area, many images are taken and then later stitched together to create the panorama. During this process, the arm itself is removed from the images. MAHLI is primarily used to take close-up images of sand and rocks. As Doug Ellison, a Curiosity camera operator at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), explained:
We get asked so often how Curiosity takes a selfie. We thought the best way to explain it would be to let the rover show everyone from its own point of view just how it’s done.
See the videos below showing how this and other selfies are made:
Last Thanksgiving, Curiosity also took its highest-resolution panorama to date, containing over 1,000 images with 1.8 billion pixels. The view is breathtaking, to say the least. The images were taken between November 24 and December 1, 2019, and then assembled together.
Curiosity landed on Mars in 2012, and since 2014 has been slowly moving up the lower slopes of Mount Sharp, the large mountain in the middle of Gale Crater. The rover has found evidence that a large lake used to fill the crater a few billion years ago, and that conditions at the time were suitable for microscopic life to have existed there. It has also found ancient organic material in rocks and confirmed the existence of the still-unexplained methane in the Martian atmosphere.
Bottom line: NASA’s Curiosity rover has taken a beautiful new selfie photo of itself on Mars.
VREEMDE PATRONEN IN DE LUCHT WORDEN OOK IN HET DONKER GEVLOGEN ( VIDEO )
VREEMDE PATRONEN IN DE LUCHT WORDEN OOK IN HET DONKER GEVLOGEN ( VIDEO )
Wij leven in vreemde tijden en wanneer dan bepaalde gebeurtenissen plaatsvinden, is het zaak om goed alert te blijven. Na een oproep aan onze lezers kwamen er veel reacties op een aantal onverklaarbare zaken, dank allemaal.
Wij hebben talloze reacties ontvangen van lezers met betrekking tot de vreemde vliegbewegingen boven ons land over een aantal verschillende vliegtuigen uit verschillende landen.
Bij de informatie die wij ontvingen zat ook een link naar de Stentor die een artikel heeft gewijd aan dit vreemde verschijnsel en zij concluderen dat dit alles te maken heeft met het in kaart brengen van de bepaalde (natuurgebieden).
Maar ook zij weten niet precies wat de reden hiervoor zou moeten zijn:
Waar de opnames exact voor worden gebruikt is niet bekend. Het vliegtuigje boven de Veluwe is van het Belgische bedrijf Eurosense, dat gespecialiseerd is in ‘geo informatie’. Zij staan 365 dagen per jaar paraat om de lucht in te gaan, maar het heldere weer van vandaag maakt dat de omstandigheden ideaal zijn voor luchtopnames. In België nemen ze echter niet de telefoon op om uitleg te verschaffen.
En dan gaan ze verder met te zeggen dat de omgeving van Zwolle ook recentelijk door Google opnieuw in kaart is gebracht.
Het zou inderdaad kunnen dat men gebruikt maakt van het heldere weer en het rustige luchtruim om nu overal luchtopnames te maken, maar of deze uitleg de werkelijke reden is weten we uiteraard niet zeker.
Ook in andere landen worden dit soort toestellen nu waargenomen:
Ik heb een reactie op artikel over die vliegtuigen over Nederland Mijn zus heeft een artikel gelezen dat in Tsjechië ook vliegtuigen waren gespot met rare vliegbewegingen en ze denken dat coronavirus zo wordt verspreid.
Ook ontvingen wij veel radarbeelden waaruit blijkt dat hetzelfde gebeurt boven Duitsland en zelfs boven de Waddeneilanden.
Een andere lezer schrijft:
Ik heb even gezocht naar een vliegtuig PH-KIO dat boven mijn woonplaats rondjes vloog en te zien op jullie site.
Wij voeren LiDAR metingen uit vanuit ons eigen bemande vliegtuig. LiDAR is momenteel een van de meest nauwkeurige landmeettechnieken waarmee het mogelijk is om met enkele centimeter nauwkeurigheid metingen uit te voeren. Metingen met ons vliegtuig kunnen wij aanvullen met LiDAR-metingen vanaf onze auto en met een landmeting uitgevoerd met gps, tachymeter of 360-graden camera.
Een andere lezer schrijft dit
Normaal doe ik dit nooit , maar Ik wil toch graag reageren op het vreemde gedrag van de vliegtuigen.
Ik vroeg mijzelf 16 maart af waarvoor er zo laat nog continu propellorvliegtuigen in de lucht zijn ( ik woon in de aanvliegroute van Rotterdam airport en dit hoor ik haast nooit), dus dacht ik , laat ik even een keer op de flightradar app kijken. Dan vraag je je toch af, waarvoor vliegt een uit België afkomstig vliegtuig deze route / dit patroon ( zie bijgevoegde screenshots)?
Ik ben op het vliegtuig nummer gaan zoeken bij flightradar en zag op 12 maart het minder drukke patroon boven rotterdam terug ( laat in de avond) de dag erna een korte vlucht in Belgie. 16 maart het drukke patroon ( ook tot in de nacht).
Ik heb op de naam "eurosense" wat op het vliegtuig gezocht en kwam er achter dat dit bedrijf allerlei foto's maakt en geografisch onderzoek doet.
Toen zag ik het bericht op jullie site en zag dat het op meerdere plaatsen was. Dat vond ik nogal raar, vooral in deze tijd. Ik ben verder gaan zoeken op " vliegtuigen zigzaggen" en vond een origineel kranten artikel over dit onderwerp een paar dagen geleden
En dan deze reactie:
Net gesproken met een piloot.
Hij vertelde dat, omdat het luchtruim nu zo stil is, er allemaal vluchten met kleine vliegtuigjes worden uitgevoerd om voor Google maps nieuwe luchtfoto's te maken.
Die vliegtuigjes maken die malle lussen om zo alles goed in beeld te krijgen, Ze mogen nu op plekken komen, waar anders het vliegen verboden is.
Dan iets wat wel heel vreemd is als het (alleen) zou gaan om het maken van foto’s voor Google omdat het zulk prachtig helder weer is.
Dat zou nog te verkopen zijn, als er niet óók in het donker wordt gevlogen, hetgeen wel het geval is.
Wij ontvingen het volgende bericht:
Op 17 maart hoorde ik om 23:25 's avonds een laagvliegend vliegtuig overkomen. Ik woon redelijk dicht bij Rotterdam Airport, dus niet echt iets vreemds. Wat wel vreemd was, was het feit dat dit vliegtuig een paar keer over kwam vliegen om dit tijdstip, en dat vond ik wel vreemd. Dat gebeurt normaliter nooit.
Ik ben een fanatiek vliegtuigspotter tot op zekere hoogte: alles wat over vliegt of wat ik zie wil ik weten waar het vandaan komt, waar het heen gaat en wat voor type vliegtuig het is. Zelf ben ik ook fervent Flight Simulator enthousiast. Dus ik naar Flightradar24.com en ja hoor: ook ik heb een vreemde manoeuvre waargenomen.
Ik heb een foto gemaakt van mijn computerscherm en aan iemand gevraagd - die veel af weet van de luchtvaart - wat deze manoeuvre inhoudt. Deze persoon heeft een jaar in dit vakgebied intensief gewerkt en is veel meer bekend met bepaalde situaties. Mij is in eerste instantie verteld dat deze manoeuvre vaak inhoudt dat het vliegtuig niet mag landen, en dus in een soort "holding pattern" gaat. Echter, wat ik van mijn eigen kennis weet is dat een holding pattern via een FMC (Flight Management Computer) wordt geprogrammeerd of zelf wordt gevlogen, maar dat deze altijd in een ovaal figuur wordt gevlogen. Nooit in het patroon wat wij hier waarnemen.
Nu zat ik het artikel te lezen en heb ik weer even contact gezocht met die persoon. Nu is mij verteld dat het inderdaad wel een vreemde situatie is, want door het gehele land moet eigenlijk een soort landelijk verbod tot landen worden uitgeroepen, mochten zo veel vliegtuigen in een holding pattern op verschillende plekken vliegen. Wat ik wel zag is dat alle zware vliegtuigen (Boeing 737 - 747, Airbus A320 - A330 etc.) zowel vracht- als passagiersvluchten, gewoon normaal de vlucht vlogen zonder afwijkingen.
Wat mij verder opvalt is dat hetzelfde TYPE vliegtuig nabij Rotterdam eerder die dag (denk ik) heeft gevlogen zoals ik kon zien op Niburu:
Wat mij nog verder opvalt is de hoogte van het vliegtuig: deze vliegt ongeveer op 1.2 a 1.3 kilometer hoogte, wat in deze regio voor Rotterdam Airport wel eens wordt aangehouden als het wat minder goed weer is voor een landing. Maar dit vliegtuig vloog naar mijn idee constant op deze hoogte en heeft deze niet verlaten (is ook te zien aan de groene lijn op Flightradar24, en eventueel in de geschiedenis terug te vinden.
In mijn geval betreft het ook een ander vliegtuig (ander serienummer) maar wel hetzelfde type. Ik vind het ook heel vreemd dat op de foto's die jullie hebben gedeeld geen vluchtplan zichtbaar is (waar het vliegtuig is opgestegen en waar het van plan is te landen), want volgens mij is dit te allen tijde verplicht en zou ten minste de opstijg plaats bekend moeten zijn bij Flightradar.
Dus bij deze wil ik jullie een nieuwe foto inzenden, want in principe is dit een nieuwe vlucht die nog niet op de website staat.
Dus, waarom vliegen die vliegtuigen in het donker dat soort patronen als het om zoiets onschuldigszou gaan als het maken van foto’s bij helder weer?
En dan de hoogte kwestie. We kregen het volgende bericht waar onder andere de navolgende foto tussen zat waarop te zien is dat die vlucht op 16000 (krap 5km) plaatsvond met een vliegtuig dat een drukcabine heeft. Deze hoogte is niet geschikt voor het maken van fotos en heeft dus een ander doel:
Hoi,
Bedankt voor je reactie. Ik heb er vandaag nog een aantal gevonden. Die stuur ik hieronder weer mee (als het lukt). Ik zag dat het soms dezelfde (kleine) vliegtuigjes zijn, die vaak van dezelfde vliegvelden opstijgen en landen. Misschien lesvliegtuigjes? Met vriendelijke groet,
Tot zover de info over de vreemde patronen die door veel kleine vliegtuigen in diverse landen tegelijkertijd wordt gevlogen.
Een lezer uit België stuurt het volgende:
Mijn naam is Steve en ik woon in Schilde (nabij Antwerpen) de laatste dagen zie ik tijdens de avond en nacht, zeker met dit heldere weer veel vliegtuigverkeer. Aangezien er bijna geen vliegtuigverkeer is door corona is dit wel raar.
Ook zag ik gisteren een soort lichtpunt in de lucht . Het bleef er toch een paar uur zonder bewegen. Ik schat enkele uren en dan was het weg.
Ik zei nog tegen mijn vriendin: is dat punt jou al eens opgevallen? Maar dan tegen 12u middernacht was het weg.Zondagavond heb ik exact hetzelfde gezien.
Van gisteren heb ik er een foto van genomen,het is niet zo goede kwaliteit sorry daarvoor.
Het feit dat je op de foto de sterren niet ziet en enkel dat punt terwijl ik zelf de sterren heel goed zag wilt zeggen dat dat lichtpunt sterk aanwezig was. Onze tuin is zuid west gericht.
Bovenstaande komt weer enigszins overeen met beelden die we ontvingen van iemand anders, helaas zonder dat we weten waar dit is.
Iemand anders schreef het volgende:
Vandaag om 22:00 hebben wij iets in de lucht zien hangen en ook heen en weer vliegen van links naar recht boven en beneden en vermoedelijk ook draaiend.. Het leek op een schijf met een cirkel eromheen die draaide en continue verschillende lichtflitsen afgaf, alle kleuren van de regenboog. Er is een melding wat preciesin elke detail op die van ons leek . Hij vloog op t einde in een keer in een grote snelheid weg.
Dan over de troepenverplaatsingen:
Iemand schrijft:
Ik wou na aanleiding van het artikel over de grootte troepen verplaatsingen reageren.
Ik heb navraag gedaan binnen defensie dit als oud militair zelf. En had begrepen dat er een grootte oefening was onder leiding van de USA om te kijken of de intra het aan kon wanneer er grootte troepen verplaatsingen waren van west naar oost.
En oefeningen die al bezig waren los van deze van onze eigen defensie zijn ook allemaal terug getrokken naar Nederland vanwege het virus. Dat verklaart de verplaatsingen van onze eigen troepen.
En een ander dit:
Las net over de goederen trein met tanks erop..
Ik werk in Eindhoven in de buurt van het spoor.. en al zeker 3weken rijden er in de avond uren goederen treinen met tanks erop!! Wat me opvalt is dat het savonds gebeurt!!
Wat gaat er gebeuren?
Weer een andere lezer:
Vandaag op de A1 bij onze grensovergang Oldenzaal Duitsland colonnes vrachtwagens, allemaal blanco, geen enkele merk of naamaanduiding, compleet schoon (de meeste wit) zonder enig spoortje vuil. Ongeveer de helft van het vrachtverkeer bestond uit deze voertuigen, de meeste Splinternieuw ogend. Heel veel geparkeerd op stopplaats grensovergang. Bij nadere inspectie uitsluitend Poolse, Russische, Baltische, Oekraiënse kentekens. Verder geen idee, misschien wapentransporten? Kan geen andere verklaring bedenken.
En hier wederom een opname gemaakt op een station, in dit geval Den Haag.
Door het verzamelen van info krijgen wij in ieder geval een duidelijker beeld. Voor beide gebeurtenissen, de vreemde vliegroutes en de verplaatsing van militair personeel, lijken op het eerste gezicht redelijke verklaringen voorhanden te zijn. Als het inderdaad zaken betreft die verhuld worden dan is dat uiteraard voor de hand liggend dat gebruik wordt gemaakt van manieren waardoor wij mensen gemakkelijk genoegen nemen dit soort "redelijke verklaringen".
Het zou niet de eerste keer zijn dat een bevolking totaal wordt misleid. En vanwege de vreemde samenloop van omstandigheden, waarbij er én een virus opduikt én er vreemde vliegroutes worden gevlogen én er veel troepenverplaatsingen plaatsvinden, is het zaak om alert te blijven en uit te kijken naar eventuele andere aanwijzingen.
Eén van die vreemde aanwijzingen is dat ze de termijn voor het verbod op samenscholing van meer dan twee mensen vooruit hebben geschoven naar 1 juni. Dat lijkt een overdreven lange periode, waarbij ze klaarblijkelijk willen voorkomen dat mensen samen komen.
De volgende foto kregen wij via een lezer die deze had aangetroffen ergens op een website in India, uit naar zijn zeggen 2019. Het is een treinwagon, met daarop de naam van het virus Covid-19. Aangezien we geen verdere informatie hadden zijn we wat gaan zoeken en kwamen deze foto tegen in een aantal Italiaanse publicaties, waarvan de mainstream media zeggen dat het een nepfoto is die gemaakt is vorig jaar herfst ergens in Amerika en dat het hier een normale codering betreft voor treinwagons en dat dit dan toevallig covid-19 is.
Geloofwaardig verhaal of niet?
En tot slot nog een beetje vrolijke noot van kunstenaar Matt de kunstenaar, die waarschuwt voor corona virussen die je computer hacken.
Pole Shift: Ancient Megafloods & Mysteries & Science
Pole Shift: Ancient Megafloods & Mysteries & Science
COAST TO COAST AM 2020.
Geological explorer and renegade scholar, Randall Carlson has four decades of study, research, and exploration into the interface between ancient mysteries and modern science. In the first half, he discussed earth changes and catastrophic events, particularly “megafloods.
A media phenomenon, Coast to Coast AM deals with UFOs, strange occurrences, life after death, and other unexplained (and often inexplicable) phenomena.
I was looking over the NASA site Midnightplanets which is a site run by NASA that keeps photos on back up. I found an alien skull in one of the Curiosity rover photos in sol 410. The soul has lots of detail...you can even see two large teeth in its wide open mouth. Its jaw and cheeks and eye ridges are well pronounced. The nose looks human-like, but wider and thicker on the top. The back of the head seems to have a part of the neck and head still attached to it. Awesome fossil find and is absolute proof that aliens once lived on Mars. But the fact that it died laying on the surface and its mouth wide open makes me think it died in terror or pain.
Scott C. Waring - Taiwan
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- Gemiddelde waardering: 0/5 - (0 Stemmen) Categorie:Ruins, strange artifacts on other planets, moons, ed ( Fr, EN, NL )
Giant Alien Spaceship Crossing The Sun (Live Footage)
Giant Alien Spaceship Crossing The Sun (Live Footage)
It seems as if our sun has a lot of strange and unusually UFO activity this year. You may wonder why so many UFOs have been seen around the sun lately.
As we have written in our previous articles, does it have to do with an approaching solar storm or there is a space war going on?
Now, a new live footage captured by sky-watcher BruceSeesAll yesterday, shows a giant alien spaceship approaching the sun from the left, then crosses the sun to disappear into deep space only to deepens the mystery of the current UFO activity near the sun.
Besides the giant UFO, Bruces captured also what he believes is a second moon which he shows us in the second part of the video.
Did he really captured a second moon? Indeed a second moon exist.
The discovery was made on February 15 by US astronomers Theodore Pruyne and Kacper Wierzchos, using the telescope at Mount Lemmon Observatory. Follow-up observations allowed astronomers to trace its orbit, and calculated that this space rock, designed as 2020 CD3 has been orbiting Earth for about three years.
Other videos of ufo by our sun, selected peter2011
Astronomers have found the edge of the Milky Way at last
Astronomers have found the edge of the Milky Way at last
Our galaxy spans 1.9 million light-years, a new study finds
In this image from the Fermi space telescope, the Milky Way's stellar disk, which runs horizontally along the middle, glows in gamma rays. A vast halo of dark matter engulfs the disk and emits no light at all, which makes measuring the galaxy’s total size a challenge.
Our galaxy is a whole lot bigger than it looks. New work finds that the Milky Way stretches nearly 2 million light-years across, more than 15 times wider than its luminous spiral disk. The number could lead to a better estimate of how massive the galaxy is and how many other galaxies orbit it.
Astronomers have long known that the brightest part of the Milky Way, the pancake-shaped disk of stars that houses the sun, is some 120,000 light-years across (SN: 8/1/19). Beyond this stellar disk is a disk of gas. A vast halo of dark matter, presumably full of invisible particles, engulfs both disks and stretches far beyond them (SN: 10/25/16). But because the dark halo emits no light, its diameter is hard to measure.
Now, Alis Deason, an astrophysicist at Durham University in England, and her colleagues have used nearby galaxies to locate the Milky Way’s edge. The precise diameter is 1.9 million light-years, give or take 0.4 million light-years, the team reports February 21 in a paper posted at arXiv.org.
To put that size into perspective, imagine a map in which the distance between the sun and the Earth is just one inch. If the Milky Way’s heart were at the center of the Earth, the galaxy’s edge would be four times farther away than the moon actually is.
o find the Milky Way’s edge, Deason’s team conducted computer simulations of how giant galaxies like the Milky Way form. In particular, the scientists sought cases where two giant galaxies arose side by side, like the Milky Way and Andromeda, our nearest giant neighbor, because each galaxy’s gravity tugs on the other (SN: 5/12/15). The simulations showed that just beyond the edge of a giant galaxy’s dark halo, the velocities of small nearby galaxies drop sharply (SN: 3/11/15).
Using existing telescope observations, Deason and her colleagues found a similar plunge in the speeds of small galaxies near the Milky Way. This occurred at a distance of about 950,000 light-years from the Milky Way’s center, marking the galaxy’s edge, the scientists say. The edge is 35 times farther from the galactic center than the sun is.
Although dark matter makes up most of the Milky Way’s mass, the simulations reveal that stars should also exist at these far-out distances. “Both have a well-defined edge,” Deason says. “The edge of the stars is very sharp, almost like the stars just stop at a particular radius.”
In the future, astronomers can refine the location of the Milky Way’s edge by discovering additional small galaxies nearby. Astronomers could also search for individual stars out at the boundary, says Mike Boylan-Kolchin, an astrophysicist at the University of Texas at Austin who was not involved with the study. The farthest such stars will be very dim, but future observations should be able to find them.
The measurement should also help astronomers tease out other galactic properties. For instance, the larger the Milky Way, the more massive it is — and the more galaxies there should be revolving around it, says Rosemary Wyse, an astronomer at Johns Hopkins University who was not part of the new work. So far, there are about 60 known Milky Way satellites, but astronomers suspect that many more await discovery.
One of the biggest questions regarding the U.S. Navy's recent disclosures regarding strange encounters with supposedly unidentified flying craft is why are we only hearing about this highly concerning phenomenon from just one service? A fact that isn't commonly understood is that it is not the Navy's job to maintain sovereignty over America's airspace, it is the U.S. Air Force's. If strange and unidentified craft are being detected or seen, the Air Force has the mission to respond and investigate, not the Navy, and it can do so at a moment's notice. So far, the Air Force has been totally mum on this issue, which is extremely bizarre considering the Navy's own messaging surrounding it.
With this in mind, last September, I reached out to the Air Force with a series of very pointed questions regarding what seems like a massive discrepancy in regards to the military branch's ability to execute its homeland air defense mission. What seemed like a good start to finding answers to these key questions quickly turned into something of a nightmare that has made me lose all confidence in the Defense Department's ability to address a subject, which they themselves have actively helped elevate within the public's consciousness, in any meaningful manner.
My initial inquiry to the Air Force resulted in a very positive experience. The folks at the Air Force headquarters' press desk were not phased at all by the topic and seemed eager to look into it on our behalf. After discussing the issue with them directly on the phone, the questions I sent them were specifically written to move the ball forward on this critical aspect of the issue and, in doing so, getting the Air Force on the record about the issue overall in some manner. Ideally, this would have included some background as to the nature of these events from the service's point of view, and especially in regards to its homeland air sovereignty mission, as well as information about whether its own aircrews were experiencing similar encounters.
Here are the questions I fielded to them on September 19th, 2019:
Here is what we are looking for on the ongoing UFO/UAP story with the Navy and the USAF's position and comment on the issue:
Have Air Force pilots encountered any similar unexplained phenomenon on radar, electro-optically, or visually? If so, what is the general frequency and magnitude of these events?
Navy Super Hornet pilots out of NAS Oceana had constantencounters with these objects in 2014-2015, especially on radar. It got so bad that by early 2015 Oceana filed NOTAMs warning aviators about the phenomenon in the warning areas off Virginia. We have talked to the crews directly about this and are in the process of obtaining those NOTAMs and the paper trail leading to their posting. Langley's F-22s, which have superior sensor capabilities in some respects to the Super Hornets, as well the base's T-38 aggressors, are based right next-door and use the exact same warning areas for training daily. Did Langley aircrews experience the same phenomenon? If so, to what extent? What about other USAF assets that use the same airspace for training?
The Navy changed its reporting practices and procedures for encounters with unexplained flying objects significantly due to the massive increase in incidents in recent years. Has the Air Force done the same? If not, why? Does it even have set procedures for these events? If so, what are they?
Has the USAF experienced the same massive increase in incursions of UAPs over its bases and installations that the USN has?
Does the Air Force have similar electro-optical and infrared video of UAPs similar to what the Navy has, or other data for that matter?
Does the Air Force see this phenomenon as a national security threat? What is it doing to mitigate or better understand it?
Thanks so much for your help on this. I think it's critical to clear these details up, especially now that the Navy has admitted that the videos depicting these unexplained craft are indeed real and show objects it cannot identify.
I quickly followed up with another question:
The Navy is saying these things are constantly (as in many times a month or more) busting into controlled or even secured airspace. In 2015, they were out there for days off Virginia in the warning areas, even causing the base to post the NOTAMs due to near misses etc. The USAF is tasked with protecting this airspace. Has the USAF launched alerts and investigated these when the Navy (or maybe even the USAF) was calling them out? What was done in regards to homeland defense when these were in the warning areas so persistently? How did the USAF and its NORAD arm take this issue up during the 2014-2015 incidents and what does the Navy says has occurred constantly all over up through this very day?
Once again, I have to stress that the Air Force has the homeland air sovereignty mission. Fighter aircraft sit on alert across the United States ready to scramble within a matter of minutes to intercept and investigate any unknown craft flying in or near the nation's airspace. This includes what some may traditionally call UFOs. The War Zone has incredibly in-depth evidence of how such an action is taken with regards to the presence of transient unidentified flying objects, let alone ones that are persistently operating in restricted airspace, as was supposedly the case off the east coast of the United States in 2014 and 2015.
Air Force units that fulfill the homeland air defense mission are spread across the country, but those equipped with the highest level of fighter aircraft capability are scattered around the continental United States' maritime perimeter and are also based in Alaska and Hawaii. F-15C/Ds equipped with the most powerful fighter-optimized active electronically scanned array (AESA) radars in the world and carrying Sniper targeting pods for long-range visual target identification primarily fulfill the maritime border defense role in the lower 48 states, with F-22s in Hawaii and Alaska doing the same.
F-16C/Ds, which are also now equipped with AESA radars, based at Andrews Air Force Base just outside of Washington D.C., keep watch over the Capital Region. Other F-16s from a handful of Air Force units that patrol the central U.S. can also help augment the country's perimeter aerial security, but the alert mission is one that must be specifically trained for, with unique protocols and infrastructure requirements. It is resource-intensive and not cheap to execute, either. In other words, it is not something just any fighter squadron, especially a Navy one that has a very different mission focus, can just execute on the fly under normal circumstances.
As such, my questions attempted to fill in a missing part of the Navy's recent UFO-related accounts. If these flying craft were indeed being detected, how is it possible that the Air Force didn't scramble to investigate them, and do so multiple times over the course of these events? If incursions over installations are ongoing, regardless of if they are drones or something far more fantastical, how isn't the Air Force directly involved with investigating and mitigating these potential threats inside the airspace they are responsible for defending?
This is not just a UFO issue, it comes down to America's ability, or willingness, to defend its airspace from non-traditional threats. The threat to the homeland posed by cruise missiles is already palpable, but we are now in an era where lower-end and swarming drone warfare is becoming one of the most preeminent security issues of our time. It's a threat that has recently manifested itself in spectacular ways that some of us have warned would occur for years. So, my questions are just as relevant to the core of our national security as they are to simply finding out new details about mysterious flying objects that seem to have risen to new heights in the public's consciousness in recent years.
After a promising start with the Air Force itself, I was told that the inquiries had been forwarded to the Office of the Secretary of Defense's (OSD) public affairs arm. One public affairs officer, Susan Gough, would be handling the request. At first, this sounded very promising. The inquiry had been elevated to someone in a position that might be able to really add some unique context to the issue.
Sadly, this ended up being anything but the case.
Simply put, my experience with Susan Gough has been the worst I have had with any of the Defense Department's public affairs personnel, ever. What has transpired, or more accurately what hasn't transpired, over the last six months leaves me with no confidence or trust in this official representing the DoD on the issue. This is not personal in any way. She may be a wonderful person, but her behavior has been a clear example of everything the Pentagon's media operations should not be and it certainly is not due to a lack of training or experience. Her resume is impressive and may even be concerning to some who are seeking some morsel of truth regarding this bizarre and historically tortured issue.
My experience is not unique in any way. Others who are working this story have had similar experiences almost to a laughable degree. The reason why so many journalists are interacting with her at all on this issue is that she now holds the entire media/public affairs portfolio on UFOs within the DoD. Sometime shortly before I submitted my questions, the decision was made to funnel every request regarding this issue to her and her alone. The services no longer had control of their own messaging on the matter. Why this decision was made has not been made clear.
I wrote and called Susan Gough for months after my initial inquiries were forwarded to her. No correspondence was answered and no comments were given—not a timeline for delivery or a simple "we cannot comment at this time" response to any of my inquiries.
Nothing.
In the meantime, prolific Freedom Of Information Act (FOIA) filer and author John Greenwald over at the Blackvault.com had received a FOIA request that not only had my questions in it, but it also had the internal correspondence within the Air Force concerning answering at least a portion of my inquiries. John was nice enough to let me know he had received the documents and that he would work with me as to their release.
Once again, the whole idea was to get something, anything on record in regards to the Air Force, America's air sovereignty, and this issue. The last thing I wanted to do was publish a story about how the Defense Department won't even acknowledge these questions. I have had absolutely the best experiences with DoD public affairs over many years. We work with them daily in what we do. The vast majority of those interactions are hugely productive. In fact, I have never had a negative relationship with a U.S. military public affairs officer, even on topics that were far from positive for the Department of Defense. Overall, they do excellent work and understand our requests and process them with total professionalism in a timely manner. I cannot overstate how important their job is and how well they usually do it.
With this in mind, I dreaded having to take issue with the Department of Defense on their communications operations. But after nearly three months of getting no replies of any kind, I had to do something.
It wasn't until I sent a very frank letter on December 5th, 2019 that I received this answer from Ms. Gough. This was the first actual correspondence I had with her since my inquiry was made in September:
Hello Tyler,
My sincere apologies. It appears that your emails were being dumped into a junk/spam folder instead of my inbox, so I wasn’t seeing anything from you for a long time. Only just noticed because you are not the only one with a similar complaint. It was not intentional, I assure you, and I’m not quite sure how/why it happened; I get quite a few continuing queries about UAPs from multiple reporters, all with similar questions, so I know it’s not the subject.
I’m sorry, I don’t recall getting a voicemail from you, but I was out of the office for health reasons several times in the last several months, and may have missed it.
Anyway, I will look at your questions this morning, and will get back to you as soon as I can with answers.
Regards,
Sue
I replied very positively, I was so glad we had a breakthrough and I wouldn't have to write about how unresponsive the Department Of Defense's representative on this matter was. Even if they weren't willing to say much, we would actually have that on the record and I made Ms. Gough aware of the internal documents that had some answers to my questions that John Greenwald obtained. So, at least I could get some commentary on those, if nothing else. Above all else, a relationship could begin with the sole point of contact on this topic within the DoD. It's a long game. I was happy to finally be working with Ms. Gough so that future clarifications could be had.
I followed up quickly after her response asking if we could have this wrapped by the end of next week. Her reply stated as such:
"Yes, we should be able to. Thank you very, very much for your patience and understanding!"
Finally, I could slap a deadline on this and give John the heads up that there was progress.
The reality ended up being the complete opposite. Ms. Gough never got back to me. What followed over the next four weeks was me reaching out looking for an update and getting nothing back. This was different though as her original excuses were clearly false because she just went back to doing the same thing even after her apology and acknowledgment of a timeline.
By January 2nd, 2020, yet another month had gone by and it was clear that she had gone dark once again.
This was my email to her:
It's the New Year and still nothing. I haven't heard anything since we last touched base nearly a month ago when you said we could wrap it up the following week. Checked in multiple times. Nothing.
I am holding off another outlet on this with their FOIAs that include the DoD's correspondences with my name all over them, at this point, it is just embarrassing for me. I also find it odd that other outlets seem to have gotten responses and clarification follow-ups. In fact, some of them are people, not outlets.
I really want a good relationship here, as I have with every single one of my DoD PA contacts, rain or shine. I hate writing emails like this, but this is ridiculous and insulting. It has been what? FOUR months?
So what's the next step? Do I have to file a formal complaint over this? Something is really broken here, especially when you have your own aviators claiming that craft are violating our airspace regularly and I can't even get responses to specific questions, some of which were answered months ago in internal correspondences that the department released via FOIA long before I ever got them. In fact, I still don't have them.
Very disappointing and frankly, stunning.
Tyler Rogoway
No response.
On January 7th, I sent another note, stating that I have done everything I can, given her every opportunity to respond, and that months had rolled by since my initial request and it was now weeks past our deadline. Finally, I got another response:
Sorry Tyler, I’ve been out a lot, and just back today. Let me ping the people who owe me the info and see if they have it now.
Clearly, she had something to share, as I had the Air Force's internal emails in my hands for months via John Greenwald's FOIA request.
After that last glimmer of hope, the gaslighting operation was made clear. Once again, Susan Gough disappeared.
By this time I was so exhausted with the issue and a ton of other long-lead projects had come due, so I set it aside. Really, I didn't want to have to explain how terrible of an experience this was and how this DoD official evaded me for months. I thought, 'maybe if I just gave it a little more time she would pop up again.'
That never happened.
At the time of writing this, it has been six months since my original request. I can't thank John enough for being so patient with me on this story. He understood my important working relationship with the DoD and how I wanted to give Ms. Gough every possible opportunity for a professional and positive outcome.
I have no idea what the situation is behind the scenes with this topic at the DoD or what Gough's directives or issues are in regard to it. Yet the fact that after the Pentagon's own personnel have stated that constant intrusions into sensitive airspace have occurred by unidentified craft, they are not willing to even respond to questions about Air Force's role in those events, the service that is responsible for defending that airspace, is damning. The DoD seems to have helped seed interest in this issue, but is now unwilling to offer any explanations or clarifications regarding it. That seems very peculiar if not downright suspicious. For a topic that has been so abused over the decades, this really is an abhorrent stance for the DoD to take and it negates any trust it may have developed on the topic in recent years.
The most troubling part about this whole mess is that at least some of my inquiries actually got answers, ones the DoD shared with a FOIA requester, but not the actual reporter asking the questions. Once again, Gough had at least something to offer, but didn't convey it after months of prodding.
Greenwald's FOIAs show that the Air Force's public affairs officials actually did excellent work looking into at least some of my questions. They did not shy away from the topic and took it seriously, but with one unresponsive person having the authority to actually convey any of that information, it meant that in this case the results of their work were never released.
Here's what the Air Force found out in regards to Langely Air Force Base's F-22 and T-38 aircrews seeing similar objects in the restricted warning areas off the eastern seaboard. You can see the whole exchange below:
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It would seem by these emails that the F-22 and T-38 pilots from Langley were not having the same encounters as the Hornet pilots from nearby NAS Oceana. If this is indeed the case, it really puts the Navy encounters in a different light and it does match anecdotally with what we have gleaned through our own background investigation. So, if the Air Force tactical jet pilots were oblivious to the craft flying off the east coast, why?
Certainly, technology isn't an issue. Like the Super Hornet, the F-22 is also equipped with an AESA radar and, in some ways, it has far more capable sensors than the Super Hornet and possesses significantly higher performance. The Navy pilots' UFO encounter stories have also matured a bit as time has gone by and explanations do exist that could explain their encounters off the East Coast that are far from out of this world, but this discrepancy really sets up a new set of circumstances that are even more puzzling than before.
In addition, another short email string appears to shows that the Air Force has not followed the Navy's move to change its policy surrounding how its personnel report encounters with unidentified aircraft and that the incidents that have occurred actually had to do with drones, not something more exotic.
Once again, the disconnect between the Navy and the Air Force's stance on this issue is puzzlingly stark, which is highly intriguing.
We may take a deeper dive into some of these issues at another time, but for now, at least we have some record, albeit obtained indirectly, of the Air Force even looking into these recent encounters directly and even on a unit level. The question then becomes why weren't we informed about the inquiry's findings? Moreso, what about my other questions? Where did they end up? Could answers have been fielded to those questions, as well?
Sadly we just don't know. In fact, we don't even have a 'no comment at this time' regarding this issue from the Pentagon's spokesperson handling it. In the end, it is in the public's interest to know how the media is being treated by the Department Of Defense on this issue after they themselves helped perpetuate it.
Calling the situation disappointing and bizarre would be a huge understatement.
via REUTERSArtistieke impressie van Ikaria wariootia, die 555 miljoen jaar geleden leefde.
WETENSCHAPEen rijstkorrel groot is het organisme dat een nieuwe studie beschouwt als de vroegste voorouder van het dierenrijk tot nu toe gevonden. Ikaria wariootia is de wetenschappelijke naam van dit wormachtige fossiel dat zo’n 555 miljoen jaar oud is.
De stamboom van de mens en van de meeste dieren gaat helemaal terug tot een soort worm, zo blijkt uit het onderzoek van een wormachtig wezen van 555 miljoen jaar oud. Het is alleszins voorlopig het oudste voorbeeld van een fossiel van bilateria. Bilateria vormen een onderdeel van het onderrijk van de dieren waartoe bijna alle dieren behoren. Sponzen en neteldieren zijn de bekendste soorten die geen bilateria zijn.
Bilateria zijn dieren met een voor- en achterkant, twee symmetrische zijkanten en openingen aan beide uiteinden die verbonden zijn via een darmkanaal. Volgens de wetenschappers van de studie die in het vakblad PNAS verscheen, was de ontwikkeling van een bilaterale symmetrie een cruciale stap in de evolutie van het dierlijke leven. Organismen konden zich daardoor doelgericht bewegen. Het verschafte hen ook een gemeenschappelijke maar succesvolle manier om hun lichaam te organiseren. Van wormen tot insecten, van dinosaurussen tot mensen: enorm veel dieren kenmerken zich door eenzelfde basisplan voor bilaterale lichamen.
Rotsholletjes
Het organisme Ikaria wariootia leefde 555 miljoen jaar geleden in het Ediacarium, het geologische tijdperk waarin leven meercellig en complexer werd. De ontdekking van het wormachtige organisme volgde op die van kleine holletjes die vijftien jaar geleden al aangetroffen werden in rotsen in Nilpena in Zuid-Australië. Wetenschappers vermoedden wel dat het sporen van bilateria waren, maar vonden in de oude afzettingen geen aanwezigheid van wezens.
Pas recent ontdekten onderzoekers Scott Evans en Mary Droser minuscule, ovale impressies bij sommige gaatjes. Dankzij driedimensionale laserscanning werd een regelmatige, consistente vorm van een cilindrisch lichaam met een duidelijke kop en staart en een lichtjes gegroefd spierstelsel blootgelegd.
Zeebodem
Ikaria wariootia was tussen 2 en 7 mm lang en 1 tot 2,5 mm breed. De grootste ovaal paste perfect voor het aanmaken van de holletjes die al vroeger ontdekt waren.
Ikaria wariootia bracht waarschijnlijk zijn leven door met graven door lagen zand op de oceaanbodem, op zoek naar organisch materiaal waarmee het zich kon voeden.
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Lake Michigan UFO sightings still unsolved 25 years later
Lake Michigan UFO sightings still unsolved 25 years later
DeJanay BoothDetroit Free Press
The eerie lights filled the sky along nearly 200 miles of Lake Michigan shoreline, from Ludington south to the Indiana border.
On March 8, 1994, calls flooded 911 to report strange sightings in the night sky. The reports came in from all walks of life — from police and a meteorologist to residents of Michigan's many beach resorts. Hundreds of people witnessed what many insisted were UFOs — unidentified flying objects.
Cindy Pravda, 63, of Grand Haven remembers that night in vivid detail — four lights in the sky that looked like "full moons" over the line of trees behind her horse pasture.
"I got UFOs in the backyard," she told a friend on the phone.
Today, the mystery of one of the largest UFO sightings in Michigan history remains unsolved, but it continues to fascinate extraterrestrial researchers, psychologists and history buffs alike.
Pravda still believes the lights were UFOs.
Read more:
Think you've seen a UFO? Here's how to report it
"I watched them for half an hour. Where I'm facing them, the one on the far left moved off. It moved to the highway and then came back in the same position," Pravda told the Free Press on Thursday. "The one to the right was gone in blink of an eye and then, eventually, everything disappeared quickly."
She still lives in the same house and continues to talk about that night.
"I'm known as the UFO lady of Grand Haven," Pravda laugh.
The Detroit News and Free Press, March 20, 1994. The newspapers printed a combined Saturday and Sunday paper at the time.
Detroit Free Press
Where it started
Daryl and Holly Graves and their son, Joey, told reporters in 1994 they witnessed lights in the sky over Holland at about 9:30 p.m. on March 8.
"I saw six lights out the window above the barn across the street," Joey Graves told the Free Press in 1994. "I got up and went to the sofa and looked up at the sky. They were red and white and moving."
Others gave similar accounts, including Holland Police Officer Jeff Velthouse and a meteorologist from the National Weather Service Office in Muskegon County. What's more, the meteorologist recorded unknown echoes on his radar the same time Velthouse reported the lights.
"My guy looked at the radar and observed three echoes as the officer was describing the movement," Leo Grenier of the NWS office in Muskegon said in 1994. "The movement of the objects was rather erratic. The echoes were there about 15 minutes, drifting slowly south-southwest, kind of headed toward the Chicago side of the south end of Lake Michigan."
In 1995, The Free Press published the conversation between the National Weather Service and Velthouse.
"What do you think it is?" said the weather service radar operator.
Velthouse described witnesses seeing five to six objects, some cylindrical with blue, red, white and green lights.
The radar operator said, "There were three and sometimes four blips, and they weren't planes. Planes show as pinpoints on the scope, these were the size of half a thumbnail. They were from 5 to 12,000 feet at times, moving all over the place. Three were moving toward Chicago. I never saw anything like it before, not even when I'm doing severe weather."
Hundreds of reports of suspected UFOs were called in not only to 911 dispatchers but also to the Mutual UFO Network's (MUFON) Michigan chapter.
MUFON, an all-volunteer nonprofit organization founded in 1969, bills itself as the "world's oldest and largest civilian UFO investigation and research organization."
In 1994, the network received UFO reports from Ludington south to the Indiana state line, spokeswoman Virginia Tilly told the Free Press in 1994.
"We're getting 10 or 15 new sightings a day," Tilly said. "We have probably 20 people in various stages of investigating these reports."
The reported UFO sightings was the largest since March 1966, Bill Konkolesky, Michigan state director of MUFON, told the Free Press this week.
The Detroit Free Press, March 8, 1995
Detroit Free Press
"It was one of the big ones in the state. We haven't seen a large UFO (reported sighting) wave since that time," Konkolesky said.
Konkolesky joined the network in 1993. He was not part of the investigation team but still has a copy of an article about the sightings with a picture of the Graves family on the front cover.
MUFON interviewed dozens of witnesses, Konkolesky said, many of whom remain in contact with the organization.
"There was a lot of enthusiasm into the UFO field (then) because of the amount of press coverage. It was outstanding," he said. "They were paying attention to the phenomenon."
Konkolesky said the flying objects reported in 1994 are characterized as "unexplained" and the sightings remain a mystery.
Not so far-fetched
The idea of alien life isn't as farfetched as once thought, with a number of recent discoveries pointing raising the possibility.
In a series of reports from USA TODAY, researchers have studied whether life could exist on a recently discovered "Super Earth" about 30 trillion miles away.
Villanova University astrophysicists Edward Guinan and Scott Engle told USA TODAY that the planet, known as Barnard b, has a temperature of 274 degrees below zero, but "niches of life" may be possible under the ice.
Another group of researchers is studying whether a mysterious object entering the Earth's solar system from interstellar space at a high rate of speed actually is a probe intentionally sent here by an alien civilization. Scientists later decided that the weird object actually was a comet.
And another study reports that more “fast radio bursts" – bright, short-lived pulses of radio waves that come from across the universe — have been detected by astronomers. Some researchers have considered the idea that these bursts could be signals from intelligent aliens, according to Science News.
Other mysteries
The UFO frenzy of 1994 was one in a string of unexplained phenomena in Michigan history.
In 2016, a mysterious phenomenon known as the Paulding Light was reported in the western Upper Peninsula.
Witnesses reported seeing a bright white light, glowing deep inside the woods, changing size and shape before fading into the darkness. Although many individuals believed the flickering lights was because of a car driving over a hill, others believed it to be something supernatural and too bright to be headlights.
A light shines off in the distance seen off of Robbins Pond Road in Paulding, MI where the mysterious Paulding Light appears on Wednesday June 13, 2016 in Michigan's Upper Peninsula.
Ryan Garza, Detroit Free Press
That same year, a photo of a furry creature in the Upper Peninsula surfaced, sparking conversation about a possible Bigfoot. At that time, the Upper Peninsula Bigfoot/Sasquatch Research Organization also reported a sighting near the community of South Branch in Ogemaw County.
In December 2016, the organization led a search for the beast in the Seney National Wildlife Refuge.
Strange Ufo Encounter By Many Witnesses Over Lake Michigan
Strange Ufo Encounter By Many Witnesses Over Lake Michigan
MARCH 8, 1994 ……SOUTH OF HOLLAND MICHIGAN
On the evening of March 8, 1994, residents of Southwest Michigan began seeing strange things in the skies over Lake Michigan to the south of Holland. Blue, white, red, and green lights, sometimes attached to cylindrical objects, and sometimes performing unusual maneuvers, were reported.
911 operators began receiving calls at around 9:30 p.m. about something that looked like “a string of Christmas lights way up in the sky.” It wasn’t just a few people reporting these things; it was counties all up and down Lake Michigan. Some sources said 300 witnesses, including several police officers, saw the lights.
There were so many reports that one of the Ottawa County 911 operators decided to call the National Weather Service radar operator at Muskegon. The conversations that 911 had with the NWS operator were taped and later made their way into the media. The radar operator’s voice could be heard describing abrupt movements of the object and multiple objects appearing on the radar screen.
The Detroit News and Free Press, March 20, 1994. The newspapers printed a combined Saturday and Sunday paper at the time.
Detroit Free Press
He said that what he was seeing could not be precipitation, especially at that height. One object was tracked moving twenty miles in ten seconds.
Holland police officer Jeff Vellhouse spoke to the operator of the Muskegon radar that picked up the radar tracks: “He said he had three things on his radar, and they were in a triangular shape. He said they hovered over Holland and moved southwest. He said that one would move out of the triangular pattern, then move back in.”
The radar operator also reported: “There were three and sometimes four blips, and they weren’t planes. Planes show as pinpoints on the scope, these were the size of half a thumbnail. They were from 5 to 12,000 feet at times, moving all over the place. Three were moving toward Chicago. I never saw anything like it before, not even when I’m doing severe weather.”
It was said that there was no NWS written or taped records of the radar contacts themselves, but Dave Reinhart of BIMUP (Bureau of Investigators of Mysteries & Unusual Phenomena) claimed to have received copies of the NWS radar operator’s report in late 1994. He also said that he had talked to an individual referred to as “Fred”, who worked at Area 51 and who had knowledge that what occurred on the night of March 8, 1994 was some sort of rendezvous of UFOs from the east, west, north, and south.
Scott Ruiter of Grand Haven saw the lights in Grand Haven Township at 10:30 p.m. March 7: “It looked like about five airplanes following each other fairly closely. One would blink, then the other, other and other, right to left,”
The National Weather Service later tried to downplay the radar trackings: “There is no relation between the UFOs and the radar tracks,” said Dean Gulezian, the weather service’s area manager for Michigan. Gulezian said that although the radar did show some echoes, one key thing is the eyewitnesses saw these things at tree-top level, while the radar echoes were from an altitude of 10,000 feet or higher.” (Note above where the first witnesses reported seeing something like a string of Christmas lights “way up in the sky”)
Randee Murphy and her husband, of Ada Township, observed a “huge” shape for about two minutes as it flew slowly about 100 feet over the woods outside their home. “It had four lights,” she said, and “made a soft, whirring noise. It sounded like a single jet engine.” The Michigan flap continued for several days, presumably ending on the 10th. The sightings were never adequately explained.
Supermassive Black Holes Shortly after The Big Bang: How to Seed Them
Supermassive Black Holes Shortly after The Big Bang: How to Seed Them
According to classical theories, these space giants would not have had the time
They are billions of times larger than our Sun: how is it possible that, as recently observed, supermassive black holes were already present when the Universe, now 14 billion years old, was “just” 800 million years old? For astrophysicists, the formation of these cosmic monsters in such a short time is a real scientific headache, which raises important questions on the current knowledge of the development of these celestial bodies. According to classical theories, these space giants would not have had the time to develop in the young Universe. Yet, observations say they were already present. A new study by SISSA proposes a response to the fascinating question
A recent article published in The Astrophysical Journal, by the SISSA Ph.D. student Lumen Boco and his supervisor Andrea Lapi, offers a possible explanation to the thorny issue. Thanks to an original model theorized by the scientists from Trieste, the study proposes a very fast formation process in the initial phases of the development of the supermassive black holes, those up to now considered slower. Proving, mathematically, that their existence was possible in the young Universe, the results of the research reconcile the timing required for their growth with the limits imposed by the age of the Cosmos. The validity of the theory can be fully validated thanks to future gravitational wave detectors namely Einstein Telescope and LISA, but tested in several basic aspects also with the current Advanced LIGO/Virgo system.
The cosmic monster that grows at the centre of galaxies
The scientists started their study with a piece of well-known observational evidence: the growth of supermassive black holes occurs in the central regions of galaxies, progenitors of the current elliptical galaxies, which had a very high gas content and in which the stellar formation was extremely intense. “The biggest stars live a short time and very quickly evolve into stellar black holes, as large as several scores of solar masses; they are small, but many form in these galaxies”. The dense gas that surrounds them, explain Boco and Lapi, has a very powerful definitive effect of dynamic friction and causes them to migrate very quickly to the centre of the galaxy. The majority of the numerous black holes that reach the central regions merge, creating the supermassive black hole seed. Boco and Lapi continue: “According to classical theories, a supermassive black hole grows at the centre of a galaxy capturing the surrounding matter, principally gas, “growing it” on itself and finally devouring it at a rhythm which is proportional to its mass. For this reason, during the initial phases of its development, when the mass of the black hole is small, the growth is very slow. To the extent that, according to the calculations, to reach the mass observed, billions of times that of the Sun, a very long time would be required, even greater than the age of the young Universe”. Their study, however, showed that things could go much faster than that.
The crazy dash of black holes: what the scientists have discovered
“Our numerical calculations show that the process of dynamic migration and fusion of stellar black holes can make the supermassive black hole seed reach a mass of between 10,000 and 100,000 times that of the Sun in just 50-100 million years”. At this point, the researchers say, “the growth of the central black hole according to the aforementioned direct accretion of gas, envisaged by the standard theory, will become very fast, because the quantity of gas it will succeed in attracting and absorbing will become immense, and predominant on the process we propose. Nevertheless, precisely the fact of starting from such a big seed as envisaged by our mechanism speeds up the global growth of the supermassive black hole and allows its formation, also in the Young Universe. In short, in light of this theory, we can state that 800 million years after the Big Bang the supermassive black holes could already populate the Cosmos”.
“Looking” at the supermassive black hole seeds grow
The article, besides illustrating the model and demonstrating its efficacy, also proposes a method for testing it: “The fusion of numerous stellar black holes with the seed of the supermassive black hole at the centre will produce gravitational waves which we expect to see and study with current and future detectors”, explain the researchers. In particular, the gravitational waves emitted in the initial phases, when the central black hole seed is still small, will be identifiable by the current detectors like Advanced LIGO/Virgo and fully characterisable by the future Einstein Telescope. The subsequent development phases of the supermassive black hole could be investigated thanks to the future detector LISA, which will be launched in space around 2034. In this way, explain Boco and Lapi, “the process we propose can be validated in its different phases, in a complementary way, by future gravitational wave detectors.
“This research” concludes Andrea Lapi, coordinator of the Astrophysics and Cosmology group of SISSA, “shows how the students and researchers of our group are fully approaching the new frontier of gravitational waves and multi-messenger astronomy. In particular, our main goal will be to develop theoretical models, like that devised in this case, which serve to capitalise on the information originating from the experiments of current and future gravitational waves, thereby hopefully providing solutions for unresolved issues connected with astrophysics, cosmology and fundamental physics”.
Contacts and sources:
Donato Ramani
SISS-Scuola Internazionale Superiore di Studi Avanzati
Ancient Face Found On Moon, Looks Viking, UFO Sighting News.
Ancient Face Found On Moon, Looks Viking, UFO Sighting News.
Date of discovery: March 23, 2020 Location of discovery: Earths moon, right of Dalton Crater Source: Google Moon Google coordinates: 17°30'50.56"N 81°48'43.32"W
I was looking over Google Moon map when I found a face in a crater. I am not sure of the craters name, but it is touching the right side of both Dalton crater and Balboa crater. If the eyes are the window to the soul, then the face is a window to the species. This species looks almost human. It closely resembles Thor from the ancient Vikings. I colorized the face to make it stand out easier and to make it easier to see. The large lips, nose and cheeks all stand out well. It has a beard and thick eyebrows and a small forehead with hair. Its ear seems to be closer to that of a cat or goat. Its eyes are similar to the ancient greek depictions of warriors. The face is everything. Scott C. Waring - Tawian
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- Gemiddelde waardering: 0/5 - (0 Stemmen) Categorie:Ruins, strange artifacts on other planets, moons, ed ( Fr, EN, NL )
NASA cuts live feed when colorful UFO appears
NASA cuts live feed when colorful UFO appears
Several days ago a colorful unidentified flying object was captured on the International Space Station live feed camera.
The footage shows the UFO in the distance when it turns around and seemly changing colors moments before NASA cuts the live stream.
It is not the first time that NASA cuts the live feed when a UFO appears and while normally the well known screen appears with the text: "The video from the space station External High Definition Camera (EHDC) has been interrupted due to to either loss of signal between the station and the communications network", this time we suddenly see a blue screen, then the live feed reappears for one second followed up by the blue screen again indicating that NASA intentionally ended the live stream to hide this UFO.
VIDEO: Triangle UFO over Burien, Washington 20-Mar-2020
VIDEO: Triangle UFO over Burien, Washington 20-Mar-2020
In this video that was recorded over Burien, Washington on 20th March 2020 we can see these four orbs that appeared red to the naked eye performing maneuvers to first form the classic triangle formation only to break this formation to form a straight line before disappearing into the darkness of the night leaving just one orb visible. What is going on with the resurgence of these red orbs?
This STEREO image from Feb. 29 shows the strange wheel-like shape that turned out to be a reflection.
NASA
UFO aficionados recently got excited about a strange shape that appeared in images captured by NASA's Stereo mission. Was it aliens? Nope. It was a reflection.
Stereo, short for Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatory, launched as twin space observatories in 2006 on a mission to study the sun and coronal mass ejections. One of the spacecraft is still in operation. Its HI2 telescope captured a nifty view that included Venus and Earth in late February. That's when the mysterious wheel-like shape appeared.
Many doubts about this video: a huge UFO spotted in our solar system by STEREO camera in the last ten days of February? Nope, that object is a recurring image artifact caused by internal reflections of a planet.
"The strange looking geometrical 'object' is actually an internal reflection of the planet Venus within the telescope optics," NASA said in the update.
This annotated image shows the Lagoon Nebula, Venus and Earth in the STEREO observatory's field of view. The reflected light artifact caused by Venus is circled.
NASA
This isn't the first (and won't be the last) time this sort of reflection has appeared in Stereo's field of view. An annotated look at Stereo data from March 12 shows the Lagoon Nebula, Venus, Earth and the light artifact, which looks like a steering wheel.
It's easy to see how a casual observer could get excited by this weird space blip. In time-lapse movies, the wheel looks like it's traveling through space. It also bears a slight resemblance to some circular sci-fi creations, like the Deep Space Nine space station from the Star Trek series of the same name.
For more fun with internal reflections, visit the Stereo image artifacts page, a delightful collection of images with strange-looking but completely explainable visual artifacts.
A SpaceX Falcon launching from Vandenberg AFB in 2017.
Need more? A recent UFO sighting over Phoenix had “Phoenix lights” hopefuls hoping, but it looks like it was another SpaceX launch. A few days earlier, the camera on another SpaceX launch picked up a UFO near the launch rocket as it descended for a landing. Should we be mad at Elon Musk … or jealous?
“We saw this really bright, bright light shining from an object moving away. It looked like a UFO to us.”
Well, if you haven’t seen a rocket launch on a hazy night, this one (see the photos here) probably struck you as a UFO too. AZ Central reports that Pam Sutton of Maricopa, Arizona, said she and her husband were driving around 7 p.m. and both saw the strange sky anomaly, as did everyone who pulled off the road with them, an editor for the Arizona Republic and former Arizona governor Jan Brewer. The Arizona Republic and local police received numerous calls, before SpaceX cleared things up with an email (wow … what a sense of urgency!) to Phoenix Fire Department’s Capt. Rob McDade.
“We were told it was indeed the SpaceX Rocket launched from Vandenberg Air Force Base.”
SpaceX again … and yes, this one was also launching 10 mini-satellites. While the cases of mistaken identity don’t seem to be bothering SpaceX and CEO Elon Musk, could it be bothering actual UFO pilots?
Heads it’s SpaceX, tails it’s aliens.
“During the streamed launch of SpaceX Starlink 3/18/2020, during the decent of first stage rocket and seconds before the re-entry burn, an object is seen from under the rocket. The object is either stationary and the rocket is falling passed it or the object is traveling in a vertical direction (unknown if up or down).”
That description comes from “Latest UFO Sightings” which posted the video (see it here) and photos, as did a few other sites (here’s another one), not to mention SpaceX itself, which posted the entire launch (watch it here). They report that there’s not much else to report. Launch debris? Certainly a possibility, although one would think SpaceX takes extreme precautions to avoid creating debris that would linger so closely to the only reusable rockets as they land. A drone? Again, SpaceX is doing enough ‘dark’ missions for the military (although this wasn’t one) to make sure no one is trying to catch a glimpse of the launch or the secret cargo. Aliens? Have we exhausted the process-of-elimination yet?
Debris, drones and other natural reasons for this UFO should be alarming to SpaceX and Musk. However, no one seems to be alarmed. Is that a signal that it’s something else? In the meantime, maybe Ken Burns should devote his next documentary to showing all the things in the sky that are NOT alien spaceships. There’s a show that could stretch longer than “The Civil War”!
“Diamonds are forever” is a clever jewelry marketing slogan, a popular James Bond film and the thing that helped geologists find a long lost of an ancient arctic continent that once stretched from Scotland to Labrador, Canada. What’s the bigger deal – the chunk or the diamonds?
“For researchers, kimberlites are subterranean rockets that pick up passengers on their way to the surface.”
Wait a minute … you said this story was about rocks, not rockets and passengers from the center of the Earth!
“The passengers are solid chunks of wall rocks that carry a wealth of details on conditions far beneath the surface of our planet over time.”
Baffin Island
University of British Columbia geologist Maya Kopylova metaphorically describes how igneous rocks called kimberlites pick up diamonds and other ‘passengers’ as they are brought from deep underground to the surface by geological forces. Kopylova and colleagues were studying kimberlites from Baffin Island in Nunavut, specifically from a De Beers Chidliak Kimberlite Province property (and yes, De Beers created the ‘Diamonds are forever’ slogan – see how all of this is connected?). While De Beers obviously wanted them looking for signs of diamonds, the team noticed that the mineral composition of these rocks showed that they belongs to the North Atlantic Craton – which sounds like a movie monster but is actually ancient form of continent. Some parts of this craton eventually became part of North America and Greenland, but others sank beneath the Earth’s crust, never to be seen again.
Never underestimate the lure of diamonds.
“Finding these ‘lost’ pieces is like finding a missing piece of a puzzle. The scientific puzzle of the ancient Earth can’t be complete without all of the pieces.”
In a press release by the University of British Columbia announcing the paper published in Journal of Petrology, lead author Kopylova describes why geologists are so excited about this find. Cratons are billion-year-old parts of the continental lithosphere – the combined ancient crust and upper mantle that eventually broke up to form today’s continents and tectonic plates. The North Atlantic Craton is one, as are the North China Craton, the Sarmatian Craton in Russia and Ukraine, the Amazonia Craton in South America, the Kaapvaal Craton in South Africa and the Gawler Craton in South Australia. Each has its own unique mineral structure which help identify them.
Also called Laurentia, the North Atlantic Craton has had its ups and downs over time, forming parts of early continents and supercontinents. Laurentia is named after the Laurentian Shield, a large area of exposed igneous and high-grade metamorphic rocks that make its area an excellent place for mining minerals and diamonds. How important are these pieces of the Laurentia puzzle?
“With these samples we’re able to reconstruct the shapes of ancient continents based on deeper, mantle rocks. We can now understand and map not only the uppermost skinny layer of Earth that makes up one percent of the planet’s volume, but our knowledge is literally and symbolically deeper. We can put together 200-kilometre deep fragments and contrast them based on the details of the deep mineralogy.”
Believe it or not, while De Beers is obviously on Baffin Island for the diamonds, this is actually part of a graduate student project at the University of British Columbia to help train future geologists. UBC students get samples to study, De Beer gets maps to future diamond mines and Kopylova gets more data to add to the early history of Earth.
And those looking for movie monster ideas get a good one: The North Atlantic Craton Meets Godzilla at the North Pole!
Located in the Atlantic Ocean in the region called Macaronesia and just about 62 miles from the northwestern coast of Africa off Morocco is a Spanish held archipelago called the Canary Islands. Known for its amazing beaches, pleasant climate, biodiversity, and numerous natural features it is a major tourist destination in the region, yet what many of those fun seekers may not know is that these scenic islands were once the location of one of the most bizarre mass UFO sightings in history, which would be seen by thousands of witnesses from all walks of life and remains an unsolved conundrum.
Photograph of the phenomenon over the Canary Islands on June 22, 1976.
(Credit: Spanish Air Force/Antonio Huneeus)
It began on June 22, 1976, when people living on the islands of Tenerife, La Palma, and La Gomera began calling in to report numerous strange lights performing odd maneuvers in the sky, amongst them one that seemed to be larger than the others, described as a giant, luminous sphere. Among these reports some were more spectacular than others, and one of the first reported incidents was made by the Navy escort ship, the Atrevida, which at the time was positioned off the coast of Fuerteventura Island. On this evening at approximately 9:27 PM the crew observed an extremely bright light moving in the general direction of the ship. It was first thought to be a normal aircraft, but this turned out to not be the case, as it began rotating, pulsating, and generating a blindingly bright halo of yellow and blue, as well as various flashing strobe effects.
The Canary Islands
(Credit: Oona Räisänen/Wikimedia Commons)
The Spanish navy vessel Atrevida.
(Credit: José Juan Medina Cobacho/Wikimedia Commons)
The captain explained that, minutes after this “halo” of light appeared, he observed the following:
[T]he light split into two parts, the smaller part being beneath, in the center of the luminous halo, where a blue cloud appeared and the part from which the bluish nucleus had come, vanished. The upper part began to climb in a spiral, rapid and irregular, and finally vanished. None of these movements affected the initial circular halo in any way, which remained just the same the whole time, its glow lighting up parts of the land and the ocean, from which we could deduce that the phenomenon was not very far away from us, but was close.
The ship’s first officer echoed the captain’s statements. And the officers also confirmed that the ship’s surface radar detected nothing at the time of the sighting.
The depositions of the naval officers were considered to be some of the most-credible testimony regarding the UFO sighting. The deposition of a physician, however, was among the more strange accounts collected during the investigation. Dr. Francisco Padrón León was in a taxi on his way to see a patient in the town of Las Rosas on Tenerife, the largest of the Canary Islands. He explained that, when he had almost arrived at his destination, the taxi’s lights hit a luminous sphere hovering motionless just off the ground. He described that the sphere was electric blue in color and constructed of a “transparent and crystalline-like material.” He estimated that the UFO had a radius of approximately one hundred feet. Inside the sphere, Dr. Padrón saw a platform that looked like it was made of metal, and what appeared to be three control consoles. He also claimed to have seen two tall humanoid figures inside the sphere, whom he estimated were between eight and a half feet and ten feet tall. They wore brilliant red outfits and some type of head gear.
When the taxi arrived at the patient’s home, Dr. Padrón continued watching the sphere. He described it as follows:
I [then] observed that some kind of bluish smoke was coming out from a semi-transparent central tube in the sphere, covering the periphery of the sphere’s interior without leaking outside at any moment. Then the sphere began to grow and grow until it became huge like a 20-story house, but the platform and the crew remained the same size; it rose slowly and majestically and it seems I heard a very tenuous whistling.
The doctor raced into the patient’s house to inform the residents about the mysterious sphere. Everyone came outside to see the object that had ascended high in the sky. The UFO quickly accelerated, shooting away at an incredible speed. The doctor described that it “dissolved into a bluish spindle-shape with red underneath.” Similar to the description provided by the navy officers, Dr. Padrón said “a brilliant white halo was formed close to the object, which bit by bit was forming another very brilliant blue halo.”
The baffled crew watched this mysterious object for a full 40 minutes, and the official report from the ship would read in part:
The original light went out and a luminous beam from it began to rotate. It remained like this for approximately two minutes. Then an intense great halo of yellowish and bluish light developed, and remained in the same position for 40 minutes, even though the original phenomenon was no longer visible. Two minutes after the great halo, the light split into two parts, the smaller part being beneath, in the center of the luminous halo, where a blue cloud appeared and the part from which the bluish nucleus had come, vanished. The upper part began to climb in a spiral, rapid and irregular, and finally vanished. None of these movements affected the initial circular halo in any way, which remained just the same the whole time, its glow lighting up parts of the land and the ocean, from which we could deduce that the phenomenon was not very far away from us, but was close.
At no point was the craft picked up on radar, and a check of air traffic in the area showed no military or civilian aircraft scheduled to be in the vicinity. This would start a whole series of reports from throughout the Canary Islands as whatever it was headed out on its inscrutable mission, and people seemed to be reporting two different types of phenomena, one being this large sphere and the other being smaller flitting orbs, and these were seen by hundreds of people across several islands. One of the most intriguing reports came from a doctor Francisco Padron Leon, who at the time was in a taxi on his way to a house call at the town of Las Rosas. However, things got very odd when both he and the driver noticed an illuminated globe up in front of them, just seeming to hover over the ground. According to Leon’s report, it measured an estimated 100 feet across, and was seemingly made up of a semi-clear material like crystal. More bizarre still was that as they drew closer they could see that the bottom of the sphere was ringed by some sort of metallic platform, upon which two immense humanoid beings around 10 feet in height were standing next to large consoles of some kind. These two creatures had oversized heads, wore some kind of helmets, and seemed to be operating a giant tube that belched forth a bluish smoke, and the doctor would say of these entities and what happened next:
At each side of the center there were two huge figures of 2.50 to 3 m. [8.5 to 10 ft.] tall, but no taller than 3 m. [10 ft.], dressed entirely in red and facing each other in such a way that I always saw their profile. Then I observed that some kind of bluish smoke was coming out from a semi-transparent central tube in the sphere, covering the periphery of the sphere’s interior without leaking outside at any moment. Then the sphere began to grow and grow until it became huge like a 20-story house, but the platform and the crew remained the same size; it rose slowly and majestically and it seems I heard a very tenuous whistling.
This gigantic sphere would ascend and then purportedly shoot off at astounding speed along with its mysterious occupants. It would then be seen by several other witnesses directly after this, including the very patient that the doctor was on his way to see, all of who described the same translucent crystalline structure and giant beings on their catwalk. By the end of the evening there would apparently be thousands of reports from across the archipelago describing something bizarre going on in the sky, coming from a wide variety of professions and ages and making them one of the most mass witnessed UFO events ever, yet it was all mostly swept under the carpet by the Spanish Air Force.
Sketch of the UFO occupants
The following year, in 1977, some of these reports were leaked to journalist J. J. Benitez by a Spanish Air Force General, and would subsequently find their way into his book UFOs: Official Documents of the Spanish Government, but this was all still considered unverifiable and filled with spooky conspiracies. It would not be until 1994 that people would really take it seriously, when the Spanish Air Force declassified its files on the events and it was clear for all to see that something very odd had indeed been documented from that evening. The declassified report was very detailed, included over 100 pages of testimony, evaluations, drawings, a full chronology of the sightings, and it also took the step of separating witnesses by their perceived level of veracity and reliability, with the reports of the crew of the Atrevida and that of doctor Leon ranking at the top. It was also explained that an investigative adjunct had been launched by the Spanish Air Force, which had found that there had been no military or civilian aircraft at the time and they officially labelled it an “unidentified aerial phenomena.” The report would conclude:
The fact that a very strange and peculiar aerial phenomena occurred on the night of 22 June is a true and proven fact, as incredible as its behavior and conditions may seem. We should have to think seriously of the necessity of considering the possibility of accepting the hypothesis that a craft of unknown origin, propelled by an equally unknown energy, is moving freely over the skies in the Canaries.
It is a startlingly clear and refreshingly frank piece of declassified information, with the rare stance of a government honestly throwing up their hands and admitting that they don’t know what they are dealing with. No Venus, ball lightning, Jupiter, or other attempts to wedge it all into the mundane, just the acknowledgment that something very weird was going on, indeed, and leaving the field open for speculation. What happened over these secluded islands back in 1976? What did they want and who or what were those enigmatic beings? The Canary Island UFO sightings remain important in that they were reported by so many witnesses, many of which were highly reliable, as well as the fact that occupants were observed and the government admitted they have no answer for it all. Although this case still remains rather obscure, it certainly seems to be worth another look.
In the annals of UFO sightings throughout history there have been many that stand out as truly incredible, even sometimes including purported military engagements between UFOs and human beings. This may seem pretty spectacular as it is, like something out of a science fiction movie, but what if we take it a step further? What happens when these enigmatic objects actually engage each other? While it seems to be a subject well off the beaten path, there are actually a few cases of UFO on UFO dogfights going way back.
The earliest case we will look at here, and probably the most flat out spectacular and bonkers, is an odd phenomenon that purportedly played out in the skies over Nuremberg, Germany, in 1561. On April 14th of that year, normal life ground to a halt as citizens looked upwards with a mixture of awe and fear as something very strange happened up there. There whizzing about in the heavens were reportedly hundreds of mysterious objects of all shapes and sizes, including spheres, cylinders, tubes, saucer-like objects, crosses, ovals, lunar crescents, a black spear, and myriad others, which seemed to be engaged in some sort of free-for-all aerial battle, scorching the sky with their hostilities, after which one of them was said to actually crash somewhere out in the wilderness. The objects moved erratically and with great speed, and an article that appeared in the local paper at the time, said of this bizarre scene:
At first there appeared in the middle of the sun two blood-red semi-circular arcs, just like the moon in its last quarter. And in the sun, above and below and on both sides, the color was blood, there stood a round ball of partly dull, partly black ferrous color. Likewise there stood on both sides and as a torus about the sun such blood-red ones and other balls in large number, about three in a line and four in a square, also some alone. In between these globes there were visible a few blood-red crosses, between which there were blood-red strips, becoming thicker to the rear and in the front malleable like the rods of reed-grass, which were intermingled, among them two big rods, one on the right, the other to the left, and within the small and big rods there were three, also four and more globes.
These all started to fight among themselves, so that the globes, which were first in the sun, flew out to the ones standing on both sides, thereafter, the globes standing outside the sun, in the small and large rods, flew into the sun. Besides the globes flew back and forth among themselves and fought vehemently with each other for over an hour. And when the conflict in and again out of the sun was most intense, they became fatigued to such an extent that they all, as said above, fell from the sun down upon the earth ‘as if they all burned’ and they then wasted away on the earth with immense smoke. After all this there was something like a black spear, very long and thick, sighted; the shaft pointed to the east, the point pointed west. Whatever such signs mean, God alone knows.
The whole thing apparently lasted for a full hour, after which all of these various objects apparently flew off towards the sun. The article was accompanied by a woodblock print depicting the battle, which was also brought into modern discourse when it was published in Carl Jung’s 1958 book Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Skies, and it has left people scratching their heads ever since. At the time of the article it was largely seen as some sort of celestial battle and a sign from God, but of course in that era flying spaceships would not have really been a thing since it was an age when we didn’t even understand the cosmos in the first place, let alone flying machines. It only makes sense they would try to explain it in a religious context, with something they could understand. In later centuries it has come to be seen as perhaps some sort of atmospheric phenomena such as a sundog, flying swarms of insects, clouds, birds, a sensationalized tall tale, or even an actual mass battle between UFOs. It is likely we will never know, considering how lost to time the report is, but it is definitely curious.
A very similar series of events allegedly occurred in April of 1665 in the skies over Barhöfft, which was then in Sweden, but is now in Germany. On this occasion there were supposedly seen several disc-shaped objects that were battling amongst themselves, after which they scattered and one remained hovering there, which apparently made all those who looked upon it sick. One Erasmus Francisci would write of this in a 1689 article entitled Der wunder-reiche Ueberzug unserer Nider-Welt/Oder Erd-umgebende, in which he says of the battle aftermath:
After a while out of the sky came a flat round form, like a plate, looking like the big hat of a man… Its color was that of the darkening moon, and it hovered right over the Church of St. Nicolai. There it remained stationary until the evening. The fishermen, worried to death, didn’t want to look further at the spectacle and buried their faces in their hands. On the following days, they fell sick with trembling all over and pain in head and limbs. Many scholarly people thought a lot about that.
As with the Nuremburg case, this has been speculated as being mirages, birds, or some other mundane phenomena, but the detail of the fishermen falling sick is intriguing, and makes one wonder if this could have been an effect of radiation sickness in an era when we didn’t even know what radiation was. What was going on here? There have been much more modern reports of this sort of battle between UFOs happening, such as one incident that reportedly happened in February of 1980 in Australia. On this day brothers Rob and Phil Tindale were at their home in the town of Aldgate when they spied what seemed to be a brightly lit yellow object “bobbing about” in the sky above. After several minutes another similar object then joined it, only this one was larger and emitted a red light towards the smaller object.
According to the brothers, the larger object would move up to the smaller one, stop, shoot its red light, back up and then repeat the process, which gave them the impression that it was an attack of some sort. The smaller object then took off and the two engaged in a breathtaking display of speed and aerial maneuverability, an obvious chase, before both of them sped off in opposite directions. One of the brothers would say, “Certainly there were two lights, one appeared to be chasing the other, they both dipped below the horizon. It was a very memorable thing.” Both of the brothers remain adamant that they actually witnessed two UFOs dogfighting each other, and there was even another witness, a local farmer named Daryl Browne, who reported seeing a “speedboat-shaped yellow thing” crash through some trees leaving a mess of broken branches behind. One wonders just what happened here.
Even more recently is an account covered on UFO Casebook and from Unsolved UFO Mysteries by William J. Birnes, and Harold Burt. Supposedly this report comes from the Russian UFO researcher Nikolay Subbotin, and took place in 1989 over Zaostrovka, Russia. Apparently, on September 16, 1989, several hundred witnesses observed a formation of six silvery saucer-shaped UFOs chase a larger, golden one, apparently attacking it in the process. During the confrontation, all of the craft exhibited acceleration and maneuverability far beyond anything known, and all were described as shooting strong beams of flickering intense light at each other. According to a report in the newspaper Semipalatinsk, the energy being thrown about by these UFOs was enough to cripple the power grid and send the whole town into darkness.
Making this report all the more sensational is that after some time of the silver saucers ganging up on seventh object, the golden one then seems to have succumbed to the many energy beam hits it was sustaining, losing altitude to go hurtling towards the ground off in the distance, purportedly coming down at a bog on a nearby military test range. As soon as this happened, the victorious silver objects then reportedly shot off into the distance, and although the first reaction of the witnesses was to see if the other had crashed, it was a military area off limits to civilians. According to Subbotin, the military wasted no time in moving in shortly after the crash, and cleared the area, during which time several personnel fell mysterious ill and the instruments of passing aircraft experienced interference. What happened to this alleged downed UFO, if it ever really existed at all? Why were those other UFOs attacking it? Who knows?
These are certainly some very surreal and off-kilter accounts, in that rather than human fighter jets engaging these unidentified flying objects they seem to have been engaging each other. It is all pretty wild to think about, these advanced craft testing their meddle with each other in battle, and if it is real one is left to wonder why they would do this. Are there differing factions of these beings that on occasion don’t see eye to eye? Are there enemies among the occupants of these craft, who for whatever reasons resort to battle? Or is it just that these are misidentified phenomena that give the illusion of such bizarre dogfights? Such cases surely are some pretty far-out stuff, and whether they are real or not they certainly stoke the fires of the imagination.
Mysterious Explosion On The Far Side Of The Sun Caused By Crashing UFO
Mysterious Explosion On The Far Side Of The Sun Caused By Crashing UFO
On March 20th, something exploded on the farside of the sun. The Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) saw the debris flying over the sun's eastern limb.
The blast site was hidden from view, so we don't know what exploded. It probably wasn't a sunspot. According to astronomers, more likely, a filament of magnetism became unstable and erupted, hurling bits of itself and surrounding plasma into space.
Hypothesis:
What about if this mysterious explosion on the farside of the sun has been caused by a celestial/ UFO object which has more devastating energy than anything we have ever seen so far and the bits of a filament of magnetism surrounded by plasma hurtling into space are in fact UFO spacecraft fragments from a huge alien ship shot down by a high energy discharge fired by this celestial/UFO object.
Many strange events are happening in space lately, think about the wave of huge alien ships and clusters of smaller UFOs, seen on the ISS live feed in February and first week of March. These UFO spacecraft are all fleeing away from the sun.
Further analysis of a number of the large alien ships seen on the ISS live feed shows that they have been destroyed or at least severely damaged surrounded by countless fragments and broken parts coming from these UFOs while the clusters of smaller UFOs could be escape pods.
About the COVID-19 pandemic, look at what the world is doing. I can not believe the whole world is crashing the global economy because of this virus.
The virus isn’t causing the worldwide economic shutdown. There have got to be better ways to fight this virus than just shutting down the global economy.
Something bigger than the virus is going on and it looks like they are testing and isolating anyone for an upcoming worldwide event or operation.
From this perspective, it seems as there is a space battle going on and we are in the firing line of this space war what appears to be coming our way.
UFO Shoots Past Hikers In Riverside, California, March 22, 2020, Photos, UFO Sighting News.
UFO Shoots Past Hikers In Riverside, California, March 22, 2020, Photos, UFO Sighting News.
Date of sighting: March 22, 2020
Location of sighting: Riverside, California, USA
Source: MUFON #107071
This sighting took place yesterday in Riverside, CA. The eyewitness and his wife were hiking with their dog and took a photo. A dark disk appeared in the photo, possibly shooting past faster than the human eye can catch, but was caught by the camera. They later saw the disk and were confused at how it could be there if they had not seen it themselves. This UFO seems to have detected the people and shot past to scan them and record them...unknowingly being recorded in the process. Awesome photo that shows a classic disk.
Scott C. Waring - Taiwan
Eyewitness states:
Wife took this pic this morning while we were on a hike. When we looked at this pic, we saw this strange object. We noticed an odd hole in the clouds to the far left. Also a strange aura around the object. This was while viewing the pic as we did not see this with our eyes.
Miami UFO video: “Police cars created a distraction from what was happening in the sky above”
Miami UFO video: “Police cars created a distraction from what was happening in the sky above”
Strange UFO event happened in Miami, Florida on 16th March 2020.
Witness report:
Unidentified objects flying over the sky, military convoy like, white spherical drone and military planes. Flying sorcerer looking lights. I was outside on my balcony. 15 police cars created a distraction from what was happening in the sky above. This orb drone looking object was rotating, pulsating and emanating this green light while military completely silent vehicles were making their way south of Miami through an artificial passage made of clouds. After a while a sorcerer looking light came in the sky, just before the military convoy was passing by.
Canadian Scientist’s Deep-Diamond Research Reveals Ancient Continent
Canadian Scientist’s Deep-Diamond Research Reveals Ancient Continent
Lucky Canadian scientists have discovered new evidence in diamonds of ancient continental formation and drift.
During the Archean Eon, 4 to 2.5 billion years ago, the Earth's crust had cooled enough to allow the formation of continents and life began to emerge. The North Atlantic Craton (NAC) is an Archaean block of the Earth's crust that formed the nucleus of a continent which included the modern land masses of southern West Greenland, the Nain Province in Labrador, and the Lewisian complex in northwestern Scotland.
Now, a team of Canadian scientists have identified a remnant of this North Atlantic craton, and according to Science UBC , it was a “chance discovery” made while they were sifting through diamond exploration samples from Baffin Island , which “led to a major scientific payoff.”
Deep Mining Earth’s Evolution
According to University of British Columbia geologist, Maya Kopylova, the chance discovery, which is detailed in a new paper in the Journal of Petrology , was made through the analysis of what are known as “Kimberlite rocks.” Occurring deep within the Earth’s crust in vertical structures known as “kimberlite pipes,” they are the most important source of mined diamonds today. And according to Dr Michael Patterson, in his 2013 paper Kimberlite eruptions as triggers for early Cenozoic hyperthermals , kimberlites formed millions of years ago at depths of 150 to 400 kilometers and over time geological and chemical forces drove them to the surface of the Earth’s crust, “embedded with diamonds.”
The paper’s lead author, Dr. Kopylova, said kimberlites “pick up passengers” on their way to the surface in the form of solid chunks of “wall rocks” that carry data about historical geological occurrences deep within the bowels of the Earth. And by pairing up the stratifications of kimberlite rock samples, and “deeper, mantle rocks,” the scientists were able to reconstruct the shapes of ancient continents.
Diamond crystal in kimberlite matrix.
(public display, Field Museum of Natural History, Chicago, Illinois, USA) Image: James St. John / CC BY 2.0 )
An Ancient Geological Puzzle With Many Moving Parts
Deep core drill samples taken from a De Beers Chidliak Kimberlite Province property, located in southern Baffin Island, were analyzed by Kopylova and colleagues and soon it became apparent that the wall rocks were “ veryspecial,” as they shared a similar mineral signature with other portions of the North Atlantic craton. Kopylova wrote that it was “easy to tie the pieces together” because adjacent ancient cratons in Northern Canada, Northern Quebec, Northern Ontario and in Nunavu, “have completely different mineralogies.”
Cratons are referred to by scientists as “continental nuclei” that serve as anchors, about which other continental blocks gather. The North American plate still has some of these nuclei present at its center but the other continents have fragmented and re-arranged crating a long and tangled geological history of plate movements. Kopylova said:
The paper’s lead author, Dr. Kopylova, said kimberlites “pick up passengers” on their way to the surface in the form of solid chunks of “wall rocks” that carry data about historical geological occurrences deep within the bowels of the Earth. And by pairing up the stratifications of kimberlite rock samples, and “deeper, mantle rocks,” the scientists were able to reconstruct the shapes of ancient continents.
Diamond crystal in kimberlite matrix.
(public display, Field Museum of Natural History, Chicago, Illinois, USA) Image: James St. John / CC BY 2.0 )
An Ancient Geological Puzzle With Many Moving Parts
Deep core drill samples taken from a De Beers Chidliak Kimberlite Province property, located in southern Baffin Island, were analyzed by Kopylova and colleagues and soon it became apparent that the wall rocks were “ veryspecial,” as they shared a similar mineral signature with other portions of the North Atlantic craton. Kopylova wrote that it was “easy to tie the pieces together” because adjacent ancient cratons in Northern Canada, Northern Quebec, Northern Ontario and in Nunavu, “have completely different mineralogies.”
Cratons are referred to by scientists as “continental nuclei” that serve as anchors, about which other continental blocks gather. The North American plate still has some of these nuclei present at its center but the other continents have fragmented and re-arranged crating a long and tangled geological history of plate movements. Kopylova said:
“Finding these lost pieces is like finding a missing piece of a puzzle: a scientific puzzle of the ancient Earth can ’t be complete without all of the pieces.”
The North Atlantic craton fragmented about 150 million years ago and it stretches presently from northern Scotland, across southern Greenland and southwest into Labrador. But the newly identified rock sample covers the diamond bearing Chidliak kimberlite province in southern Baffin Island adding roughly “10 percent to the known expanse of the North Atlantic craton.” Previous attempts at continental reconstructions have been based on much shallower rock samples which had formed at depths of one to 10 kilometers but new technologies allowed this team of researchers to obtain mineralogy samples from “200-kilometers deep.”
The drill core samples taken from deep below the Chidliak Kimberlite Province in southern Baffin Island are described as exceptionally valuable, and very expensive to retrieve - much, much more than the average University Geology department budget would extend to. And it was for this reason the samples were initially provided by Peregrine Diamonds , who were acquired in 2018 by the international diamond exploration company and retailer De Beers .
Kopylova said their partner companies demonstrate “a lot of goodwill by providing research samples to UBC, which enables fundamental research and the training of many grad students.” Now, cynical readers will already be thinking to themselves that there is no way a commercial drilling company would “give away” such expensive drill core samples “in good will,” and they’d be right, for in return, UBC research provides the private drilling company with essential geological information about the deep diamondiferous mantle to support their successful, and highly profitable, diamond mining business.
Top image: Ancient continent was detected using samples from Baffin Island, Canada Source: Ruben / Adobe Stock
CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — Planetary nebula? Supernova remnant? No, this incredible image is actually a photo of a rocket launch. The rocket's exhaust combined with atmospheric effects emulates an image of a deep-space object.
A photographer captured the shot during the launch of SpaceX's 20th cargo resupply mission on March 6 as the Falcon 9 blasted off toward the International Space Station. Before the first-stage booster touched down at the company's landing zone, a short distance away, it created quite the spectacle.
"It's always amazing to see this phenomenon happen in real time," Erik Kuna, a spaceflight photographer for Supercluster, told Space.com. "But there's nothing like seeing the images captured afterwards in your camera's viewfinder. I'm always amazed at the detail and clarity."
Standing in a grassy field at NASA's Kennedy Space Center that night, I, too, watched as the Falcon soared into the night sky. Appearing as a bright orange fireball, the rocket turned night into day, while the roar of the engines washed over me.
It was cold and windy at the press site, but it was also a clear night. This meant that you could see the rocket as it went through the various stages of flight: liftoff, main-engine cut-off (MECO), stage separation, second-stage ignition and a series of three landing burns.
As the rocket executed these steps, a glowing cloud appeared in the sky, resembling a planetary nebula. The cloud pulsed and rippled as the rocket's engines burned through their fuel. In the cloud, you could see two bright dots that separated as the rocket's two stages moved farther away from each other.
The phenomenon is featured in a short video that SpaceX posted to Twitter following the launch. The company explained that the effect is produced following stage separation, when the two stages are each doing their own thing: the second stage is firing up and propelling the payload into orbit while the first stage is firing its engines to head back to Earth.
Erik Kuna captured an incredible view of SpaceX's CRS-20 cargo launch to the International Space Station. In this image the launch resembles a planetary nebula. (Image credit: Erik Kuna/Supercluster)
The result? A trippy-looking rocket "nebula." But this isn't a phenomenon unique to the launch earlier this month. Erik Kuna, has been enthralled by the nebula since he first captured a nebula shot during the CRS-17 launch last year.
According to Kuna, most launches can cause stunning light shows, it's just not always as pronounced. "It happens every launch, just some are more prominent than others," he told Space.com. "The best are SpaceX launches where the booster returns to land, but any launch will have some level of the phenomenon."
For instance, during twilight launches just before sunrise or sunset, the sun can illuminate the rocket's plume and make it look like a giant jellyfish in the sky. These launches are often confused for UFOs because of the weird squiggly clouds produced. (Spoiler alert: It's definitely not aliens.)
ULA's Atlas V rocket, carrying the AEHF-5 military communications satellite, launched at dawn on Aug. 8, 2019. The rocket's exhaust is illuminated by the sun, producing a jellyfish-shaped plume. (Image credit: ULA)
Nebula images require slightly different circumstances, however. First, you need a nighttime rocket launch and a booster landing, preferably touching down on land.
That's where the Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy come into play. SpaceX designed its Falcon family of rockets to be reusable, so after liftoff, the rocket's first stage conducts an aerial somersault, reorienting itself midair to return to Earth. Then, it gently touches down, either on land or on the deck of a floating platform at sea.
Return to land landings are best for nebula shots because their flight trajectories make the interactions between the first and second stage separation and the boostback burn more visible against the dark sky. "This creates a magical symphony of light and gases that mix into a canvas of colors and shapes, producing one epic photo," Kuna told Space.com
"During previous night launches, I noticed that we would see this atmospheric glow almost like auroras around the rocket exhaust," he said. "The rockets were producing these fascinating patterns that looked a lot like deep-space images."
The interactions between a rocket's first and second stages can produce a dazzling image reminiscent of a nebula in deep space, as seen in this image of a SpaceX cargo launch to the space station.
(Image credit: Erik Kuna/Supercluster)
Kuna set out to capture the incredible phenomenon with photography, researching what kind of gear and settings he would need to use. Thanks to the ultrasensitive sensors in his camera and special light-gathering lenses, he was able to capture the stunning spectacle.
"The technique is kind of simple once you know your subject and understand what is happening," he said. For photographers who want to give it a try, he recommends a high ISO, a wide aperture and a slow shutter speed with a telephoto lens.
Kuna says there's a bit more to it than traditional launch shots, but that success really comes down to mastering basic concepts. Kuna was the first to capture the spectacle, but has seen a rise in the nebula's popularity ever since.
"I think it's been elusive for many because as photographers we are weary of things like noise [variations in brightness or color] or lack of sharpness in an image," he says.
But experimentation pays off. When he looked at his camera, he knew he had something special — the holy grail of launch shots: a rocket nebula.
"I had a picture (in my head) of what I thought a nebula looks like," Kuna said. "I started experimenting and finally captured it during that launch." He said his co-worker noticed the similarity to the cosmic cloud. "He leaned over my shoulder and said 'that looks like a freaking nebula,'" Kuna said. "I knew I got the shot." And the term "rocket nebula" was born.
So what do we see when looking at a rocket nebula photo? According to Kuna, in the CRS-17 photo, the first stage engine appears as a pinpoint of orange glow while the second-stage vacuum engine radiates out as a bluish purple web of light on the bottom.
"These two interact to form the image you see, both areas smashing into each other, wave after wave, creating a beautiful display in the dark sky," he said.
Each nighttime land landing, Kuna tries to photograph the nebula. So far, he's captured three: CRS-17, STP-2 (a Falcon Heavy mission) and now CRS-20. (The CRS-17 booster touched down at sea, not on land, but it was close enough to the launch site to produce the same effects.)
In this view of a SpaceX Falcon Heavy launch, the two stages are more pronounced, with the rocket's second stage producing the incredible purple spirals at the bottom of the image.
(Image credit: Erik Kuna/Supercluster)
John Kraus, a local rocket photographer, had a different take on the CRS-20 nebula that was featured in NASA's Astronomy Picture of the Day (APOD) on March 12. In it, he focuses more on the boostback burn, the first of three burns that the rocket conducts in order to land itself.
In his image, we see the Falcon 9's first-stage boostback burn arc up toward the top of the frame as the second stage continues on its journey to low Earth orbit, its own fiery trail visible below the boostback burn. In the background are expanding exhaust plumes from the rocket's two stages.
John Kraus @johnkrausphotos
A closeup, long exposure look at Falcon 9’s boostback burn and second stage burn, and the resulting plume interaction between the two stages. Incredible.
This image is a hybrid between your typical "streak" photograph, a sort of time-lapse image, and a rocket nebula. Streak shots have historically been rocket photography gold if you frame your shot just right. That's because in one shot, a photographer can capture the entire launch, including the landing.
"I think [streaks] are an exciting way to sum up an entire launch — or in my case, a unique portion of it — in a single photograph," Kraus told Space.com.
Kraus and Kuna both say that planning a shot like this is very different from planning a streak.
"Nebulas and streaks are two different worlds," Kuna said. "One is about capturing a small amount of light through the biggest opening possible on your camera and focusing on a specific moment of the launch, while a streak aims to capture a large amount of light in a very small opening, usually through a wider lens during a long period of time to convey the rocket's motion."
"To think we would never see this sight if SpaceX didn't land its boosters; it's truly majestic and awe-inspiring," he said. "I can't wait for the Starship boostback!"
Whether you're trying a streak for the first time or a nebula or anything else, Kraus said to remember to try new things, you never know what you may capture.
Top physicist claims USS Nimitz UFO 'time travelled' to reach 19,000mph
Top physicist claims USS Nimitz UFO 'time travelled' to reach 19,000mph
Dr Jack Sarfatti, a world-renowned expert in quantum physics, believes a metamaterial that not from our time allowed the speed of light to "slow down" on the infamous UFO
One of the most startling descriptions given by the fighter pilot witnesses was that it somehow dropped from 80,000ft to around 28,000ft in several seconds and 28,000ft to just above sea level in under a second.
Such a feat to reach sea level would mean the craft would have had to be travelling at 19,000mph – speeds unimaginable for Earthly craft.
But Dr Jack Sarfatti, a world-renowned expert in quantum physics and author of several books in the field, believes he knows what happened.
The USS Nimitz UFO has been officially classified as a UAP by the Navy
(Image: US Navy)
Speaking on The Hidden Truth Show with James Breslo, he suggested the craft used a type of meta-material that allowed the speed of light to “slow down”.
"See the problem is this, if you read any of the standard papers in the field, if they’re talking about warp drive, time travel and wormholes they say the problem is it ‘takes too much energy’ to achieve it," he explained on the YouTube podcast.
"The tic-tac does not need a lot of energy. They observed the tic-tac going from 80,000ft down to 50ft in less than two seconds and there’s no jet engines, no flares.
“It’s going at 1,000s of Gs, how’s it doing that? There is no way it can do that by conventional propulsion.”
Meta-material that the fuselage of the Nimitz UFO is built on helps explain this unimaginable speed.
"What happens is that if you pump electromagnetic energy into the material, it will have a certain resonance.
“In that resonance, the speed of light inside the material can go down to a very small number.”
This, according to Dr Sarfatti, will allow for the type of “warp drive” technology made famous in sci-fi blockbusters like Star Trek.
As the physicist notes, the meta-material industry is hugely lucrative and has already been used for sensors and lenses.
Dr Jack Sarfatti is a leading figure in the world of quantum mechanics(Image: YOUTUBE/THE HIDDEN TRUTH SHOW)
But, while many firms are using forms of the technology already, the one seen on the Nimitz UFO does not belong to the US Navy.
Instead, Dr Sarfatti suggests the craft actually came back from the future.
This, he claims, is made possible by using the Novikov loop. Dr Sarfatti explained to this site that: "A causal loop is a paradox of time travel that occurs when a future event is the cause of a past event, which in turn is the cause of the future event.
"Both events then exist in spacetime, but their origin cannot be determined."
The metamaterial fuselage means the craft doesn't just move through space but "controls it", Dr Sarfatti added.
The low-energy “warp drive” seen in the Tic Tac allows it to “squeeze the space in front of it and stretch the space behind”.
The 80-year-old is so confident in his theory that he is hoping to present it to US President Donald Trump.
During the interview, he claimed “talks are ongoing” over a meeting.
Recently discovered comet C/2019 Y4 (ATLAS) isn’t bright enough to see with the unaided eye … yet. But it’s getting brighter. Will it provide a good show or fizzle out? Click here to learn more.
A nice image of Comet C/2019 Y4 (ATLAS) by Efrain Morales from Aguadilla, Puerto Rico. The marked object is a distant galaxy.
A recently discovered comet is getting the attention of astronomers and sky enthusiasts as it’s become brighter than expected in the last few days. Astronomers using the ATLAS (Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System) in Hawaii discovered Comet C/2019 Y4 (ATLAS) on December 28, 2019. As of mid-late March, it shines at about the brightness of an 8th-magnitude star – not visible to the eye yet – but within reach of medium-sized telescopes in dark skies. The comet is currently crossing Mars’ orbit and is approaching the inner solar system. As it gets closer to us, it’ll get brighter still.You’ll find charts for observers at the bottom of this post.
Comet ATLAS should become bright enough to be easily visible in binoculars, and perhaps bright enough to be seen with the unaided eye from dark sky locations.
Just know that comets are notoriously erratic and inherently unpredictable! We will have to wait to see how Comet Atlas performs.
Astronomer Alessandro Marchini, director of the Astronomical Observatory at the University of Siena in Italy – whose death toll from COVID-19 ramped up dramatically yesterday – sent the video below last night. He wrote:
During this surreal period of the health emergency for the Covid-19, I’m trying to use our social channels to entertain people forced at home. This evening I observed the comet C/2019 Y4 ATLAS during a Facebook Live streaming and here is a time-lapse I made with the images I acquired with our telescope. I hope all is fine with you.
Comet C/2019 Y4 (ATLAS) will come closest to Earth on May 23, 2020. Its perihelion or closest approach to the sun will occur on May 31, 2020.
If predictions are correct, Comet ATLAS might reach a visual magnitude of +5 around May 1, 2020. That is theoretically bright enough to be see with the eye, but the fuzziness of faint comets can make them harder to spot than comparably bright stars. When looking for fuzzy objects, it’s best to use averted vision: explanation here.
How bright will the comet get after that? Estimates of Comet ATLAS’s peak brightness range from magnitude +2 to -6 during perihelion or closest approach to the sun, but please know that many comets fizzle and never reach their expected brightnesses. We will have to wait and see.
Orbit of Comet C/2019 Y4 (ATLAS)
Courtesy of NASA/JPL.
How close to our planet will the comet come? The celestial visitor will pass at a huge distance, at some 72,610,769 million miles away (116,855,706 km).
Comet C/2019 Y4 (ATLAS) will pass very close the sun, and thus may disintegrate before becoming bright enough to be seen with the unaided eye.
It will pass at some 23,517,819 miles (37,848,261 km) from the sun, which is closer to our star than Mercury’s elliptical orbit (about 36 million miles or 57.9 million km on average).
Calculations by NASA/JPL indicate Comet ATLAS takes some 6,025 years to complete an orbit around the sun. Observations show it has a similar orbit to the Great Comet of 1844, which suggest Comet Atlas may be a fragment of the same 1844 comet.
Will Comet C/2019 Y4 (ATLAS) provide a good show or just fizzle out? Let’s keep a close eye on it, just in case! Bookmark this article, as we’ll provide updates and new photos when we can …
Here are some charts for you.
Location of Comet C/2019 Y4 (ATLAS) in late March 2020. This chart faces north-northeast from a temperate latitude in the Northern Hemisphere. The time is around 9 p.m. local daylight (8 p.m. if you’re not using daylight time) for all locations. In late March, the comet requires a small or medium-sized telescope, but it may be visible in binoculars very soon!
Illustration by Eddie Irizarry using Stellarium.
Location of Comet C/2019 Y4 (ATLAS) during late March 2020. Facing north-northeast at around 9 p.m. local daylight time (8 p.m. if you’re not using daylight time) for all locations. In late March, the comet requires a small or medium-sized telescope, but it may be visible in binoculars very soon!
Illustration by Eddie Irizarry using Stellarium.
Location of Comet C/2019 Y4 (ATLAS) during early April 2020. Facing north at around 9 p.m. local daylight time (around 8 p.m. if you’re not in daylight time).
Illustration by Eddie Irizarry using Stellarium.
Location of Comet C/2019 Y4 (ATLAS) on April 15, 2020, around 9 p.m. local daylight time (around 8 p.m. if you’re not in
daylight time). Illustration by Eddie Irizarry using Stellarium.
Location of Comet C/2019 Y4 (ATLAS) on April 30, 2020, around 9:30 p.m. local daylight time (around 8:30 p.m. if you’re not in daylight time).
Illustration by Eddie Irizarry using Stellarium.
By May 15, 2020, Comet C/2019 Y4 (ATLAS) will become increasingly closer to the Northwest horizon. By then it might be bright enough to be easily seen with small binoculars, or perhaps even with the unaided eye!
Illustration by Eddie Irizarry using Stellarium.
Bottom line:Recently discovered Comet C/2019 Y4 (ATLAS) isn’t bright enough to see with the unaided eye … yet. But it’s getting brighter. Will it provide a good show or fizzle out?
Bizarre footage showing several red UFOs hovering in the night sky in Texas has sparked a conspiracy frenzy.
The strange video, taken in the city of El Paso, shows eight bright lights slowly moving across the sky.
Four seemed clustered in a group with the bottom orb appearing to flash much like a plane. Ahead of them, a further four can be seen flying away in a line.
The video was taken by Mario Rios at around 7.15pm on March 17. After posting it to YouTube, the clip was picked up by popular conspiracy channel The Hidden Underbelly 2.0.
“So in this footage, we can see these red orbs following some sort of flight path as they go over this building,” the channel owner said.
The lights seen moving across the night sky in Texas(Image: YOUTUBE/MARIO RIOS)
“Now, I know we could write these off as Chinese lanterns, but they don’t seem to be flickering and seem to be following a path.
“If you look at the two at the front, they seem to be very tight together.
“It’s not so easy to write this off as Chinese lanterns. And also, Mario does sound a bit scared.”
Hundreds of people have seen the clip, with many voicing their own thoughts on what the objects could be in the comments section.
“These aren’t Chinese lanterns,” one wrote. “You’re going to see in the time to come what they really are.”
The objects seemed to be moving in a formation
Another bizarre claimed to have seen the same lights in Brazil, adding: “There were more than 50 lights, which ran in the sky and disappeared into space.”
A third suggested: “Those lights are ours. It is said that 75% of those lights are our own. Reverse-engineered.”
But some were more practical, suggesting they were nothing more than drones.
It was around a couple of years back that Donald Trump, the United States president asked authorities to begin a space force to proclaim the dominance of the country in the skies and beyond. However, conspiracy theorists argue that the space force or a similar kind of sky army has been active for the past couple of decades, and they believe that sightings of a triangular aircraft, popularly known as TR-3B is concrete evidence of advanced space technology the country has attained.
Strange lights in Texas sparks debate
Recently, a YouTube channel named 'The Hidden Underbelly' has shared an eerie video that shows eight bright flying objects flying in formation in the skies of Texas. The strange video clip was captured by a man named Mario Rios, and it gained popularity after it was shared by the conspiracy theory YouTube channel.
After analyzing the video, the conspiracy theory channel revealed that these strange flying objects are not Chinese lanterns, as they don't seem flickering, and all these flying objects followed a path.
"In this footage, we can see these red orbs following some sort of flight path as they go over this building. Now, I know we could write these off as Chinese lanterns, but they don't seem to be flickering and seem to be following a path. If you look at the two at the front, they seem to be very tight together. It's not so easy to write this off as Chinese lanterns. And also, Mario does sound a bit scared," said the conspiracy theorist in the YouTube video.
What are those flying objects?
After watching the video, viewers also shared their opinions to explain this weird UFO sighting. Most of the viewers argued that these flying vessels are not Chinese lanterns, and it could be most probably alien space ships from deep space. Some other people claimed that these vessels could be secretive military vessels developed by the United States army.
"It is more terrifying to think we are alone in the Universe that to know there are at least others out there," commented J Kennedy, a YouTube user. "Those lights are ours. It is said, that seventy-five percent of those lights are our own. Reverse engineered," commented Twisted Existence, another YouTuber.
SCIENTISTS FIRED A COPPER CANNONBALL INTO AN ASTEROID — HERE'S WHAT HAPPENED NEXT “All this is super exciting.”
SCIENTISTS FIRED A COPPER CANNONBALL INTO AN ASTEROID — HERE'S WHAT HAPPENED NEXT
“All this is super exciting.”
What happens when you fire a cannonball at an asteroid?
Thanks to a wild new study published Thursday in the journal Science, we now know the answer.
The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency's (JAXA) Hayabusa2 spacecraft fired a copper cannonball into Ryugu, an 850 meter-wide near-Earth asteroid. The 2 kilogram "Small Carry-on Impactor," a bit larger than a tennis ball, hit the asteroid at approximately 7,200 kilometers/hour and blew out a 14.5 meter wide crater with a depth of .6 meters. After a year of analysis, scientists have reported their analysis of the plume created by the impact and properties of the crater. From Space.com:
The number and size of craters that pockmark asteroids such as Ryugu can help scientists estimate the age and properties of asteroid surfaces. These analyses are based on models of how such craters form, and data from artificial impacts like that on Ryugu can help test those models...
Features of the artificial crater and the plume suggested that the growth of a crater was limited mostly by the asteroid's gravity and not by the strength of the space rock's surface. This, in turn, suggested that Ryugu has a relatively weak surface, one only about as strong as loose sand, which is consistent with recent findings that Ryugu is made of porous, fragile material.
These new findings suggest that Ryugu's surface is about 8.9 million years old, while other models suggested that the asteroid's surface might be up to about 158 million years old. All in all, while Ryugu is made of materials up to 4.6 billion years old, the asteroid might have coalesced from the remains of other broken-apart asteroids only about 10 million years ago, Arakawa said.
Scientists used the Japanese-made spacecraft Hayabusa2 to fire a 2-kilogram copper cannonball at a speed of 2 kilometers-per-second into the asteroid Ryugu, a tiny, rocky body orbiting nearby, between Earth and Mars.
The cannonball, though tiny, managed to blast a 14-meter-wide, semicircular crater into the asteroid’s crisp surface. But aside from making an impact in the real sense, the shot transformed scientists' understanding of the asteroid's age, composition, and other properties.
The unprecedented results pave the way for researchers to better estimate these same details for the myriad other asteroids strewn across the universe.
“All this is super exciting,” Patrick Michel, director of research at the French Scientific Research National Center, tells Inverse.
“And in this crazy and dangerous world (...), it gives hope that we can fight big challenges! The SCI was an operation done on a tiny body, at several hundred million km from Earth. This is amazing and gives a lot of hope.”
WRECKING AN ASTEROID
The collision enabled scientists to capture images and samples from the asteroid that would be otherwise impossible.
“The surface of the asteroid is heated by the solar radiation and irradiated by the solar wind and the cosmic ray, so the outermost layer of the surface could be altered,” Masahiko Arakawa, professor of planetology at Kobe University, tells Inverse.
He explains that the organic materials and hydrated minerals on the surface of the asteroid can change dramatically over time.
“We wanted to have a fresh material without alteration, so we developed and operated a Small Carry-on Impactor, SCI, to form an artificial impact crater to expose the asteroid subsurface or interior,” Arakawa says.
The team then developed a microsatellite to observe the crater formation process and the continuous ejection of the subsurface material.
“Collisions play a fundamental role in the formation and history of our Solar System, starting with planet formation through collisional accretion,” Michel explains.
“So far, models developed to understand the collisional history of our Solar System rely on ad-hoc parameters to determine the outcome of each collision.”
This means researchers’ understanding of cosmic collisions are usually obtained from laboratory simulations, and not first-hand observations.
“Scaling the lab results to asteroid scales is not trivial,” Michel says.
“The SCI experiment is the first hyper-velocity impact experiment on such an asteroid, and it is a super complex operation, and yet achieved with high success.”
Ejecta curtain growth, and deposition.JAXA, Kobe University, Chiba Institute of Technology, Kochi University, University of Occupational and Environmental Health
MAKING HOLES, ANSWERING QUESTIONS
Firing the cannonball enabled researchers to directly observe the formation of a crater in microgravity for the first time, answering how much the microgravity affects crater formation.
The crater growth process appears to be controlled by the surface gravity, not by the surface material strength. In fact, the diameter of the new crater on Ryugu is about 7 TIMES LARGER than if it had formed on sand under the Earth’s gravity.
The impact crater made by the cannonball on Ryugu.
“We found that the crater’s formation and dimensions are such that the only way to explain them is that the process is controlled by the gravity of the asteroid, despite its extremely low value,” Michel says.
“This was totally unexpected, and I must say that I still have a hard time to interpret this.”
“How can such small gravity be the only contributor? And we see many boulders, which should have strength, so how is this possible? This is fascinating and opens a totally new window in our understanding of cratering physics in such different regimes than on Earth,” Michel says.
“IF WE WANT TO DEFLECT AN ASTEROID BY AN IMPACT, WE NEED A MUCH BETTER UNDERSTANDING OF THIS PROCESS.”
Aside from this finding, Arakawa and his colleague were also able to put a number on the asteroid's age — previously estimates had pegged it at between 9 million and 160 million years. Turns out Ryugu is on the younger side of the spectrum.
“Our results suggest that 9 million years is better for the surface age of Ryugu.”
DEFENSES UP
Knowing what Ryugu's surface is made of and how impact craters form there is critical for defending our own planet from incoming collisions from the cosmos, Michel says.
One of the main strategies scientists propose for any near-Earth object that looks like it might actually hit us is to send a projectile to knock it off course.
“If we want to deflect an asteroid by an impact, we need a much better understanding of this process,” Michel says.
“So, even if the SCI was not meant to deflect Ryugu because the impact energy is too small, its results will definitely feed planetary defense studies.”
According to Michel, this experiment helps to pave the way for NASA's DART and Hera missions, which will perform the first asteroid-deflection test using a kinetic impactor.
But in these missions' cases, the asteroid target is very different from Ryugu, and probably much less porous, so the results won't apply entirely. However the new study does offer a guide for using this "wrecking ball" method of data collection to understand how asteroids form, their key features, and whether they might do damage to Earth.
Abstract:
The Hayabusa2 spacecraft investigated the small asteroid Ryugu, which has a rubble pile structure. We describe an impact experiment on Ryugu using Hayabusa2’s Small Carry-on Impactor (SCI). The impact produced an artificial crater with a diameter >10 m, which has a semicircular shape, an elevated rim and a central pit. Images of the impact and resulting ejecta were recorded by the Deployable CAMera 3 (DCAM3) for >8 min, showing the growth of an ejecta curtain (the outer edge of the ejecta) and deposition of ejecta onto the surface. The ejecta curtain was asymmetric, heterogeneous, and never fully detached from the surface. The crater formed in the gravity-dominated regime i.e., crater growth was limited by gravity, not surface strength. We discuss implications for Ryugu’s surface age.
Is New UFO Footage Videos Enabling You To Discover Alien Craft?
Is New UFO Footage Videos Enabling You To Discover Alien Craft?
The latest UFO footage on the web can offer you several excellent videos. It may be hard to believe, but it’s true. These strange alien craft videos can be found on the web in a number of ways, including your local television station. From there, it’s on to the internet and you get to watch them.
Now, if you’re a skeptic then perhaps you don’t want to try this new way of accessing footage. After all, you’re just going to have to live with your skepticism for now. However, there are more benefits to watching the UFO footage than just denying your doubts. You could actually be joining the club.
In fact, in this case, you might be the first person to see this strange video. Just imagine how excited your child would be if they found the video on YouTube. They’ll also get to see and understand why UFOs exist.
How would you feel if you could see that? If you haven’t seen one yet, then now is the time. You can find UFO footage online, and there are a number of sites that specialize in their documentary videos.
You can find more than just this site’s selection of UFO video on the web. There’s a variety of online sites that show a wide range of UFO footage. With these websites, you can view even the newest UFO footage on the web and see the latest ones.
Another major benefit is the very low cost. A great deal of money can be saved when you watch UFO footage online. Your savings will start out small, but over time you will save hundreds of dollars. When you’re just starting out in this hobby, you can use that savings to get the proper equipment to help you discover these ancient craft.
In addition, the economy is still recovering from a natural disaster’s effect on our economy. It’s a good time to save money on everyday items like gas and food. When you can watch UFO footage online, you won’t even think about spending a dime.
This, in addition to the financial benefits of looking for UFO videos online, is why it’s so important to have a membership to a credible site. You should pay only for videos that are worthy. Many of the UFO videos online have been verified, so you know they’re legitimate.
NASA Says 4 Asteroids Headed For Earth This Weekend
NASA Says 4 Asteroids Headed For Earth This Weekend
NASA Says 4 Asteroids Headed For Earth This Weekend
KEY POINTS
NASA detected four asteroids approaching Earth
The biggest asteroid in the group measures 180 feet wide
All four asteroids will approach Earth this weekend
NASA’s automated asteroid tracking system has detected four near-Earth objects that are expected to approach the planet this weekend. According to the agency, the biggest asteroid in the group is about as big as the Leaning Tower of Pisa in Italy.
The first asteroid that will approach Earth this weekend has been identified by NASA’s Center for Near-Earth Object Studies (CNEOS) as 2020 FK. As indicated in CNEOS’ database, this asteroid has an estimated diameter of about 43 feet, which makes it the smallest in the group.
CNEOS noted that this asteroid is currently traveling across space at a speed of over 23,000 miles per hour.
Trailing behind 2020 FK is an asteroid known as 2020 FS. This space rock is currently flying towards Earth at a speed of about 9,600 miles per hour. CNEOS estimated that this asteroid measures around 56 feet wide.
Both 2020 FK and 2020 FS will visit Earth’s vicinity on Saturday. 2020 FK is expected to approach the planet on March 21 at 12:05 a.m. EDT from a distance of about 0.00909 astronomical units or around 845,000 miles away.
2020 FS, on the other hand, will zip past the planet on March 21 at 11:29 a.m. EDT. During its approach, the asteroid will be about 0.02096 astronomical units from the Earth’s center, which is equivalent to around 1.9 million miles.
On Sunday, Earth will be visited by two asteroids. The first one is called 2020 DP4, which is the biggest asteroid in the group. According to CNEOS, this space rock has an estimated diameter of 180 feet. It is currently moving across the Solar System at a speed of 18,000 miles per hour.
The second asteroid that will fly past Earth on Sunday is known as 2020 FF1. This space rock measures about 49 feet wide and is moving towards Earth at a velocity of almost 29,000 miles per hour.
2020 DP4 will fly past Earth on March 22 at 2:34 p.m. EDT from a distance of about 0.00903 astronomical units or 840,000 miles away. As for 2020 FF1, this asteroid will approach from a much closer distance on March 22 at 6:09 p.m. EDT. According to CNEOS, this asteroid will zip past the planet from a distance of only 0.00477 astronomical units or 443,000 miles away.
Image: Artist illustration of an asteroid heading for the EarthPhoto: Pixabay
During the streamed launch of SpaceX Starlink 3/18/2020, during the decent of first stage rocket and seconds before the re-entry burn, an object is seen from under the rocket. The object is either stationary and the rocket is falling passed it or the object is traveling in a vertical direction (unknown if up or down). It appears to have the shape of a dodecahedron and silver-grey metallic surface that is reflective (yet not mirror reflective). This object was Danger close to their reentry vehicle and would expect some sort of report on it.
Paul Kyberd, Senior Lecturer in Particle Physics Informatics, Brunel University London
The fact that we are here at all is one of the greatest puzzles of physics. We are made from normal particles such as electrons, but every such particle also has an antimatter companion that is virtually identical to itself, but with the opposite charge. When matter andantimatter come into contact, they annihilate each other in a flash of light.
Physics suggests that matter and antimatter were created in almost equal quantities in the Big Bang. So how come there’s almost only matter left today – why didn’t the matter and antimatter annihilate each other to render the universe lifeless? Our new research has enabled scientists to build a new type of accelerator, based on particles called muons, that could help us find out.
A muon is almost identical to an electron, except that it is 207 times heavier. What’s more, it decays into other particles in two millionths of a second. This lifetime, although short for us, is quite a long time for an unstable fundamental particle, and this explains why muons make up almost all the charged cosmic rays which reach the Earth’s surface.
Much of our ability to investigate the structure of matter at the shortest distances depends on creating beams of particles and accelerate them to high energies. However there are only four stable particles which can be used in this way, the electron and its anti-particle (positron), and the proton and its antiparticle (antiproton).
Particle beams consisting of those have been used for many years, yet both of these pairs have drawbacks. The electron and its partner are very light – when we try to accelerate them, they radiate electromagnetic energy. This is can be useful for applications such as TV but makes it hard to reach the sort of energies which we need to improve our understanding of the universe.
Unlike electrons, the proton and the anti-proton are made up of more fundamental particles – quarks and gluons. In a collision between a proton and anti-proton it is these fundamental particles which actually collide, resulting in a lower energy crash than you would have got if protons had been truly fundamental particles.
Each particle also has an antiparticle, not included here. (Image credit: Publicdomainpictures.net)
The muons are heavy enough that they radiate much less energy, but fundamental (not made up of smaller particles) so that all their energy is available for the investigation. When scientists created the Nobel-prize winning Higgs particle with protons, they needed a machine 10km in diameter: the Large Hadron Collider. A muon machine, however, could achieve this with a circumference of just 200 metres.
The disadvantage of muons is that, unlike electrons and protons, they are unstable and need to be produced and then rapidly used before they all decay. We can produce muons by taking a narrow, high-intensity beam of protons and running it into a target made of a metal, such as titanium. This produces a beam of another fundamental particle called the pion.
Pions form a beam which fans out. If the original proton beam looks like a laser pointer, the pion beam looks more like a torch beam – with intensity dropping rapidly with distance. The pions then decay to produce the muons, meaning the beam spreads even more – resembling a light bulb.
We cannot accelerate such a beam in a machine like the LHC, so we need to create a beam which spreads out much less. This is challenging given that we have only have two millionths of a second to produce, accelerate and collide it.
But our team of physicists and engineers, from around the world – known as the Muon Ionisation Cooling Experiment (MICE) – has now shown that it is possible. We used a process known as cooling to help compress the beam. This involves passing the muons through a container with liquid hydrogen at -250°C, slowing the particles down. We then passed them through an electromagnetic cavity, which caused the beam to accelerate in the required direction.
By repeating this several times it is possible to create a beam which spreads out much less and has a dense core. This beam can be injected into a particle accelerator to produce a high-energy muon beam. Such a beam can either be collided or left to circulate until the muons decay into an intense beam of neutrinos – far in excess of any neutrino beam which can currently be produced.
Probing the universe
In fact, a neutrino beam created from muons is part of a planned Neutrino Factory, which would allow us to answer many questions related to the origin and evolution of the universe – such as the mysterious imbalance between matter and antimatter.
Neutrinos could also help us understand the details of how life-essential elements such as oxygen, carbon and silicon, which are formed in stars, spread across universe. These heavier elements were not produced in the Big Bang and yet are responsible for the planet we live on and all the life around us. We know that bursts of neutrinos, which are released in star explosions (supernovas), are responsible.
We could also collide two beams of muons in the same way as we collide protons at the LHC. The muons, being simpler than the protons, would allow for more precise determination of the properties of the Higgs particle, for example.
The properties of the muon also makes it an invaluable tool in the field of material physics. The ability to create more closely focused beams may improve the current measurements and open up new diagnostic methods.
Our method may also be used to help increase the intensity of any other charged particle beams. It has been a long project lasting over a dozen years, but it has been worth the effort when we consider what a powerful tool we have created.
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CURIOSITY’S AWESOME 360-DEGREE VIDEO MAKES YOU THINK YOU'RE STANDING ON MARS
Credit: NASA
CURIOSITY’S AWESOME 360-DEGREE VIDEO MAKES YOU THINK YOU'RE STANDING ON MARS
We may havelost an Opportunity on Mars, but that isn’t holding Curiosity back. After hanging out at Vera Rubin Ridge on Mount Sharp since 2017, NASA’s Curiosity rover is crawling over the dusty terrain of the Red Planet again — but not before the Curiosity team released a panoramic video that will really make you think you’re standing right there in moon boots (because we don’t know what Mars boots look like yet).
For some perspective, I took this shot of the clean room within which Curiosity and its accompanying spacecraft were built back in 2011. One can see the heat shield being built toward the right (the white dome) while the rover sits behind it, its black legs sprawling out without wheels (at the time).
The video not only gives you a 360-degree view of Mars from the rover’s point of view, but also a closeup of the dust and regolith its wheels have to contend with as it explores what could be a future destination for astronauts. You can see why the drill site it’s standing on is appropriately nicknamed “Rock Hall”. The feeling of actually standing on a planet some 34 million miles from Earth is kind of mind-blowing.
Gaze out into the distance and you will experience a view of the ruddy peak of Mount Sharp, which the rover has been relentlessly climbing since 2014. You can also see the geological features that are Curiosity’s next destinations, including Glen Torridon, which the team believes is a “clay-bearing unit”, and the floor of Gale Crater, from which Mount Sharp rises.
In the wake of Curiosity taking off from Vera Rubin Ridge, the team is using its data in an attempt to figure out how exactly the ridge formed. It has mysteriously resisted erosion while the bedrock was slowly worn away by solar radiation blasts and other factors.
There is still no definite answer as to why the ridge itself has refused to go down, but Curiosity’s observations provided proof that the rocks on the ridge came into being from sediment settling in a lake that evaporated eons ago.
"We've had our fair share of surprises," Curiosity science team member Abigail Fraeman said. "We're leaving with a different perspective of the ridge than what we had before."
Curiosity has also unearthed proof of ancient water on Mars. The rover teamed up with a NASA orbiter exploring Vera Rubin Ridge from above, and when the orbiter picked up on a strong signal for hematite, which often forms in water, Curiosity zoomed in closer. It was able to not only confirm the presence of hematite but also find crystals and other evidence of groundwater that had long since dried up. Because these mineral deposits appeared in patches, the team believes that the flow of groundwater had different impacts on various parts of the ridge.
What the rover saw didn’t always match the view from space. This is why you need more than one robotic eye when it comes to studying the geology of another planet.
"The whole traverse is helping us understand all the factors that influence how our orbiters see Mars," said Fraeman. "Looking up close with a rover allowed us to find a lot more of these hematite signatures. It shows how orbiter and rover science complement one another."
Curiosity has also discovered organic molecules, which may or may not mean that Mars ever supported life, but it could have at least been habitable if the vast desert we see now was once a lush alien paradise. From the POV of that video, even the desert is fascinating.
DIERENIn 2017 zijn er plotseling 900.000 pinguïns van de aardbol verdwenen. Terwijl er eerst meer dan een miljoen koningspinguïns op het onbewoonde eiland Île aux Cochons leefden, waren dat er in 2017 amper 200.000. Zelfs drie jaar later houdt het mysterie biologen nog steeds bezig.
Ile aux Cochons is een onbewoond eiland, gelegen in de zuidelijke Indische Oceaan. Het ligt ergens tussen Madagaskar en Antarctica, en het was de thuis van wel 500.000 koppels koningspinguïns, de op een na grootste pinguïnsoort met een gele kraag. De kolonie op Île aux Cochons was daarmee ook de op een na grootste kolonie ter wereld. Totdat er plots 900.000 pinguïns verdwenen. Plots, zonder enig spoor na te laten. Dat moest blijken uit enkele satellietbeelden, want het eiland is zeer moeilijk bereikbaar.
Maar omdat het mysterie zo groot is, beslisten enkele onderzoekers van het Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS) om een nieuwe expeditie te organiseren, de eerste naar het onbewoonde eiland in 37 jaar tijd.
Een vijftal maanden geleden, in november 2019, werden de onderzoekers met een helikopter gedropt op het afgelegen eiland. Ze hadden in totaal zo’n 700 kilogram aan onderzoeksmateriaal met zich meegebracht en arriveerden te midden van het broedseizoen. Die periode voeren vader en moeder pinguïn continu afwisselende taken uit: terwijl de ene de eieren uitbroedt, gaat de andere op zoek naar voedsel. Om de jacht naar voedsel te ‘tracken’ bevestigden de onderzoekers enkele elektronische tags bij tien verschillende pinguïns.
Er werden stalen bloed genomen, om te controleren op ziektes. En de onderzoekers controleerden of er plotseling roofdieren aanwezig waren op het eiland. Zo werden er nachtcamera’s geïnstalleerd in de buurt van de broedende pinguïns om de aanwezigheid van andere dieren te checken. Daarnaast bestudeerden ze de botten van enkele dode dieren om die te testen op veranderingen in het voedselpatroon van de pinguïns. Dat bleek niet zo te zijn.
Ook was er geen sprake van roofdieren die de pinguïns fataal zijn geworden. En in het bloed van de dieren werden geen aanwijzingen gevonden voor ziektes. De levende pinguïns zagen er overigens gewoon gezond uit.
Wat gebeurde er dan wel met de, bijna 1 miljoen, verdwenen pinguïns? Bij het afronden van hun (eerste onderzoek) kunnen de Franse biologen het nog niet met zekerheid zeggen, maar vermoedelijk leidden veranderingen in de omgeving tot het verlies van de pinguïns. Omdat de oceanen opwarmen, wordt het voedsel schaarser en moeten pinguïns steeds verdere zwemmen. Zo blijkt uit de data die de bevestigde tags registreerden, dat de zoektocht naar voedsel hen hen tot wel 500 kilometer ver kan brengen. Zo’n tocht kan er evengoed een zijn waarvan ze nooit meer terugkeren, zo stellen de onderzoekers.
Among the cases of supposed UFO crashes, the infamous one at Roswell, New Mexico, seems to always take the spotlight. After all, this is the event that even people who know nothing of the UFO phenomenon at large know about, so iconic is it in scope. Yet, what many people might not realize is that Roswell is by far not the only supposed UFO crash in history, and not even the earliest. One very intriguing report comes from many years before the Roswell incident, and while not as famous, it is every bit as strange.
The story goes that in the spring of 1941, a Reverend William Huffman, of the Red Star Baptist Church in Cape Girardeau, Missouri, was asked by the local Sheriff to come and help give last rites to the victims of a plane crash on the outskirts of town. Huffman then dutifully made his way out to the supposed crash site to find the place crawling with police, FBI agents, fire fighters, and military medical personnel who were all buzzing around a twisted mass of metal wreckage. At this point it seemed as if this was exactly as he had been told, a plane crash, but things would soon take a turn for the bizarre.
The reverend soon noticed that some of the pieces of the crashed craft were not as one would expect, and that rather than jagged as one would suspect, they seemed to have “a rounded shape with no edges or seams, and a very shiny, metallic finish.” This was decidedly odd, and did not seem to be a typical airplane, yet as he examined the wreckage further it got even weirder still. Charlette Mann, the reverend’s granddaughter and the one who first brought the case to attention after being told the story by her grandmother on her deathbed, would tell UFO researcher Leonard Stringfield of what he had seen in that wreckage thusly:
Upon arrival it was a very different situation. It was not a conventional aircraft, as we know it. He described it as a saucer that was metallic in color, no seams, did not look like anything he had seen. It had been broken open in one portion, and so he could walk up and see that. In looking in he saw a small metal chair, gauges and dials and things he had never seen. However, what impressed him most was around the inside there were inscriptions and writings, which he said he did not recognize, but were similar to Egyptian hieroglyphics.
Taking this further into the realm of the outlandish was when Huffman was allegedly asked to come look at and pray over three dead bodies, but these did not appear to be human. The beings were described as being of almost childlike stature, with hairless large heads, big oval-shaped eyes, incredibly long arms and fingers, tiny mouths and ears, no discernible noses, and dressed from head to toe in what seemed to be a shiny material like “wrinkled aluminum foil.” Mann says of the state of the bodies:
There were 3 entities, or non-human people, lying on the ground. Two were just outside the saucer, and a third one was further out. His understanding was that perhaps that third one was not dead on impact. There had been mention of a ball of fire, yet there was fire around the crash site, but none of the entities had been burned and so father did pray over them, giving them last rites.
Huffman purportedly did administer last rites to these strange creatures, after which he was approached by some military personnel and told in no uncertain terms to keep it all total secret. He doesn’t seem to have done a very good job of this, because he apparently went home and immediately told his family what he had seen. However, they would not say a word about it to anyone, and Huffman’s wife would keep it all to herself until she came down with cancer and on her death bed in 1984 confided in Mann of what he had told them on that strange day, and she had apparently even seen a picture of one of the alien bodies, which was in the possession of her father. She has said of this picture:
Well, the first awareness that I had of it (the dead bodies) is actually a picture that my father had and it was at a dinner party. And, I had heard rumors, and bits and pieces over conversations, but it was a picture, an old picture, because it had … it was like the old Kodaks, with little lines and scallops around it. There were two men holding up a non-human, is the best way I can describe it. A little entity, a little person who appeared to be about 4 feet tall. They had him underneath the armpits with arms outstretched on either side of him.
When Stringfield heard the story of the crash he immediately launched an investigation into the case. Stringfield found that other living witnesses such as Mann’s sister and the living brother of the Cape Girardeau County sheriff in 1941 were both able to corroborate the story. He also was able to uncover fire department records of a plane crash in the area at the specified time, and he even managed to track down a photograph of the alleged alien, which was kept by Guy Huffman, the reverend’s son and Charlette’s father. Stringfield would publish his findings in an article for the UFO publication Status Report, and he would later include the account in his book UFO Crash / Retrievals: The Inner Sanctum.
It is hard to know what to make of this case. The account comes from a woman who got it from her grandmother, who got it from her grandfather, so already we have this as a third hand account at best. Stringfield found that others corroborated the account, but that still leaves the chance that Huffman himself was spinning tall tales. There is evidence that a crash did happen at the time, but it is clearly and unambiguously described as an airplane crash, with no mention of dead alien bodies. The photograph that Mann and Stringfield claimed to have seen remains elusive, and no one has been able to track it down, leaving it in limbo. There just doesn’t seem to be much solid evidence that this ever happened, and yet what if it did? Was this another Rosewell UFO crash that in this case managed to slip between the cracks and be successfully brushed under the carpet by the government? What did Huffman encounter out there, if anything? These are questions destined to remain unanswered, and this story of a lesser known UFO crash will probably remain even more shrouded in shadows than its more famous cousin.
Out in the West Texas town of El Paso I fell in love with a Mexican girl Nighttime would find me in Rosa’s Cantina Music would play and Feleena would whirl
El Paso, Texas, owes a debt of gratitude to the late country singer Marty Robbins for writing and recording a song that was his best and still the best-loved song about the West Texas city. (Sing along with Marty here.) However, it was released in 1960 and a lot has happened since then in El Paso beyond gunfights over a beautiful girl. Maybe it’s time for a new song about the latest phenomenon to hit El Paso – UFOs. Garth, Keith, Miranda, Carrie … are you listening?
A video of an alleged fleet of UFOs flying over El Paso on March 17, 2020, was uploaded by the YouTube channel The Hidden Underbelly 2.0, which regularly posts a variety of paranormal videos. This one is said to have come from a Mario Rios who was driving at 7:15 pm on an unnamed El Paso freeway when he spotted the lights moving slowly low in the sky. That’s about all an excited Mario has to say about them. (Watch the video for yourself here.) While you ponder what you think the lights might be, here’s what Hidden Underbelly 2.0 has to say.
“In this footage, we can see these red orbs following some sort of flight path as they go over this building. Now, I know we could write these off as Chinese lanterns, but they don’t seem to be flickering and seem to be following a path. If you look at the two at the front, they seem to be very tight together. It’s not so easy to write this off as Chinese lanterns. And also, Mario does sound a bit scared.”
Yes, that’s a good argument against Chinese lanterns, especially as bright as these lights are at the distance they seem to be recorded from. There’s too many to be Venus or another planet and they’re too bright to be Elon Musk’s satellites that have been mistaken for UFOs so often recently. Space force testing? Aliens? There’s a lot to be scared or anxious about these days, so Mario’s excited voice can be excused, but that doesn’t mean he’s looking at alien spaceships.
Out through the back door of Rosa’s I ran Out where the horses were tied I caught a good one, it looked like it could run Up on its back and away I did ride Just as fast as I could From the West Texas town of El Paso Out to the badlands of New Mexico
Marty Robbins’ El Paso cowboy had a good reason for jumping on a horse and riding out of town … murder charges. These El Paso orbs could be law enforcement as well – El Paso is a Mexican border town and there are plenty of police and DEA helicopters patrolling the area, but four at a time? And moving so slowly?
What about weather balloons? A UFO over El Paso in December 2019 was eventually identified as one of those, but they usually ride alone like the guy in the song. There was another ‘fleet’ of UFOs seen by many people in El Paso in January 2020. Those turned out to be flares – not surprising since El Paso is home to Fort Bliss, the huge U.S. army base known for missile and artillery training and testing. It’s most likely that those are what Mario saw, although no one has offered definitive proof.
That shouldn’t stop any aspiring country songwriters from penning lyrics to a tune called “UFOs Over El Paso.” Here’s a start to the music of the Marty Robbins classic …
Over the skies of the town of El Paso UFOs flying, my eyes opened wide Looked at my pickup and boy was I jealous I hoped they’d see me and give me a ride.
13,000 Year Old Black Knight Satellite UFO That NASA Knows About
13,000 Year Old Black Knight Satellite UFO That NASA Knows About
13,000 Year Old Black Knight Satellite UFO That NASA Knows About
Something highly secret is being monitored by NASA, an ancient satellite orbiting earth that’s not ours! First detected by Nikola Tesla and then by astronomers around the world, this strange polar orbiting craft may still be producing signals…
Presented by David Wilks at Awakening UFO & Conspicuous Life Expo, Manchester, UK.
Bright elongated UFO releases orbs filmed by plane passenger
Bright elongated UFO releases orbs filmed by plane passenger
Acommercial airliner is flying at a high altitude when a passenger notices an elongated UFO in the sky on which he decided to film it.
Although the location and date of the sighting is unknown, the first part of the video shows the original footage captured by the passenger. With the second part slowed down and enhanced you will be able to see the orbs form a triangle.
Could it be that this unidentified flying object is a secret craft equipped with the latest cloaking technology tested by the military similar to the infamous tic-tac UFOs?
Farmington reaches 70th anniversary of mass UFO sighting
Farmington reaches 70th anniversary of mass UFO sighting
Mike EasterlingFarmington Daily Times
The front page of The Daily Times on March 18, 1950, chronicles the appearance of several strange objects in the sky above Farmington.
Courtesy image
FARMINGTON — Farmington has reached the 70th anniversary of one of the more sensational events in its history this week, but it's a safe bet to say few residents will pay much attention to that milestone – or even be aware of it.
From March 16 to March 18 in 1950, the city experienced a mass UFO sighting, with some reports indicating "hundreds" of residents saw strange objects in the sky in broad daylight over the three-day period.
Their accounts were reported in breathless fashion not just in this publication — "HUGE 'SAUCER' ARMADA JOLTS FARMINGTON" screamed the banner headline on page 1 of The Daily Times on March 18, 1950 – but in many others as well. Those include The Santa Fe New Mexican ("Farmington 'Invaded' by Saucer Squadron") and the Las Vegas (New Mexico) Daily Optic ("'Space Ships' Cause Sensation").
An account of the incident by The Associated Press was picked up by newspapers across the country.
It's a fantastic story, one that might have seemed destined to leave an indelible impression on UFO history and the sizable community of amateur sleuths and researchers who have made it their duty to investigate and publicize such incidents.
And, yet, the Farmington UFO incident of 1950 largely has been lost to history, especially when it is compared to its in-state counterpart, the famed, alleged crash of an alien spacecraft on a ranch northwest of Roswell in June 1947.
While that incident — sketchy as its details may be — is widely regarded as the most famous UFO-related event in history, having achieved legendary status over the years, the Farmington event that took place a few years later barely registers on anyone's radar.
With seven decades having passed, that remains true, even though Farmington's brush with UFO fame, or infamy, holds up to scrutiny far better than most other incidents, many of them much better known. That's the assessment of an Albuquerque man who studies such phenomena, but who acknowledges the need to take a skeptical approach to most UFO reports.
David Marler
Courtesy photo
David Marler, an independent UFO researcher and author who works in the health care field, has spent years studying the Farmington UFO incident, delivering his findings in the form of a website that serves as the most exhaustive and in-depth report on the event. He labels it "one of the most dramatic and well-documented cases in the history of UFO phenomenon" and said his research has uncovered dozens of similar sightings in the American Southwest, Mexico and Central America during that same time period.
"There was a lot more other than Farmington going on (during March 1950)," he said.
Marler isn't alone in feeling compelled to gain a better understanding of the incident. Many people who take a keen interest in the history of San Juan County share that fascination, and some of them have direct ties to the mass sighting that has become part of their family lore.
Patty Tharp of the San Juan County Historical Society is the niece of one of the witnesses to the incident, Clayton Boddy, who served as the business manager of The Daily Times in 1950. She recalls her late uncle regularly talking about the sighting when she was growing up and said the tale of the UFO armada is well known among the county's older residents.
She remembers her uncle as a man not given to exaggeration, and said he wasn't the kind to call attention to himself by manufacturing outlandish stories. He definitely believed he witnessed something out of the ordinary that day, Tharp said.
"He described the object and said several other people saw it, as well," she said.
A well-documented event
Marler said there are several elements that separate the Farmington UFO incident from so many others, mostly the fact that so many people claim to have witnessed it. The sightings took place between 11 a.m. and noon each day in the skies over San Juan County, not at night in some remote location where they were witnessed by only a single person or a handful of people.
Farmington was a much smaller community in those days — it had a population of between 3,600 and 5,000 people then, according to Marler — but the incident was by no means restricted to just a few sets of eyeballs. Marler also notes the sightings were thoroughly documented and reported in various newspapers at the time, and references to it exist in a great many government documents, as well.
The Daily Times' account chronicles how pedestrians along Main Street could be seen looking skyward and pointing, and the paper reportedly was "deluged" with calls from readers reporting the objects, although the story explains that high winds and a dust storm prevented clear vision.
The account explains how the objects appeared to play tag, traveling at "almost unbelievable speeds." The paper quoted Boddy, a former Army captain, who said he was on Broadway Avenue when he became aware of the phenomenon.
"All of a sudden, I noticed a few moving objects high in the sky," he is reported as having said. "Moments later, there appeared to hundreds of them."
Boddy declined to estimate the size or speed of the objects, but he said they appeared to flying at an altitude of approximately 15,000 feet.
Several other witnesses were quoted in the story, as well, including merchants, housewives, mechanics, insurance agents and Harold F. Thatcher, head of the Farmington unit of the Soil Conservation Service. Thatcher was quoted as emphatically denying a theory that the objects people had seen were bits of cotton floating in the air.
Many of those witnesses reported seeing a single red object that appeared to be leading the others. In his investigation of the incident, Marler would go on to dub that object "Red Leader" — a reference he believed "Star Wars" fans would appreciate.
Also quoted in The Daily Times story was Marlo Webb, then a 26-year-old manager in the parts department at the Perry Smoak Chevrolet Garage on Main Street in downtown Farmington. Webb told the paper he estimated the objects were small, about the size of a dinner plate, and noted the objects moved in an unusual way — "sideways, on edge and at every conceivable angle," he said. "This is what made it easy to determine that they were saucer-shaped."
Webb's testimony lends the event considerable credibility. He went on to become the town's mayor in the 1970s and now, at the age of 96, serves as chairman of the boards at Farmington's Webb Chevrolet, where he still works nearly every afternoon.
Webb seems willing enough to discuss his memory of the incident these days with anyone who asks. But, as a World War II Naval aviator used to seeing unusual things, he seems to regard the event as little more than a curiosity.
"I know how easy it is to be deceived by something in the sky," he said.
In fact, when he was contacted by The Daily Times last week, Webb said he had no idea the 70th anniversary of the incident was approaching and insisted he couldn't remember the last time he had thought about it.
"I can tell you everything I know about it in five seconds because I don't know much," he said.
Webb said he was working at his stepfather's Chevy dealership across the street from the Totah Theater on March 17, 1950, when someone told him they had seen some saucer-shaped objects in the sky. Webb went out to have a look, and when he turned his eyes to the north, he said he could make out 12 to 20 objects. He said they were loosely arranged, certainly not flying in formation, but moving steadily from east to west.
"They were darting around almost like leaves in the sky being blown around," he said.
Webb watched the objects for approximately 10 to 15 minutes, then went back inside to work.
"I couldn't leave my department uncovered," he said.
He said the duration of the event seemed to last much longer than that, however, because he recalled seeing people on Main Street looking into the sky for a long time afterward. He recalled many of those witnesses seemed a lot more taken by the event than he was, discussing what they had seen for years afterward.
"They almost made a career out of repeating what they saw," he said.
Webb wasn't one of those people.
"I never thought about it," he said, when asked what kind of significance he attached to the event. "There are a lot of things happening in the sky we're not aware of. I just won't waste my energy. I can't do anything about it anyway. … I don't have the background to research it and decide what it is."
Webb said he spoke to a military investigator after the incident and told him the same story. He understands some people want to draw other conclusions from what they've heard about the event, but he said he never felt the urge to do that.
"I've never said what I thought it was or made a judgment on it," he said.
A matter of family history
The Daily Times story about the event quoted approximately a dozen witnesses by name, but numerous other accounts have lived on through accounts passed down among family members.
Zang Wood, former president of the San Juan County Historical Society, was a Farmington High School student in the fall of 1950 and said he never saw a thing.
"A lot of kids said they did," he said. "I don't know if it was mass hysteria or what."
But Wood's mother, who was a San Juan County employee, was driving to work with another woman to Aztec from Farmington that day. When they got to Flora Vista, they said an object appeared above them and passed directly over their car.
"I'm not going to call my mom a liar," he said, recalling her as "a pretty level-headed lady. She didn't see things."
Wood said he doesn't buy the flying saucer stories because he didn't see them himself. But he refuses his dismiss his mother's account.
"If she saw something, she saw something," he said.
Another well-known authority on local history, Marilu Waybourn, author of "Homesteads to Boomtown — A Pictorial History of Farmington, New Mexico, and Surrounding Area," said she was in college in Missouri in the spring of 1950 when the incident took place. But she got an earful about it from her friends when she returned to Farmington at the end of the semester.
Waybourn wound up writing about the mass sighting on its 40th anniversary in the March 1990 edition of CrossCurrents, an independent publication that described itself as "A Journal of Life in the Four Corners."
In her story, Waybourn recounts that she heard the story at least a dozen times after she returned from college, and a group of her friends took her to a location that was purported to be a landing site of one of the objects. She described it as "a large circle, about 60 feet in diameter, with the sagebrush flattened out and singed weeds around the edge."
Waybourn also quoted a Farmington resident named Pauline McCauley who said she was a little girl at the time of the sighting. McCauley said she was herding sheep south of town that day in the spring of 1950 when she heard a sound above her, looked up and spied a circular object that looked like an upside-down bowl. McCauley told Waybourn the object had windows, and she could see three people inside wearing striped caps and navy blue uniforms with brass buttons.
Waybourn heard various other stories over the years, many of them from people who didn't want their names used for fear of being ridiculed. She said the incident sparked a great deal of curiosity at the time and remains a topic of discussion for older folks today.
"They took it for what it was," she said. "That it was something they wanted to know more about."
Rio Rancho resident Ron Boddy, the son of witness Clayton Boddy, said his father talked about the incident occasionally over the years, but he never made a big deal of it.
"The last time I really talked to my dad about that was probably 40 years ago," he said, adding that his father, a veteran of World War II and the Korean War, was not easily impressed. "It was unusual to him, but not earth shattering or life changing."
Ron Boddy said his father was still a major in the Army Reserve at the time of the incident, and he recalled his father getting a phone call later from a military official asking him to refrain from doing any more interviews on the subject.
"I remember him saying he was asked not to bring it up or talk about it," Ron Boddy said.
But the younger Boddy regrets not pressing his father for details about the incident now.
"I wish now, looking back, I wish I had talked to my dad about it more," he said, explaining that he never got the sense his father thought the objects he saw were extraterrestrial in nature.
"To him, it was an unidentified flying object, not a spacecraft," Ron Boddy said.
Tharp, Clayton Boddy's niece, also has taken a keen interest in the event. She said the wire services picked up the stories on the incident from the New Mexico papers, and she has collected clippings that mention her uncle from newspapers all over the country. She agreed with her cousin Ron Boddy that her uncle didn't consider the appearance of the strange objects to be an alien visitation.
"He seemed to think it wasn't something from another planet — that it was a military deal," she said.
What to make of all this?
The quality and quantity of the information surrounding the Farmington UFO event has always impressed Marler. He said the accounts of the witnesses who were quoted in The Daily Times were remarkably consistent, and when those people talked about their memories of that day years later, their stories did not change.
"I'm really struck by the sincerity and honesty of the people I interviewed," he said. "They're not saying they saw flying saucers, but they saw something."
That separates them from the principals in other UFO stories he has investigated, many of whom are not nearly as credible.
"It really smacks of realism," he said, adding that the children of the witnesses he has spoken to unfailingly recall their parents as grounded, level-headed people who weren't looking for attention.
He also notes that an account of a UFO sighting occurred that day in Tucumcari, an event reported in the March 18, 1950 edition of the Tucumcari Daily News, and an Air Force captain and two technical sergeants at Kirtland Air Force Base in Albuquerque reported seeing three strange objects in the sky that afternoon.
Marler also has collected newspaper accounts of UFO sightings from that time period not just across New Mexico, but all over Texas and well into Mexico.
His website explains that, after an official investigation, a government official responded to the public curiosity over the event by claiming the objects that people had seen were the remnants of a ruptured, high-altitude U.S. Navy Skyhook balloon. Marler, who has presented several lectures on his findings, flatly dismisses that theory, explaining that it might have been plausible for one day of UFO sightings, but not three. He also points to research that shows there were no documented Skyhook balloon launches around that time frame.
Given the technological limitations or that era, no photos or film footage of the Farmington incident are known to exist. Marler points out that if such an event were to happen now, there likely would be an abundance of such material. But he takes the mass UFO sighting here much more seriously than he does many other events he has investigated and said he is not sure why it hasn't gotten the attention he thinks it deserves.
He said the Farmington incident is well known in UFO researcher stories, but he acknowledged it is not nearly as well known as the Roswell incident or even the alleged crash of a UFO outside Aztec in 1947 — an event commemorated through an annual mountain bike race and etched in local pop culture.
Through his research, Marler said he has tried to eliminate various possible explanations for what happened in Farmington in the spring of 1950.
"When you eliminate those prosaic explanations, it's like checking off a list," he said. "What you're left with is an unknown. But unknown does not equal extraterrestrial."
The question of why the Farmington incident never captured the public's imagination the way Roswell did is a riddle to Marler and some others interviewed for this story. He gives some credence to the idea that Farmington is a very conventional town and perhaps has collectively downplayed the incident for fear of being labeled the same way Roswell has been.
But Tharp doesn't see it that way.
"I would disagree with that," she said. "Roswell is just as conservative as Farmington. There were so few people in 1950 who lived here. … Maybe it just kind of went by the wayside."
Wood agrees that Farmington is a conservative place that likely would bristle at being associated with little green men. But mostly, he thinks folks here have just decided to leave the incident behind.
"It's just like so many other things," he said. "Just like coronavirus — they'll talk about it for a year, then move on. … We have other things to worry about."
Mike Easterling can be reached at 505-564-4610 or measterling@daily-times.com.
For years, amateur astronomers have been waiting for a bright, naked-eye comet to pass by Earth— and finally, such an object may have arrived.
The possible celestial showpiece is known as Comet ATLAS, or C/2019 Y4. When it was discovered on Dec. 28, 2019, it was quite faint, but since then, it has beenbrightening so rapidly that astronomers have high hopes for the spectacle it could put on. But given the tricky nature of comets, skywatchers are also being cautious not to get their hopes up, knowing that the comet may fizzle out.
It's been awhile since a comet gave skywatchers a good show, particularly in the Northern Hemisphere. In March 2013, Comet PanSTARRS was visible right after sunset, albeit low in the western sky. But although it briefly attained first magnitude with a short, bright tail, its low altitude and a bright, twilight sky detracted from what otherwise would have been a much more prominent object. Comet Lovejoy in 2011 and Comet McNaught in 2007 both evolved into stunning objects, but unfortunately, when at their best, were visible only from the Southern Hemisphere.
It has now been nearly a quarter of a century since we have been treated to a spectacularly bright comet: Comet Hale-Bopp passed by during the spring of 1997 and Comet Hyakutake did so exactly one year earlier. Both were truly "great" comets, very bright and fantastically structured; in very dark conditions, Hyakutake's tail appeared to stretch more than halfway across the sky.
So now, after a "comet drought," Comet ATLAS may finally enliven the evening skies of early spring. Or then again, maybe not.
When astronomers first spotted Comet ATLAS in December, it was in Ursa Major and was an exceedingly faint object, close to 20th magnitude. That's about 398,000 times dimmer than stars that are on the threshold of naked-eye visibility. At the time, it was 273 million miles (439 million kilometers) from the sun.
But comets typically brighten as they approach the sun, and at its closest, on May 31, Comet ATLAS will be just 23.5 million miles (37.8 million km) from the sun. Such a prodigious change in solar distance would typically cause a comet to increase in luminosity by almost 11 magnitudes, enough to make ATLAS easily visible in a small telescope or a pair of good binoculars, although quite frankly nothing really to write home about.
Except, since its discovery, the comet has been brightening at an almost unprecedented speed. As of March 17, ATLAS was already magnitude +8.5, over 600 times brighter than forecast. As a result, great expectations are buzzing for this icy lump of cosmic detritus, with hopes it could become a stupendously bright object by the end of May.
Another factor buoying hopes for ATLAS as a potential dazzler is that its orbit is nearly identical to that of the so-called Great Comet of 1844.
Like the 1844 comet, ATLAS follows a trajectory that would require 6,000 years per orbit and take it to beyond the outer reaches of the solar system, roughly 57 billion miles (92 billion km) from the sun. Probably in the far-distant past, a much larger comet occupied this same orbit, but fragmented into several pieces — including the 1844 comet and ATLAS — upon rounding the sun.
But any comparison is dangerous. The 1844 comet was not discovered until shortly after perihelion, so we have no knowledge of its brightness behavior beforehand. But that information is currently all we know about ATLAS, and we won't be able to see the object after it reaches the sun.
And let's not forget some of the comets of the past that seemingly had "glory" written all over them, only to utterly fail to live up to expectations: Comet ISON in 2013, Comet Austin in 1990 and Comet Kohoutek in 1974.
So what's ahead?
John Bortle, who has observed hundreds of comets and is a well-known expert in the field, got his first look at Comet ATLAS through 15 x 70 binoculars on Sunday night (March 15). And he's stumped, he wrote. "For the first time in many years I am left at a bit of a loss as to what honestly worthy advice I can offer would-be observers. I really don't know quite what to make of this object."
The head (or coma) of Comet ATLAS is big, albeit "very faint and ghostly," Bortle said, which doesn't make sense. "If it's a truly significant visitor, it should be considerably sharper in appearance. Instead we see, at best, a quite modestly condensed object with only a pinpoint stellar feature near its heart."
The unpredictability of comets is an old story. Astronomers use special formulas to try to anticipate how bright a comet will get. Unfortunately, comets' individual behavior and characteristics can be as varied as people: No two are alike.
Now, here is the conundrum regarding Comet ATLAS: Until a couple of weeks ago, it was brightening at an astounding rate. That brightening has slowed somewhat, but it is still an impossible rate of brightening to maintain. Were ATLAS to continue to brighten at this rate all the way to its closest approach to the sun at the end of May, it would end up rivaling the planet Venus in brightness!
"We should expect the rate of increase to slow again," Carl Hergenrother, an assiduous comet observer based in Arizona, said. "This is where it gets tricky for predicting just how bright it will get." Right now, no one can predict how long it will continue to quickly brighten and how dramatically that brightening will slow.
The only thing left to do is to track Comet ATLAS in the days and weeks ahead. Fortunately, its path in March and April will be very favorable for Northern Hemisphere observers, as it will be circumpolar and always remain above the horizon. As darkness falls, it will be positioned more than halfway up in the north-northwest sky. Right now, the comet is in western Ursa Major, and it will shift into the boundaries of Camelopardalis the Giraffe — a rather dim, shapeless star pattern — by March 29. There it will stay, right on through the month of April.
As to how bright Comet ATLAS will get, that's anybody's guess. It might become faintly visible to the naked eye under dark sky conditions by mid- or late April. By mid-May, when it disappears into the bright evening twilight, perhaps it will have brightened to second magnitude — about as bright as Polaris, the North Star.
Whether ATLAS continues to overperform and shines even brighter, develops a significant tail or suddenly stops brightening altogether and remains very faint and ghostly are all unknown right now. We'll just have to wait and see.
"It's going to be fun the next few weeks watching Comet ATLAS develop (and provide a nice distraction from the current state of the world), Hergenrother wrote. "Here's to good health and clear skies!"
The Curiosity rover has found organic molecules called thiophenes, which, on Earth, are associated with biological systems. Are they evidence for once-living microbes on Mars?
This is Mars, the planet next door, as seen through the robot eyes of the Curiosity rover. This is where the Curiosity rover found ancient organic molecules in Martian mudstones.
The search for evidence of life on Mars, past or present, just took an interesting new twist. Researchers studying the data sent back by NASA’s Curiosity rover have found evidence for organic molecules called thiophenes, which, on Earth at least, are primarily a result of biological processes. The researchers are not claiming proof of life, but the discovery is certainly intriguing. The finding is being called “consistent with the presence of early life on Mars.”
The findings were announced by researchers from Washington State University, and the peer-reviewedpaper was published in the journal Astrobiology on February 24, 2020.
On Earth, thiophenes are often found in coal, crude oil, kerogen and even a species of mushrooms called white truffles. They can also be found in stromatolites and microfossils. On Mars, they were found by Curiosity, along with other organics, in an ancient mudstone formation called the Murray Formation.
The new paper explores some of the ways that thiophenes could be created on Mars, either biologically or abiotically (without life). As astrobiologist Dirk Schulze-Makuch, one of the two authors, explained in a statement:
We identified several biological pathways for thiophenes that seem more likely than chemical ones, but we still need proof. If you find thiophenes on Earth, then you would think they are biological, but on Mars, of course, the bar to prove that has to be quite a bit higher.
A slab of mudstone called Old Soaker in the Murray Formation. Curiosity took these images on December 31, 2016. The mudstone shows what are thought to be mud cracks from when the region was once wet and then dried up a few billion years ago.
Thiophenes are essential to biology, containing four carbon atoms and one sulphur atom in a ring. They can, however, occur without any connection to life. On Mars, this could be from meteor impacts or perhaps thermochemical sulphate reduction (TSR), where a set of compounds is heated to 248 degrees Fahrenheit (120 degrees Celsius) or more. This could conceivably have happened during volcanic activity on early Mars.
There are several ways that thiophenes can be formed biologically, however, which is what makes them of such interest to scientists looking for evidence of Martian life. Bacteria can create a sulphate reduction process – biological sulphate reduction (BSR) – that results in thiophenes. The thiophenes themselves can also be broken down by bacteria in several ways.
One interesting aspect of the Martian thiophenes is that the geological processes that can create them require the sulphur to be nucleophilic, where sulphur atoms donate electrons to form a bond with their reaction partner. But most of the sulphur known to exist on Mars is non-nucleophilic. TSR could reduce them to nucleophilic sulphides, but so could BSR.
One problem is that while Curiosity can detect molecules such as thiophenes, it is limited in how much detailed analysis it can do. The onboard lab it uses – the Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM) instrument – primarily breaks down large molecules into smaller pieces using heat, although some additional testing can be done using wet chemistry.
So how can scientists tell if these thiophenes are biological or non-biological in origin?
It isn’t easy with the tools that Curiosity has, so an answer will probably have to wait for a follow-up mission such as NASA’s Perseverance rover, set to launch this July, or Europe’s Rosalind Franklin rover, also scheduled to launch in July or August 2020.
Self-portrait of Curiosity taken on February 3, 2013.
Rosalind Franklin, in particular, will use the Mars Organic Molecule Analyzer (MOMA) to analyze these kinds of molecules with additional non-destructive methods.
One big clue can come from the carbon and sulphur isotopes of the molecules. Lighter variations of isotopes – with fewer neutrons – are preferred by living organisms. Schulze-Makuch said:
Organisms are “lazy.” They would rather use the light isotope variations of the element because it costs them less energy.
Interestingly, as noted in an Air & Space article by Schulze-Makuch, the isotopic signature of sulphur-containing sediments found by Curiosity is very similar to that found in rocks from the Haughton impact crater in Nunavut, Canada … which are thought to result from BSR.
If one of the rovers found these or similar molecules with the lighter isotopes, that would be very suggestive of a biological origin, although perhaps still not proof. Additional analysis would still be needed to definitively determine whether the molecules were associated with once-living microbes. Better yet, of course, would be finding actual microfossils of ancient microbes.
Until then, we have tantalizing clues and hints at possible former life, but more research is needed. A biological explanation does seem at least plausible when other factors are taken into account, including now well-established evidence that conditions on Mars were once much more habitable on the surface then they are now. In Gale crater, the Curiosity rover has found that there used to be lakes and streams; it even found riverbed gravel left over from an ancient stream that used to empty into the crater lake.
Dirk Schulze-Makuch at Washington State University.
The rover also found a variety of organic compounds in rocks, not just the thiophenes, and confirmed that both methane and oxygen increase and decrease on a seasonal cycle in that area. This is still not proof of life, but taken all together, these lines of evidence may be starting to paint an intriguing picture. As Schulze-Makuch noted:
As Carl Sagan said ‘extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.’ I think the proof will really require that we actually send people there, and an astronaut looks through a microscope and sees a moving microbe.
Bottom line: The Curiosity rover has found organic molecules called thiophenes, which may be evidence for ancient life on Mars.
A computational approach inspired by the growth patterns of a bright yellow slime mold has enabled a team of astronomers and computer scientists at UC Santa Cruz to trace the filaments of the cosmic web that connects galaxies throughout the universe.
Their results, published March 10 in Astrophysical Journal Letters, provide the first conclusive association between the diffuse gas in the space between galaxies and the large-scale structure of the cosmic web predicted by cosmological theory.
According to the prevailing theory, as the universe evolved after the big bang, matter became distributed in a web-like network of interconnected filaments separated by huge voids. Luminous galaxies full of stars and planets formed at the intersections and densest regions of the filaments where matter is most concentrated. The filaments of diffuse hydrogen gas extending between the galaxies are largely invisible, although astronomers have managed to glimpse parts of them.
None of which seems to have anything to do with a lowly slime mold called Physarum polycephalum, typically found growing on decaying logs and leaf litter on the forest floor and sometimes forming spongy yellow masses on lawns. But Physarum has a long history of surprising scientists with its ability to create optimal distribution networks and solve computationally difficult spatial organization problems. In one famous experiment, a slime mold replicated the layout of Japan’s rail system by connecting food sources arranged to represent the cities around Tokyo.
This intricate filamentary network (above) is a reconstruction of the cosmic web created by feeding data on the locations and masses of 37,000 galaxies into an algorithm based on the growth patterns of a slime mold. The images below are expanded views of small regions, showing the underlying galaxies on the left and, on the right, the filaments of the cosmic web superimposed on the galaxies. See larger image here.
(Image credit: Burchett et al., ApJL, 2020)
Slime mold algorithm
Joe Burchett, a postdoctoral researcher in astronomy and astrophysics at UC Santa Cruz, had been looking for a way to visualize the cosmic web on a large scale, but he was skeptical when Oskar Elek, a postdoctoral researcher in computational media, suggested using a Physarum-based algorithm. After all, completely different forces shape the cosmic web and the growth of a slime mold.
But Elek, who has always been fascinated by patterns in nature, had been impressed by the Physarum “biofabrications” of Berlin-based artist Sage Jenson. Starting with the 2-dimensional Physarum model Jenson used (originally developed in 2010 by Jeff Jones), Elek and a friend (programmer Jan Ivanecky) extended it to three dimensions and made additional modifications to create a new algorithm they called the Monte Carlo Physarum Machine.
Burchett gave Elek a dataset of 37,000 galaxies from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS), and when they applied the new algorithm to it, the result was a pretty convincing representation of the cosmic web.
“That was kind of a Eureka moment, and I became convinced that the slime mold model was the way forward for us,” Burchett said. “It’s somewhat coincidental that it works, but not entirely. A slime mold creates an optimized transport network, finding the most efficient pathways to connect food sources. In the cosmic web, the growth of structure produces networks that are also, in a sense, optimal. The underlying processes are different, but they produce mathematical structures that are analogous.”
Elek also noted that “the model we developed is several layers of abstraction away from its original inspiration.”
Of course, a strong visual resemblance of the model results to the expected structure of the cosmic web doesn’t prove anything. The researchers performed a variety of tests to validate the model as they continued to refine it.
The slime mold Physarum polycephalum develops a network of interconnected tubes as it explores the environment for food. (Photo credit: Frankenstoen/CC BY)
Dark matter
Until now, the best representations of the cosmic web have emerged from computer simulations of the evolution of structure in the universe, showing the distribution of dark matter on large scales, including the massive dark matter halos in which galaxies form and the filaments that connect them. Dark matter is invisible, but it makes up about 85 percent of the matter in the universe, and gravity causes ordinary matter to follow the distribution of dark matter.
Burchett’s team used data from the Bolshoi-Planck cosmological simulation—developed by Joel Primack, professor emeritus of physics at UC Santa Cruz, and others—to test the Monte Carlo Physarum Machine. After extracting a catalog of dark matter halos from the simulation, they ran the algorithm to reconstruct the web of filaments connecting them. When they compared the outcome of the algorithm to the original simulation, they found a tight correlation. The slime mold model essentially replicated the web of filaments in the dark matter simulation, and the researchers were able to use the simulation to fine-tune the parameters of their model.
“Starting with 450,000 dark matter halos, we can get an almost perfect fit to the density fields in the cosmological simulation,” Elek said.
Burchett also performed what he called a “sanity check,” comparing the observed properties of the SDSS galaxies with the gas densities in the intergalactic medium predicted by the slime mold model. Star formation activity in a galaxy should correlate with the density of its galactic environment, and Burchett was relieved to see the expected correlations.
Now the team had a predicted structure for the cosmic web connecting the 37,000 SDSS galaxies, which they could test against astronomical observations. For this, they used data from the Hubble Space Telescope’s Cosmic Origins Spectrograph. Intergalactic gas leaves a distinctive absorption signature in the spectrum of light that passes through it, and the sight-lines of hundreds of distant quasars pierce the volume of space occupied by the SDSS galaxies.
“We knew where the filaments of the cosmic web should be thanks to the slime mold, so we could go to the archived Hubble spectra for the quasars that probe that space and look for the signatures of the gas,” Burchett explained. “Wherever we saw a filament in our model, the Hubble spectra showed a gas signal, and the signal got stronger toward the middle of filaments where the gas should be denser.”
In the densest regions, however, the signal dropped off. This too matched expectations, he said, because heating of the gas in those regions ionizes the hydrogen, stripping off electrons and eliminating the absorption signature.
“For the first time now, we can quantify the density of the intergalactic medium from the remote outskirts of cosmic web filaments to the hot, dense interiors of galaxy clusters,” Burchett said. “These results not only confirm the structure of the cosmic web predicted by cosmological models, they also give us a way to improve our understanding of galaxy evolution by connecting it with the gas reservoirs out of which galaxies form.”
Creative coding
Burchett and Elek met through coauthor Angus Forbes, an associate professor of computational media and director of the UCSC Creative Coding lab in the Baskin School of Engineering. Burchett and Forbes had begun collaborating after meeting at an open mic night for musicians in Santa Cruz, focusing initially on a data visualization app, which they published last year.
Forbes also introduced Elek to the work of Sage Jenson, not because he thought it would apply to Burchett’s cosmic web project, but because “he knew I was a nature pattern freak,” Elek said.
Coauthor J. Xavier Prochaska, a professor of astronomy and astrophysics at UCSC who has done pioneering work using quasars to probe the structure of the intergalactic medium, said, “This creative technique and its unanticipated success highlight the value of interdisciplinary collaborations, where completely different perspectives and expertise are brought to bear on scientific problems.”
Forbes’ Creative Coding lab combines approaches from media arts, design, and computer science. “I think there can be real opportunities when you integrate the arts into scientific research,” Forbes said. “Creative approaches to modeling and visualizing data can lead to new perspectives that help us make sense of complex systems.”
In addition to Burchett, Elek, Prochaska, and Forbes, the coauthors include Nicolas Tejos at the Pontifical Catholic University of Valparaiso, Chile; Todd Tripp at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst; and Rongmon Bordoloi at North Carolina State University. This work was supported by NASA.
How slime mold helped scientists map out the cosmic web
How slime mold helped scientists map out the cosmic web
Astronomers have struggled to visualize the giant tendrils of matter that connect galaxies
The intricate patterns of this yellow slime mold can help tease out the structure of the vast strings of matter that connect galaxies in the universe’s cosmic web.
Creeping tendrils of slime seem to mirror the structure of the universe’s enormous filaments. That superficial similarity, in an organism called a slime mold, helped scientists map out the cosmic web, the vast threads of matter that connect galaxies.
Made up of gas and the unidentified substance called dark matter, the cosmic web began forming early in the universe’s history, as matter clumped together due to gravity. Computer simulations of that formation suggest that a tangled tatting should link galaxies, but the web is so ethereal that scientistsstruggle to image it directly (SN: 10/3/19).
The slime mold Physarum polycephalum develops a network of interconnected tubes as it explores the environment for food. (Photo credit: Frankenstoen/CC BY)
Enter the slime mold Physarum polycephalum, a single-celled organism that appears as a slimy yellowish lace, often seen bedazzling rotting tree trunks. Normally, a slime mold forms connections between sources of food. Its patterns have striking similarity to human-made networks, such as railroads (SN: 1/21/10).
Scientists produced this map of the universe’s cosmic web based on locations and masses of known galaxies and the lacy patterns of slime mold.J. BURCHETT ET AL/ASTROPHYSICAL JOURNAL LETTERS 2020
Astronomer Joseph Burchett and computer scientist Oskar Elek, both of the University of California, Santa Cruz, and colleagues adapted a computer method for producing slime mold–like patterns so that, instead of food sources, it could connect more than 37,000 known galaxies sprinkled throughout space. Surprisingly, that technique reproduced the kinds of structures seen in computer simulations of the cosmic web, scientists report March 10 in the Astrophysical Journal Letters.
The researchers compared their map with measurements that reveal the density of gas at certain points in the web. Brilliant sources of light called quasars shine through this network, which absorbs some of their light. By studying the amount of absorption, the team found that regions that the slime mold technique predicted should be somewhat denser also had more hydrogen gas.
New telescopes could help spot ‘photon ring’ of the first black hole ever imaged
New telescopes could help spot ‘photon ring’ of the first black hole ever imaged
Detecting the thin rings would reaffirm Einstein’s theory of gravity
A computer simulation of the black hole at the center of the galaxy M87 shows two rings: a thick orange line and a pixel-thin bright band at the inner edge of that thick line. New telescopes could help identify the presence of such rings, which were hidden in the previous black hole image.
Faint rings of light surrounding enormous black holes could be spotted with the help of a future generation of telescopes in space.
The doughnut-shaped glow spotted in the first image of a black hole, released in April 2019 by the Event Horizon Telescope collaboration (SN: 4/10/19), is more complex than the worldwide network of radio telescopes could discern. The black hole’s gravity is so intense that some particles of light, called photons, can circle the black hole partway — or once, twice or multiple times — before escaping to be picked up by telescopes. Those orbiting photons produce a “photon ring,” made up of a series of subrings — circles of light that appear successively thinner and harder for telescopes to pick out.
“It’s sort of like a hall of mirrors, where we’re getting an infinite series of images,” says astrophysicist Michael Johnson of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass.
Now, Johnson and colleagues calculate that, with the help of new telescopes in space, the photon subrings theoretically could be observed around the supermassive black hole at the center of the galaxy M87, the subject of that first black hole snapshot.
The Event Horizon Telescope, or EHT, combines the powers of telescopes across the world, via a technique called very long baseline interferometry, so that they operate like one, larger telescope (SN: 4/10/19). But to tease out more details, such as black hole subrings, researchers would need to add telescopes separated by even larger distances.
A radio telescope orbiting Earth could capture the first subring, the team reports March 18 in Science Advances. But observing the second subring would require an even more distant telescope — on the moon. The third subring could be detected with a telescope even farther out, 1.5 million kilometers from Earth.
Scientists previously have proposed such telescopes, but the plans haven’t yet gotten off the ground. Johnson says that the new study provides new motivation for adding a space-based telescope to the EHT’s network.
Although the EHT wouldn’t directly photograph the subrings, it could detect their existence. That detection would reaffirm Einstein’s theory of gravity, the general theory of relativity, which predicts the rings’ existence. It also could allow for better measurements of the black hole’s mass and how fast it is spinning.
The idea “will be challenging, but it’s something to look forward to,” says astrophysicist Avi Loeb at Harvard University, who was not involved with the research. “It is an exciting goal for the next generation.”
An eye-opening event in the lives of most children occurs the day one of their precious toys or perhaps the television or an electronic device stops working and they bring it to their father to fix. Watching anxiously for him to carefully open it, do something inside, close it up and turn it on, a more likely scenario is that Dad holds it in one hand, takes the other and smacks it hard. If that doesn’t work, he may bash it against the table or hit it with something harder than his and as you look on in horror.
Of course, horror turns to admiration when the thing begins working again as Dad brags that it’s not how hard you hit it, it’s knowing WHERE to hit it. Well, NASA is obviously run by a few dads because that’s exactly what happened recently when a heat probe nicknamed “the Mole” didn’t dig a hole as its name suggests it should, so the Insight received instructions to … get ready … whack a Mole! Did it work?
NASA training lab?
The “Mole,” part of the Heat Flow and Physical Properties Package, is a 16-inch-long (40 cm) spike connected to a hammering mechanism that’s supposed to dig up to 16 feet (5 meters) into the Martian surface. Unfortunately, the soil in the area where InSight is parked is denser and rockier than expected, and the mole has twice popped back out of its hole before reaching 16 feet. This has been going on for a year and, after all other suggestions for fixing the problem failed, the NASA team decided to tell InSight to whack the mole with the shovel it’s supposed to use to scoop the dirt excavated by said mole. The whack was gentle – almost a push – so as not to damage the cover on the mole. Just like a dad, the team held its breath as it tried to activate the expensive excavation device again.
NASA InSight @NASAInSight Mar 13 A bit of good news from #Mars: our new approach of using the robotic arm to push the mole appears to be working! The teams @NASAJPL/@DLR_en are excited to see the images and plan to continue this approach over the next few weeks. 💪 #SaveTheMole
The mole was saved! The gentle tap worked and the mole is back to inserting the probe in order to measure heat under the Martian surface and help determine how the planet was formed.
Ready for a manned Mars mission
While NASA engineers are excited about whacking the mole back into operation, it’s also a bit depressing when you realize the project is a true metaphor for where our space program is today – we really are just barely scratching the surface of planetary exploration and are a long way from putting footprints on the ground and real probes deep into the planet.
When compared to the technology dreamed up in movies, TV series and sci-fi novels, we really are just at the Whack-a-Mole stage.
Now, go call your dad and thank him for preparing you for a career with NASA.
Incredible Video Of An Alien Craft Buzzing The Space X Rocket
Incredible Video Of An Alien Craft Buzzing The Space X Rocket
DECEMBER 22, 2019 …….VANDENBERG AIR FORCE BASE , CALIFORNIA
Elon Musk‘s plan to deliver universal internet access via a network of low Earth orbit satellites has left some stargazers confused, after the first batch prompted hundreds of UFO reports.
The size of the satellites also mean it is unlikely that people looking up at the night sky will be able to see them with their naked eye.
Reports from some astronomers, however, suggest the solar panels on the Starlink satellites create a flare, causing them to appear brighter than any star that they are passing in front of.
Mr Musk, the CEO of the space firm, said the first 60 satellites deployed successfully but will not be operational until another 800 have been launched.
Below is a photo of the alien craft, it was extracted from the video
NASA Releases A Picture Of The Curiosity Rover With A Mysterious Shadow
NASA Releases A Picture Of The Curiosity Rover With A Mysterious Shadow
In September 2012, Nasa released a pictureriosity, a rover that was exploring Mars. A regular photo of the rover’s exploration containing a mysterious shadow intrigued the internet and raised questions.
On Apollo 15, crewmembers could not see that they were descending onto the rim of a broad crater. After shutting off the engine, the lunar module rocked backward about 11 degrees into the crater until the rear footpad contacted the ground. The front footpad was then off the ground, bearing no weight. This 11-degree tilt was near the design limits for the lunar module.
Study teams have gone back to look at Apollo lunar landing data to appraise how much moon terrain was ejected into space.
Not only did Apollo landing crews get fogged out by the blown dust, making touchdowns troublesome, but substantial amounts of rock and debris were also sent flying during the rocket-powered landings.
NASA aims to put astronauts on the moon again by 2024, so what to do about the dust problem? Scientists are trying to devise the workarounds that appear needed if traveling to the moon is to become routine.
First, there are several historical accounts concerning safe touchdowns of humans on the moon, starting with the very first Apollo lunar landing, in July 1969. As Neil Armstrong, commander of the Eagle lunar module, reflected in a technical debrief, "at something less than 100 feet, we were beginning to get a transparent sheet of moving dust that obscured visibility a bit. As we got lower, the visibility continued to decrease."
Similarly, on Apollo 12, Pete Conrad ran into so much dust that he was blinded as he made his final descent to the surface. He later recounted that "the dust went as far as I could see in any direction and completely obliterated craters and anything else … I couldn't tell what was underneath me. I knew I was in a generally good area and I was just going to have to bite the bullet and land, because I couldn't tell whether there was a crater down there or not."
Several follow-on Apollo landing commanders noted similar concerns.
Dust being displaced by exhaust from the Apollo 15 mission's lunar lander, Falcon. (Image credit: NASA)
Making for a bad day
NASA hopes to apply the lessons from the Apollo era to future lunar missions.
"To paraphrase an old bromide, those who forget the past are doomed to land like it," said Chirold Epp, project manager for the Autonomous Landing and Hazard Avoidance Technology at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston.
"Having looked at the Apollo landings, I have come to two conclusions: One, those crews did a great job. Two, data from several of the landings support the idea that we must give future moon landers more information to increase the probability of mission success," Epp added.
Epp said that if a lunar module came to rest at an angle beyond 12 degrees, the astronauts might not be able to launch themselves off the surface. "So, if a crew landed on a hill or with a footpad or two on a large rock or in a crater, that could make for a bad day," he said.
During the Apollo 12 mission, astronaut Pete Conrad encountered so much dust that his final descent to the surface was done in the blind, landing on the rim of a crater. (Image credit: NASA)
Physics of rocket exhaust
"The moon is a low-gravity and airless body, which makes the rocket plume effects very different than what we experience on Earth," said Philip Metzger, a planetary scientist at the Florida Space Institute at the University of Central Florida (UCF) in Orlando.
"On Earth, rocks travel the farthest, while dust is stopped just a short distance away by the drag of Earth's atmosphere," Metzger told Space.com. "On the moon, it is the exact opposite, with the dust going the fastest and farthest. The dust can cause severe damage to the surfaces of materials if we land too close to other hardware on or orbiting the moon."
Lunar lander engine exhaust blows dust, soil, gravel and rocks at high velocity and will damage surrounding hardware — such as lunar outposts, mining operations or historic sites — unless the ejecta are properly mitigated, Metzger said.
Over the past 20 years, researchers have developed a consistent picture of the physics of rocket exhaust blowing lunar soil, "but significant gaps exist," Metzger said. "No currently available modeling method can fully predict the effects. However, the basics are understood well enough to begin designing countermeasures."
Apollo 14 close call: The mission's landing craft experienced a 7-degree tilt. (Image credit: NASA)
Wanted: launching pads
Metzger and other team members at UCF's Center for Lunar and Asteroid Surface Science (CLASS) say landing pads are needed for missions that repeatedly visit a lunar outpost.
For lunar landings, CLASS research has shown that the sandblasting that will occur at a lunar outpost is unacceptable, as it will excessively degrade optics, solar cells, thermal control surfaces and moving joints on mechanisms. Impacts of blowing rocks could also break hardware.
Florida Space Institute rsearchers are investigating methods to mitigate the effects of these blasts, such as sintering lunar regolith. They're also looking at robotics for bulldozing and building berms, as well as considering the use of gravel or pavers. And they're organizing a series of robotics competitions for landing pad construction technologies in conjunction with machine learning firms to further advance the necessary robotics capabilities.
"NASA takes the potential ejecta issues associated with rocket engine plume surface interaction very seriously," said Robert Mueller, senior technologist and principal investigator in the Exploration Systems and Development Office at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
That's for good reason, Mueller said; future human landers will have more issues with plume effects than Apollo landers because of higher engine thrust. NASA researchers are developing concepts for lunar landing and launchpads for crewed landers as well.
The space agency is currently taking steps to evaluate the potential effects in a lunar vacuum environment, Mueller told Space.com, with new computer modeling codes that have been under development through NASA's Small Business Innovation Research and Small Business Technology Transfer programs.
Researchers are scoping out the need for landing pads for missions that repeatedly visit a lunar outpost. (Image credit: Rob Mueller, Swamp Works, NASA, KSC)
Caught on camera
There has not been any concerted effort to mitigate the lunar dust problem, ever, said Michelle Munk, entry, descent and landing system capability lead at NASA's Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia. "We have a 'production' code to predict what will happen — but it is not validated with data, so we really don't know how good the predictions are."
Munk said it is especially challenging to run a realistic ground test for the lunar environment, which would provide good "truth" data. NASA's Space Technology Mission Directorate recently started a project that has both ground-testing and computational-modeling components.
Additionally, Munk is the principal investigator for four stereo cameras that will be carried on board Intuitive Machines' Nova-C lunar lander, which is scheduled to launch in 2021 on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket under NASA's Commercial Lunar Payload Services program. The payload is called Stereo Cameras for Lunar Plume-Surface Studies (SCALPSS).
SCALPSS is being developed at NASA Langley and leverages camera technology used on the agency's Mars 2020 rover Perseverance, Munk said. The camera cluster will capture video and still-image data of the lander's plume as the plume starts to impact the lunar surface until after engine shutoff, which is critical for future lunar and Mars vehicle designs, she said.
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.
We may not have been ready to fight the coronavirus invasion, but half of Great Britain is ready to take up arms and do battle with an extraterrestrial invasion – even though most don’t think we will win. Why are the British so afraid of attacks from outer space? Do ETs want their tea? Are they mad about Harry and Megan leaving too?
“To mark FOX tv’s new series, ‘War of the Worlds’, the network commissioned the polling company OnePoll to do a research study of 2,000 adults in the UK. The results show that half of Britons believe in the existence of extraterrestrial life and even expect an alien visitation before the year 2068. Londoners, the Welsh and those in the south west of England were the biggest believers in extraterrestrial life.”
Ah, War of the Worlds … the 1897 H.G. Wells sci-fi classic that continues to influence our thinking and stoke our fears over 100 years later. It’s still pertinent today, (spoiler alert!) especially with the demise of the Martian invaders due to a pathogen infection. Exonews covers the latest version of the novel – a new TV series – and a recent survey taken by OnePoll which found that 46% of those polled said they would join a resistance force to fight against malevolent ETs no matter where they came from. However, only 23% think they would be standing over the bodies of dead aliens at the end and over half thought it would be the end of humanity. Even worse, they believe they’d get little help from their (or any other) government.
Would you join the resistance?
“The study also found nearly three quarters of Brits believe that world governments know more about alien life than they’re letting on and are hiding information from the public. If these world leaders were aware of an impending attack, 58% think they would keep information secret to avoid panic. 67% polled think that our leaders need a plan for first contact with other life forms.”
Panic? Governments hiding information? The survey also found that 71% of those polled think that Earth has already been visited by ETs, either on scientific missions or to steal our natural resources. Where are the British getting these wild ideas? Someone who knows from the inside is Nick Pope, who was interviewed by The Sun for his views on the survey. The former member of the Ministry of Defence said, as he has many times before, that he has firsthand knowledge of authorities hiding information about UFOs. Pope also agrees with his fellow Brits that aliens aren’t our greatest threat. Is it the coronavirus?
“In the event of an alien invasion, a whopping 71% of Brits expected more danger still from their fellow humans.”
Yep. When we meet the enemy, he will be us. In the meantime, Pope doesn’t think governments are doing enough to prepare for an invasion, while 17% of those polled think we’ll see benevolent ETs sent to help us from killing ourselves with guns or greenhouse gases.
The last man?
What would you do if ETs invaded Earth? Would you go all gung-ho Will-Smith-Independence-Day on them … even if you didn’t have a fighter jet? Would you loot the possessions of the dead like The Narrator in the original “War of the World” novel, then go into hiding, hoping the coronavirus or something worse kills them before they or the virus kills us? Would you wait for government help? Would you not? Would you join an underground resistance like brave citizens around the world have in previous invasions, fighting even when they knew they couldn’t win?
GROOT OBJECT ONTDEKT OP DE MAAN VAN MARS ( VIDEO )
GROOT OBJECT ONTDEKT OP DE MAAN VAN MARS ( VIDEO )
Eén van de meest mysterieuze zaken in de ruimte is de maan Phobos die zijn rondjes rondom de planeet Mars draait. Met een lengte van 11 kilometer is het een kleine maan, hol van binnen en volgens de Europese ruimtevaartorganisatie ESA geen natuurlijk object.
Voor wie nog nooit gehoord heeft van de Mars maan Phobos, hierna een klein stukje uit een eerder artikel:
Zelfs als je geen wetenschapper bent en je bestudeert bovenstaande foto dan kom je als snel tot de conclusie dat het meer lijkt op een soort metalen gedeukte en geblutste carrosserie van een ruimteschip of station dan op een planeet.
Dan is er nog een ander raadsel betreffende Phobos. Toen de Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) de piepkleine maan van Mars in beeld bracht en foto’s naar de aarde stuurde, stonden op een gegeven moment alle wetenschappers te dansen van opwinding. Want, daar aan de oppervlakte van Phobos stond onmiskenbaar een uitsteeksel.
Het werd al snel een monoliet genoemd, een uitstekend stuk rots, maar zelfs kinderen in groep 3 geloven al niet meer dat er zomaar uit het niets een vierkant stuk rots de lucht in steekt.
De astrofysicusDr. Iosif Samuilovich Shklovsky was de eerste die de bewegingen van de omloopbaan van deze Mars satelliet berekende. Hij kwam tot de conclusie dat deze kunstmatig en hol is en dat het in feite niets anders is dan een gigantisch ruimteschip is.
De Russische astronoom Dr. Cherman Struve bracht maanden door met het uiterst nauwkeurig berekenen van de omloopban van de beide manen van Mars (Phobos en Deimos) aan het begin van de twintigste eeuw. Toen Shklovsky de aantekeningen van hem bestudeerde, kwam hij tot de conclusie dat naarmate de jaren en de decennia waren verstreken, de snelheid en de positie van de omloopbaan van Phobos niet meer dezelfde was als die zoals die door Struve was berekend.
Na een langdurige studie van de diverse invloeden zoals aantrekkingskracht en zwaartekracht kwam Shklovsky tot de conclusie dat er geen natuurlijke oorzaak was die het vreemde gedrag van beide manen kon verklaren en dan in het bijzonder het bizarre gedrag van Phobos. Beide manen waren kunstmatig; iets of iemand heeft ze gebouwd.
Tijdens een interview legde Shklovsky het volgende uit: “er is maar één manier waarop de voorwaarden voor de samenhang, de constante vorm en de buitengewone kleine dichtheid van Phobos kan worden verklaard. We moeten aannemen dat het een hol leeg lichaam is wat lijkt op een leeg blik”.
Decennia lang werd het werk van Shklovsky door de gevestigde wetenschap volkomen genegeerd, totdat ESA de vreemde kleine maan aan een nader onderzoek onderwierp. Het resultaat hiervan verscheen in 2010 in het "peer reviewed” Geophysical Research Letters en geeft aan dat Phobos niet datgene is wat astronomen en astrofysici generaties lang hebben geloofd, een asteroïde die gevangen is in een baan om Mars.
“Wij rapporteren onafhankelijke resultaten van twee subgroepen van het Mars Express Radio Team (MaRS) die los van elkaar de gegevens hebben geanalyseerd van de “Mars Express (MEX) radio tracking” met het doel om consequent de zwaartekrachtsaantrekking van de maan Phobos op het MEX ruimteschip te analyseren en zodoende de massa van Phobos vast te kunnen stellen. Wij concluderen dat de binnenkant grote lege ruimtes bevat. Wanneer wij de gegevens toepassen op de verschillende hypothesen met betrekking tot de oorsprong van Phobos, dan zijn de resultaten niet in overeenstemming met het gegeven dat het hier om een “gevangen” asteroïde zou gaan”.
Dit is precies hetzelfde als wat Dr. Shklovsky in de jaren zestig al concludeerde. Phobos werd kunstmatig gebouwd en in een omloopbaan om Mars gebracht. Maar waarom en door wie?
Hij begint met het verhaal van voormalig astronaut Buzz Aldrin die een jaar of zeven geleden heeft verklaard dat er zich op de maan Phobos een monoliet bevindt. Een kunstmatig gemaakte constructie van rotsen en dergelijke.
Hij zei toen verder, dat wanneer mensen die constructie ontdekken ze zich dan zullen afvragen wie die constructie daar heeft gebouwd. Want, wanneer eenmaal duidelijk is dat er sprake is van een kunstmatige constructie, dan is dat automatisch bewijs van buitenaards leven, want het is niet gevormd door de natuur, maar door een kustmatige intelligentie.
Tot nu toe ging men er van uit dat de constructie waar Aldrin op doelde het vreemde uitsteeksel is dat in bovenstaande foto te zien is, maar Scott zegt dat dit niet het geval is, maar dat het de ontdekking is die hij heeft gedaan op Phobos.
Wat hij heeft ontdekt is te vinden op een foto die niet door NASA is gemaakt, maar door de ESA.
Een groot object helemaal aan de bovenkant van de maan met een lengte van ongeveer 2,2 kilometer. Als je bedenkt dat de complete maan 11 kilometer lang is dan krijg je een idee van de grootte.
Het heeft wel wat weg van een soort ruimteschip en wanneer je ervan uit gaat dat Phobos een soort ISS is (International Space Station), dan zou dit schip daar aangemeerd kunnen liggen, net zoals onze ruimteschepen dat doen bij het ISS.
Dan blijft natuurlijk de vraag open wat er is gebeurd waardoor dit schip daar ogenschijnlijk verlaten is achtergelaten.
Heeft Scott daadwerkelijk een bijzondere ontdekking gedaan op Phobos? Kijk naar de volgende beelden en oordeel zelf.
Pleiadians vs. Reptilian Underground War! Researcher Says 800,000 Years Ago There Was an Alien War on Our Planet
Pleiadians vs. Reptilian Underground War! Researcher Says 800,000 Years Ago There Was an Alien War on Our Planet
COAST TO COAST AM –
Scholar of ancient cultures, Bruce Fenton, detailed evidence which he believes shows that ancient aliens visited this world almost 800,000 years ago, creating a race of hybrids by genetically altering primitive hominids. Around this time, a spaceship of 50,000 Pleiadian colonists was “crystallized” by an attacking group of Reptilians living underground, he suggested, and the remnants of the liquefied ship rained down on Earth in the form of anomalous spheres, which have been discovered in South Australia.
A media phenomenon, Coast to Coast AM deals with UFOs, strange occurrences, life after death, and other unexplained (and often inexplicable) phenomena.
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SpaceX Falcon 9 Mission Catches a UFO Live
SpaceX Falcon 9 Mission Catches a UFO Live
On March 18, 2020 Falcon 9 lifted off from Launch Complex 39A (LC-39A) at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, which was SpaceX sixth launch of Starlink satellites.
At the moment the first stage coming back to earth an unidentified flying object shoots straight past the rocket.
Since the object moves upward at high speed while the first stage is on its way back, it indicates that it is likely not a fairing or other part of the rocket.
Famous UFOlogist Says the World is Completely Unprepared for Possible Alien Invasion
Famous UFOlogist Says the World is Completely Unprepared for Possible Alien Invasion
An alien invasion is something humanity entirely unprepared, according to ufologist and former Ministry of Defence UFO investigator Nick Pope. He said that if aliens are drawing up plans toward Earth, then we are the other way around as we don’t have any plans for them. Mr. Pope, the man who has been considered as the real-life Fox Mulder, added that governments around the world have no alien invasion war plan.
Conspiracy theorists have claimed that there are plans kept secret within the governments, but Mr. Pope insisted there’s none as he would have been responsible for writing it.
Currently, the world’s greatest scientists are facing a somewhat tangible threat of the coronavirus, which is becoming more than a public health risk as it has the potential to trigger a societal breakdown.
Mr. Pope pointed out that the arrival of aggressive invasive aliens might bring the same associated threat.
He stated that extraterrestrial threat or real-life War of the Worlds would not only mean facing the danger of these aliens.
According to Mr. Pope, things can fall apart very quickly in our increasingly complex and interconnected world. Key points and critical infrastructures could come under pressure as aliens could knock out a grid, people could not get money from the cashpoints, petrol may run out, foods may run out, law and order could break down.
Mr. Pope explained that this is a worst-case scenario, but it is better to plan for the worst rather than assuming that everything will be fine. He said that it’s ironic people are searching for aliens, but we don’t have a plan for what we do if we find them.
A triangle-shaped UFO has been spotted hovering in the skies above the US city of Chicago, in the third sighting this year.
The footage shows a camera panning from some high-rise buildings into the cloudy night-time sky.
There appears to be a formation of lights in a triangle shape hovering in the same place.
Two women behind the camera can be heard trying to work out what they are, with one suggestion they could just be lights being beamed into the sky.
But her friend dismisses that explanation, saying: “There are no events going on that would mean it’s a reflection of lights.”
The video was shared by UFO conspiracy theorist Tales From Out There yesterday.
Conspiracy theorists think a triangular UFO has been filmed once again in the US(Image: YOUTUBE/TALES FROM OUT THERE)
The witness later explained she and her friend both thought the object was a plane at first.
But this soon changed. “We then noticed something even stranger,” the onlooker said.
“It wasn't actually stationary, but appeared to be moving horizontally of the direction a plane would normally move.
“While a plane moves along the nose and tail, this was moving from what appeared to be a wing.
“But it was very jarring as it was quiet that night due to the spreading of COVID-19.
“I personally don’t believe this was extra-terrestrial but government-based. I haven’t been able to find other reports on it and I think there is a reason for that.”
The sighting comes after similar “crafts” were recorded in Texas since the start of the year.
But viewers were split over the latest video. Some believed the UFO was proof of a government conspiracy.
One wrote: “This is why thy want people to stay inside their homes. It's not just the coronavirus.
“We have been having more sightings in the past few weeks than ever. Pay attention people!”
Another was more sceptical, though, suggesting it was nothing but “lights from spotlights on the clouds”.
Prehistoric Ostrich Egg Unravels Clues to Human Life 33,000 Years Ago
A team of scientists have discovered 33,000-year-old ostrich egg beads in the Lesotho Highlands, about a 1,000 kilometers away from where ostriches roamed. This establishes hitherto unknown prehistoric cultural exchange networks.
About 33,000 years ago, an ostrich in southern Africa’s Karoo Desert had its lunch of sweet grasses and flowers, then it laid an egg. Later that same night, the egg was lifted by a hunter-gatherer and after it was eaten, pieces of shell were drilled with holes and threaded onto an animal sinew cord and worn as a decorative string of beads. But this particular item of ancient jewelry travelled far to the east of where it was crafted and became treasured by a distant hunter-gatherer group living high in the eastern mountains.
Ostrich eggshell beads have been used to cement relationships in Africa for more than 30,000 years.
Now, 33,000 years after that ostrich egg was laid, stolen, crafted and exchanged, a University of Michigan study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science by paleolithic archaeologist Brian Stewart and colleagues, details the discovery of the beads in what is now Lesotho. Stewart is assistant professor of anthropology and assistant curator of the U-M Museum of Anthropological Archaeology, and his new paper provides evidence not only for “where” these beads were made, but also for “how long” hunter-gatherers used such things as a kind of “social currency.
It was by measuring the atomic structure of the beads that details of the exchanging of these ornaments, over such long distances, were shown to have spanned much deeper into prehistory than previously thought. In the new study, which is available to read on PNAS, Stewart said “humans are just outlandishly social animals, and that goes back to these deep forces that selected for maximizing information, information that would have been useful for living in a hunter-gatherer society 30,000 years ago and earlier.”
Archaeologists work at rock shelters at Sehonghong and Melikane in southern Africa.
Lesotho is a small, high-altitude country consisting of a matrix of rivers cutting across dramatic mountain ranges, including the 3,482m (11,424 feet)-high peak of Thabana Ntlenyana. This landlocked kingdom is encircled by South Africa , and it has the highest average elevation in the African continent. Stewart said it would have been “a formidable place for hunter-gatherers to live.” However, the quantities of fresh water coursing through the country and its “belts of resources, stratified by the region’s elevation,” served as protection against climate and environmental changes for those who hunted there from as early “as 85,000 years ago,” according to the study.
Ostrich eggshell beads, and the jewelry items made from them, according to Stewart, are “ Stone Age versions of Facebook or Twitter likes,” in that they affirm connections with exchange partners and alert other groups to the status of those relationships. Anthropologists know that contemporary hunter-gatherers used ostrich eggshell beads as offerings to establish and cement relationships with other groups, and in Lesotho, archaeologists have found small ornaments made of ostrich eggshell, but no evidence exists of those ornaments having been made there.
Archaeologists work at rock shelters at Sehonghong and Melikane in southern Africa.
Finding eggshell beads “without” any evidence of production, the researchers ‘assumed’ that they had got to Lesotho through ancient exchange networks and testing their ‘suspicions’, the beads were examined using strontium isotope analysis. What this means is that the eggshell composition was analyzed to determine what and where the creature had been eating.
When animals graze strontium isotopes are absorbed into their tissues, and in this case in an eggshell, and Lesotho is situated in the Karoo Supergroup, which was created by relatively recent volcanic eruptions that formed the Lesotho Highlands. The researchers measured how much strontium was available in vegetation and soil samples, as well as rodent tooth enamel samples from museum specimens collected from across Lesotho and surrounding areas. They discovered that nearly 80% of the beads “could not” have originated from ostriches living near the highlands where the beads were found.
Ostrich eggshell beads, and the jewelry items made from them, according to Stewart, are “ Stone Age versions of Facebook or Twitter likes,” in that they affirm connections with exchange partners and alert other groups to the status of those relationships. Anthropologists know that contemporary hunter-gatherers used ostrich eggshell beads as offerings to establish and cement relationships with other groups, and in Lesotho, archaeologists have found small ornaments made of ostrich eggshell, but no evidence exists of those ornaments having been made there.
Archaeologists work at rock shelters at Sehonghong and Melikane in southern Africa.
Finding eggshell beads “without” any evidence of production, the researchers ‘assumed’ that they had got to Lesotho through ancient exchange networks and testing their ‘suspicions’, the beads were examined using strontium isotope analysis. What this means is that the eggshell composition was analyzed to determine what and where the creature had been eating.
When animals graze strontium isotopes are absorbed into their tissues, and in this case in an eggshell, and Lesotho is situated in the Karoo Supergroup, which was created by relatively recent volcanic eruptions that formed the Lesotho Highlands. The researchers measured how much strontium was available in vegetation and soil samples, as well as rodent tooth enamel samples from museum specimens collected from across Lesotho and surrounding areas. They discovered that nearly 80% of the beads “could not” have originated from ostriches living near the highlands where the beads were found.
Archaeologists work at rock shelters at Sehonghong and Melikane in southern Africa.
The egg matched the strontium found in much older sedimentary rocks that surround the supergroup, the outermost ring of which is 325 (201 mi) and 1,000 (621 mi) kilometers away from the Lesotho sites, determining that the beads were exchanged during climactic upheaval, “about 59 to 25 thousand years ago.”
Around 50,000 years ago, according to Stewart, the climate was going through “enormous swings” and he thinks it might be no coincidence that that’s when this type of technology began. He thinks this exchange network was perhaps used for transferring “information” about the whereabouts of natural resources, the conditions of landscapes, animals, plant foods and other people, and perhaps for securing “marriage partners.”
Essentially, these ancient ostrich beads establish that relationships developed between hunter-gatherer groups, ensured shared resources, so that when one region’s climatology turned bad, they could lean on the other’s stock pots.
Top image: Ostrich eggshell beads have been used to cement relationships in Africa for more than 30,000 years. Source: John Klausmeyer, Yuchao Zhao & Brian Stewart / University of Michigan
Huge 1,500-Year-Old Arrowhead Released From Melting Glacier
Archaeologists in Norway have uncovered a 1,500-year-old iron arrowhead in a melting glacier.
The team of investigators inspecting Jotunheimen, a massive melting Norwegian glacier, have so far found over 2000 relics and now an arrowhead dating back to the Germanic Iron Age. Measuring seven inches long and weighing little over an ounce ‘ Climate Change ’ is being held responsible for revealing the ancient Viking's missed shot that had been embedded in a glacier for 1,500 years.
An Ancient Landscape of Unspeakable Beauty
The ancient Germanic Iron Age arrowhead was forged in iron and was discovered with its arrow shaft, and even a feather from its flight, locked in a glacier in southern Norway. The team of scientists noted that climate change has made its way to the Jotunheimen glacier and the warmer air temperature is causing the ice to melt which in turn freed the ancient artifacts.
Secrets Of The Ice@brearkeologi
Yesterday we posted a photo of a very large arrowhead from c. AD 500 found on one of our ice sites. Here is a video taken moments after it was discovered, showing both the projectile point and the arrowshaft close to the melting ice. We glacial archaeology
According to a report in GlacierHub.org, anthropologist Shoshi Parks, said three national parks converge in this region of central Norway, but “Jotunheimen is arguably the most spectacular, having 250 peaks over 1,900 meters high [one mile]” including Galdhøpiggen and Glittertind which are the two tallest in northern Europe. And furthermore, in a Daily Mail article the archaeologist descries the region as having “alpine lakes and shimmering turquoise glaciers, chequering an ancient landscape of unspeakable beauty.”
Climate Change Can ‘Reverse’ Archaeology
A Feb 2019 article in Norway Today said 2018 was a very bad year for the Norwegian glaciers which retreated “33 meters on average in the course of last year alone,” which according to heat records represented “the greatest decline since the measurements began.” With many of the nation’s glaciers experiencing dramatic melting over the past few years experts say this is being accelerated by climate change which is causing archaeologists to uncover ice-locked relics, but conversely, this situation will also destroy any artifacts that are not discovered in time.
Last year, the archaeological team excavating Jotunheimen found an ancient snowshoe for horses, which is estimated to date back to the Viking Age or the Medieval Period, and more than 2,000 artifacts have been found at the glaciers with the oldest being around 6,000 years old. The artifacts include man-made items like hunting tools, textiles, leather and clothing, as well as zoological remains like antlers, bones, and dung. But Lars Pilø, who is part of the Glacier Archaeology Program told CNN that “rapid melting causes bits and pieces of human history to “melt out in reverse time order.”
According to an article in Smithsonian Magazine Norway is not the only place where climate change is causing archaeological artifacts to emerge from ice, as Marissa Fessenden wrote for smithsonian.com in 2015, “bodies of soldiers lost during World War I have emerged from the Alps and Incan mummies have emerged from glaciers in the Andes.” National Geographic say melting permafrost in southwest Alaska has released “2,500 artifacts, including woven baskets and wooden masks” and while there are countless negative impacts of the changing climate, the recovery of these artifacts “could be an unexpected positive.”
Jørgen Hollesen, a researcher at the National Museum of Denmark, told Glacier Hub that melting ice is threatening archaeological artifacts locked in glaciers and that climate change is presenting different problems in the Arctic Circle. A 2018 study, coauthored by Hollesen, found there were around “180,000 registered archaeological sites in the Arctic” dating from the Stone Age to the medieval and more recent but there are also “settlements, cemeteries, churches and fishing villages of Norse, European, Inuit and Sami people .”
Climate-change related events are destroying a wide range of cultural sites with the resultant coastal erosion, landslides and melting permafrost and sea ice permits fierce waves and storms direct access to coastlines. What seems to be rising, or melting, from all this, is that our uncertain climate ‘future’ may inadvertently help archaeologists better understand our ‘past’.
Top image: Arrowhead recently found at Jotunheimen. Source: Secrets of the Ice
What is dark matter? No one knows. But it’s there, apparently, making up the vast majority of the mass of the universe. Or at least, that’s what the math says. Now some scientists think that the math might be wrong, and there might be another explanation for the apparent density of the universe. In some ways that’s a more likely scenario. After all, every one of science’s attempts to detect and conclusively prove the existence of dark matter has failed. Despite this lack of conclusive proof, the vast majority of physicists believe that dark matter is real and it does make up the majority of the universe. It’s just finding it that’s the problem.
Well, like a lot of impossible-to-find things, dark matter may have already been found. According to a paper recently published in the Journal of Physics G by physicists Mikhail Bashkanov and Daniel Watts, dark matter may be made of a subatomic particle called a d*(2380) hexaquark, or “d-star,” a six-sided quark which was probably discovered by German scientists in 2014. Quarks and gluons are the bizarre subatomic particles that form protons and neutrons.
Dark matter is thought to make up 85% of the universe.
Most other explanations for dark matter revolve around new and never-before-observed particles that lie outside the Standard Model of physics. But Bashkanov and Watts believe that dark matter might be made of these “d-star” quarks. On their own, the d-star quarks couldn’t explain dark matter. They would decay much too quickly. But Bashkanov and Watts believe that during a brief period of time at the beginning of the universe, these quarks could have formed together in a type of matter called a Bose-Einstein Condensate (BEC).
If this were true, it would explain why we can’t find dark matter. It would be impossible for us to interact with. The Bose-Einstein Condensate would have mass, but no electromagnetic charge. The force that keeps objects separate and allows interaction between them (like my fingers pressing the keys on my keyboard without going right through my computer) is the electromagnetic force holding the atoms together. A d-star BEC, the physicists write, could theoretically be perfectly neutral with no electromagnetic charge. Without that, dark matter would pass through other matter like a ghost without ever interacting with it. It would, however, exert a gravitational pull on the outside universe.
There was only a brief period in our universe’s life when this type of dark matter could have been made. In the time immediately after the Big Bang, the universe was a soup of quark-gluon plasma that hadn’t yet solidified into the particles that make up the known universe. Eventually, the universe cooled and the quark-gluon soup solidified into more stable particles. Bashkanov and Watts say this transitional period had all the right conditions for some of the d-star hexaquarks to form the hypothetical Bose-Einstein Condensate that we now call dark matter.
If this is the explanation for dark matter, the scientists say that we may be able to detect it. While BECs are extremely long-lived, they do sometimes decay around Earth. Bashkanov and Watts say that the decay of the dark matter BECs would have a particular signature that would look as if it was coming from every direction at once. Now, they say, the next step is to look for that signature.
Has the mystery been solved? Who knows. It’s worth pointing out again that literally every other time someone has said they knew how to detect dark matter, they’ve been completely wrong.
NASA scientists believe that if there is life on Mars it is likely to be found inside the red planet’s caves.
According to Space.com, NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory research scientist Vlada Stamenković explained the Martian underground life theory at a recent astronomy conference. There were other astrobiologists and experts in attendance who expressed the theory and agreed that the best places to look for life on Mars are the subterranean caves and the salt and ice.
Speaking at the Mars Extant Life event at the National Cave and Karst Research Institute in Carlsbad, New Mexico last November, Stamenković reportedly stated, “The surface of Mars is a very oxidizing, radiation-heavy environment where liquid water is not really stable for an extended amount of time.”
“It’s the worst place to look for life-sites on Mars,” Stamenković said. “Groundwater might be the only habitat for extant life on Mars if it still exists today.”
The surface of Mars is very cold and dry. There is a lot of radiation on the red planet making it mostly inhabitable for current known organisms. Although, Space.com notes that there has been recent discoveries about life in extreme environments here on Earth.
More than 1,000 possible cave entrances have been mapped on Mars by the U.S .Geological Survey’s (USGS) Astrogeology Science Center just recently, Scientific Americanreported.
Some scientists believe that flexible robots should be created that could explore the cave systems on Mars. Yet that would be very costly to accomplish.
Instead, Stamenković suggested that NASA use a rover that could sense underground groundwater or chemicals associated with life from the surface.
NASA intends to send its 2,260 pound Perseverance rover to Mars later this year to gather samples of potential life that is either alive or extinct and then send it back to Earth for vigorous testing.
“Scientists have long known that there is water in the form of underground ice at the Martian poles. But the poles are a harsh environment – a cold place on a planet where the summer daytime temperature at the equator can approach a balmy 70 ºF, but the night time temperatures in the same location and on the same day can swing to -100 ºF. Winter temperatures on the Martian poles can get as low as -195 ºF. So, settling on the Martian poles to get at water isn’t in the cards,” Don Lincoln, a senior scientist at Fermilab, America’s flagship particle physics laboratory, previously wrote in Forbes.
Robots have been scoping out Mars for years investigating the surface for signs of past life and evidence of water while orbiters circling around Mars image and map out the planet. Underground martian ice was discovered by the Mars Odyssey orbiter (MOO) and then followed up on by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO).
Then in 2015, NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) provided strong evidence that liquid water flows intermittently on present-day Mars, according to NASA.
Finally in 2019, it was published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters that ice could be just an inch beneath the surface of the planet. NASA mapped out the entire planet’s water and ice locations last year. These areas of Mars housing water or ice near caves may be where extraterrestrial life lies in the form of microbial life and maybe even undiscovered still yet unknown organisms. But we better hurry up, as the desolate planet of Mars is quickly evaporating water from the surface.
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Key UFO Seen Over Massachusetts This Week, Video, UFO Sighting News.
Key UFO Seen Over Massachusetts This Week, Video, UFO Sighting News.
Date of sighting: March 8, 2020 Location of sighting: Plymouth County, Massachusetts, USA This key shaped UFO was seen over MA this week. The object seems to be made up of separate parts. The eyewitness called it many black orbs together. That may be so. My first though its its many black balloons tied together so they can't fly away, however they should not be lined up like this and if it were balloons it would not be able to accelerate and speed away, as the eyewitness says. Alien orbs however might take a shape bundling together like this and following each other in a hive like states. Odd for sure. Wish we had better video of it, more focused video would help us solve this immediately. Perhaps others have also recorded it. Time will tell. Scott C. Waring Eyewitness states:
The object flew parallel to our heads, I would say no further than the length of a football fieldaway from us. I saw that it was about the size of a helicopter, if not larger, but couldn't tell what it was. That is why I took my camera out and began filming. By the time I got my phone out, the object had already begun accelerating away from us. While it may appear to be hovering in the video, it is actually traveling forward at a great deal of speed.
According to Brazilian sky-watcher Tio Abadom an intrusive celestial body is being monitored by space telescopes and ground telescopes around world. The unknown object, currently near the planets Jupiter and Saturn seems to accelerate on average.
Coincidence or not but last week, a strange sky phenomenon has been captured in Trenton, New Jersey by Alonzo Ent, who was able to capture some sort of celestial object close to the sun (often called as a second sun).
Alonzo, who is an experienced cameraman stated: "It was moving extremely fast and although it was very hard to pull focus, I was able to keep it some what, steady... It only lasted about 5 minutes and then gone."
Although Tio talks about the infamous planet Nibiru we may wonder whether it could be a giant alien mothership.
Could it be that what is happening now on Earth is a direct link to this unidentified space object?
AMAZING: Really fast UFO filmed over Cisco, Texas 15-Mar-2020
AMAZING: Really fast UFO filmed over Cisco, Texas 15-Mar-2020
This interesting footage of a bright and really fast unidentified flying object was filmed over Cisco, Texas on 15th March 2020.
Witness report:
Lighted object moving above tree line. I went outside & saw a lighted object moving above treeline. I went back inside my home to grab my cell phone. I was looking north west from my back yard watching the lighted object move around just above the treeline then it descended into the treeline. I did not actually see it land. I was able to record about 25 seconds of video that I am including in this report.
Archean Earth Was Covered by Global Ocean, New Study Suggests
Archean Earth Was Covered by Global Ocean, New Study Suggests
The surface of Earth was likely covered by a global ocean 3.24 billion years ago (Archean Eon), according to a new studypublished in the journal Nature Geoscience.
An artist’s impression of a water-world planet.
Image credit: Sci-News.com.
“Our findings could help scientists to better understand how and where single-cell organisms first emerged on Earth,” said Dr. Boswell Wing, a researcher in the Department of Geological Sciences at the University of Colorado Boulder.
“The history of life on Earth tracks available niches. If you’ve got a waterworld, a world covered by ocean, then dry niches are just not going to be available.”
In the study, Dr. Wing and colleagues examined 3.24-billion-year-old hydrothermally altered oceanic crust from the Panorama district in the Pilbara Craton of Western Australia.
“There are no samples of really ancient ocean water lying around, but we do have rocks that interacted with that seawater and remembered that interaction,” said Dr. Benjamin Johnson, a scientist at Iowa State University.
“The process is like analyzing coffee grounds to gather information about the water that poured through it.”
To do that, the researchers analyzed data from more than 100 rock samples from across the dry terrain.
They were looking, in particular, for two different isotopes of oxygen trapped in stone: a slightly heavier atom called oxygen-18 and a lighter one called oxygen-16.
They discovered that the ratio of those two isotopes of oxygen may have been a bit off in seawater 3.24 billion years ago — with just a smidge more oxygen-18 atoms than you’d see today.
“Though these mass differences seem small, they are super sensitive,” Dr. Wing said.
Sensitive, it turns out, to the presence of continents.
“Today’s land masses are covered by clay-rich soils that disproportionately take up heavier oxygen isotopes from the water — like mineral vacuums for oxygen-18,” Dr. Wing said.
The study authors theorized that the most likely explanation for that excess oxygen-18 in the ancient oceans was that there simply weren’t any soil-rich continents around to suck the isotopes up. That doesn’t mean, however, that there weren’t any spots of dry land around.
“There’s nothing in what we’ve done that says you can’t have teeny, micro-continents sticking out of the oceans,” Dr. Wing said.
“We just don’t think that there were global-scale formation of continental soils like we have today.”
Which leaves a big question: when did plate tectonics push up the chunks of rock that would eventually become the continents we know and love?
The scientists aren’t sure. But they’re planning to scour other, younger rock formations at sites from Arizona to South Africa to see if they can spot when land masses first roared onto the scene.
“Trying to fill that gap is really important,” Dr. Johnson said.
Star Trek fans go wild over Texas UFO showing square 'Borg cube' in the clouds
Star Trek fans go wild over Texas UFO showing square 'Borg cube' in the clouds
Star Trek fans fear resistance is futile after a UFO video appears to show the hated robot baddies invading Earth above the top secret White Sans US base
Star Trek fans are going wild for a Texas UFO video that seems to depict a perfectly square "Borg cube" appearing from the clouds above.
The clip, filmed close to the top secret White Sands US base several years ago, clearly shows a strange object in the sky that looks just like the horror aliens’ spaceship in the hit sci-fi series.
It comes as the hated robot baddies currently star in the hit new Picard series on Amazon Prime.
Thousands of Star Trek fans have been sharing the UFO video after it was posted on ufosightingsfootage.uk
The Borg coined the show's catchphrase "Resistance is futile" and turn people into drones.
"Borg cube" appears above White Sands US base(Image: Secureteam10)
Jack Greminger said on Facebook: "It's a Borg cube, we're doomed I tell you, doomed. Resistance is futile."
Sebastian Meusel added: "No it's the Borg, we are all going to be drones... where is my cat I don't want him to be assimilated."
And Mike Drennan said: "It's the Borg, but when they arrived and saw what we were like as a species, they had no interest in adding our biological and technological distinctiveness to their own and immediately left."
The UFO website shared a 2015 clip which was shared by YouTube channel secureteam10.
"Borg cube" appears above White Sands US base
(Image: Secureteam10)
It starts with images of the black cube emerging clouds over El Paso from "a black hole type portal".
A narrator claims two independent witnesses confirmed the sightings.
El Paso resident Walter C Lands captured the footage on his phone and said: "It began to get very windy out and I noticed a small portion of clouds begin to swirl and circle in on each other forming a portal shape - at which point the portal became jet black."
A second eye-witness, an accountant who did not wish to be named, also took a picture of the skies over El Paso. She said: "I noticed a square-shaped figure.
"It was a giant solid thing with designs around it and a faint magnetic oscillation type humming."
"Borg cube" appears above White Sands US base(Image: Secureteam10)
The secureteam10 narrator said: "We've got a doozy for you today.
"The images you see right now were sent into us by a source named Walter C Lance of El Paso, Texas, who thankfully snapped the images ... of what can only be described as a massive three-dimensional cube shape UFO.
"In the first image it can be seen almost shooting out at a pretty fair rate of speed at what looks like a massive black hole type portal or opening in within the the sky and surrounding clouds.
"The very fact that this UFO arrived by jumping through a suddenly appearing black hole in the sky leads us to believe that this isn't man-made."
The asteroid Ryugu has a texture like freeze-dried coffee
The asteroid Ryugu has a texture like freeze-dried coffee
This porous space rock could reveal details of how planets formed
The Hayabusa2 spacecraft measured the maximum temperatures during one full rotation of the asteroid Ryugu and found that most of the asteroid stays cool. Blue regions are around 300 kelvins (27° Celsius) and yellow are around 330 kelvins (57° C). Just a few hot spots, in red, were dense boulders that reached 360 kelvins (87° C).
The asteroid Ryugu is light and fluffy. Images taken by Japan’s Hayabusa2 spacecraft suggest the whole asteroid is highly porous, scientists report in Nature on March 16.
“It is something like freeze-dry coffee,” says planetary scientist Tatsuaki Okada of the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency. If early protoplanets had similar structures, that could mean planets formed quickly.
As an ancient, carbon-rich asteroid, Ryugu is thought to be a time capsule of solar system history. To read that history, Hayabusa2 explored Ryugu from June 2018 to November 2019, and grabbed two samples from the asteroid to bring back to Earth (SN: 7/11/19).
Hayabusa2 observed how the asteroid’s surface retained and released heat, a clue to its composition and structure. Dense rocks take in heat slowly and hold that heat for longer; more porous rocks change temperature quickly, like sand on a beach.
Ryugu’s heat map shows that it’s about 50 percent porous, meaning half of it is holes, Okada and colleagues report. Even most of the asteroid’s large boulders appear porous.
That airiness fits with the idea that Ryugu is a rubble pile formed after the breakup of a larger body some 700 million years ago (SN: 3/20/19). But the new observations suggest that parent body might have been porous, too.
“This might be common for the asteroids and even for planetesimals in the early solar system,” Okada says.
If true, it could have big implications for how quickly planets formed. Planetary scientists think the early solar system was a violent place, with protoplanets colliding, breaking up and re-accumulating all the time. Porous protoplanets might fall apart and come together again more easily than dense ones, Okada says. That means “the timescale of planetary formation may be changed drastically,” and planets might have formed faster than scientists thought, he says.
This is one of the largest Ice Age structures made of mammoth bones
This is one of the largest Ice Age structures made of mammoth bones
Hunter-gatherers in what’s now Russia constructed the massive ring around 25,000 years ago
Bones from at least 60 mammoths went into constructing this giant ring, one of the oldest and largest Ice Age structures made of the animals’ bones, a study finds.
Ancient people took on a mammoth project, in more ways than one.
Excavations at Russia’s Kostenki 11 site have uncovered one of the oldest and largest Ice Age structures made of mammoth bones. Hunter-gatherers assembled bones from at least 60 mammoths into an imposing ring around 25,000 years ago, say archaeologist Alexander Pryor of the University of Exeter in England and colleagues.
Building this structure, which measures about 12.5 meters across, required a huge investment of time and energy, the scientists report in the April Antiquity. Bones may have come from hunted mammoths or from carcasses of animals that died of natural causes. Sieving of soil samples identified charred wood from fires set inside the ring, but it’s unclear how its makers used the structure, Pryor’s team says.
Excavations at Russia’s Kostenki 11 site have uncovered the extensive remains of this ancient mammoth-bone structure.A. PRYOR
Circular mammoth bone structures, most dating to no more than 22,000 years ago, previously have been found across eastern Europe and western Russia (SN: 12/13/86). Researchers have often assumed that these constructions, including two others found at Kostenki 11 in the 1950s and 1960s, housed people during harsh winters.
The new discovery challenges that idea. A large, open space in the bone ring appears unsuitable for long-term occupation, in part because it would have been difficult to roof, Pryor’s group says. And only a few stone tools were found. Ice Age hunter-gatherers may have stored food or conducted ritual ceremonies in their mammoth creation, the researchers speculate.
Ice Age hunter-gatherers, foraging the bone-chilling, unforgiving steppes of what today is Russia, somehow completed a remarkable construction project: a 40-foot-wide, circular structure made from the skulls, skeletons and tusks of more than 60 woolly mammoths. The reason remains a mystery to archaeologists.
“The sheer number of bones that our Paleolithic ancestors had sourced from somewhere and brought to this particular location to build this monument is really quite staggering,” said Alexander Pryor, an archaeologist at the University of Exeter in England. “It does boggle my mind.”
Alexander Dudin, a researcher from the Kostenki Museum-Preserve, and a team of scientists began excavating the 25,000-year-old mammoth-bone circle in 2014 at a site called Kostenki 11, which is 300 miles south of Moscow. It is the third structure uncovered at the site. The discovery was published Monday in the journal Antiquity.
Archaeologists have unearthed about 70 mammoth-bone structures across Eastern Europe. But this one is the oldest on the Russian plain thought to be made by modern humans. Most of the previously identified structures were small, leading researchers to conclude they were most likely used as winter dwellings on a nearly treeless landscape.
But the researchers said this circle was too large for a roof, which might suggest it was used for a different purpose.
“There are more than 60 mammoths in this one structure” said David Beresford-Jones, an environmental archaeologist at the University of Cambridge and an author on the paper. He added, “It doesn’t make much sense, really, as a house.”
Layers of rock showing signs that fires were burned at the site. One hypothesis was that burning greasy mammoth bones aided hunter-gatherers as they tried to strip meat off the mammoths before wolves and foxes arrived to try to seize the haul.Credit...A.J.E. Pryor
The team suggested that the hunter-gatherers instead may have butchered massive mammoth carcasses at the site and then stored the meat and fat in nearby permafrost as if in an ancient refrigerator.
Dr. Pryor arrived at Kostenki 11 in 2015 and quickly went shoeless, tiptoeing so that he wouldn’t crush any of the hundreds of mammoth bones scattered around the site. The ring, which also included ribs, jaws and leg bones, had probably been piled 20 inches high before collapsing thousands of years ago, he said.
The team collected sediment samples from inside the bone circle and from three large pits located outside.
Through further processing, they identified more than 400 charcoal pieces, evidence of wood-burning. The charcoal came from conifers such as spruce, larch and pine, suggesting that trees still grew in the harsh, frozen environment. They also radiocarbon-dated the charcoal, which further supported that the site was about 25,000 years old.
They also found burned mammoth bones, which indicated that the Paleolithic people were probably starting fires with wood and then using the beasts’ greasy bones to feed the flames. Bone-fueled fires burn brighter than wood fires, but spread less warmth.
“You won’t produce a nice good fire for roasting your mammoth meat on,” Dr. Beresford-Jones said. But the flames would have allowed the hunter-gatherers to work through the night to hastily strip meat off mammoth bones before hungry wolves and foxes arrived to try to seize the haul.
The team also uncovered plant material similar to what is seen in modern parsnips, carrots and potatoes. This suggested that the Paleolithic people may have supplemented their mammoth meals with vegetable side dishes.
Excavating the Kostenki 11 site. When Dr. Pryor first arrived there in 2015, he removed his shoes, tiptoeing so that he wouldn’t crush any of the fragile bones scattered around the site.Credit...A.E. Dudin
Mietje Germonpré, an archaeozoologist at the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences in Brussels, and who was not involved in the study, called the paper a “truly unique discovery,” and said its findings were sound.
Paul Pettitt, an archaeologist at Durham University in England, applauded the team for the methods they used to recover ancient charcoal from the dirt. But he said it could not be ruled out that the structure might have been used as a cozy home during the long winters, which could reach minus 4 degrees Fahrenheit.
The team acknowledged that they did not fully solve the mystery of how the mammoth-bone circle was used. They still do not know whether the hunter-gatherers killed or scavenged the beasts, how long the location was used or if it held any ritualistic importance.
“These woolly-mammoth circular structures are really enigmatic, but they are hugely impressive,” Dr. Pryor said. “They speak to a time when our human ancestors were battling against the coldest and harshest and most difficult point of the last glacial cycle in Europe.”
Nicholas St. Fleur is a science reporter who writes about archaeology, paleontology, space and other topics. He joined The Times in 2015. Before that, he was an assistant editor at The Atlantic. @scifleur•Facebook
Alexander PryorMet de beenderen van zo'n 60 mammoets werd een constructie opgezet in de ijstijd.
WETENSCHAPEen nieuw ‘mammoethuis’ is opgedoken in Rusland. Het is het oudste en het grootste tot nu toe. Zo’n 25.000 jaar geleden maakten jager-verzamelaars met honderden botten van 60 mammoets een grote cirkelvormige constructie van 12,5 meter doorsnede. Waarom, dat weet niemand.
In de jaren 60 en 70 vonden onderzoekers al gelijkaardige maar kleinere constructies op dezelfde site, Kostenki 11, 500 km ten zuiden van Moskou. Het is inmiddels een museum.
In 2014 botsten archeologen op de nieuwe constructie op de site. Een jaar later begonnen de opgravingen, die drie jaar zouden duren. Pas deze week werden de bevindingen van de wetenschappers gepubliceerd in het vakblad Antiquity.
De beenderen van de mammoets komen uit de ijstijd. Ze werden in het verleden al in Oost-Europa aangetroffen. Tot nu toe werden de oudste beenderen gedateerd op 22.000 jaar geleden. De nieuwe fossielen zijn zo’n 25.000 jaar oud.
Alexander Pryor
Mogelijk dienden de constructies als huizen die hen beschermden tijdens de harde winters. De temperaturen konden dan zakken tot -20 graden. Dat zou een verrassende verklaring zijn, omdat de jager-verzamelaars uit de ijstijd nooit lang op dezelfde plaats bleven en zo’n bouwconstructie heel wat tijd in beslag moet hebben genomen. “Mammoetbotten zijn erg zwaar, en het bouwen van de cirkelvormige structuur was een enorme investering in tijd en energie”, legt Alexander Pryor, hoofdauteur en archeoloog aan de Universiteit van Exeter, uit.
De archeologen vonden 51 kaken en 64 schedels van mammoets. De ronde had geen duidelijke ingang. Binnen de cirkel was er bewijs dat er hout verbrand werd, maar verder geen aanwijzingen dat er mensen langere tijd in verbleven. Daarom denken de onderzoekers dat het niet dienst deed als winterverblijf. “Het betekende duidelijk iets voor hen en het had hoogstwaarschijnlijk met een ritueel te maken, ook al had de constructie blijkbaar ook een praktisch doel”, aldus Pryor.
Buzz Aldrin gave a interview on C-Span about 7 years ago where he stated, "visit the moon on Mars. Theres a monolith there. A very unusual structure on this little potato shaped object that goes around Mars once every 7 hours. When people find out about that, they are going to say, who put that there? Who put that there? Well, if you choose, the universe put it there." Needless to say, this got me and other UFO researchers excited years ago, so we have all been looking, searching for this Buzz Aldrin Monolith he speaks of. Last night, I decided to take a look at the ESA site and the first photo I came across was in HD...and was of the Mars moon Phobos. This ESA image was just put up for the public to see on Dec 6, 2016, so its the newest out. There was only 25% of the moon visible because there was a shadow over its other 25%. I thought I could add light to the HD photo in order to explore the other 25% and low and behold, I made a huge discovery...the Buzz Aldrin monolith. Its much bigger than any of us thought. We all assumed that the monolith was this tall rectangular structure that was found about 5 years ago, but it wasn't. That was nothing. This new structure is very big, and must have been smudged out using photoshop on most other Phobos photos in existence. The ESA editors must have missed this one, because its 100% evidence that aliens have constructed it and used the Mars moon as a space station...and may be controlling the moon, its orbit, speed even today. Phobos is 7 miles in radius, thats 11km. So if we use this full photo of Phobos and compare it to the structure, we find that the structures length is 1/5 that of Phobos, meaning the structure or ship is approximately 1.4 miles long or 2.2km. Thats huge! Buzz was right! Scott C. Waring
Looking though the gigapan Mars photos, I found something that closely resembles an ancient clay bottle. Its very similar to this 2,000 year old Roman bottle which I include into the photo for you to compare. Again I am showing you a NASA Mars photo which has been altered by NASA into a False Color...which makes the surface look red and brown. But in reality, Mars surface looks more similar to a desert on Earth. NASA adds False Color to hide from the public the fact that Mars is more hospitable than they want you to know. This way, there is no other country racing to Mars and NASA will have no competition...which gives them a lot of time to get there.
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- Gemiddelde waardering: 0/5 - (0 Stemmen) Categorie:Ruins, strange artifacts on other planets, moons, ed ( Fr, EN, NL )
US General Warns of ‘Sinister Force' Scouting Earth
US General Warns of ‘Sinister Force' Scouting Earth
General Douglas MacArthur was an American war hero and one of the most popular armed service members of the 1940s and 50s.
But what few know about him is his strong interest in the UFO phenomenon, so much so that he warned of "sinister forces" beyond Earth three different times publicly in the last 15 years of his life.
Two of these warnings were given in speeches — the rarely heard audio is presented in this video.
So, what do you think? Was MacArthur's warning that UFOs were scouting Earth for future invasion just paranoia? Or could it have been a driver of early efforts to militarize space?
Time-Lapse Video Shows Mysterious Red Trails in the Sky Over Outer Banks
Time-Lapse Video Shows Mysterious Red Trails in the Sky Over Outer Banks
A new round of debate has emerged after a time-lapse video recorded over the Outer Banks appears to show that UFOs may have been frequenting the North Carolina’s barrier islands.
On February 18, photographer Wes Snyder posted a 2-minute video on YouTube, noting that it was made from a three-hour time-lapse of the Milky Way. The footage also shows Frisco’s famous Futuro home that resembles a flying saucer.
Snyder, an Outer Banks-based photographer, realized that he got more than he bargained after compiling the pictures into a video.
He said on YouTube that he seemed to have caught some mysterious unidentified red trails. He revealed that these strange things appeared for approximately 30 minutes during his 3-hour time-lapse.
Snyder has yet to get a good explanation or even a sound guess. The video was entirely created from photos taken on September 23. It took him months to compile into a video.
Snyder does not think those strange trails to be a plane as it moved in a chaotic pattern.
After getting thousands of views, the video was then featured on the syndicated TV show “Just This Minute,” wherein the show’s host Nick Calderone said that planes don’t fly like that.
Some commenters of the video speculated that it was the U.S. military conducting exercises. Others called it creepy, while a few said it was wickedly cool.
It existed just 900 million years after the Big Bang.
This radio image shows two jets shooting out of the center of Cygnus A, a galaxy not too far from our own. A new paper reports discovering a similar object in a much more distant, ancient galaxy. That galaxy has a bright, relatavistic jet emanating from its central supermassive black hole pointed at Earth, making it a blazar.
Nine hundred million years after theBig Bang, in the epoch of our universe's earliest galaxies, there was already a black hole 1 billion times the size of our sun. That black hole sucked in huge quantities of ionized gas, forming a galactic engine — known as a blazar — that blasted a superhot jet of bright matter into space. On Earth, we can still detect the light from that explosion more than 12 billion years later.
Astronomers had previously discovered evidence of primeval supermassive black holes in slightly younger "radio-loud active galactic nuclei," or RL AGNs. RL AGNs are galaxies with cores that look extra-bright to radio telescopes, which is considered evidence that they contain supermassive black holes. Blazars are a unique type of RL AGN that spit out two narrow jets of "relativistic" (near-light-speed) matter in opposite directions. Those jets emit narrow beams of light at many different wavelengths and have to be pointed right at Earth for us to detect them across such vast distances. This new blazar discovery moves the date of the oldest confirmed supermassive black hole to within the first billion years of the universe's history and suggests there were other, similar black holes in that era that we haven't detected.
"Thanks to our discovery, we are able to say that in the first billion years of life of the universe, there existed a large number of very massive black holes emitting powerful relativistic jets," Silvia Belladitta, a doctoral student at the Italian National Institute for Astrophysics (INAF) in Milan and co-author of a new paper on the blazar, said in a statement.
The discovery by Belladitta and her co-authors confirms that blazars existed during an epoch of our universe's history known as "reionization" — a period after a long, post-Big Bang dark age when the first stars and galaxies began to form.
And discovering one blazar strongly suggests there were many others, the authors wrote. If only one blazar existed in this early phase of the universe, it would be an extraordinarily lucky break for it to have pointed its narrow, visible beam at Earth. It's much more likely that there were many such blazars pointing in all sorts of directions, and that one of them happened to throw its light our way.
"Observing a blazar is extremely important. For every discovered source of this type, we know that there must be 100 similar, but most are oriented differently, and are therefore too weak to be seen directly," Belladitta said.
That information helps astrophysicists reconstruct the story of how and when these monster black holes formed.
It has become a bit of a cottage industry to rail against the current state of UFOlogy. The phenomenon seems beset with talking heads, poseurs and outright charlatans. So much so, it occasionally brings even the best of us to the brink of despair. But just when I thought there were no good men left to fight for answers to the UFO conundrum, I met up with Ted Phillips.
Ted Phillips is part of a rare breed. He is a UFO investigator – not a writer, not a theorist – a hard-core, old-school investigator. For the past forty-five years, he has traversed the United States, doing the arduous work of turning UFO testimony into hard, quantifiable evidence. He’s sifted through dirt, climbed trees, measured, photographed and measured again. The fruits of his efforts, some almost totally unknown to modern audiences, are nothing short of startling.
Phillips grew up in the great American Midwest, his radio tuned to the likes of Frank Edwards and Long John Nebel. A fascination grew within the man that, in 1964, finally prompted him to take action.
He packed up his Chevy and headed southwest for his very first UFO investigation – a trip that put him smack in the middle of the Lonnie Zamora sighting in Socorro, New Mexico. The then 22-year-old Phillips was one of the first serious researchers to talk with Zamora and the numerous other people who witnessed the now classic egg-shaped UFO. Phillips retains what must be considered the definitive collection of analysis and evidence from that case – one he still considers among the most compelling of all time.
While in Socorro, Phillips crossed paths with an astronomer from Northwestern University who was investigating UFOs for the U.S. Air Force. That man, of course, was Dr. J. Allen Hynek. This meeting proved to be the start of a professional relationship and close friendship that would last until Hynek’s death in 1986.
In the years that followed, Phillips honed his skills as a painstaking investigator. “My approach is the same one you now see on television shows like CSI,” he told Department 47. “You must always handle a UFO scene with care, as though it were a crime scene.”
He would need all of those skills in 1966 when he examined a harrowing close encounter at Roaring River State Park in Missouri. Three hunters observed a daylight object in the park and, upon returning to their camp site, found all of their camping equipment incinerated. Whatever caused the fire was hot enough to melt aluminum tent poles but selective enough not to ignite the dry trees overhead. As the hunters surveyed the damage, they heard a humming noise. To their amazement, a bizarre disk-shaped object came into view a mere 300 feet away. As the men watched, a tree near the object burst into flame. The UFO finally made a quick exit but not before one of the hunters snapped two photographs.
Phillips called in his friend Dr. Hynek to help interview the witnesses and analyze the Roaring River evidence. Despite their combined efforts, no prosaic explanation for the event has ever been determined.
“Afterwards, Dr. Hynek admitted to me that the UFO phenomenon was bigger than he thought and that people were needed who were willing to specialize,” Phillips explained. “It was he who encouraged me to focus on physical trace cases.”
Phillips took that advice to heart and, over the years, he’s been directly or indirectly involved with over 3000 UFO incidents that produced physical trace evidence. He has personally investigated hundreds of these, including the famous 1971 Delphos, Kansas incident and a 1979 case in which a UFO collided with a Minnesota sheriff’s patrol car.
All that careful analysis and attention to detail has paid dividends. Patterns and connections emerged in the evidence Phillips collected. For example, he learned from repeated compression tests on various landing marks that these alleged vehicles weighed from seven to fourteen tons. Similar tests of footprints found at UFO sites indicated that the entities who made them weighed about sixty pounds. All of this pointed to physical creatures with nuts-n-bolts technology – a hypothesis that, even in 2008, still strikes Phillips as the most logical answer.
The 1970s proved to be a hectic decade with so many cases that the tireless Phillips barely kept up. However, his investigations came to an abrupt halt with Dr. Hynek’s death in 1986. “It just wasn’t any fun without my friend,” he recalled.
Phillip’s self-imposed retirement continued until 1998 when he had a conversation with another icon of UFOlogy, Jacques Vallee. Vallee had known Phillips for years since he had included him as a member of the Invisible College, a blue-ribbon panel of UFO researchers. Vallee expressed concerns about the direction of UFOlogy and ultimately convinced Phillips to resume his important work.
So, that year, Ted Phillips founded The Center for Physical Trace Research (www.ufophysical.com). To his profound surprise, however, he discovered that, during his years of retirement, the phenomenon had undergone a radical change.
“Sometime during the late 1980s, the number of incidents involving large flying objects dropped considerably.” Phillips states. “At the same time, reports involving very small UFOs increased dramatically.”
Phillips also noticed that these miniature UFOs tended to appear repeatedly in a given area. This was a new facet of the phenomenon – one that may yet yield long-awaited answers. He knew only so much can be done with isolated, one-time UFO encounters. However, if an area of recurring activity could be identified, scientific methods and instruments might be brought to bear to measure and analyze the objects as never before.
To respond to this new opportunity, Phillips formed a Special Investigations Unit (SIU) within the CPTR. This small group of dedicated researchers functions like the Navy SEALS in that they are inserted into UFO hotspots armed with electronic and imaging equipment. In recent months, the SIU has been actively involved with an on-going investigation of a place that goes by the pseudonym of Marley Woods. Marley Woods has been visited on numerous occasions over the years by small, inexplicable lights. The lights vary in size, color, behavior and performance characteristics. More often than not, however, they appear to be the size of a beach ball. The objects have been seen by multiple, independent witnesses at close range. They have exhibited electromagnetic effects well known to most students of the phenomenon, including interfering with car ignitions, video cameras and even cell phones.
On several occasions in 2007, the SIU spent time in the Marley Woods. They are hoping to conduct additional research at the site later this year. Members of the SIU team include: Tom Ferrario, Adam Johnson, Debbie Ziegelmeyer and Chuck Zukowski. Ferrario and Ziegelmeyer are both certified divers, a skill that will be put to the test during the team’s next visit. Phillips explains that anomalous objects have, on more than one occasion, been seen to enter large farm ponds in the vicinity. The SIU divers will search those ponds to see if traces of the objects’ activity can be found.
Phillips admits he’s particularly intrigued by this component of the case. He cites a recent Michigan encounter where a small UFO purportedly bounced off the top of a woman’s car. That object left a strange, yellow residue, which the witness had the foresight to preserve. The substance was then subjected to chemical and bacteriological analysis indicating that, strangely enough, this object may also have spent time in a farm pond.
Funding for such projects is always scarce but the group is working to bankroll the purchase of new, more sophisticated imaging equipment. They also look to add an electromagnetic field generator to their arsenal – one that just might attract one of the Marley Woods’ objects. Phillips is somewhat philosophical about the funding challenges faced by his organization. “After all, Dr. Hynek only managed one, $4000 grant during his entire career,” he mused.
To that end, the Center is accepting monetary donations on its website. Just this month, the group began marketing a DVD of its first investigation at Marley Woods, the proceeds of which will go toward future expeditions.
You’d think that, after forty-five years, Ted Phillips might want to slow down a bit. However, one conversation with this man reveals an energy and enthusiasm equal to that of his much younger colleagues. The veteran investigator says he’s holding leads on three new sites, much like Marley Woods, that are just begging to be investigated. Somehow, I can’t help but think Ted Phillips is still the man to get the job done.
If you’re one of those who still believes or hopes that the strange cigar-shaped interstellar comet/asteroid/hybrid ‘Oumuamua is actually a spaceship … or if you wish we could have gotten a closer look at a visitor from another star while it was near Earth – you may be in luck. A scientific group that formed just two weeks after ‘Oumuamua was discovered in 2017 says it’s not too late. Project Lyra has issued a detailed paper describing how ‘Oumuamua can be caught and analyzed with existing technology and when the best time for a launch will be. Can it be done? Will the robotic crew on ‘Oumuamua see it fast approaching and hit the gas – or whatever might be powering it?
“We now know such a mission, at least in principle, is achievable. The possible scientific return would be tremendous and might fundamentally alter our understanding of our place in the universe.”
Software developer Adam Hibberd, a volunteer with the Initiative for Interstellar Studies who designed the software to determine the optimal dates and trajectory for the mission and is the lead author on the paper to be published in Acta Astronautica, described in Wired how this will be a “this changes everything” project. ‘Oumuamua is currently moving away from Earth at a speed of 26.33±0.01 km/s (16.36 miles/sec) or 500 million miles per year, which will have it crossing the boundary into interstellar space in the late 2030s.
A SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket.
The Project Lyra model determined that a launched by the most powerful rocket — either SpaceX’sFalcon Heavyor NASA’s soon-to-be-available Space Launch System– would start the process. The spacecraft would have to be equipped with a booster rocket that would be fired as it makes its turn around the Sun – giving an extra boost to the Sun’s gravitational assist. It would then swing around Jupiter, getting another gravitational boost. That would give it enough speed to catch up to ‘Oumuamua. Since Falcon Heavy is ready, what are we waiting for?
“Unfortunately we can’t just launch any year we like. To make missions feasible using current technology, we are reliant on Jupiter taking up a certain point in its 12-year orbit around the sun, and so the opportunities follow approximately a 12-year cycle.”
Ah, yes. The limits of current technology – the bane of those raised on Star Trek. Because a conventional spacecraft needs a gravitational acceleration boost, the optimal launch date for the Project Lyra craft would be in 2033, putting its catch-‘Oumuamua date sometime in 2048. The good news is, that gives the Project Lyra team some time to find ‘Oumuamua in interstellar space – not a trivial task either.
Current technology
If existing technology can catch ‘Oumuamua, why not use it to catch the next interstellar object that comes past Earth instead? Again, that requires finding them early enough – a task space scientists have not yet mastered with existing telescopes. This highlights the importance of space research and development that’s not tied to government budgets or private space company profit margins. If we’re serious about space exploration, learning more about the universe, searching for other life forms, chasing interstellar objects and the like, we need to see them and their costs as an investment in the future of humanity.
The Dead Sea Scrolls, the first bundles of which were discovered in 1946 in the Qumran Caves in the Judaean Desert on the northern shore of the Dead Sea, date back to the 3rd century BCE and are believed to be some of the oldest known surviving manuscripts of books in the Hebrew Bible. Are they? Sixteen fragments of the Dead Sea Scrolls, currently in the possession of the Museum of the Bible in Washington, DC, were recently studied by art forgery experts and … get ready to be disappointed … were identified as excellent fakes. What does this mean for the Hebrew Bible?
“The Museum of the Bible is trying to be as transparent as possible. We’re victims. We’re victims of misrepresentation, we’re victims of fraud.”
If this story sounds familiar, it was just last year that of the Museum of the Bible – a non-sectarian museum in theory – was informed that six of its Dead Sea Scrolls fragments were forgeries. The collection was donated to the museum by founder and CEO Of Hobby Lobby Steve Green, who refuses to say where he obtained them nor how much he paid, but it’s estimated to be millions. Now it seems that even if Green kept the receipts, he admitted to the National Geographic that he was duped by unscrupulous sellers on his entire collection of scroll pieces.
“After an exhaustive review of all the imaging and scientific analysis results, it is evident that none of the textual fragments in Museum of the Bible’s Dead Sea Scroll collection are authentic. Moreover, each exhibits characteristics that suggest they are deliberate forgeries created in the twentieth century with the intent to mimic authentic Dead Sea Scroll fragments.”
Trust me.
At a recent conference in Washington, Colette Loll, founder and director of Art Fraud Insights, released a 200-page report on an investigation of the Green family’s scrolls. The report shows that the museum’s fragments were leather hide parchment, which may have come from ancient Roman shoes of the era. They were coated with a shiny substance, possibly glue, that came from one source, indicating all of these forgeries were handled by the same forger – even though the Green family says they came from four different sellers. This was one slick forger … the fragments were coated with minerals from the Dead Sea caves area.
While these scroll fragments fooled a number of so-called experts, CNN reports that the real ones used 3D microscopes, infrared spectroscopy and “energy dispersive X-ray analysis” and found some pretty glaring errors. Perhaps the biggest was discovered by labs in Germany which determined that the ink was recent and lettering was applied after the fake creases and tears were made to the leather.
Does this mean all of the estimated 100,000 Dead Sea scroll fragments may be fakes? Fortunately, most of those are in the Israel Museum in Jerusalem and those have undergone intense scrutiny for years to authenticate them. It’s the fragments showing up in black markets and on eBay that should be questioned.
Hey, you … look at this.
It’s too bad these forgers don’t actually read the documents they’re copying … especially the parts about stealing and bearing false witness. And those who try to own these antiquities for themselves should remember the part about coveting their neighbor’s goods. When it comes to ancient historical artifacts, religious or otherwise, we’re ALL neighbors.
I was looking at some footage of the sun and decided to take a closer look at the black triangle I discovered many months ago. The object is still there. Some people try to say its not a craft, but a dark spot on the sun...which is not possible...since the sun is rotating below the UFO, but the UFO only moves slightly to left and sometimes to the right. So clearly its in orbit. The dark triangle may have been there for a long time. I went back as far as 9 months and its still there! Perhaps its been there all along and NASA was just hoping that none would notice a moon size space ship in our suns orbit. Check out the video below I made. Scott C. Waring - Taiwan
What Caused This Enormous Discharge in Deep Space?
What Caused This Enormous Discharge in Deep Space?
Last February, NASA's satellite Stereo A HI1 captured something strange in space for several days.
What we see is an immense force field coming in from the right, surrounded by some sort of energy ring. What follows is an enormous outburst or 'discharge' turning it into a giant bubble, even it is spinning, though it's almost imperceptible but watch it carefully.
While it is possible that this huge bubble is a lens flare from the huge planet moving from left to the right. due to its brightness it doesn't explain the outburst or 'discharge.'
My ques is that it has been caused by Nibiru due to an alignment. Since Venus rotates backwards to the other planets, like the Nibiru does; they both rotate clockwise, there may be a resonance between the Nibiru and Venus, and Venus would be affected more by the Nibiru than the other planets which rotate anticlockwise, e.g. Earth.
The Unexplained Deactivated Nukes Incident by UFOs at Malmstrom Air Force Base 1967
The Unexplained Deactivated Nukes Incident by UFOs at Malmstrom Air Force Base 1967
On March 24, 1967, men see an unidentified object hovering over Montana’s Malmstrom Air Force Base, home to nuclear weapons, which are all disabled simultaneously. Former Air Force Capt. Robert Salas, who was at Malmstrom Air Force Base in Montana in 1967 when 10 ICMs he was overseeing suddenly became inoperative – at the same time base security informed him of a mysterious red glowing object in the sky. The incidents were never officially explained.
All 4 of the gas giant planets in our solar system – Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune – are known to have rings. Could many of the so-called super-puff or cotton candy exoplanets have rings instead of super low densities?
Artist’s concept of a “super-puff” exoplanet with rings transiting in front of its star.
Among the strangest exoplanets discovered so far are the so-called super-pufforcotton candy planets. They appear to have extremely low densities, lower even than our solar system’s planet Saturn, which has long been said to be so “light” it could float on water, if you could find an ocean big enough to hold it. Researchers at Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington, D.C., have developed a new line of thought about these exotic worlds. They announced on March 2, 2020, that some super-puff planets aren’t as puffy as first thought.
What if there’s another explanation? Lead researcher Anthony Piro at Carnegie explained in a statement:
We started thinking, what if these planets aren’t airy like cotton candy at all? What if the super-puffs seem so large because they are actually surrounded by rings?
The associated peer-reviewed paper was published in The Astronomical Journal on February 28.
Super-puff or cotton candy planets are characterized by their large radii in contrast to their not-so-large masses. Their densities are very low. Their apparent differences from any planets in our solar system made them a surprising discovery when they were first began to be found, a few years ago.
Artist’s concept of the most extreme examples of super-puff planets known – the 3 giant planets orbiting the star Kepler-51 – discovered in 2012 and identified as super-puffs in 2014. They lie about 2,600 light-years from Earth.
Image via NASA/ ESA/ L. Hustak/ J. Olmsted/ D. Player/ F. Summers (STScI)/ Hubblesite.
It’s an interesting idea, that the super-puffs – at least some of them – might be more like Saturn and the other giant planets in our solar system than first thought. All four of the gas giant planets in our solar system – Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune – are known to have rings. Could many of the super-puffs have rings instead of super low densities?
Exoplanets are difficult to detect; it’s hard to see them in the glare of distant stars. Rings around exoplanets would be even more difficult. The researchers wondered if alien astronomers on distant exoplanets could look back at our solar system and see Saturn’s rings. Or, from a great distance away, would they mistake Saturn for a super-puff? According to Shreyas Vissapragada at Caltech:
We started to wonder, if you were to look back at us from a distant world, would you recognize Saturn as a ringed planet, or would it appear to be a puffy planet to an alien astronomer?
An ethereal view of Saturn’s rings as seen by Cassini on February 3, 2017. Do some cotton candy exoplanets have similar ring systems?
Image via NASA/ JPL-Caltech/ Space Science Institute/ NASA Science.
In thinking through this question, the researchers took into consideration how a large ringed planet would appear as it transited in front of its star, and the kind of ring material that might exist around super-puffs. Their conclusion is that rings might explain some of the super-puffs discovered, but probably not all of them. According to Piro:
These planets tend to orbit in close proximity to their host stars, meaning that the rings would have to be rocky, rather than icy. But rocky ring radii can only be so big, unless the rock is very porous, so not every super-puff would fit these constraints.
Three of these planets were studied recently by the Hubble Space Telescope, orbiting the sunlike star Kepler-51, about 2,600 light-years away. They are almost the size of Jupiter, but only 1/100th as massive. They have atmospheres composed of the lightweight gases hydrogen and helium, covered by a thick layer of methane haze.
Anthony Piro at Carnegie Institution for Science, lead author of the new study.
Those planets also appear to be rapidly shrinking, losing billions of tons of material into space every second, suggesting that the cotton candy characteristics may just be a transitory phase in their evolution. They may end up looking more like mini-Neptunes.
Determining whether any of these planets actually do have rings will require follow-up observations by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, which is scheduled to launch in 2021. If they do, that would help scientists learn more about how such worlds form and how they compare to actual super-puffs and other giant exoplanets, as well as the giant planets in our own solar system.
Bottom line: A new study suggests that some cotton candy exoplanets may not be as puffy as first thought, but instead have rings, like Saturn.
Mars Express Sees Intriguing Geological Features in Moreux Crater
Mars Express Sees Intriguing Geological Features in Moreux Crater
The High Resolution Stereo Camera on ESA’s Mars Express orbiter has captured stunning images of Moreux crater, a huge impact crater in the Terra Sabaea region of the Red Planet.
This image of Moreux crater comprises data gathered on October 30, 2019.
Known for its wide swathes of rippling, textured, gently sloping dunes, Mars’ Terra Sabaea region is home to many fascinating geological features — including the prominent Moreux crater, the star of a new image from ESA’s Mars Express.
Image credit: ESA / DLR / FU Berlin / CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO.
When compared to other impact craters on both Mars and Earth, Moreux crater appears a little misshapen and messy — the result of ongoing erosion over Martian history.
The crater is roughly 3 km deep, and spans 135 km from edge to edge.
Its central peak, created as material from the crater floor rebounded and rose upwards following the initial impact, is around 2 km in height.
Its egg-shaped rim is broken up, its dark walls are ridged, rippled and mottled.
Perspective view of the Moreux crater.
This image shows a feature on Mars’ surface named Moreux crater. It comprises data gathered on 30 October 2019 during orbit 20014. The ground resolution is approximately 16 m/pixel and the images are centered at about 44°E/42°N.
Image credit: ESA / DLR / FU Berlin / CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO.
The range of colors featured in the new images from Mars Express reveals much about the composition of a particular region, material or feature.
While the surrounding material is visible in hues of butterscotch and caramel, the crater’s walls are dark, resembling a smudged ring of ash or charcoal.
Dark brown and black dunes cover the crater floor, while the peak remains a pale yellow-orange.
Dark, prominent ejecta, comprising material flung outwards during the crater-forming collision, spread outwards from the crater rim, discoloring and encroaching upon the lighter surrounding terrain.
This varied color palette reflects an equally varied geological composition.
The dunes within and around the crater are thought to contain sandy material rich in pyroxene and olivine: rock-forming minerals that are mafic (containing magnesium and iron) and characterized by their typically dark appearance.
Perspective view of the Moreux crater.
Image credit: ESA / DLR / FU Berlin / CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO.
Martian winds are also thought to have swept and gathered fine, basaltic, volcanic sand and ash into and around the crater.
Basaltic rock is commonplace on both Mars and other celestial bodies. It is a key component of the maria, or seas, on the Moon, for instance, and causes them to appear visibly and notably darker than the lunar highlands.
Many of the features, such as dunes and flows, surrounding the central peak and southern region of Moreux crater (to the left of the first image) appear to have been formed by ice.
This is thought to have occurred in the form of substantial episodes of glacial activity over the past few million years.
Many other features show signs of wind erosion, or having been formed via wind-related processes — most notably, the dunes covering the crater floor.
These dunes are largely sickle-shaped (barchanoid), and reveal much about wind direction within and across the crater.
From the orientation of the dunes, scientists inferred a complex system of prevailing winds, likely influenced by the topography of the crater itself.
Dunes to the north and east of the central peak are largely influenced by winds coming from the northeast, while dunes sitting west of the park are controlled by winds from the northwest.
These cross-cutting winds create an interesting and unique dune morphology within Moreux crater, adding to the feature’s intrigue.
The moon and Earth may be more different than previously thought, challenging existing models for how the moon formed, a new study finds.
Earth originated about 4.5 billion years ago, and previous research suggested that the moon arose a short time after that. For the past three decades, the prevailing explanation for the moon's origin was that it resulted from the collision of two protoplanets, or embryonic worlds. One of those was the newborn Earth, and the other was a Mars-size rock nicknamed Theia, after the mother of the moon in Greek myth. "Once the dust settled, two bodies were left — Earth and the moon," new study co-author Zachary Sharp, a planetary scientist at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, told Space.com.
This "giant impact hypothesis" seemed to explain many details about Earth and the moon, such as the large size of the moon compared with Earth and the rates of rotation of the two bodies. However, in the past 20 or so years, evidence has emerged to challenge that hypothesis and suggest a multitude of alternatives.
Computer models of the giant-impact scenario often say that 70% to 90% of the moon should be made of material from Theia. The problem is that most bodies in the solar system have unique chemical makeups, and so the Earth, Theia — and therefore the moon — should too. However, rock samples that the Apollo missions returned from the moon show that the natural satellite's composition is uncannily similar to Earth's, much more similar than such models would predict for versions of elements called isotopes. (Isotopes of an element each have different numbers of neutrons in their atomic nuclei.)
This extreme similarity in isotopes of elements such as oxygen has raised great challenges for the giant-impact scenario. One possibility is that the proto-Earth and Theia were nearly identical to start with when it came to oxygen isotopes, which seems unlikely. Another is that the proto-Earth and Theia's oxygen isotopes were fully mixed in the aftermath of the collision, perhaps due to an impact so violent that it vaporized a large portion of the early Earth, with the moon emerging from the resulting, doughnut-shaped mass called a synestia. But this and other scenarios may require unlikely impact conditions, scientists have said.
In the new study, researchers conducted new high-precision measurements of oxygen isotope levels in a range of lunar samples. The researchers expanded on previous work by focusing on a wide variety of types of moon rock.
The scientists found that there were subtle but regular differences in oxygen isotopic composition depending on the kind of lunar rock tested, Sharp said. This suggested that prior work that averaged together lunar isotope data while ignoring differences in rock type might not have given an accurate picture of the differences between Earth and the moon.
"Going into this project, it was expected that our results would likely mirror that of previous studies," study lead author Erick Cano, a stable-isotope geochemist at the University of New Mexico, told Space.com. "The most surprising part of our results was finding the amount of variation that we did between the individual lunar samples."
To explain these findings, the researchers suggested that the giant collision between proto-Earth and Theia did indeed lead to mixing between the bodies. Still, the resulting moon and Earth had distinct compositions, albeit very similar ones, Sharp said.
Later, in the first 1,000 or so years after the impact, vaporized rock from the disk of debris left behind by the impact likely led "to lava raining down on the moon for hundreds of years," Sharp said. Complex physical and chemical interactions between this lava rain and the ocean of magma that covered the newborn moon could then have led to an oxygen isotopic composition in the uppermost lunar rocks that was more similar to Earth's. In contrast, samples that came from the deep lunar mantle had the most different oxygen isotopic composition of the lunar rocks tested when compared to Earth.
The most important implication from these findings is that giant-impact models no longer have to account for virtually indistinguishable oxygen isotopic compositions between Earth and the moon, Cano said. "I think this will open the door for an entirely new range of impact scenarios," he added.
Future research can expand on this new study by analyzing other lunar samples, Cano said. "The obstacles for this future research may be the limited quantities of material that we have from the Apollo missions," he said. "Some of these lunar rock types were only brought back in very small quantities and can be very difficult to obtain for study."
Cano, Sharp and study co-author Chip Shearer, a lunar scientist also based at the University of New Mexico, detailed their findings online Monday (March 9) in the journal Nature Geoscience.
BLUE ORIGIN'S JEFF BEZOS DETAILS HIS RADICAL VISION FOR COLONIES IN SPACE
BLUE ORIGIN'S JEFF BEZOS DETAILS HIS RADICAL VISION FOR COLONIES IN SPACE
These colonies would support all manner of ecosystems.
Blue Origin wants to build the tools to help humanity explore the solar system, ultimately expanding life out to take advantage of more resources and support over one trillion people.
Jeff Bezos, founder of both the space-faring firm and internet retailer Amazon, explained at a Thursday event why Blue Origin is working to reduce the cost of rocket launches. It’s all part of his long-term vision to enable humans to continue growing, exploring the stars instead of staying on Earth and gradually rationing its use of energy and resources. During the event, he unveiled the Blue Moon lander capable of sending humans to the moon by 2024.
Bezos, who forms part of a new commercially-driven space race, has a slightly different vision to his contemporary Elon Musk. While the SpaceX founder wants a city on Mars by 2050, Bezos is more interested in staying close to humanity’s home — echoed in the name of the company, “Blue Origin.” The company’s long-term goal is to build the tools so humans can create giant floating colonies around the Earth, supporting all manner of ecosystems.
A future space city in a colony.
Blue Origin
BLUE ORIGIN: WHY DOES JEFF BEZOS WANT TO BUILD A SPACE COLONY?
Bezos highlighted immediate problems on Earth like hunger, homelessness and climate change. However, he also noted long-range problems, like the fact that humans will run out of energy on Earth. Humans use 97 watts of power per person in their metabolic rate, but as humans in the developed world people use 10,500 watts per person.
The abundance of energy has enabled generations to live a better life than their predecessors, but it’s an unsustainable trend. Human energy use is compounding at three percent, essentially doubling energy use every 25 years. Global energy use today could be met by covering Nevada in solar cells, but in around 200 years at current trends, humanity would need to cover the entire Earth’s surface in solar cells to meet energy needs.
Humanity has focused on efficiency to meet energy demands. In the year 1800 a human had to work 84 hours to earn enough for one hour of artificial light, but in 2019 a human only has to work 1.5 seconds for the same amount of light. Similarly, air transport has seen a fourfold efficiency gain: the amount of fuel needed to fly one person from Los Angeles to New York City has dropped from 109 gallons to 24 gallons. Computers have grown one trillion times more efficient, completing more calculations per kilowatt-second than ever before. These efficiencies, however, mean humans simply use more of these products.
“So, we get to choose,” Bezos said. “Do we want stasis and rationing, or do we want dynamism and growth?”
BLUE ORIGIN: WHAT WILL JEFF BEZOS’ SPACE COLONIES LOOK LIKE?
Bezos envisions a trillion humans in the solar system, with “a thousand Mozarts, or a thousand Einsteins.” In his vision, they would be living in colonies similar to the ones developed by physicist Gerard K. O’Neill.
O’Neill explained that humans are unlikely to live on planetary surfaces, as they’re small, far away, and essentially unable to support real-time communication. They also lack Earth-like gravity. Instead, they would live on something like this:
O'Neill's vision of a space colony.Blue Origin
These colonies are vast, with the International Space Station a tiny dot in comparison. Centrifugal force would be used to create artificial gravity, similar to the structures in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. Each colony would hold one million people. These colonies could create “pleasant” places to live, similar to Earth-based cities.
An interior view of the colony.Blue Origin
Humans could create recreational colonies, with zero gravity for flying around for fun.
The high-speed transit system inside a colony, with a drone taking care of a farm.Blue Origin
They could replicate the most tropical regions of Earth, which Bezos described as “Maui on its best day.”
A more nature-themed colony.Blue Origin
“What does the architecture look like when it no longer has a primary purpose of shelter?” Bezos said. “We’ll find out.”
A future city.Blue Origin
The colonies can be stationed close to Earth, so people can travel to and from with ease. Earth would become zoned residential and light industry, a “beautiful” place to visit. Heavy, damaging industry can be done off-Earth.
The amount of energy required to go between these colonies would be very low and fast, described by Bezos as a “day trip.”
A future space colony city.Blue Origin
It’s a bold idea that goes beyond even many science fiction authors’ imaginations. In an interview with O’Neill played at the Blue Origin event, legendary writer Isaac Asimov said that science fiction basically never touched on ideas like these because many authors were “planet chauvinists,” adding that the closest he came was through asteroid mining.
To create these colonies, humans will depend on two factors: radically reducing the cost of space launches, and utilizing in-space resources. Lifting all resources from Earth would be too difficult.
Bezos admitted that he would not be the one to make the colonies. The children in the front row of the audience may, as will their children. Bezos described “entrepreneurial activity,” future companies expanding into this new market.
Unfortunately, the lack of infrastructure means society cannot currently support these future industries. Bezos compared it to Amazon, which could use existing postal services to support its initial company. It didn’t need to invent a new infrastructure, nor did they have to create computers, or payment systems, or telecom networks. These networks enabled Amazon to benefit from this existing work. Similarly, Bezos explained that his generation will create the infrastructure to colonize space, paving the way for future generations to create the space version of Amazon and the like.
As his firm continues work on space rockets like New Glenn and lunar landers like Blue Moon, Bezos is focusing on building this infrastructure to help support colonies he probably won’t live to experience.
HD 74423 bulges toward its companion star.Gabriel Pérez Díaz (IAC)
If any beings live in the solar system HD 74423, their young ones would sketch daytime scenes quite differently than human children do. Where we draw one sun, they’d draw two. And where we draw our star as a round orb, they’d likely draw one of their suns as a bulging teardrop. Gifted animators might even capture the bump’s motion as it stretches toward and recedes from its companion over a matter of hours.
This star’s outlandish shape and behavior are prominent enough to be detected from Earth, 1,600 light years away, astronomers announced on Monday with a publication appearing in Nature Astronomy. Theorists have long suspected such a system was possible, but HD 74423 is the first confirmed binary containing one star whose pulses reach out toward its partner. And because it represents a new way for two stars to interact, it could also help astrophysicists better understand what makes some stars ripple and contort while others stay largely motionless.
“Wow,” wrote Gerald Handler, an astronomer at the Nicolaus Copernicus Astronomical Center in Poland in an email to a colleague upon first seeing data containing the flickers of the bulging star. “I have never seen something like that before.”
Our sun appears pretty unchanging day after day, but that’s because we’re looking at it from so far away. Up close, boiling blisters on its surface reveal the star’s more variable, liquid side. Other stars experience internal churning and bubbling too, and under the right circumstances they can positively pulse with activity. (The field of asteroseismology uses these reverberations to infer what’s going on deep beneath a star’s surface.)
One dramatic case of stellar throbbing is the type of star known as a “heartbeat star.” They occur in pairs with elliptical orbits that bring the two stars alternatively nearer together and farther apart. When the partners draw close, they give each other an extra gravitational squeeze that then relaxes as they pull away. Overtime these regular squeezes cause one or both stars to undulate—stretching out like an egg and then collapsing back into a squat orange-like shape.
HD 74423, the new discovery, is a pair of stars that whip around each other in a roughly circular orbit once every 38 hours. They keep a pretty constant distance from each other, Handler says, which means they don’t fit the definition of heartbeat stars. Their behavior is even weirder.
Since the partners orbit each other so closely, one partner’s gravitational pull drags the surface of the other toward it, stretching the star out into a persistent teardrop shape. And the teardrop pulsates inward and outward toward the companion. In an upcoming publication, the astronomers will propose that this pulsation takes place because the tapered part of the star is “fluffier,” Handler says, and this fluffiness amplifies natural ripples from deeper in the sun in the direction of the partner.
Astrophysicist Donald Kurtz of the University of Central Lancashire in the UK first predicted that such a setup might be possible decades ago, but no astronomer had located one until now. "I've been looking for a star like this for nearly 40 years and now we have finally found one," Kurtz said in a press release.
And they almost didn’t find it. NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), which focuses on looking for exoplanets, made the discovery possible. In HD 74423, the companion star blocks light from the teardrop star much as an exoplanet might, but not similarly enough to get picked up automatically by NASA’s planet-hunting algorithms.
Instead, two volunteer citizen scientists—Robert Gagliano and Tom Jacobs—independently noticed anomalous flickers in the light coming from HD 74423 as the teardrop grew, shrunk, and turned. They flagged the system as a potentially interesting target, and Handler confirmed the details by observing it more closely with the South African Astronomical Observatory. “Without those guys we probably would never have found it,” he says.
And now that they have it, the next step is to look for more. While this case is largely an astronomical curiosity, finding other pulsating teardrop stars could help answer a larger question in the study of stellar vibrations: why do some stars quake while others remain still? Even in the twin stars of HD 74423, only one appears to be quivering. Astronomers would also like to figure out more about how much oomph is required to orient the pulsations in a given direction, and what the system will look like in billions of years—all questions that require deeper insight into the structure and behavior of the balls of plasma that dot our universe.
“We just need to keep looking,” Handler says. “We have more questions right now than answers.”
Hundreds of mysterious mini-planets found lurking in far reaches of the solar system
Hundreds of mysterious mini-planets found lurking in far reaches of the solar system
Jasper Hamill
This is Neptune, a large and very cold gas giant which is almost three billion miles away from Earth
(Image: Nasa)
A vast swarm of micro-worlds has been found in a mysterious area of our solar system beyond the chilly ice giant Neptune’s orbit.
Astronomers spotted more than 300 ‘trans-Neptunian’ objects in the far reaches of humanity’s home star system.
These are minor planets and are part of a large population of objects orbiting in a region past Neptune.
The most famous trans- Neptunian object is Pluto, although this classification is controversial because some stargazers think it’s a proper planet even though it was downgraded to the status of ‘dwarf planet’ in 2006.
Researchers from Penn University were looking for dark matter when they observed the new micro-worlds.
It’s hoped that studying these new objects will help to solve the mystery of Planet 9 – a hypothetical huge world believed to exist way out towards the edge of our solar system.
Pluto is regarded as a trans-Neptunian object
(Image: Nasa)
Professors Gary Bernstein said: ‘There are lots of ideas about giant planets that used to be in the solar system and aren’t there anymore, or planets that are far away and massive but too faint for us to have noticed yet.
‘Making the catalogue is the fun discovery part. Then when you create this resource; you can compare what you did find to what somebody’s theory said you should find.’
Last year scientists offered a new theory to explain why they haven’t been able to see Planet 9, suggesting it was a ‘primordial black hole’ the size of a bowling ball with enough gravitational pull to affect the chunks of ice and rock way out in the reaches of space.
Primordial black holes haven’t been proven to exist yet – but it’s believed they are much smaller black holes that formed during the big bang.
Planet 9 has also not yet been officially discovered, but its presence was inferred by analysis of trans-Neptunian objects.
Observations of these objects revealed ‘gravitational anomalies’ which may have been caused by the push and pull of a large planet.
Astronomers have also glimpsed a number of ‘microlensing events’, which is a phenomenon caused when passing light ‘bends’ under the influence of a large object’s gravitational pull.
The Planet 9 object could be one rogue hole that was ‘captured’ by the sun and steered into orbit around it or part of a larger population.
In an early version of a study published on Arxiv, scientists wrote: ‘We highlight that the anomalous orbits of Trans-Neptunian Objects and an excess in microlensing events… can be simultaneously explained by a new population of astrophysical bodies with mass several times that of Earth.’
Primordial black holes haven’t actually been proven to exist yet
(Getty Images/iStockphoto)
‘We take these objects to be primordial black holes and point out the orbits of Trans-Neptunian Objects would be altered if one of these holes was captured by the Solar System, in line with the Planet 9 hypothesis.
‘Capture of a free-floating planet is a leading explanation for the origin of Planet 9 and we show that the probability of capturing a PBH instead is comparable.’
It’s hard enough to spot a planet at the fringes of our solar system, let alone a mini black hole. But these ancient holes may give off ‘annihilation signals’.
This doesn’t mean they sound an alarm before they decide to attack but is the name for a process predicted to take place within ‘dark matter halos’ believed to surround the holes.
While many sports use inflated balls that trace back to kicking or throwing inflated animal bladders, a game involving a hard rubber ball predates them all because rubber was only grown in Mexico and central America. That game carries the generic name “ballgame” and most people know about it because artwork shows the games were played in the nude and the losers may have been sacrificed – depictions used by European invaders to depict Mesoamericans ad brutal savages to be conquered and educated. As always, the uncovering of new evidence changes things and newly-discovered archeological finds show that Mesoamericans were playing their ballgames as early as 1443 BCE and the game itself was more ‘hip’ that once thought.
“We challenge the lowland paradigm by providing evidence that the earliest highland ballcourt dates to the Early Formative, nearly a millennium earlier than any previous highland architectural data and just over two centuries after the Paso de la Amada court. We contribute two types of ballgame data recently excavated at Etlatongo: remains of two formal superimposed architectural ballcourts and associated ballplayer ceramic figurines.”
A new study published in the journal Science Advances challenges the idea that organized ballgames with rubber balls were developed and played almost exclusively in coastal and lowland areas of Mexico and Central America. Excavations done from 2015 to 2017 by the Formative Etlatongo Project (FEP) in the Nochixtlán Valley of the Mixteca Alta, Oaxaca, Mexico, uncovered a ballcourt dating to 1374 BCE – just 200 years after the oldest known coastal court and centuries before other highland courts.
Athletes hit a rubber ball with their hips in a version of Mesoamerica’s ballgame.
(WIKIMEDIA COMMONS, CHRISTOPH WEIDITZ, GERMANISCHES NATIONALMUSEUM NÜRNBERG)
Even more interesting, figurines of players showed them wearing thick protective belts around their hips, which means they were playing a rare form of ballgame where competitors moved the ball forward and around by bouncing it off of their hips, with walls around the court allowing for bounces and rebounds similar to today’s hockey. The courts were long and narrow, which might make the game resemble a ‘hip’ version of handball.
Finally, there were none of the famous rings or hoops attached to the wall as targets or goals, which indicates this ballgame may have resembled volleyball, with players trying to get their opponents to miss in order to score. This indicates to the researchers that this was an early game in the process of transformation, just like the Mesoamerican society at the time, when warring leaders switched to trade and cooperation between regions and saw the sport as a great way to show power as well as teamwork and friendly competition.
Yeah, yeah, yeah … what about the human sacrifices?
Ah, yes … the part we all remember from history class. Figurines discovered at lowland game sites show players standing over captive opponents, leading to speculation that some sort of victory torture was involved in ballgame. With the known propensity for human sacrifice in other aspects Mesoamerican life, it was probably easy to connect the dots and imply this was an act of beheading and perhaps some games were continued with human heads for balls. No evidence has been found of ballgame-related human sacrifice or blood-spilling at Etlatongo, so it appears the practice evolved later as the game became more symbolic of war, fertility, religion and struggles with the underworld.
As a result of this discovery, archeologists expect to find more ballcourts in the Mexican highlands, which give more insight into life in pre-Columbian Mesoamerica, just like sports reflects real life today.
Daytime disc-shaped UFO VIDEO: Brooklyn, NY – March 2020
Daytime disc-shaped UFO VIDEO: Brooklyn, NY – March 2020
New footage of a solid black oval disc-shaped object flying in the sky above Brooklyn, New York on Saturday, 14th March 2020.
Witness report:
Very flat donut shaped disc, black in color, no noise, very quiet neighborhood other than birds and occasional cars passing by. I walk my dog every morning at 7am. Today i stepped out for no more than 60 seconds when the brightness of the moon caught my attention.As I glared at the moon for a bit, I saw this flat,black, disc shaped donut appear from over the houses across the street so I immediately took out my phone and started to record it. Got about 2mins on film and went online seeking disc shaped drones… Nothing resembled what I saw and what youre seeing in my video. Then I tried searching flat donut shaped UFOs and found a bunch of these objects like the one in my video. I cant say for sure what it is, but it’s definitely unidentifiable. I hope the public can help me figure out what I saw. Oh and excuse my language, it’s a NYC thing.
Paleontologists have found an exceptionally well-preserved and diminutive skull of a previously unknown bird-like dinosaur species in a piece of Cretaceous-period amber from northern Myanmar.
Photograph, computed tomography scans and interpretive drawings of the Oculudentavis khaungraaea specimen: (a) photograph of the amber piece with skull ventrolaterally exposed; scan (b) and drawing (c), left lateral view; scan (d) and drawing (e), rostral view; scan (f) and drawing (g), occipital view; scan (h) and drawing (i), dorsal view. Abbreviations: de – dentary, fr – frontal, hy – hyoid bone (or bones), jg – jugal, la – lacrimal, mx – maxilla, pa – parietal, pm – premaxilla, po – postorbital, qd – quadrate, sc – scleral ossicle, so – supraoccipital, sq – squamosal, th – teeth. Scale bars – 5 mm; longer scale bar below (b) applies to (b-i).
Image credit: Xing et al, doi: 10.1038/s41586-020-2068-4.
The newly-identified species, named Oculudentavis khaungraae, could represent the smallest known Mesozoic dinosaur in the fossil record.
“Amber preservation of vertebrates is rare, and this provides us a window into the world of dinosaurs at the lowest end of the body-size spectrum,” said Dr. Lars Schmitz, a researcher in the W. M. Keck Science Department at Claremont McKenna, Scripps and Pitzer Colleges.
“Its unique anatomical features point to one of the smallest and most ancient birds ever found.”
The piece of amber, just 31 x 20 x 8.5 mm, containing the skull of Oculudentavis khaungraae came from the Angbamo site near Tanai in the Hukawng valley of Myanmar’s Kachin province.
Dr. Schmitz and colleagues studied the specimen’s distinct features with high-resolution synchrotron scans to determine how the skull differs from those of other bird-like dinosaur specimens.
They found that the shape and size of the eye bones suggested a diurnal lifestyle, but also revealed surprising similarities to the eyes of modern lizards.
The skull also shows a unique pattern of fusion between different bone elements, as well as the presence of teeth.
Oculudentavis khaungraaea.
Image credit: Han Zhixin.
“The specimen’s tiny size and unusual form suggests a never-before-seen combination of features,” the scientists said.
“The discovery represents a specimen previously missing from the fossil record and provides new implications for understanding the evolution of birds, demonstrating the extreme miniaturization of avian body sizes early in the evolutionary process.”
The specimen’s preservation also highlights amber deposits’ potential to reveal the lowest limits of vertebrate body size.
“No other group of living birds features species with similarly small crania in adults,” Dr. Schmitz said.
“This discovery shows us that we have only a small glimpse of what tiny vertebrates looked like in the age of the dinosaurs.”
Archaeologists Unearth Long-Lost Capital of Ancient Maya Kingdom
Archaeologists Unearth Long-Lost Capital of Ancient Maya Kingdom
Archaeologists excavating the site of Lacanja Tzeltal in Mexico have discovered the ruins of the capital of a kingdom....known as Sak Tz’i’ or “white dog”...
Map of architectural groups and stream channels at the site of Lacanja Tzeltal, Mexico.
Image credit: Golden et al, doi: 10.1080/00934690.2019.1684748.
The archaeological site of Lacanja Tzeltal is located in what is today the state of Chiapas in southeastern Mexico. It was likely first settled by 750 BCE and then occupied for over 1,000 years.
Sak Tz’i’ was by no means the most powerful of the Maya kingdoms, and its remnants are modest compared to the more well-known sites of Chichen Itza and nearby Palenque.
“Finding Sak Tz’i’ is still a major advance in our understanding of ancient Maya politics and culture,” said Dr. Charles Golden, an anthropological archaeologist at Brandeis University.
The residents of Sak Tz’i’ lived in the countryside harvesting a wide variety of crops and making pottery and stone tools.
The archaeologists found the remnants of what was likely the city’s marketplace where these goods were brought to be sold.
The kingdom’s residents also came to the city to attend ceremonial ball games in which players kept a solid rubber ball, sometimes as heavy as twenty pounds, bouncing back and forth across a narrow playing field using their hips and shoulders.
On the northeastern end of the city are the ruins of a 45-foot (13.7 m) high pyramid and several surrounding structures that served as elite residences and sites for religious rituals.
The center of religious and political activity was the Plaza Muk’ul Ton (Monuments Plaza), a 1.5-acre (0.6 ha) courtyard where the people gathered for ceremonies. A staircase leads from the plaza to a towering platform, where temples and reception halls were arrayed and members of the royal family once held court and might have been buried.
Sak Tz’i’ had the misfortune of being surrounded on all sides by more powerful states. For the inhabitants of the capital and countryside, this meant the perpetual threat of warfare and violent interruptions of daily life.
The researchers found evidence that the capital was surrounded on one side by steep-walled streams. On the other side, masonry walls were built to keep out invaders.
These fortifications weren’t always effective. Inscriptions on one monument tell of a time when at least a portion of the city was set ablaze during a conflict with neighboring kingdoms.
Ultimately, the survival of Sak Tz’i’ may have depended as much on its ability to make peace with its neighbors — and even play them off of each other — as its military strength.
“This is one of the reasons Sak Tz’i’ holds so much interest for researchers,” Dr. Golden said.
“Little is known about how mid-size Maya realms maneuvered and managed to persist in the face of constant hostilities from more powerful kingdoms.”
Drawing (left) and 3D model (right) of Panel 1 from the site of Lacanja Tzeltal, Mexico.
Image credit: Golden et al, doi: 10.1080/00934690.2019.1684748.
So far, dozens of sculptures have been found among the ruins at the Sak Tz’i’ site, though many have been damaged by looters or degraded over the millennia by rain, forest fires and lush tropical vegetation.
The best-preserved sculpture is a 2- by 4-foot (0.6 x 1.2 m) tablet. Its inscriptions tell stories about a mythical water serpent, described in poetic couplets as ‘shiny sky, shiny earth,’ and several elderly, stony gods whose names aren’t given. There are also accounts of the lives of dynastic rulers.
Another inscription tells of a mythic flood, while others list what are probably historic dates for the births and battles of various rulers, including a king named K’ab Kante’.
This intertwining of myth and reality is typical of Maya inscriptions and had special meaning for ancient scribes and readers.
At the bottom of the tablet is a dancing royal figure. The Maya believed royalty could become one with or even transform into a god. In this case, the ruler is dressed as the rain god connected to violent tropical storms, Yopaat.
In his right hand, he carries an axe that is the lightning bolt of the storm, which has a deified aspect named K’awiil. In his left hand, the figure carries a ‘manopla,’ a stone gauntlet or bludgeon used in ritual combat.
The team’s paper was published in the Journal of Field Archaeology.
Something Strange Police Dash Cam Footages in Texas and Georgia
Something Strange Police Dash Cam Footages in Texas and Georgia
Today we’re doing the top five mysterious and unexplained dashcam videos. Let us know what you think of these clips in the comments below! Some of them sure are creepy.
If NASA astronauts land on the moon as planned in 2024, they'll have an advantage their Apollo predecessors lacked: insights gathered by tiny robotic spacecraft that visit the moon before them.
NASA has announced the first two such projects selected to fly as part of the Artemis program to land astronauts on the moon: Lunar Flashlight and the Cislunar Autonomous Positioning System Technology Operations and Navigation Experiment (CAPSTONE). The missions represent the next step for the small spacecraft, known as cubesats, which became available for Earth orbit in the 1990s as electronics and sensors shrank to allow bread-box-sized (or slightly larger) satellites to perform scientific work. Since then, cubesats have become so powerful that they are used regularly for Earth observations. And the first interplanetary cubesats successfully flew to Mars in 2018 with the NASA InSight mission, so the spacecraft are becoming hardy enough for deep-space missions.
Thanks to their diminutive size, cubesats are both easy to pack on a rocket and cheap to launch. They often ride along with larger satellites. As NASA's Artemis program aims to return astronauts to the moon in 2024, NASA is planning to launch the first lunar cubesats in 2021.
"In the case of lunar exploration, cubesats are proving themselves to be increasingly capable platforms to precede human explorers on the moon and Mars," Christopher Baker, small spacecraft technology program executive within NASA's Space Technology Mission Directorate, said in a NASA statement.
The agency has said that a total of 13 cubesats will fly on the first flight in the program, Artemis I, which is currently scheduled for the second half of 2021 after timeline slips. That mission will send an Orion spacecraft on an uncrewed loop around the moon to test lunar technologies ahead of human landings.
One of those cubesats will be Lunar Flashlight, a collaboration among several NASA centers, which will look for ice deposits in permanently shadowed craters of the moon and try to estimate how much ice is there, using lasers. Explorers hope that water ice can address needs for drinking water or rocket fuel. (Water is also heavy to tote from Earth, so the ability to get water from lunar ice would reduce the cost of future exploration missions.) Another satellite with ground-penetrating radar, or some rover missions, could follow Lunar Flashlight to better characterize the depth of the deposits.
The second newly confirmed cubesat, CAPSTONE, is a commercial collaboration. And this cubesat won't launch on a NASA rocket; instead, it is scheduled to fly on a Rocket Lab Electron vehicle in early 2021. CAPSTONE will fly in the same lunar orbit planned for NASA'sGateway space station, to test entering the unusual orbit. Orbiting the moon is further complicated by mass concentrations under the lunar surface that perturb orbits, and NASA doesn't want to risk launching the larger and more expensive Gateway without a test. "No spacecraft has been placed there," Baker said. "We want to measure what it takes to get into and remain in that orbit," particularly fuel, he said.
CAPSTONE will also test future navigation without reliance on tracking from Earth, by figuring out the satellite's position relative to NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter. This technique will allow missions to venture deeper into space without needing constant contact with Earth.
NASA is also looking at the possibility of using swarms of cubesats that work together to make observations and solve problems. Baker suggested that these cubesats could be used as a "quick reaction" tool to let researchers respond to the most pressing data as it comes in.
"Frankly, given the pace of the small spacecraft community, [along with] our academic and industry partners, there may well be an underestimation of what we can accomplish in the next five years," he said.
Can you really survive traveling through an enormous black hole? A team of physicists has been studying the notion.
(Roen Kelly/Discover)
One of the most cherished science fiction scenarios is using a black hole as a portal to another dimension or time or universe. That fantasy may be closer to reality than previously imagined.
Black holes are perhaps the most mysterious objects in the universe. They are the consequence of gravity crushing a dying star without limit, leading to the formation of a true singularity – which happens when an entire star gets compressed down to a single point yielding an object with infinite density. This dense and hot singularity punches a hole in the fabric of spacetime itself, possibly opening up an opportunity for hyperspace travel. That is, a short cut through spacetime allowing for travel over cosmic scale distances in a short period.
Researchers previously thought that any spacecraft attempting to use a black hole as a portal of this type would have to reckon with nature at its worst. The hot and dense singularity would cause the spacecraft to endure a sequence of increasingly uncomfortable tidal stretching and squeezing before being completely vaporized.
Flying Through a Black Hole
My team at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth and a colleague at Georgia Gwinnett College have shown that all black holes are not created equal. If the black hole like Sagittarius A*, located at the center of our own galaxy, is large and rotating, then the outlook for a spacecraft changes dramatically. That’s because the singularity that a spacecraft would have to contend with is very gentle and could allow for a very peaceful passage.
The reason that this is possible is that the relevant singularity inside a rotating black hole is technically “weak,” and thus does not damage objects that interact with it. At first, this fact may seem counter intuitive. But one can think of it as analogous to the common experience of quickly passing one’s finger through a candle’s near 2,000-degree flame, without getting burned.
Hold your finger close to the flame and it will burn. Swipe it through quickly and you won’t feel much. Similarly, passing through a large rotating black hole, you are more likely to come out the other side unharmed.
(Credit:mirbasar/Shutterstock.com)
Hold your finger close to the flame and it will burn. Swipe it through quickly and you won’t feel much. Similarly, passing through a large rotating black hole, you are more likely to come out the other side unharmed. (Credit: mirbasar/Shutterstock.com)
My colleague Lior Burko and I have been investigating the physics of black holes for over two decades. In 2016, my Ph.D. student, Caroline Mallary, inspired by Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster film “Interstellar,” set out to test if Cooper (Matthew McConaughey’s character), could survive his fall deep into Gargantua – a fictional, supermassive, rapidly rotating black hole some 100 million times the mass of our sun. “Interstellar” was based on a book written by Nobel Prize-winning astrophysicist Kip Thorne and Gargantua’s physical properties are central to the plot of this Hollywood movie.
Building on work done by physicist Amos Ori two decades prior, and armed with her strong computational skills, Mallary built a computer model that would capture most of the essential physical effects on a spacecraft, or any large object, falling into a large, rotating black hole like Sagittarius A*.
Not Even a Bumpy Ride?
What she discovered is that under all conditions an object falling into a rotating black hole would not experience infinitely large effects upon passage through the hole’s so-called inner horizon singularity. This is the singularity that an object entering a rotating black hole cannot maneuver around or avoid. Not only that, under the right circumstances, these effects may be negligibly small, allowing for a rather comfortable passage through the singularity. In fact, there may no noticeable effects on the falling object at all. This increases the feasibility of using large, rotating black holes as portals for hyperspace travel.
Mallary also discovered a feature that was not fully appreciated before: the fact that the effects of the singularity in the context of a rotating black hole would result in rapidly increasing cycles of stretching and squeezing on the spacecraft. But for very large black holes like Gargantua, the strength of this effect would be very small. So, the spacecraft and any individuals on board would not detect it.
This graph depicts the physical strain on the spacecraft’s steel frame as it plummets into a rotating black hole. The inset shows a detailed zoom-in for very late times. The important thing to note is that the strain increases dramatically close to the black hole, but does not grow indefinitely. Therefore, the spacecraft and its inhabitants may survive the journey.
(Credit: Khanna/UMassD)
The crucial point is that these effects do not increase without bound; in fact, they stay finite, even though the stresses on the spacecraft tend to grow indefinitely as it approaches the black hole.
There are a few important simplifying assumptions and resulting caveats in the context of Mallary’s model. The main assumption is that the black hole under consideration is completely isolated and thus not subject to constant disturbances by a source such as another star in its vicinity or even any falling radiation. While this assumption allows important simplifications, it is worth noting that most black holes are surrounded by cosmic material – dust, gas, radiation.
Therefore, a natural extension of Mallary’s work would be to perform a similar study in the context of a more realistic astrophysical black hole.
Mallary’s approach of using a computer simulation to examine the effects of a black hole on an object is very common in the field of black hole physics. Needless to say, we do not have the capability of performing real experiments in or near black holes yet, so scientists resort to theory and simulations to develop an understanding, by making predictions and new discoveries.
The set-back - the latest in a long series for this project - has been signposted for some weeks.
All the hardware is built, but there remains an intimidating list of outstanding checks that must be completed before the mission can be declared flight-ready.
Chief among the obstacles in the timeline are some underperforming electronics boxes in the Russian descent and lander mechanisms that would put the rover safely on the ground; and also the overall flight software from Europe.
Full testing required to achieve confidence in these items necessarily pushes the project beyond July/August.
Matters have been further complicated in recent days by the international coronavirus crisis which has started to disrupt the engineering effort.
Image copyrightTHALES ALENIA SPACEImage captionAll the hardware to carry the rover to Mars is built
"We have made a difficult but well-weighed decision to postpone the launch to 2022. It is driven primarily by the need to maximise the robustness of all ExoMars systems," announced Russian space agency (Roscosmos) Director General, Dmitry Rogozin.
"I am confident that the steps that we and our European colleagues are taking to ensure mission success will be justified and will unquestionably bring solely positive results for the mission implementation."
European Space Agency Director General, Jan Wörner, added that coronavirus was having an impact on the preparations, "because people from different places of industry in Russia, in Italy and France cannot move easily as in the past. So, therefore, there is also an impact, but I would not like to say the coronavirus is the one and only reason - but... it has an impact on the mission, yes."
Launching in late 2022 means the rover will touch down in 2023, given the cruise time to the Red Planet.
NASA/JPL/UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONAImage caption
The rover was to be targeted at Oxia Planum on Mars. That won't change for 2023
Rosalind Franklin has been built to try to detect life, past or present, on the Red Planet.
Because of this, the rover and its instruments have been prepared to incredibly stringent levels of cleanliness. This status must now be maintained over the coming two years of storage.
The project's industrial prime contractor, Thales Alenia Space of Italy, will do this in an ISO-7 chamber at its Turin factory.
"We will have to make sure that we flush permanently the ultra-clean zone and maybe even have to make an outgassing activity to make sure pollutants are all evacuated before making the rover ready again to be transferred to [the launch pad in 2022], " explained Francois Spoto, Esa's ExoMars Team Leader.
Unclear is precisely how much the delay will cost, but Esa's Director of Human and Robotic Exploration, David Parker, said it wouldn't have a significant effect on his programmes.
"We have a budget, which includes a contingency margin for delayed launch to 2022," he told BBC News.
"Of course, that's based on our estimates; we now have to go and negotiate with industry to get the confirmed costs. But that's our normal life - we have to estimate the cost of things, define it and then negotiate with industry. But no, it should not be a financial crisis."
ESAImage caption
Artist's impression: The robot rover will search for life on Mars
First envisaged as a small technology demonstration mission, the robot vehicle was formally approved by European nations back in 2005, with a launch first pencilled in for 2011.
Then, as ambitions grew and the design was beefed up, the start date was put back. At first, it was shifted to 2013, but further problems saw slippage to 2016, and then again to 2018.
For much of its history, the rover project, codenamed ExoMars, has had to fumble through with budgets that were insufficient to maintain the promised timelines.
At one stage, back in 2009, Esa decided to join forces with America to try to make the mission happen, only to see Nasa walk away three years later when its priorities changed.
Even with this fresh impetus, however, the project continued to stumble. The Esa-Roscosmos 2018 target gave way to 2020. Now the launch date is being moved again.
The rover has been an important component of British space policy. The UK is the second biggest contributor to the ExoMars programme.
Graham Turnock, Chief Executive of the UK Space Agency, said: "ExoMars is an important, ambitious mission, with the UK-built Rosalind Franklin rover set to help us understand the past environment of Mars and search for evidence of life. To be successful, the mission must be carried out within an acceptable level of risk, so I support Esa's responsible decision to delay the launch for further testing."
Astronomers were using the Dark Energy Survey (DES) to detect dark energy in space but upon studying the data, they were surprised to come across another major discovery. By analyzing the first four years of data obtained when the DES was in operation (from August 2013 to January 2019), they were able to identify a total of 139 new minor planets.
These minor planets are located far beyond Neptune on the edge of our Solar System. A minor planet can be anything from an asteroid to a dwarf planet. Trans-Neptunian objects (or TNOs) are minor planets in our Solar System that orbit the sun at a farther distance than Neptune. And they’re not easy to find as they are quite small and are very far from us – for comparison, Neptune is 4.5 billion kilometers (30 AU or astronomical units) from the sun.
Gary Bernstein, who is a physicist and astronomer from the University of Pennsylvania as well as one of the authors of the research study, stated, “The number of TNOs you can find depends on how much of the sky you look at and what’s the faintest thing you can find.” The team certainly had a tough job as they studied 7 billion dots that could have possibly been minor planets. They were able to eliminate objects that were located in the same spot for several consecutive nights as they were not moving in the same manner as TNOs would. After extensive work, they were able to conclude that 316 of them were TNOs and 139 had not been previously documented.
The new TNOs were located at distances from 30 to more than 90 astronomical units from the sun – from around the same distance as Neptune is from our sun to more than three times further. As a matter of fact, seven of the new trans-Neptunian objects have been called extreme TNOs, meaning that they have an average orbital distance of more than 150 astronomical units. Once confirmed, these would be the most distance objects ever seen in our Solar System. So far, there have been approximately 3,000 TNOs identified in our solar system.
With the discovery of these new minor planets, and especially the extreme TNOs, researchers are hopeful to finally find evidence of Planet Nine which has been theorized to orbit at a distance of 200 astronomical units. “There are lots of ideas about giant planets that used to be in the Solar System and aren’t there anymore, or planets that are far away and massive but too faint for us to have noticed yet,” Bernstein noted.
With approximately a year and a half left of data still to study, who knows what the scientists will find – maybe they’ll discover hundreds more minor planets or perhaps even proof of the existence of Planet Nine. We’ll just have to wait and see.
INWONERS VAN NOORD NEDERLAND VERRAST DOOR DUBBELE MAAN AAN DE HEMEL
INWONERS VAN NOORD NEDERLAND VERRAST DOOR DUBBELE MAAN AAN DE HEMEL
Een aantal inwoners van noord Nederland wreef zich een aantal dagen geleden in de ogen, want ondanks dat ze geen alcohol hadden gedronken zagen ze toch dingen dubbel. Het gebeurde ’s avonds en mensen die naar de maan keken, zagen opeens duidelijk twee exemplaren aan de hemel.
Als één iemand iets ziet, dan is het soms moeilijk om dat anderen te doen geloven, want men zegt al snel: “Je ziet dingen die er niet zijn”. Als er meerdere mensen zijn die iets vreemds zien, dan wordt het opeens wel echt en als er dan ook nog iemand foto’s neemt, dan heb je een echt mysterie.
Een dergelijk mysterie vond plaats afgelopen maandagavond in Emmen en op andere plaatsen in Noord Nederland.
Hierna wat een lezer uit Emmen ons vertelt (dank!):
Gisteren om 18.00 uur liep ik met mijn hond en keek ik ook naar de maan. Het leek alsof de wolken precies voor de Maan verdwenen. Ik verklaarde dat met lichtsterkte. Ik keek zelf wel heel raar naar de maan. Ik weet nog dat ik dacht dat het wel een tunnel leek.
Nu krijg ik van vrienden uit Breda met een Nikon p900 deze foto's toegestuurd. Ik dacht eerst dat ze ze zelf gemaakt hadden. Maar nee, wat bleek was dat ze de foto's hadden gekregen van iemand die notabene op steenworp afstand bij mij in de wijk woont
Dit zijn de foto’s:
Op onze vraag of het tweede object pas zichtbaar werd na het maken van de foto, krijgen we het volgende antwoord:
Nee zij nam de foto omdat zij het met het blote oog zag. Het was een zij. Was zelfs bij mij in de wijk hahaha. Ik zie ook wel eens gekke dingen maar heb nooit camera bij me. Neem vanaf nu mijn mobiel maar eens mee als ik mijn hond aan het uitlaten ben.
En dan nog de verdere toelichting:
Het zit dus verborgen achter de bewolking volgens de maker van de foto, en toen de bewolking wegtrok zag ze het en maakte een foto van de maan en het Licht dat op een maan lijkt. En toeval bestaat niet. Hier zit dus korte tijd tussen en ze vindt het vreemd dat de andere maan achter die wolk zat.
Wanneer een object zich achter een wolk bevindt en vanuit daar tevoorschijn komt zoals ook duidelijk op de foto’s is te zien, kan er ook geen sprake zijn van een lensflare. Bovendien heeft de dame die de foto maakte het tweede object ook met het blote oog gezien.
Klaarblijkelijk is zij niet de enige, want wij ontvingen nog de volgende aanvulling:
Ik heb inmiddels 5 getuigen in Noord Nederland die deze Maan ook hebben gezien.
Mochten er meer mensen zijn die dit hebben gezien of die denken te weten wat het is dat we hier zien, laat het ons weten via redactie (apenstaart) niburu.co
I was looking over a Mars photo when I noticed two objects that resemble shoes. Each shoe is different in size. One is large and the other small as if they were feet from a parent and child. Why would only feet be left is unknown, but nevertheless, they sit there in front of us. Long ago I suggested that Mars may have had a weapon that could turn flesh and bone into stone...a weapon that would leave statues as reminders of the fear that you should have of the enemy. I still believe this to be true, and in front of us is the evidence. Scott C. Waring
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- Gemiddelde waardering: 0/5 - (0 Stemmen) Categorie:Ruins, strange artifacts on other planets, moons, ed ( Fr, EN, NL )
We Are Being Watched By Large Alien Ships
We Are Being Watched By Large Alien Ships
Impressive ... this is getting more and more exciting, these formations of UFOs and huge spacecrafts moving freely through space and close to the International Space Station.
The ongoing appearance of these clusters of extraterrestrial spacecrafts is no longer a coincidence, something is going on in deep space forcing these UFOs to move to other locations.
You can clearly see the structure and shape of some of these large alien ships.
A scientist who believes coronavirus came from space by meteor now says prevailing winds are spreading the disease to the hardest-hit countries.
Professor Chandra Wickramasinghe of the Buckingham Centre for Astrobiology has alleged that the meteor that exploded over China in October released viral particles.
Once in the upper stratosphere, the virus either fell to Earth or got caught up in the stratospheric air currents that circle the Earth, he told MailOnline.
From here, the virus has spread along 'a global band of between 40–60° latitude north', with all the 'main strong cases' appearing 'exactly along that range', he said.
Infectious disease experts have debunked Professor Wickramasinghe's claim, however, noting that COVID-19 is similar to other known coronaviruses.
This, they explained, would suggest that it was also transmitted to humans from animals — not from a recent meteorite fall.
Scroll down for video
The scientist who claimed that coronavirus came from space by meteor has said that prevailing winds are spreading the disease to the hardest-hit countries. Pictured, the fireball caused by a meteor burning up in the Earth's atmosphere above China on October 11, 2019
The virus has spread by the prevailing winds along 'a global band of between 40–60° latitude north', with all the 'main strong cases' appearing 'exactly along that range', Professor Wickramasinghe said. Experts have dismissed the claim that the virus could be spread by the air — noting that, even if it did, it would thin out travelling international distances
'The sudden outbreak of a new coronavirus is very likely to have a space connection,' Professor Wickramasinghe told The Express in February.
The astrobiologist is a proponent of 'panspermia' — the theory that life is seeded across the universe by travelling on meteors, comets and space dust.
A meteor was seen as a blazing, bright fireball flying across the sky in the north-east of the country at around 12:16 am on October 11, 2019.
The space rock — which reportedly shone so brightly that it made the night sky look light day — is thought to have disintegrated in the atmosphere.
'We consider the seemingly outrageous possibility that hundreds of trillions of infective viral particles were then released embedded in the form of fine carbonaceous dust,' he added.
In support of the theory, he highlighted the 'remarkable aspect' that the coronavirus outbreak occurred in the same region of China as where the fireball was seen.
He added that he thinks that the meteor 'contained, embedded within it, a monoculture of infective 2019-nCoV virus particles that survived in the interior of the incandescent meteor.'
'We believe infectious agents are prevalent in space, carried on comets, and can fall towards Earth through the troposphere. These, we think, can and have in the past gone on to bring about human disease epidemics.'
The MailOnline asked Professor Wickramasinghe whether the correlation of a single meteor sighting with a virus outbreak proved that the former caused the latter.
'It's an interesting connection to take note of, I suppose, but it certainly doesn't prove that that's the way that it took place necessarily,' Professor Wickramasinghe admitted.
The scientific community, however, has largely dismissed Professor Wickramasinghe's claims.
'The most compelling evidence that SARS-CoV-2 didn’t come from a meteorite is that it is so closely related to other known coronaviruses,' infectious disease specialist Dominic Sparkes of University College London told IFLScience.
'It’s closely related to the SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome) virus that caused an outbreak in the early 2000s and the MERS (Middle Eastern respiratory syndrome) virus which still causes disease currently,' he added.
'SARS was found to be the result of bats transferring virus to civet cats which transferred on to humans, while MERS is known to be passed on to humans from camels.'
'It therefore is far less of a leap to assume the closely-related SARS-CoV-2 virus has been passed on to humans in the same way.'
The meteor, pictured, was seen as a blazing, bright fireball flying across the sky in the north-east of the country at around 12:16 am on October 11, 2019
Professor Wickramasinghe, however, has dismissed these arguments, suggesting that the similarity of the coronavirus sequences in humans and animals like bat is 'highly questionable' and is 'being re-analysed' — and that even if they were similar, this would not disprove the suggestion that the virus came from space.
Experts have also previously noted that coronavirus is not being spread by the wind.
'Even if the virus could be spread by air, it would be thinned largely to the extent that people could ignore it after it had travelled a few kilometres,' meteorologist Lam Chiu-ying said last month.
'Don’t believe it, preventing the local spread of the virus is the most important thing.'
COVID-19 only survives for 72 hours on surfaces and the US Centre for Disease Control has said that six feet is a safe distance to avoid person-to-person infection.
The space rock — which reportedly shone so brightly that it made the night sky look light day — is thought to have disintegrated in the atmosphere
'Viruses from space is an old chestnut that deserves to be roasted immediately,' said virologist Ian Jones of the University of Reading.
'The sequence of the Wuhan virus is very close to those previously observed in bats.'
'In contrast to the authors’ statement transmission among people is clear, as in the recent Brighton cases, and the epidemiology modelling clearly tracks back to the Wuhan seafood market in December last year.'
'The trouble with this sort of nonsense is that it detracts from the really detailed work that is currently ongoing to track, cope with and prevent infection.'
What the virus really demonstrates is the troublesome side of evolution, everything jostling to gain a toehold somewhere. Getting ahead of it needs a range of dedicated programs, not this sort of guff.'
'We consider the seemingly outrageous possibility that hundreds of trillions of infective viral particles were then released embedded in the form of fine carbonaceous dust,' Professor Wickramasinghe said. His theory has been rebutted by infectious disease experts
Professor Wickramasinghe — along with his colleague Sir Fred Hoyle of the University of Cambridge — has been a leading proponent of the panspermia hypothesis since the mid 1970s.
'The earth is not a disconnected entity in the biosphere — we are connected to the external universe,' Professor Wickramasinghe said.
In the eighties, he proved that some of the dust found in interstellar space contained organic material, most of which was carbon.
Together with Sir Hoyle, he further contended that lifeforms and genetic material continue to enter the Earth's atmosphere to account for new diseases, epidemic outbreaks and the creation of the genetic novelty needed for major-scale evolution.
Professor Wickramasinghe has previously suggested that other deadly diseases came from an extraterrestrial source — including the 1918 flu pandemic, certain strains of mad cow disease and polio, and SARS, which he connected to a 2002 meteorite that exploded over the border of China and Russia.
'There is growing evidence that says this DNA comes from space and it is carried into our atmosphere on micro-meteorites before dissipating,' he told The Express.
WHAT IS PANSPERMIA?
Panspermia is a theory that suggests life spreads across the known physical universe, hitchhiking on comets or meteorites.
Extremophiles, capable of surviving the inhospitable conditions of space, could become trapped in debris that is ejected into space after collisions between asteroids and planets that harbour life.
These dormant life-forms may then travel for an extended amount of time before colliding randomly with other planets.
One argument that supports the panspermia theory is the emergence of life soon after the heavy bombardment period of earth, between 4 and 3.8 billion years ago.
During this period, researchers believe the Earth endured an extended and very powerful series of meteor showers.
However, the earliest evidence for life on Earth suggests it was present some 3.83 billion years ago, overlapping with this bombardment phase.
These observations suggest that living things during this period would have faced extinction, contributing to the idea that life did not originate on Earth.
The idea of directed panspermia suggests lifeforms were deliberately sent out through the universe by intelligent civilisations.
Professor Francis Crick, one of the biologists who discovered the structure of DNA, examined the possibility of this in a paper in 1973.
However, Professor Crick and his colleagues concluded that the scientific evidence was 'inadequate at the present time to say anything about the probability'.
A Scientist Claims It’s Possible Novel Corona Virus Has A Space Connection
A Scientist Claims It’s Possible Novel Corona Virus Has A Space Connection
After the news that a US patient got a novel coronavirus (N-CoV) and its origin has baffled medical authorities, a scientist claimed that the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) is the first wave of space alien biological invasion of Earth.
On the evening of February 26, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) confirmed that the patient in California who has infected with the COVID-19 didn’t have a travel history in China and any other countries with confirmed cases. According to the CDC, the patient wasn’t exposed to everyone known to have the disease.
California Rep. John Garamendi said that the affected person is in severe condition. CDC Director Dr. Robert Redfield said that they already explained to doctors in the United States that a person needed to have travel history to any country with confirmed cases or be a near touch of an individual who had been in affected areas before with COVID-19 cases.
Meanwhile, Cambridge astrobiologist Dr. Chandra Wickramasinghe claims that the COVID-19 virus may have come from a fragment of a comet that exploded in North-East China in October last year.
In Wickramasinghe’s perspective, the sudden outbreak of a new coronavirus is very probable to have an extraterrestrial connection. The British scientist brings up the possibility that masses of trillions of infective viral debris that lived in the bright meteor has been then released embedded within the shape of sweet carbonaceous dust.
Wickramasinghe explains that infectious agents are known to be widespread in the area, which might be transported on comets and fell toward Earth through the troposphere.
No matter where people look, there are pyramids scattered across the globe.
And while Europe isn’t that famous for being home to ancient pyramids, the truth is there are quite a few scattered across the European continent.
Whether Pyramids around the globe are the result of an ancient global blueprint of structures or the teachings of an ancient civilization that predates popular ancient civilizations like the Ancient Egyptians or the Maya is a mystery.
For some reason, ancient cultures around the globe, all decided to build massive pyramids, for no apparent reason whatsoever.
One of the Pyramids of Tenerife. Image Credit: Shutterstock
In Europe pyramids are scarce, so every time we write about a pyramidal structure in Europe we try to learn as much as we can about those structures.
The Pyramids of Tenerife—and Historical landmark in Guimar, Canarias
While many were unaware of this fact, Spain has pyramids. However, the mystery structures scattered on a Spanish Island have not been recognized as such by the mainstream archeologists.
The Canary Islands, more specifically Tenerife, features up to 6 pyramids that according to many researchers are aligned astronomically and built, presumably, by a mysterious culture that has long since disappeared.
Explorer Thor Heyerdahl, and the Pyramids of Guimar
On the Island of Tenerife, there is a region called Guiamar the mystery pyramids are located. Today, these incredible structures are part of the Ethnographic Park which was created by explorer Thor Heyerdahl with the financial support of Fred Olsen.
Heyerdahl was the man who, after reading a newspaper report about the pyramids, moved to Tenerife to explore the Pyramids. He lived in Tenerife for the rest of his life.
The Pyramids of Tenerife are believed to be aligned astronomically. Image Credit: Shutterstock
The Norwegian explorer drew connections between the mysterious pyramids on Tenerife, and other similar stepped pyramids he had encountered across the globe.
Heyerdahl believed that such pyramids may have been built by an ancient civilization that had the ability to perform trans-oceanic voyages, and may be the missing link between ancient Egyptian and American Pyramids.
Thorugh his research and study of the Pyramids, Heyerdahl was convinced that the so-called Guanches, inhabitants of the island of Tenerife before the Castilian conquest, may have built those Pyramids initially.
Mainstream scholars disagree, with everything
Mainstream scholars, on the other hand, disagree with the ancient Pyramid theory and say that the alleged structure arent pyramids at all, but are piles of volcanic rocks that farmers erected when preparing their land for cultivation.
A side view of the Pyramids of Tenerife. Image Credit: Shutterstock.
According to mainstream scholars, the alleged pyramids are cultivational terraces and were built sometimes in the nineteenth century, based on ceramics discovered in the excavations carried out by archaeologists from the University of La Laguna.
One of those people was Philip Coppens, a man who visited the pyramids himself and found out that:
“On one plaza between two pyramids, archaeologists excavated into the structure, but stopped at a level they associated with the 18th century – and which was between 50 and 150 centimeters underground. From this, the mistaken conclusion was reached that they had dug down all the way to the bottom, and had realized the oldest layer was two centuries old. Nothing can be further from the truth.”
So, the question here is… why did they stop after digging only 150 centimeters? What was it that convinced them there was nothing noteworthy to be found if they had dug any deeper than that?
A sacred alignment?
The idea that the structures on Tenerife are more than just cultivational terraces has long existed among researchers and authors.
Heyerdahl and his flowers believed the six majestic pyramids of Tenerife were built following an intricate pattern and alignment which was created for ceremonial purposes.
Mainstream scholars disagree that these structures are Pyramids. Image Credit: Shutterstock
In 1991, researchers from the Canary Institute of Astrophysics Juan Antonio Belmonte Avilés, Antonio Aparicio Juan, and César Esteban López demonstrated how the longer sides of the terraces at Güímar were intricately placed in position to mark the direction winter and summer solstices.
Guanches—the builders of the Pyramids of Tenerife?
So, who built these astronomically aligned structures, if it wasn’t farmers?
According to many authors, the enigmatic structures were built by the so-called Guanches people.
The Guanches are a mystery as no one really knows how the white-skinned people came to live on islands so close to the African Continent.
Some archaeologists and anthropologists argue how the Guanche people are descendants of the Berbers from North Africa, and most likely Libya.
However, legends contradict that theory and suggest the Guanches are more than just descendants from the Berbers, and that they are the original inhabitants of Atlantis, and survived the cataclysmic events of the disappearance of the city/continent of Atlantis. The Guanches, aka Atlanteans, only survived because as Atlantis ‘Sank’, they were on the peaks of the mountains which we today refer to as the Canary Islands.
While today myths and history have merged on the Island of Tenerife, the truth is that there are many other structures on Tenerife that resemble Pyramids. The six pyramids at Guimar are just some of the many structures that we can find on Tenerife today. The Village of Santa Barabara has several other Pyramids that until this day have been ignored by experts.
The U.S. Army refused to release any records about its deal with Tom DeLonge’s UFO-hunting group To the Stars Academy (TTSA).
In October of 2019, the former Blink-182 frontman’s UFO organization joined forces with the US Army’s Combat Capabilities Development Command, a research and development body. According to the contract, the government is interested in studying some pretty exotic science such as active camouflage, inertial mass reduction, and quantum communication. In particular, the government is interested in the group’s ADAM Project, which Doug Halleaux, a spokesperson for the U.S. Army Combat Capabilities Development Command Ground Vehicle Systems Center described as “a global dragnet for the collection and evaluation of novel materials.” In 2018, TTSA put out a call for individuals and organizations to submit materials from alleged exotic sources as part of the project.
Knowing this, Greenewald instead filed a FOIA Request regarding a copy of all records and emails related to Dr. Joseph Cannon of U.S. Army Futures Command (who is working on the agreement) containing keywords such as "TTSA" and "To The Stars."
The Army got back to Greenewald telling him that 29 documents were found relating to his request, and each page was exempt from his request. The Army stated that it was not going to release any records. Motherboard reached out to Halleaux, the Army’s CCDC spokesperson, who said that any documents related to DeLonge’s organization would be classified as “trade secrets and commercial or financial information [that are] privileged or confidential.”
In other words, the public can’t know what the Army and TTSA is working on because of corporate and commercial secrets, namely intellectual property and finances. This includes related email communications. Halleaux told Motherboard that he personally had no idea what the Army and TTSA were up to, and if he did, he couldn’t talk about it.
TTSA now has roughly four-and-a-half years left on its five-year contract with the Army to research and develop future military technology. Halleaux told Motherboard in 2019 that the government believes the “key technologies or capabilities that [the Army] is investigating with TTSA are certainly on the leading edge of the realm of the possible” and comes at a low cost for the government. Regardless, mounting a complex exploration of the various projects outlined in the CRADA such as “adaptive camouflage,” “beamed energy propulsion,” and “quantum communication” will definitely take some serious collaboration, laboratory set-up, equipment gathering, research and time. It is highly unlikely that any actual technology development has occurred in the last six months.
IMAGE: THE BLACK VAULT
In a written statement to Motherboard, TTSA’s Chief Operating Officer and former director of Advanced Systems Development at Lockheed Martin's Skunkworks, Steve Justice, stated,
“It is easy to assume that TTSA's government [agreement] automatically ‘locks up’ the results of research. However, it must be noted that the discussions with the government that led to the contract language were completed with the knowledge that one of TTSA's prime objectives is public transparency and commercial applications. Note the contract language that specifically identifies two-way sharing of information. The benefit of the [agreement] is to gain access to otherwise inaccessible government laboratories and technical expertise to expose all attributes of unusual materials and share the results. If unusual attributes are found, TTSA may use that information to create applications for public benefit. We cannot speak for any actions the Army might take after studying the results.”
While the whole weird relationship between UFOs and the Army’s research and development arm has left many people scratching their heads, the real question is why would advanced space faring extraterrestrials keep crashing and leaving their scrap in the deserts of Nevada and New Mexico? Perhaps they are leaving humanity some technological breadcrumbs or they are just jerks dumping their garbage on our planet; whatever the case, the government isn’t saying much.
23 years ago today, the people of Arizona witnessed one of the most infamous UFO incidents in history.
A new documentary series by filmmaker Seth Breedlove takes an in depth look into the so-called “Phoenix Lights.” On the Trail of UFOs doesn’t try to prove that the incident was aliens or flares, but instead expertly explores the cultural ramifications of the event on the UFO community.
“As an event, the Phoenix Lights is important simply because it gained so much media attention, was witnessed by so many people, and today, can still not be precisely explained away,” Breedlove told Motherboard. “Every year more witnesses come forward; from airline pilots to military personnel to ordinary people living from places as far removed as downtown Phoenix to Las Vegas.”
On March 13th, 1997, hundreds of Arizonans called their local law enforcement and a popular UFO reporting hotline to report a series of strange lights moving over their cities and towns. The Phoenix Lights case remains one of the largest UFO sightings in history, and continues to be an established fixture of contemporary UFO discourse.
At roughly 7:00 pm, people in northwestern Arizona began reporting a large craft passing overhead. According to the National UFO Reporting Center, the first call they received came in at 8:16pm from a retired police officer in Paulden, Arizona, a town about two hours north of Phoenix. He reported seeing a series of reddish lights arranged in a V-formation.
Over the next couple days, calls continued to pour in regarding the sighting of multiple lights in the sky, some arranged in the shape of a boomerang, and others as odd moving lights with tails and “fireballs.” Ron Regehr, a veteran UFO researcher with the Mutual UFO Network and a former engineer with Boeing and Northrop Grumman, told Motherboard in an interview that he was part of the team that helped in developing the Defense Support Program Satellites (DSP), a series of infrared sensing tactical satellites that detect the launch of missiles, space launches, and nuclear detonations.
Regehr explained that he generated regular reports about what the DSP detected every 60 days. According to Regehr, he received a phone call from a colleague that the DSP picked up an object over South Eastern Nevada. It traveled in that direction until its signal became too weak, and it was lost over Tucson, Arizona.
Regehr told Motherboard that the event was “significant in that so many people witnessed the event and the extent authorities went to to denounce their experience. But, so many people were polarized that it took on an almost immediate ‘cult like’ life of its own. 23 years later folks are still talking about it!”
On the Trail of UFOs follows podcaster and author Shannon LeGro into the murky and weird UFO world. While it explores several other cases, the series spends its time analyzing the UFO community and the people who claim to have encounters with the anomalous. Breedlove’s previous documentary work includes Terror in the Skies (2019), The Bray Road Beast (2018), and The Mothman of Point Pleasant (2017). Much like his previous work, Breedlove’s focus is on the individuals caught up in the event, and how it altered their lives instead of trying to ascertain whether aliens or monsters are real. As for the Phoenix Lights, Breedlove points out that “it’s a culturally important event because it illustrates how at-risk witnesses were of being ridiculed if they came forward.”
“I’m not sure today that the response to the Phoenix Lights would be as over-the-top as it was in 1997 when you had the governor going on television with a man in an alien costume to poke fun at the very idea of a UFO,” Breedlove said. “Things have changed drastically in 23 years and the Phoenix Lights helps illustrate that fact.”
On the Trail of UFOs drops on March 20th on Prime Video.
Scientists Find The First-Ever Animal That Doesn't Need Oxygen to Survive
MICHELLE STARR
Some truths about the Universe and our experience in it seem immutable. The sky is up. Gravity sucks. Nothing can travel faster than light. Multicellular life needs oxygen to live. Except we might need to rethink that last one.
Scientists have just discovered that a jellyfish-like parasite doesn't have a mitochondrial genome - the first multicellular organism known to have this absence. That means it doesn't breathe; in fact, it lives its life completely free of oxygen dependency.
This discovery isn't just changing our understanding of how life can work here on Earth - it could also have implications for the search for extraterrestrial life.
Life started to develop the ability to metabolise oxygen - that is, respirate - sometime over 1.45 billion years ago. A larger archaeon engulfed a smaller bacterium, and somehow the bacterium's new home was beneficial to both parties, and the two stayed together.
That symbiotic relationship resulted in the two organisms evolving together, and eventually those bacteria ensconced within became organelles called mitochondria. Every cell in your body except red blood cells has large numbers of mitochondria, and these are essential for the respiration process.
They break down oxygen to produce a molecule called adenosine triphosphate, which multicellular organisms use to power cellular processes.
We know there are adaptations that allow some organisms to thrive in low-oxygen, or hypoxic, conditions. Some single-celled organisms have evolved mitochondria-related organelles for anaerobic metabolism; but the possibility of exclusively anaerobic multicellular organisms has been the subject of some scientific debate.
That is, until a team of researchers led by Dayana Yahalomi of Tel Aviv University in Israel decided to take another look at a common salmon parasite called Henneguya salminicola.
(Stephen Douglas Atkinson)
It's a cnidarian, belonging to the same phylum as corals, jellyfish and anemones. Although the cysts it creates in the fish's flesh are unsightly, the parasites are not harmful, and will live with the salmon for its entire life cycle.
Tucked away inside its host, the tiny cnidarian can survive quite hypoxic conditions. But exactly how it does so is difficult to know without looking at the creature's DNA - so that's what the researchers did.
They used deep sequencing and fluorescence microscopy to conduct a close study of H. salminicola, and found that it has lost its mitochondrial genome. In addition, it's also lost the capacity for aerobic respiration, and almost all of the nuclear genes involved in transcribing and replicating mitochondria.
Like the single-celled organisms, it had evolved mitochondria-related organelles, but these are unusual too - they have folds in the inner membrane not usually seen.
The same sequencing and microscopic methods in a closely related cnidarian fish parasite, Myxobolus squamalis, was used as a control, and clearly showed a mitochondrial genome.
These results show that here, at last, is a multicellular organism that doesn't need oxygen to survive.
Exactly how it survives is still something of a mystery. It could be leeching adenosine triphosphate from its host, but that's yet to be determined.
But the loss is pretty consistent with an overall trend in these creatures - one of genetic simplification. Over many, many years, they have basically devolved from a free-living jellyfish ancestor into the much more simple parasite we see today.
(Stephen Douglas Atkinson)
They've lost most of the original jellyfish genome, but retaining - oddly - a complex structure resembling jellyfish stinging cells. They don't use these to sting, but to cling to their hosts: an evolutionary adaptation from the free-living jellyfish's needs to the parasite's. You can see them in the image above - they're the things that look like eyes.
The discovery could help fisheries adapt their strategies for dealing with the parasite; although it's harmless to humans, no one wants to buy salmon riddled with tiny weird jellyfish.
But it's also a heck of a discovery for helping us to understand how life works.
"Our discovery confirms that adaptation to an anaerobic environment is not unique to single-celled eukaryotes, but has also evolved in a multicellular, parasitic animal," the researchers wrote in their paper.
"Hence, H. salminicola provides an opportunity for understanding the evolutionary transition from an aerobic to an exclusive anaerobic metabolism."
What you’re seeing, essentially, is part of a corona -- when a rainbow-like halo engulfs the sun or the moon -- and the bands and colors change as the cloud evolves.
Iridescence is most often seen close to the sun.
It's usually spotted when part of a cloud is forming because that's when all of the water droplets have a similar history and similar size.
Police car films something strange on the road in Rabun County, Georgia. What is it?
Police car films something strange on the road in Rabun County, Georgia. What is it?
In Rabun Conty, Georgia, residents have been thrown into a fright after a bizarre story emerged regarding cops being scared at a road location by what has been described as a “something strange”.
That and more strange events caught on tape. Real or fake?
A once-hidden island has been uncovered in Antarctica after melting glaciers caused by record high temperatures revealed its rocky shore to passing scientists.
A group of polar researchers from the Thwaites Offshore Research (THOR) project spotted the island as their ship passed through Pine Island Bay in Antarctica.
The island has been named Sif after the Norse goddess of fertility and family, who was also the wife of the warrior god Thor, by the THOR glacier research team.
Researchers on board the Nathaniel B. Palmer ship are studying the Thwaites glacier in Pine Island bay, one of the fastest-retreating glaciers in Antarctica.
The team don't know how long the 634,400 sq ft island has been exposed, but say it was likely revealed by higher than usual temperatures caused by climate change.
Scroll down for video
The new island has been named Sif by researchers who say it was uncovered due to warming temperatures causing ice sheets to melt
'After being the first visitors, we can now confirm that Sif Island is made of granite and that it is covered by remnant ice shelf, and a few seals,' said Julia Smith Wellner from the THOR expedition team
It is big enough for satellites to spot from space but the never-before-seen island has previously been hidden under thick layers of ice, and was only revealed after parts of the glacier broke off and melted.
Cartographers for the British Antarctic Survey estimate the island, made of granite, is about 1,240ft across by 520ft wide - roughly 634,400 sq ft or about the same size as Windsor Castle.
Researchers hope to be able to reveal more about the composition of the island and how it came to be uncovered when their journey finishes at the end of March.
Ships rarely travel as far south as the Palmer so the crew are probably the first to discover the island and may be the first humans to step foot on its rocky shore.
'After being the first visitors, we can now confirm that Sif Island is made of granite and that it is covered by remnant ice shelf, and a few seals,' said Julia Smith Wellner from the THOR expedition team.
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Cartographers for the British Antarctic Survey estimate the island, made of granite, is about 1,240ft across by 520ft wide - roughly 634,400 sq ft or about the same size as Windsor Castle
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This satellite image shows Sif Island and a series of icebergs - Sif is the large white block in the bottom middle of the image
They took samples from the island in the hope of getting a clearer picture of how the frozen continent is shifting, but won't know for sure until they get to a lab in March.
'This one island could hold a lot of clues,' University of Virginia in Charlottesville glacial geologist Lauren Simkins told Nature News.
As glaciers retreat they release pressure on the continent allowing the ground underneath the ice to rise up - a process called rapid rebound.
This sometimes stabilises the ice by anchoring it in place but can also accelerate the break up of the glacier by creating more cracks.
'Rapid rebound could increase stress on the remaining ice sheet, causing it to break apart more quickly', she said.
'But a rising continental shelf could also anchor glaciers, increasing their stability and slowing their march to the sea.'
When they first spotted the new island, there was a commotion on board as everyone rushed to see the rocky land amongst miles of water and ice.
'I think I see rocks,' shouted an officer aboard the ship.
They looked at charts and maps of the area and realised it was a 'brand new island' likely 'never seen before'.
'There was a commotion as everyone on board rushed to see the rocky, ice-covered outcrop and suggest potential names.
'But the hubbub quickly gave way to excitement about the scientific implications of the find,' says Wellner, a marine geologist at the University of Houston in Texas.
Thwaites Glacier is in West Antarctica and is sometimes called the Doomsday Glacier due to its potential impact on global sea levels
Climate scientist Peter Neff examined the new images and satellite data to try and determine how long it has been uncovered for.
He said it looks like 'Sif Island' has been slowly revealed since about 2010.
The THOR project is an international mission tasked with studying the stability of the massive Thwaites glacier in Pine Island Bay, Western Antarctica.
Researchers say the melting ice on the new rock will help them better determine how quickly changes are happening and what this means for the glacier.
Ships rarely travel as far south as the Palmer so the crew are likely the first to discover the island and may be the first humans to step foot on its rocky shore
'New islands emerging as ice sheets retreat is not particularly surprising', Paul Cutler, a programme director in glaciology at the US National Science Foundation in Alexandria, Virginia told Nature News.
'New islands have appeared over the past few years in the Canadian Arctic and Greenland' but this is 'an exciting opportunity to piece together the geological history of a vastly under-studied region of Earth'.
The new discovery comes as NASA recorded a record high temperature for the continent - at 64 degrees Fahrenheit with melted ice spotted from space.
This is also not the first island in Antarctica to be effected by rising temperatures.
The island is big enough for satellites to spot from space but the never before seen island has previously been hidden under thick layers of ice
Satellite images last week revealed 20 per cent of snow on Eagle Island melted in just 10 days due to the extreme temperatures.
The warm spell began on February 5 and ran through to February 13, peaking on February 6, with temperatures on the Antarctic Peninsula reaching 64.9°F (18.3°C).
'I haven’t seen melt ponds develop this quickly in Antarctica,' said glaciologist Mauri Pelto of Nichols College in Massachusetts.
'You see these kinds of melt events in Alaska and Greenland, but not usually in Antarctica.'
Sometimes called the Doomsday Glacier due to the potential impact its collapse could have on sea levels, Thwaites is unusually broad and fast.
Already, Thwaites accounts for about four per cent of global sea-level rise as warming waters cause it to melt from the underside.
Researchers have long held concerns that a tipping point in the stability at its foundations could result in a run-away collapse of the glacier.
There are multiple teams studying the glacier at the moment to determine the risk it poses to global sea levels and the newly uncovered island will feed into that work.
HOW MUCH WILL SEA LEVELS RISE IN THE NEXT FEW CENTURIES?
Global sea levels could rise as much as 1.2 metres (4 feet) by 2300 even if we meet the 2015 Paris climate goals, scientists have warned.
The long-term change will be driven by a thaw of ice from Greenland to Antarctica that is set to re-draw global coastlines.
Sea level rise threatens cities from Shanghai to London, to low-lying swathes of Florida or Bangladesh, and to entire nations such as the Maldives.
It is vital that we curb emissions as soon as possible to avoid an even greater rise, a German-led team of researchers said in a new report.
By 2300, the report projected that sea levels would gain by 0.7-1.2 metres, even if almost 200 nations fully meet goals under the 2015 Paris Agreement.
Targets set by the accords include cutting greenhouse gas emissions to net zero in the second half of this century.
Ocean levels will rise inexorably because heat-trapping industrial gases already emitted will linger in the atmosphere, melting more ice, it said.
In addition, water naturally expands as it warms above four degrees Celsius (39.2°F).
Every five years of delay beyond 2020 in peaking global emissions would mean an extra 20 centimetres (8 inches) of sea level rise by 2300.
'Sea level is often communicated as a really slow process that you can't do much about ... but the next 30 years really matter,' lead author Dr Matthias Mengel, of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, in Potsdam, Germany, told Reuters.
None of the nearly 200 governments to sign the Paris Accords are on track to meet its pledges.
KLIMAATVERANDERING ONTHULT GLOEDNIEUW EILAND VOOR DE KUST VAN ANTARCTICA
KLIMAATVERANDERING ONTHULT GLOEDNIEUW EILAND VOOR DE KUST VAN ANTARCTICA
Caroline Kraaijvanger
Het ons tot voor kort onbekende eiland was altijd bedekt met een dikke laag ijs, die door de opwarming van het gebied nu grotendeels is verdwenen.
Het eiland bevindt zich in de Pine Island-baai, die weer onderdeel uitmaakt van de Amundsenzee, gelegen voor de kust van West-Antarctica. In deze baai komen onder meer de beruchte Pine Island- en Thwaites-gletsjer uit. Beide gletsjers zijn de laatste tijd vaak in het nieuws door de snelle veranderingen die ze ondergaan. Zo laat de Pine Island-gletsjer regelmatig grote brokken ijs los en is de grote, snel smeltende Thwaites-gletsjer momenteel reeds verantwoordelijk voor zo’n 4% van de wereldwijde zeespiegelstijging.
International Thwaites Glacier Collaboration Wetenschappers houden de laatstgenoemde gletsjer – niet in de laatste plaats omdat deze in zijn eentje een zeespiegelstijging van zo’n 65 centimeter kan veroorzaken – nauwlettend in de gaten. En er werd zelfs een expeditie opgezet die helemaal om deze gletsjer en zijn omgeving draait. De International Thwaites Glacier Collaboration doet momenteel ter plekke onderzoek naar de stabiliteit van de gletsjer en de bijdrage die deze gletsjer en omgeving kan leveren aan de wereldwijde zeespiegel. Zo werden er eind vorig en begin van dit jaar diepe gaten in de gletsjer geboord, wat leidde tot de ontdekking van warm water dat het ijs van onderaf aantast en zo waarschijnlijk bijdraagt aan de versnelde smelt van de gletsjer die zich qua oppervlakte grofweg kan meten met Groot-Brittannië.
Nieuw eiland Wetenschappers die aan deze belangrijke onderzoeksexpeditie deelnemen, hadden – afgaand op wat we van de Thwaites-gletsjer weten – ongetwijfeld wel verwacht getuige te zijn van grote en snelle veranderingen in het gebied. Maar dat ze er op een gloednieuw eiland zouden stuiten..dat had niemand zien aankomen.
Sif De onderzoekers hebben het eiland ‘Sif-eiland’ gedoopt. “Ons project (dat onder de vlag van de International Thwaites Glacier Collaboration valt, red.) draagt de naam THwaites Offshore Research, of kortweg Thor,” vertelt onderzoeker Julia Wellner, vanuit Antarctica aan Scientias.nl. “Thor is een Noorse God en zijn vrouw Sif is de godin van de aarde. Haar naam leek goed te passen bij een stukje land dat we tijdens ons project hebben ontdekt.” Wellner is voornemens om de naam – na terugkeer in de bewoonde wereld – officieel in te dienen en hoopt dat deze door instanties bevoegd om het eiland een naam te geven, wordt omarmd. “Ik hoop dat Sif blijft hangen.”
Op Sif Natuurlijk hebben de onderzoekers kort na de ontdekking van het eiland hun werk even neergelegd om het eilandje te bezoeken. Daarmee zijn ze niet alleen de ontdekkers van het eiland, maar waarschijnlijk ook de eerste mensen die het eiland hebben bezocht. “Het eiland was in het verleden bedekt door een ijsplaat: gletsjerijs dat richting de oceaan is gestroomd en op het water is gaan drijven,” zo vertelt Wellner. “Het eiland lag altijd al boven de zeespiegel, maar we hebben het nooit gezien, omdat het onder het ijs lag. De ijsplaat heeft zich in de laatste jaren echter teruggetrokken, waardoor het eiland bloot is komen te liggen.”
Opwarming Onderzoek ter plaatse wijst uit dat het eiland nu slechts nog wat restjes van die ijsplaat herbergt. Het is allemaal zeer waarschijnlijk te herleiden naar de opwarming van de aarde, aldus Wellner. “De Thwaites-gletsjer is de snelst veranderende ijsmassa op West-Antarctica en de reden dat we hier zijn. Dus we wisten al dat het ijs zich hier terugtrekt. Dat is dan ook geen verrassing. Maar het eiland is dat wel.”
Julia Smith Wellner@houston_wellner
After being the first visitors, we can now confirm that Sif Island is made of granite and that it is covered by remnant ice shelf, and a few seals. Photos by CD Hillenbrand (BAS) and Laura Taylor (UH). @glacierthwaites@glacieroffshore@GAViglione#nbp2002@BAS_News@UHEAS
Waardevol En de ontdekking van het eiland kan wel eens heel waardevol blijken te zijn voor de missie van Wellner en collega’s. Ze hebben namelijk goede hoop dat het eiland meer kan vertellen over hoe het gebied er in het verleden uitzag en door de tijd heen veranderd is. Daarom hebben ze op het eiland onder meer al enkele stenen verzameld die later uitgebreid geanalyseerd kunnen worden. “Eén van de belangrijkste dingen die we zullen gaan doen, is het dateren van de periode waarin de gesteenten blootlagen. We willen achterhalen of ze in de laatste 100 of 1000 of 10.000 jaren ook al eens ijsvrij zijn geweest en zo meer te weten komen over hoe het ijs zich in het verleden heeft gedragen.”
Het komt niet elke dag voor dat onderzoekers een nieuw eiland ontdekken. Maar Wellner sluit niet uit dat het in de toekomst nog wel vaker gebeurt. “Het is zeker mogelijk dat er doordat het ijs zich steeds sneller terugtrekt, meer nieuwe eilanden worden ontdekt.”
Bronmateriaal:
Interview met Julia Wellner Afbeelding bovenaan dit artikel: Gui Bortolotto
DIT LIJKT EEN ONDERGRONDSE TUNNEL OP MARS TE ZIJN - EN WIE WEET WAT ER BINNEN TE VINDEN IS
DIT LIJKT EEN ONDERGRONDSE TUNNEL OP MARS TE ZIJN - EN WIE WEET WAT ER BINNEN TE VINDEN IS
Caroline Kraaijvanger
Het gaat mogelijk om een lavatunnel waarin het in een grijs verleden goed toeven was voor eventueel Martiaans leven.
Wie zijn ogen vluchtig over de door HiRISE – een instrument aan boord van de Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter – gemaakte foto laat glijden, ziet misschien enkel een zwarte vlek. Maar in werkelijkheid is het een diepe put, zo blijkt uit een vervolgopname, eveneens gemaakt door HiRISE. En mogelijk zelfs de ingang tot een tunnel die zich wellicht meters of zelfs kilometers onder het oppervlak van Mars uitstrekt.
Afbeelding: NASA / JPL / UArizona.
Ontstaan “We weten niet precies hoe de put is ontstaan,” vertelt onderzoeker Rosse Beyer, verbonden aan het NASA Ames Research Center. “Maar we denken dat deze op dezelfde manier ontstaan is als de putten die we in lavatunnels zien in vulkanische gebieden op aarde, zoals op Hawaii.” De tunnels waar Beyer naar verwijst, ontstaan tijdens erupties, waarbij lava zich ondergronds een weg baant en het oppervlak van de lavastroom afkoelt en als het ware een korst vormt, waaronder het warme, vloeibare lava kan blijven stromen. “Wanneer de vulkanische activiteit tot een einde komt, lopen deze grote tunnels leeg. Naarmate de tijd vordert, kan natuurlijke erosie ervoor zorgen dat een deel van de tunnel dat zich dicht bij het oppervlak bevindt, instort. Zo’n gat in het dak van de tunnel wordt ook wel een ‘skylight‘ genoemd. Van bovenaf gezien lijkt het een diepe put, tot je erin gaat en ziet dat een tunnel zich vanuit deze put in twee richtingen uitstrekt.”
Op de beelden die HiRISE heeft gemaakt, is niet goed te zien of we hier met zo’n ‘skylight‘ in een lavatunnel te maken hebben. In de wanden van de put die HiRISE in beeld heeft gebracht, zijn geen openingen te vinden. Maar wellicht bevinden die zich in de wanden die HIRISE niet kan zien. Beyer acht het in ieder geval heel aannemelijk dat we bij afdaling in deze put vertakkingen vinden die zich verder onder het oppervlak van Mars uitstrekken. “De put lijkt heel diep en afgaand op het feit dat deze zich bevindt in een gebied dat ooit vulkanisch actief was, denken we dat het wel om een ‘skylight‘ in een lavatunnel gaat.”
Afmetingen De put is ovaalvormig en zo’n 180 bij 114 meter groot. Van de diepte kan Beyer in dit stadium slechts een voorzichtige inschatting maken. “We weten waar de zon zich bevond (toen deze foto’s gemaakt werden, red.) en aangezien het zonlicht de bodem van de put niet raakt, moet deze zeker 100 meter diep zijn.”
Leven in een lavatunnel Voor onderzoekers zijn deze diepe putten en tunnels – waarvan er al meerdere op Mars, maar ook op de maan zijn aangetroffen – heel interessant. “Meer te weten komen over grotten op Mars en de maan is vanuit een geologisch standpunt heel nuttig, zeker als je beter wilt begrijpen hoe deze werelden door de tijd heen veranderd zijn.” Daarnaast worden de grotten ook wel gezien als een geschikte leefplek voor toekomstige Mars- en maankolonisten. “Waar aardse kolonisten op bijvoorbeeld Mars onder meer mee te maken krijgen, zijn extreem lage temperaturen en het feit dat Mars geen sterk magnetisch veld of een dikke atmosfeer heeft. De combinatie van de aardatmosfeer en het aardmagnetisch veld beschermt ons tegen zonnevlammen en kosmische straling, maar Mars heeft dat dus niet. Als je een leefgebied in een grot zou kunnen creëren, zou de temperatuur wat stabieler zijn; net zoals grotten op aarde een constante temperatuur hebben, zouden ook grotten op Mars dat hebben (ze zijn wel wat kouder dan op aarde, maar de temperatuur schommelt in ieder geval niet enorm). Verder zou ondergrondse huisvesting ook extra bescherming bieden tegen zonnevlammen en kosmische straling.”
Of we toekomstige Marskolonisten in de toekomst in deze lavatunnels aan gaan treffen, is – ondanks de ogenschijnlijke voordelen van een leven ondergronds – echter nog niet zeker. “Eén van de redenen dat we op aarde niet in grotten wonen, is het feit dat het wat onhandig is. En datzelfde zullen we op Mars zien; toegang krijgen tot deze lavatunnels kan wel eens lastig zijn en mogelijk bevinden ze zich ook niet in gebieden waar Marskolonisten willen zijn.”
Als het leven in deze lavatunnels – even afgezien van hun toegankelijkheid – voor ons vrij behaaglijk is, kan het dat natuurlijk ook zijn voor andere, buitenaardse levensvormen. En dat is nóg een reden om deze putten en tunnels eens van dichtbij te bekijken. “Het kunnen goede plekken zijn om te zoeken naar leven,” bevestigt Beyer. “We weten dat grotten op aarde vaak ook florerende ecosystemen kennen.” Maar hij wil daar wel een belangrijke kanttekening bij plaatsen. “Op aarde zien we vrijwel overal waar we kijken, leven en op Mars niet.” Met dat in het achterhoofd acht Beyer het niet zo heel waarschijnlijk dat we in deze grotten sporen van levende Martianen aan gaan treffen. “Misschien is het wel waarschijnlijker dat we er bewijs vinden van vergaan Martiaans leven, uit een tijdperk waarin de omstandigheden voor leven wat gunstiger waren.” Maar ook dat zou natuurlijk wereldnieuws zijn.
Bronmateriaal:
"Staring into a Pit" - HiRISE Interview met Ross Beyer Afbeelding bovenaan dit artikel: NASA / JPL / UArizona
Time Travel Technology is Real and We Can See The Future Now
Time Travel Technology is Real and We Can See The Future Now
Lurking deep within Einstein’s theories lie the secrets of time travel. We are all subject to the arrow of time as it perpetually pulls us forward into the future. Present moments crumble away into past memories and become times never to be seen or experienced again.
For some, this is simply not acceptable. Theoretical Physicist Ron Mallett explains the reality of time travel technology that we could see in the near future.
Researchers have found over 300 trans-Neptunian objects (TNOs), minor planets that are located in the far reaches of the solar system, including more than 100 new discoveries according to a new study published in The Astrophysical Journal Supplement Series.
The team of researchers, led by graduate student Pedro Bernardinelli and professors Gary Bernstein and Masao Sako, believe that the latest findings could aid future searches for the hypothetical Planet Nine and other undiscovered planets as the study describes a new approach to finding similar objects.
Pixabay
Usage of Dark Energy Survey
The researchers used the data from the Dark Energy Survey (DES), which completed six years of data collection in January, to discover the TNOs. However as DES was designed to study galaxies and supernovas, the researchers had to develop a new way to track the movement. The experts said that the dedicated TNO surveys take measurements as frequently as every hour or two, which allow researchers to more easily track their movements.
Pedro Bernardinelli said: "Dedicated TNO surveys have a way of seeing the object move, and it's easy to track them down. One of the key things we did in this paper was figure out a way to recover those movements."
Chances of finding 500 new TNOs
After several months of method-development and analysis, the researchers found 316 TNOs, including 245 discoveries made by DES and 139 new objects that were not previously published. Pluto, the best-known TNO, is 40 times farther away from the sun than the Earth is, and the TNOs found using the DES data range from 30 to 90 times the Earth's distance from the sun. Some of these objects are on extremely long-distance orbits that will carry them far beyond Pluto.
The researchers said that there are chances of finding new TNOs, possibly as many as 500, based on the data estimates, in the near future.
300 New Minor Planets Found Beyond Neptune in Our Solar System, Hunt for Planet X Continues
300 New Minor Planets Found Beyond Neptune in Our Solar System, Hunt for Planet X Continues
This updated catalog of trans-Neptunian objects and the methods used to find them could aid in future searches for undiscovered planets in the far reaches of the solar system.
Using data from the Dark Energy Survey (DES), researchers have found more than 300 trans-Neptunian objects (TNOs), minor planets located in the far reaches of the solar system, including more than 100 new discoveries. Published in The Astrophysical Journal Supplement Series, the study also describes a new approach for finding similar types of objects and could aid future searches for the hypothetical Planet Nine and other undiscovered planets. The work was led by graduate student Pedro Bernardinelli and professors Gary Bernstein and Masao Sako.
The goal of DES, which completed six years of data collection in January, is to understand the nature of dark energy by collecting high-precision images of the southern sky. While DES wasn’t specifically designed with TNOs in mind, its breadth and depth of coverage made it particularly adept at finding new objects beyond Neptune. “The number of TNOs you can find depends on how much of the sky you look at and what’s the faintest thing you can find,” says Bernstein.
Because DES was designed to study galaxies and supernovas, the researchers had to develop a new way to track movement. Dedicated TNO surveys take measurements as frequently as every hour or two, which allows researchers to more easily track their movements. “Dedicated TNO surveys have a way of seeing the object move, and it’s easy to track them down,” says Bernardinelli. “One of the key things we did in this paper was figure out a way to recover those movements.”
Using the first four years of DES data, Bernardinelli started with a dataset of 7 billion “dots,” all of the possible objects detected by the software that were above the image’s background levels. He then removed any objects that were present on multiple nights—things like stars, galaxies, and supernova—to build a “transient” list of 22 million objects before commencing a massive game of “connect the dots,” looking for nearby pairs or triplets of detected objects to help determine where the object would appear on subsequent nights.
With the 7 billion dots whittled down to a list of around 400 candidates that were seen over at least six nights of observation, the researchers then had to verify their results. “We have this list of candidates, and then we have to make sure that our candidates are actually real things,” Bernardinelli says.
To filter their list of candidates down to actual TNOs, the researchers went back to the original dataset to see if they could find more images of the object in question. “Say we found something on six different nights,” Bernstein says. “For TNOs that are there, we actually pointed at them for 25 different nights. That means there’s images where that object should be, but it didn’t make it through the first step of being called a dot.”
Bernardinelli developed a way to stack multiple images to create a sharper view, which helped confirm whether a detected object was a real TNO. They also verified that their method was able to spot known TNOs in the areas of the sky being studied and that they were able to spot fake objects that were injected into the analysis. “The most difficult part was trying to make sure that we were finding what we were supposed to find,” says Bernardinelli.
After many months of method-development and analysis, the researchers found 316 TNOs, including 245 discoveries made by DES and 139 new objects that were not previously published. With only 3,000 objects currently known, this DES catalog represents 10% of all known TNOs. Pluto, the best-known TNO, is 40 times farther away from the sun than Earth is, and the TNOs found using the DES data range from 30 to 90 times Earth’s distance from the sun. Some of these objects are on extremely long-distance orbits that will carry them far beyond Pluto.
The location of the objects found in the first four years of DES data. The outline shows DES’s search range and the color of each dot shows how far away the object is in astronomical unit (with one AU the equivalent of 93 million miles). Two of the detections were more than 90 AU, or over 8 billion miles away.
(Image: Pedro Bernardinelli)
Now that DES is complete, the researchers are rerunning their analysis on the entire DES dataset, this time with a lower threshold for object detection at the first filtering stage. This means that there’s an even greater potential for finding new TNOs, possibly as many as 500, based on the researchers’ estimates, in the near future.
The method developed by Bernardinelli can also be used to search for TNOs in upcoming astronomy surveys, including the new Vera C. Rubin Observatory. This observatory will survey the entire southern sky and will be able to detect even fainter and more distant objects than DES. “Many of the programs we’ve developed can be easily applied to any other large datasets, such as what the Rubin Observatory will produce,” says Bernardinelli.
This catalog of TNOs will also be a useful scientific tool for research about the solar system. Because DES collects a wide spectrum of data on each detected object, researchers can attempt to figure out where the TNO originated from, since objects that form more closely to the Sun have are expected to have different colors than those that originated in more distant and colder locations. And, by studying the orbits of these objects, researchers might be one step closer to finding Planet Nine, a hypothesized Neptune-sized planet that’s thought to exist beyond Pluto.
“There are lots of ideas about giant planets that used to be in the solar system and aren’t there anymore, or planets that are far away and massive but too faint for us to have noticed yet,” says Bernstein. “Making the catalog is the fun discovery part. Then when you create this resource; you can compare what you did find to what somebody’s theory said you should find.”
The Dark Energy Survey is supported by funding from the United States Department of Energy Office of Science; the National Science Foundation; funding agencies in the United Kingdom, Spain, Brazil, Germany, and Switzerland; and the participating institutions. A complete list of funding organizations and collaborating institutions is at The Dark Energy Survey website.
Other Penn researchers and graduates involved in this study are Matthew Belyakov, Dillon Brout, Tongtian Liu, Jennifer Locke, William Saunders, Lakshay Sharma, and Aditya Inada Somasundaram. The preprint version of this research article is available on ArXiv.
This research was supported by National Science Foundation grants AST-1515804 and AST-1615555 and Department of Energy grant DE-SC0007901.
Contacts and sources:
Erica K. Brockmeier
University of Pennsylvania
Publication:
Trans-Neptunian Objects Found in the First Four Years of the Dark Energy Survey. Pedro H. Bernardinelli, Gary M. Bernstein, Masao Sako, Tongtian Liu, William R. Saunders, Tali Khain, Hsing Wen Lin, David W. Gerdes, Dillon Brout, Fred C. Adams, Matthew Belyakov, Aditya Inada Somasundaram, Lakshay Sharma, Jennifer Locke, Kyle Franson, Juliette C. Becker, Kevin Napier, Larissa Markwardt, James Annis, T. M. C. Abbott, S. Avila, D. Brooks, D. L. Burke, A. Carnero Rosell, M. Carrasco Kind, F. J. Castander, L. N. da Costa, J. De Vicente, S. Desai, H. T. Diehl, P. Doel, S. Everett, B. Flaugher, J. García-Bellido, D. Gruen, R. A. Gruendl, J. Gschwend, G. Gutierrez, D. L. Hollowood, D. J. James, M. W. G. Johnson, M. D. Johnson, E. Krause, N. Kuropatkin, M. A. G. Maia, M. March, R. Miquel, F. Paz-Chinchón, A. A. Plazas, A. K. Romer, E. S. Rykoff, C. Sánchez, E. Sanchez, V. Scarpine, S. Serrano, I. Sevilla-Noarbe, M. Smith, F. Sobreira, E. Suchyta, M. E. C. Swanson, G. Tarle, A. R. Walker, W. Wester, Y. Zhang. The Astrophysical Journal Supplement Series, 2020; 247 (1): 32 DOI: 10.3847/1538-4365/ab6bd8
Shape shifting Farallon Islands lighthouse, San Francisco turns into statue of Christ the Redeemer, Brazil
Shape shifting Farallon Islands lighthouse, San Francisco turns into statue of Christ the Redeemer, Brazil
This week, Mila Zinkova looked out over the ocean and saw a familiar sight: The statue of Christ the Redeemer in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Which is strange. Because she was standing almost 7000 miles away in San Francisco, California.
Credit image: Mila Zinkova.
"This is actually the Farallon Islands lighthouse west of San Francisco, it was shape-shifted by the Fata Morgana, it was a mirage, says Zinkova."
In this case, the mirage turned a California lighthouse into a Brazilian statue. "That's not all," says Zinkova. "Evidently Fata Morgana was not satisfied with this design because she kept changing it all the time, reports Spaceweather.
Then, a second sun exploded in the same atmospheric duct. At one point it was rectangular.
If you think the government has more information about UFOs than it’s letting on, you’re not alone. In fact, you’re in the majority. A 2019 Gallup poll revealed 68 percent of people feel that way. Thirty-three percent of all respondents said that they believe UFOs were built by aliens from outer space.
The Venn diagram center of those two groups clings to one of the most enduring conspiracy theories: The Government (it’s always with a capital G for believers) is squirreling away information about alien spacecraft. This idea appears, and has for years, on internet forums, social media, TV shows, memes, movies, and, of course, fiction, like Max Barry’s “It Came From Cruden Farm.”
Almost as interesting as any government secret is why it’s kept secret. And for alien UFOs, the conspiratorial answers span a whole spectrum: They’d cause too much peace, make too much chaos, give too many people too much technology, or, maybe—as is the case in Barry’s story—just be a real disappointment. Because the why here has so many potential answers, believers can choose the one that makes most sense to them or tick off “all of the above.”
The public doesn’t know what goes on inside Area 51. To think that there must be something truly incredible inside—that has the mouthfeel oftruth.
Even powerful politicians, it turns out, think there may be more to the saucer story than meets the public eye. That’s why, when presidents become presidents, sometimes they, too, take an interest in the extraterrestrial. On Jimmy Kimmel Live in 2014, for instance, Bill Clinton revealed that during his time in office, he’d asked his people to look into both the Area 51 and Roswell files. “If you saw that there were aliens there, would you tell us?” Kimmel asked.
“Yeah,” said Clinton. (But if you’re inclined to believe in a cover-up, isn’t this affirmative just further evidence of disinformation?)
The president in Max Barry’s story similarly uses his power to seek out ufological secrets—immediately after his inauguration. The Air Force chief of staff, to the president’s surprise but perhaps not the reader’s, confesses that, yes, there is a specimen from space. It is, just as last year’s would-be raiders suspected, tucked away inside Area 51, a notoriously secretive Air Force installation in Nevada, whose existence wasn’t officially acknowledged till 2013 (although, you know, we knew).
It makes a certain sense that in this story, and in popular consciousness, the government holds these celestial secrets. After all, it alone meets the classic criteria of guilt: Means. Motive. Opportunity. Those elements make the conspiratorial conviction feel juuuust plausible enough. And if a hypothetical narrative is juuuust plausible enough, adherents have juuuust enough ground to remain standing on it—which is part of why this conspiracy theory has long, sturdy legs.
First of all, the government has the means to pull off an alien cover-up. Unlike individual humans or companies attempting to enforce dubious nondisclosure agreements, the military and intelligence communities have the authority to classify information, making it an actual crime to spill the secrets. This confidential information, sequestered in a limited number of brains, can also be geographically sequestered: Military installations take up millions and millions of acres across the U.S. That’s a lot of land to hide behind.
Area 51 is the most famous home of aliens-on-Earth conspiracies. Together, this base and the “secret squirrel” spots it abuts span 2.9 million acres, which is nearly twice the size of Delaware. Guards can put a halt to curious civilians’ trespassing by using “deadly force,” also known as “killing them.” The public doesn’t know what goes on inside Area 51 today, and we probably won’t for decades to come. To think that there must be something truly incredible inside—that has the mouthfeel of truth.
The government is also generally better at cover-ups than your average Fortune 500 company or UFO-hunting individual. Take the real-world 1947 events in Roswell: After a rancher found crash debris on his land, the military first said it came from a flying saucer, then reversed course and called it a weather balloon. That wasn’t true, and officials knew it: The wreckage was from a classified project called Mogul, a high-altitude nuclear-test detector. The government wasn’t covering up aliens, but it did prove itself able to keep the truth hidden for decades.
Information stays shhh within government if it would damage national security. But some scientists have suggested that contact with ETs would actually increase the likelihood of peace on Earth: The existence of extraterrestrials could bring us all together as Earthlings—united not by nationality but by planetarity. We could connect with the cosmos, look at it with a new sort of wonder, and a gratitude that we are not—that none of us are—alone. Plus, whether they’re beaming blueprints through space or propelling their bodies through it, the others certainly have better tech than we do. They could teach us how they built warp drives, or developed self-contained life-support systems, or reined in their social media giants. And if they didn’t teach us, we could strip their spaceship to pieces, figure out how it worked, and reverse-engineer our own—kind of like pre-engineer children deconstruct the electronics in their houses for fun. It could be a renaissance, a high-tech respite from international conflict.
That’s a nice idea. But researchers don’t agree on how people would react to such a revelation. More importantly, no one really has any idea what would happen with the body politic, just as you can guess at how you’d behave if you met Bigfoot, but you don’t actually know. And besides, maybe it’s not in a government’s best interest to unite the people: After all, wars always balloon someone’s bank accounts, and a truly global society could topple country-level leaders. You could see a rationale behind keeping the cosmic visits quiet even if they’d ultimately be good for the little guy.
In the universe of Barry’s story, federal studies suggested that an alien visit wouldn’t swing positive or neutral but ultranegative. Researchers predict conflicts between the great powers, more spying, more assassinations, the dissolution of moderate religion, the blowup of radicalism, immigration issues, etc. These hypothetical woes have the same tenor as the government’s true fears about UFOs, at least in the past, according to a document called the Robertson Panel report. In 1953, the CIA sponsored a small group of scientists and military personnel to evaluate the national security risks UFOs did or did not pose and what to do about it. “The group believed that the Soviets could use UFO reports to touch off mass hysteria and panic in the United States,” National Reconnaissance Office Historian Gerald Haines wrote of the report. Governments don’t, in general, want any sort of hysteria or panic within their borders. Ergo, maybe they’d hide, cover up, lie about the potential source of that potential panic. Especially if—as in movies like War of the Worlds, Independence Day, and The Day the Earth Stood Still—the extraterrestrial visitors put forth an apocalyptic threat, rather than a peaceful “How do you do, cosmic cousins?”
Some, though, believe the government is hiding the greatest discovery in human history because its people want to hang on to those spoils. Maybe military engineers are reverse-engineering the saucer (or whatever) in secret. That would keep the technology hidden from foreign nations, giving the U.S. an unbeatable advantage.
Defensive or offensive alien innovation isn’t the only stuff conspiracists think the government might keep from us. Go on the right forums, or WikiLeaks databases, and you can find the idea that ETs have shown us how to get virtually free energy—by harnessing “zero-point energy,” or basically pulling power out of the ether. A government might hide that so it can keep its people poor and dependent, keep big companies in business, and keep the ultimate source of power (literal and figurative) for itself.
In Barry’s story, the motivation for secrecy overturns these tropes, which position the alien as competent and powerful. Instead, Barry’s ET, which the president calls a “sentient sofa,” is the extraplanetary version of an alt-right troll that failed to launch from its parents’ basement. Upon learning this, the president decides to keep the talking couch locked in Area 51. Regardless of the motive, though, the outcome is the same: A high-level politician chooses, as Barry’s does, to keep keeping secrets. “Bury it,” he says.
But if the government says it doesn’t have aliens, believers can say that’s just a lie, further proof of a cover-up. And let’s say 2 million people do one day raid Area 51, and they fail to find anything. Maybe they just didn’t see the secret basement door whose seams are so tight they don’t show up at all. Maybe the Air Force moved the sentient sofa as soon as rumors of a raid spun up. And if a president, like the one in Barry’s story, doesn’t speak of the alien secrets, maybe he just found the truth—and decided it didn’t deserve to be out there.
Ex-government adviser claims UFO cover-up as RAF prepare to release secret files
Ex-government adviser claims UFO cover-up as RAF prepare to release secret files
The Royal Air Force is set to declassify a cache of UFO sighting files this spring into the public domain – as the government faces calls for greater transparency
The UK Government's UFO unit closed in 2009 after concluding that in more than 50 years they had never received any hard evidence of a potential extraterrestrial threat.
A Ministry of Defence spokesman 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 onto a dedicated gov.uk web page.”
Ahead of the release, Nick Pope – who investigated UFOs for the MoD – has said the government should show greater transparency.
The UK Government's UFO unit closed in 2009 after concluding that they had not found any hard evidence of a potential extraterrestrial threat(Image: Getty Images)
He said: “I'm not surprised there's such a high level of belief in a government cover-up. I know from first-hand experience that the authorities haven't always been as forthcoming as they might have been about their level of interest in UFOs.
“This survey shows high levels of interest and belief in UFOs and extra-terrestrial life.
"I think it reflects a number of recent revelations, including the declassified videos of US Navy jets chasing UFOs, and the news that the UK government is about to release more of its UFO files.”
Pope is now calling on governments to take the matter seriously and enact contingency plans in the event of an alien invasion.
He added: “There needs to be a government plan for first contact with extraterrestrials - irrespective of whether they turn out to be hostile or friendly.
"Even if you think it's unlikely, it's common sense to have a plan for something when the consequences would be so impactful.”
It comes as a poll of 2,000 people found 50% believe in aliens and there is a real risk to world order from a War of the Worlds style extraterrestrial attack.
Those people also believe an attack within the next 50 years is possible.
The study also found nearly three quarters believe that worldwide governments are hiding information, fearing they know more about extraterrestrial life than they're letting on.
More than two-thirds reckon authorities should have a plan for first contact with other life forms.
Of the alien believers surveyed, 71 % think Earth has already been visited at some point by aliens, suspecting it happened thousands of years ago – but 29% imagine they’re yet to make their first landing.
The Filming of a UFO Shooting a Beam at an Airborne Missile As Recounted By Former Lt. Robert Jacobs | VIDEO
The Filming of a UFO Shooting a Beam at an Airborne Missile As Recounted By Former Lt. Robert Jacobs | VIDEO
... Jacobs’ account has been entirely corroborated by another officer, retired Major (later Dr.) Florenze J. Mansmann, who carefully studied the Top Secret film at Vandenberg AFB, California prior to its confiscation by CIA agents. Mansmann said that his frame-by-frame analysis of the footage, using a magnifier, revealed that the UFO—which appeared to the unaided eye as small, white dot—was actually a domed, disc-shaped craft that had pivoted on is vertical axis before emitting each beam of light.
Half of us believe that aliens exist and that Earth will face an Independence Day-style attack in the next 50 years.
More than two thirds of believers say the Government must put a plan in place to deal with a sudden ET spaceship invasion, a poll reveals.
And worringly, 71% of them say this planet is already secretly hosting aliens, who may have first touched down on Earth thousands of years ago.
UFO expert Nick Pope said: “These fascinating findings say as much about distrust of government denials on UFOs as they do about people’s belief in extra-terrestrial visitation.
“This new survey supports my view that there needs to be a Government plan for first contact with extra-terrestrials, irrespective of whether they turn out to be hostile or friendly.
“Even if you think it’s unlikely, it’s common sense to have a plan for something when the consequences would be so impactful.”
Londoners, the Welsh and those in the South West of England were the biggest believers in extra-terrestrial life.
New sci-fi series War of the Worlds, that inspired the new study, airs on FOX at 9pm on Thursdays.
UFO investigator Nick added: “This intriguing new survey shows high levels of interest and belief in UFOs and extra-terrestrial life.
“I think it reflects a number of recent revelations, including the declassified videos of US Navy jets chasing UFOs, and the news that the UK government is about to release more of its UFO files.
“I’m not surprised there’s such a high level of belief in a government cover-up."
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Coronavirus is Messing With the Hunt for Life on Mars
Coronavirus is Messing With the Hunt for Life on Mars
The ExoMars 2020 rover mission has been delayed until 2022 due to the need for more testing, and because the coronavirus epidemic has left "practically no possibility" for travel for European scientists.
The launch of the ExoMars 2020 rover mission has been postponed to 2022 primarily because the spacecraft requires more tests, troubles that have been amplified by the coronavirus epidemic that has left "practically no possibility" for travel, according to mission leads.
Developed jointly by the European Space Agency (ESA) and Russia’s space agency Roscosmos, the ExoMars 2020 mission, which was scheduled to launch in July, aims to put a European-built rover called Rosalind Franklin on Mars, which will be carried by a Russian-built lander called Kazachok.
The surface mission is tasked with hunting for signs of life on Mars in the Oxia region at the Martian equator. The mission was originally scheduled to launch in 2018, but was pushed back to 2020 because multiple components were not ready for that deadline. The new delay will push the arrival of the lander and rover on Mars back to 2023, at the earliest, because the best opportunities to travel from Earth to Mars occur roughly every two years.
ESA director general Jan Wörner announced the postponement in a press conference in Moscow on Thursday, after consultation with Roscosmos director general Dmitry Rogozin. The main reason for the holdup is that Kazachok’s software and parachute systems require more tests to ensure they will be ready for the critical entry, descent, and landing (EDL) sequence on Mars.
In addition to the need for more tests, Wörner and Rogozin both confirmed that the COVID-19 pandemic has amplified uncertainties about the ExoMars launch. One of this mission’s touted strengths is its collaborative spirit, but its international framework is now vulnerable to travel restrictions and potential quarantines to contain the outbreak
For instance, one of the rover’s control centers is located in Italy, where the population is currently quarantined, and several European Union nations have announced measures to curb travel and ban large public gatherings.
"We have made a difficult but well-weighed decision to postpone the launch to 2022,” Rogozin said in a statement. “It is driven primarily by the need to maximise the robustness of all ExoMars systems as well as force majeure circumstances related to exacerbation of the epidemiological situation in Europe which left our experts practically no possibility to proceed with travels to partner industries.”
While the pandemic remains an organizational wild card for mission leads, ESA spokesperson Ninja Menning confirmed in an email that “the delay is not primarily due to concerns over COVID-19.”
At the press conference, Wörner said that most of the spacecraft’s components are ready to launch, but he stressed that more “verification activities will ensure a safe trip” and that “we cannot allow ourselves any margin of error.” This high degree of caution about the EDL sequence is especially understandable considering that the first lander in the ExoMars program, called Schiaparelli, crashed during its attempt to touch down on Mars in 2016.
The pandemic has disrupted many other space agencies and industries. NASA’s Ames Research Center in California has told the majority of its staff to stay home after an employee tested positive for COVID-19, and industry conferences, such as Satellite 2020, have cancelled events as a precaution.
NASA’s Perseverance rover and China’s first Martian rover are both still scheduled to launch to Mars this summer at this time, with landings set for 2021.
WASP-76 b may be the most extreme exoplanet we know of.
This illustration shows a nightside view of the exoplanet WASP-76b. The ultrahot giant exoplanet has a dayside where temperatures climb above 4,350 degrees Fahrenheit (2,400 degrees Celsius), high enough to vaporize metals. Strong winds carry iron vapor to the cooler nightside where it condenses into iron droplets. To the left of the image, we see the evening border of the exoplanet, where it transitions from day to night.
There's a new contender for the "most exotic exoplanet" title.
The crown may have rested for a while now on the head of HD 189733 b, a cobalt-blue alien world where molten-glass rain whips sideways through the air at up to 5,400 mph (8,790 km/h). But a new study reports that iron rain likely falls through the thick, turbulent air of WASP-76 b, a bizarre "ultrahot Jupiter" that lies about 640 light-years from the sun, in the constellation Pisces.
WASP-76 b zips around its host star once every 1.8 Earth days, an orbit so tight that the gaseous planet is "tidally locked," always showing the star the same face. Temperatures on this dayside climb above 4,350 degrees Fahrenheit (2,400 degrees Celsius) — hot enough to vaporize metals — whereas the nightside is a much cooler (but still ridiculous) 2,730 F (1,500 C), researchers said.
"These are likely the most extreme climates we could ever find on a planet," said study lead author David Ehrenreich, an associate professor of astronomy at the University of Geneva in Switzerland.
"We have to stretch our understanding of what is a climate, what is a planetary atmosphere, to understand this object," Ehrenreich told Space.com.
WASP-76 b was discovered in 2013. The alien planet is about as massive as Jupiter but nearly twice as wide, likely because the massive radiation loads the exoplanet receives from its host star puff up its atmosphere considerably. (And one quick note about the object's distance: Some sources say that WASP-76 b is about 390 light-years away, but that number is inaccurate, Ehrenreich said. He and his colleagues calculated WASP-76 b's distance using data from Europe's ultraprecise star-mapping spacecraft Gaia.)
For the new study, the researchers studied WASP-76 b using the Echelle Spectrograph for Rocky Exoplanets and Stable Spectroscopic Observations (ESPRESSO), an instrument installed on the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope in Chile.
ESPRESSO detected a strong signature of iron vapor at the "evening" border that separates WASP-76 b's dayside from its nightside. But no such signature was spotted at the "morning" border on the other side of the planet, where the nightside melds into day.
"Something must be happening on the nightside that makes iron disappear," Ehrenreich said.
The best explanation, he added, is that winds and WASP-76 b's rotation carry vaporized iron from the dayside to the nightside. The nightside is cool enough for the iron vapor to condense into clouds, which then dump rain into the air over there. That rain could consist of compounds such as iron sulfide or iron hydride.
But, "given the conditions, the most likely [scenario] is that iron condenses into liquid droplets of pure iron," Ehrenreich said. (This iron rain probably eventually makes its way back to the dayside again via atmospheric circulation, perpetuating the cycle, he added.)
And that rain probably isn't sprinkling down in a gentle mist, because the big temperature disparity between WASP-76 b's two halves generates winds of startling ferocity. The iron in the planet's dayside air, for example, is hurtling toward the nightside at about 11,000 mph (18,000 km/h), Ehrenreich said.
The dayside of the tidally locked "ultrahot Jupiter" exoplanet WASP-76 b may be much puffier than the nightside because of higher heat loads. The borders between these two hemispheres might thus feature towering cloudfalls that would rain iron droplets down onto any tourist (fool)hardy enough to visit this exotic world. (Image credit: Frederik Peeters)
WASP-76 b's exoticism doesn't end there. The dayside atmosphere may be much more puffed up than that of the nightside because of the higher heat loads, the researchers said. So the "evening" and "morning" borders between the two hemispheres might be marked by towering clouds that fall from the light toward darkness.
"And the drizzle of this fall would not be water droplets but iron droplets," Ehrenreich said.
The craziness of WASP-76 b has more than just gee-whiz appeal. The new information about this odd exoplanet should help scientists refine and test climate and global circulation models, leading to a better understanding of exoplanetary atmospheres in general, Ehrenreich said. And WASP-76 b also serves as a compelling reminder for researchers to keep an open mind, because nature churns out a dizzying diversity of worlds.
"Exoplanets are a real treasure trove full of surprises," Ehrenreich said. "The more you look, the more you find."
He and his colleagues aim to dig up more such surprises. The new results, which were published online today (March 11) in the journal Nature, come from the very first science observations ever made with ESPRESSO, back in September 2018. The researchers are now conducting a broad survey of exoplanet atmospheres using ESPRESSO, which could reveal if WASP-76 b is an outlier or a member of a very weird class of worlds.
"What we have now is a whole new way to trace the climate of the most extreme exoplanets," Ehrenreich said in a statement.
APEen illustratie van hoe de planeet en de ijzerwolken er mogelijk kunnen uitzien.
WETENSCHAP Wetenschappers hebben ontdekt dat op exoplaneet WASP-76b wel heel buitengewone weersomstandigheden voorkomen. Het kan er tot 2.400 graden Celsius worden, waaien tot snelheden van meer dan 16.000 kilometer per uur en bovendien valt er geregeld vloeibaar ijzer uit de lucht.
WASP-76b bevindt zich op 640 lichtjaren van ons vandaan. De planeet staat zo dicht bij zijn ster in het Pisces-sterrenstelsel dat het er enorm heet is op het planeetoppervlak. De planeet draait niet rond zijn eigen as, waardoor het langs één kant van WASP-76b altijd dag is, en langs de andere kant altijd nacht.
IJzerwolken
Aan de kant waar het altijd dag is, lopen de temperaturen hoog op waardoor ijzer verdampt tot wolken. Door de felle wind tussen de dag- en nachtkant blazen de ijzerwolken naar de kant waar het altijd nacht is en regent het ijzer daar uit. Aan de koude kant van de planeet is het ‘maar’ 1.500 graden Celsius.
De ontdekking is een van de eerste resultaten die astrologen konden vaststellen met een nieuwe telescoop, genaamd de Very Large Telescope in het Zuid-Amerikaanse Chili. Volgens de astrologen moet het onderzoeksapparaat ons meer inzicht geven in verre werelden buiten ons sterrenstelsel.
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The Buache Map: A Controversial Map Which Shows Antarctica Without Ice
The Buache Map: A Controversial Map Which Shows Antarctica Without Ice
Buache map titled “Map of the southern lands between the Tropic of Capricorn and the Antarctic Pole, where one sees the New discoveries made in 1739 south of Cape of Good Hope by orders of the (French) East-India Company. Based on the journals and the original map of Mr de Lozier Bouvet, leader of this expedition. Extended with various Physical observations etc., 1754.”
The Buache Map is an 18th century map commonly claimed to accurately depict the continent of Antarctica before it was buried by ice. By extension, it has been claimed that this map is evidence that an ancient civilization had mapped Antarctica without ice, and the Buache Map was drawn based on this ancient source.
However, there are also arguments against this interpretation of the Buache Map and the claim that the continent of Antarctica was known to a highly advanced ancient civilization long before it was ‘re-discovered’ by modern man in the early part of the 19th century.
Philippe Buache, Creator of a Controversial Map
The Buache Map was drawn by a French geographer by the name of Philippe Buache de la Neuville, hence its name. The full title of this map (in French), however, is “Carte des Terres Australes comprises entre le Tropique du Capricorne et le Pôle Antarctique où se voyent les nouvelles découvertes faites en 1739 au Sud du Cap de Bonne Esperance,” which translates into English as “Map of the Southern Lands contained between the Tropic of Capricorn and the Antarctic Pole, where the new discoveries made in 1739 to the south of the Cape of Good Hope may be seen.” Although the Buache Map is often said to have been published in 1737, the date of publication on the map itself is given as September 3, 1739.
“Carte des Terres Australes Comprises entre le Tropique du Capricorne et le Pôle Antarctique” by Buache and published in 1739.
The man behind the map, Philippe Buache de la Neuville, was a cartographer and map publisher, as well as the “foremost theoretical geographer of his generation.” Buache began his career as a workshop assistant and apprentice of Guillaume de L’Isle, who was also an important and prolific cartographer.
When de L’Isle died in 1726, his publishing firm was taken over by Buache, who had also married his mentor’s daughter so that he was part of the family. In 1729, Buache was appointed as the Premier Geographe du Roi , roughly translated as the ‘first / principal geographer of the king.’ In the following year, Buache entered the Académie des sciences as the successor of Guillaume de L’Isle.
Buache was a pioneer of a new form of theoretical geography. Although Buache’s new system was arguably “defective in many instances,” it nevertheless “contributed greatly toward the progress of that science, and popularized it.”
To produce his maps, Buache is said to have employed “geographic knowledge, scholarly research, the journals of contemporary explorers and missionaries, and direct astronomical observation.” From these, he made a number of deductions. One of the deductions made by Buache which turned out to be true, for instance, was the existence of Alaska and the Bering Strait. Nevertheless, not all of Buache’s speculations were true. One example of this is the supposed existence of a central Antarctic sea.
Legends of the Buache Map – Antarctica Without Ice
Returning to the Buache Map, it has been suggested that it “accurately depicts the subglacial topography” of Antarctica, a claim said to have its origins in Charles Hapgood’s 1966 book, ‘ Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings .’ It has also been suggested that Buache used a map / maps that was / were either made by some highly developed ancient civilization or even by “alien cartographers.”
One argument against this interpretation is the fact that nobody knows for sure what the topography of subglacial Antarctica actually looks like. At present, there is no way to judge the veracity of the claim that the Buache Map provides an accurate representation of the subglacial Antarctic coastline. Additionally, there are numerous differences between the Buache Map and the Piri Re’is Map , another map purported to illustrate the topography of an ice-free Antarctica.
The French legends that cover the Buache Map also provide a clue as to the way the map may be read and understood. For example, the words conjecturée (conjectured) and soupçonnée (suspected) can be found on parts of the southern continent , indicating that this landmass was not copied from some ancient map, but was a hypothesis by Buache.
Additionally, the writings on the side of the map indicate that the French explorer Jean Baptiste Charles Bouvet de Lozier reported seeing many icebergs during his journey to the south. Therefore, Buache speculated that the icebergs were from somewhere in the south.
1753 world map by the French cartographer Philippe Buache.
Finally, there are two versions of the Buache Map, the first is shown without this speculated landmass, while the second depicts the hypothesized Antarctica . The former is said to be more common, and may have been an earlier version of Buache’s hypothesis, while the latter is thought to incorporate Buache’s later thoughts on the matter.
Alternatively, it has been suggested that the Buache Map with Antarctica may have been issued by another cartographer fraudulently, or may even be an outright modern forgery.
“The Bubble Boy” is a classic episode of the sitcom “Seinfeld” which centered on a boy living in a bubble that protected him from germs but not George Costanza. The sci-fi show “Under the Dome” put an entire city in a bubble, while Freeman Dyson’s Dyson Sphere theoretically enclosed a star inside a round container. While those ‘bubbles’ exist or are conceivable, a Swiss physicist has proposed that the Milky Way galaxy and a thousand or so galaxies around it are in a giant bubble that is protecting us from supernovae and miscalculations in the rate of the expansion of the universe. Is there really a multi-galactic bubble or is this Swiss scientist missing a few blades in his mental Army knife?
“A significant tension has become manifest between the current expansion rate of our Universe measured from the cosmic microwave background by the Planck satellite and from local distance probes, which has prompted for interpretations of that as evidence of new physics.”
Lucas Lombriser, a professor in the Theoretical Physics Department at the University of Geneva, is the author of “Consistency of the local Hubble constant with the cosmic microwave background,” a paper published in the journal Physics Letters B (and summarized in a press release), where he brings to light “tension” in the theoretical physics world caused by conflicting measurements of the expansion of the universe since the Big Bang. Specifically, the so-called “Hubble constant” — which is used to determine distances in a universe where galaxies move faster the farther away the get from a point in space – isn’t so ‘constant’ anymore.
Hubble telescope – named for Edwin Hubble, astronomer and inventor of the Hubble constant
Why is this a problem? Determining the history of the expansion of the Universe since the Big Bang is necessary to learn more about its energy composition, the validity of General Relativity and the cosmological principle which says that the distribution of matter in the universe is homogeneous and uniform on a large scale and there are no observable irregularities. However, the Hubble constant (50,400 mph per million light-years or 73.4 km/s/Mpc) is strangely different when using data from the European Space Agency’s Planck satellite, which comes from measuring the cosmic microwave background that is an echo of the Big Bang. That data puts the Hubble constant at 46,200 mph per million light-years or 67.4 km/s/Mpc. In 2019, researchers used the light of red giant stars to put the Hubble constant at 47,300 mph per million light-years or 69.8 km/s/Mpc. All three are valid … so which one is it?
“If we were in a kind of gigantic ‘bubble,’ where the density of matter was significantly lower than the known density for the entire universe, it would have consequences on the distances of supernovae and, ultimately, on determining H0.”
Rather than solve the problem, Lombriser fixes the numbers by introducing a giant bubble or ‘Hubble bubble’ with a diameter of 250 million light years that holds 1,000 galaxies, including our own, and has a lower density of matter than the rest of the universe. If the density of matter inside the Hubble bubble was 50% lower than for the rest of the universe, a new value would be obtained for the Hubble constant which would agree with the one obtained using the cosmic microwave background.
Is the Hubble bubble a physical boundary? Is it really round?
So, it seems Lombriser’s Hubble bubble isn’t really a physical structure as much as it’s just a defined area with a lower density than the surrounding rest of the universe. It conveniently fixes the existence of two or more Hubble constants by using two sets of numbers to avoid conflicting answers. This still sounds like he’s massaging the numbers to make them fit the answer rather than finding the cause of the differences in universe expansion speeds, but that could be due to the fact that understanding and explaining life, the universe and everything is a bit beyond this writer’s pay grade.
Did Lombriser fix a problem using a theoretical tool that’s one corkscrew shy of a Swiss Army knife?
“The probability that there is such a fluctuation on this scale is 1 in 20 to 1 in 5, which means that it is not a theoretician’s fantasy. There are a lot of regions like ours in the vast universe.”
Are there? If the universe suddenly stops expanding, we know who to blame.
On October 21, 1952, a Flight Lieutenant Michael Swiney of the Royal Air Force took off in his Meteor trainer jet on a training flight with a flight student. At the time he was a flight instructor at the RAF’s Central Flying School, at Little Rissington, Gloucestershire, England, and today his student was a Royal Navy Lieutenant, David Crofts. The two were engaged in a cross country flight that would take them on a route along the south coast of the country, after which they would turn around and head back. It was meant to be a routine flight and with the calm weather on a fairly calm afternoon there were no anticipated problems. Yet this was to be a flight into strangeness that neither one of the men would ever forget, and which would propel itself into the realm of some of the great UFO mysteries.
The flight went according to plan at first, with a perfect take off and climb up through the cloud cover. It was as they punched through the clouds at an altitude of approximately 12,000 feet that Swiney allegedly spotted three white spherical objects at an estimated altitude of 35,000 feet, directly ahead of them. It was the pilot’s first impression that these were parachutes, but as they drew closer it became very obvious that these were something far stranger. He would say of the objects:
It was something supernatural. I immediately thought of course, of saucers, because that’s actually what they looked like. They were not leaving a condensation trail as I knew we were. They were circular and appeared to be stationary. We continued to climb to twice that height [to 30,000 feet] and as we did so they did in fact change position. They took on a slightly different perspective. For example the higher we got they lost their circular shape and took on more of a ‘flat plate’ appearance – like when you hold a tea-saucer above your head and look at it, and then bring it down to your eye-level, it loses the circular shape and becomes a flat plate. At one time the objects, which were still very much in view, appeared to go from one side of us to the other, and to make quite sure it was not an illusion caused by us in our aeroplane moving to one side, I checked that we were absolutely still on a very steady heading, and sure enough they had moved across to the starboard side of the aircraft.
Swiney’s plane managed to climb to 35,000 feet, and they approached close enough to the anomalous objects to see that they were devoid of any wings, vents, portholes, fins, or anything else that would have been expected of a conventional aircraft, and it was all so outlandish that Swiney began to suspect he was perhaps suffering from a lack of oxygen and that he was possibly hallucinating. However, this was put to rest when his passenger, Crofts, saw them as well. Crofts would describe the strange objects thusly:
I looked straight through the D-window and there were three dots ahead…[initially] they wouldn’t have been bigger than my thumb-nail at arm’s length and there were certainly three of them. I looked up from time to time and saw they were approaching and getting further and further apart. What I saw looked like the bottom of a stemmed glass. They were lens shaped, like an ellipse and the sun was behind them, and there was no cloud at that height. It was impossible to tell the size of them or how far away they were.
This was all unsettling enough that the shaken Swiney decided to call off the training exercise and head back towards base, despite Crofts’ suggestion that they move to intercept. As they made their way back to base, Swiney radioed ground Air Traffic Control, and although Swiney wanted to get as far away from the objects as possible, ground control ordered them to turn around and approach the anomalies. Swiney dutifully banked around and reportedly blasted towards them at full speed, actually managing to gain on them before suddenly the objects turned at a sharp angle and sped away at a rate of acceleration that was far beyond anything known before vanishing, leaving both Swiney and Crofts completely puzzled.
In the meantime, it turns out that a Ground Control Interception radar in southern England designated Sopley had picked up the objects, which were moving at around 3,000 miles an hour over the countryside of the southwest of England. This was causing quite a bit of panic, as all aircraft in the area were meticulously tracked and accounted for, and these particular objects were nothing that was supposed to be there. Considering this was right in the middle of the Cold War and with tensions high, this meant that these unidentified, out-of-place aircraft were potentially a threat to national security. The response was to scramble any available fighter jets immediately in order to assess the potential threat and possibly engage, and two Meteors from RAF base Tangmere, in Sussex, were launched to join up with Swiney’s plane and offer support, however, they were unable to make visual confirmation, the objects vanished from radar somewhere off the coast of Kent, and the fighters returned to base.
After this incident the whole thing was kept remarkably quiet, even though it was also picked up on a private listening station and there has been evidence that GCHQ, the government’s own secret listening station at Cheltenham, in Gloucestershire, had also aware of the events as they unfolded. It seems that the RAF and the Air Ministry were keen to explain it all away and distance themselves from it all, despite the multiple radar confirmations at the same time as visual contact was made by Swiney and company. Indeed, at some point the entire file on the incident reportedly has since just sort of gone away, as if nothing ever happened on that fateful day at all. Yet those who were there insist that it indeed did happen, and speak of the thick layer of secrecy overlaying the incident. Indeed, not long after this supposedly happened, the Air Ministry issued a warning that restricted RAF personnel from discussing encounters with unexplainable phenomenon with anyone other than official superiors.
As a matter of fact, the practice of the British Ministry of Defense with regards to UFOs at the time was to typically regularly destroy and dispose of any files pertaining to such UFO incidents, as they were seen as largely explainable with mundane explanations and were not worthy of funneling resources into. Since this practice was only stopped in 1967, all official reports from before that year no longer exist in any form. However, Swiney claims that in 1974, after decades of the event weighing on his mind, he requested to see the file on the incident witnessed by he and his co-pilot, and much to his surprise it was actually shown to him. He explains of this:
I was then in a position to say that I wanted to see the report I had written in 1952. I simply said ‘I want to see it’ and the next thing was one of my staff (a RAF Group Captain) plonked it on my desk,” Swiney explained. The file was obtained from an Air Intelligence branch that had inherited D.D.I. (Tech)’s records, and the officer who recovered the file said it had been located “in the Blue Book. So I had a look at it. It was all there, and if I remember rightly I also saw David Croft’s report which was attached to it. I had a look at it and when I was satisfied I put it in the out-tray. I should have taken a copy there and then.
After this the report seems to have just vanished, and an attempt to take a look at it again in 2000 with the help of researcher Dr. David Clarke resulted in them being given the runaround through several agencies, all of who said they were unable to locate the requested file. They were also told that no files on UFOs from before 1967 were available in general because of the past policy of destroying them all, making his 1974 experience all the stranger. When confronted about this discrepancy they received no answer or further explanation from the government, and the file seems to have just disappeared into thin air. As far as the Ministry of Defense is concerned, it never happened. Yet Swiney has always remained adamant that this file did exist, that he saw something truly beyond explainable, and that it was no normal balloon, aerial phenomena, or other mundane cause, and he has said of this:
I had then been flying for about nine years and I had seen many funny reflections, refractions through windscreens and lots of other things, but this was nothing of the sort. We tried very hard to explain away what we were looking at but there was no way we could do that. There was something there, there is absolutely no doubt about it. It was NOT a reflection. I am completely open-minded. I don’t think there are little green men who are going to suddenly land and get out of peculiar-looking craft. But what I do know is that both David Crofts and I saw something, the like of which we had never seen before, and I have never seen since. I cannot explain it. But all I do know is that I did see, as did he, something which was most unusual.
In the meantime, what has gone on to be mostly known as the “Rissington Incident” has been much discussed in the UFO community and has appeared on such well-known TV programs as UFO Files the BBC’s Timewatch. What happened here with these pilots? Was this phenomenon, which was also clearly observed by ground radar, all caused by mundane causes, or was it something more? What happened to that file, and did it ever exist at all? The answers remain unclear, and the Rissington Inceident has gone on to become a regularly discussed unsolved UFO case that will likely invite debate for years to come.
Man Says "This Is Crazy, This Is Just Crazy!" As He Films What Look Like Wormholes Opening in Sky!
Man Says "This Is Crazy, This Is Just Crazy!" As He Films What Look Like Wormholes Opening in Sky!
Man says “This is Crazy, This is just Crazy!” As he films what look like WORMHOLES opening in sky!
Possibly one of the BEST legitimate daytime “UFO” captures…..EVER!
We are living in very unique, changing times and during these times I have become more than intrigued by these changes and what is causing them. I’m referring to the earth changes, changes in our sun and how the earth’s atmosphere manages this what I believe to be a much different sunlight.
Over the last 10 years I have become very familiar with our planet, the mechanics of it and how it reacts to many different aspects of space weather and many other things as well. I monitor everything from the sea floor to the cosmos and everything in between. I am a full-time Watchman and as these uncertain times move forward I’ve got your back. When you really need to know…you’ll know.
Guys this just came up in the news about coronavirus. The mainland China authorities are warning that the virus not only could cause permanent damage to the lungs and immune systems, it could also possibly make men sterile. You heard me right. Further testing on more individuals who have caught the virus needs to be done, but if all males who catch the virus can't have children...and if this virus spreads across the population of humanity, it could cause humans to no longer be able to reproduce. That means eventual extinction. Thats just a worst case scenario and probably wont happen. But I wonder if females also get permentant damage to their reproductive systems? We need further testing and more info. I will keep you updated. I wonder if this virus was a weapon made in a lab. If it sterilizes males then its 100% that its a weaponized virus. Scott C. Waring News states:
The damage of the new coronavirus to the human body is mainly caused by the lungs and the immune system. However, the mainland authorities and the Hubei Provincial Government have also released the latest news to remind men who have been infected with new coronary pneumonia that fertility tests should be performed. They are worried that the new coronavirus may also cause men. Reproductive system damage.
UFOs Seen Entering And Leaving Mouth Of Volcano In Mexico, Video, UFO Sighting News.
UFOs Seen Entering And Leaving Mouth Of Volcano In Mexico, Video, UFO Sighting News.
Date of sighting: Feb 10, 2020 Location of sighting: Volcano popocatépetl, Mexico This is a great discovery of several UFO around the famous Mexican volcano Popocatepetl. One of the UFOs is seen leaving the mouth of the volcano and shooting straight up into space. Another comes down and enters the mouth of the volcano. Absolute proof of what we UFO researchers already knew...there is a alien base 5-6km below this volcano. An entire alien city of many species living there. Scott C. Waring - Taiwan
Black UFO Over California, Daytime Footage, Video, UFO Sighting Global News.
Black UFO Over California, Daytime Footage, Video, UFO Sighting Global News.
Date of sighting: Feb 22, 2020 Location of sighting: California, USA This raw footage was recorded by Yotuber Esmeralda Martinez. The person witnessed a black cone shaped object moving across the sky in California. The object at first looks like a bird, but its not. The shape is not right for a bird, and it has no wings...and no flapping. I also notice at one point...the UFO stops...hovers in place, turns and then continues on its way. This means its intelligently controlled. It doest look like any drone I have ever seen before. This is a UFO. Perhaps aliens are scanning the public for numbers on how many people are carrying the coronavirus. This is a monumental problem the whole world is currently facing. That would spark the interest of aliens. Scott C. Waring
While looking over some Mars photos, I noticed a bowl that was cracked and full of dirt. A bowl might not seem important to a lot of people, but to me its 100% proof that the aliens that lived here were intelligent. You see, they made a bowl...a tool or instrument to help serve the family food. This bowl is thicker on the center sides but thiner on the top and bottom. The bowl also has finger push marks in its side still visible. I'm sure the rover almost ran over this bowl...so why couldn't they have driven over, and pushed it using the rovers arm? Or even examined it closer with its camera to see more detail? Thats NASA...on mars for the ride, not for the discoveries.
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- Gemiddelde waardering: 0/5 - (0 Stemmen) Categorie:Ruins, strange artifacts on other planets, moons, ed ( Fr, EN, NL )
Close Encounters of the Fifth Kind: Contact Has Begun
Close Encounters of the Fifth Kind: Contact Has Begun
World Premiere of the film is April 6th in LA.
“Close Encounters of the Fifth Kind” is a feature documentary presented by Dr. Steven Greer, the global authority on extraterrestrials who created the worldwide disclosure movement and routinely briefs presidents and heads of state on the ET phenomenon. His previous works, Sirius and Unacknowledged, broke crowdfunding records and ignited a grassroots movement. In this film, Dr. Greer presents the most dangerous information that the architects of secrecy don’t want you to know: how forgotten spiritual knowledge holds the key to humans initiating contact with advanced ET civilizations. The film features groundbreaking video and photographic evidence and supporting interviews from prominent figures such as Adam Curry of Princeton’s PEAR Lab; legendary civil rights attorney Daniel Sheehan, and Dr. Russell Targ, who headed the CIA’s top-secret remote viewing program. Their message: For thousands of people, contact has begun. This is their story.
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- Gemiddelde waardering: 0/5 - (0 Stemmen) Categorie:ALIEN LIFE, UFO- CRASHES, ABDUCTIONS, MEN IN BLACK, ed ( FR. , NL; E )
Solar Killshot and the Worldwide Cover-Up
Solar Killshot and the Worldwide Cover-Up
In 2013, Edward A. Dames, Major, U.S. Army (ret.) well known for his remote viewing capabilities, stated that he is very concerned about unprecedented events that will take place in the near future which will affect the whole world.
Edward A Dames - Quote from 2013: "I am far more concerned with a global pandemic breaking out, concomitant with a worldwide economic collapse, and leading to a devastating solar flare hitting the planet. To that end, the emergence of the H7N9 bird flu in China really fits as a candidate for the pandemic."
Seven years later, the year 2020: World Health Organization declares Coronavirus as a pandemic break out -The world economy is on the brink of a financial and economic collapse and yes the H7N9 bird flu fits as a candidate for the pandemic.
In 2013, the Coronavirus in its current form was not yet known, so Edward A. Dames called it the H7N9 bird flu, or would he be right after all?
Now, Ufospotlight.wordpress.com published a disturbing report in which “A Chinese Intelligence Officer reveals true magnitude of China’s fake “Coronavirus” Crisis”?
Quote: “I am a senior Chinese military intelligence officer and I know the truth about the “corona virus” outbreak. It is far worse than the media are telling you.”
Quote: “It is currently flu season in China. When we realized that we could no longer control the spread of the biological agent, we sent our men to all the hospitals and instructed all doctors to diagnose every case of the common flu as “Coronavirus”. We came up with a new name - 2019 - nCoV — and handed out “fact sheets” that described a made-up illness.”
So far it seems that Edward Dames got it right with his predictions but what about a devastating solar flare will hit the planet.
Currently we transit from Solar Cycle 24 to Solar Cycle 25. Quote: “While we are not predicting a particularly active Solar Cycle 25, violent eruptions from the sun can occur at any time,” said Doug Biesecker, Ph.D., panel co-chair and a solar physicist at NOAA’s Space Weather Prediction Center.
About the strange Ezekiels Wheel like UFO spotted next to the sun. This specific object is also depicted in ancient hieroglyphs, mentioned in the Mayan culture as well as in the Aztec culture and also depicted in crop circles.
It is a reference to the very nature of its existence, in ancient scrolls translated Eziekels Wheel posses immense power of destruction. According to scholars, when Ezekiels Wheel is near the sun it has the power to disrupt the sun.
We also have reported several times about the large formations of UFOs caught on the ISS live feed. So far it is unknown why they appear, only to pass Earth to travel further into space to all directions, or it must be that they are fleeing for something, because they know what's coming.
As Edward A. Dames predicted in 2013, there will be a precursor (Ezekiels Wheel?) to a solar storm, which will lead to a devastating solar flare, similar to the Carrington Event in 1859.
What is happening now, it looks like they use 'the worldwide Coronavirus (read biological agent) outbreak’ as a mind control tool for various purposes to further restrict people's rights and freedom, including to distract and to prepare the world population for a devastating solar storm in the near future.
Ed Dames will get it right with his prediction about an expected solar killshot? Time will tell!
Meanwhile, two days ago again a formation of UFOs appeared on the ISS live feed while passing - at a safe distance - the planet Earth.
What is mutilating cows in the Midwest? FBI probed thousands of reports of cattle killed with 'surgical precision' since the early 1970s - with the deaths blamed on satanic cults, the government and ALIENS
What is mutilating cows in the Midwest? FBI probed thousands of reports of cattle killed with 'surgical precision' since the early 1970s - with the deaths blamed on satanic cults, the government and ALIENS
WARNING: GRAPHIC CONTENT
Since the early 1970s, thousands of cow murders and mutilations have reportedly taken place in the Midwest
Reports include cattle having ears, lips, eyes, noses, anuses and genitalia removed with 'surgical precision'
Conflicting theories abound - some believe either aliens or the government are responsible for the mutilations, or 'mutes', which have also been reported across the US and abroad
The FBI attempted to investigate the incidents but were largely unsuccessful due to 'lack of jurisdiction'
On a bright, sunny morning in the summer of 1973, Ron and Paula Watson, two farmers in Springfield, Missouri, witnessed something that changed their lives forever.
It was an alien abduction, they say. But not of a human – of cattle.
They said they saw a 'green, cone-shaped craft' – next to which two 'silver little beings' were standing over a large black cow.
'I told Ron, 'My god, they got a cow! What are they doing to it?' Paula said. 'It had its eyes open and its tongue was like, hanging out a little bit. But it just laid there and it didn't move.'
She described in detail how she saw the aliens running their hands over the cow and then inspecting their long fingers before they 'floated' it into their large ship in the distance.
Their neighbors never believed their story, though one did admit to having one black cow left unaccounted for. The Watsons' story sounds like something out of an early science-fiction film – but it became one of many stories of alien and UFO sightings used to explain the thousands of cow mutilations reported across the United States in the 1970s.
Since the 1970s, bizarre murders and mutilations of cattle have been reported across the nation, primarily in the Midwest. In this photo (left) of a cow in Saguache County, Colorado in 1975, a female cow's utters have been removed with surgical precision. In the image on the right, a cow was found with its tongue removed in July 2013 on a farm in Missouri
News reports make up the bulk of the FBI's 32 page report on the subject, which is prefaced by a brief explanation that their investigation was hindered by a lack of jurisdiction in most cases
Within the depths of the FBI's database of unsolved mysteries lies the graphic tale of these cattle murders, which outraged and petrified farmers for decades, and is still continuing today.
Speculation surrounding who – or what – might be responsible for the killing and mutilation of thousands of cows has ranged from satanic worshipers, government agents, and even aliens.
The most curious aspect is not that the cattle have died, but the way in which they did. Since the early 1970s farmers have discovered their treasured (and expensive) animals dead with various organs excised – including eyes, noses, tongues, hearts, livers, anuses, and genitalia removed with laser precision.
Though many theories have been offered it's a phenomenon that no one – not even the FBI – have ever been able to solve.
In 1974, newspapers started to catch wind of these bizarre mutilations, which first took place primarily in extremely rural farmlands in the Midwest. Instances were reported across the nation but were mostly scattered among South Dakota, Colorado, Kansas, and Nevada.
The news reports make up the bulk of the FBI's 32 page report on the subject, which is prefaced by a brief explanation that their investigation was hindered by a lack of jurisdiction in most cases.
The FBI told DailyMail.com that this was due to the fact that at the time there was no federal law declaring animal mutilation a federal crime, which didn't allow the department to continue investigating.
Many residents reported seeing helicopters circling the areas where cattle later turned up dead and sliced up with seemingly surgical accuracy. This prompted concerns that the mutilations, nicknamed 'mutes' by those familiar with the subject, were being propagated and covered up by the government.
in this image on the left, the cow's heart was excised with expert care - and was the third of three cattle mutilated on the same farm in Missouri beginning in 2011. Theories of who, or what, might be responsible have ranged from satanic cults, aliens, and the government. In the image on the right, ranchers found an animal with its sex organs and anus removed
Linda Moulton Howe is a former Miss Idaho turned investigative journalist and regional Emmy-winning filmmaker who has been a primary proponent of the 'alien argument'
This was around the same time of the height of alien paranoia in the United States – when UFOs, or balls or discs of floating light, were being spotted in similarly rural areas, often preceding or following the cow mutilations.
Many who have dedicated their lives to the subject believe, in fact, that aliens are responsible for the mutilations and that the government has been attempting to cover up their crimes (and existence) for years.
One such person is Linda Moulton Howe, the regional Emmy-winning filmmaker who the Watsons shared their story with for her documentary Earth Mysteries: Alien Life Forms. She has been one of the most steadfast supporters of the alien argument.
Her research conjures the images of what we picture as the stereotypical alien abduction – flying saucers beaming animals up into space with light.
At least two people even reported being abducted by aliens at that time – including one woman named Judy Doraty and her daughter Cindy.
In a 1990 symposium proceeding Howe wrote: '…I found in so many eyewitness accounts of orange glowing objects the size of football fields hovering above pasturelands where mutilated animals were later found. Or beams of light observed shining down from 'silent helicopters' that lighted pastures 'brighter than daylight' and the next day mutilated animals were found. And eyewitness reports of strange craft and/or non-human creatures involved with animals.
'There was Judy Doraty who in 1973 watched a brown and white calf rise in a pale beam of yellow light. Inside the craft, she saw tissue cut from the eye, tongue and testicles by two small grey-skinned creatures. They had four fingers, instead of five, and those long, thin fingers tapered into dark nails. Their eyes had vertical pupils like a cat or a crocodile's.
'Judy's daughter, Cindy, also described in a 1990 hypnosis session seeing a calf rising in a beam of yellow light.'
In a rare winter mutilation, this calf was found in Hooper, Nebraska in 1975 with its jaw completely cut out all the way up to its right eye socket. Eyewitnesses often reported seeing beaming lights or suspicious helicopters near where mutilated cows were later found
US Senator Floyd Haskell from Colorado pleaded with the FBI to become involved with the mutilations in August 1975 after receiving more than 130 cases in the state alone, and farmers had taken to arming themselves out of fear
Supernatural explanations were the only ones that made any sense at the time – given that the technology of the era was not advanced enough to have performed what appeared to be the use of localized lasers.
The areas surrounding the excisions, often around the anus of the murdered animals, had a blackened and burned appearance to them – suggesting the use of a high-powered laser. Other researchers, however, proposed different conclusions.
Christopher O'Brien, an author and investigative journalist on the subject, said that in his 200 cases of dealing with cattle death, about 40 of those were done by 'something with intelligence'.
Christopher O'Brien, an author and who has investigated the subject for decades, said that in his 200 cases of dealing with cattle death, about 40 of those were done by 'something with intelligence'. He is pictured researching left in 1993 and right in 2012
This Hooper, Nebraska calf also had its anus cut in a 10-inch wide diameter and 18-inch deep. O'Brien told DailyMail.com that he didn't believe aliens were responsible - because 'who would fly thousands of light years to collect cow butts?'
He is more skeptical of the alien explanation – saying that Howe's research doesn't incorporate many of the scientific findings that have been made.
He told the DailyMail.com that when a cow decomposes, the vegetable matter contained in one of its four stomachs makes the animal bloat. As the moisture leaves the body it then starts to deflate – causing the exposed edges of the animal to stay hard and darkened.
'To someone who doesn't know what they're looking at – it looks like a burn,' he said.
O'Brien feels that the alien argument is one used to sensationalize the topic and are only looking at a small portion of the total data.
He can't deny, however, how disturbing the number of 'high strange' cases are that he's seen – the ones that involve otherworldly circumstances.
On one occasion which O'Brien calls his 'strangest case' – he was called to the scene of a mutilated calf in Del Norte, Colorado.
'It was really freaky, it wouldn't rot,' he said. 'It was found in a complete pristine, five inch snow field without one drop of blood on the snow. All the blood had been taken from the animal. The heart and liver had been expertly excised and left in the body cavity.
'The chief medical veterinary pathologist said "it wasn't an animal that did this",' he continued.
In O'Brien's book, Stalking the Heard, he writes that the month-old calf was also missing its spine from the hips to the skull and the brain was gone. It's right front leg was also gone, and the vast majority of its ribs, both eyes, ears, intestines, reproductive tract, and lungs had been removed. Its rectum was also mutilated.
Two witnesses also reportedly saw a large beam of light near the house the previous evening before the calf was found.
O'Brien's 'strangest case' was this month-old calf that was missing its spine from the hips to the skull and the brain was gone. It's right front leg was also gone, and the vast majority of its ribs, both eyes, ears, intestines, reproductive tract, and lungs had been removed. Its rectum was also mutilated and its heart and liver were excised but left inside the body cavity
He hits on another popular argument for the cattle deaths – though arguably the least plausible explanation. Many believe that the excisions were being done simply by other animals – scavengers such as vultures or coyotes.
O'Brien is quick to discredit this based off of his own experience.
'The first thing I look for is cut hair follicles,' he said. 'When birds or coyotes rip they rip between the lines of hair they don't cut the hair. If I find a 2-3 inch section of cut hair follicles I know that someone or something with a sharp implement did that. It wasn't done by birds or scavengers.'
These 'high strange' cases are less likely to be reported by ranchers, according to O'Brien.
'The freakier the case the less likely the rancher is to report it – they're so freaked out they won't even tell their family or neighbors. He doesn't want people in the community to think he's been singled out and victimized by some supernatural thing. That's why they're very reluctant to come forward.
'It's only when they see the hundreds and hundreds of helicopters being reported around these sites – mostly military helicopters – it's only when they see that that they feel like they've been targeted or victimized by their government and that pisses them off.'
Though the occurrences in the United States have considerably slowed down since they were at their height in the early 1970s, they certainly haven't stopped. O'Brien notes that they have seen a consistently high number of cases in South America, especially Brazil and Argentina.
O'Brien says that throughout his decades of studying mutilations, he's noticed that there's been a shift to South America, where he believes they've had more than 4,000 cases since 2002. A news report included in an FBI briefing stated that more than 1500 cattle in 22 states were killed and mutilated from 1973 to 1976 in the United States
He claims that since 2002, there have been more than 4,000 cases of cattle mutilation in South America - and are still reporting anywhere from three to a dozen cases a week.
Back in the United States, just before the New Year in 2016, and again a few days afterwards, two cows were mutilated in nearby rural towns in Kansas.
In McPherson County, Carla and John Shearer discovered one of their pregnant cows dead with one eye removed and both her top and bottom eyelids and eyelashes excised.
'We lose animals, but not like this,' Shearer told the Kansas Agland. The couple believes whoever killed their $4,000 cow used a tranquilizer or stun gun to immobilize it before killing it.
'She died in motion – she was walking and she just went straight down,' Shearer added.
Carla and John Shearer on McPherson County, Kansas discovered one of their pregnant cows dead with one eye removed and both her top and bottom eyelids and eyelashes excised in January 2017
The bull found in nearby Harvey County was found dead with its genitals removed – also cut with surgical precision.
It is O'Brien's opinion that the mass mutilations – of which there were thousands reported in the 1970s alone – are a part of a secretive government effort to research animal plagues such as mad cow or prion disease.
'We've seen this many, many times throughout history – where one case will happen and then within a week there will be a dozen. I think they're looking for something – that's the best explanation I can give. And I think they're looking for something within the food chain.
'Bovine spongiform encephalopathy is the most horrendous affliction that you could possibly imagine. It's 100% fatal – it produces large holes in the brain tissue and creates holes like Swiss cheese in the neuron system and the brain synapses start to misfire. You forget to breathe and your autonomic system starts to break down.
'That I think is the basic underpinnings of it – we're dealing with a group that is interested in keeping an eye on the food chain. The beef industry is the largest, most powerful industry that you never hear about. I think we're dealing with something that's being protected by some quasi-governmental group,' he said.
Though tempting to indulge in the possibility of space creatures invading the planet to study our animals, O'Brien finds this explanation a bit too impractical.
'It sounds like bad science fiction,' he said. 'Who would fly hundreds of light years to come and gather cow butts?'
Now and again I’m asked about the issue of “cattle mutilations”/”animal mutilations” in the U.K. Well, yes there are such things in the U.K. I should stress, though, that when I’m asked about these grisly and undeniably disturbing phenomena, people are usually talking about the theory that aliens are the culprits. The truth, though, is that most mutilations in the U.K. are undertaken by sick people who should be behind bars. That said, there are some genuinely weird cases. On April 11, 1977, no less than fifteen wild ponies were found dead at Cherry Brook Valley, Dartmoor, Devonshire, England, by a Tavistock storekeeper named Alan Hicks, who had been crossing the wild and desolate moors with his children. It was not until mid-July, however, that the media began reporting on the incident in-depth. Newspaper articles in my possession demonstrate that the story traveled as far as South Africa; however, consider the following story, extracted from the U.K.’s Western Morning News of July 13, 1977:
“Fears that the mystery deaths of fifteen ponies near a Dartmoor beauty spot were caused by visitors from space were being probed by a Torbay team yesterday. Armed with a Geiger counter, metal detectors and face masks, four men are investigating what leading animal authorities admit seems a ‘totally abnormal happening,’ and are hoping their equipment will throw a new light on the three month old mystery. While other investigators have looked for signs of malnutrition, disease or poisoning – or even gunshot wounds – the four men are seeking proof that extra-terrestrials were responsible for the deaths.”
The trail went icy cold until pretty much 1991 when a great mate of mine, Jonathan Downes, a prolific author, journalist, investigator, and the director of the Center for Fortean Zoology, began to probe the case. Jon – who was living in Devonshire at the time, and who still resides there to this very day – succeeded in tracking down a number of those people that had been quoted by the newspapers some fourteen years previously. Curiously, Jon detected a very distinct reluctance to talk, even after almost a decade and a half. Even more bizarre, one of those same individuals, who strictly adhered to a non-paranormal explanation for the pony deaths, complained to a research colleague of Jon’s acquaintance for constantly pestering her day and night by phone, when, in actuality, the only contact had been one, solitary telephone call. It was a mystery never solved.
On the afternoon of a spring day in 1992, Jon Downes was deep in conversation with a police officer from Middlemoor Police Station in the English city of Exeter. The subject of the conversation was the so-called “big cat” sightings (such as the notorious Beast of Bodmin, Beast of Dartmoor, and Beast of Exmoor) that have been reported throughout the British counties of Devon and Cornwall for decades. Was Jon aware, the officer inquired, that there had occurred at nearby Newquay Zoo in the late 1970s a series of grisly mutilations of animals under extremely strange circumstances? Jon replied that, no, he was not.
Fortunately, however, the officer was able to put Jon in touch with the one man in a position to discuss the facts: the head keeper at the zoo at the time in question. And here’s where things began to get distinctly odd. Jon wasted no time in tracking the man down. Elderly and in failing health, he confirmed to Jon the basics of the story: very strange deaths had occurred at the zoo, and wallabies, swans and geese had been beheaded. But more significantly, their corpses had been totally drained of blood. Another strange saga remained unsolved.
While I don’t personally adhere to the theory/belief-system that the U.K. mutes are the work of ETs, some do. One of those is Mike Freebury. I met Freebury for the first time a few years ago, when I was back in the U.K. for two weeks. He is the author of a 2011 book titled Killers on the Moor. It’s a 252-pages-long book that looks deeply in the matter of mutes in the U.K. If the animal mutilation issue interests you, then you really should get a copy of Killers on the Moor. Regardless of whether you are of the opinion that aliens, wild animals, government conspiracies, or cults are the culprits, Freebury’s book is important, as it’s the only one ever written on the subject of U.K.-based animal mutilations.
Arnu arrives at the A’Le’Inn in a big SUV, pulling up and saying hi to the hungover twentysomethings rocking in rocking chairs out front before he greets us.
“You ready?” he asks, and we pack into his Tahoe and head right back out on the Extraterrestrial Highway.
Arnu has owned property in Rachel since the early 2000s. Back in its boom, when the tungsten mine near Tempiute Mountain was still digging wealth out of the planet, around 500 people lived here. Today, it’s a small town—just around fifty residents, who meet up at the collective mailbox when the Postal Service arrives. Young people, Arnu says, tend to leave. There’s no TV reception. There’s just a squeak of cell phone service. Few places exist to build a career, none to go to college. Some people work at what they simply call “the test site,” an umbrella term that could refer to any of the secret-squirrel operations nearby—the Nevada National Security Site, the Tonopah Test Range, or Area 51.
Around ten people also work at the A’Le’Inn, by far Rachel’s biggest employer. They’re always hiring, because people are always leaving. But people are always showing up, too. “Sometimes they come up here because they are interested in Area 51,” says Arnu, “and they just get stuck.”
That’s what happened to Arnu, decades ago now. It all started with online research into Area 51, reading a website run by a former programmer and airline worker named Glenn Campbell. In the 1990s, Campbell ran the Area 51 Research Center and two UFO newsletters—The Groom Lake Desert Rat and the just plain Desert Rat. The newsletter logo featured a sentient rodent with safari shirt, walkie-talkie, and binoculars, underneath the tagline “The Naked Truth from Open Sources.”
Recalling this, Arnu speeds along the straight road. “He was one of the first that brought the attention of the general public,” he says. But Campbell was mysterious, evasive. “I wanted to know what’s really going on here. Are there UFOs are there no UFOs?”
So Arnu took a day trip, traveling from his home in San Francisco. And when he arrived, he found a place that was fascinating as much for its terrestrial qualities as its celestial hypotheticals. “I had never really experienced the desert in this way,” he says. “And it was just like, ‘Oh my God, this is a whole different world.’ ”
He thought of it, thinks of it now, in terms of motorcycle trips—a hobby of his that he just calls “riding.” “It’s always my thing: I want to see what’s behind the next turn, the next hill,” he says. And despite how this highway feels—unchanging, flat, forever—if you veer from it, turns and hills and the secrets behind them abound.
Release date: March 3Courtesy of Pegasus Books
Arnu went back home knowing he would return. The presence of the place loomed over him, shook him. Soon enough, the labor market gave him a chance: His company downsized, so he took a severance package and car-camped around Rachel.
Soon after that, Arnu started his own website, mostly a blog detailing his daily exploits: As he summarizes it, Today I went out to this gate, this is what I found, check out my pictures. More important than anything he wrote, though, were the comments sections.
“It’s like people were only waiting for a place to congregate,” he says. He soon started a forum—still going strong today—dedicated to such interaction. “We’re geeks,” he says. “We’re loners. But at the same time we also want to discuss what we do with like-minded people.”
He moved to Vegas in 2002 and then bought the property in Rachel, working remotely a lot so he could spend a week at a time in the remote desert.
“And here I am,” he says. “Years later. Still unraveling the mystery of Area 51.”
Arnu looks through the Tahoe’s windshield and points at a prominent peak ahead of us. If you can get to the top, you can see inside Area 51, which would then be 26 miles away. This high spot is the only one left with that view, the military having gobbled up all closer vantage points in a series of land grabs. Here’s what the base looks like from up there: Dark, if you’re doing it right, because the interesting stuff happens at night. But all of a sudden, way across the valley, a runway illuminates itself, a long line of lights dotting the landscape. “You know something is about to happen,” Arnu says. Aircraft bulbs streak along the runway, as a Whatever speeds to takeoff. And as soon as the Whatever is airborne, its lights blink out of existence, and so do the runway’s. The Earth becomes as optically opaque as it was before.
It’s not that they appear. It’s that they disappear.
Nevertheless, the base continues to give away information invisibly: Pilots talk on radios, and if the chatter is not so secret, you may be able to catch a monologue.
Arnu has a radio scanner, which he now turns on, mounted to the dash of his Tahoe. It runs through many Hertz in search of such communication. As the display rolls across frequencies, I prepare to tell Arnu about what we saw last night, feeling silly and like every other overexcitable person who’s ever visited the region.
I know from our prior emails that Arnu doesn’t ride the alien train. Sure, creepy stuff happens here. Sure, there are strange lights, technologies we can barely fathom. But they don’t require invocation of the extraterrestrial: They’re just the government, doing things the world isn’t privy to—the growing up of projects perhaps born classified, just like it always has here.
That started with the U-2, which flew twice as high as a commercial jet, and much higher than anything else at the time. Workers commuted daily on passenger jets—a secret service people call, in its modern incarnation, “Janet airlines”—partly so that permanent residences would not reveal the scale of efforts here. U-2 pilots, though they worked for the CIA, wore civilian clothes and pretended to do weather-related research, according to the book Area 51 by investigative journalist Annie Jacobsen.
Later, Area 51 hosted the Oxcart spy plane project, the U-2 successor that also flew close to the sun but showed up dimmer on radar. Jacobsen writes that FAA and NORAD employees were instructed “not to ask questions about anything flying over 40,000 feet.” And when commercial flights crossed paths with an Oxcart, and a pilot did report it, the FBI would meet the plane at the gate, asking passengers to sign nondisclosure agreements.
Rachel is the closest town to Area 51, a top-security Air Force testing ground in the southeastern Nevada desert.Alexey Stiop/Deposit Photos
Around the country, people nonetheless spotted spy planes and reported them as UFOs. Says a CIA report from 1997, “Over half of all UFO reports from the late 1950s through the 1960s were accounted for by manned reconnaissance flights (namely the U-2) over the United States.” Many, including UFO skeptics, dispute this take, but it doesn’t seem absurd that the government would use UFO reports to understand how conspicuous its technology would look in less friendly skies. And it doesn’t actually want people to see skylights and think “spy planes.” So it is sometimes in the feds’ best interest to let people attribute the phenomenon to something mysterious, unearthly, not them. And—bonus—because many people thought UFOs were woo-woo and not “real,” whoever heard about these UFO sightings would likely dismiss the very real U-2 or A-12 their kid had just seen. The government’s secrets could stay secret. If you wanted to create a theory about why the military hasn’t come out swinging against some of its pilots’ more modern sightings, you might consider this part of the past.
“ ‘Oh, well, these people just saw another UFO,’ ” mimics Arnu. “In actuality they may have seen something super-secret ... If you make people look like fools when they say they saw something, if they say they saw something super secret, what better way to discredit them?” Given the government’s history of passive deception, and active secret-keeping, here, is it any surprise that people suspect it could be hiding something more inside Area 51?
But I want to know what Arnu, who sees this stuff every day, thinks of my sighting. So I describe the on-off lights, their hovering, and my theory that this was some kind of hide-and-seek exercise.
Arnu frowns in concentration. “Were the lights kind of orange?” he asks. “A bright orange color?”
“Yes!” says Carolyn from the backseat. Arnu nods and then goes on to describe exactly what we saw, detail for detail, as if he were there.
“That was flares you were seeing,” he says. A plane chases another plane, and the chaser sends off a (fake) heat-seeking missile. The chased plane drops flares, which burn so hot that they distract the missile, which then chases them instead of the jet’s exhaust. These planes drop flares in patterns—disc shapes, sometimes—to send the missiles clear off course.
Hearing this incident repeated back, with more meaning, makes me feel the way people do when they discover their seemingly singular experience is, in fact, universal: equal parts relieved and disappointed.
Arnu’s first UFO sighting, turns out, was also flares. He had been camping right where we did, in the gravel parking area. “I looked over Tikaboo,” he says, referring to one of the peaks, “and all of a sudden, I see this disc-shaped object of orange orbs hanging in the sky.”
It’s all true, he recalls thinking. They’re coming to get me.
But they weren’t and they didn’t. He was just primed: He thought he had witnessed a UFO because that’s what he expected to witness. “Your eyes see what you want them to see,” he says.
He then begins to talk about YouTube videos of cars disappearing on the Extraterrestrial Highway. They’re not disappearing, he says: They’re coming down from summits, hitting dips.
“We saw that!” I say, and describe how I scared ourselves into thinking that the guards had set a trap.
“That’s why I’m such a skeptic,” says Arnu. “Because I’ve seen it. And I know for a fact what they’re describing is very explainable.” Talking to Arnu feels like seeing a therapist who understands, even when you don’t, that your problems are all because of your mom.
They came from outer Finland: the town where everyone saw UFOs – in pictures
They came from outer Finland: the town where everyone saw UFOs – in pictures
The photographer Maria Lax comes from a northern Finnish town where UFO sightings were common – so she set about looking for answers. Her book Some Kind of Heavenly Fire is published by Setanta Books
‘I’m from a small town in northern Finland surrounded by a vast, sparsely populated wilderness. Most pass through the town without ever knowing it was a hotspot for UFO sightings in the 1960s,’ writes Maria Lax
‘It wasn’t until I read my grandfather’s book about the UFO sightings in the area that I learned of the incredible stories of supernatural events, bravery and struggle against hardship in what is largely a barren land. Already suffering from dementia, he was unable to answer any of the questions I had so I went looking for the answers. I turned to the people who had seen the mysterious lights, to newspaper archives and my family’s photo albums from the era’
‘All of the locations in the book are places I have been going to since my childhood. By doing the project, talking to people, reading my grandfather’s book, searching through family albums and walking around the familiar landscapes I got to know my past and my family history much better. This image was taken near my grandparents’ house on a New Year’s Day when there was a long power cut and an eerie fog came out of nowhere - the perfect weather for the type of photographs I wanted to shoot’
‘Over the few years I worked on this project I interviewed several people in the town, and all their accounts are remarkably similar. Colourful lights would follow cars, or people walking home alone. The lights would be silent, pulsating in different colours before disappearing into the sky. Sometimes bright lights would wake people up in their homes in the middle of the night - and would again vanish without a trace’
‘With the lack of sunlight northern Finland experiences for a considerable part of the year, it’s impossible to escape the darkness. I decided to embrace it and felt like the absence of natural light allowed me to experiment with my images. I wanted to fill the darkness with colours and use long exposures to draw out the unexpected from the locations I knew so well’
‘The first known UFO sightings in the area were made as early as the 1920s. But because of fears that they would be labelled as crazy by others, people kept what they saw a secret and would only come forward with their experiences decades later - and more than likely most never spoke of what they saw’
‘There is a larger story running alongside the UFO sightings. Rapid industrialisation in the 60s and early 70s meant that people couldn’t support their families by farming and were forced to move to cities in search of jobs. Some towns lost nearly half their populations. A whole lifestyle disappeared in a matter of a few years, and those who lived through it remember it as a painful, uncertain time. It’s little wonder the UFO sightings embodied a fear of the future and the unknown. I wanted to bring all of this in by photographing the abandoned houses and showing the isolation’
‘One of the people I interviewed told me: “I remember waking up one night and the room being awash with the most beautiful colours. I knew it was the aliens but I wasn’t afraid. I knew they didn’t wish me any harm.” Although some locals I spoke to were still visibly scared and cautious of sharing what they had experienced decades ago, others said the strange lights were a thing that gave them hope; a sign they hadn’t been forgotten’
‘The title Some Kind of Heavenly Fire comes from a quote in my grandfather’s book about the alien sightings. When an older woman saw what looked like the forest on fire on a cold winter’s night, she described the strange lights by saying it wasn’t anything from this world - but what she saw was “some kind of heavenly fire”. The town where I come from was, and still is, deeply religious in parts, and I thought that quote was the perfect summary for the different elements for the photo book’
‘This project is an artistic expression of something that is part of my hometown and my family history. I have kept the narrative ambiguous and hope that anyone who sees these images can form their own truth about this little town with a big secret’
Even skeptics acknowledge eyewitness accounts of strange aircraft in the skies are worth investigating. With everyone from pilots to other credible sources describing unidentified flying objects, or UFOs, in the air as far back as 1947, it’s impossible to completely discount the real possibility extraterrestrials may be paying us visits.
But which states are most prone to these sightings? Telecommunications company SatelliteInternet.com compiled data from the National UFO Reporting Center to find out.
The results:
Washington
Montana
Vermont
Alaska
Maine
Washington has the highest number of sightings (according to population) by far—an estimated 5894 through June 2019, which amounts to 78.22 sightings per 100,000 people. Montana had 823; Vermont had 482. Oregon, which came in at number 6, had 2844 sightings, but a larger population put the average at 67.86 sightings per 100,000. If aliens are indeed operating the sighted crafts, they appear to be fond of sprawling landscapes with wide-open spaces, like Montana and Vermont.
The states with the least number of sightings:
Texas
Louisiana
Georgia
Mississippi
Alabama
Texas has logged many accounts—4969—but their state population means an average of just 17.31 sightings per 100,000 people. Alabama had 10,882 sightings for an average 22.26. It appears as though aliens aren’t visiting southern states.
You can file a UFO sighting at the National UFO Reporting Center. Be prepared to summarize details like light, trails, whether the object landed or made a sound, if anything was chasing the object, or if entities were seen.
Where did the Moon come from and how was it formed? It’s a question that scientists have been scratching their heads over for decades.
According to the widely-accepted “giant-impact hypothesis,” the Moon was formed billions of years ago when a Mars-sized planet called Theia collided with the Earth, breaking off a large chunk in the process.
Now, researchers from the University of New Mexico say in a new paper published in Nature Geoscience that they believe they’ve found the remains of Theia buried beneath the lunar surface.
The big drawback to the impact hypothesis — as discussed at length by numerous scientists over many years — is the fact that even though oxygen isotopes in lunar rocks collected during NASA’s Apollo missions closely resemble those found on Earth, they’re strikingly different from those found on other objects in our Solar System, as explained by Science Alert.
So how could the Moon be largely made up of the remains of Theia, as many models have predicted?
Despite very small odds, Earth and Theia may have originally had similar compositions, but then been mixed up beyond recognition.
In their research, the New Mexico scientists examined oxygen isotopes in a range of different lunar rock types, collected from a variety of altitudes. They found that the deeper the origin of the rock, the heavier the oxygen isotopes, when compared to the ones found on Earth.
“Clearly, Theia’s distinct oxygen isotope composition was not completely lost through homogenisation during the giant impact,” the researchers wrote in their paper.
That means the oxygen isotopes didn’t fully mix during the Theia-Earth impact, leading to their conclusion that Theia could’ve still originated from outside of the Solar System before impacting with Earth.
“This data suggests that the deep lunar mantle may have experienced the least mixing and is most representative of the impactor Theia,” said research scientist and co-author Zach Sharp in a statement.
Key point:Eyewitnesses, even fighter pilots, are prone to human error.
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!
Are aliens real? Learn about sightings, abductions, and crashes around the world. Hear about unbelievable stories, dating back to ancient Egypt, including the famous crash in Roswell, New Mexico that eventually led to the government cover-up in Area 51. UFO’s in the universe confirmed!
Transcript Provided by YouTube:
00:00 Ancient Egypt, Roswell, New Mexico, and David Grohl. Here are some of the biggest 00:05 UFO sightings in history. Stay tuned to number one to see how the famous rock 00:10 band the Foo Fighters are involved. 00:22 Number 10: The Tulli Papyrus. 00:25 in approximately 1440 BC scribes of the 00:29 Pharaoh Thutmose III claimed to have seen fiery discs in the sky. 00:33 What’s amazing about this story is that it’s the first written account of humans 00:38 seeing UFOs in history the translation of the ancient tule papyrus asserts that 00:42 strange fiery objects were seen in the sky 00:45 for at least four days, and continued to grow in number. Here’s what current 00:49 historians believe the papyrus to have read, “Now, after some days had passed over 00:55 these things lo, they were more numerous than anything they were shining in the 00:59 sky. More than the Sun to the limits of the four supports of heaven powerful was 01:04 the position of the fire circles the army of the King looked on and His 01:08 Majesty was in the midst of it it was after supper thereupon they went up 01:13 higher directed to south fishes and volatile fell down from the sky he was a 01:18 marvel never occurred since the foundation of this land. Caused his 01:22 Majesty to be brought incense to pacify the earth. What happened in the book of 01:27 the house of life to be remembered for the eternity.” Some claim the ancient 01:32 Egyptians merely saw strange astrological or weather phenomena. But 01:37 opposing arguments remind us that the Egyptians were one of the most advanced 01:41 astrologers of any ancient culture. For them to mistake a weather phenomenon for 01:46 an unnatural object is highly unlikely. 01:50 Number 9: Roswell, New Mexico. 01:52 Probably the most famous of all UFO sightings occurred in Roswell, New Mexico 01:57 in 1947. The deep conspiracies and cover-ups that have spawned from these 02:02 events have influenced art, movies, and music, as that event is thought to be the 02:07 catalyst of all area 51 secrets. We’ll have to talk more about area 51 at a 02:11 later time, but for now, more about this famous UFO . William Brazil, better known 02:16 as Mac, was a ranch foreman on the Foster homestead about 30 miles north of 02:21 Roswell. On June 14, 1947, while out on the ranch, Mac noticed some metallic debris 02:28 in the desert and went to investigate. What he found, though, was indescribable. Tough, 02:33 pliable metal that would Bend, but would bounce back to its original 02:37 shape without even a crease. Mac mentioned what he’d found to the local 02:41 sheriff on July 7th and the rest, as they say, is history. 02:46 Immediately after being reported, the US government agencies swooped in to recover 02:50 the strange craft and its occupants. Initially they were moved to Wright 02:54 Field, in Ohio, where they were kept until 1951. But secrecy and security demanded 03:01 that the strange findings were moved to a remote location in the Nevada desert… 03:04 Area 51. Nobody knows for certain what was discovered in Roswell, or what 03:10 secrets the government is hiding from us in Area 51, but whether alien or 03:14 domestic, the truth is that something was discovered in Roswell in 1947. The 03:19 government collected it, and has managed to keep the truth a secret for over 70 03:24 years. That’s not suspicious! 03:27 Number 8: The second…first(?) Recorded Sighting? 03:32 June 19th, 1801, The streets of Hull, England were quiet…nothing out of the ordinary. 03:37 That is, until a strange blue glow began to light up the city. The people of the 03:43 town later said that a huge moon like orb was seen floating over the city, 03:47 casting a strange light upon the town. The moon was aid to form itself into 03:53 seven small distinct moons, or globes of fire, which disappeared for the space of 03:58 a few seconds. Its reappearance was equally brilliant. At first showing 04:02 itself like the face of the Moon, afterwards in five circular balls, and 04:07 lastly like several small stars which gradually faded away, leaving the whole 04:11 atmosphere brilliantly illuminated. Sounds amazing, right? After this sighting, 04:16 which was the first recorded sighting of modern times, more newspaper reports of 04:21 UFO sightings appeared all over Scotland. 04:24 Number 7: Tierport, South Africa. 04:26 South Africa has been a hotbed of UFO sightings, including a 1965 UFO landing 04:33 that was confirmed in a press release by Lieutenant Colonel JB Brits, the district 04:38 commandant of Pretoria North. Some folks in South Africa have even told stories 04:43 of abductions occurring as early as 1956. One such occasion, on July 24th, 1956, a 04:51 photographer capturing photos of an inexplicable object in the sky claimed 04:56 she was abducted by the craft and impregnated by one of the crew members… 05:00 Akon! Now, I don’t think this is the hip-hop artist Akon, 05:03 but it’s definitely a possibility. Sightings have continued through the 05:07 years, but in June of 2011 20 of these crafts were spotted as they crossed the 05:12 skies of Teirport. Some witnesses were even able to capture photos of seven of 05:17 the craft. These objects were described as silent orange lights traveling across 05:21 the sky. Witnesses stated that the orange lights moved much faster than the speed 05:26 of a commercial aircraft. What do you think? Let us know in the comments below! 05:31 05:31 Number 6: The Ghost Rockets. 05:33 It’s not very often than multiple countries 05:37 report seeing the same unidentified objects in the sky, but that’s exactly 05:41 what occurred with the ghost rocket incident. 1946 was an active year for UFO 05:46 sightings over the skies of Europe. Over 2,000 reported sightings were logged by 05:51 the Swedish government, alone, however these same unexplained objects were also 05:56 reported in Greece, Portugal, Belgium, and Italy. And more than 200 sightings were 06:02 corroborated by government radar systems. Most of these reports described 06:06 fast-flying ,missile shaped objects. While they typically flew horizontally across 06:11 the sky, the concerning item for those who saw the phenomenon is the fact that 06:16 the objects maintained maneuverability in the sky – a feat that was unheard of 06:21 for rockets at the time. In a declassified US Air Force document, it is 06:25 clear that Swedish and US governments both believe that the objects had 06:29 extraterrestrial origins. “For some time, we’ve been concerned by the recurring 06:33 reports on flying saucers. They periodically continue to pop up. 06:37 During the last week one was observed hovering over Neubiberg Air Base for 06:42 about 30 minutes. They’ve been reported by so many sources, 06:45 and from such a variety of places, that we are convinced that they cannot be 06:50 disregarded and must be explained on some basis which is perhaps slightly 06:54 beyond the scope of our present intelligence thinking. When officers of 06:58 this Directorate recently visited the Swedish air intelligence service this 07:02 question was put to the Swedes. Their answer was at some reliable and fully 07:06 technically qualified people have reached the conclusion that these 07:10 phenomena are obviously the result of a high technical skill which cannot be 07:15 credited to any presently known culture on Earth. They are therefore assuming 07:22 that these objects originated from some previously unknown or unidentified 07:26 technology, possibly outside the earth.” The Ghost Rocket sightings ended as 07:30 quickly as they began in 1946, however, in both 2012 and 2014 recent sightings have 07:37 prompted both government and civilian investigations into potential landings 07:41 and crashes that seem to be occurring in a Swedish Lake. Maybe ET is just after the 07:47 Swedish Fish! 07:48 Number 5: Ängelholm Memorial. 07:50 During the same 07:52 period as the ghost rocket sightings, Swedish entrepreneur Gösta Carlsson 07:56 supposedly stumbled across a landed UFO and even got to meet a passenger of the 08:01 spacecraft, who had exited the saucer. Carlsson must have made quick friends 08:06 with the alien race, as it is told that they exchanged recipes for natural, 08:10 holistic medicines that Carlsson later shared with the world through his 08:13 pharmaceutical company. Alien pharmaceuticals, huh? Not sure if I trust 08:18 the source! Anyway, to memorialize the meeting, a concrete statue of the UFO was 08:23 constructed in 1972 and remains a tourist attraction to this day… 08:27 especially by UFO enthusiasts around the world. 08:30 Number 4: Abduction! 08:31 Speaking of memorials, if you were to travel the back 08:36 roads of New Hampshire on US Route 3, you might stumble across a strange 08:39 plaque near the town of Lincoln. It’s dedicated to Betty and Barney Hill and 08:44 the fateful events of September 19th, 1961. Betty and Barney were traveling home in 08:49 their car following a vacation in Montreal. At some point during their 08:53 drive, the Hills noticed a strange light up in the night sky. Betty had thought 08:57 that it was a falling star, other than the fact that was falling up, and 09:02 continued to be visible for a long period of time. Betty found a pair of 09:06 binoculars in the car and was able to track the movements of the object as it 09:10 passed in front of the moon. She described it as an odd shaped craft that 09:14 was surrounded by flashing, multicolored lights. Concerned, the Hills climbed back 09:19 into their 1957 Chevy Belair and continued to drive home. Out of nowhere, 09:24 the craft descended upon them and Barney came to a screeching halt as the UFO 09:27 hovered above the road right in their path. 09:30 Fearing they were going to be captured, Barney began to speed away. Their car was 09:34 no match for the extra-terrestrial horsepower, though, and the saucer was 09:37 quickly hovering above their car. According to the Hills, the car began to 09:41 vibrate and their bodies begin to tingle. 09:44 And that’s it! 09:45 The couple of woke some 35 miles away. They had no idea how they got there. 09:50 They did remember seeing the UFO moments before, but they had no recollection of the 09:55 time in between. In the weeks following this incident, Betty Hill began to have 09:58 vivid dreams that seemed more like a recollection of actual events. She was in 10:03 the medical ward of the UFO while being examined by an alien figure. During her 10:08 conversations with the leader of the aliens, he showed her a star map of where 10:12 they hailed from. From Betty’s memory of the dream, she was able to recreate the 10:16 star map, which astronomers have identified as the system of Zeta Reticuli. 10:21 Many books and movies have been written concerning the first documented alien 10:25 abduction, and it’s most certain that Betty and Barney Hills lives were never 10:29 the same after this event. But what really happened that night? Honestly, 10:33 we’ll probably never know. 10:35 Number 3: Cape Girardeau Crash. 10:38 10:39 Cape Girardeau is a small Missouri town, a mere 118 miles south of St. Louis. One 10:45 fateful night in 1941, though, led to a government cover-up and members of the 10:49 town being sworn to secrecy. More than 75 years ago, on the night of April 12th, 10:54 1941 a reverend was asked to leave the comforts of his home in the middle of 10:58 the night so that he could administer last rites 11:01 to victims of what was thought to be a plane crash, just outside of town. As a 11:05 town sheriff and the Reverend arrived at the scene 11:07 they found firefighters working hard to put out a fire that resulted from the 11:10 crash. Through the smoke and fire, it was obvious that this was no plane. As later 11:15 transcribed by UFO researcher Michael Huntington, “The Reverend arrived and saw 11:20 a classic flying disc with part of the side ripped open and two alien bodies 11:24 that were, at least dead, and one that may have been dying, may have been alive, 11:29 couldn’t breathe. The Reverend looked inside of the flying 11:33 saucer and saw wires and components of some sort of alien design. There were 11:37 strange hieroglyphics and bizarre knobs and dials. The Reverend knew that he 11:41 couldn’t really give last rites. About that time the Army Air Corps arrived 11:45 from Sikeston Field and cordoned off the area and swore everybody to secrecy 11:50 and confiscated any pictures. There were pictures allegedly taken that night of 11:55 men holding one of the alien bodies and somewhere out there are those pictures.” 11:58 The story was kept quiet until the 1970s when the witnesses were aging. On his 12:03 death bed, the Reverend finally broke down and told his granddaughter, 12:06 Charlotte Mann what he had seen. Unsure how to take his news, Charlotte was able 12:11 to get corroborating stories from the other aging witnesses, who all claim to 12:14 have seen the craft firsthand. Since the 1970s, Cape Girardeau has become a hotbed 12:19 for UFO research 12:21 Number 2: The Battle of Los Angeles. 12:24 Okay number two sounds 12:27 like something directly out of a Hollywood action movie, the Battle of Los 12:31 Angeles. Following the attack on Pearl Harbor, and the recent decision to enter 12:35 World War II, Americans were on high alert for anything suspicious that might 12:39 indicate an enemy attack. On February 25th, 1942 one such incident occurred and 12:45 has subsequently become known as the Battle of Los Angeles. In the early hours 12:49 of the morning, just after 2:00 a.m. military radar units sent word of what 12:54 appeared to be enemy aircraft approaching the mainland United States. 12:57 As not to give the enemy an easy target, a citywide blackout was ordered and the 13:01 air-raid siren sounded. Reports of an unidentified object in the 13:05 sky began circulating just after 3:00 a.m. and eventually the troops begin 13:09 firing anti-aircraft guns at whatever objects were in the night sky. As 13:13 reported by the Los Angeles Times, “Powerful searchlights from countless 13:17 stations stabbed the sky with brilliant probing fingers while anti-aircraft 13:22 batteries dotted the heavens with beautiful, 13:24 if sinister, orange bursts of shrapnel.” But what was strange was the objects 13:29 never fired back. In fact, after one full hour of firing 1,433 rounds of 13:37 anti-aircraft artillery into the sky…not a single enemy plane was taken down. Not 13:42 a single bomb was dropped from an enemy plane. And no evidence of an enemy 13:46 attack was ever found. There was plenty of damage due to friendly fire, though. 13:50 Beyond the scattered shrapnel of anti-aircraft ammo that had exploded all 13:55 over the town, windows were shattered in homes and businesses all over LA. Several 14:00 homes were completely destroyed by the friendly artillery shells falling from 14:03 the night sky. At least five people died from the events surrounding this attack, 14:07 from incidents ranging from car accidents to stress induced heart 14:10 attacks. While no one knows for certain what was seen over the night sky in Los 14:14 Angeles, many UFO theorists have gone on record to state that the glowing, moving 14:18 targets that the air raid troops were firing at with our rudimentary 14:21 earthbound weapon systems were actually groups of UFOs flying over the Los 14:26 Angeles night sky. Before we get to number one take a moment to subscribe! 14:30 Also don’t forget to leave a comment and let us know what you think about UFOs 14:35 and extraterrestrial beings. 14:39 Number 1: David Grohl and the Foo Fighters. 14:42 Any music lover that’s listened 14:45 to rock in the 90s or the 2000s should be familiar with rock legend David Grohl. 14:50 Beginning his rock stardom as the drummer for the legendary grunge band 14:53 Nirvana, David Grohl went on to found the also well-known fighters of foo or… 14:59 something like that. Anyway, what does this have to do with UFOs you ask? 15:04 Well, Mr. Grohl himself has gone on record to state that he was reading a 15:08 lot of UFO books at the time of the band’s inception. The term Foo Fighters 15:12 dates back to World War II where it was actually used to refer to the 15:16 unidentified objects that were regularly spotted by Air Force pilots as they flew 15:20 missions critical to war efforts. These reports talk in depth about bright 15:25 lights following Allied airplanes. Traveling in speeds of over 200 miles 15:29 per hour, these lights would complete amazing maneuvers and formations all 15:33 around the Allied Force planes, while others would simply follow the pilots 15:37 through the European and Pacific skies. Reports originating as early as 1941 15:42 have described these objects with many different characteristics ranging from 15:46 fiery and glowing red, to orange white, or even green. Some were reported as disk 15:52 shaped, while others were reported as cylindrical objects or even wedge-shaped. 15:56 One of the fiery objects was actually hit with gunfire which caused the larger 16:01 ball of fire to break up into several small pieces and fall to the ground. 16:05 While the buildings below caught on fire, nothing was found from this fireball 16:09 that would have identified its origin or makeup. To this day no known cause for 16:14 these strange appearances exist. Some say it was a secret Nazi unmanned weapon. So 16:19 secretive, in fact, that the Nazis still aren’t even talking about it today! 16:23 Others feel it is related to electrostatic discharge from the planes.
Merciless Ancient Flood Carried 300,000 Lives Away
Merciless Ancient Flood Carried 300,000 Lives Away
A new paper provides evidence that a historic Yellow River flood in China killed an estimated 300,000 people, suggesting the city of Kaifeng was to killer floods, what Pompeii was to mega-volcanoes.
The Chinese city of Kaifeng was a former imperial capital and a new study published in the journal Scientific Reports provides geological and archaeological evidence supporting old literary accounts found in historical documents, that a catastrophic flood in 1642 AD destroyed the inner city and “entombed its inhabitants” within several meters of silt and clay.
Dr. Michael Storozum is a Doctor of Philosophy at Shanghai’s Fudan University Institute of Archaeological Science and, as lead author of the new research paper, he said this flood was particularly “catastrophic” because the city’s defensive walls had partially collapsed during a military siege which caused the floodwaters to become trapped inside.
China Vs Nature’s Wrath: The Flood of 1642 AD
Kaifeng is located on the southern bank of China’s Yellow River’s in the modern central Henan province and in antiquity it was one of the world’s largest cities serving as an imperial capital for several Chinese dynasties . The Yellow River is known to have flooded more than a thousand times in the past 2,000 years causing some of the deadliest flood disasters in recorded history, having claimed an estimated million lives. And over the past 3,000 years, while the Yellow River has flooded Kaifeng city around 40 times, according to the new paper, the 1642 AD event was “perhaps the most devastating of them all”.
Kaifeng and the Yellow River. (a) Topography of the North China Plain. (b) Area around Kaifeng, showing the elevation of the Yellow River compared to Kaifeng. (c) City walls of Kaifeng (solid line - Song dynasty wall, dashed line - Ming/Qing dynasty) (d) The super elevated channel of the Yellow River hanging above Kaifeng, with the tallest building in medieval Kaifeng, the Iron Pagoda, for scale.
In a Newsweek article about the new study, Xin Xu and Rivka Gonen, authors of the book The Jews of Kaifeng, China: History, Culture, and Religion , said that for six months Kaifeng had been resisting a rebel siege on its outer defensive walls and the governor fatefully ordered that the waters of the Yellow River be “unleashed in hopes of destroying the rebel army”. The walls were subsequently broken apart but rather than washing away the rebels the raging dirty waters penetrated the low-lying city taking the number of inhabitants from 378,000, to only “a few score thousand” (60,000) survivors.
The Flood Was Like A Washing Machine Loaded With Razor Blades
Storozum and colleagues explain in their paper that the constant influx of floodwater entering the city created a “deadly mix of mud and urban debris” that they say significantly amplified the destructive power of the flooding Yellow River, causing it to cut through and tear apart everything caught up in its wrath. What this 17th century flood event at Kaifeng tells the scientists is that “urban resilience is not static” but varies in accordance with the magnitude and type of natural hazard, the built landscape, as well as the city's social institutions, said the authors.
Victims of the 1642 AD flood were discovered along with a deadly mix of mud and urban debris.
It’s not only historic floods that the researcher’s new investigations shine light on, for similar events are predicted to occur in our modern world in which “ climate change is expected to cause an increase in extreme weather around the globe,” wrote the scientists. And they also pointed out that as global temperatures continue to rise, which increases the frequency of extremities of floods, studying this one historic event provided an important reminder that unexpected events have happened in the past “and will likely happen again”.
The Facts As They Stand, Are Soaked To The Bone
According to a recent report on the science platform First Street , flooding is a natural process that greatly benefits the environment by, “abating erosion, protecting habitat, cultivating biological productivity” which leads to groundwater recharge. However, high frequency and excessive flooding conversely damage ecosystems, natural habitats, and entire communities, as was experienced over the last month in the UK and other places around the globe. According to a BBC report published today, Copernicus, the EU's climate change service, last winter was “the warmest winter on record for Europe, by a long margin,” being 3.4C above the 1981-2010 average and 1.4C higher than the previous warmest winter of 2015-16.
In North America, according to First Street , between 2000 and 2017 tidal flooding increased “an average of 233% nationally” and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) predicted that in 2019, “200 million people in 25 North American states were at risk from flooding”. Trying to explain this sharp increase in heavy downpours and flooding across most of the United States over the last 20 years, it is believed to be largely caused due to changes in “sea levels, surface temperature, and sea surface temperature,” and these fluctuating environmental factors bring about inconsistent, unpredictable, and increasing flood patterns.
And so far as costs are concerned, according to NOAA, flood damage in America alone has cost the American tax payers, “$1 trillion in inflation adjusted dollars since 1980” representing over 63% of the costs of all disasters totaling a billion dollars or more.
Top image: The Yellow River Breaches its Course by Ma Yuan Source: Beijing Palace Museum / Public Domain
Andrew Collins exclusively reveals the true face of a Siberian Denisovan.
What the Denisovans might have looked like has been one of the hottest debates in paleoanthropology since the discovery of this extinct human lineage back in 2010. Were they big or small? Did they look like their cousins, the Neanderthals, or were they more like anatomically modern humans in appearance? Lastly, were they the giants of legend as some are now speculating?
Resolving these issues is difficult as just a handful of Denisovan fossil remains have been found. They include two enormous molars, two fragments of a parietal bone from a Denisovan skull, and a finger bone from a young female who lived 75,000 years ago - all found during excavations at the famous Denisova Cave in Siberia. There is also a 160,000-year-old mandible that was found in a cave on the edge of the Tibetan plateau in northwestern China and recently identified as being that of a Denisovan.
Despite this frustrating situation, in September 2019, it was announced that Professor Liran Carmel and Dr. David Gokhman of Hebrew University, Jerusalem, had used epigenetics to analyze gene regulation and cytosine degradation in order to determine the suspected physical make up of the Denisovan face. Their finished reconstruction shows the head and neck of a young female with a rounded head, wide mouth and jaw, minimal chin, brown skin, and striking brown eyes. So well received was their reconstruction that in December 2019 the team won the 2019 Science magazine’s People’s Choice for Breakthrough of the Year .
The Hebrew University team’s award-winning reconstruction of the Denisovan face.
Crucial in Carmel and Gokhman’s reconstruction of the Denisovan face was data gained from the lineage’s genome first sequenced in 2010 by the Max Planck Institute in Leipzig, Germany. This showed that a significant number of Denisovan genes have been inherited by modern human groups through interbreeding in the distant past. It is perhaps for this reason that Carmel and Gokhman’s Denisovan bears similarities to Papua New Guineans and also to certain Australian Originals, both of whom display anything up to 5 percent Denisovan DNA ancestry, the highest rate in any human groups. (See, for comparison, figure below which shows Koori Originals photographed around 1847 in Victoria, Australia. Their features, particularly the man in the middle, can easily be compared with Carmel and Gokhman’s Denisovan reconstruction).
Koori Originals photographed by Douglas T. Kilburn around 1847 in Victoria, Australia. Their features are comparable with those of Carmel and Gokhman’s Denisovan reconstruction.
So did all Denisovans look like Australian Originals, or indigenous Melanesians? The answer is almost certainly no. For example, studies of Denisovan genes inherited by modern populations in East Asia, Island Southeast Asia, and Papua New Guinea have revealed new information about the evolution of the Denisovan genome. This shows that soon after the Denisovans split from a common ancestor they shared with their cousins the Neanderthals (as much as 475,000-450,000 years ago) the population diverged into two separate types.
One Denisovan population came to inhabit a vast territory possibly extending from Central Asia, Siberia, and northern China in the north to Mongolia and Tibet in the south. Their descendants most likely moved through the Russian Far East before finally crossing the Beringia land bridge into North America; this occurring perhaps as early as 20,000 years ago. From the many discoveries being made in the Denisovan layer at the Denisova Cave it would seem that these Siberian Denisovans as they are known displayed a high level of advanced human behavior.
The other population of Denisovans lived in southern and southeastern Eurasia, as well as in Island Southeast Asia, Melanesia and possibly even Australia. They displayed a more basic genome, suggesting that they were a more archaic lineage than their northern neighbors.
This second branch of Denisovans are known as Sunda Denisovans (occasionally Australo-Denisovans) after the former Sunda landmass that once linked the Malaysian Peninsula with Indonesia. They themselves would appear to have split into two distinct groups, the youngest of them, according to genetic evidence, perhaps lingering on in places like the Philippines and Papua New Guinea until around 15,000 years ago.
So far there is no hard evidence that the Sunda Denisovans developed the same advanced human behavior achieved by their northerly neighbors. Stone tools as much as 50,000 years old found on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi may have been made by Denisovans. If they were created by Denisovans then it would imply that their ancestors had not only crossed the Wallace Line, the deep water channel dividing most of the Indonesian archipelago from Sulawesi, but also that they had sea-going capabilities.
If the portrait of the young female created by Carmel and Gokhman’s Hebrew University team is truly representative of a Denisovan, then it is the likeness of a Sunda Denisovan, not a Siberian Denisovan, whose evolutionary development was quite different to that of its southerly counterparts.
So the question remains: what did the Siberian Denisovans look like? How different would they have been to Carmel and Gokhman’s reconstruction? To answer this question the present writer asked independent researcher and writer Debbie Cartwright to help in the collation of everything available on the physical appearance of a Siberian Denisovan.
This included all obvious information obtained from the Denisovan genome, such as the fact that Denisovans had brown hair, brown eyes, and brown skin, along with any further information to be gleaned from the few fossil remains found to date. We also looked at the suspected effects on the lineage’s evolutionary development derived from knowledge that the Siberian Denisovans would appear to have thrived at very high altitudes and also in extremely cold conditions. This probably included the Altai Mountains of Siberia and Mongolia and the Tibetan plateau, one of the highest places on earth.
Such extreme environments might well have necessitated the development of specialized respiratory systems including highly adapted noses that were able both to absorb all available oxygen at altitudes where the air was particularly thin, while at the same time warming up the air sufficiently before it passed into the lungs. For instance, a study by Mark Shriver, a geneticist and anthropologist at Pennsylvania State University, found that the effects of climate upon the evolution of nose size and shape suggested that larger, narrower noses are more suited to higher and colder climates, while wider flatter noses are more suited to hot tropical climates.
The Neanderthal Connection
It is important also not to forget that Denisovans were related genetically to Neanderthals, meaning that they would have borne at least some physical characteristics in common with them. This probably included a heavy brow bridge, thickset features, and a receding chin - a fact confirmed with the discovery of the 160,000-year-old Denisovan mandible found in a cave on the Tibetan plateau in northwestern China. This is extremely wide and robust and lacks a well-defined chin.
The Xiahe mandible, only represented by its right half, was found in 1980 in Baishiya Karst Cave.
Also, like the Neanderthals, the Denisovans probably had receding foreheads and extended occipital buns, meaning they perhaps had long heads, as opposed to the more rounded craniums displayed by some early modern human populations such as Australian Originals.
Modern Human Introgression
Having made the connection between Denisovans and Neanderthal physiology it is also likely that Denisovans had at least some traits in common with anatomically modern humans ( Homo sapiens ). When a previously misplaced fragment of the finger bone found in the Denisova Cave in 2008 was reunited with the second, more famous, fragment used by the Max Planck Institute to sequence the Denisovan genome, it was realized that the finger did not resemble that of a Neanderthal as had been widely expected. Although the finger bones of archaic humans such as Neanderthals and Homo erectus are extremely thick and quite stubby, the Denisovan finger bone is a lot slimmer, like that of an anatomically modern human.
This connection between anatomically modern humans and Denisovans is perhaps far deeper than anyone has so far suspected for, as the current writer has speculated elsewhere, there is a strong likelihood that the ancestors of the Siberian Denisovans, after leaving Africa, encountered pre-dispersal modern humans already occupying the Levant. Evidence for the existence of these early modern humans has come from the discovery at the Qesem Cave in Israel of eight teeth belonging to members of the Acheulo-Yabrudian Cultural Complex (AYCC), which thrived in the Levant corridor circa 420,000-250,000 years ago. These were found to be almost identical to those of anatomically modern humans.
Having interbred with these early modern humans, the Siberian Denisovans would then have continued their migration eastwards, entering Central Asia, Siberia, and finally, Mongolia and China. If correct, they would have been carrying physiological traits picked up from early modern humans living in the Levant. This is something that the Sunda Denisovans would seem to have missed out on since they most likely took a different route out of Africa, crossing the Arabian peninsula before entering southern Asia, southeastern Asia, and, finally, Island Southeast Asia.
The possibility that the Siberian Denisovans were carrying at least some early modern human genes might also help explain why the Siberian Denisovan genome is slightly different to that of the Sunda Denisovans, and why they would appear to have displayed advanced human behavior before their final disappearance around 45,000 years ago.
And so this brings us to an impression of the Siberian Densovan that appears as follows…
The face of a Siberian Denisovan by artist George Hernandez working in concert with writer-researcher Debbie Cartwright and the present author. Genetic information, Denisovan and Neanderthal fossils, and unique traits in anatomically modern humans were used to reconstruct this likeness.
For our reconstruction of the Siberian Denisovan we have included some physical traits seen in modern human populations that perhaps benefitted from introgression with this archaic human population. They include modern populations in North Asia, East Asia, and even North America - where First Peoples of the Great Lakes-St Lawrence River region such as the Ojibwa and Cree have been found to possess some Denisovan DNA. They, more than any other population, might well have retained Siberian Denisovan traits through the isolation of their ancestors prior to first contact with Europeans at the start of the historical period.
Debbie Cartwright and I then worked with talented Californian artist George Hernandez to achieve the best likeness of an archaic Siberian Denisovan, here revealed for the first time. It is shown also for comparison alongside Carmel and Gokhman’s own reconstruction.
The reconstructed face of a Siberian Denisovan (left) alongside the Hebrew University’s own representation of a Sunda Denisovan (right).
Many similarities can be noted between the two versions, including wide mouths, receding chins, heavy brow ridges, brown eyes, skin and hair, and also large noses, but there are also some differences as well. The face of the Siberian Denisovan is much longer, the brow ridge more prominent (like that of a Neanderthal), the forehead recedes more, while the cheekbone is much higher.
Aquiline Noses
We have also chosen to give the Denisovan a narrow, aquiline nose with a prominent bridge, as opposed to the large, but much flatter nose, of the Carmel and Gokhman reconstruction. As we have seen, such distinctive noses helped in the absorption of oxygen in elevated environments where the air is particularly thin. Yet curiously, an aquiline nose (also known as the Roman or hooked nose) combined with a prominent bridge has often been compared with the head shape of a large bird, most obviously that of an eagle (the Latin word aquiline means “eagle-like).”
Bird shamanism would appear to have played a significant role in human development for as much as 400,000 years. If, as we suspect, the Siberians Denisovans did possess aquiline noses, then with their prominent bridges and heavy brow ridges there is every reason to suspect that their facial details could be said to resemble those of a bird, something noted in individuals with aquiline noses in more modern times.
Illustration comparing an individual with an aquiline nose, heavy brow and prominent nose arch with the head of an eagle by Charles Le Brun
If correct, then this might have encouraged Siberian Denisovan groups to adopt the guise of birds to engage in early forms of animism and even shamanism, similar to that noted in connection with the AYCC inhabitants of the Qesem Cave in Israel as much as 400,000-250,000 years ago. In other words, Siberian Denisovans came to resemble birds both in physical appearance and in mannerisms, a connection emphasized and even celebrated through ritual practices.
Dreadlocks
Lastly, we chose to give our Denisovan thick, dreadlocked hair as opposed to the frizzy hair seen in Carmel and Gokhman’s reconstruction. Why did we do this? The answer is two-fold. First, it comes from the adoption of dreaded hair for socio-cultural and socio-religious purposes by various modern human populations such as the Himba people of Namibia, the Hindu Sadhus or holy men of India, and the Rastafarians of Jamaica.
Secondly, the deliberate management of long thick hair by dreading and the subsequent use of mud (as well as goat hair in the case of Himba women) to help coat it aids in the prevention of lice and other insect infestations. In addition to this, dreadlocks bunched up on the head would have accentuated the Denisovans’ suspected elongated heads, emphasizing their individual identity in a world that towards the end of their time circa 45,000-50,000 years ago, would have included Neanderthals, anatomically modern humans and, most likely, hybrids stemming from an admixture of all these various lineages of the homo genus.
Clearly, such a unique feature is based on speculation of how the Siberian Denisovans managed long hair without cutting it and how it might have come to signify their ritual culture. This is an important point, for no matter what evidence is used to reconstruct the face of an archaic human, it will always involve some personal bias. This can be seen, for example, from the many different representations of Neanderthals. They range from virtual ape-men covered in thick body hair, to others where the individual becomes almost indistinguishable from any red-haired, freckled person you might encounter on the street today.
Thus, it has to be accepted that the Denisovan face imagined by artist George Hernandez under the directions of Cartwright and the author must by definition have its own personal bias. This said, we feel it is the closest representation to date of a Siberian Denisovan, as opposed to the face of the Sunda Denisovan developed by Carmel and Gokhman.
Further assessments on the shape of the Denisovan skull and the proportions of the face can only be achieved following the discovery of additional fossils; most urgently a complete cranium. Beyond this will be the eventual discovery of a Denisovan femur, which will help settle the debate over whether or not the Denisovans were of exceptional size and height.
This was first implied by the enormous size of the two Denisovan molars found in the Denisova Cave. Although the two fragments of the Denisovan skull found at the site in 2016 are also suggestive of a large body frame, not enough fossil remains have come to light to answer the question of height and girth with any degree of certainty. So, until such times we must be content with the two faces of a Denisovan presented to the public so far – that of Carmel and Gokhman’s team from the Hebrew University and that of our own. At least these provide some idea of what this extinct branch of the Homo genus might have looked like.
Top image: The reconstructed face of a Siberian Denisovan (right) alongside the Hebrew University’s own representation of a Sunda Denisovan (left).
Rare Masterpiece Uncovered on Ancient Egyptian Sarcophagus
Rare Masterpiece Uncovered on Ancient Egyptian Sarcophagus
An Italian-Egyptian team have reconstructed a masterpiece of ancient Egyptian art. They have been able to virtually recreate the face of a leopard that was found on a sarcophagus lid in a necropolis. They recreated the face of the big cat using the latest digital technology.
A team led by Italian archaeologist Patrizia Piacentini, from the Milan State University, found the necropolis under the sands of the desert not far from Aswan. The burial site was unearthed some 15 feet (5m) underground. According to Ansamed, the necropolis “extends for more than 25,000 square meters on the western bank of the Nile River , near the Mausoleum of Aga Khan III.”
Apart from the network of tombs found underground, some burials were also discovered dug into a nearby hill. It is believed that the burial site was in use for a millennium from the 7 th century BC until the 3 rd century AD when Egypt was a Roman province.
Entrance of the newly discovered tomb, where the leopard painting on the sarcophagus was found.
Ansamed reports that “one of the tombs, number AGH026, already made news last year when a large room was found with about 30 bodies buried during the 2nd century BC.” This had a treasure trove of grave goods, including funerary art and a very rare stretcher for transporting mummified cadavers.
In this location, the team found a leopard that was painted onto the stucco of a shattered lid of a sarcophagus. In ancient Egyptian culture, this animal was the symbol of power and determination. Live Science reports that the representation of the predator was “likely intended to strengthen the spirit of the recently deceased for the journey to the land of the dead.”
The painted image of the leopard was found in a poor condition and much of it was missing. It was painted onto the fragment of a lid of the sarcophagus, which was very fragile and full of sand. The experts decided to remove the stucco, with the image, from the lid in order to save the artwork. It was a very delicate task and it could easily have gone wrong. Archaeology.org quotes Piacentini as saying “it was a very delicate operation that had us holding our breath, we had tears in our eyes.”
The fragmentary sarcophagus lid with the painted leopard face on it.
At one time, the face of the leopard would have been aligned with the face of the mummy inside the coffin. Live Science quotes the lead researcher Piacentini, that the symbol of the leopard “was common in ancient Egypt, but it is very rare to find it painted.” The team took the fragment with the image of the leopard from the site, in order to preserve it.
Then they decided to use some breakthrough technology in an effort to digitally reconstruct the c.2200-year-old painting. The researchers were able to recreate the leopard, which was originally very realistically painted, with vibrant colors and wide eyes. Piacentini told Fox News “we made the discovery at the end of January 2019, but just finished the 'virtual' restoration of the fragment.” The digital reconstruction demonstrates the great skills of Egyptian artists and their ability to create realistic and naturalistic works of art.
Also found in the same tomb as the leopard painting was a dish with some pine seeds. Based on Roman era cookbooks it seems that these were very popular and used in a variety of foods. It is likely that the seeds were placed beside the burial of a person by his family. The Egyptians believed that the deceased would enjoy them in the afterlife.
The leopard found at Aswan is now being conserved. Ilaria Perticucci and Rita Reale, both professional conservators, are planning to restore the image in the controlled environments of laboratories in Aswan. It is not known if the restored painting will be put on display in the future. The necropolis, where the remarkable image was found, continues to be excavated by archaeologists.
Top image: Virtual rendition of the painting of the leopard face found on the ancient Egyptian sarcophagus.
After the US Navy confirmed a spate of unusual sightings by its pilots last year, candidates in the 2020 election have been asked what they think of the possibility of extra-terrestrial life.
Some candidates have dodged the question, others have openly shared their views.
Sen. Bernie Sanders has suggested that he would declassify information about UFOs if he wins.
President Donald Trump has expressed skepticism about UFOs but told a reporter last year the US was monitoring the situation.
See what other leading candidates – including those who ran and then dropped out – think.
As the 2020 presidential race heated up, the candidates came ever-closer scrutiny for their policies on the key issues facing the US.
But some reporters have made it their mission to find out where they stand on a subject usually relegated to fringes of the internet – the existence of UFOs.
The question is getting increasing attention after the Navy confirmed last September that a spate of videos showing military planes being buzzed by mysterious, fast objects.
In response to an freedom of information request in January, the Navy also said it had top-secret information about UFOs that it could not make public as it could cause “exceptionally grave damage to the National Security of the United States” if released.
Here are some of the candidates who’ve shared their thoughts on UFOs, and what they said.
Bernie Sanders suggested he would release classified information if elected
Foto: Democratic 2020 U.S. presidential candidate Sanders rallies in North Charleston, South Carolina
Source: Reuters
Sanders made the suggestion to podcast host Joe Rogan in an interview last August.
Here’s the full exchange:
Rogan: If you found out something about aliens. If you found out something about UFOs, would you let us know?
Sanders: Well, I’ll tell you, my wife would demand that I tell you.
Rogan: Is your wife a UFO nut?
Sanders: No, she’s not a UFO nut. She goes: “Bernie, what is going on do you know? Do you have any access to records?”
Rogan: You don’t have any access? You’ll let us know though?
Sanders: Alright, we’ll announce it on the show. How’s that?
President Donald Trump doesn’t seem to believe in UFOs, but did say his administration was looking into them
Foto: FILE PHOTO: U.S. President Donald Trump visits India
Source: Reuters
President Donald Trump was quizzed about the rising number of Navy UFO sightings in an interview with ABC News last June.
And though he was sceptical about the reports, he did confirm that the US government was monitoring the situation.
“They do say, and I’ve seen, and I’ve read, and I’ve heard. And I did have one very brief meeting on it. But people are saying they’re seeing UFOs. Do I believe it? Not particularly.”
Asked if he would be told if extraterrestrial life was found, Trump said: “We’re watching, and you’ll be the first to know.”
Amy Klobuchar said she would declassify information so “earnest journalists” can dig into it
Foto: U.S. Senator Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) speaks to guests during a campaign stop at the Marion County Democrats soup luncheon at the Peace Tree Brewing Company on February 17, 2019 in Knoxville, Iowa
Source: Scott Olson/Getty Images
Sen. Amy Klobuchar, who dropped out of the race after the South Carolina primary, made her remarks to Daymond Steer, a reporter on local New Hampshire newspaper Conway Daily Sun.
The state’s primary in February was the first of the election season.
In his interviews, he typically saves one big question for the last: Do they believe in UFOs and if elected president would they declassify information about them?
“I think we don’t know enough … I don’t know what’s happened, not just with that sighting, but with others,” Klobuchar told Steer in January. “And I think one of the things a president could do is to look into what’s there in terms of what does the science say, what does our military say.”
“Here’s the interesting part of that answer is that some of this stuff is really old,” she said. “So, why can’t you see if you can let some of that out for the public so earnest journalists like you who are trying to get the bottom of the truth would be able to see it?”
Pete Buttigieg said humans ‘should always be looking at what’s going on around us’
Foto: U.S. Democratic presidential candidate and Mayor of South Bend, Indiana Pete Buttigieg campaigns during a SEIU California Democratic Delegate Breakfast in San Francisco, California, U.S. June 1, 2019.
Source: REUTERS/Stephen Lam
Former Mayor Pete Buttigieg of South Bend, Indiana, struck a philosophical tone when Steer asked him the same question in January. He dropped out at a similar time to Klobuchar.
The former military intelligence officer remarked that “strange things happen out there” and that though life outside Earth probably existed, he had not seen any evidence that alien life forms had visited this planet.
“As a curious species, [we] should always be looking at what’s going on around us,” Buttigieg told Steer.
“Unimaginably strange things often happened in the grand sweep of American and world history and we should never fail to be on the lookout for what’s happening around us.”
What in the blazes is a ‘blazar’ and should we be worried that the oldest and biggest one in the universe is pointed directly at Earth?
“We present the discovery of PSO J030947.49+271757.31, the radio brightest (23.7 mJy at 1.4 GHz) active galactic nucleus (AGN) at z > 6.0.”
Well, that opening line from a new study published in Astronomy & Astrophysics tells us absolutely nothing about blazars that a non-astronomer can understand. Fortunately, we have Silvia Belladitta, a Ph.D. student at the University of Insubria in Italy and leader of the study, to explain it to us in somewhat simpler terms in a statement to Phys.org.
“The spectrum that appeared before our eyes confirmed first that PSO J0309+27 is actually an AGN, or a galaxy whose central nucleus is extremely bright due to the presence in its center of a supermassive black hole fed by the gas and the stars it engulfs.”
Hey, watch where you’re pointing that thing!
PSO J0309+27 was first discovered when Belladita and her colleagues looked at bright radio sources captured by the NRAO’s Very Large Array (VLA) in New Mexico, the Panoramic Survey Telescope and Rapid Response System in Hawaii (Pan-STARRS), and the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) space telescope. A bright object was isolated and named PSO J030947.49+271757.31 (PSO J0309+27 for short). Knowing its exact location, they then took measurements from the Large Binocular Telescope (LBT) in Arizona and NASA’s Sift space telescope to determine that it was an active galactic nucleus (AGN) – a black hole at the center of a galaxy that was consuming the stars around it. All exciting stuff, but one piece of data from the LBT made this a unique and mind-blowing discovery.
“In addition, the data obtained by LBT also confirmed that PSO J0309+27 is really far away from us, according to the shift of the color of its light toward red or redshift with a record value of 6.1, never measured before for a similar object.”
OK, mind-blowing for astronomers. PSO J0309+27 is a supermassive black hole at the center of a galaxy and is a billion times more massive than our Sun. For an apples-to-apples (or AGN-to-AGN) comparison, the supermassive black hole at Milky Way’s center is only four million times more massive than the Sun. While PSO J0309+27’s mass is impressive, its light is even more extraordinary. It means that the radar jets blasting out of PSO J0309+27 are pointed directly at Earth – THAT’S why it’s called a ‘blazar’. Any slight deviation would make it a barely detectable non-blazar AGN. At the distance of 13 billion light years, the third remarkable thing about PSO J0309+27 is that it’s barely a billion years older than the entire universe.
“Thanks to our discovery, we are able to say that in the first billion years of life of the universe, there existed a large number of very massive black holes emitting powerful relativistic jets. This result places tight constraints on the theoretical models that try to explain the origin of these huge black holes in our universe.”
Other supermassive black holes pale in comparison.
Yes that’s a big deal to Belladitta and her fellow astronomers, who are now anxiously awaiting the Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile coming online this year. The first objects they’ll most likely study are the 100 other known AGNs.
And finally … is Earth in any danger with the biggest and oldest blazar in the universe blazing its jets directly at us? Not a chance.
It was while the Northwest Airlines Airbus A319 was in the airspace of Minnesota, at around 8 pm on the evening of 25th March 2004, when the air traffic control in Minneapolis received communication from the crew that they could see two unidentified objects approximately 15 miles in front of their position and seemingly traveling in the same direction (and so maintaining this steady cushion).
The plane was traveling at an approximate altitude of 35,000 feet and it appeared the two strange objects were possibly only slightly higher than that. The crew requested any information from the control tower of other air traffic in the area.
However, the response returned that there were no signs of any other aircraft in the plane’s vicinity. They would ask the crew, though, if they were “still seeing the targets” to which they would respond they very much were.
Upon focusing on the scene in front of them further, one of the pilots felt he could see two sets of two objects, which, if correct, would mean that four individual, solid crafts were making their way, from the north, in a west, southwest direction to a destination unknown.
The two spherical objects would remain in their sight for approximately a quarter of an hour before eventually vanishing into the distance. While the plane continued its flight with no further incidents, eventually landing as planned in Los Angeles, the air traffic controller would make a report of the incident to the National UFO Reporting Center (NUFORC).
The incident would catch the attention of Peter Davenport the NUFORC’s director. So much so, that Davenport would initially arrange to speak with the witness on an upcoming talk radio broadcast. However, before the show could take place, the controller’s supervisor somehow became aware of the impending appearance and would order that the witness not appear on the show and was not to speak of the incident publicly.
While this might be nothing more than a desire to keep such “sensationalist” stories away from a commercial airline so as to avoid any potential negative effects, it also smacks ever so slightly of the way other witnesses, particularly those connected to airlines, have been silenced from telling their stories. NOTE: The above image is CGI.
The most recent UFO footage on the Internet is completely free to download, yet you still can’t find a single video on the Internet that has more images and color than the latest UFO video to come from the Mediterranean. If you need any more proof of how important this newest UFO video is, then just read on.
Most people are familiar with UFO sightings in the United States such as those which have been reported in the Midwest region or the Mississippi Valley Delta. However, there are many videos of UFOs in the Mediterranean which are as varied as the countries they come from. There are many UFO videos from France, Italy, and Spain, and another from Switzerland, to name a few.
Although most UFO videos in Europe and North America take the viewer on a ride through the sky and onto the ground, some of these videos feature scenes that are taken from within the atmosphere of earth. These images are especially impressive because they include blue and green flashes and streaks that appear to be video film. Of course, this doesn’t mean that they’re actually from an extraterrestrial craft, but it does show that UFO videos from the Mediterranean can be as captivating and mesmerizing as those from other parts of the world.
What does this mean for someone who wants to see a UFO up close and personal? It means that if they want to be truly amazed by the amazing technology we humans have at our disposal, then they need to watch a video from the Mediterranean. You can’t compare these videos to the ones from Florida, Texas, or California, because the European videos feature some amazing imagery and not all of them are filmed on black and white.
Because the many images in these videos are taken from the atmosphere of earth, they don’t make much sense unless you understand what’s going on. You need to remember that NASA scientists didn’t believe in the existence of UFOs until they started taking pictures of them from the surface of the moon. When you take a video from the atmosphere of earth, you are viewing what is known as an enhanced digital video.
But not all videos from the atmosphere of earth show the same footage, so you need to watch one from each country in order to compare. In fact, some European UFO videos do not include footage at all, as they come from both above and below the atmosphere of earth. If you want to see some of the most spectacular images of the new generation of UFO footage from the Mediterranean, then you need to get on the Internet and see for yourself.
The videos that feature imagery from the atmosphere of earth are typically far superior to the ones that don’t, and they all have the power to awe anyone who views them. The human race has been fascinated by the UFO phenomenon since the very first time a person took a picture of an object in the sky. Nowadays, the technology used to capture the most exciting UFO videos from the earth has reached new heights.
There are even several of these videos on the Internet that you can download without having to pay a cent, but you can only do that if you want to see these videos for yourself. People who want to see the latest UFO footage on the Internet can find numerous websites that offer it, and if you want to experience what it is like to be on the ground when a UFO zooms across the sky, then you need to see one of these videos from the Mediterranean. There is no arguing the fact that these videos are the latest and greatest form of entertainment available, so why would you be interested in anything else?
Huge "Ezekiel's Wheel" Type UFO Spotted In Our Solar System By NASA's Stereo Ahead Camera
Huge "Ezekiel's Wheel" Type UFO Spotted In Our Solar System By NASA's Stereo Ahead Camera
The camera from NASA's satellite Stereo Ahead HI2 which orbits around the Sun has has picked up somethings that shouldn't be there.
The unknown object which looks like a huge "Ezekiel's Wheel" made its appearance on February 19, 2020 and it is still out there and NASA has not yet issued a response to the strange apparition.
It is not the first time that this UFO, which also looks like the spacecraft in the 2001 movie "A space Odyssey", appears in front of the Stereo Ahead HI2, the same satellite also caught this object in 2011.
It was said at the time that it was a camera artifact, but when it comes to a camera artifact then why does it only come back after nine years and not more often as you would expect.
Stereo is a solar observation mission. Two nearly identical spacecraft were launched in 2006 into orbits around the Sun that cause them to respectively pull farther ahead of and fall gradually behind the Earth. This enables stereoscopic imaging of the Sun and solar phenomena, such as coronal mass ejections.
Strange object hovering in the dark sky over Preston
Strange object hovering in the dark sky over Preston
Preston, Lancashire, UK – A UFO was caught on camera flying above Preston in the early hours of February 20. Gail Jacques spotted a mysterious bright white object moving above the city’s rooftops. She first saw the UFO over Preston Prison at round 1:30 am.
Gail's picture of the 'Preston Prison UFO' has since been magnified.
Pic: Marek Ostiadel
According to Gail, the object hovered for several minutes before moving at incredible speed. She immediately snapped photos of the strange flying object.
Her interest in knowing the true identity of the Preston Prison UFO led her to share the pictures with friends on social media.
Gail said that the UFO was too fast and precise for a helicopter. She explained that it moved so fast in seconds.
The pictures have generated mixed reactions online, with many Prestonians offered possible explanations.
Some say it’s a plane or helicopter, others say it’s a drone, and a few say it’s something not of this world.
Is it a plane? Is it a drone? Or is it something out of this world...?.
Pic: Marek Ostiadel
There are also who say it’s a Venus or Jupiter. Some believe it is the International Space Station.
Stephen Hall explains that it’s not a star as it’s below the cloud cover. He finds it interesting.
Steve Connolley does not believe it’s the International Space Station (ISS) as it seems too far away from sunset or sunrise, as the ISS is generally only visible close to these times.
Alison Fidder countered the explanation that it’s the planet Venus by saying that the planet sets at around 9:30 pm at the moment.
Retired Preston woman Gail Jacques caught the mysterious object flying over Preston Prison at 1.30am on Thursday (February 20). Pic: Gail Jacques
What are people saying?
"Interesting, it's below the cloud cover, so not a star," said Stephen Hall.
"Depending which direction you're looking it could have been a plane in holding pattern for Manchester," said Steve Thornley.
He explained: "The landing lights at a distance can appear to move pretty quick in the turn."
Steve Connolley said: "Seems too far away from sunset or sunrise for the ISS (International Space Station) as it’s generally only visible close to these times.
"And, as Steve (Thornley) said above, don’t think there are any ISS passes at the moment."
"It is the planet Venus," declared a sceptical Trevor Edwards.
"Not at 1:30 am, Venus sets at around 9.30pm at the moment," countered Alison Fiddler.
Patricia Bilsborrow added to the intrigue, stating: "I’ve seen this a few times in the last week or two and wondered what it was. It doesn’t look like a star."
What do you think? Is the truth really out there? Let us know what you think of the 'Preston Prison UFO' ...
The sun’s counterglow – or gegenschein – is kind of a stargazers’ legend. What is it, and how can you see it? Erwin Matys and Karoline Mrazek of Project Nightflight explain.
See the faint concentration of light toward the center of this image? That’s the elusive gegenschein – aka the counterglow – a diffuse spot visible in the darkest of skies, centered at the point directly opposite the sun. Sunlight reflecting on interplanetary dust causes it.
The sun’s counterglow — or gegenschein — is kind of a stargazers’ legend. Every amateur astronomer has heard about it, only a few of them have actually seen it, and even fewer were lucky enough to capture an image of this dim and ghostlike apparition.
Matter of fact, it isn’t an object at all. But let’s start from the beginning.
What exactly is the gegenschein?
It is widely known that the space between the planets isn’t empty. The plane of the solar system is filled with an enormous disk of small dust particles with sizes ranging from less than 1/1000 millimeter up to 1 millimeter. It is less commonly known that this interplanetary dust cloud is a highly dynamic structure. In contrast to conventional wisdom, it is not an aeon-old leftover from the solar system’s formation. That primordial dust is long gone. Today’s interplanetary dust is – in an astronomical sense of speaking – very young, only millions of years old. Most of the particles originate from quite recent incidents, like asteroid collisions.
This is not the gegenschein. The picture shows the zodiacal light, which is closely related to the gegenschein. Here imaged from a rural site, the zodiacal light is a cone of light extending from the sun along the ecliptic, visible after dusk and before dawn. The gegenschein stems from the same dust cloud, but is always opposite the sun, for example, highest in the sky at midnight. The gegenschein is much harder to detect or photograph than the zodiacal light.
Exposed to various forces, the particles do not remain in stationary orbits but inhabit the disk in ever-changing motion. The smallest particles (less than 1/1000 millimeter) are swiftly blown out of the solar system by the solar wind. The larger particles don’t survive very long either. They tend to collide with larger bodies or slowly spiral into the inner solar system where they fall into the sun.
Nevertheless, the supply of interplanetary dust particles is constantly replenished by the above-mentioned asteroid collisions and the erosion of comets. So, the interplanetary dust cloud of the solar system is not a static formation but a dynamic structure consisting of quite young components.
For an observer on Earth, this dynamic dust cloud is mainly visible in the form of the zodiacal light. After dusk and before dawn it extends as a cone of light from the sun along the ecliptic path. Often called the “false dawn,” the zodiacal light is quite bright and can be seen from any observing site that doesn’t suffer from severe light pollution, especially when the ecliptic is high in the sky. For Northern Hemisphere observers, this is the case in the evening sky during spring and in the morning sky during autumn.
The morning and evening zodiacal light are the two areas of the interplanetary dust disk where sunlight gets forward scattered to earth, resulting in the bright silvery light cones. The interplanetary dust disk is also visible along the rest of the ecliptic path, where it is called the zodiacal band. Unlike the zodiacal light, however, these sections are very hard to detect since they have an extremely low surface brightness. But at the point directly opposite the sun the geometry again works in our favor and enhances the visibility of the interplanetary dust. This is the area of the gegenschein.
But why does the gegenschein glow brighter than the rest of the zodiacal band? Looking at the interplanetary dust disk from Earth, the section at the antisolar point is illuminated from directly behind our heads. This results in an increase in brightness that is called the opposition effect. The opposition effect is a frequent phenomenon for solar system bodies. For example, the moon shows a significant peak in brightness around full moon, i.e. at its opposition. Another example are Saturn’s rings in the days around opposition, when they brighten drastically.
The main reason for this brightening during opposition is shadow hiding, meaning that all particles are fully illuminated. This opposition effect can even be experienced here on Earth during daylight if you are outdoors and look at the ground in front of you. If the ground is sufficiently coarse, you will see a brightening around the shadow of your head. To document this phenomenon, we made the photo below, which shows the opposition effect on volcanic gravel.
This is like the gegenschein. For this photo, a small action cam was positioned on a tripod looking down on volcanic gravel on La Palma island. The insert shows some of the gravels with a size of several millimeters and their rough surface structure. Around the camera’s shadow the opposition effect results in an obvious brightening. The glow pictured here is similar to the glow of the gegenschein on the night sky.
Interestingly, the brightening around the camera’s shadow had an apparent diameter of 10 degrees, which is about the same size as the diameter of the gegenschein in the night sky. Next time you walk on a rough surface in sunlight, give it a try and look for this terrestrial version of the counterglow.
To sum it up, the gegenschein is not an object. It is a play of light on the solar system’s interplanetary dust disk. The section of the dust at the antisolar point is squarely illuminated, which results in a brightness enhancement due to shadow hiding. This so-called opposition effect can be encountered at many occasions, but with the gegenschein it makes its most ghostlike and outlandish appearance. This is probably the reason why it is such a prized trophy among amateur astronomers.
How we captured the gegenschein
From our observing and photography sessions at dark-sky sites, the gegenschein was a familiar companion. Out under the stars, sooner or later one of us would mention: “Mmh, the gegenschein is quite obvious tonight,” followed by the typical reply: “Yep, bright and shiny!” This short dialogue would indicate that our eyes had reached full dark adaptation and our night vision was at maximum capacity. We often talked about making an image of our good old dark-sky companion, the gegenschein. But for some reason it never came to it. Other projects were in the way, on other occasions the position in the sky was not right, or the atmosphere’s transparency was just not good enough.
But on the night from October 30 to 31, 2019, we finally did give it a go. On October 30 we were already several days on an imaging excursion on La Palma island. During daytime the annoying Calima weather pattern had finally stopped and skies were again as deep blue and transparent as they can be on this beautiful stars island. Accommodated in a solitary finca far away from inhabited areas and about 800 meters (2,600 feet) above sea level we had the perfect conditions for photographing the gegenschein. Around midnight, when the counterglow culminates, our instruments registered a sky brightness of 21.4 magnitudes per square arcsecond in the zenith. This is so dark that Sirius noticeably brightened the landscape when it rose behind a mountain ridge later that night. The gegenschein itself was pretty obvious to the unaided eye. Below the constellation Aries, directly on the ecliptic path, a distinct glow about 10 degrees across marked the antisolar point. The very faint zodiacal band crossing the whole sky was visible too, almost looking like an artificial marking of the ecliptic. Under these conditions, shooting the gegenschein was an easy task.
For those interested in the technical details: we made 23 unfiltered exposures of 4 minutes with a 16mm lens @f/5.6 on a Baader-modified 1100D Canon DSLR. For sky tracking we used a purely mechanical device, the Mini Track LX2. This innovative device is a frequent companion on our imaging excursions. For those interested in more details, we provide a thorough review of the Mini Track LX2 for download on our website. The total weight of our imaging gear was less than 3 kilograms (6.6 pounds), including camera and tripod. The 23 individual exposures of the gegenschein were later calibrated, registered and stacked with DeepSkyStacker. Processing of the final image was done in Photoshop, where we applied substantial contrast enhancement.
How you can see the gegenschein
If you never encountered the gegenschein yourself, don’t expect it to be as prominent as in the photograph at the top of this post. We applied heavy contrast enhancement to the image to make the counterglow, its shape, and its size better visible. To our human eyes, even under the best conditions the gegenschein is an elusive and dim glow. On several occasions we compared the visual brightness of the counterglow and sections of the Milky Way. We always found it to be about as bright as the dimmest parts of the winter Milky Way. The stretch of the Milky Way that approximates the counterglow’s brightness best is the section between the star Mirfak and the asterism called “the Kids” next to Capella. That is, very dim. Any bright object in its vicinity (e.g. Jupiter or Mars at opposition) makes it hard to observe.
Aside from being slightly brighter in the middle and fading out uniformly in all directions the gegenschein shows no structure at all. It has a roundish form, circular or elliptical, measuring approximately 10 degrees across. That is about the size of a fist stretched out at arm’s length.
Drawing of the gegenschein as seen on November 23, 2019, from a dark-sky observing site in Lower Austria. On this night the antisolar point was between the 2 star clusters of the Hyades and Pleiades. The drawing gives a realistic impression of what to expect when looking for the counterglow.
If you want to hunt down the elusive gegenschein yourself, the tips below might come handy:
First of all, check the position:
Before you begin searching for the gegenschein in the night sky you should check its current position. The map below helps you to determine where to look for it. It also shows you whether the counterglow is detectable at all, because its visibility highly depends on its position against the starry background. In June, July and December it is completely invisible, because it is in front of the Milky Way. Other obstacles can be the bright planets Mars and Jupiter. When one of them is near opposition, it is in the same region of the sky as the counterglow and may outshine it. Some planetarium programs or stargazing apps might also be useful tools to determine the position of the gegenschein. If the software provides an option to display the center of the earth’s shadow this will show you the current antisolar point.
View larger. | This map gives you an idea where to look for the gegenschein in front of the starry background. The scale at the bottom indicates the constellations that culminate at your local midnight on a given date. This also approximates where you can find the gegenschein on the dotted line of the ecliptic. For example, at the end of March it will glow in the constellation Virgo.
The gegenschein is always highest above the horizon around local midnight, so that is the best time of the night to give an observation a try. There should also be no moon above the horizon. But that’s not all. Like the sun itself, the antisolar point too has different culmination heights during the course of the year. For observers in the Northern Hemisphere the antisolar point has its highest culmination at the winter solstice around December 21. Sadly, during December the gegenschein is in front of the Winter Milky Way and therefore invisible. So, the best months to see the gegenschein from northern latitudes are November and January. For Southern Hemisphere observers, the largest culmination height of the antisolar point happens at summer solstice around June 21. For southerners too, the Milky Way is in the way. Again, one should look before or after the solstice, in this case during May or August.
View larger. | Only if all of the conditions listed in this diagram are true, you have a valid chance of actually detecting the gegenschein.
Try from the best observing location you have access to:
The gegenschein cannot be seen from light-polluted sites. Even moderate light pollution diminishes the counterglow’s contrast way too much. Based on our observations, the absolute minimum to detect the gegenschein is a sky brightness of 21.0 mag/arcsecond2 in the zenith. But this applies only if you are already quite familiar with the gegenschein and know exactly what and where to look for. For first-time observers we recommend a site with a sky brightness of 21.2 mag/arcsecond2 in the zenith or better. These conditions can only be found far away from cities or other inhabited areas. Observing sites in the mountains especially qualify because of the reduced air mass at higher altitudes above sea level.
Wait for favorable weather conditions:
Even if you observe from a dark-sky location, the average clear sky might not be good enough for seeing the gegenschein. What you really want is a night sky with exceptionally high transparency. This will only be the case if the air mass above your observing site is as dry as possible. To get an idea of the current situation at your location, you can use a website that provides weather forecasts for astronomical observations (e.g. 7timer.info). Sites like this display data about humidity at all tropospheric layers. Another condition for high transparency would be that the air is clean, i.e. free of dust. At mid-latitudes, the necessary conditions of dry and clean air often can be found after the passage of a cold front or a trough.
Expand your observing skills:µ
Given you have good eyesight in the dark and you already have some observing experience, there are several observing techniques you need to master for the gegenschein. First of all, you need to learn how to become truly dark adapted. This might put your patience to a test, since your eyes need at least 3/4 of an hour to fully adjust to the dark. So, no smartphones or other handheld devices during this time. You should only use very dim red lights if you don’t want to ruin your night vision. A second technique you might need for seeing the gegenschein is averted vision. With averted vision, you do not look directly at an object but a little off to the side, while continuing to concentrate on the object. This way you are using peripheral vision which is more sensitive to low light levels than the center of the eye. Some observers report that this technique makes a big difference for them and it might help you too. In any case, hunting down the gegenschein will improve your observing skills a lot. Besides, it makes a highly interesting project and sooner or later you too will be able to put that prized stargazer’s trophy on your shelf.
About Project Nightflight:“Our mission is the starry sky. We internationally promote the conservation of the starry sky as environmental resource.To support this goal, we work together closely with our sponsors and international news media. We provide news portals, nature related websites, books, magazines and newspapers with high resolution images of the unspoiled night sky, catching stories about the magic of the starry sky, useful tips for stargazing and astrophotography and informative articles on light pollution prevention. With our images and stories, which are frequently published by major print and online news media, we raise awareness for the need to keep light pollution at bay. Our team is based in Vienna, Austria, and consists of experienced, world-wide active astrophotographers who work on a volunteer basis. Most of our active members are marketing or communication professionals. If you want to learn more about our organization please download theProject Nightflight profile.”
The gegenschein in the whitish blur toward the top of this photo by Jeff Dai from October 2016 at Lake Puma Yumco, Tibet. The prominent loop and colors near the horizon are airglow.
Bottom line: The gegenschein isn’t an object. It’s a play of light on the solar system’s interplanetary dust disk. The gegenschein lies at the antisolar point, the point exactly opposite the sun. At this point, sunlight squarely illuminates the dust that moves between the planets. In this way, the gegenschein is related to the zodiacal light, which also stems from sunlight reflecting from dust between the planets. But the gegenschein is much more elusive than the zodiacal light. It’s a diffuse patch in the night sky, which moves directly opposite the sun.
The new budget request includes a massive cut to Mars Odyssey that effectively ends its mission.
NASA's Mars Odyssey spacecraft passes above Mars' south pole in this artist's concept illustration. The spacecraft has been orbiting Mars since October 24, 2001. The spacecraft will serve as a vital relay for NASA's Mars rover Curiosity's landing on Aug. 5, 2012. [Related: Mars Rover Curiosity Landing Coverage]
NASA's longest-running Marsmission may be on the chopping block.
While President Donald Trump's 2021 budget request clearly threatened NASA missions like the jet-borne telescope SOFIA, another potential shutdown was tucked inside the request. Proposed cuts to the 2001 Mars Odyssey program would bring its budget to a scant million dollars a year, effectively terminating the mission. The budget request is just that, a request; Congress makes the ultimate decision about budgets and can choose to continue funding the mission. Nevertheless, the threat has Mars scientists anxious about the mission's future.
"I can't think of any situation where you would say, OK, let's just turn it off," said Tanya Harrison, a planetary scientist who studies Mars and has relied on Odyssey observations. "You never know what you're going to find if you keep going with these missions."
Odyssey launched in April 2001, arriving in orbit around the Red Planet six months later. Within a year of its launch, the spacecraftfound water ice beneath the ground, the first direct evidence of subsurface water on the Red Planet. Since then, the spacecraft has made a number of important discoveries and observations, including the longest continuous observations of Martian weather.
But science isn't all Odyssey does. Right now, it's also the primary communications connection for the Curiosity rover. "It's the workhorse for sending data back from the rovers," Odyssey team member Phil Christensen told Space.com. Christensen, a planetary scientist at Arizona State University, leads the Thermal Emission Imaging System (THEMIS) instrument on Mars Odyssey. With NASA's next Mars rover, Perseverance (formerly known as Mars 2020), scheduled to arrive in February 2021, a communication crisis could become a future concern.
The proposed defunding is even more puzzling, the scientists said, because the spacecraft is in relatively good health and has enough fuel to last up to a decade longer. "Something else [on the spacecraft] will die before we run out of fuel," Christensen predicted.
True, a series of strong solar flares put one instrument out of commission in 2003. And the spacecraftlost one of its reaction wheels in 2012, though its existing three are sufficient to point Odyssey in the right direction. But despite approaching its second decade, the spacecraft appears to have a bright scientific future in store — assuming it survives the 2021 budget proposal.
Budget woes
The concerns all stem from Trump's budget request, a document the executive branch sends Congress to start the annual budget process. The request outlined presidential priorities and how the administration would like money to be allocated for the fiscal year beginning in October.
That request highlighted the proposed cancellation of the SOFIA and WFIRST space telescopes, the latter of which previous requests have also targeted. In contrast, Odyssey's changes were tucked away in hundreds of pages of documents. There, a chart cuts Odyssey's budget from $11.5 million in 2019 to $1 million in 2021 and no funding in later years (fiscal year 2020 is only partially enacted at this point and so is not listed). No explanation for it is given.
It's easy to shrug off the long-lived mission, which has already received eight mission extensions. But when it comes to spacecraft, a functioning mission is worth more than might be expected. A colleague once told Christensen that a pile of parts is worth a certain amount value, which increases when the parts are assembled and again when a spacecraft survives the rugged testing required of space-faring machinery. But once the spacecraft is functioning at Mars, the value is without measure.
"When it's in orbit and has proven itself for 20 years, it's literally a priceless resource," Christensen said. "Why would you turn off something that's already there and working and doing a great job?"
Money is most likely the motivating factor. The NASA budget tends to be a zero-sum game, with few overall increases. And the agency wants to beef up a program to bring samples home from Mars, which generally requires moving money from another NASA column in the budget request. That's what Christensen suspects is happening.
Odyssey isn't the only Mars mission facing a requested budget reduction. The 2021 budget also proposes cutting the Curiosity rover's funds by about 25%, a substantial hit for the brave little rover. Christensen suspects that the $10 million cut from Odyssey and $10 million from Curiosity has all been applied to a sample return mission. At the same time, the Mars Future Mission program requestjumped by nearly $200 million in 2021 alone, with funding forecast to increase further over the next five years.
But to Christensen, it doesn't make sense to scrap Odyssey to make that happen. "Sample return is going to be a multibillion-dollar endeavor," he said. "In the big picture, saving $10 million isn't really that important."
Bringing rocks back from Mars is something Mars scientists havelong fought for. Coincidentally, Christensen said he's spent many years advocating for sample return because he thinks it's important. And he's sure that shutting down Odyssey isn't something that NASA administrators are undertaking lightly.
"They've got some tough decisions to make," he said.
A rock and a hard place
NASA has struggled through proposed budget cuts in the past that failed to kill their missions. The SOFIA "telescope on a plane" mission has lost funding in presidential budget requests several times over the past few years, yet it's still flying.
But if Congress goes along with the Odyssey cancellation, the process will be long and complicated. The Odyssey mission control room sits not at a NASA center but at Lockheed Martin's Colorado office.
A spacecraft can't just be turned off, especially not one orbiting a world with potentially habitable environments, like Mars. Exactly how Lockheed Martin would decommission Odyssey has not yet been disclosed. According to a member of the Odyssey team who wished to remain anonymous, NASA has declined to acknowledge the proposed budget cut to the team or take steps to decommission the spacecraft, according to team members.
NASA did not respond to requests from this reporter for the decommissioning plan and postponed interview requests, At NASA's request, Lockheed Martin canceled a scheduled interview to discuss the subject, leaving not only the Odyssey team but also the public in the dark.
In January, NASA and Lockheed Martin shut down theSpitzer Space Telescope, an infrared instrument orbiting the sun behind Earth. That decommissioning took roughly six months of coordination between the two organizations. "It's not a trivial process to decommission a spacecraft," Christensen said.
To close its mission by October 2020, when the proposed 2021 budget goes into effect, the spacecraft would likely have to begin its decommissioning program about six months earlier. If the budget hasn't been sorted out by May 1, 2020, the Lockheed Martin team may find itself between a rock and a hard place.
One option is to continue operating the spacecraft as normal, fingers crossed tightly for a budgetary rescue. If Congress stands by the spacecraft, the mission will continue into its second decade and hopefully beyond that. But otherwise, the private company may find itself scrambling at the last minute to rush the decommissioning process, potentially causing entirely new problems.
The other, more likely option according to the confidential source is that the company will balk at the potential funding loss and begin the shutdown process. (Without comment from NASA or Lockheed Martin, it's unknown what other steps would be required to decommission the spacecraft.)
Both Christensen and the anonymous source said that they've heard rumors that Odyssey would dump its fuel at some point between May and October. Christensen speculated that could be a step to prevent potential explosions in the future, which would litter the Martian atmosphere with thousands of pieces of debris.
Once the spacecraft has dumped its fuel, even an increased budget wouldn't save Odyssey. Without fuel, the spacecraft won't be able to point or transmit. If unchanged, its current orbit should keep it drifting around Mars for another 30 years, per the guidelines that prevent a spacecraft from impacting a planet within 50 years of leaving Earth.
A continued presence
Odyssey has been in orbit for a long time. A child born when the spacecraft launched would be in their first year of college today. So a proposed cancellation is "not surprising, since the mission is so old," Harrison said. "The oldest missions tend to be put on the chopping block."
Odyssey carries what is currently the only infrared imager orbiting Mars. Over the last 19 years, that instrument, THEMIS, has produced an incredibly detailed view of the planet and its physical nature. Measuring the surface temperature at day and night provides insight into the properties acting on Mars today, such as wind and glaciation, as well as the volcanic processes of the past.
The spacecraft has also been able to studyMartian weather patterns over its lifetime. "If you showed up on Earth and watched the weather for one year, you'd say, this is what the climate is like on Earth," Christensen said. "If you keep track of the climate over a 20-year period, then you have a totally different view of how the atmosphere is behaving."
Those records can have long-term implications for one day sending humans to Mars, and continued observations can only improve them. In 2018, aglobal dust storm single-handedly shut down the Martian rover Opportunity by obscuring its solar panels for an extended period.
The same phenomenon could endanger human habitats on Mars. "If we're going to send humans there, the weather's going to be really important," Christensen said. "To this day, we cannot predict when the next big Martian global dust storm is going to occur."
Threats to Odyssey may also affect other missions at Mars, since the spacecraft serves as a major communications hub for surface missions. Rovers carry very small antennae, perfect for sending data short distances but an option for the long transmission from Mars to Earth. Instead, they ping satellites orbiting the planet. Christensen said there are currently four spacecraft capable of relaying those signals home: Odyssey, NASA'sMars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO), NASA'sMAVEN spacecraft and theEuropean Trace Gas Orbiter. Of those, Odyssey does most of the heavy lifting.
"Odyssey is really good at communication," Christensen said. "We've done it for a really long time."
MRO, the most likely communication replacement, has had its own share of trouble since its 2005 launch. "It seems to have gone into safe mode more frequently [recently]," Harrison said. She remembered a period where the spacecraft was out of commission for four months, making it a tenuous replacement for Odyssey.
MAVEN is currently focused on studying the upper atmosphere. Its orbit wasrecently shifted to allow it to shoulder some of the burden of communication, but doing so limited its scientific observations. The European spacecraft could also serve as a redundancy, as long as the agency is willing to give up collecting some of its own scientific data to allow Curiosity and the future Perseverance rover, formerly known as Mars 2020, to phone home.
The tradeoff between orbital and surface science is something all of the potential replacements would face. Shutting down the working Odyssey mission would not only eliminate the science produced by the spacecraft itself but also cut into the time other orbiters can spend doing science.
Both Harrison and Christensen said that communication redundancies mattered. "Having that backup contingency is really important, especially as we're about to launch another rover to Mars," Harrison said. "The more communication relays we have to Earth, the better."
Christensen remains optimistic about Odyssey's odds of survival and suggested some alternative models that could support the spacecraft even if Congress does cut its funding. "I think there are creative ways to keep this mission alive," he said. The mission could become student-run, he said, providing undergraduate and graduate students with the hands-on training they need and allowing them to engage with Mars. Or science could be outsourced to countries unable to send their own mission to the Red Planet, in exchange for additional funding. Or a college or university could step up to run the spacecraft and handle the funding.
"These things are too priceless to just flip the switch when you don't have to," Christensen said.
Harrison echoed that sentiment. "These missions are so complicated and we put so much effort into them that it seems like a waste to turn them off from a budget standpoint if they're still working," she said.
As in 2014's second season, the third installment of "Cosmos" is hosted by American Museum of Natural History astronomer Neil deGrasse Tyson. The original series, which aired in 1980, featured Cornell University astronomer Carl Sagan and introduced countless people to the wonder of space science, and the reboot, which airs on the National Geographic channel, is carefully designed to do the same.
(The release of the new third season of "Cosmos" was delayed for a year while National Geographic investigated claims of sexual misconduct by the show's host. The network eventually dismissed the allegations and Tyson apologized publicly for any misunderstanding of his behavior.)
"Part of the DNA of 'Cosmos' is its capacity to blend the science with storytelling," Tyson said during a media event held by the Television Critics Association in California in January. "We all know storytelling from the beginning of our species. We all know science because you learned it in your science textbooks. Previously, when you wanted to communicate science … it felt very lecture-y." The new "Cosmos" is not lecture-y. It is easily digested science backed by great visuals.
The Ship of Imagination as seen in the first episode of the new season of "Cosmos." (Image credit: National Geographic channel)
The new season consists of 13 episodes, with subjects including the fascinating story of the unlikely originator of the rendezvous concept that enabled the Apollo lunar landings, the 20-year Cassini mission to Saturn and a visit to the New York World's Fair of 2039.
The Cassini episode in particular touches the heart: The show quite lyrically presents the end of the probe's long life, when it was directed to destroy itself in Saturn's atmosphere. This sort of creative, daring storytelling is at the core of the success of "Cosmos" and is bolstered by lavish, feature-quality visual effects.
"We have animations, we have visualizations, and there's music behind it," Tyson said. "These are tools that have been well known in the industry, but no one ever thought to put it to science. That's what 'Cosmos' does."
The result is quite moving, as we see a cluster of mission scientists barely holding back tears as their beloved spacecraft plunges to its demise.
In a later interview, Ann Druyan, Sagan's widow and co-writer on the original series, said that beneath the show's overall theme of exploring the history of our understanding of the universe, there is another strong motif — that of the relevance and importance of science in our lives and culture.
Druyan said she feels that in the last few years, there has been a "flight from reality" in how we deal with science. She was frank in her assertion that there is widespread "loss of respect for science" and that "deception" about these topics has become "business as usual."
That attitude permeates both the public and institutions, she said. Working on the original series, "Carl [Sagan] and I had many differences with our government, but we felt tremendous pride in the achievements of the space program and what it was doing," she said. "Now something has really changed in the government's attitude towards science, which was once its shining jewel. It's hostile and cynical. When anybody is hostile and cynical about our most powerful tool for apprehending reality, you know they're up to no good. 'Cosmos' is our way of standing up for the awesome power of science."
She credited executive producer Seth MacFarlane with getting the reboot of the show on the air. "There would be no second season of 'Cosmos' without Seth … I'd been trying for years to get a new 'Cosmos' produced, and it wasn't until I met Seth that there was a champion for 'Cosmos.'"
An image from the new season of "Cosmos." (Image credit: National Geographic channel)
The "Cosmos" team insists that good storytelling is the key to enlightening and engaging the public, according to producer Jason Clark. "We're not actually taking you out to space," he said, "so we have to visualize that in a way that feels profound and real, but that doesn't lose a connection with the audience in the art of storytelling."
He described Sagan's performance in the original series as akin to a fireside chat and said that Tyson has embraced the same narrative style.
"I feel really in this season that [Tyson] delivered this incredible kind of connected, simple, one-on-one capability that we could support with visuals," Clark said, by taking viewers to "the far reaches of the universe or down into the quantum level. And when you go there, it's transformative." The team emulated the visual storytelling style of the best big-budget fiction films, he said, with the added benefit that "this is all real … it's true, so it's quite powerful."
Tyson brings his own unique style to this new iteration of "Cosmos," one that is well suited to increasingly cynical 21st-century viewers. When asked if he wrote in a different voice for Tyson than for Sagan, executive producer Brannon Braga said no. "It's in 'Cosmos's' voice," he said. "Neil's ability to take those words and make them naturalistic and connect with an audience on the camera is a perfect combination and resulted in success."
Tyson and the writers are dedicated to preserving the overall tone that Sagan and Druyan established in the original series, the team said, and rekindling a faith in science to answer the big questions that underlie "Cosmos." They have done so with grace and dignity, something rarely achieved in this kind of television, and one that has the potential to unite the viewing audience.
"Rather than hit people over the head for their beliefs, we present the notion that if we're going to survive … at some point we have to establish what is true and what is not," Tyson said. "If you understand that, you'll be in a much better position to make decisions that affect the survival of humanity. It's an appeal for all of us to gather together and imagine the future as a community — not as a country, not as a faction, but as a species."
"Cosmos" premieres on the National Geographic channel on March 9 at 8 p.m. ET/9 p.m. CT and will be reprised on the Fox television network this summer.
The moon and Earth may be more different than previously thought, challenging existing models for how the moon formed, a new study finds.
Earth originated about 4.5 billion years ago, and previous research suggested that the moon arose a short time after that. For the past three decades, the prevailing explanation for the moon's origin was that it resulted from the collision of two protoplanets, or embryonic worlds. One of those was the newborn Earth, and the other was a Mars-size rock nicknamed Theia, after the mother of the moon in Greek myth. "Once the dust settled, two bodies were left — Earth and the moon," new study co-author Zachary Sharp, a planetary scientist at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, told Space.com.
This "giant impact hypothesis" seemed to explain many details about Earth and the moon, such as the large size of the moon compared with Earth and the rates of rotation of the two bodies. However, in the past 20 or so years, evidence has emerged to challenge that hypothesis and suggest a multitude of alternatives.
Computer models of the giant-impact scenario often say that 70% to 90% of the moon should be made of material from Theia. The problem is that most bodies in the solar system have unique chemical makeups, and so the Earth, Theia — and therefore the moon — should too. However, rock samples that the Apollo missions returned from the moon show that the natural satellite's composition is uncannily similar to Earth's, much more similar than such models would predict for versions of elements called isotopes. (Isotopes of an element each have different numbers of neutrons in their atomic nuclei.)
This extreme similarity in isotopes of elements such as oxygen has raised great challenges for the giant-impact scenario. One possibility is that the proto-Earth and Theia were nearly identical to start with when it came to oxygen isotopes, which seems unlikely. Another is that the proto-Earth and Theia's oxygen isotopes were fully mixed in the aftermath of the collision, perhaps due to an impact so violent that it vaporized a large portion of the early Earth, with the moon emerging from the resulting, doughnut-shaped mass called a synestia. But this and other scenarios may require unlikely impact conditions, scientists have said.
In the new study, researchers conducted new high-precision measurements of oxygen isotope levels in a range of lunar samples. The researchers expanded on previous work by focusing on a wide variety of types of moon rock.
The scientists found that there were subtle but regular differences in oxygen isotopic composition depending on the kind of lunar rock tested, Sharp said. This suggested that prior work that averaged together lunar isotope data while ignoring differences in rock type might not have given an accurate picture of the differences between Earth and the moon.
"Going into this project, it was expected that our results would likely mirror that of previous studies," study lead author Erick Cano, a stable-isotope geochemist at the University of New Mexico, told Space.com. "The most surprising part of our results was finding the amount of variation that we did between the individual lunar samples."
To explain these findings, the researchers suggested that the giant collision between proto-Earth and Theia did indeed lead to mixing between the bodies. Still, the resulting moon and Earth had distinct compositions, albeit very similar ones, Sharp said.
Later, in the first 1,000 or so years after the impact, vaporized rock from the disk of debris left behind by the impact likely led "to lava raining down on the moon for hundreds of years," Sharp said. Complex physical and chemical interactions between this lava rain and the ocean of magma that covered the newborn moon could then have led to an oxygen isotopic composition in the uppermost lunar rocks that was more similar to Earth's. In contrast, samples that came from the deep lunar mantle had the most different oxygen isotopic composition of the lunar rocks tested when compared to Earth.
The most important implication from these findings is that giant-impact models no longer have to account for virtually indistinguishable oxygen isotopic compositions between Earth and the moon, Cano said. "I think this will open the door for an entirely new range of impact scenarios," he added.
Future research can expand on this new study by analyzing other lunar samples, Cano said. "The obstacles for this future research may be the limited quantities of material that we have from the Apollo missions," he said. "Some of these lunar rock types were only brought back in very small quantities and can be very difficult to obtain for study."
Cano, Sharp and study co-author Chip Shearer, a lunar scientist also based at the University of New Mexico, detailed their findings online Monday (March 9) in the journal Nature Geoscience.
What I don't understand is why does it make a turn like a plane, I mean UFOs don't have to do that as they have inertial dampeners or gravity nullifiers with that rotating like that is done because of the ailerons, this object is rotating to make a turn like a plane does and that's illogical, might be something from the Air force new type of plane with that.
Extraterrestrials Are Waiting For The Right Moment Before They Make Contact – Scientists Say
Extraterrestrials Are Waiting For The Right Moment Before They Make Contact – Scientists Say
Cynthia McKanzie – MessageToEagle.com
If you were a member of an alien race would you think it’s wise to initiate contact with humans? Could humanity handle contact with extraterrestrials?
According to scientists, extraterrestrials are deliberately waiting for the right moment before they reveal themselves to Earthlings.
In a recent study published by the Astronomical Journal scientists have tried to shed new light on the Fermi paradox and the Aurora Effect by investigating the existence of alien civilizations on other planets.
Credit: Public Domain
“We model the settlement of the Galaxy by space-faring civilizations in order to address issues related to the Fermi Paradox. We are motivated to explore the problem in a way that avoids assumptions about the agency (i.e., questions of intent and motivation) of any exo-civilization seeking to settle other planetary systems,” researchers write in their study.
Scientists started by considering the speed of an advancing settlement front to determine if the Galaxy can become inhabited with space-faring civilizations on timescales shorter than its age.
They included the directed settlement of nearby settleable systems through the launching of probes with a finite velocity and range. In addition to this, researchers also considered the effect of stellar motions on the long-term behavior of the settlement front which adds a diffusive component to its advance.
“The results of these models demonstrate that the Milky Way can be readily filled-in with settled stellar systems under conservative assumptions about interstellar spacecraft velocities and launch rates,” scientists said.
The Fermi Paradox, a concept presented by physicist Enrico Fermi regarding the existence of extraterrestrial intelligence has intrigued all researchers searching for alien life. According to the Fermi Paradox due to the number of planets and stars in the galaxy, there should be another world teeming with intelligent extraterrestrial life. If this is true, then Earth should have already been visited or at least contacted by aliens.
However, since humans have not yet come across evidence of intelligent extraterrestrial life, many doubt the existence of alien civilizations.
Researchers of the recent study say that it’s possible extraterrestrials are in close vicinity to the Earth, but they’re simply waiting for the time when Earth or the Solar System gets closer to their homeworld before sending out a probe or launching an expedition.
“If long enough is a billion years, well then that’s one solution to the Fermi paradox,” Carroll-Nellenback told Business Insider. “Habitable worlds are so rare that you have to wait longer than any civilization is expected to last before another one comes in range.”
“Every system could be habitable and could be settled, but they wouldn’t visit us because they’re not close enough,” he added.
Most people believe that humans will sooner or later establish open contact with aliens, but it’s possible certain requirements must be met before this meeting can take place. Science fiction authors and some scientists sometimes say humans will be invited to join the Galactic Club, but when this will happen is unknown.
Our world will change completely once we enter the Galactic Club.
Credit: Artist Unknown
According to David Schwartzman, a biogeochemist at Howard University in Washington D.C, there is a reason not to give up on SETI. Schwartzman thinks aliens are out there, despite the fact that the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) has only found silence. He also outlines what we need to do for planet Earth to be initiated into the Galactic Club.
“Our world will change completely once we enter the Galactic Club.
I submit that if we want to enter the Galactic Club, the challenge lies in reconstructing our global political economy. A few minor side benefits should result, like no more war, no more poverty, a future for all of humanity’s children with a substantial proportion of biodiversity intact. We should not expect the Galactic Club to save us from ourselves,” Schwartzman said.
"Why are all the good UFOs invisible?" one Gather.com user asked in response to the latest "invisible UFO" report posted to the site.
You might have thought a defining characteristic of a UFO would be visibility. But thanks to zealous alien hunters doggedly scanning the sky with night-vision cameras, a new class of flying objects that only emit infrared light has emerged from the darkness. Are they spies from the great beyond?
"Some people claim to see actual battles between UFOs up in the sky, using night-vision equipment," the ufologist Robert Sheaffer told Life's Little Mysteries. "Those devices magnify faint objects so much that the sky seems to be filled with invisible UFOs. In reality, of course, they are seeing owls, bats, moths, airplanes, satellites, etc." Night-vision optics trade low resolution for high sensitivity, he explained, so that points of light (such as distant satellites) spill out into circles that make the objects appear huge.
However, some of the invisible UFOs out there really are spies of a sort — or whatever else you choose to call military drones. [7 Things Most Often Mistaken for UFOs]
Consider, for example, an invisible triangle UFO recently caught on camera by the Laredo Paranormal Research Society, a Texas group. Intheir footage, captured using an infrared-sensitive third-generation night-vision camera and posted to YouTube July 13, an object composed of three evenly spaced glowing orbs streaked southward across the field of view and disappeared behind the roof of a house.
According to LPRS founder Ismael Cuellar, the "infrared-cloaked" object could not be seen with the naked eye, and cruised silently. "[We] have ruled out birds, bugs, airplanes, helicopters, and even flying drones by comparing them side by side as a point of reference," Cuellar told Life's Little Mysteries. This seems to leave just one explanation: It's a cloaked alien spaceship.
Not so, according to Ben McGee, a geoscientist, aerospace consultant, UFO skeptic and lead field researcher on the National Geographic series "Chasing UFOs." In McGee's opinion, all the signs point to this object being a border patrol drone with infrared anti-collision or identification lights. Here's why he thinks so.
"Nearly one-third of traffic through the nearby Laredo International Airport has historically been military in nature. Laredo is very near to the Mexican border. The military is increasingly using drones to assist with border security, which are small, quiet, and dim (to the naked eye) aircraft," McGee wrote in an email, adding that most drones are also triangular. [UFO Sightings Are 3,615 Times More Common than Voter Fraud]
This alleged drone oversaturated the camera's infrared sensor. Why? "Particularly with unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV), anticollision systems are of the utmost importance," he wrote. "One custom UAV lighting manufacturer recently announced custom infrared navigation lights for a major UAV defense contractor. Using these lights in 'constant-on' infrared mode would make the tail, belly, and wingtips extraordinarily bright in infrared, washing out the shape of the aircraft in-between."
And that description pretty closely matches the case.
"In short," McGee said, "high-intensity/close-range infrared lights interacting with a sensitive infrared camera is the problem — turning an aircraft into a triangular blob — rather than the infrared camera being the solution to revealing invisible triangles or pyramids zooming about our airspace."
Follow Natalie Wolchover on Twitter @nattyover or Life's Little Mysteries @llmysteries.
In my previous article on “Invisible UFOs,” I discussed three cases from the U.K., and all from the 1950s. It’s now time to take a look at a very similar case from the United States and also occurred in the 1950s. The documentation on this intriguing story can be found inthe UFO section of the FBI’s website, The Vault. With that all said, let’s now take a look at the case itself. It all goes back to 1951 and strange, aerial activity that occurred in the vicinity of a military installation, Fort Monmouth, New Jersey. The documentation on the incident starts as follows: “On September 20, Andrew J. Reid G-2 [Army Intelligence]Ft. Monmouth, NJ, provided following report of unconventional aircraft observed by radar at above Army installation. On Sept 10, fifty one], an AN/MPG-1 radar set picked up a fast moving low flying target, exact altitude undetermined at approximately 11:10 a.m., southeast of Ft. Monmouth at a range of about twelve thousand yards. The target appeared to approximately follow the coast line, changing its range only slightly but changing its azimuth rapidly. The radar set was set to full aided azimuth tracking which normally is fast enough to track jet aircraft, but in this case was too slow to be resorted to. Target was lost in the N.E. at a range of about fourteen thousand yards.”
Matters had barely begun, however, as the following extract from the official papers reveals: “This target also presented an unusually strong return for aircraft[,] being comparable in strength to that usually received from a coastal ship [italics mine]. The operator initially identified target as a ship and then realized that it could not be a ship after he observed its extreme speed. September 10, fifty one an SCR-584 radar set, at 3:15p.m., tracking a target which moved about slowly in azimuth north of Ft. Monmouth at a range of about 42,000 yards at extremely unusual elevation angle.”
Notably, the movements of the vast craft were also picked up by another radar expert: “Both sets found it impossible to track the target in range due to it speed and the operators had to resort to manual range tracking in order to hold the target. The target was tracked in this manner to the maximum tracking range of 32,000 yards. The operator said the target to be moving at a speed several hundred mph higher than the maximum aided tracking ability of the radar sets. The target provided an extremely strong return echo at times even though it was the maximum range. However, echo signal occasionally fell off to a level below normal return. These changes coincided with maneuvers of the target.”
There was more amazing activity to come: “On September 11, fifty one [sic] at about 1:30 p.m. the target was picked up on an SCR-584 radar set that displayed unusual maneuverability. Target was approximately over Navesink, NJ, as indicated by his 10,000 range, 6,000 feet altitude and due north azimuth. The target remained practically stationary on the scope and appeared to be hovering [italics mine]. The operator looked out of the vehicle housing the radar in an attempt to see the target, since it was at such a short range, however, overcast conditions prevented such observation.”
And we have this incredible data from the base’s staff: “Returning to their operating position the target was observed to be changing in elevation at an extremely rapid rate, but change in range was so slow the operator believed the target must have risen nearly vertically [italics mine]…Once again the speed of the target exceeded the tracking ability of the SCR-584 set so that manual tracking became necessary…The weather was fair when the observation was made September 10th and cloudy for the September 11th report.”
Truly, a fascinating and amazing early encounter of the UFO kind. And of the invisible type, too.
Back in late 2013, Micah Hanks wrote a feature here with the title of:“Arnold’s Flying Saucers: Were They Saucers at All? He stated: “Despite the popularity this subject would garner in those golden years after the War, perhaps there is no early UFO incident that has proven to be quite as influential as that of Kenneth Arnold, a civilian pilot who spotted an entire fleet of strange aircraft while flying over Washington state in June of 1947.
The strange craft that Arnold observed would spark a flame that grew like wildfire, eventually forming the modern UFO phenomenon, and at the center of it all was the curious staple that became known as the flying saucer.” Arnold’s encounter took place near to Mt. Rainier and, in no time at all, resulted in the birth of the UFO phenomenon. Of course, there are numerous theories for what Arnold encountered: alien spacecraft, top secret of the U.S. military and even a flock of geese. Whatever the truth, for many Arnold’s experience is still perceived today as one of the most important UFOs cases of the 20th century.
It was said for a long time that the biggest problem with Arnold’s encounter was that it lacked any kind of corroboration. That may not have been the case, though. It’s now time to introduce you to a man named Fred Johnson, a prospector who just might have been in the right place – and at the right time – to see exactly what Arnold sighted. Both the military and the FBI took an interest in what Johnson had to say, as the following documentation – from the FBI – demonstrates: “Fred Johnson reported without consulting any records that on June 24, 1947, while prospecting at a point in the Cascade Mountains approximately five thousand feet from sea level, during the afternoon he noticed a reflection, looked up, and saw a disc proceeding in a southeasterly direction. Immediately upon sighting this object he placed his telescope to his eye and observed the disc for approximately forty-five to sixty seconds.”
Johnson “remarked that it is possible for him to pick up an object at a distance of ten miles with his telescope. At the time the disc was sighted by Mr. Johnson it was banking in the sun, and he observed five or six similar objects but only concentrated on one. He related that they did not fly in any particular formation and that he would estimate their height to be about one thousand feet from where he was standing. He said the object was about thirty feet in diameter and appeared to have a tail. It made no noise. According to Johnson he remained in the vicinity of the Cascades for several days and then returned to Portland and noted an article in the local paper which stated in effect that a man in Boise, Idaho, had sighted a similar object but that authorities had disclaimed any knowledge of such an object. He said he communicated with the Army for the sole purpose of attempting to add credence to the story furnished by the man in Boise.”
The FBI concluded: “Johnson also related that on the occasion of his sighting the objects on June 24, 1947 he had in his possession a combination compass and watch. He noted particularly that immediately before he sighted the disc the compass acted very peculiar, the hand waving from one side to the other, but that this condition corrected itself immediately after the discs had passed out of sight. Informant appeared to be a very reliable individual who advised that he had been a prospector in the states of Montana, Washington and Oregon for the past forty years.”
We may never for sure if Fred Johnson encountered the very same craft that Kenneth Arnold did. At the very least, however, it’s a fascinating and thought-provoking story.
Linda Moulton Howe: Earthly Phenomena Thousands of Years Old Could Have an Alien Origin
Linda Moulton Howe: Earthly Phenomena Thousands of Years Old Could Have an Alien Origin
Linda Moulton Howe – For thousands of years they have been monitoring human development and interacting with the selected, molding and changing historical outcomes. We have been the subject of guidance, manipulation, and experimentation.
They have been referred to as the Ancient Sky Gods and The Watchers. But we would now refer to them as ‘The ET Presence’. Archived Show – Awakening Expo, Manchester, UK.
Linda Moulton Howe…1000′s Of Years Old Earthly Phenomena That Could Have An Alien Origin?
David Wilcock: Russian Secret Projects Utilize Earth Energies for Portal Travel
David Wilcock: Russian Secret Projects Utilize Earth Energies for Portal Travel
David Wilcock rolls up his sleeves and digs into compelling Russian science that shows us exactly what portals are, how they work, why they appear at these points, and the unique conversion of gravitational energy into electromagnetic energy that takes place within them.
You will hear multiple eyewitness reports of people going through portals, what happens to them, and how even natural time travel occurs… from just a few days of “time slip” to far longer events.
David Wilcock: Russian Secret Projects Utilize Earth Energies for Portal Travel
Black Ring UFO Seen Over Disneyland, Los Angeles, CA March 2020, Video, UFO Sighting News.
Black Ring UFO Seen Over Disneyland, Los Angeles, CA March 2020, Video, UFO Sighting News.
Date of sighting: March 8, 2020 Location of sighting: Disneyland, Los Angeles, California, USA Here is an interesting video of a possible ring UFO over Disneyland theme park in LA, CA this week. In the past some rides at parks have been known to cause black rings, however there are also serious US military reports that do note seeing a ring UFO suddenly change into a saucer shaped cloud over a military base. What significance does this have to real UFOs? UFOs can create clouds around them, or so the evidence presented by the US government documents have stated since 1957 of the Fort Belvoir UFO Case, it's photos are below. The Condon Report (p.168) devoted 11 pages to this case. One morning in September, 1957 an Arm private at Fort Belvoir, Va. was called from his barracks by his buddies to witness what appeared to be a black, ring-shaped UFO approaching. The private grabbed his Brownie camera and snapped 6 pictures of it, of which this was the first. After about 5 minutes, the black ring, which appeared "solid" to the soldier and glided steadily along, began to be "engulfed in white smoke." Photos at end of this post. Scott C. Waring Eyewitness states:
The following video is of what happening on earth date 3/8/2020 “Alien Portal.” Share it people got to know what’s coming 😰. That was not the only place that happened at, it happened at SD too.
Actual photos taken by a US solder of metal ring UFO making cloud around it.
Coronavirus Could Give Us an Idea What Will Take Place When ET Life Reaches Earth
Coronavirus Could Give Us an Idea What Will Take Place When ET Life Reaches Earth
President Nixon talking to the Apollo 11 crew members (left to right: Neil A. Armstrong, Michael Collins, and Buzz Aldrin Jr.) while the astronauts were in quarantine after returning to Earth from their trip to the moon.
It would be nice to find life on other worlds, no doubt about it! However, it may be wise to reconsider this entire thing. If we indeed find alien life, can we handle it epidemiologically, biologically, and emotionally?
We are currently in the middle of an alarming worldwide situation with previously unknown disease COVID-19. As of this writing, confirmed cases reach close to 90,000 in 68 countries, leading to over 3,000 deaths. Tokyo Olympics are threatened to be postponed, flights have been grounded, major international gatherings canceled, and a global recession looms. In the US, the Dow Jones Industrial Average had its worst week since the 2008 and 2009 recession, shedding one-third of its gains since the 2016 election. Most of these are due to fears of the negative impact of COVID-19.
Humanity is suffering the effects of the disease, but the Chinese and Asian-looking people are taking the big blow. The virus started in Wuhan, China, and ugly behaviors have surfaced around the world. At a California high school, an Asian-American 16-year old was assaulted and accused of carrying the virus. There’s an underlying anti-Chinese sentiment in South Korea, with some shops posting signs not allowing Chinese. In Vancouver, a Chinese boy playing at a school playground was taunted as being a virus carrier.
COVID-19 has nothing to do with space, as it is an entirely terrestrial problem. But the thing is, even its terrestrial origin, it leads to thousands of deaths around the world. What more if the virus came from the space? NASA is poised to launch in July a new rover to Mars that will hunt for microbial life and collect some soil and rock samples that will be bought to Earth. These samples are potentially containing that microbial life.
NASA has a long history of protecting the Earth from biohazards from other planets and vice versa, according to a column in Space.com. The agency has one division solely formed for that goal, which is formally known as the Office of Safety and Mission Assurance (OSMA) and commonly known as the Planetary Protection office.
Still, the risk exists. Even the strictest labs always have a non-zero chance that something could escape. Imagine it will, and many people will become infected. Aside from the impact of their health, they would not only be racialized but also extraterrestrialized, in the sense that they are not even fully human anymore.
The battle against SARS-CoV-2 shows that humanity can have a unified effort, and it will be the same if one of those alien living things threatens us all. Collectivism is among our highest qualities. On the other hand, the othering, racializing, directed at people of Chinese descent, is one of our lowest qualities.
The Fascinating and Terrifying UFO Incident Experience of Travis Walton (1975)
The Fascinating and Terrifying UFO Incident Experience of Travis Walton (1975)
The Bizarre and Fascinating Travis Walton UFO Incident Story in 1975.
The Travis Walton UFO incident refers to an American logger who claims he was abducted by a UFO on November 5, 1975, while working with a logging crew in the Apache-Sitgreaves National Forest in Arizona. Walton reappeared after a five-day search. The Walton case received mainstream publicity and remains one of the best-known alleged alien abduction stories, although skeptics consider it a hoax.
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- Gemiddelde waardering: 0/5 - (0 Stemmen) Categorie:ALIEN LIFE, UFO- CRASHES, ABDUCTIONS, MEN IN BLACK, ed ( FR. , NL; E )
Mohenjo-Daro: An ancient city destroyed by a nuclear attack thousands of years ago?
Mohenjo-Daro: An ancient city destroyed by a nuclear attack thousands of years ago?
Is it possible that Mohenjo-Daro – an ancient city that belonged to the Indus Valley Civilization- was destroyed by a nuclear attack thousands of years ago?
Only seven years after the first atomic explosion in New Mexico, theoretical physicist Robert Oppenheimer, one of the people often named as “father of the atomic bomb” was giving a lecture at the University of Rochester. On that occasion, a student asked him if the first nuclear device that went off was the one at Alamogordo, during the Manhattan Project. Dr. Oppenheimer respond: Well … yes. In modern times, yes, of course.
What did Dr. Oppenheimer want to say? If we look at the theoretical physicist’s answer literally, it means that in ancient times nuclear bombs –or variations of them— existed among ancient civilizations.
Consequently, this brings us to one of the most important questions most of us have tried never to ask: Was mankind visited in the distant past by other civilizations beyond earth. And if so, did these ancient civilizations really have advanced technologies like nuclear bombs?
In modern-day Pakistan, in the vicinity of the banks of the Indus River, we can find one of the most enigmatic archaeological sites on the surface of the planet –which once belonged to one of the oldest civilizations on the planet, the Indus Valley civilization— Mohenjo-Daro.
Together with Harappa located some six hundred kilometers further northeast, Mohenjo-Daro and Harappa are two of the most prominent ancient cities that belonged to the Indus Valley Civilization.
Interestingly, if there is something surprising at Mohenjo-Daro, then it is the complete absence of buildings that can be identified as temples or palaces or any kind of symbolism that may be associated with such.
Archaeologists sustain that all buildings follow a uniform pattern, highlighting its construction in adobe bricks with no ornaments and windows, all within an urban planning far more advanced than that of any other ancient civilization thousands of years ago, with wide avenues and straight roads (many of them perfectly paved), with rectangular buildings which were all equipped with a network of drainage systems, canals, pipes and sewers, etc.
Interestingly, just as the ancient Sumerian civilization, the Indus Valley seemed to have emerged all of a sudden, without any trace of an earlier evolution prior to the apparition of Harappa and Mohenjo-Daro.
But if the appearance of such amazing civilization remains a mystery, their disappearance is even more fascinating and was initially attributed to the arrival of invading peoples of Indo-European origin.
But many researchers argue that something entirely different happened at Mohenjo-Daro.
We only have to take a look at ancient Vedic texts, a set of antique Sanskrit writings which are considered legacies of the gods, where we find references which may help get to the bottom of the numerous mysteries that surround Mohenjo-Daro and the Indus Valley Civilization.
One of the ancient texts, the Mahabharata, an extensive poem of some 215,000 verses details events that occurred in the city of Mohenjo-Daro where both gods and mortals were wrapped in an epic war, overshadowing the remote origins of the city since the Mahabharata places the ancient city in the years 3103 BC during the Kali Iuga or ‘Black Age0 –a kind of apocalypse that occurred in the distant past that modified much of the ancient history of India.
There are hundreds and hundreds of unanswered questions, but there are ancient texts that offer many answers despite being considered as heretic and misinterpreted by modern scholars.
Interestingly, many ancient texts shed light onto the numerous enigmas of history and if not almost entirely, they illuminate the path of a truly untold story that bends the possibilities of our written history.
As we mentioned above, one of such texts is the ancient Mahabharata.
“Gurkha, flying a swift and powerful vimana, hurled a single projectile charged with the power of the Universe.
An incandescent column of smoke and flame, as bright as ten thousand suns, rose with all its splendor.
It was an unknown weapon, an iron thunderbolt, a gigantic messenger of death, which reduced to ashes the entire race of the Vrishnis and the Andhakas.
The corpses were so burned as to be unrecognizable.
Hair and nails fell out; Pottery broke without apparent cause, and the birds turned white.
…After a few hours all foodstuffs were infected… …to escape from this fire the soldiers threw themselves in streams to wash themselves and their equipment.”
A second passage:
“Dense arrows of flame, like a great shower, issued forth upon creation, encompassing the enemy. A thick gloom swiftly settled upon the Pandava hosts. All points of the compass were lost in darkness. Fierce wind began to blow Clouds roared upward, showering dust and gravel.
Birds croaked madly… the very elements seemed disturbed. The sun seemed to waver in the heavens The earth shook, scorched by the terrible violent heat of this weapon.
Elephants burst into flame and ran to and fro in a frenzy… over a vast area, other animals crumpled to the ground and died. From all points of the compass , the arrows of flame rained continuously and fiercely.”
— The Mahabharata
According to many researchers, this controversial ancient text perfectly describes the use of nuclear weapons 5,000 years before the Americans utilized them on the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Similarly, there are plenty of texts that relate to all kinds of details that illustrate the existence of airships (vimanas) and rockets or missiles capable of reaching long distances.
While as always we must remain with a minor sense of skepticism, we can argue that the above-mentioned text is not original, or its translation is not the most accurate. However, there are many other details that point towards an abrupt end of the inhabitants of Mohenjo-Daro.
It is necessary to mention there is a great contradiction when assessing the reasons and causes that could have caused the sudden disappearance from the maps of an ancient city like Mohenjo-Daro.
Although on one hand it has been speculated that a possible invasion resulted in the slaughtering of its people at the hands of invading hordes, archaeologists have only found around 30 skeletons in the streets. The obvious question we need to ask here is: Where is the rest of the population then? Where does the name ‘mound of the dead’ come from?
Is it possible that most of the population of Mohenjo-Daro escaped before the terrible invasion?
While invading forces is one theory, some archaeologists speculate that the city may have been abandoned due to a sudden change in the course of the Indus River, some tie around 1700 BC, but it does not explain other mysteries that surround Mohenjo-Daro.
Although very few skeletons found, it seems that death came to them very quickly.
Interestingly, there is a so-called epicenter of around 45 meters in diameters at the center of the city where the terrain and buildings appear to be crystallized as if they were exposed to a massive heat source.
On the buildings located near the center of the city, researchers have found that the bricks of the walls that are faced towards the exterior and looking away from the epicenter are also fused or melted.
However, this could have only been achieved, according to researchers, by exposing the buildings to a temperature of above 1500 ° centigrade.
What kind of weapons could have caused such devastating effects on both people and the surrounding buildings? Is it possible that as some people sustain, Mohenjo-Daro was really destroyed by a nuclear explosion?
Due to the fact that this hypothesis is considered extremely sensationalist and many believe it to be impossible, there isn’t a single serious study which tackles the presence of radioactivity present at the location of the city of Mohenjo-Daro.
The presence of objects and surfaces which appear to be melted or fused have been associated with forces of nature as observed in other locations such as Scotland, Australia and Egypt, all product of rays and electric arcs of great power.
Regrettably, as with other discoveries that challenge our history, many researchers have ignored the numerous mysterious surrounding Mohenjo-Daro and have not tried to answer the mysteries behind its sudden disappearance and fascinating history.
When you think about Mohenjo-Daro and mention it in the same sentence with Nuclear Weapons you would then be called a conspiracy theorist.
Interestingly not only are Harappa and Mohenjo-Daro the only locations were we can discuss this extravagant hypothesis and question whether it is plausible, there are several locations where researchers have detected the “footprints” of what they are calling ‘possible nuclear explosions in ancient times’.
As it turns out, there are at least three major points in the area between the mountains of Rajmahal and the Ganges River where scientists have spotted large layers of ash and a presence of radiation which is higher than the average normal.
But stay curious and ask questions no one else is willing to ask, stay focused and always come to your own conclusion, Who knows, maybe after all the secrets of the atom and nuclear power were known to the ancients thousands of years ago.
Here’s how to see that huge asteroid that’ll safely pass Earth in April
Here’s how to see that huge asteroid that’ll safely pass Earth in April
Posted by Eddie Irizarry in ASTRONOMY ESSENTIALS | SPACE
The huge asteroid known as (52768) 1998 OR2 will pass closest on April 29, 2020. Observers peering through telescopes will see it as a slow-moving “star.” Charts, tips – plus how to watch online – here.
Orbit of asteroid (52768) 1998 OR2. It requires 3 years and 8 months to orbit the sun onc. It gets nearly as far from the sun as Jupiter (about 5 times Earth’s distance from the sun).
Image via NASA/ JPL.
Have you heard the buzz about a big – very big – asteroid that’ll pass close in April? We have! No, it won’t hit our planet. In fact, it won’t have any effects on Earth. Still, excitement is building among both professional and amateur astronomers about the upcoming flyby of asteroid (52768) 1998 OR2 – the biggest asteroid due to fly by Earth this year – coming closest on April 29, 2020. This space rock is probably at least a mile wide (1.8 km) and maybe 2 1/2 times that big (4.1 km). Closest approach is April 29 around 5:56 a.m. Eastern Daylight Time (09:56 UTC; translate UTC to your time). Professional observatories are already pointing their telescopes at the huge space rock. Amateur astronomers with smaller telescopes will have an opportunity to see it as a slow-moving “star” very soon; if that’s you, we give charts and tips for observers at the bottom of this post that should help.
No access to a telescope? No problem. The Virtual Telescope Project in Rome will host a free, online public viewing of the asteroid on April 28, 2020.
The Virtual Telescope Project will present an online viewing of Potentially Hazardous Asteroid (52768) 1998 OR2 on April 28, 2020. As the time approaches, check this page for more details.
Let’s make absolutely clear that there’s no chance of a collision between this asteroid and Earth. Asteroid (52768) 1998 OR2 will pass at some 4 million miles (6 million km), or about 16 times the Earth-moon distance. It’s true the object is classified as a Potentially Hazardous Asteroid. The Center for Near Earth Objects defines such an object as one that comes as close to Earth as:
… 0.05 AU or less [about 19.5 lunar distances] and an absolute magnitudeof 22.0 or less …
In other words, such objects are reasonably close and reasonably big. And do we need to say there are a bunch of objects like this? Wikipedia lists 22 of the largest here. Recent decades have revealed more and more asteroids orbiting the sun, as the video below from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory shows:
None of the 22 Potentially Hazardous Asteroids listed by Wikipedia is known to be on a collision course with Earth in the foreseeble future. In fact, none of the asteroids in the video above is known to be on a collision course. Likewise, asteroid (52768) 1998 OR2 isn’t on a collision course with Earth, not anytime soon. The orbit of this asteroid is well known for at least the next 200 years. Its closest approach to Earth in this century and the next will happen in 2079, when it’ll swoop to within about a million miles of Earth (still about four times farther away than the moon). That 2079 sweep past Earth will still be a big deal. Asteroid (52768) 1998 OR2 is the largest known of all large Near-Earth Objects that’ll pass less than five times the Earth-moon distance over the next two centuries!
Astronomers at Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico will study asteroid (52768) 1998 OR2 from April 8 to 24, 2020, as the space rock travels through space at 19,461 miles per hour (31,320 km/h).
The high resolution radar images that will be obtained from Arecibo should provide scientists a better estimate of the space rock’s size and shape.
Astronomers with reasonably sized telescopes are already capturing images of asteroid (52768) 1998 OR2. This March 6, 2020, image of the asteroid comes from a single 30-second exposure, remotely taken with Elena, a 17-inch robotic telescope. At the imaging time, (52768) 1998 OR2 was at about 22 million miles (36 million km) from Earth. At its closest in late April, it’ll be about 4 million miles (6.4 million km) away.
How to see asteroid (52768) 1998 OR2 with a small telescope
During its April 2020 pass, this asteroid will at no time be bright enough to view with the unaided eye. However, it’s estimated to reach a visual magnitude of around 10 to 11, which means observers with at least 6-inch or 8-inch telescopes (the number indicates the size of the primary mirror) will see the asteroid (very slowly) moving in front of the stars!
Sky enthusiasts can initially use a wide-angle (32mm or 35mm) eyepiece to point the telescope to a reference star in the asteroid’s path (charts below). After being assured that the instrument is pointing at the correct patch of the sky, a 26mm or 27mm eyepiece is recommended to detect the asteroid’s slow motion. You will want to note the star field, and watch for the object that moves over a period of about 10 to 15 minutes. Yes, that’ll be the space rock.
This illustration shows the location of asteroid (52768) 1998 OR2 on the night of April 24, 2020 around 11:45 p.m. central time. As seen from central U.S., facing west, southwest.
Illustration by Eddie Irizarry using Stellarium.
On April 24, 2020 at 11:45 p.m. central time, observers using small computerized telescopes can point their instruments at these reference stars, to observe asteroid (52768) 1998 OR2. Compare the views 10 or 15 minutes later to detect an apparent star that has changed position.
Illustration by Eddie Irizarry using Stellarium.
There will be closer approaches of asteroids in the future, including Apophis, which – although smaller – will pass very close to Earth in 2029. Another, larger space rock – 2 miles (3 km) wide – designated as asteroid (415029) 2011 UL21 will pass slightly farther than (52768) 1998 OR2 in June 2024.
But the upcoming flyby in April 2020 of asteroid (52768) 1998 OR2 is the most significant close approach of an asteroid until 2027, as another huge asteroid known as (4953) 1990 MU will safely pass by Earth at 12 lunar distances.
Astronomers first discovered asteroid (52768) 1998 OR2 on July 24, 1998, from Haleakala Observatory, Hawaii.
Have a Go-To Telescope? Point your instrument at star HIP 48674 on April 25, 2020 at 10 p.m. central time to find the huge asteroid, which will appear as a slow-moving star. To see its movement, compare the views over about 10 to 15 minutes.
Illustration by Eddie Irizarry using Stellarium.
Location of asteroid (52768) 1998 OR2 on the night of April 27, 2020. The space rock passes close to star HIP 50745 around 9:15 p.m. central time.
Illustration by Eddie Irizarry using Stellarium.
Location of asteroid (52768) 1998 OR2 around the nights of closest approach (April 28-29, 2020). Facing south, as seen from the central U.S.
Illustration by Eddie Irizarry using Stellarium.
Showtime! On April 29, 2020, around its closest approach to Earth, asteroid (52768) 1998 OR2 will pass close to galaxy NGC 3463 and star HIP 53416. Around 9:30 p.m. CT, point your small computerized telescope to these reference objects. Compare the views 10 to 15 minutes later to detect the apparent “star” that changed position. That’s the asteroid.
Illustration by Eddie Irizarry using Stellarium.
On April 30, 2020 at 9:30 p.m. asteroid (52768) 1998 OR2 is located close to stars HIP 54875 and 55201. Use a GoTo telescope to locate these reference stars to be able to locate the slow moving asteroid.
Illustration by Eddie Irizarry using Stellarium.
Bottom line:The huge asteroid known as (52768) 1998 OR2 will pass closest to Earth on April 29, 2020. Observers peering through telescopes will see it as a slow-moving “star.” Charts, tips – plus how to watch online – here.
Melinda Snodgrass got the idea for her science fiction novel The High Ground when she started thinking about how awful human beings can be.
“I had a sudden vision of this nine-foot-tall alien ant-like creature with mandibles and claws—just a hideous, horrifying creature,” Snodgrass says in Episode 370 of the Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast. “And it was cowering in absolute terror from a small human holding a machine gun. And I got to thinking about humanity and our tendency to be really mean, mean monsters.”
The novel takes place in a universe in which a human empire called the Solar League has subjugated five alien species, who now live as servants and second-class citizens. Snodgrass thinks this is a pretty plausible first contact scenario.
“If we do invent a faster-than-light drive, and go out into the universe, and meet other aliens, I am convinced that the first thing we will do is kick the holy crap out of them,” she says. “So instead of us always fighting off the invading aliens, we are the invading aliens.”
She also believes that any moral progress humans have made is much more tenuous than people realize, and that women’s rights could quickly vanish if childbearing became a priority, as is the case in the Solar League. “When you’re going out into space and colonizing planets, if you happen to end up on a planet that isn’t a goldilocks planet—a very Earth-like world—where there’s a harsh environment, the thing that becomes a precious commodity is your ability to sustain the population,” she says. “So over the ensuing years, women fall back into a much more traditional role.”
All of that creates a lot of conflict for her character Mercedes de Arango, one of the first women to attend the Solar League’s elite military academy. It’s a predicament Snodgrass can relate to, having once been the only female lawyer at her law firm.
“I literally had a bunch of male lawyers from this big office building run downstairs, and I heard them calling, ‘We hear Charlie’s hired himself a girl. Where’s the girl?'” Snodgrass says. “And they all came and looked at me in my office like I was a creature in a zoo. It was very bizarre.”
Listen to the complete interview with Melinda Snodgrass in Episode 370 of Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy (above). And check out some highlights from the discussion below.
Melinda Snodgrass on her father:
“My dad was just fantastic, he was the center of my life. I loved him so much, and he gave me every opportunity—to study opera in Europe, to ride horses, when I was 16 he sat me down and said, ‘We’re opening a checking account and you have to manage it,’ and on and on. At the time of his death he was managing a small natural gas and oil company, and now I actually manage the company. I took it over in 2002, and I’ve been running it ever since. So I have this sense of history with being the heir apparent—or the heiress apparent—to a business. … It is weird though, because at times my dad would slip. I had a half-brother, who was a great deal older than I was, and dad would sometimes say, ‘My other son, John.’ And then people like Senator Montoya, who was having lunch with us that day, was laughing and saying, ‘Wait a minute, what’s she?'”
“Roger and I became very close in the final two years of his life. He joined our gaming group, he would come and have dinner at our house many, many evenings. He was just the most charming, kind person I’ve ever known. … When I had just started writing, this literary agent that I had—who was also Victor Milan‘s and Bob Vardeman‘s agent—we were all at this dinner, at the local science fiction convention, and she said, ‘You have to change your name.’ And Roger immediately said, ‘No. No she doesn’t.’ He said, ‘Look at my name. Even though I’m on the bottom shelf in every bookstore, nobody forgets my name.’ And he turned to me and he said, ‘Don’t you change your name, because nobody will ever forget that name.’ And I kept it.”
“[George R.R. Martin] has turned it into probably the best science fiction independent bookstore in the Southwest. Because in addition to the little movie theater, there’s a bar—they have a liquor license—and then there’s concessions, and he has artists come in and hang their art for a few weeks, so you get to see various Santa Fe artists, and he has all of our books. And when they’re not doing movies, he’ll have events. Connie Willis will come down, and I’ll interview her, and then she’ll do a signing afterward. … So you can go in and buy some books, and have a White Walker Cocktail while you’re there, watch an independent movie, and when George is in town you’ll often find him there, ensconced in his armchair by the fireplace, in the evenings, to visit with people.”
“I was in this law office, and I hated it. I would get into work in the morning, close my door, cry for about 15 minutes, and then get control of myself and get on with work. … [Victor Milan and I] went to see The Empire Strikes Back, and we got to the scene with Yoda and Luke, and Luke says, ‘I’ll try,’ and Yoda says, ‘Do or do not. There is no try.’ And for some reason it was like a thunderbolt for me, and I was like, ‘I can spend the rest of my life in this law firm, and in a few years maybe I’ll have the big office and I’ll be terrorizing some young associate the way I’m being terrorized, or I can try to chart my own life. ‘Do or do not, there is no try.’ So I walked into the office the next morning, I typed off a letter of resignation, I packed up my plants and my diplomas, I laid it on my boss’s desk, and I walked out.”
Astronomers Have Detected a Whopping 8 New Repeating Signals From Deep Space
MICHELLE STARR
One of the biggest mysteries out there in the Universe is inching closer to answers. An astonishing eight new repeating radio signals known as fast radio bursts (FRBs) have been detected flaring from deep space.
This brings the known total of repeating FRBs to 10. It means we're starting to build a statistical database of repeaters, which could help astronomers to figure out what these signals actually are.
Fast radio bursts are certainly perplexing. They are detected as spikes in radio data, lasting just a few milliseconds. But, in that time, they can discharge more energy than 500 million Suns.
Most FRBs are only detected once and can't be predicted, so tracing them back to their source is really tricky (although, as demonstrated earlier this year for the first time, not impossible).
That's why repeaters are so important. And the news that they are not as rare as we thought means it might be possible to trace more back to their source galaxies, and determine what kinds of environments they come from.
We can also start looking for similarities and differences between repeating FRBs.
"There is definitely a difference between the sources, with some being more prolific than others," physicist Ziggy Pleunis of McGill University told ScienceAlert.
"We already knew from FRB 121102 that the bursts can be very clustered: sometimes the source doesn't burst for hours and hours and then suddenly you get multiple bursts in a short amount of time. We have observed the same thing for FRB 180916.J0158+65, for which we report ten bursts in this paper."
On the other side of the scale, six of the FRBs reported in the paper only repeated once, and the longest pause between signals was over 20 hours. The eighth one (FRB 181119) repeated twice after the initial detection, pinging a total of three times.
We don't yet know what this means, but it could indicate - as hypothesised in a paper last month by Harvard-Smithsonian astrophysicist Vikram Ravi - that all FRBs are actually repeaters, but some are a lot more active than others.
"Just as some volcanoes are more active than others, and you can think a volcano is dormant because it has not erupted in a long time," Pleunis noted.
But there are similarities between FRBs, too. The individual bursts from repeaters seem to last a little bit longer than the bursts from one-off FRBs. That's pretty interesting.
There's also the frequency drift. The first two repeaters - FRB 121102 and FRB 180814 - showed a downward drift in frequency, with each burst getting successively lower. Think of a sad trombone sound effect.
Most of the eight new repeaters,also demonstrated this downward frequency drift. This could be a clue as to what's producing the signals.
"I just think it is so amazing that nature produces something like that," Pleunis said. "Also, I think that there is some very important information in that structure that we just have to figure out how to encode and it has been a lot of fun to try to figure out what exactly that is."
CHIME is optimised for monitoring a very broad swathe of the sky, across a lower range of frequencies than radio telescopes like ASKAP or the Parkes Observatory in Australia, which have also detected FRBs.
So far, CHIME's approach is proving remarkably effective at detection. In addition to these repeaters, and the repeater announced in January, CHIME has detected a number of one-off bursts, too. It's not optimised for tracing those detections to a source, though.
That's where the broader scientific community comes in. Just today, a different team of researchers, including Ravi, announced they had made headway localising the eight new repeaters to known galaxies, just based on the direction the signals came from.
We can even roughly tell how far away the bursts may have originated based on how dispersed the signal is - the higher these measures, the farther the distance.
In fact, this is where it gets intriguing, because one of the signals, FRB 180916, has the lowest dispersion seen yet, indicating that it could be nearby.
"Even with the biggest telescopes, if it's closer to you, you always get a better view than if it's something farther away," astronomer Keith Bannister from Australia's national science agency CSIRO, who was not involved in the research, told ScienceAlert.
"So that particular low dispersion measure was super exciting, because there's a good chance that that will be nearby. And that means it will be easier to look at, once we really know exactly where it is in the sky."
The polarisation of the signals (how twisted the signal is) is informative, too. If the signal is really twisted up, it means it came from an extreme magnetic environment, such as can be found around a black hole or neutron star. This is what the signal from FRB 121102 was like.
But the team was able to measure the polarisation of one of the new signals, FRB 180916, and it was really low. This tells us that not all repeating FRBs come from extreme environments.
We don't know what this means yet. We don't know if there are several different classes of objects or events producing these signals. We don't know if they all repeat, or why they repeat. But these results are bringing us tantalisingly close to finally having some answers.
"I think (and I hope!) the paper will prompt other astronomers to point their telescopes to these newly discovered sources," Pleunis said.
"Then, there is a lot of information here for model builders to work with. I think it will help them figure out what produces repeating FRBs.
"Also, I think our findings will influence the search strategy of other teams that try to discover repeating FRBs."
The research has been submitted to The Astrophysical Journal and is available on arXiv.
You wouldn't want to book a ticket on the Avenue 5, the luxury space cruise ship at the heart of HBO's new limited space comedy series. But if you did, at least you'd ride in style.
That's largely due to the vision of production designer Simon Bowles, who worked with series creator Armando Iannucci("Veep") and a set decorating team to create the look of perhaps the the most luxurious cruise ship in space of all time.
"On this project, I could see there was a wonderful opportunity to really kind of pull about the two worlds that the passengers and the crew inhabit on Avenue 5," Bowles told Space.com in an interview. "For the beautiful, futuristic part of the ship ... it's computer engineered so that every curve, every small detail is so considered with the aesthetics in mind, but also, I really wanted to keep it within the realms of science as much as possible."
Avenue 5 concept imagery for a 2-mile space cruise ship at the heart of of HBO's space comedy.
Set 40 years in the future, "Avenue 5" chronicles the ill-fated voyage of a space cruise ship across the solar system after its eight-week trip to Saturn veers wildly off course. Its two-month voyage will now last years, stranding thousands of passengers and crew who just want to get home.
"Avenue 5" debuted on HBO Jan. 19 and is in the home stretch of its nine-episode run, with episode eight airing tonight (March 8). It stars Hugh Laurie as Captain Ryan Clark, who is play-acting at command of the titular space liner; Josh Gad as the eccentric Herman Judd, the billionaire owner of "Avenue 5"; Lenora Crichlow as Billie McEvoy, the ship's second engineer; and a host of other characters who have to work together (in space and on Earth) to survive.
But the "Avenue 5" itself is as much a star as the show's human actors. According to Bowles, the ship is vast — about 2 miles long (3kilometers). It has a definite "Upstairs, Downstairs" feel to it when it comes to the glitzy, luxurious passenger areas and the seedy lower decks for the ship's actual crew. The ship, he explained, likely started off as a huge transport ship for cargo, with luxury spaces like staterooms, a vast windowed promenade, restaurants (and yes, a golf course), added over time.
(Image credit: HBO)The Atrium of Avenue 5, an opulent cruise ship in HBO's space comedy.
"And that's why this ship is so dirty and grungy," Bowles said of the lower decks. "So, when they're moving through the rear section of the ship, they're having to step over things, or duck because of this huge I-beam ... whereas in the passenger, its very open there, and opulent."
All of the sets were designed with 3-D models first, then explored with Oculus Rift before being fabricated through 3-D printing, Bowles said. In all, the design team came up with 50 or 60 different sets.
Inspired by real spaceflight
Some of "Avenue 5's" gritty spacecraft design is inspired by reality, with Bowles drawing on a tour about 15 years ago of the Russian space agency's Star City cosmonaut training center and its space station mockups to add a sense of history to the show's actual spaceflight controls.
"I spent time and met with cosmonauts over there, and I've been to their flight control [center]," Bowles said, adding that he was struck by the relatively low-tech, "very manual way of interacting with space" of Russia's space agency at the time.
"The looks of the lower decks section, where the actual crew is underneath the kind of glitzy part, was really reminiscent of what it was like on the Russian segment of the station," he added.
The spacesuits of Avenue 5, too, have a used look to them, as if countless astronauts have donned and doffed them over the years to maintain the ship.
(Image credit: HBO)The dining area of Avenue 5 where you can order a Judd Light beer.
Bowles also researched real-life space mission control centers to help shape the Mission Control for Avenue 5. In addition to Russia's flight control center, he looked to NASA's Mission Control Center in Houston, views of the private flight control center SpaceX has for its Dragon vehicles in California and even China's massive Traffic Control Center in Beijing for inspiration. In the end, he opted for a circular design with the flight director (Rav Mulcair portrayed by Nikki Amuka-Bird) at its center.
"Normally, in those kind of spaces, everybody's facing towards the screen, you know, or an array of screens," Bowles said. "So I really knew that I wanted something like totally different."
All hail Herman Judd
The podium that Mulcair can use actually rotates to face different parts of the flight control room, and can even rise up. Bowles imagines that Avenue 5's billionaire owner Herman Judd might use the podium as sort of throne to speak down to his employees. "I thought it'd be hilarious because this whole thing has to be the center of attention."
And speaking of Judd, his logo is everywhere on Avenue 5. It's on the beer, the walls, on digital screens and even in the lighting displays, with dozens of tiny "J" symbols spread out in different patterns. In the ship's comedy club, every brick on the stage's backdrop has the Judd logo on it, just because.
(Image credit: HBO)The faux bridge of Avenue 5 is a sleek piece of sci-fi. But the real controls are in the lower decks.
(Image credit: HBO)The conference room of Avenue 5 features a colossal wood table and paneling.
"You don't see them so much, but yeah ... everything has got to be branded with that guy's logo," Bowles said, adding that designing Judd's brand was a lot fun. He imagines a backstory where Judd employees had to decide how much branding was enough.
"It's the people who are doing the interior design and graphic design for him, for the Judd Corporation," Bowles said. "They think they're doing the right thing by putting his name out there. It may not even be an egotistical thing for him."
(Image credit: HBO)The Judd Corporation's logo is front and center in a wall light by Porta Romana.
(Image credit: HBO)Billionaire Herman Judd's quarters on the Avenue 5.
Season 1 of "Avenue 5" is nearly at an end, but years remain before the ship's passengers and crew will reach Earth. So it's no surprise HBO has renewed the series for a Season 2. What types of design surprises await for viewers in that new season?
"Oh, this is a tricky question, because I'm looking at all the visuals for the next season," Bowles said, but he let no secrets slip. Instead, he promised that Iannucci and he hope to find new parts of the ship to explore.
"You know, who wants to go back and keep on retreading old ground? We want to go into new places," Bowles said. "That's why we wanted the ship to be very large, so that we can, every season, explore whole new exciting places and spaces within the ship."
Bowles added that he was grateful viewers connected with "Avenue 5" to make a second season happen.
"There's these wonderful kind of creative opportunities for the next season and beyond that that can be so exciting," he said. "I can't wait to share it with everybody."
Episode 8 of HBO's "Avenue 5" will air tonight, March 8, at 10 p.m. ET/PT.
(Image credit: HBO)Yes, there's a spa on Avenue 5.
An artist's interpretation of the water-rich atmosphere of K2-18b. (Image credit: Alex Boersma)
Three teams of astronomers have been fascinated by an alien world known as K2-18b. But what's all the fuss about?
In September, two teams announced that they had found signs of liquid water in the planet's atmosphere — a landmark discovery in the search for potentially habitable alien worlds. But the mere presence of water isn't the only condition necessary for life. Other conditions, like temperature and pressure, can also affect a planet's habitability. Now, a third team reports that the pressures of liquid water on the same world may be good for life to evolve — another intriguing development for scientists.
Benneke and his colleagues used the Hubble and Spitzer space telescopes to study K2-18b a dozen times over a three-year period, to collect precise observations of its atmosphere.
Although scientists have studied exoplanet atmospheres before, those worlds have been larger than K2-18b, which is only about 2.6 times the size of Earth and 8.5 times its mass. The planet's small size made the observations especially challenging, requiring multiple detailed measurements that, combined, could provide a more in-depth probe of the world.
"Nothing like this has been done before," Benneke said.
"Similar to Earth"
K2-18b is 110 light-years away, in the constellation Leo,where it orbits a small but active type of star that can hurl bursts of radiation at orbiting planets. Although the star is smaller and dimmer than the sun, K2-18b's 33-day orbit means the planet receives roughly the same amount of energy from its star as Earth receives from the sun.
The star's small size makes it easier to detect details of a diminutive planet like K2-18b because observations of a planet depend on how much light it blocks as it passes in front of its star from Earth's perspective. A smaller planet blocks less light than a larger one, but a smaller star has less light to block, making that small signal somewhat easier to see. (The planet's orbit also helped scientists capture multiple passes across its star.)
In the Hubble and Spitzer observations, Benneke and his team found the signature of water in the exoplanet's atmosphere — and not just any form of water. "Even more exciting, we discovered in the data that there's a cloud deck on the planet," Benneke said.
The clue was that starlight beaming through the atmosphere came to an abrupt stop at a certain altitude. Benneke and his colleagues used models to determine that the height was the perfect pressure and temperature for water to survive.
"The only plausible explanation is that these are liquid water clouds, very similar to what we have on Earth," Benneke said.
As the clouds fill with water droplets, they most likely create rainfall. But that rain would never touch the ground. Instead, it would fall until temperatures and pressures caused it to evaporate once again, the researchers said. Benneke compared rainfall on K2-18b to terrestrial virga, which occurs when high temperatures and pressures cause rain to evaporate before it reaches the ground.
Finding a similar weather pattern on an exoplanet is an intriguing prospect to Benneke.
"[K2-18b] is the coldest planet with [atmospheric] detection, the smallest planet, the least-massive planet," he said. "To me, it's the most exciting one."
An artist's image of K2-18b, the first small exoplanet known to have water in its atmosphere. (Image credit: ESA/Hubble, M. Kornmesser)
A common mystery
Although K2-18b has the right conditions for Earth-like clouds to form, that doesn't make the planet itself Earth-like. Instead, it is classified as a sub-Neptune, a gas giant without a surface. NASA's Kepler spacecraft determined that sub-Neptunes are likely the most common type of exoplanets in the Milky Way, making up more than three-fourths of the planetary population.
Nonetheless, astronomers are having a difficult time understanding the relatively small gas giants, and that's one reason the K2-18b findings are so exciting. "We don't quite know what's going on with these planets," Benneke said. "It's probing this regime of planets that we have a very poor understanding of right now."
Sub-Neptunes have masses that fall somewhere between Earth and Neptune, and there's no analogue in the solar system. Understanding worlds like K2-18b can help improve scientists' knowledge of how planets grow and evolve. "If you want to understand planets as a whole, the diversity of planets, it's very critical that you understand the most common ones," Benneke said.
After reading that New York Times story, Scoles was suspicious and wanted to figure out what was really going on with the Pentagon program. She didn't solve that mystery, but she did end up writing a book about contemporary UFO culture. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Journalist Sarah Scoles takes a close look at UFO culture and why so many people, like Fox Mulder, just want to believe.
Space.com: When did you know that this was going to be a book?
Sarah Scoles: I wrote two articles for Wired … but then after those were done and published, I was still on my computer late at night trying to figure out what was going on with why UFOs were so popular right now and what was going on with this Pentagon program. I didn't think that all of that research really had a place in an article or that an article could be long enough to encompass it. And so I talked to my editor, and I said, "Books are generally a bad idea. Should I do this one?" She said, "You know, if it's something you're going to be Googling late at night no matter what, you might as well write something about it." That was kind of the moment where I was like, "I guess I just am down this rabbit hole and can't stop so I might as well share what I find with other people."
(Image credit: Rebekah Scoles)
Space.com: Talk about the importance of traveling to reporting for this project. Where did you visit that most influenced your thinking about UFO culture?
Scoles: I realized at some point that I, on my own, was not going to solve whatever the mystery of UFO sightings or this investigation program was and I would have to take a different tactic, which was understanding the people and the kind of culture surrounding it. Especially since I'm a freelancer, I had more freedom to go places and do things. And I thought that it would be the best way to do justice to that community, to go and actually experience the places and events that they take part in. And so, for most of the chapters, I think I ended up going somewhere. And so the on-the-ground reporting was important to me.
One of my favorite places is this small tourist attraction in Colorado called the UFO Watchtower, which gets its own chapter in the book and was a place I had been before just because I live here and I go on lots of road trips. But I hadn't never tried to understand it as a cultural phenomenon. It's this weird, small attraction in the middle of nowhere. And once I went there with a reporting mindset, rather than just a tourist mindset, it was cool to see it as kind of a community gathering place and where people with lots of different opinions on lots of different things can interact with each other in a peaceful way, which I think is kind of lacking in general in society right now.
Another place that was really formative for my thinking about all this was going to the International UFO Congress outside of Phoenix. And it was my first interaction with people who were really into UFOs. And also there, you find skeptics, you find hardcore believers, you find people who believe that there's a bunch of aliens in the basement talking to politicians all the time, and even people who just think it's classified military projects. And just seeing that there was this thing that drew all these people with these widely varying opinions and relationships to evidence, a thing that brought them together was informative, I think.
Space.com: You end up writing a lot about information, authority and trust. How did working on the book change the way you think about those topics?
Scoles: I came into it with a pretty traditional science-journalist mindset: Why do people not value scientific expertise, why do they subscribe to conspiracy theories, and why do they think about evidence in illogical ways? — just like fundamentally not understanding that. I think I came away from it having looked at the history of UFOs, and specifically the way the government agencies have dealt with the topic in the past, which is some bad-faith investigation projects and a lot of hiding of documents and proceedings for one reason or another.
I came to understand why it was that people didn't trust the government on this topic or didn't trust scientists. And a lot of it was because, in the past, federal agencies and scientists had kind of dismissed the topic, been untruthful about the topic or, in some cases, spread false information, and I think also coming to think of UFOs as a belief system instead of actually a scientific topic helped me understand the ways that other people think about other things like vaccinations or climate change. People don't interact with it like you would a scientific experiment. And while I don't think that's great, I feel like I came away understanding why people think that way.
Space.com: Why did you think it was so important to approach these people on your own terms and to try to understand them?
Scoles: It actually comes from a story that I won't name that I did kind of early in my science journalism career, where I took this kind of pseudoscience subculture and just ripped it apart and wasn't very nice to the people who were part of it. I didn't really like the feeling that I had after publishing that article. I didn't like the way that people thought that I had entered it in bad faith, which I probably had, and that I had spent 2,000 words making fun of what they believed, which even if it was a thing that I didn't think was valid, was important to them.
I've kind of kept that with me. When you're not talking about people who have power or money, I guess I didn't want to punch down is the journalism lingo. And so when I set out to [write this book], it was very important to me not to write a book that was just making fun of people, which I think it would have been easy to do. [I wanted] to actually try to engage with people who thought differently than I did and to understand where they were coming from and not just say that where they were coming from didn't make sense.
As I was choosing people to talk to, sometimes I would encounter people who weren't powerful or weren't making money off of people, but who had beliefs or experiences that I didn't think that I could treat respectfully while maintaining my own credibility. And so in that case, I would just not write about them and instead choose people who I thought I could do journalistic justice to while also not just making fun of what they thought.
Space.com: You talk about two recent moments in particular, the New York Times story on the alleged Pentagon program and the Sunspot investigation. What similarities stood out to you about the two events, and what do you think that tells us about society in the past few years?
Scoles: The biggest thing I took away from the commonalities between those two is the influence that the media has on the way that information becomes public. So after the New York Times story happened, it disclosed this supposed UFO investigation program. And then all of a sudden, there were hundreds of other articles kind of repeating the same thing. Because it was a compelling story, because it gets clicks and because journalists don't have time to re-report everything that someone else reported, so a lot of times, things just get summarized again and again and again and kind of mutate over time.
I kind of tell the same thing at Sunspot. There was an evacuation of an observatory, the FBI was there, no one knew what was going on. All of a sudden, in the headlines, there was this idea that it was because the observatory found something about aliens, and then also the refutation of that idea. And it just kind of spread, the way that things spread on the internet. And all of a sudden, there's this whole narrative. I think just the way that information propagates on the internet, because people click them, because people love aliens and UFOs and are interested, whole new stories and myths can kind of pop up out of not a whole lot of information. Although that's always been true, that's also what happened at Roswell. So maybe history just repeats itself.
Space.com: Do you think there's been a surge in interest in UFOs, or does it just feel like it?
Scoles: Honestly, it's hard to tell exactly, especially once you're in the bubble of something. The people who I'm paying attention to because I'm reporting on this feel like there's been an upsurge in information, but they're part of that community. … I think there is an exaggerated sense of people's interest in it.
Throughout UFO history, the media coverage of UFOs has been disproportionate to the actual interest in UFOs. But then, when there is media coverage, people do become more interested, and this is kind of this cycle. The polls about belief in UFOs kind of have people holding steady on par with the interest in the '90s. So maybe the interest is larger than it was in the early 2000s, but it's not disproportionate to what it has been in the past.
Space.com: What do you hope a reader takes away from the book?
Scoles: I think the biggest thing I hope that people come away with, which I think is what I came away with, is a little more empathy for people who believe things that you might think are ridiculous or ill-informed. People are motivated by all kinds of factors in their personal lives or in history or surrounding culture. You can't just dismiss people's deeply held beliefs because they don't agree with yours. …
I think, especially because of belief systems around topics that are scientific or kind of science-adjacent, we see a lot of issues around that now, where scientific topics become belief-centric or conspiracized and politically influenced. Instead of just throwing out what lots and lots of people think, it might be better to engage with it a little bit.
The other thing is, the reporting has made me think a lot about government transparency and accountability and the way that federal agencies treat topics and treat information — which is a lot of hiding of things or not talking about things or giving statements that people can't interpret. I don't think that really serves us, the taxpayers, very well.
Mysterious flying object streaking over the Grand Canyon, Arizona
Mysterious flying object streaking over the Grand Canyon, Arizona
Many people are convinced that UFOs piloted by aliens are real but there are also unidentified flying objects equipped with advanced propulsion technology which belong to the military.
Most of these military UFOs are still secret. Now on March 9, 2020 a visitor to the Grand Canyon in Arizona has taken a photo of an object traveling extremely fast suggesting that this craft could be such a secret military UFO.
The UFO was not visible when the photo was taken and there was no sound. After viewing the photo the UFO showed up.
Could it be that the photographer, who has uploaded the image to Mutual UFO Network (MUFON), has accidentally photographed such a secret man-made craft?
“Oh, the places you’ll go when you can surf a supernova!”
While that sounds like a great title for a fictional children’s book on space travel by the late Dr. Seuss, it’s actually a real idea for near-speed-of-light space travel by a renowned theoretical physicist who has lately been thinking way outside the box. Will humans someday travel in spaceships propelled by the power of supernovas?
“In this paper, we explore the possibility of using natural astrophysical sources to accelerate spacecrafts to relativistic speeds. We focus on light sails and electric sails, which are reliant on momentum transfer from photons and protons, respectively, because these two classes of spacecrafts are not required to carry fuel on board.”
“By considering a number of astrophysical objects such as massive stars, microquasars, supernovae, pulsar wind nebulae, and active galactic nuclei, we show that speeds approaching the speed of light might be realizable under broad circumstances.”
Theoretical physicist Abraham “Avi” Loeb tore himself away from theorizing that interstellar comets might be alien spaceships to join brains with astrobiologist Manasvi Lingam to ponder ways humans might accomplish the same type of travel at much higher speeds. In a pre-published paper, “Propulsion of Spacecrafts to Relativistic Speeds Using Natural Astrophysical Sources” summarized in Scientific American, Loeb and Lingam propose using the already real technology of laser-pushed light sails with some massive propellants far more powerful than lasers. Loeb explains to Universe Today how he got the idea.
“Back in December 2019, my wife and two daughters were on travel and I had the luxury of staying at home alone for a week and thinking about science. While taking a shower, I thought on how the Sun is not effective at launching lightsails to high speed, but a brighter source of light might be. I followed this thought with detailed calculations on supernovae, which are billions of times brighter than the Sun for a week and realized that lightsails with existing parameters can reach the speed of light if they are strategically placed ahead of time around the massive star that is about the explode.”
How hot WAS that water? Loeb shared his idea with colleague Lingam, who helped determine (apparently without the benefit of a shower) that a supernova was the best source of speed-of-light, or even one-tenth speed of light, power. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist in a hot shower to see some big non-black holes in this idea – like finding supernovas when they’re just about to explode, positioning the sailing ship and insuring it and its crew survive the trip, regardless of how fast they arrive at their destination. Lingam says none of this is a problem.
“There are many challenges such as sail stabilization, maintaining high reflectance and preventing heating, and avoiding damage while traveling in the source environment as well as the interstellar medium. Most of these issues may be overcome, at least in principle, by utilizing electric sails instead of light sails. Alternatively, if one decides to stick with light sails, then one will have to fold the sail during some stages of the voyage, choose an unusual sail architecture, and rely upon nanophotonic structures to improve stability.”
Nuclear-powered cars once made sense too – have you seen any of those lately? That’s not a problem for deep, out-of-the-box thinkers like Loeb and Lingam. In fact, they invoke the name of the late Frederick Dyson in revealing the other, more attainable benefit of this kind of thinking – if our piddly human brains can come up with these ideas, advanced civilizations have probably implemented them already and are using them to get around the galaxy. If that’s the case, signs of them, like Dyson spheres, might point SETI researchers in the right direction for finding their location and putting a marker on the map for when we finally invent the ships ourselves. Better yet, we can aim our instruments at these spots to send messages to come and get us – kind of an interstellar Uber call. That assumes these aliens are benevolent. Otherwise, it could be more like a message telling extraterrestrials that their dinner is ready for pickup.
Food for deep thought.
Getting back to a human level of thinking, Supernova Surfers would be a great name for a band.
If you have read my 2017 book, The Roswell UFO Conspiracy, you’ll know that I largely gave up – years ago – on the theory that what has popularly become known as “The Roswell Incident” involved extraterrestrials and an alien spacecraft. If the truth does surface one day, I strongly suspect that the decades-long controversy will shown to have been something very different. I’m talking about secret, high-altitude experiments using human guinea-pigs, in the summer of 1947 in New Mexico. Of course, I may be wrong. And, if Roswell does turn out to have been an extraterrestrial event, I’ll be very pleased, as it will vindicate the research of all those who believe that aliens have visited Earth. But, I just don’t see it happening. As my research into Roswell continues at a steady pace, I’m getting more and more data that suggests Roswell was a dark and disturbing, secret test that went catastrophically wrong.
There’s no doubt that one of the biggest and most controversial”spin-offs” from the original story is that of the Majestic 12 documents. For those who may know, Majestic 12 – or MJ12 – was said to have been a top secret group created in 1947 by President Harry Truman. Essentially to keep the Roswell bodies and craft under wraps, and to investigate concerns relative to alien intrusions. It was 1987 when the Majestic 12 documents became public knowledge, something that led many UFO investigators to believe that this was finally the smoking-gun everyone was looking for. Indeed, Tim Good gave the documents significant coverage in his 1987 book, Above Top Secret. There’s no doubt, though, that the late Stanton Friedman was the one person – more than any other – who flew the flag for Majestic 12.
In the same way that I once believed Roswell involved aliens, I was also of the opinion – for quite a while – that the Majestic 12 documents were the real thing. My views, however, began to change as time went by and as new revelations surfaced. Eventually, to the point where – today – I’m convinced the documents and the story they tell are pure bullshit – something I addressed to a lengthy degree in my 2019 book, Flying Saucers from the Kremlin. It demonstrates how and why the Majestic 12 papers just don’t stand up as real documents. It’s not just UFO researchers like me who have shot down the documents. The National Archives have done a praiseworthy job of doing exactly that, too.
National Archives staff state that they have “…received many requests for documentation and information about ‘Project MJ-12.’ Many of the inquiries concern a memorandum from Robert Cutler to Gen. Nathan Twining, dated July 14, 1954. This particular document poses problems for the following reasons: The document was located in Record Group 341, entry 267. The series is filed by a Top Secret register number. This document does not bear such a number. The document is filed in the folder T4-1846. There are no other documents in the folder regarding ‘NSC/MJ-12. Researchers on the staff of the National Archives have searched in the records of the Secretary of Defense, the Joint Chiefs on Staff, Headquarters U.S. Air Force, and in other related files. No further information has been found on this subject.”
The National Archives adds: “Inquiries to the U.S. Air Force, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the National Security Council failed to produce further information. The Freedom of Information Office of the National Security Council informed the National Archives that ‘Top Secret Restricted Information’ is a marking which did not come into use at the National Security Council until the Nixon Administration. The Eisenhower Presidential Library also confirm that this particular marking was not used during the Eisenhower Administration. The document in question does not bear an official government letterhead or watermark. The NARA conservation specialist examined the paper and determined it was a ribbon copy prepared on ‘diction onionskin.’ The Eisenhower Library has examined a representative sample of the documents in its collection of the Cutler papers. All documents in the sample created by Mr. Cutler while he served on the NSC staff have an eagle watermark in the bond paper. The onionskin carbon copies have either an eagle watermark or no watermark at all. Most documents sent out by the NSC were prepared on White House letterhead paper. For the brief period when Mr. Cutler left the NSC, his carbon copies were prepared on ‘prestige onionskin.'”
And the questionable issues continue, as the National Archives make abundantly clear: “The National Archives searched the Official Meeting Minute Files of the National Security Council and found no record of a NSC meeting on July 16, 1954. A search of all NSC Meeting Minutes for July 1954 found no mention of MJ-12 nor Majestic. The Judicial, Fiscal and Social Branch searched the indices of the NSC records and found no listing for: MJ-12, Majestic, unidentified flying objects, UFO, flying saucers, or flying discs. NAJA found a memo in a folder titled ‘Special Meeting July 16, 1956’ which indicated that NSC members would be called to a civil defense exercise on July 16, 1956.”
Finally, there is this from the National Archives: “Robert Cutler, at the direction of President Eisenhower, was visiting overseas military installations on the day he supposedly issued this memorandum— July 14, 1954. The Administration Series in Eisenhower’s Papers as President contains Cutler’s memorandum and report to the President upon his return from the trip. The memorandum is dated July 20, 1954 and refers to Cutler’s visits to installations in Europe and North Africa between July 3 and 15. Also, within the NSC Staff Papers is a memorandum dated July 3, 1954, from Cutler to his two subordinates, James S. Ia and J. Patrick Cone, explaining how they should handle NSC administrative matters during his absence; one would assume that if the memorandum to Twining were genuine, Lay or Cone would have signed it.”
I could just about accept one or two slight errors in the Majestic 12 documents – after all, I have found occasional errors in 100 percent genuine files relating to UFOs – but the Majestic 12 papers are absolutely overwhelmed by errors and problems. Namely, the very ones the National Archives detailed above. I get it why people are drawn to the Majestic 12 material: it’s exciting, it gets conspiracy-theorists fired up, and it offers data that suggests aliens really did come down on the Foster Ranch, Lincoln County, New Mexico in the summer of 1947. The fact is, though, the documents are bogus and aliens did not crash at Roswell. Move on.
NASA is busy recruiting astronauts for future missions to the ISS, the Moon and Mars, but a new discovery may shove a few humans off of the Martian ships to make room for pigs. Specifically, those hogs trained in the art of truffle-sniffing. The Curiosity Rover recently found organic compounds on the Martian surface that resemble those in coal, crude oil and white truffles. Will Elon Musk add a pen to his Mars ship or will pigs fly First Class?
“If you find thiophenes on Earth, then you would think they are biological, but on Mars, of course, the bar to prove that has to be quite a bit higher.”
In a press statement by Washington State University announcing the publication of a new paper on the subject in the journal Astrobiology, WSU astrobiologist Dirk Schulze-Makuch describes the discovery by Curiosity of thiophenes – compounds with the formula C4H4S (four carbon, four hydrogen and one sulfur atom) which can either be biotic or abiotic. They are found on Earth in kerogen (solid, insoluble organic matter), coal, crude oil, as well as in fossilized stromatolites (single-celled cyanobacteria) and other microfossils. And in white truffles (Tuber magnatum) or trifola d’Alba Madonna (“Truffle of the White Madonna” in Italian), the most expensive edible fungus in the world. (The highest price paid for a single white truffle is $330,000 for one weighing 1.5 kilograms (3.3 lb.))
No, not these truffles.
“In the biological scenario, bacteria, which may have existed more than three billion years ago when Mars was warmer and wetter, could have facilitated a sulfate reduction process that results in thiophenes.”
The press release points out that thiophenes can be formed by thermochemical sulfate reduction (heating compounds to 248 degrees Fahrenheit (120 degrees C) until they break down, or may have been brought to Mars by meteorites. Since there’s no fun or glory in finding those, the biological sources are the ones Schulze-Makuch and co-author Jacob Heinz (from the Technische Universität in Berlin) want the next rover to search for.
The Rosalind Franklin Rover — named for an English chemist and X-ray crystallographer whose work was central to the understanding of the molecular structures of DNA, RNA, viruses (we could use her now!), coal, and graphite – will be launched in July 2020 with a Mars Organic Molecule Analyzer to collect larger molecules than Curiosity can. In particular, they want it to search for light isotopes that are “a telltale signal for life.”
What about the truffle-sniffing pigs?
“I think the proof will really require that we actually send people there, and an astronaut looks through a microscope and sees a moving microbe.”
Schulze-Makuch isn’t big on that idea just yet. Besides, how will they be able to sniff and root while wearing a space suit? And who would want to try to get a pig into a spacesuit in the first place?
Someone who wants at least $330,000 for 1.5 kg of Martian white truffles, that’s who!
Of the many and varied kinds of UFO encounters that have been reported since 1947 – the year in which the Flying Saucer was “born” – some stand out more than others. One category of encounter that particularly intrigues me involves UFOs caught on radar. And when the incidents involve pilots pursuing UFOs through the sky – while ground-radar is tracking them at the same time – this makes a fairly persuasive case for the reality of a genuine UFO. It gets weirder, though: what about incidents in which UFOs are tracked on radar – sometimes by staff at more than one military base – but the UFOs cannot be seen visually. Its almost as if some UFOs have the ability to become invisible to the human eye. Maybe they do. That’s the theme of today’s article. I’ll share with you three fascinating cases. The first comes from the late J.R. Oliver, whose wife very generously gave me permission to use the account of her late husband, and which makes for fascinating reading. Oliver prepared the account some time before his death, of which the following is just an extract from a much longer account:
“In August 1949, in order to test the updated air defenses of England against attack, Operation Bulldog was launched. Operation Bulldog’s attacking forces consisted of aircraft of the Benelux countries supported by U.S. air squadrons based on the continent. Flying from various airfields in Holland, France, Belgium and Germany, their objective was to attack London and other prime targets in southern and midland England, without being officially ‘downed’ by fighter aircraft brought into action by the defensive network of Fighter Command. The radar defense chain extended from Land’s End, along the south coast and up to the north of Scotland, overlapping at all heights from sea level to about 100,000 feet. Even so long ago, it was almost impossible to fly a glider across the Channel without it being plotted. The exercise ran for fifteen days and was structured in such a way that the technical resources and personnel of the defensive screen were stretched to the limit.”
It wasn’t long at all before something very weird occurred, as Oliver noted in his letter: “Within about fifteen minutes, the PBX operator came in, approached the Duty Controller and advised him that Bethe first to see the contact and my plot was the first to go on the plot board. As other operators took their positions, more plots were called out concerning position of the object and its height. The object was flying roughly parallel with the south coast, from west to east. Reaching a point out to see off the ‘heel’ of Kent, it abruptly turned north and as it approached the Thames estuary we passed it on to Martlesham radar, with whom we had been in contact via the PBX link, and whose radar area impinged on our own. Shortly after, we lost contact with it, due to the limit of our own radar range.”
Oliver then noted something even more incredible: “It was a simple matter to assess the speed of the object from the times and distances between plots and its height was directly read from our Type 13 radar, designed to read the height of any aircraft within its range. Flying at close to 50,000 feet, the air speed of the object we had observed and plotted in accordance with RAF standard procedures was assessed at very nearly 3,000 miles per hour [italics mine]. The general consensus regarding its size, among the very experienced radar personnel engaged in the operations, was that the object offered an echo similar to that of a large passenger or freighter surface vessel, something in the region of 15,000 or 20,00 tons [italics mine]. Word filtered down that on approaching Bempton radar in Yorkshire, the object suddenly increased speed and headed directly upwards, vanished off-screen at about 100,000 feet.”
Despite the careful tracking of the huge object – by the radar operators of several military bases – the UFO was never visibly seen: it was only encountered on the radar screens. Now, let’s take a look at another case that involved an “invisible UFO.” It comes from a man named William Maguire. In September 1952, he was serving in the U.K.’s Royal Air Force – on radar. Of his experience of the UFO type – that occurred at a military facility called RAF Sandwich in the south of England – Maguire told me: “The mechanics were being blamed for not calibrating the instruments properly; we were being blamed for not interpreting the readings properly. But the obvious answer staring us in the face, on every single instrument on the base, was the fact that there was sitting up at an unbelievable height, this enormous thing with the equivalent mass of a warship and it just stood there…and stood there…and stood there.”
Invisible UFOs?
So, we have a second case that involves the tracking by radar of a gigantic craft, but that is not encountered visually. On March 26, 1957, there was yet another amazing encounter. The document states in part: “A report was received from Royal Air Force Church Lawford on 26th March, 1957 of a sighting of an unusual nature. The object moved at a speed timed at exceeding 1400mph. This in itself was unusual as the object had accelerated to this speed from a stationary position. No explanation has yet been found for this sighting but a supplementary report, including a copy of the radar plot, was requested and has been received from Church Lawford this afternoon.”
It’s important to note that the “sighting” was seen on radar. Yet again, nothing was actually seen in the sky. Invisible UFOs? Maybe. There is, however, another explanation – very different, but also very intriguing – that I’ll get to in part-2 of this article.
Over the years – decades, in fact – the CIA has declassified a wealth of UFO-themed documentation. The stash is filled with reports of UFO encounters filed by pilots, police-officers, scientists and members of the public. Many of those same reports were extracted from worldwide newspapers that the CIA carefully scrutinized on a regular basis. While there is no definitive smoking gun in the files, there’s no doubt that the papers demonstrate the longstanding interest – and occasionally the concern – the CIA had about the UFO phenomenon. There are some genuinely intriguing cases in the CIA’s archives, one of which I’m going to bring to your attention today. Dated September 20, 1957 and prepared for the Acting Director of Central Intelligence, it begins as follows:
“As reported by components of the US Air Defense Command, an unidentified flying object (UFO) was tracked by US radars on a relatively straight course from the eastern tip of Long Island to the vicinity of Buffalo. The object was reportedly moving westward at an altitude of 50,000 feet and speed of 2,000 kts. ‘Jamming’ was reported by several radars in this vicinity and westward as far as Chicago. In a subsequent briefing for representatives of the IAC, the US Air Force reported that the original reports had been degraded somewhat by information that: (a) there was an 11 minute break in the tracks; (b) weather conditions in the area were of the type which have in the past produced false radar pips and electronic interference; (c) B-47’s of SAC were in the area near Chicago on an ECM training flight. The ADC has not completed its investigation of this incident, but in any event it now seems clear that the phenomena reported west of Buffalo were not related to the UFO.”
A U-2 Dragon Lady
The report continues: “We have no intelligence on Soviet activities (e.g. long-range air, submarine, or merchant shipping operations) which can be related specifically to this reported event. We believe it unlikely that a Soviet aircraft could conduct a mission at this speed and altitude and return to Bloc territory. However, we credit the USSR with the capability to have a submarine-launched cruise-type missile of low subsonic [supersonic] performance and a range of about 500 n.m., but we have no specific evidence of the existence of such a missile. We have examined possible Soviet motives for launching a one-way vehicle on an operation over the US, and consider that there would be little motivation at this time, except possibly a psychological or retaliatory motive, which we believe is marginal. One-way reconnaissance operations are largely ruled out by the likelihood that the results would be of small value, and the risk of compromise would be very great.”
It’s clear that this case raised eyebrows and was the subject of significant investigation. It may well have been a genuine UFO. There is, however, another possibility. In 1999, Gerald K. Haines – in his position as the historian of the National Reconnaissance Office – wrote a paper titled “CIA’s Role in the Study of UFOs, 1947-90.” It’s now in the public domain, thanks to the provisions of the Freedom of Information Act. It can be read at the CIA’s website at this link. Haines’ paper detailed the history of how, and why, the CIA became interested and involved in the phenomenon of UFOs. Although Haines covered a period of more than forty years, I will bring your attention to one particular section of his paper. Haines revealed an intriguing connection between UFOs and the U-2 spy plane. On August 4, 1997, the U.K.’s Independent newspaper ran an article titled “US hid spy plane projects behind UFO hysteria.” The article was focused on Haines’ paper.
In part, it stated: “Early U-2s were silver and reflected the sun’s rays and often appeared as fiery objects to people below, Mr. Haines said. They were later painted black. Air force investigators, ‘aware of the secret U-2 flights, tried to explain away such sightings by linking them to natural phenomena such as ice crystals and temperature inversions.’By 1956 the air force internally had clear explanations for 96 per cent of UFO sightings, Mr. Haines wrote, referring to the experimental aircraft. ‘They were careful, however, not to reveal the true cause of the sighting to the public.’ At the height of the Cold War the CIA hid its involvement in studies of UFO sightings because it feared that if word came out it would lead to a national hysteria that could be exploited by the Soviet Union.”
In light of all the above data, it’s possible that this September 1957 case involved a high-flying spy plane – whether the U-2 or another kind – rather than a true UFO. Sometimes, what appears to be a UFO may be something definitively home-grown. And highly secret, too.
Encounters with UFOs or alien entities can be a life-changing experience and elicit a wide range of reactions from the people who experience them. For some it is fear of the unknown, an overwhelming terror induced by seeing something they feel they were not meant to. For others it might be awe and wonder, and still others still might doubt what they have seen at all, trying to stuff the experience into a neat little hole of the logical and rational explanations, regardless of that creeping feeling clawing at the back of their mind that it is anything but. However, humans being humans there is also another reaction, to just open fire and kill them all, and there are actually quite a few accounts of this happening.
There are supposed attacks by humans on UFOs dating back all the way to at least the 1940s, and by far the most famous of these is perhaps the one that occurred on February 25, 1942. On this evening air raid sirens all over the city of Los Angeles, California began blaring, followed by a fierce barrage of anti-aircraft fire lighting up the night sky. Considering that the United States had just entered World War II just months before, this was thought by the terrified populace to be an enemy attack launched by the Japanese. Although officials would later claim that “The Battle of Los Angeles” had been the result of a false alarm and jumpy nerves, of course conspiracy theorists have said that not only is this a cover-up, but that it was not the Japanese at all, but rather UFOs that were being fired upon in a panic. A very famous image used as evidence of this is one circulated in the news at the time which purportedly shows spotlights converging on a UFO in the sky over Los Angeles as tracer fire erupts everywhere. The image has been debated and discussed for years, and although accused of being touched up and hoaxed, still often gets placed on lists of iconic UFO images. Just what is it we are looking at here?
Iconic photo of the Battle of Los Angeles
War time seems to have a lot of these kinds of accounts, and it seems to make sense, what with everyone trigger happy and the tendency for UFOs to seem to be drawn to human military conflict for whatever reasons. Troops in the Vietnam War certainly seem to have experienced this first hand from time to time. One particularly bizarre incident occurred in 1970, at Lone-Jon Island, where a 5-man team of soldiers claimed that they were being hunted by bright lights measuring a mere 4 inches by 4 inches in size. These lights were described as disc-shaped and having what were called “black eyes,” and they were said to be capable of great feats of maneuverability, darting, zig-zagging, and hovering all over the place. The team claimed that when they fired upon the objects they would shift color to an angry glowing red, with the black eye part morphing into a bright green. These intimidating, menacing lights apparently stalked and attacked the team during both daylight and nighttime hours over a period of 5 days, often coming shockingly close, to within 5 feet of the team’s position. One of the men supposedly took several photos of the bizarre incident.
When the men got back from their harrowing ordeal and were debriefed they told of what had happened to them and were reportedly told to forget about it. Their equipment was also searched and some of it confiscated, including the pictures that had been taken. People were brought in to interview them extensively on what they had seen, and although it was unclear who they were, at least one of the men was convinced that they were CIA. Even odder still is that a few months later some American personnel allegedly showed up at the homes of the soldiers’ parents asking about any photographic materials that may have been sent to them. The whole thing adds the layer of a sinister cover-up to the already rather scary events depicted by the report.
American forces don’t seem to have been the only ones dealing with hostilities with UFOs. In a really weird report, in the summer of 1968, a Ranger recon unit was operating along the DMZ in an area that what was referred to as the “North Country” in the early morning hours. The team was wary and on edge, completely attuned to their surroundings, as it had already been established that an enemy Viet Cong unit was positioned on the other side of the hill, so the enemy could have been anywhere creeping about in the jungle around them. At approximately 2AM, the team claimed that a bright, fluorescent blue light could be seen closing in on their position, and that the strange, unidentified object stopped to hover momentarily around a quarter of a mile away before moving towards the baffled unit once again. The entire time the flying object was said to be completely silent.
As the recon unit struggled to comprehend this bizarre sight that they were seeing, the NVA on the other side of the hill, after presumably gawking at the sight as well, did what humans do and reportedly began firing on the light in full force. The night lit up with tracer rounds blazing skyward towards the strange object floating there and it must have been quite a haunting, mesmerizing sight. For a few moments the object did not react, merely absorbing the assault without showing any sign of distress or damage. Indeed, it seemed to be completely unfazed by the barrage of bullets raging at it. Then, it was claimed that a blindingly bright beam of light lashed forth from the object and the NVA machine gun fire abruptly stopped to send the jungle into a sudden silence so profound that it was jarring, the instant quiet almost deafening in the wake of the cacophony that had exploded through the air just moments before. The light in the sky then reportedly cruised off in complete silence to leave nothing but the droning sounds of the nighttime jungle behind.
The next morning, the recon team decided to make their way to the NVA camp to see what had happened, sensing that they were going to find something weird at the very least and they would not be disappointed. They found the enemy camp to be seemingly abandoned, and strewn about were 12.7MM machine guns and other assorted firearms that looked as if they had been partially melted by a relentless, scorching heat. A closer inspection of the camp turned up what appeared to be piles of ashes and bits of what could have been charred bones scattered about. The leader of the team apparently took pictures of the scene, which he would later include in his report of the spooky incident. Shortly after, he went to rejoin his unit but was told that he had been reassigned to another team. When he asked about what had become of his report and the photos he was allegedly told that no such report existed, and that if he were to continue pressing the matter he could face prison time. Other members of the team were purportedly similarly intimidated with such threats.
Another incident involving the NVA was reported in the State Journal in Lansing, Michigan on Sept. 29, 1972, in a piece entitled What Was UFO Over Hanoi? The report claimed that a huge, luminous orange spherical UFO had appeared at a high altitude above Hanoi on a clear day, and then hovered in a stationary position. North Vietnamese air defenses had then almost immediately fired upon it with three consecutive surface-to-air missiles, but these were either unable to reach it or unable to harm it, although after the missiles were fired it was reported that the UFO diminished somewhat in intensity, becoming “less bright” than it had been before. Nevertheless it reportedly continued to hover over the city for a full one hour and 20 minutes before leaving. In a similar incident reported by the Russian publication Aura-Z, another UFO was supposedly seen over Hanoi and was also fired upon by missiles, which apparently did hit it but had no effect. In this case, the UFO is claimed to have fired a “fine, needle-like, light blue ray” at the defense batteries, completely destroying them and allegedly killing around 200 personnel in the process. This particular, no doubt spectacular report has been suspected of being a hoax, but it is intriguing nonetheless.
Moving on into 1978 we have a truly spectacular case in which an actual alien was not only supposedly shot at, but allegedly killed. The setting for this bizarre tale is Fort Dix and McGuire, located about 18 miles southeast of Trenton, New Jersey, in the United States. It started with personnel at the base spotting UFOs nearby for several weeks, and in the early morning hours of January 18, 1978 an on-duty airman who has only ever been identified by the pseudonym “Sgt, Jeffery Morse,” was purportedly approached by a NJ State Trooper who had quite the story to tell. The trooper explained that an MP on the base had been pursuing one of the UFOs that had been seen on base, and had ended up not only encountering an alien, but shooting and evidently killing it.
According to the this state trooper, the MP had spotted a low-flying unidentified craft and proceeded to chase it for around an hour before his vehicle was suddenly bathed in the bright blue-green light of an oval-shaped UFO hovering directly above him, which caused his engine to stall and cut off all radio communications. As the MP sat there staring in shock and awe, a humanoid creature apparently then crept out from the gloom of night to step directly into the beams of his headlights, which showed that it was about 4 feet tall, with and oversized bald head, large black eyes, slender torso, thin arms and legs, and wet looking grayish skin. The already spooked MP had apparently then completely panicked and lost it, hoisting his .45 automatic sidearm and wildly blasting away at both the creature and the UFO hovering over him until it was empty, hitting the humanoid several times to send it running off into the night as the mysterious craft above shot up into the sky. The bizarre creature had then apparently succumbed to its wounds and fallen to die right there on the grounds of the Air Force Base, and the trooper was on his way to check the report out.
More personnel joined them and when they approached the area where the alien had died they did indeed see it lying there motionless, and without getting too close began roping off the area. It was as they were doing this that a group of what Morse called “blue berets” swooped in and took charge, telling them to leave and not speak of what they had seen. After that it would seemingly be all bushed under the carpet and the body whisked away to who knows where. Morse would apparently tell all of this to UFO researcher Leonard H. Springfield, and explain of the incident:
We found the body of the thing near the runway. It had apparently climbed the fence and died while running. It was all of a sudden hush-hush and no one was allowed near the area. We roped off the area and AFOSI came out and took over. That was the last I saw of it. There was a bad stench coming from it too. Like ammonia smelling but wasn’t constant [in] the air. That day, a team from Wright-Patterson AFB came in a C141 and went to the area. They crated it in a wooden box, sprayed something over it, and then put it into a bigger metal container. They loaded it in the plane and took off. That was it, nothing more said, no report made and we were all told not to have anything to say about it or we would be court-martialed.
Morse and other witnesses were then purportedly repeatedly interrogated and warned to not talk of the matter, forced to sign forms that bound them to secrecy, after which each and every one of them was transferred far away, with Morse sent all the way over to Okinawa, Japan. He would say that after that they had continued their harassment, once detaining him at the airport for no reason when he came to the States to visit his family, and he even passed to Springfield an official looking report that he claimed verified his story. Interestingly, far from this being just the ramblings of this one guy Morse, there was some amount of corroboration, when a retired Air Force Major George Filer III would in later years step forward to claim that the whole story was indeed true, and that he had been there that night as well. Although Flier hadn’t actually seen the corpse himself, it was apparently a big deal on base at the time, with everyone talking about the “alien body” and a whole lot of intense activity and unfamiliar vehicles and aircraft about that was not usual. Unfortunately, there is no way to know if either Morse or Flier were telling the truth or not, and of course the Air Force has flat out denied that anything of the sort ever happened, labelling it all a hoax. We will probably never know how much truth any of it holds, if any, but it is a pretty wild ride at any rate.
Adding to all of this are those air engagements, dogfights in which pilots have allegedly actually shot at UFOs in dogfights, Independence Day style. According to the account, early on the morning of April 11, 1980, 23-year-old Peruvian air force lieutenant Oscar Santa Maria Huerta was conducting exercises in his fighter jet over La Joya Air Force Base, when he was ordered to investigate a strange, silvery object that had appeared in restricted airspace. He soon made visual confirmation with the strange object, which he at first thought was a balloon or spy device that was not supposed to be there, and seemingly did not hesitate to engage with extreme prejudice. He allegedly completely blazed up and opened fire on the object, saying:
I reached the necessary distance and shot a burst of sixty-four 30mm shells, which created a cone-shaped ‘wall of fire’ that would normally obliterate anything in its path. Just one of those shells would wipe out a car, but they had no effect on the object. I thought that the balloon would then be torn open and gases would start pouring out of it. But nothing happened. It seemed as if the huge bullets were absorbed by the balloon, and it wasn’t damaged at all.
The object responded by shooting off at a rapid pace, with Huerta in hot pursuit, headed in the direction of the city of Camana, approximately 84km from the base. At some point the object abruptly stopped in mid flight, to send the fighter pilot in evasive maneuvers to avoid and shoot past it, but he kept at it, positioning himself for another attack run. As he came in once again, the object made a fast climb, evading the fighter. The strange object or craft then proceeded to evade similar efforts to launch an attack, and then Huerta had the idea to attack it instead from above, yet it managed to stay well above him even as they climbed to a dangerous 19,200 meters. He was definitely getting the impression that this was no normal weather balloon or spy drone, and getting closer he could see that it certainly was not, of which he would say:
I was startled to see that the ‘balloon’ was not a balloon at all. It was an object that measured about 10 meters in diameter with a shiny dome on top that was cream-colored, similar to a light bulb cut in half. The bottom was a wider circular base, a silver color, and looked like some kind of metal. It lacked all the typical components of aircraft. It had no wings, propulsion jets, exhausts, windows, antennae, and so forth. It had no visible propulsion system. At that moment, I realized this was not a spying device but a UFO, something totally unknown. I was almost out of fuel, so I couldn’t attack or maneuver my plane, or make a high-speed escape. Suddenly, I was afraid. I thought I might be finished. I was zigzagging to make my plane harder to hit, always with my eyes on the rearview mirrors, hoping it wouldn’t chase me.
Dangerously low on fuel, Huerta managed to land his fighter, and many of the base personnel could witness the object still buzzing about like an angry bee before leaving the area. Huerta would later say, “I find myself in the unique position, at least for the moment, and as far as I know, of being the only military pilot in the world who has actually fired a weapon and struck a UFO. It still gives me chills to think about it.”
Our most recent, and very quite possible the most completely bonkers one of the bunch, is the time a guy apparently attacked and maybe killed an alien being with a samurai sword. In 2009, a resident of a ranch near Phoenix, Arizona by the name of John Edmonds claims that he was under siege by mysterious alien entities that would prowl about his property at night to peek into windows and actually come to him and his wife in the night to assault and perform medical experiments on them, leaving behind needle like holes in their skin, bruises, and causing them to come down with mysterious illnesses. These creatures were described as being basically “Grey Aliens,” the classic description of large bald heads holding those almond shaped eyes and with skinny frames, and he says they relentlessly prowled about his remote property. Edmonds believes they are inter-dimensional in nature, and would say of these strange entities in an interview with Coast to Coast AM:
I have heard and seen critters moving around on our enclosed sun room. The west wall contains four large windows. The speed generated by their movement (3 critters) at once made the glass in the double pane windows actually buzz and misalign in the frames to the point the windows are now very difficult to close and lock properly with out using a screw driver to realign them in the frame first. I believe the high frequency buzz is a side effect of their partial in phase or out of phase inter-dimensional travel. In a safe situation critters transcend cleanly from one dimension to another. In what they perceive as risky circumstances, they only physically materialize to a point of just crossing the dimensional physical threshold. The buzzing occurs at a quantum level as they are partially in both dimensions at the same time. If they are suddenly startled they pull back out of phase into their regular dimension. If they feel safe, then they come completely into this dimension and the buzzing stops. This is the perfect opportunity to physically grab one and then hold on as hard as possible because they will try to “bug out” again immediately.
And grab them he would. These creatures would also kill the man’s dogs and some of his horses, but it appears they had chosen the wrong house to mess with, because according to Edmonds one evening he had had enough, grabbing a Japanese katana-style sword he owned and confronting it to hack away. During the melee, he would allegedly viciously, mortally wound it,
I killed in self defense after repeated home invasions by similar creatures over a period of many years. The assaults by these creatures were responded to in the most violent behavior I could respond with because of weekly and some times daily confrontations during which our home, ranch, horses and dogs were killed. Pierced by the sword with six inches of cold steel perforating the body cavity and seemingly lifeless, the Gray alien still managed to disappear before I could withdraw the weapon and chop off the head. My intention in removing the head was to see if this would prevent it from disappearing. It is my hypothesis the head controls the ability to control the dimensional transference between one place and another. I had hoped to interrupt the process by diminishing the body integrity. I wiped up the blood/Fluid and tissue of the Gray I nearly split in two parts with an exceptionally well sharpened Samurai sword. After hand to hand combat with these little parasites.
The alleged sword and aftermath
He would then collect tissue and blood samples and purportedly send them to a researcer called “W.C. Levengood” for analysis, who would allegedly inform him that they were most certainly not only not human, but unlike anything seen before, even going as far as to say they were the smoking gun for the existence of aliens. Unfortunately for any of us waiting for concrete answers, this Lenengood apparently then just sort of disappeared and took the samples with him. Convenient. That, plus the fact that the alien managed to vanish after being damn near cut in half by a sword, leaves us with no physical evidence outside of photographs and the samples that Edmonds insists totally, for real exist, and this ends up just another wild report with no corroboration. Unsurprisingly, it remains unproven, and we are left to wonder just how much of this completely absurd report is true. It is certainly novel, though, attacking an alien entity with a samurai sword. Whether his insane story is true or not, he deserves points for creativity at the very least.
So what are we dealing with here? Are these genuine stories of humanity doing what we do best and trying to blow stuff up real good, or is this just hoaxes and fabrications? I have no doubt that many people would have such negative, violent reactions to encountering the unknown, but did any of these really happen? There seems to be no way to really know for sure, the physical evidence always flirting with us and staying out of grasp, and while they are certainly spectacular reports, it is probably better to take them with a grain of salt and maybe even hope they are not real, because we would likely not stand a chance in a fair fight with these forces. Make of this all what you will.
It was midway through 1971 when a brief but intriguing letter was sent to the Pentagon by someone who had some notable things to say about UFOs. He or she was, however, determined to remain anonymous. It was a letter that was also shared with the FBI – by Pentagon staff. If its contents were true, then it told an incredible story. In some ways, we could say that it amounted to a planned, “forced UFO disclosure.” As for the letter itself, you can read it at the FBI’s website, The Vault, (in this particular UFO portion of the site and specifically on page 110). With that said, onto the content of the letter. It begins as follows: “In approximately seven months or January, 1972, certain copies of top-secret documents shall be sent to the New York Times as well as two other newspapers. These documents are related to and will be an ostentation of the involvement of the Pentagon in the controversial ‘Unidentified Flying Objects’ or ‘Flying Saucer’ subject. It will show that not only the US Air Force was involved in UFO research but the other military branches as well.”
The source of the story continued : “Analysis and the actual conclusions of the classic UFO cases shall be revealed. This shall be accomplished by zeroxed [sic] documents and photographs that General Wolfe had reviewed when he was head of the Army’s UFO support program in the Pentagon during the Eisenhower years.” They concluded with these words: “Sorry, but it is concluded here that this is the best course to take because we feel that the secret UFO investigations are parallel in nature to the Times-Pentagon-Vietnam controversy. If we are wrong in taking this action, time will tell.”
Pentagon
As for that “Times-Pentagon-Vietnam controversy,” this is a reference to the so-called “Pentagon Papers.” History.com say of this affair: “The Pentagon Papers was the name given to a top-secret Department of Defense study of U.S. political and military involvement in Vietnam from 1945 to 1967. As the Vietnam War dragged on, with more than 500,000 U.S. troops in Vietnam by 1968, military analyst Daniel Ellsberg—who had worked on the study—came to oppose the war, and decided that the information contained in the Pentagon Papers should be available to the American public. He photocopied the report and in March 1971 gave the copy to The New York Times, which then published a series of scathing articles based on the report’s most damning secrets.”
Now, let’s take a look at General Wolfe. He was actually General Kenneth Bonner Wolfe. The U.S. Air Force provides detailed information on the general: “Kenneth Bonner Wolfe was born in Denver, Colo., in 1896. He attended high school in Portland, Ore., and San Diego, Calif., and in January 1918 enlisted as a private first class in the Aviation Section of the Signal Reserve Corps. He received ground and flying training at Berkeley, Calif., and Park Field, Tenn., and in July 1918 was commissioned a temporary second lieutenant in the Air Service. He served for a brief period at Park Field as a flying instructor and then moved to Souther Field, Ga., in the same capacity. In January 1919 he returned to Park Field and in March of that year went to Carlstrom Field, Fla. In July 1919 he was made officer in charge of flying at Souther Field, Ga., and the following January was appointed chief engineer officer at the Air Intermediate Depot at Americus, Ga. On July 1, 1920 he received his Regular Army commission as a second lieutenant in the Air Service, and was promoted to first lieutenant that same day.”
The USAF adds: “He began a tour as flying instructor at Brooks Field, Texas, in November 1922, and during this time assumed charge of aero repair at that station in addition to his other duties. In May 1926 he moved to Clark Field, Philippine Islands, as plans and operations officer. He joined the Fifth Air Force on Okinawa in August 1945, as chief of staff and became commanding general two months later. After assuming command of the Fifth, he directed its transition from a mighty assault force to the occupational air arm of Japan and southern Korea, operating from headquarters at Nagoya, Japan. In January 1948 he returned to the United States and was appointed director of procurement and industrial mobilization planning at Air Materiel Command headquarters at Wright Field, Ohio. He was appointed deputy chief of staff for materiel at U.S. Air Force headquarters in September 1949. Rated a command pilot, combat observer and aircraft observer, General Wolfe has more than 7,000 hours flying time. He has been awarded the Distinguished Service Medal with oak leaf cluster and the Order of the British Empire.”
Papers do not reveal what steps the Pentagon and/or the FBI took with regard to this letter and its whistle-blower-type writer. At least one department of the DoD dismissed it out of hand. On the other hand, there’s the matter of timing and relevancy: the source, recall, suggested that revealing the government’s UFO secrets would be “parallel in nature to the Times-Pentagon-Vietnam controversy.” The time-frame was interesting too: Ellsberg provided the Pentagon Papers to the New York Times in March 1971. It was only months later that the mysterious letter surfaced. Of course, history has shown that no such mass-release of UFO documentation ever occurred. Was it all just a prank? Was the source speaking truthfully, but prevented at the last moment from disclosing whatever it really was they knew? Almost fifty years later, we will almost certainly never know. But, maybe one day, the bones of the story will be fleshed out – if someone is willing to chase down the story.
BIJBELS RUIMTESCHIP VERSCHIJNT OP NASA TELRSCOOP ( VIDEO )
BIJBELS RUIMTESCHIP VERSCHIJNT OP NASA TELRSCOOP ( VIDEO )
Eind vorig jaar schreven wij een artikel over ruimteschepen uit de tijd van de bijbel en hoe deze in onze tijd weer worden waargenomen op aarde. Net alleen op aarde, zo blijkt nu, maar ook op de ruimtetelescopen van NASA verschijnt nu een dergelijk schip en het schijnt richting aarde te komen.
Wij mogen onszelf gelukkig prijzen dat wij in heel interessante tijden leven waarin veel opmerkelijke dingen gebeuren. Dat wij leven in een tijd die misschien later zal blijken een overgang te vormen van de ene naar de andere soort wereld.
Eind vorig jaar schreven wij in een artikel onder andere het volgende:
Van William Guy gaan we naar Nancy Lieder die in haar nieuwsbrief zegt dat hetgeen gefilmd is door William Guy gelijk is aan het bekende wiel van Ezechiël. Een soort groot cirkelvormig ruimteschip.
Zij geeft de volgende verklaring voor de vreemde cirkelvormige ufo"s:
Deze cirkelvormige ufo's worden regelmatig wereldwijd gezien en zijn een waarschuwing voor hen die de bedoeling begrijpen van de ervaringen van Ezechiël. Deze profeet is bekend geworden als een die verwoesting en herstel voorspelde. De verschijning van cirkelvormige ufo's of ufo's in een cirkelformatie dient als waarschuwing voor de komende poleshift en de dramatische gevolgen daarvan.
De aarde zal worden verwoest door enorme aardbevingen en hoge vloedgolven die ervoor zullen zorgen dat hele kustregio's zullen verdwijnen, waarbij de bewoners verdrinken en de complete infrastructuur wordt vernietigd.
En dan nu naar berichten die laten zien dat er zich een enorm groot ruimteschip in de vorm van een wiel van Ezechiël in de ruimte bevindt. Die naam wiel van Ezechiël is ontstaan door de beschrijving van een ruimteschip in de bijbel door Ezechiël.
Hij zag iets dat leek op een enorm, ontzagwekkend voertuig. Het wordt ook wel een wagen genoemd. Het had vier enorme wielen met daarnaast vier bijzondere geestelijke wezens, waarvan later wordt gezegd dat het cherubs zijn.
NASA heeft een aantal telescopen in de ruimte, waaronder de Stereo ruimtetelescopen die op de zon gericht staan waarmee er nu opmerkelijke opnames zijn gemaakt.
Beelden van een enorm object dat zich door de ruimte beweegt en lijkt op het ruimteschip zoals dit ooit door de profeet Ezechiël werd beschreven.
Als we zeggen ruimteschip, dan praten we in dit geval echt over enorm. Een object ter grootte van de maan dat lijkt op de beschrijving van een profeet uit de bijbel.
Een enorm toevallig passerend ruimteschip onderweg misschien naar een ander zonnestelsel of naar de aarde om een deel van de wereldbevolking op te halen en deze te behoeden voor de rampen die gaan komen?
Uit een eerder door ons gehouden poll blijkt dat bijna 60 procent van onze lezers zonder aarzelen aan boord zou stappen mocht het toestel hier naartoe onderweg zijn.
Dus wie weet, duimen maar en hopen maar dat we terecht komen op een planeet waar je nog gewoon 130 mag rijden en waar ze nog nooit van Mark Rutte hebben gehoord.
Rare Jellyfish UFO Finally Caught On Video, Brasil, UFO Sighting News.
Rare Jellyfish UFO Finally Caught On Video, Brasil, UFO Sighting News.
Date of sighting: Sunday, Feb 16, 2020 Location of sighting:Sao Paulo, Brasil This is a rare capture of a UFO type I have heard about, but only seen a few times in blur photos in old reports. A jellyfish shaped craft was recorded in the sky over Brasil last week. The object has a half dome white body and long thick tentacles similar to a jellyfish. This has to be the best close up of a jellyfish UFO I have ever seen. In the video we see the tenticlals yet they don't move. Had this been a balloon the tentacles would be plastic and blowing to the opposite direction the wind is, however they long objets just hang there. That means not a balloon. This is the best recording of a jellyfish UFO in existence. This is incredible proof that not only are we being visited by aliens, but the tech they use mimics living creatures. Scott C. Waring
The retired Navy Commander who spotted the infamous Tic Tac-shaped UFO relayed another strange story from a Navy helicopter pilot on the Joe Rogan Experience. Back in the '90s, the pilot was retrieving BQM drones and submarine telemetry torpedoes from the ocean when he saw an unexplained "dark mass coming up from the depths." The pilot said the torpedo "just got sucked down underwater, and the object just descended back down into the depths."
You might not know the name David Fravor, but you probably know what he saw … even if he’s still not sure what that was. Fravor is the retired U.S. Navy Commander who in 2017 told the New York Times that he spotted a Tic Tac-shaped UFO from the cockpit of his F/A-18F Super Hornet—“around 40 feet long and oval in shape”—100 miles off the coast of San Diego in 2004.
There’s video, of course, of Fravor’s now-legendary encounter, originally released for public viewing by The New York Times and To The Stars Academy of Arts & Science, a UFO research group from former Blink-182 member Tom DeLonge:
Last month, that UFO video made headlines once more when the Navy confirmed it was real. The clip indeed showed “unexplained aerial phenomena,” but the service said it and two other videos should have never been released to the public in the first place.
So Fravor has begun the requisite publicity tour. In an interview with the comedian and podcaster Joe Rogan, Fravor recounted his sighting from 15 years ago, but also revealed a new story from a Navy helicopter pilot who reached out with his own strange, creepy tale while on the job.
Back in the ‘90s, this pilot’s job was to fetch BQM aerial target drones and submarine telemetry torpedoes from the ocean. At the time, the pilot was flying a CH-53—“a big, heavy-lifter the Marine Corps uses for certain things,” Fravor told Rogan. “Off the East Coast they do a lot of shooting, at the time it was off Puerto Rico.”
“The helo drops a swimmer in the water, he hooks the whole thing up and they fly back,” Fravor said. “The first time they were out and they were going to pick up a BQM, he’s sitting in the front—in the CH-53 you can see down by your feet—and as he’s looking down, they’re 50 feet (15 metres) above the water, he sees this kind of dark mass coming up from the depths.”
As the pilot picked up the BQM, he was apparently at a loss for words. “He’s looking at this thing going, ‘What the hell is that?’ And then it just goes back down underwater. Once they pull the kid and the BQM out of the water, this object descends back into the depths.”
One dark mass coming up from the depths is weird enough. Two is officially cause for concern. A few months later, the helicopter pilot saw the exact same thing.
“He’s out picking up a torpedo, they hook the diver up on the winch, and as they’re lowering him down, he sees this big mass. He goes, ‘It’s not a submarine’. He’s seen submarines before. Once you’ve seen a submarine you can’t confuse it with something else. This big object, kind of circular, is coming up from the depths and he 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.
“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. They never recovered it.”
The helicopter pilot swears the torpedo didn’t sink, per Fravor—and that pilot even told the Times about the incident back in 2017, but the paper never reported it. We’re guessing the editors would reconsider today.
So … what was the dark mass if it wasn’t a submarine? A whale? The Loch Ness Monster? For now we can only speculate, at least until the next video leaks.
Oval-Shaped UFO Moves Vertically Over Rush Hour Traffic
Oval-Shaped UFO Moves Vertically Over Rush Hour Traffic
A UFO hunter is urging the witnesses of a Tic Tac-shaped spacecraft moving above a rush hour traffic as he claims he has obtained a report many people witnessing it.
Chris Evers, 59, claims multiple witnesses saw a UFO that looked like a little oval-shaped mint flying vertically above heavy traffic in Hull.
Chris Evers, 59, believes a UFO craft zoomed over Hull last Tuesday
(Image: Hull Live)
Chris, the founder of the Hull UFO Society in the 90s, said he received reports of an extraterrestrial craft flying over the city on Tuesday at around 5:30 pm last week.
Chris said he got a report through to him that a UFO was a large Tic Tac-shaped device or craft flying during a rush hour, and apparently several people saw it.
Chris noted that the UFO was flying upright and not horizontally. The report also made mention of the two strange protrusions at the bottom of the bizarre object.
He now encourages people to come forward with proof of the sighting.
Chris, who runs an online magazine Outer Limits, said that he had been told witnesses took pictures of it, but he hasn’t seen any.
His interest in UFO was first sparked by seeing a mysterious object over Hull when he was 14.
He said he has been interested in the extraterrestrial since 1974. Chris eventually founded the Hull UFO society, and his Outer Limits magazine has been going on for four years this coming April.
According to Chris, the area has a lot of strange activities, including the famous incident involving a UFO moving under the Humber Bridge.
A UFO hunter is urging the witnesses of a Tic Tac-shaped spacecraft moving above a rush hour traffic as he claims he has obtained a report many people witnessing it.
Chris Evers, 59, claims multiple witnesses saw a UFO that looked like a little oval-shaped mint flying vertically above heavy traffic in Hull.
Chris, the founder of the Hull UFO Society in the 90s, said he received reports of an extraterrestrial craft flying over the city on Tuesday at around 5:30 pm last week.
Chris said he got a report through to him that a UFO was a large Tic Tac-shaped device or craft flying during a rush hour, and apparently several people saw it.
Chris noted that the UFO was flying upright and not horizontally. The report also made mention of the two strange protrusions at the bottom of the bizarre object.
He now encourages people to come forward with proof of the sighting.
Chris, who runs an online magazine Outer Limits, said that he had been told witnesses took pictures of it, but he hasn’t seen any.
His interest in UFO was first sparked by seeing a mysterious object over Hull when he was 14.
He said he has been interested in the extraterrestrial since 1974. Chris eventually founded the Hull UFO society, and his Outer Limits magazine has been going on for four years this coming April.
According to Chris, the area has a lot of strange activities, including the famous incident involving a UFO moving under the Humber Bridge.
Chris, the founder of the Hull UFO Society in the 90s, said he received reports of an extraterrestrial craft flying over the city on Tuesday at around 5:30 pm last week.
Chris said he got a report through to him that a UFO was a large Tic Tac-shaped device or craft flying during a rush hour, and apparently several people saw it.
Chris noted that the UFO was flying upright and not horizontally. The report also made mention of the two strange protrusions at the bottom of the bizarre object.
He now encourages people to come forward with proof of the sighting.
Chris, who runs an online magazine Outer Limits, said that he had been told witnesses took pictures of it, but he hasn’t seen any.
His interest in UFO was first sparked by seeing a mysterious object over Hull when he was 14.
He said he has been interested in the extraterrestrial since 1974. Chris eventually founded the Hull UFO society, and his Outer Limits magazine has been going on for four years this coming April.
According to Chris, the area has a lot of strange activities, including the famous incident involving a UFO moving under the Humber Bridge.
In our search for life in the universe our solar systems provides us with tantalizing options including several ocean worlds.
This past week NASA’sJet Propulsion Lab Von Karman Lecture Series hosted Dr. Morgan Cable who spoke on the topic of The Search for Life: Exploring Ocean Worlds.
Here’s the lecture description: “The search for life is “civilization level science.” What happens if or when we find it? Using the upcoming block of “Ocean Access” missions, Dr. Morgan Cable shows us why ocean worlds are important and what the discovery of life could mean to us as a civilization.”
Organic molecules present in truffles, coal and oil on Earth have been identified on the surface of Mars and may hint at the presence of alien life on the red planet.
These chemicals, called thiophenes, are important molecules as they contain both carbon and sulphur — two ingredients essential for life.
NASA's curiosity rover has identified signs of them on the surface of Mars and astronomers think the most likely source of origin is from biological processes.
Further analysis by the Rosalind Franklin rover that will launch later this year will help add credence to the tentative theory, researchers hope.
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NASA's curiosity rover has identified signs of thiophenes on the surface of the red planet and astronomers believe the most likely source is from biological processes. These chemicals contain both both carbon and sulphur — two ingredients essential for life
WHAT ARE THIOPHENES?
Thiophene molecules have four carbon atoms and a sulphur atom arranged in a ring.
Both of these elements are essential for life.
Thiophenes are found on Earth in coal, crude oil and oddly enough, in white truffles.
Thiophenes can also be created through a chemical reaction called thermochemical sulfate reduction.
This process involves a set of compounds being heated to 248 degrees Fahrenheit (120 degrees Celsius) or more.
Washington State University astrobiologist Dirk Schulze-Makuch looked into how thiophenes came to exist on Mars.
Their findings, published in the journal Astrobiology, indicate the chemicals were likely produced by biological processes and not chemical reactions.
This is a major step in the hunt for Martian life but is not concrete proof, the scientists say.
'We identified several biological pathways for thiophenes that seem more likely than chemical ones, but we still need proof,' Dirk Schulze-Makuch said.
'If you find thiophenes on Earth, then you would think they are biological, but on Mars, of course, the bar to prove that has to be quite a bit higher.'
NASA's Curiosity rover (pictured) has identified signs of them on the surface of the red planet and astronomers believe the most likely source is from biological processes
Thee most likely source of these chemicals is thought to be biological processes of primitive lifeforms but it is also possible they were formed after a meteor impact.
A space rock crash landing can cause searing temperatures and thiophenes can be created if a host of certain chemicals are heated to around 120°C (248°F).
HOW WILL ROSALIND'S 'ALIEN HUNTING' CAMERA WORK?
The camera system, called Pan-Cam, was designed by engineers at University College London.
It perches atop the rover’s high mast and is fitted with sensors that scan the planet's surface in search of minerals or water.
Once it identifies an area, it will travel towards it at 47 inches an hour, then drill down to take a biopsy of the land.
The samples will then be stored into a self-contained laboratory on the rover, where it'll be crushed and examined.
If thiophenes were made as a result of biological processes it is likely it was via bacteria three billion years ago.
Back then, Mars was warmer and wetter and a more hospitable land where the key chemical reaction to form thiophenes can take place - a reaction called sulfate reduction process that creates thiophenes.
Data from Curiosity has been exhausted and astronomers hope the imminent launch of the Rosalind Franklin rover can shed more light on the chemicals and their origin.
It will be carrying a Mars Organic Molecule Analyser, or MOMA, which can collect large samples and analyse them without having to destroy them.
Analysing isotopes - chemical strains that can reveal its history - could help learn more about this potential indicator of life on Mars.
Dr Schulze-Makuch said: 'Organisms are "lazy". They would rather use the light isotope variations of the element because it costs them less energy.
Yet even if the next rover returns this isotopic evidence, it may still not be enough to prove definitively that there is, or once was, life on Mars.
'As Carl Sagan said ‘extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence",' Dr Schulze-Makuch said.
'I think the proof will really require that we actually send people there, and an astronaut looks through a microscope and sees a moving microbe.'
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.
Some ‘superpuff’ exoplanets may actually be ringed worlds like Saturn
Some ‘superpuff’ exoplanets may actually be ringed worlds like Saturn
Rings could make the mysterious planets look bigger than they really are
Wide rings could block light from a star as a planet crosses in front of it, making the planet look bigger than it really is, scientists say. This artist’s illustration shows what such a planet might look like up-close.
ROBIN DIENEL, COURTESY OF THE CARNEGIE INST. FOR SCIENCE
Some puzzling planets called superpuffs could be Saturns in disguise.
These exoplanets appear very large given their masses, suggesting that they have densities like cotton candy. Astronomers have struggled to explain how these planets could have turned out so fluffy (SN: 11/30/15).
“People had been thinking of complicated ways to explain these mysterious planets,” such as dust storms leaving a planet, says theoretical astrophysicist Anthony Piro of the Carnegie Observatories in Pasadena, Calif.
Now, Piro and exoplanet scientist Shreyas Vissapragada of Caltech propose a simpler explanation. Instead of being outsized for their weight class, some superpuffs could sport wide rings that make the planets appear bigger than they really are, the researchers suggest February 28 in the Astronomical Journal.
“This seemed like such a natural, kind of cute explanation,” Piro says. “We know of things like Saturn in our own solar system. Why can’t something like that exist in other solar systems as well?”
The duo considered 10 known superpuffs observed with the Kepler space telescope, and ran computer simulations to see if the planets’ girths could be due to rings.
The team found that because all of the superpuffs sit fairly close to their stars, their rings would need to be made of rock, unlike Saturn’s icy rings (SN: 8/23/17), to avoid melting away. And, as a result, the proposed rocky rings can’t extend too far from a planet, or the rocks’ gravity would pull them together into moons.
That means that the three superpuffs orbiting the star Kepler 51 can’t be explained by rings — the planets appear big enough that any rocky rings they might have would turn into moons, the team found. But the other seven worlds might have rings and are worth checking, Piro says.
Following up on these planets might need to wait for NASA’s sharp-eyed James Webb Space Telescope, scheduled to launch in 2021 (SN: 4/19/16).
For centuries, humans have wondered whether Earth is unique in the universe, or if similar planets exist out there. Even a decade ago, we still did not know — but then NASA's Kepler Space Telescope made discoveries that changed everything.
Thanks to that important mission, the answer became clear: other planets like ours are out in the cosmos. We just haven't seen one with our own eyes yet.
Since its 2009 launch, Kepler has discovered more than 2,000 confirmed exoplanets and has given us a huge amount of information about their orbits and sizes. The planets found range greatly in their masses, composition and orbital distances: for instance, enormous gas giants orbiting incredibly close to their stars, called hot Jupiters; planets that orbit two stars, called circumbinary planets; and rocky planets with the potential to be like Earth. [In Mission To Find Another Earth, Project Blue Hopes To Inspire (Video)]
The planets considered Earth-like are rocky on their surface and about 0.5 to 1.5 times the size of Earth. They also land in the "habitable zone" of their orbiting stars, meaning they fall in the sweet spot of orbital distance — not too close and not too far away — and therefore have the potential to be able to support liquid water on their surfaces. The ability to support water is huge, as it means the planet could have the potential to support life.
Kepler showed us these planets are common in the universe. In fact, we now know there are more potentially habitable planets in our galaxy alone than there are people alive on Earth. One out of every two sun-like stars you see in the night sky has a rocky, Earth-like planet in its habitable zone.
Depiction of NASA's Kepler mission's smallest habitable zone planet: Kepler-62f. (Image credit: NASA Ames/JPL-Caltech/Tim Pyle)
Earlier this year, one potentially habitable planet made news when scientists discovered it orbiting the nearby red dwarf star Proxima Centauri. That planet, called Proxima b, which has similarities to Earth that include orbiting in the habitable zone of its star, so the potential to support water, and a size about 1.3 times that of Earth.
Artist's conception of the surface of Proxima Centauri b (Proxima b, for short). (Image credit: ESO/M. Kornmesser)
We now know these planets exist, but we have yet to see them. To know more about a planet's Earth-like properties, such as whether it hosts water or oxygen, further specific detection methods are needed. Thanks to recent breakthroughs, the technology now exists to capture a direct image of an Earth-like planet outside our solar system. That's what we aim to do at Project Blue.
Our mission is to capture an image, visible to the human eye, of one of these worlds. Proxima b is an unlikely candidate, as it orbits so close to its small, dim star that it would be extremely difficult to image with a telescope. Project Blue is therefore targeting our best chance at success: our stellar neighbor Alpha Centauri.
Our goal is to see a "pale blue dot" that could indicate the presence of oceans or an atmosphere — and the potential to support life. Since Alpha Centauri is a binary system, it doubles our chances, and the probability that we'll find at least one potentially habitable planet is around 85 percent.
Capturing the first image of a planet like ours and seeing it with our eyes will help us begin to characterize its properties and spark a movement to quickly further research. The photograph of Earth 2.0 would be a defining moment in human history and is sure to transform how we see ourselves in the universe.
NASA's satellite spotted a strange object moving across the solar system.
The object was as big as the Moon
Experts believe the object was an alien vessel
UFO experts claimed that a massive alien vessel as big as the Moon is currently moving across Earth’s neighborhood. According to the experts, the alleged UFO was spotted by NASA’s solar satellite.
The strange UFO sighting was reported via YouTube by the channel The Hidden Underbelly 2.0. According to the operator of the channel, the camera of NASA’s Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) was able to capture a strange object moving across the Solar System on Feb. 29.
The camera, known as Stereo A, was positioned to observe the Sun. In the short clip recorded by the camera, various planets such as Earth, Venus and Mercury can be seen orbiting in the Solar System. Then, an unidentified object appears in the video and stars to move towards the planets.
Unfortunately, a couple of seconds after the strange object appeared, Stereo A begins to malfunction and the video cuts off.
Based on the video, the object appears to have a circular shape with a cross or diamond-shaped structure at its center. After watching the video and enhancing its images, Scott Waring of ET Data Base claimed that the object was an alien vessel that was traveling across the Solar System.
“Here is a really interesting video of a circular craft with a diamond-shaped center,” Waring wrote in a blog post. “It was moving through a NASA SOHO video and got caught. The UFO is there for only 4 seconds, but if slowed down, we can see its detail well.”
Based on the appearance of the object, Waring estimated that it could be about as big as the Moon or possibly even bigger. For Waring, the object proves that alien vessels are currently wandering the Solar System. He also said that NASA intentionally denies their existence to prevent the public from panicking.
“This is 100% proof that aliens are in our Solar System right now,” Waring stated. “This ship is massive, moon size or bigger and moving incredibly fast. I'm sure NASA would never mention it because if they did, they would have to tell the public the truth about aliens existing. They don't want to cause any panic.”
The Kepler Spacecraft has detected a lot of exoplanets orbiting stars in other solar systems, but its data may have just uncovered an exomoon for the first time.
NASA'S CURIOSITY JUST TOOK THE HIGHEST RESOLUTION PANORAMA OF MARS TO DATE
NASA'S CURIOSITY JUST TOOK THE HIGHEST RESOLUTION PANORAMA OF MARS TO DATE
The rover is quite the photographer.
While America overdosed on turkey, NASA's Curiosity rover spent this past Thanksgiving holiday all alone, millions of miles away on Mars.
But unlike the rest of us, the rover was far from idle. Instead, the Martian explorer worked on its photography skills.
Between November 24 and December 1, 2019, Curiosity took more than 1,000 images of the Red Planet, piecing together the highest resolution panorama of Mars to date. The stunning image reveals the dry, dusty surface of Mars in its full glory.
"While many on our team were at home enjoying turkey, Curiosity produced this feast for the eyes," Ashwin Vasavada, Curiosity's project scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which leads the Curiosity rover mission, said in a statement.
The robot took six and a half hours to produce this detailed panorama. NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS
NASA released the final image on Wednesday.
The panorama captures a wide view of Glen Torridon, an area of Mars that Curiosity is currently exploring near a mountain called Mount Sharp.
Curiosity used the telephoto lens on its Mast Camera to snap the high-resolution image. Altogether, it is made up of 1.8 billion pixels, revealing the Martian landscape in unprecedented detail.
The rover also used a medium-angle lens to produce a lower resolution version of just 650 million pixels, which also features the robot’s arm and front deck.
The rover may have left its finger on the lens while snapping this lower-resolution image. NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS
The image marks the first time Curiosity has dedicated its operations to producing a 360-degree panorama of its surroundings, according to NASA.
It took Curiosity nearly seven hours to capture both shots. The holiday period meant the rover could spare the extra time, though — with its operating team away on holiday, it didn’t have many tasks on its to-do list.
While this view is unprecedented, Curiosity is known for its photography skills. In 2013, it snapped a lower-resolution panorama of the Martian surface while it was on the Rocknest site. The image is not as detailed as the new panorama, and features the rover’s shiny metallic body in the foreground. Clearly, the robot has stepped up its game over the intervening years.
Curiosity's first attempt at a panorama image.NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS
The rover is also fond of taking selfies, snapping pictures of itself as it explores the Red Planet.
Curiosity landed on Mars in 2012 with the mission of searching for hints of microbial life that may have existed on the Red Planet during its early history.
The car-sized robot roams the Gale Crater on Mars, where it has discovered a lake that may have contained water billions of years ago, and an environment that may have supported life.
Curiosity will soon be joined by NASA’s Mars 2020 rover, which is scheduled to launch this summer. Like its robot peer, the Mars 2020 rover is designed to search for signs of current or past signs of life on the Red Planet.
UFO 'Bigger Than Earth' Flying Past the Sun Spotted by NASA Observation Mission aka
UFO 'Bigger Than Earth' Flying Past the Sun Spotted by NASA Observation Mission aka "Ezekiel's Wheel" Type
The development comes weeks after a camera at the International Space Station spotted an unknown cone-like object that was flying upward.
NASA’s STEREO observation mission has spotted what fans of conspiracy theories said is a gigantic UFO flying past the Sun. The incident itself occurred on 29 February, but the footage of it was posted just recently on the channel “Hidden Underbelly 2.0” dedicated to mysterious events and sightings. According to the host, STEREO’s camera filmed the humongous object for four seconds after which it turned off and began working only after the UFO passed.
The “humongous object” appears to be bigger than Mercury, Venus, and the Earth. “You can tell this thing doesn’t look like our space station, no way. It doesn’t look like any satellite that I have seen. To be honest, when I first saw the footage I thought: Ezekiel’s Wheel! It’s very similar – the circle with a cross in it”, the host said.
The host refers to a saying in the Book of Ezekiel, where the prophet spoke about a flying chariot, which he described as a “wheel in the middle of a wheel”.
NASA has not yet issued a response to the issue. via Sputnik.news
Selfie of Curiosity Rover reveals Ancient Machinery on Mars
Selfie of Curiosity Rover reveals Ancient Machinery on Mars
A selfie of the Curiosity Rover at Greenheugh Pediment on Mars, uploaded by Neville Thompson on his Gigapan page, shows a couple of strange objects.
The alleged objects appear very different compared to the large rocks surrounding them, suggesting that these objects may be parts of old machinery used for mining activities.
NASA’s Curiosity Rover has photographed many interesting images of the surface of Mars since it touched down on the red planet in 2012 and these images is yet another proof that ancient civilizations lived on the red planet in the distant past?
The Unexplained UFO Lights over G.E. Peebles Test Facility in Ohio’s Area 51 (1996)
The Unexplained UFO Lights over G.E. Peebles Test Facility in Ohio’s Area 51 (1996)
The UFO Lights over G.E. Peebles Test Operation Facility in Ohio’s Area 51.
The Peebles operation, with more than 250 employees and located on nearly 7,000 acres, is both an engine test and final assembly facility. Each year, Peebles runs final acceptance testing on about 1,250 engines manufactured by GE and its joint venture partners. From Peebles, these engines are shipped to aircraft manufacturers for installation on customer aircraft. Does Hangar 18, Legendary Alien Warehouse, Exist? Crashed UFOs, alien autopsies and government cover-ups — untangling the legend surrounding Ohio’s Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. As home to Project Blue Book, ground zero for government investigation of UFOs from 1951 to 1969, Wright Field (now Wright-Patterson Air Force Base) outside Dayton, Ohio, ranks up there alongside Area 51 as a subject of enduring speculation.
Posted by Andy Briggs in ASTRONOMY ESSENTIALS | SPACE
Globular clusters are spherical collections of up to perhaps a million stars, orbiting mostly in the star halo of spiral galaxies, containing some of a galaxy’s oldest stars.
The globular cluster M5, as seen by the Hubble Space Telescope. This photo was an Astronomy Picture of the Day in June 2015.
Globular clusters are tightly packed, symmetrical collections of up to about a million stars, orbiting mostly in the star halos surrounding most spiral galaxies. Globular clusters contain some of the oldest stars in a galaxy and are thought to have formed early in its history. Could it be that – when it was first forming – a spiral galaxy like our Milky Way was once an amorphous cloud of gas and dust? Could its first stars have collected into globular clusters? Could these clusters have stayed put in the halo around a galaxy’s center, as the rest of the galaxy flattened out and formed spiral arms? That scenario would explain why globular clusters orbit in a galaxy’s halo and contain a its oldest stars.
But the fact is that no one knows precisely how globular clusters formed, and what role, if any, they played in the development of galaxies. We do know that globular clusters are the oldest, largest and most massive type of star cluster and that they contain the oldest stars. Their age can be demonstrated by their almost complete lack of gas and dust, all of which has presumably been incorporated into stars.
Globular clusters are big. They can reach 300 light-years in diameter. Unlike the open star clusters – containing a few hundred young, sibling stars, scattered through the disk of our galaxy and presumably other galaxies – globular clusters are big, symmetric and old, like an earthly city’s oldest and most staid citizens.
View larger. | The famous globular cluster Messier 13 or M13 – largest and brightest globular cluster easily visible from the Northern Hemisphere – seen against its star field. At 25,000 light-years away and about 145 light-years in diameter, M13 is a popular target for amateur astronomers using small telescopes.
Our own Milky Way has around 150 globular clusters, with perhaps more awaiting discovery, hidden by galactic dust. Our neighboring spiral galaxy in the direction of the constellation Andromeda – M31 or the Andromeda galaxy – appears to have around 300 globular clusters. Some football-shaped, elliptical galaxies do have globular clusters, too, like M87 in the direction of the constellation Virgo, home to the supermassive black hole that was famously imaged by the Event Horizon Telescope in 2019. This giant elliptical galaxy, M87, has been estimated to possess around 15,000 globular clusters, with more than 1,000 having been directly observed telescopically so far.
About 150 globular star clusters are known to surround our galaxy’s center.
Globular clusters orbit galaxies in orbits which are highly eccentric and highly inclined to the galactic plane. Orbiting in the “outskirts” of a galaxy, they take perhaps a few hundred million years to complete a single orbit. In a telescope, a globular cluster looks like a fuzzy ball, with individual stars at the periphery merging into a solid ball of light towards the center. However, this is simply because the stars are so close together that they can’t be resolved individually telescopically. At the center of a globular cluster, stars may reach a density of between 100 and 1,000 stars per cubic parsec. That’s in contrast to the density of stars near our sun, estimated at about 0.14 star per cubic parsec. If you were standing on a planet orbiting a star in a globular cluster, your night sky would be extremely crowded with nearby stars!
This Hubble Space Telescope image shows the core of the great globular cluster Messier 13, in the constellation Hercules.
The stars in globular clusters are the galaxy’s most ancient inhabitants, comprising a population of what astronomers call Population II stars. Those whose age has been measured are between 11 and 13 billion years old, making them almost as old as the galaxy itself. Not surprisingly, many of these ancient stars have evolved into huge, bloated red giant stars, as our sun will do in a few billion years. The stars are extremely metal-poor, which is to say – in the peculiar language of astronomy – they have tiny amounts of materials heavier than helium compared to the surrounding interstellar medium (astronomers refer to all elements heavier than helium as “metals”). Because the heavier elements are made inside stars – and then spread throughout the interstellar medium via supernova explosions – this paucity of metals is exactly what would normally be expected from such old stars. In other worlds, Population II stars consist almost exclusively of hydrogen and helium, the materials that were present in the early universe.
However, there is a mystery: globular clusters also have “abundance anomalies” of heavier metals, meaning there are elements present which are found elsewhere, in stars that formed more recently. In particular, there appears to be excesses of sodium, carbon, oxygen and aluminum, with heavier metals such as strontium, yttrium, barium and europium also being present in some clusters. These anomalies have not been satisfactorily explained, although there have been several explanations put forward, such as the early presence of supermassive stars .
The most famous globular cluster in the northern hemisphere is M13 in the constellation of Hercules, sometimes referred to as the Great Globular Cluster, which was discovered by Edmond Halley in 1714. Charles Messier later added it into his famous catalog in 1764. In amateur telescopes, it is a small fuzzy patch of light, some 22,000 light-years from Earth. At the center of this cluster, stars orbit so closely that occasionally they collide, their deaths leading to the creation of new stars known as “blue stragglers.” This stellar population is the only type of newer stars in globular clusters.
Other globular clusters of note are M22 in Sagittarius – one of the brightest in the sky – M5 in Serpens and M12 in Ophiuchus. Many of the night sky’s biggest and brightest globular clusters are best viewed on spring nights and often feature in so-called “Messier Marathons.”
Globular clusters are a wonderful sight in even the smallest telescopes, although a large instrument is needed to resolve individual stars towards their centers.
When you look at them, you are seeing populations of stars born in our galaxy’s infancy!
Amateur astronomers enjoy peering at globular clusters through their small telescopes. Here is Omega Centauri, captured by Greg Hogan in Kathleen, Georgia. Thanks, Greg!
Bottom line: Globular clusters are spherical collections of up to perhaps a million stars, orbiting mostly in the star halo of spiral galaxies and containing some of a galaxy’s oldest stars.
Juno arrived at Jupiter in 2016. It’s in a 53-day orbit around the planet. Close sweeps past the planet are called “perijoves” (peri means “near”). Here are some spectacular images from the most recent sweep, Perijove 25, in February.
Jupiter at mid-northern latitudes as seen by Juno during Perijove 25. The small, round, swirly spots are storms in Jupiter’s atmosphere.
Image via NASA/ JPL-Caltech/ SwRI/ MSSS/ Kevin M. Gill.
The Juno mission to Jupiter has been orbiting the giant planet since 2016, and NASA has made the raw images from Juno’s camera available to the public for processing. Click here if you want to help. Juno has a 53-day orbit around Jupiter, and close passes of the planet are called perijoves, from the Greek wordperi meaning near. Images are now coming in from Juno’s most recent close sweep past the planet, Perijove 25, on February 17, 2020. We’ve also included some images on this page from the next-to-last sweep past Jupiter (Perijove 24) on December 26, 2019.
Jupiter as seen from the south, also from Perijove 25.
Image via NASA/ JPL-Caltech/ SwRI/ MSSS/ Kevin M. Gill.
Brian Swift processed the video below, using imagery from the JunoCam instrument during Perijove 25.
The best place to see the latest processed images from Juno is probably Twitter. Follow the three people below, who are active in image processing.
Kevin M. Gill@kevinmgill
Fisheye view of Jupiter at mid-northern latitudes, @NASAJuno Perijove 25
A mosaic from @NASAJuno images PJ25_25 and PJ25_27 obtained on Feb 17, 2020. Approx true color/contrast and enhanced versions. The oval left of center is known as NN-WS-4. It is about 7000 km long in the east-west direction and is at planetographic latitude ~42 degrees north.
Here’s a mosaic of images of Jupiter, processed and assembled by Brian Swift from Perijove 24. He labeled this as a “collage [with] exaggerated contrast/color.”
Image via NASA/ JPL-Caltech/ SwRI/ MSSS/ Brian Swift.
And here’s a cool image to end on, processed by citizen scientist Tanya Oleksuik and released by NASA on March 2, 2020. It’s from the second-to-last close sweep past Jupiter by Juno, in December 2019 (Perijove 24). Tanya created this color-enhanced image using data from the JunoCam camera.
See the 2 white ovals merging, within the orange-colored band? NASA’s Juno spacecraft caught these 2 storms in the act of merging on December 26, 2019, a few days after a close flyby of the planet (Perijove 24). The 2 merging white ovals are anticyclones; they rotate counter-clockwise. The larger of the ovals has been tracked for many years, as it grew in size through mergers with other anticyclonic white ovals on Jupiter.
Bottom line: Newly processed images from the days around the Juno spacecraft’s most recent low pass over the planet – called a “perijove” – on December 17, 2019.
This article was originally published on The Conversation.
Last week, scientists announced the discovery of Kepler-186f, a planet 492 light years away in the Cygnus constellation. Kepler-186f is special because it marks the first planet almost exactly the same size as Earth orbiting in the “habitable zone” – the distance from a star in which we might expect liquid water, and perhaps life.
What did not make the news, however, is that this discovery also slightly increases how much credence we give to the possibility of near-term human extinction. This because of a concept known as the Great Filter.
The Great Filter is an argument that attempts to resolve the Fermi Paradox: why have we not found aliens, despite the existence of hundreds of billions of solar systems in our galactic neighborhood in which life might evolve? As the namesake physicist Enrico Fermi noted, it seems rather extraordinary that not a single extraterrestrial signal or engineering project has been detected (UFO conspiracy theorists notwithstanding).
This apparent absence of thriving extraterrestrial civilizations suggests that at least one of the steps from humble planet to interstellar civilization is exceedingly unlikely. The absence could be caused because either intelligent life is extremely rare or intelligent life has a tendency to go extinct. This bottleneck for the emergence of alien civilizations from any one of the many billions of planets is referred to as the Great Filter.
Are We Alone? What exactly is causing this bottleneck has been the subject of debate for more than 50 years. Explanations could include a paucity of Earth-like planets or self-replicating molecules. Other possibilities could be an improbable jump from simple prokaryotic life (cells without specialized parts) to more complex eukaryotic life – after all, this transition took well over a billion years on Earth.
Proponents of this “Rare Earth” hypothesis also argue that the evolution of complex life requires an exceedingly large number of perfect conditions. In addition to Earth being in the habitable zone of the sun, our star must be far enough away from the galactic centre to avoid destructive radiation, our gas giants must be massive enough to sweep asteroids from Earth’s trajectory, and our unusually large moon stabilizes the axial tilt that gives us different seasons.
These are just a few prerequisites for complex life. The emergence of symbolic language, tools and intelligence could require other such “perfect conditions” as well.
Or Is the Filter Ahead of Us? While emergence of intelligent life could be rare, the silence could also be the result of intelligent life emerging frequently but subsequently failing to survive for long. Might every sufficiently advanced civilization stumble across a suicidal technology or unsustainable trajectory? We know that a Great Filter prevents the emergence of prosperous interstellar civilizations, but we don’t know whether or not it lies in humanity’s past or awaits us in the future.
For 200,000 years humanity has survived supervolcanoes, asteroid impacts, and naturally occurring pandemics. But our track record of survival is limited to just a few decades in the presence of nuclear weaponry. And we have no track record at all of surviving many of the radically novel technologies that are likely to arrive this century.
Esteemed scientists such as Astronomer Royal Martin Rees at the Cambridge Center for the Study of Existential Risk point to advances in biotechnology as being potentially catastrophic. Others such as Stephen Hawking, Max Tegmark and Stuart Russell, also with the Cambridge Center, have expressed serious concern about the exotic but understudied possibility of machine superintelligence.
Let’s Hope Kepler-186f is Barren When the Fermi Paradox was initially proposed, it was thought that planets themselves were rare. Since then, however, the tools of astronomy have revealed the existence of hundreds of exoplanets. That just seems to be the tip of the iceberg.
But each new discovery of an Earth-like planet in the habitable zone, such as Kepler-186f, makes it less plausible that there are simply no planets aside from Earth that might support life. The Great Filter is thus more likely to be lurking in the path between habitable planet and flourishing civilization.
If Kepler-186f is teeming with intelligent life, then that would be really bad news for humanity. For that fact would push back the Great Filter’s position further into the technological stages of a civilization’s development. We might then expect that catastrophe awaits both our extraterrestrial companions and ourselves.
In the case of Kepler-186f, we still have many reasons to think intelligent life might not emerge. The atmosphere might be too thin to prevent freezing, or the planet might be tidally locked, causing a relatively static environment. Discovery of these hostile conditions should be cause for celebration. As philosopher Nick Bostrom once said:
The silence of the night sky is golden … in the search for extraterrestrial life, no news is good news. It promises a potentially great future for humanity.
Organic Molecules Found on Mars Could Have a Biological Origin, Study Shows
MICHELLE STARR
New analysis of organic molecules found in dried-up Martian mud in the Gale Crater has revealed an intriguing possibility. Scientists have concluded that we can't rule out those molecules actually have a biological origin.
NASA's Curiosity rover took this selfie in 2019.
NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS/Kevin M. Gill
Although our understanding of the Martian molecules is limited and incomplete, the information we do have could be consistent with life on the Red Planet billions of years ago.
The molecules were actually extracted by the Curiosity rover from a mudstone section of the Gale Crater called the Murray Formation; a study on the finding was published in 2018. The initial experiments revealed a number of molecules, including a group of aromatic compounds called thiophenes.
Here on Earth, these compounds are usually found in some pretty interesting places. They show up in crude oil - made of compressed and superheated dead organisms such as zooplankton and algae; and coal - made of compressed and superheated dead plants.
The compound is thought to form abiotically - that is, through a physical process, not a biological one - when sulphur reacts with organic hydrocarbons at temperatures greater than 120 degrees Celsius (248°F), a reaction called thermochemical sulphate reduction (TSR).
However, while this reaction is abiotic, the hydrocarbons and sulphur can both be of biological origin. So, researchers set out to investigate how thiophenes could have formed on Mars.
"We identified several biological pathways for thiophenes that seem more likely than chemical ones, but we still need proof," said astrobiologist Dirk Schulze-Makuch of Washington State University.
"If you find thiophenes on Earth, then you would think they are biological, but on Mars, of course, the bar to prove that has to be quite a bit higher."
There are a number of ways thiophenes could have emerged on Mars without necessitating the presence of life. For instance, thiophenes have been detected in meteorites; so extramartian rocks could have carried the molecules in.
Geological processes can also produce the heat necessary for TSR, especially back when Mars was volcanically active; and volcanic activity, of course, also produces sulphur.
But there's something interesting about the Martian thiophenes. The processes described above require the sulphur to be nucleophilic, that is, the sulphur atoms donate electrons to form a bond with their reaction partner. Yet most of the sulphur on Mars exists as non-nucleophilic sulphates.
These can be reduced to nucleophilic sulphides via TSR. But there's another possibility, too - biological sulphate reduction (BSR). Some bacteria - and white truffles, too, actually, although you probably won't find those on Mars - can synthesise thiophenes.
So it's possible that when Mars was a warmer, wetter place than it is today, around 3 billion years ago, that bacterial colonies existed, and produced the thiophenes. This could occur even in below-zero temperatures. Then, when Mars dried up, the thiophenes were left there for Curiosity to dig out of the mudstone all these years later.
Sadly, the sample was a bit damaged. Curiosity uses an analysis technique called pyrolysis that heats the samples to over 500 degrees Celsius. So there's a limit to the knowledge we can glean from what survived.
But the Rosalind Franklin rover, scheduled for launch in July, will have on board an instrument that is much less destructive. So any thiophenes it digs out of the ground may be more intact when analysis is applied.
In addition, the carbon and sulphur isotopes could be revealing, too. That's because living organisms prefer lighter isotopes; if the thiophenes contain lighter isotopes, that could weight the evidence towards biological processes too.
Sadly, we probably won't know for sure based on just what our robotic friends can dig out of the ground.
"As Carl Sagan said 'extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence'," Schulze‑Makuch said.
"I think the proof will really require that we actually send people there, and an astronaut looks through a microscope and sees a moving microbe."
Two galaxy clusters collided to create the “Bullet Cluster,” shown here. Normal matter is shown in pink and the rest of the matter is illustrated in blue, revealing that dark matter dominates this enormous cluster.
(Credit: X-ray: NASA/CXC/CfA/M.Markevitch et al.; Optical: NASA/STScI; Magellan/U.Arizona/D.Clowe et al.; Lensing Map: NASA/STScI; ESO WFI; Magellan/U.Arizona/D.Clowe et al.)
Most of our universe is hidden in plain sight. Though we can’t see or touch it, most astronomers say the majority of the cosmos consists of dark matter and dark energy. But what is this mysterious, invisible stuff that surrounds us? And what’s the difference between dark energy and dark matter? In short, dark matter slows down the expansion of the universe, while dark energy speeds it up.
Dark matter works like an attractive force — a kind of cosmic cement that holds our universe together. This is because dark matter does interact with gravity, but it doesn’t reflect, absorb or emit light. Meanwhile, dark energy is a repulsive force — a sort of anti-gravity — that drives the universe’s ever-accelerating expansion.
Dark energy is the far more dominant force of the two, accounting for roughly 68 percent of the universe’s total mass and energy. Dark matter makes up 27 percent. And the rest — a measly 5 percent — is all the regular matter we see and interact with every day
Dark matter cannot be photographed, but researchers can detect it and map it by measuring gravitational lensing. Its distribution is shown here in the blue overlay of the inner region of Abell 1689, a cluster of galaxies 2.2 billion light-years away.
(Credit: NASA/ESA/JPL-Caltech/Yale/CNRS)
Dark Matter
In the 1930s, Swiss-born astronomer Fritz Zwicky studied images of the roughly 1,000 galaxies that make up the Coma Cluster — and he spotted something funny about their behavior. The galaxies moved so fast that they should simply fly apart. He speculated that some kind of “dark matter” held them together.
Decades later, astronomers Vera Rubin and Kent Ford found a similar phenomenon when they studied the rotation rates of individual galaxies. The stars at a galaxy’s outer edge should circle slower than stars near the center. That’s the way planets in our solar system orbit. Instead, they noticed that the stars on a galaxy’s outskirts orbit just as fast — or faster — than the stars closer in. Rubin and Ford had found more evidence that some invisible form of matter is apparently holding the universe together.
“Even stars at the periphery are orbiting at high velocities,” Rubin once explained in an interview with Discover. “There has to be a lot of mass to make the stars orbit so rapidly, but we can’t see it. We call this invisible mass dark matter.”
The left galaxy rotates how astronomers would have expected if dark matter didn’t exist. The galaxy on the right reflects what their telescopes actually reveal. (Credit: Wikimedia Commons)
Astronomers now have many other lines of evidence that suggest dark matter is real. In fact, the existence of dark matter is so widely accepted that it’s part of the so-called standard model of cosmology, which forms the foundation of how scientists understand the universe’s birth and evolution. Without it, we can’t explain how we got here.
But that lofty status puts pressure on cosmologists to find definitive proof that dark matter exists and that their model of the universe is correct. For decades, physicists all over the world have employed increasingly high-tech instruments to try and detect dark matter. So far, they’ve found no signs of it.
A wide view of the local universe, spanning hundreds of millions of light-years, reveals the clumped and weblike structure of the cosmos, with strands of galaxies and immense voids. The Milky Way is just one of many points that make up the Virgo Supercluster. Rather than just empty, passive spaces, voids may hold clues to understanding dark matter, dark energy and galactic evolution.
Astronomers have known that our universe is expanding for about a century now. Telescopic observations have shown that most galaxies are moving away from each other, which implies the galaxies were closer together in the distant past. As a result, the evidence piled up for the Big Bang. However, astronomers assumed that the combined gravitational pull of all the cosmos’ stars and galaxies should be slowing down the universe’s expansion. Perhaps it would even someday collapse back in on itself in a Big Crunch.
That notion was thrown out in the late 1990s, however, when two teams of astronomers spotted something that didn’t make any sense. Researchers studying supernovas in the the most distant galaxies discovered that distant galaxies were moving away from us faster than nearby galaxies. The universe wasn’t just expanding — the expansion was speeding up.
“My own reaction is somewhere between amazement and horror,“ astronomer Brian Schmidt, who led one of the two teams, told The New York Times in 1998. “Amazement, because I just did not expect this result, and horror in knowing that it will likely be disbelieved by a majority of astronomers — who, like myself, are extremely skeptical of the unexpected.“
(Credit: Roen Kelly/Discover)
But rather than refute it, subsequent observations have only made the evidence for dark energy more robust. In fact, some prominent critics of dark matter still accept the existence of dark energy.
Now, that doesn’t mean researchers know what dark energy is. Far from it. But they can describe its role in the universe, thanks to Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity. Einstein didn’t know about dark energy, but his equations suggested new space can come into existence. And he also included a fudge factor in relativity called the cosmological constant, which he added — and later regretted — to keep the universe from collapsing inward. This idea allows space itself to have energy. However, scientists have still never actually seen this force on Earth.
Some theoretical physicists think there’s an entire dark realm of particles and forces out there, just waiting to be discovered. Whatever dark energy and dark matter are made of, they seem to be playing tug-of-war with our universe — both holding it together and pulling it apart.
On February 6, weather stations recorded the hottest temperature on record for Antarctica, 64.9°F (18.3°C). The warm spell caused widespread melting on nearby glaciers
These images show melting on the ice cap of Antarctica’s Eagle Island. They were acquired by NASA’S Landsat 8 satellite on February 4 and February 13, 2020.
On February 6, 2020, weather stations recorded the hottest temperature on record for Antarctica. Thermometers at the Esperanza Base on the northern tip of the Antarctic Peninsula reached 18.3°C (64.9°F) – around the same temperature as Los Angeles that day. The warm spell caused widespread melting on nearby glaciers.
The warm temperatures arrived on February 5 and continued until February 13, 2020.
Mauri Pelto, a glaciologist at Nichols College, observed that during the warming event, around .9 square miles (1.5 square km) of snowpack became saturated with meltwater (shown in blue above). According to climate models, Eagle Island experienced peak melt – 1 inch (30 millimeters) – on February 6. In total, snowpack on Eagle Island melted 4 inches (106 millimeters) from February 6-February 11. About 20 percent of seasonal snow accumulation in the region melted in this one event on Eagle Island.
The heat is apparent on this map, which shows temperatures across the Antarctic Peninsula on February 9, 2020. The map was derived from the Goddard Earth Observing System (GEOS) model, and represents air temperatures at 2 meters (about 6.5 feet) above the ground. The darkest red areas are where the model shows temperatures surpassing 50°F (10°C).
I haven’t seen melt ponds develop this quickly in Antarctica. You see these kinds of melt events in Alaska and Greenland, but not usually in Antarctica.
He also used satellite images to detect widespread surface melting nearby on Boydell Glacier.
Pelto noted that such rapid melting is caused by sustained high temperatures significantly above freezing. Such persistent warmth was not typical in Antarctica until the 21st century, but it has become more common in recent years.
The warm temperatures of February 2020 were caused by a combination of meteorological elements. A ridge of high pressure was centered over Cape Horn at the beginning of the month, and it allowed warm temperatures to build. Typically, the peninsula is shielded from warm air masses by the Southern Hemisphere westerlies, a band of strong winds that circle the continent. However, the westerlies were in a weakened state, which allowed the extra-tropical warm air to cross the Southern Ocean and reach the ice sheet. Sea surface temperatures in the area were also higher than average by about 2-3°C (about 3.5-5.5 F).
Dry, warm foehn winds also could have played a part. Foehn winds are strong, gusty winds that cause downslope windstorms on mountains, often bringing warm air with them. In February 2020, westerly winds ran into the Antarctic Peninsula Cordillera. As such winds travel up the mountains, the air typically cools and condenses to form rain or snow clouds. As that water vapor condenses into liquid water or ice, heat is released into the surrounding air. This warm, dry air travels downslope on the other side of the mountains, bringing blasts of heat to parts of the peninsula. The drier air means fewer low-lying clouds and potentially more direct sunlight east of the mountain range.
Rajashree Tri Datta, an atmospheric researcher at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, said:
Two things that can make a foehn-induced melt event stronger are stronger winds and higher temperatures.
With warmer air in the surrounding atmosphere and ocean, the conditions were conducive this month for a foehn wind event.
This February heatwave was the third major melt event of the 2019-2020 summer, following warm spells in November 2019 and January 2020. Pelto said:
If you think about this one event in February, it isn’t that significant. It’s more significant that these events are coming more frequently.
Bottom line: In February 2020, weather stations recorded the hottest temperatures on record for Antarctica. The warm spell caused widespread melting on nearby glaciers.
Linda Moulton Howe: A Hidden Alien Language Within Binary Codes Could Reveal the ET Agenda
Linda Moulton Howe: A Hidden Alien Language Within Binary Codes Could Reveal the ET Agenda
Linda Moulton Howe – For thousands of years a secret language may have been right under our very noses. A language that has flashed up in the minds of UFO contactees, a language that has been described by witnesses of UFO Crash debris.
A language that has been seen etched into the sides of alien crafts for over 80 years. What are these Alien Symbols and how do they aquavit to the Binary Code?
Linda Moulton Howe: A Hidden Alien Language within Binary Codes Could Reveal The ET Agenda
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- Gemiddelde waardering: 0/5 - (0 Stemmen) Categorie:ALIEN LIFE, UFO- CRASHES, ABDUCTIONS, MEN IN BLACK, ed ( FR. , NL; E )
Advanced Ancient Civilizations That Had Abilities We Are Still Struggling To Understand
Advanced Ancient Civilizations That Had Abilities We Are Still Struggling To Understand
Legendary accounts tell of these feats of levitation being performed by ancient civilizations speaking “words of power” over the huge stones which moved of themselves. There are similar ancient accounts about the Egyptians and Tibetans employing similar mysterious mental levitational skills.
The easy cutting and movement of gigantic slabs of stone, and the carving of enormous statuary, were not the only strange abilities of bygone early civilizations. They possessed many amazing skills in such matters as navigation and map-making, of which a few specimens are still preserved today. The question remains, how did they get this seemingly advanced knowledge from?
Advanced Ancient Civilizations That Had Abilities We Are Still Struggling To Understand
Awesome craft moves unbelievably fast through the sky in Southern Arizona.
Awesome craft moves unbelievably fast through the sky in Southern Arizona.
An awesome unidentified flying object moves unbelievably fast through the sky in Southern Arizona. The footage, captured on March 6, 2020 raises many questions about what it could have been.
It is suggested that the object is a bug of some kind flying real close to the camera but not everybody is convinced and argue that it is more likely an antigravity craft whether man-made or alien.
Another point of discussion is the vortex like cloud in the background and some people wonder if it came into our dimensional plane of existence through the vortex.
Navy Has One More Video and More Documents On The Nimitz UFO Encounter
Navy Has One More Video and More Documents On The Nimitz UFO Encounter
As you may recall, the Navy released three videos of bizarre UFO encounters, involving characteristics that defy much of our understanding of physics. One was from the Nimitz aircraft carrier incident, and the others were from a much later encounter with the carrier Roosevelt. The videos were short in length and somewhat grainy. Many journalists have attempted if there’s more of those videos that are at least longer, clearer versions of the ones already made public. However, all such requests were answered in the negative.
Interestingly, researcher Christian Lambright submitted a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request to the Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI) in October 2019 to look for some particular details along these lines. Recently, he finally received a response. While the military did not provide him with any new videos or documents, they did concede that they have other papers and another video that would apply to his recent request. Unfortunately, they could not release the documents and video footage because they were classified top secret and secret respectively. The Navy claims that their release could cause grave damage to national security.
The new development is in contrast to what Pentagon spokesperson Susan Gough had announced. Despite testimony from several of the sailors from the Nimitz battle group who witnessed these events claiming that they remembered seeing longer videos, Ms Gough informed us on several instances that those three videos were the only ones they had and no clearer or more extended versions existed.
Now, we have the Pentagon, through Ms Gough, saying there are no more videos and we have ONI saying there’s at least one more. Somebody is lying again, as both of these things can’t be simultaneously true.
Who should we believe? Let us know in the comment section.
We're used to thinking of possible homes for life on watery worlds orbiting stars like the sun, but a new research paper has found a new potential habitat: a rocky planet orbiting just past the event horizon of a rapidly spinning supermassive black hole.
The exotic forces around that black hole are able to warm up the planet just right, but the scenario comes with a catch: the planet must orbit at nearly the speed of light.
We don't know all the possible places that life could arise in our universe, because so far we only have one example: us. And while scientists (and sci-fi authors) enjoy thinking about all sorts of exotic arrangements and possibilities for lifeforms, for serious searches of extraterrestrial intelligence, our best bet is to use our own circumstances as a template, hunting for life that isn't too dissimilar to what we find on Earth.
From that, we can draw two extremely broad requirements. One, life like our own requires liquid water. Water is the most common molecule in the universe, composed of hydrogen (element No. 1 when it comes to abundance in the cosmos) and oxygen (the byproduct of fusion reactions inside stars like our sun, making it also very common). But that water is usually either vaporized into a plasma (and hence very bad for life) or locked down in its solid, frozen state as ice (also not very good for life).
The liquid stuff is harder to come by, and requires a source of heat that isn't so hot that water just evaporates. We've found this perfect balance in only two kinds of locations: the so-called "habitable zone" of stars, a band of orbits where the light output it just right; and buried underneath the icy crusts of certain moons of the outer planets in our solar system, where tidal heating generates the necessary energy.
But just raw heat isn't enough. Life is a complex process that uses energy to do interesting things (like move around, eat and reproduce). All those processes are not perfectly efficient, so they generate waste heat. This waste heat must be dumped safely away from the environment; otherwise, you end up with nightmare greenhouse scenarios, with temperatures escalating to uncontrolled levels and killing off any life that got started.
On the Earth, we dump our waste heat into the vacuum of space itself in the form of infrared radiation. This contrast, between a source of energy and a place to put all the waste, enables life to flourish on our home planet, and presumably any other planet with a similar setup.
At first glance, black holes appear to be the least inviting homes for any potential lifeforms. After all, they are objects made of pure gravity, pulling in anything that gets too close beneath their event horizons, shutting them off from further contact with the rest of the universe forever. Nothing, not even light, can escape their gravitational maw.
Black holes don't give off light themselves — they're black, after all — but that inescapable gravity can provide a surprise, unique to them throughout the cosmos.
Permeating the universe is something called the cosmic microwave background (CMB). The CMB is the leftover radiation from when the universe was just a baby, only 380,000 years old. It is, by far, the greatest source of radiation in the entire cosmos, easily swamping all the stars and galaxies by many orders of magnitude. The reason you don't see it is that it's primarily in the microwave region of the electromagnetic spectrum (hence the name).
In other words, the CMB is cold, with a temperature just about 3 degrees above absolute zero.
But as that CMB light falls into a black hole, it becomes blueshifted, bumped to higher and higher energies from the extreme gravity. Just before it hits the event horizon, CMB light can gain so much energy that it shifts into infrared, visible and even ultraviolet portions of the spectrum.
In other words, near a black hole, the CMB stops being cold, and gets very, very hot.
What's more, if the black hole is spinning, it's able to focus the light into a narrow beam, making the CMB appear as a single spot on the sky. Kind of like a sun.
Goldilocks
So if you're able to get close enough to a black hole, you'll find yourself surprisingly warm, and if you're a planet, you might just find your water ice converted into liquid water oceans — a potential home for life.
But for life to thrive, it also needs a heat sink, which can handily be provided by the black hole itself. Close to the black hole, gravitational distortions enlarge the appearance of the event horizon, swelling it far larger than you might naively think.
Close enough to the black hole (say, at a radius less than 1% above the event horizon), the hot CMB shrinks to fill only a small disk, while the event horizon swells to cover 40% of the sky. If your planet is rotating, you then have a "sun" and a "night" — and life has everything it needs to do its business.
But orbits at this radius are usually extremely unstable, prone to just falling all the way into the terrible blackness itself. Recently, a team of researchers published an analysis in The Astrophysical Journal, exploring this scenario to see if there was any way to stabilize the situation.
And they found a way to make it work. If the black hole is big, at least 1.6x108 times the mass of the sun, and rapidly spinning, then it hosts a "habitable zone" just barely above the event horizon, where the CMB light peaks in the UV part of the spectrum — hot, but not terrible. Any closer and the planet would be destroyed by extreme gravitational forces, and any farther and the CMB would be too cold. But in that narrow band? Just right.
Though this scenario is possible, it wouldn't be very pretty. The planet would have to orbit at nearly the speed of light, experiencing a time dilation factor of thousands — meaning that for every second that goes by on that world, hours would slide by for us. And who knows if a planet could even find its way that close to a black hole while still surviving.
Still, the work shows that we have to keep our minds open when it comes to potential homes for life, up to and including some of the most terrible environments in the universe.
NASA's next Mars rover — a life-hunting, sample-caching robot scheduled to launch this summer — is officially called Perseverance, agency officials announced today (March 5).
The new name suits the car-size rover and its groundbreaking mission nicely, NASA officials said.
"There has never been exploration — never, never been making history — without perseverance," Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator of NASA's Science Mission Directorate, said during a name-unveiling ceremony today.
"Perseverance is a strong word," he added. "It's about making progress despite obstacles."
The kids are all right
Artist's illustration of NASA's 2020 Mars rover, now officially known as Perseverance, on the Red Planet. (Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech)
Like all of NASA's previous Mars rovers, Perseverance was named via a nationwide student competition. The contest kicked off last year and drew 28,000 essay submissions from K-12 students, NASA officials said.
This huge initial pool was culled to 155 semifinalists, which were whittled further to nine finalists this past January. Those nine included three proposals from each of the three age categories (grades K-4, 5-8 and 9-12). The finalist monikers, and the kids who proposed them, were:
Endurance, K-4, Oliver Jacobs of Virgina.
Tenacity, K-4, Eamon Reilly of Pennsylvania.
Promise, K-4, Amira Shanshiry of Massachusetts.
Perseverance, 5-8, Alexander Mather of Virginia.
Vision, 5-8, Hadley Green of Mississippi.
Clarity, 5-8, Nora Benitez of California.
Ingenuity, 9-12, Vaneeza Rupani of Alabama.
Fortitude, 9-12, Anthony Yoon of Oklahoma.
Courage, 9-12, Tori Gray of Louisiana.
NASA encouraged the public to vote for their favorite of these final nine, but the decision ultimately was made by Zurbuchen.
As the proposer of the winning name, Mather, a seventh grader at Lake Braddock Secondary School in Burke, Virginia, will get a free trip to Cape Canaveral, Florida, to watch Perseverance launch in July.
Mather read his winning essay during today's event and said he has a love of space and science that he plans to carry through his entire life.
"I want to go to college, get a degree in some form of engineering or science — space engineering and astronautics sound good right now," he said today. "And then, after that, go work at NASA as an engineer."
Looking for signs of life
Perseverance will land inside Mars' 28-mile-wide (45 kilometers) Jezero Crater in February 2021, kicking off a $2.5 billion mission to search for signs of ancient Red Planet life — the first time a NASA surface craft has actively hunted for possible Martians since the twin Viking landers did so from the mid-1970s through the early 1980s.
Jezero is a great place to do this work, NASA officials have stressed. The crater harbored a lake and a river delta billions of years ago, meaning that life could have both flourished there and left lasting evidence of its existence. (Here on Earth, river deltas are great at preserving biosignatures, mission team members have said.)
The rover will look for signs of life on-site, using its powerful seven-instrument suite. But Perseverance will also collect and cache several dozen samples of pristine, promising Mars material for future return to Earth, where scientists can continue the hunt using advanced equipment in labs around the world. Those samples could be here as early as 2031, if all goes according to plan.
Perseverance will do a variety of other work as well, from characterizing Jezero's geology to helping pave the way for human exploration of Mars, which NASA aims to achieve in the 2030s. For example, the rover has a ground-penetrating radar instrument that will look for deposits of subsurface water ice — a valuable resource for astronaut pioneers. And another instrument will demonstrate the production of oxygen from the thin, carbon dioxide-dominated Martian atmosphere.
That's not the only technology demonstration flying on the mission. Perseverance is also carrying a small helicopter scout, which will make brief sorties to show that rotorcraft can indeed explore the Red Planet air.
Perseverance also has 23 cameras and two microphones, potentially allowing us to hear the sounds of Mars for the first time ever. (Two previous NASA Mars craft, the Mars Polar Lander and the Phoenix lander, also carried microphones. But the Mars Polar Lander crashed, and Phoenix's microphone was never turned on.)
NASA has let schoolkids name all of its Red Planet rovers to date.
NASA's first-ever wheeled Mars explorer, Sojourner, was deployed from the Pathfinder lander in July 1997. Sojourner was named by Connecticut 12-year-old Valerie Ambroise in honor of 19th-century abolitionist and activist Sojourner Truth.
Sofi Collis, a third grader from Arizona, won the competition to name Spirit and Opportunity, twin NASA rovers that landed on Mars three weeks apart in January 2004. And the car-size Curiosity rover, which has been exploring the Red Planet's Gale Crater since August 2012, was named by Kansas sixth grader Clara Ma.
Perseverance's body is modeled on that of Curiosity, and the new rover will employ the same sky-crane descent and landing system as its predecessor. And the link between the two missions goes deeper than that; Perseverance aims to extend work done by Curiosity, which determined that Gale Crater was capable of supporting Earth-like life long ago.
Zurbuchen acknowledged the ties between the two missions and stressed that their names go together well, too.
"Perseverance and curiosity together are what exploration is all about," he said.
After a national contest, NASA’s next Mars rover has an official name: Perseverance.
Until now, NASA has simply called Perseverance the Mars 2020 rover, which stuck out next to past rovers with inspiring names like Spirit, Opportunity, and Curiosity. Like Perseverance, those rovers were also named by the winners of student contests, according to a Jet Propulsion Laboratory press release — a longstanding effort to keep the public engaged with the space agency’s exploration missions.
Wherefore Art
When it launches later this year, Perseverance will scan Mars for signs of past and present life while also studying the planet’s environment and geochemistry. And Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, said that contest winner and seventh-grader Alexander Mather picked a name that encapsulated those challenges.
“Alex’s entry captured the spirit of exploration,” Zurbuchen said in the release. “Like every exploration mission before, our rover is going to face challenges, and it’s going to make amazing discoveries. It’s already surmounted many obstacles to get us to the point where we are today — processing for launch.”
Honorable Mentions
When Perseverance reaches Mars, it will not only carry scientific instruments but also over 100 of the names suggested for the contest.
“All 155 semifinalists’ proposed rover names and essays have been stenciled onto a silicon chip with lines of text smaller than one-thousandth the width of a human hair,” Lori Glaze, director of NASA’s Planetary Science Division said in the release, “and will be flown to Mars aboard the rover.”
In a move that surely must have frustrated the hundreds, if not thousands, of people pouring over databases full of old Martian satellite images and rover photographs for signs of life, NASA posted an unusual shot on its “Astronomy Picture of the Day” blog of a really strange-looking hole on the side of a Red Planet volcano with a caption that readily admits it could contain life forms. (Image above. Credit: NASA.) All we need is someone or some rover to creep up to the edge and peek in. Any volunteers? Anyone? Bueller?
“Holes such as this are of particular interest because their interior caves are relatively protected from the harsh surface of Mars, making them relatively good candidates to contain Martian life. These pits are therefore prime targets for possible future spacecraft, robots, and even human interplanetary explorers.”
On March 1, 2020, NASA’s pic of the day was a hole photographed in 2011 by the HiRISE instrument on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. Located on a slope of the Pavonis Mons volcano, the opening measures 35 meters (115 feet) across and the hole, based on the angle of its shadow, measures at least 20 meters (65.5 feet) deep. If Pavonis Mons sounds familiar, the volcano is the subject of the Flaming Lips instrumental song “Approaching Pavonis Mons by Balloon (Utopia Planitia)” on the album Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots, which later was made into a Broadway musical by The West Wing creator Aaron Sorkin. Is NASA hinting that there might be pink robots in this hole? Or perhaps it’s a space elevator to Deimos, the smaller moon of Mars, as depicted in Buck Rogers in the 25th Century. Or is NASA hiding something else … in plain sight?
Pavonis Mons is a giant shield volcano made from stacks of overlapping lava flows that measures 8.7 miles high — taller than Mt. Everest. A digital model shows a pile of debris inside the hole, indicating it was once as deep as 295 feet. That makes the hole deeper than most caves on Earth. If early humans lived in caves, why not Early Martians? Or current Martian life forms?
“These results have important implications for habitability and human exploration of the moon but also for the search for extra-terrestrial life on Mars. Lava tubes are environments shielded from cosmic radiation and protected from micrometeorites, potentially providing safe habitats for future human missions. They are also, potentially, large enough for quite significant human settlements.”
Riccardo Pozzobon from the University of Padova, Italy, agrees. In a study conducted in 2017, he and other scientists compared volcanic lava tubes on Earth in Hawaii, Iceland, and the Galapagos Islands to those seen on the Moon and Mars. On the Moon, some are 1 km (0.6 miles) across and hundreds of kilometers in length. Both these and the smaller ones on Mars are big enough for future human settlements and possibly past or current extraterrestrial life.
Another view of pavonis mons
(NASA)
We may soon find out. The Mars 2020 rover is scheduled to launch on July 17 and land on February 18, 2021, with the mission to search for signs of life. Unlike other rovers, this one will carry a helicopter – perfect for flying over and perhaps even flying into the hole on Pavonis Mons.
Maybe The Flaming Lips should head back to the studio and begin working on some lyrics to “Approaching Pavonis Mons by Balloon (Utopia Planitia)” about approaching it by helicopter or on wheels.
APIngenieurs van NASA met rover 'Perseverance' in het Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Californië.
WETENSCHAP & PLANEETDe eerstvolgende robotjeep die de NASA naar Mars zal sturen krijgt de naam Perseverance (“Volharding”). Dat heeft het Amerikaanse ruimtevaartbureau NASA donderdag (plaatselijke tijd) bekendgemaakt.
De Perseverance moet op zoek gaan naar sporen van vroeger microbiologisch leven, en zal ook het klimaat en geologie van de rode planeet onderzoeken.
De nieuwe verkenner is de opvolger van de Curiosity uit 2012, die nog altijd rondtoert op Mars. Het nieuwe voertuig heeft zeven nieuwe instrumenten aan boord, laten de ingenieurs van het Jet Propulsion Laboratory van NASA weten. De nieuwe instrumenten zullen het terrein van Mars bestuderen en in bodemstalen op zoek gaan naar tekenen van leven.
“Wat we zullen leren uit de stalen die tijdens deze nieuwe missie zullen genomen worden, heeft het potentieel om een antwoord te geven op de vraag of we alleen zijn in het universum”, stelde Ken Farley, die als wetenschapper betrokken is bij het project, eerder.
Voor de nieuwe verkenner ontwikkelde NASA ook een nieuwe landingstechnologie waarmee het voertuig plekken op Mars zal kunnen bezoeken die te riskant waren voor Curiosity.
AFPBedoeling is in juli te vertrekken, om in februari neer te strijken op Mars.
De naam werd aangereikt door een scholier uit Virigina die een landelijke wedstrijd heeft gewonnen om de Marsverkenner te dopen. Totnogtoe ging die met de droge naam ‘Mars 2020’ door het leven. Bedoeling is in juli te vertrekken, om in februari neer te strijken op Mars.
Er waren 28.000 deelnames aan de wedstrijd. De winnende scholier krijgt nu een uitnodiging om op Cape Canaveral in Florida de lancering bij te wonen.
Eerder vonden scholieren voor Amerikaanse Marsjeeps al namen uit zoals Sojourner, Spirit, Opportunity en Curiosity. Die laatste nam onlangs nog de scherpste panoramafoto van Mars ooit.
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Bewijs voor mysterieuze wereldomvattende beschaving die aarde beheerste? 250+ verbluffende foto’s
Bewijs voor mysterieuze wereldomvattende beschaving die aarde beheerste? 250+ verbluffende foto’s
Volgens Jimmy van het populaire YouTube-kanaal Bright Insight leefde er duizenden jaren geleden een mysterieuze wereldomvattende beschaving op aarde.
Hoe kan het dat de tempels van de Inca’s en de Maya’s in Midden- en Zuid-Amerika, en de piramides van de Egyptenaren – beschavingen die helemaal geen contact met elkaar gehad zouden hebben – zoveel overeenkomsten vertonen?
Jimmy heeft een video gemaakt waarin hij aan de hand van meer dan 250 foto’s laat zien hoezeer oude bouwwerken van over de hele wereld op elkaar lijken.
De foto’s tonen volgens hem dat er veel is wat we niet weten over ons verleden.
Begrafenismaskers
Gouden begrafenismaskers zijn bijvoorbeeld niet alleen gevonden in Egypte, maar ook in Peru en Griekenland, waar overigens ook piramides zijn ontdekt.
De caduceus, de herautenstaf, is gevonden in drie culturen, te weten de Indiase, Soemerische en Griekse.
In Chachapoyas in het noorden van Peru zijn beelden ontdekt die heel erg doen denken aan de moai-beelden op Paaseiland.
Veelhoekige stenen
Soortgelijke beelden zijn aangetroffen in Bolivia, Turkije en Indonesië.
Vrijwel identieke muren bestaande uit veelhoekige stenen zijn te vinden in Peru, Japan, Egypte, Turkije, Griekenland, Italië en op Paaseiland.
Billy Meier Prophecies! Real or Fake UFO's? The Controversial Story
Billy Meier Prophecies! Real or Fake UFO's? The Controversial Story
We enter 2020 with an explosive, intense, dynamic and fascinating interview-conversation with UFO Researcher, Author, Lecturer, Documentary Filmmaker and the English-speaking representative for the controversial reclusive Swiss UFO photographer and Alien contactee – BILLY MEIER! Michael Horn is interviewed by AOT TV´s Lucas Alexander in this compelling and controversial edition of Age Of Truth TV. IS BILLY MEIER A FRAUD OR IS HE REAL? Who is Billy Meier really, and if his extraordinary story and photographic evidence is real, how come HE WAS CHOSEN to predict prophecies of world events and disasters to come, told by his alien contacts from the Pleiadian Star System? Why was Billy Meier “allowed” to take all these numerous photographs of UFO crafts? Is he in fact linked to the deep-state military – or the New World Order power-elite?
Michael Horn is calling the Billy Meier case, the ONLY authentic UFO case with real evidence! He has spent 40 year researching the Billy Meier case, and become very controversial in the field of UFOlogy and amongst researchers into Alien, E.T. existence on planet Earth and all over the universe. Michael Horn claims that Billy Meier, through his E.T. contacts have given warnings about man-made Climate Change as early as 1951, and many times thereafter, and he claims that Climate Change is very much man-made. This is leading the conversation into an interesting area, discussing The Club of Rome, New World Order plans and U.N. Agenda 21 and much more. In 2004, after 25 years of research into Meier’s information, Michael Horn became the voluntary Authorized American Media Representative for the Billy Meier Contacts. Michael gives national and international multi-media presentations, university lectures, interviews, etc., and makes frequent media appearances representing the Meier contacts
…. SELECTED TOPICS DISCUSSED: – IS BILLY MEIER REAL OR A FRAUD? – Did Billy Meier take all the numerous photographs of REAL UFO´s from elsewhere in the universe, Alien crafts, or could they be man-made advanced military technology? – Is Billy Meier a TRUE Alien contactee, and a chosen prophet, or is he part of a military cover-up, promoting a secret New World Order agenda plan?
- Is Climate Change really man-made, or is there an agenda behind the massive media propaganda about Global Warming, through f.ex. Greta Thunberg. – U.N. Agenda 21 – New World Order – The DARK ORDER (aka. Illuminati) – The Club Of Rome – Prophecies from Billy Meier about world catastrophes. – UFO researchers/ UFO community vs. Billy Meier and Michael Horn. – 5G roll-out and the danger of electromagnetic radiation and frequencies. – REINCARNATION! Is it a soul-trap? ……all this and much much more when AGE OF TRUTH TV presenter and investigative reporter, Lucas Alexander is interviewing Michael Horn in this hard-talk explosive 2 hour 22 min. show. Filmed on December 5, 2019 at the Age Of Truth TV studios in Copenhagen, Denmark, and via ZOOM to Flagstaff Arizona, USA.
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UFO disc coming out of jumpgate in space
UFO disc coming out of jumpgate in space
On February 20, 20202 we reported about the strange space vehicles that seemed to appear out of flashes of light.
Now, more of these strange lights have been captured on the ISS live feed the last days.. Could it be that these flashes are jumpgates or wormholes from which UFOs emerge? And as said before, what could be reason for their arrival?
The enlarged images show unidentified flying objects coming out of these flashes. Even in some images you can see a sort of portal.
“I Have Seen the Bodies.” Cases from the Crash Retrieval Vault. Richard Dolan Intelligent Disclosure
“I Have Seen the Bodies.” Cases from the Crash Retrieval Vault. Richard Dolan Intelligent Disclosure
Richard and Tracey return to the astonishing and all-too-forgotten cases of the late Leonard Stringfield, the pioneer of UFO/UAP crash retrieval research. For this program, they discuss three more cases uncovered by Stringfield during the late 1970s, when this phenomenon was only just beginning to be discussed among UFO researchers. The cases are fairly detailed, fascinating, and compelling.
An international team of astrobiologists claim that organic molecules discovered by NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover could be evidence of life on Mars.
In a paper published in the journal Astrobiology, the team argues that the presence of “thiophenes,” which are special compounds found in coal, crude oil and white truffles back on Earth, could be a sign of ancient life on the Red Planet.
“We identified several biological pathways for thiophenes that seem more likely than chemical ones, but we still need proof,” Washington State University astrobiologist and lead author Dirk Schulze-Makuch said in a statement.
The team, however, isn’t jumping to any conclusions just yet.
“If you find thiophenes on Earth, then you would think they are biological, but on Mars, of course, the bar to prove that has to be quite a bit higher,” Shulze-Makuch added.
While thiophenes are made up of two bio-essential elements, carbon and sulfur, it’s still very possible they could’ve been created during meteor impacts that heat sulfates to high temperatures — a possible explanation the researchers are also considering.
If the compounds were indeed a sign of life, they could’ve been the result of bacteria some three billion years ago breaking down sulfates — or alternatively could have been broken down by the bacteria.
But, again, it’s far too early to draw conclusions.
The Curiosity rover analyzes compounds by breaking them down into fragments. The upcoming European Space Agency’s Rosalind Franklin rover, however, could fill in the gaps with its Mars Organic Molecule Analyzer (MOMA), which doesn’t use the same destructive technique as Curiosity.
What has Schulze-Makuch most excited is the possibility of finding differing ratios of heavy and light isotopes in compounds, the result of organisms breaking down elements and “a telltale signal for life,” according to the researcher.
“As Carl Sagan said ‘extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence,'” Schulze-Makuch said. “I think the proof will really require that we actually send people there, and an astronaut looks through a microscope and sees a moving microbe.”
A meteor streaks across the sky. In a new study, researchers report finding a novel protein in the meteorite Acfer 086, which landed in Algeria in 1990.
A research team claimed to have found the first known extraterrestrial protein, spotting it in a space rock that fell to Earth 30 years ago.
The scientists, led by Malcolm McGeoch of the Plex Corp. in Fall River, Massachusetts, analyzed the meteorite Acfer 086, which landed in Algeria in 1990. High-precision mass spectrometry revealed the presence of a novel protein, McGeoch and his team wrote in a new paper that's available on the online preprint site arXiv.org.
The protein, which the researchers proposed calling "hemolithin," consists of chains of the amino acids glycine and hydroxyglycine, as well as iron, oxygen and lithium atoms, the researchers reported. And the hemolithin is significantly enriched in deuterium, a heavy isotope of hydrogen that features a neutron in its atomic nucleus along with a proton. (The nucleus of a "normal" hydrogen atom has a proton but no neutron.)
Such deuterium enrichment does not appear in amino acids that form here on Earth, and so it "indicates protosolar disc or molecular cloud origin," McGeoch and his colleagues wrote in the paper, which has been submitted to a journal and is currently undergoing peer review. (You can read the preprint for free here.)
"This is the first report of a protein from any extraterrestrial source," the scientists added.
To be clear, the researchers aren't claiming that the hemolithin is evidence of alien life. But the discovery, if it holds up, would still be of great interest to astrobiologists. That's because it would show that very complex chemistry of the sort employed by life as we know it on Earth occurs of its own accord in deep space. (Proteins are the workhorses of cells, performing a wide variety of tasks for organisms.)
The implication would be that it doesn't take a miracle for bona fide biochemical systems to get up and running — and that, therefore, life might be widespread throughout the cosmos.
This notion is hardly outré anymore, because researchers are racking up more and more evidence of complex chemistry occurring beyond Earth. Big organic molecules swirl in the thick atmosphere of Saturn's huge moon Titan, for example, and amino acids — the building blocks of proteins — have been found in meteorites and on comets.
But such talk of implications is preliminary; the new paper is still under peer review, after all. And not everyone is onboard with the results.
"I am not impressed by this report," said Jeffrey Bada, distinguished professor of marine chemistry emeritus at the University of California, San Diego's Scripps Institution of Oceanography.
"The main problem is the occurrence of hydroxyglycine, which, to my knowledge, has never before been reported in meteorites or in prebiotic experiments. Nor is it found in any proteins," Bada, whose research interests include the geochemistry of amino acids, organic cosmogeochemistry and the search for alien life, told Space.com via email. "Thus, this amino acid is a strange one to find in a meteorite, and I am highly suspicious of the results."
Space.com reached out to the corresponding author of the new study, Julie McGeoch of Harvard University's Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology. She said she'd be happy to discuss the paper — but only after it has passed peer review.
So, stay tuned; we may be hearing more about possible extraterrestrial proteins in the not-too-distant future.
1. In 1692 Edmond Halley (of comet fame) proposed that the Earth is hollow. Below the outer crust where we live, he pictured two concentric shells and a core about the size of Mercury, all floating in a luminous gas.
2. Helloooo down there: Halley even imagined that these shells might be inhabited. Jules Verne riffed on this idea in his classic Journey to the Center of the Earth.
3. Halley was right about the planet-size core, at least. At Earth's center is an iron-rich orb more than 4,000 miles wide—bigger than Mercury, actually—closer to our feet than L.A. is to New York.
4. Its outer part is molten. Its inner part is a solid hunk of metal that spins independently of the rest of the planet.
5. Earthquake waves that pass through the inner core travel faster north-south than they do east-west. One theory: The inner core consists of metallic crystals aligned with Earth’s poles, and the waves move more rapidly when they go with the grain.
6. The inner core is nearly as hot as the surface of the sun, and the pressure down there is 3 million times what it is on the surface.
7. Earth's solid and liquid cores together generate the magnetic field that keeps the solar wind—a nonstop, 250-mile-per-second stream of charged particles emitted by the sun—from stripping away our atmosphere.
8. Earth's mini-me: A group at the University of Wisconsin is attempting to model Earth's field by bottling 500,000-degree plasma in a 10-foot-wide aluminum sphere with really solid walls. The currents inside should mimic flows in the outer core.
9. The deepest place ever reached by human technology is the Kola Superdeep Borehole near Murmansk, Russia, the product of a Cold War inner-space race.
10. Bacteria have been discovered in the cavities and cracks of gold mines 2.4 miles beneath Earth's surface. They live on hydrogen and sulfates, and their primary source of energy is radiation, not the sun. Yum.
11. Microbiologist James Holden of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst speculates that our planet's deep biomass could weigh as much as all the things living up here on the surface.
12. According to NASA scientists, life on Mars may be huddling out of sight in a similar deep, hot biosphere.
13. Change is inevitable, even in the core. Examining paleomagnetic data, geoscientists at Johns Hopkins University suggest that the eastern and western halves of Earth’s core take turns growing and melting.
14. That may be why the axis of Earth's magnetic field is cockeyed, leaning these days to the east, while a few geologic eyeblinks ago it tilted to the west.
15. The Johns Hopkins researchers think the axis gets anchored in the growing half. Which could account for our planet’s weird history of magnetic field reversals, with north and south poles swapping places.
16. Such magnetic field quirks might also be explained by pandemonium at the boundary between the molten core and the overlying mantle.
17. Berkeley physicist Richard Muller speculates that oxygen, silicon, and sulfur are being squeezed out of the inner core and floating up to the core-mantle boundary, where they collect into hot, slushy dunes. Every once in a while, one dune may violently tumble into the mantle, revving up convection and disturbing the magnetic field.
18. Reduce, reuse, recycle. The slow churn of plate tectonics pulls crust into the interior, where any plant and animal life in it gets trapped and cooked. Organic material eventually resurfaces in lava and volcanic gases, including atmosphere-warming carbon dioxide.
19. Such cycling, and the protective magnetic field generated by the core, keep our planet at the perfect temperature for life.
20. Look at Venus, with its 900-degree Fahrenheit days and nights. If not for our planet's restless insides, that could be us.
Sometimes, when you’re focusing on a very strange story – eerie, even – the best thing you can do is to sit back and let the witness tell the tale, and without interruption. And, that’s exactly what I’m going to do today. The account below comes from a well-respected UFO researcher and writer, Denise Stoner, who very generously shared this with me for publication. Denise is – with Kathleen Marden – the co-author of The Alien Abduction Files. With that said, onto the story in Denise’s own words: “At least three times here in Florida at a particular combination health/grocery/restaurant called Whole Foods I have been observed by a strange character. This is a good place to blend as many folks who shop here are ‘odd characters’ to begin with or ‘hippie like,’ gone back to nature types. So, the person who has observed me is wearing a gauzy outfit, thin hair, woven straw Panama type hat and sun glasses fits right in. His skin, hair, and clothing are all almost the same beige color.
“The difference is he has a drink in front of him, a notebook, stares at me the whole time as we eat at a table on the sidewalk. He never has food of his own nor does he touch the drink. It seems he knows when we are almost finished eating, he gets up, walks slowly past our table, rounds the corner that is clearly visible but must pass a pillar on the corner of the shopping plaza by our table. Once he goes behind that pillar,he never comes out the other side. There is literally nowhere for him to go but out the other side, then down the sidewalk or out to the parking lot – but no, he is gone. I cannot get up to follow thinking I am going to bump in to him on the other side of the pillar. He lets me know in no uncertain terms that he is watching me or letting me know he is there.
“Yes, I have pondered many times what prevents me from picking up my cell phone and taking a picture of this individual. I have no answer for that. It absolutely crosses my mind the whole time the episode is taking place. Afterwards I feel foolish, know I will be made fun of in the telling of the story, and promise myself I will have the camera ready the next time. It never happens. Are we somehow prevented from having photographic evidence needed as proof? I do have several speaking engagements a year and have decided to add one of these odd stories each time as I feel people need to know this type of thing exists. Let them decide for themselves what they think. This is going on and that is a fact – the fact appears to be that we have some type of ‘human’ with unusual abilities living among the earthly beings and our only choice for now is to be observant, to watch and wait. What other options do we have?”
“The situation to you as it has remained clear as crystal in my mind. As for my Mom, she knows something happened but it has gotten foggy and she doesn’t know why, yet she recalls something happened that made her feel very uncomfortable. My Mom and I had gone to the mall on Christmas Eve for a couple of last minute stocking stuffer type gifts. We actually knew what we wanted so parked outside J.C. Penney’s on the side where those goods were. We went in and immediately noticed that in late afternoon, there were only a few shoppers. We picked out our gifts and got in line at the cashier in back of two other people. We could easily see the exit door and the sun in the parking lot, we were facing that way. The glass doors opened and two very tall, thin women entered. They had long almost waist length blond hair parted in the middle on top and it was thin in texture. Their skin was also pale and I did not notice any make up but each had huge piercing blue eyes. Their gait was odd like they were too tall (approximately 6’1) to walk smoothly. I was already an investigator for MUFON so was aware of oddities in people and had done background searches for the Federal Government, so was trained to be observant.
“They were pushing one of those umbrella style strollers with no fancy attachments – just the hammock type bed, wheels, and handles. I noticed they had no purses or accessories such as a diaper bag to carry diapers or bottles, etc. The women moved slowly it seemed and drew my attention to the stroller. There was a baby blanket in the bottom portion and on top the head of a baby no bigger than a small grapefruit, pasty colored skin, no noticeable nose, a line for a mouth and huge dark eyes taking up most of the rest of this head. I wondered if the baby was deformed but knew this was not the case somehow. The baby appeared alert and was staring up at me. My Mom bumped me with her arm to get my attention and said ‘what is wrong with that baby?’ I felt I needed to tell the person in front of me because we had been talking with her about being slow in finishing up our shopping. When I tapped her on the shoulder I then was shocked to see not only her but the lady in front of her and the cashier were kind of frozen in place. Everything seemed to be moving in extremely slow motion around us.
“The blond women seemed to pass the thought to me that I needed to take another good look at the baby and study it. Then as if a film was put back in to normal speed they walked past me and the cash register began to work, people – the only three in the area were moving again as if nothing happened. I told my Mom to hold our places and I ran after the women. Just next to us was the infants’ clothing department. The women had turned in to that aisle. I followed and when I turned in to the aisle – they disappeared. Just gone like they had never been there. I ran back the short distance to my Mom and told her they were gone. We checked out and my Mom kept saying, ‘what was going on with that baby?’ I told her no one goes shopping with a baby that tiny without taking needed supplies, bottles, diapers, clothes, etc.
“I remember asking her if she thought we had seen something alien such as a hybrid and she just shook her head as if there was no answer. We stepped out the door and that’s when the experience with the men took place. When we exited the mall my Mom had already stepped off the curb to locate my car, I was stopped by three men who were leaning on the brick wall by the door. Wearing black suits, black hats, white shirts, sun glasses. Short in stature. The only difference from your reports was the fact that one had a briefcase – black also. I don’t recall their mouths moving but it could be I was just nervous.
“One of them said, ‘you will not discuss what happened inside that store, do not talk about it to anyone; do you understand?’ I did not answer, stepped off the curb as I felt I was in danger and called after my Mom. Just after I stepped off the curb I turned back to discover these men were gone and there was nowhere for them to go other than in to the parking lot or further down the sidewalk as there was a brick wall where they had been and continued down the length of the building to the only door we had come out. We had been shown something in the store we both feel wasn’t normal and were talking about it as we left to see if we were imagining things when I met these men. Does this sound typical of these types? I am too old to be abducted and used for breeding and have had a hysterectomy so that could not have been the purpose – to show me a child of mine and I felt nothing like that was going on.”
It sometimes seems that the UFO phenomena is drawn to military activity. For whatever reasons something seems to draw these forces in, and there are countless reports of UFO activity around military installations or events. It has actually become quite the point of discussion among UFO aficionados, and one very prominent example of this is the time a wave of strange UFO phenomena washed over one of the largest military exercises the world has ever seen.
In the fall of 1952, one of the largest peacetime military exercises in history was underway in the frigid waters of the North Atlantic in the vicinity of Denmark and Norway. Called “Operation Mainbrace,” or also “Exercise Mainbrace,” the massive naval operation was carried out by the Allied Command Atlantic, which is one of the commands of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), and was meant to simulate a response to an attack or invasion by the Soviet Union on Europe. The operation was truly epic in scope, involving the navies of nine countries, the USA, UK, Canada, France, Denmark, Norway, Portugal, the Netherlands and Belgium, and composed of over 200 ships, 1,000 aircraft, and 80,000 personnel. It was the most powerful fleet seen in the North Sea since World War. It was a truly impressive series of military war games, and it would also turn out to be an absolute magnet for UFOs, and indeed one of the most amazing military UFO incidents ever.
It all kicked off on September 13, 1952, when crew aboard the Danish destroyer Willemoes saw a glowing blue triangular unidentified object shoot through the night sky at an estimated speed of 900 mph. This would be far from the only strange sight witnessed in the skies above the operation, and reports from other navy personnel would come in over the coming days. On September 19, a British Meteor jet involved with the operation coming in to land at the airfield at Topcliffe, Yorkshire, England, was observed by crew on the ground to be followed by an anomalous silvery circular object that swayed “like a pendulum” and reportedly stopped when the jet circled around to engage it. The UFO then made a sudden acceleration into the distance, only to do a sharp turn and continue on in a different direction. One of the witnesses, a Lieutenant John W. Kilburn, would say of the incredible incident:
I was standing with four personnel of No. 269 Squadron watching a Meteor fighter gradually descending. The Meteor was at approx. 5000 feet and approaching from the east. Flight Officer Paris suddenly noticed a white object in the sky at a height between ten and twenty thousand feet some five miles astern of the Meteor. The object was silver in color and circular in shape. It appeared to be travelling at a much slower speed than the Meteor, but on a similar course. It maintained the slow forward speed for a few seconds before commencing to descend, swinging in a pendular motion during descent. Like a falling sycamore leaf. After a few seconds, the object stopped its pendulous motion and its descent and began to rotate about its own axis. Suddenly it accelerated at an incredible speed towards the west turning onto a south-easterly heading before disappearing. All this occurred in a matter of fifteen to twenty seconds. The movements were not identifiable with anything I have seen in the air and the rate of acceleration was unbelievable.
On the following day another high profile sighting was made, this time by the crew of the U.S. aircraft carrier the U.S.S. Franklin D. Roosevelt. The ship was thrown into a state of confusion and alarm when a large silvery sphere was observed, seeming to follow the fleet. On board that day was a journalist by the name of Wallace Litwin, who managed to snap a series of four color photographs of the object. At the time he thought it must surely be a weather balloon, but he was soon informed that it was moving way to fast to be a balloon and also that none of the ships had launched any. The photos were examined by Navy Intelligence officers, who deemed the object to not be a balloon, although there was no other explanation offered. All witnesses also confirmed that it was not a balloon, and it was seen as very disconcerting, as this was well monitored airspace that had just been violated. Litwin would say:
In other words, the skies above this NATO fleet were very carefully observed and nothing flew around overhead unobserved. But I knew that I had taken a picture of what looked like a ping-pong ball 10 feet over my head.
On that very same day the oddness would continue when three Danish Air Force officers at Karup Air Field, Denmark, saw a shiny metal disc-like object move rapidly out towards the fleet at sea. On September 21 another silver sphere seeming to be speeding away from the fleet’s position was tracked by a formation of RAF jets. The jets moved to intercept the mysterious object, but found that it was easily able to evade them with a physics defying display of maneuvers and speed, after which is shot off into the distance. It would apparently appear once again to follow the planes, but then disappear for good when one of the pilots circled around towards it.
In many of these cases there turned out to be radar confirmation, and considering the experience of these witnesses there seemed to be little reason to think that these could be mere weather balloons or some atmospheric phenomena or Venus. There were numerous other reports from personnel aboard ships and aircraft with the fleet, from witnesses of all nationalities, and even none other than Dwight D. Eisenhower supposedly saw one as he was aboard one of the vessels. One witness reported on this incident thusly:
We were North and East of England with the NATO fleet in the North Atlantic. It was about 1:30 a.m. Through the stormy rain and lightning, this big blue-white light appeared right off starboard bow. It came down to 100 feet off the water and just hung there as we cruised by it. The UFO was easy to see when the lightning flashed. It then rose straight and left. Four of us saw it. Here’s the kicker! General Ike, who’d flown over by chopper with the Admiral had just come out on the signal bridge wearing P.J.s and a robe looking for coffee. We were sitting and making small talk when the bright light came on. We all watched it ten minutes, then just stood there staring at each other. After a while, General Eisenhower said, he better go ‘check this out’ and left. He also told us to ‘forget about it for now’. Next day and ever after, nothing was ever said about it. I don’t know what it was or why it was hushed, but I saw it.
Interestingly, even after Operation Mainbrace ended on September 25 UFO sightings reports would come pouring in from the region, almost as if they had been agitated by the activities the fleet had been carrying out, before suddenly disappearing as mysteriously as they had arrived. What brought these phenomena here? Are these forces drawn to our military activities for some reason, or is this just misidentifications, weather balloons, and Venus? Considering the caliber of witnesses on offer here, perhaps it is best to keep an open mind, and the Operation Mainbrace UFO encounters remain a well-documented fixture of UFO lore.
Among the many witnesses of UFO phenomena, some of them really stand out, and some of the most remarkable of these are when the men or women of law enforcement report their encounters with these otherworldly forces. These are people out doing their job to serve and protect, yet sometimes it seems that they come across things that nothing in their experience or training has prepared them for. Here we will look at a few of some of the most terrifying UFO encounters that police officers have reported, in which the outcome was truly bizarre and frightening.
For our first case we go back to the 1960s. On September 3, 1965 a Deputy Sheriff Bob Goode was out on patrol along Highway 35, just outside of Damon, Texas, joined by another officer, Chief McCoy. At around 11PM they allegedly noticed a purple light off in the distance. As they stared at it wondering just what they were looking at, another smaller light reportedly detached from the main body, after which both seemed to hover. The curious officers began taking a series of dark backroads that would take them closer to the strange phenomena, which they estimated was around 5 or 6 miles away. They got about as close as the roads would take them and stopped the patrol car to marvel once again at those eerie hovering lights, and as they did they were startled when the two objects came rushing right towards them with breathtaking speed, covering several miles within seconds. The objects then seemed to position themselves directly overhead, bathing the entire landscape in bright purple light, like day time on some alien world, and they could feel heat emanating from them. McCoy would say the larger object was “as big as a football field,” and later say of the frightening experience:
The bulk of the object was plainly visible at this time and appeared to be triangular shaped with a bright purple light on the left end and the smaller, less bright, blue light on the right end. The bulk of the object appeared to be dark gray in color with no other distinguishing features. It appeared to be about 200 feet wide and 40-50 feet thick in the middle, tapering off toward both ends. There was no noise or any trail. The bright purple light illuminated the ground directly underneath it and the area in front of it, including the highway and the interior of our patrol car. The tall grass under the object did not appear to be disturbed. There was a bright moon out and it cast a shadow of the object on the ground immediately below it in the grass.
Image by Steve Baxter
The two men tore out of there, and after a few moments of hovering the lights shot off back to their original position. The two officers stopped once more to observe them, but the chances of a repeat of what had happened scared them into leaving. They would later be interviewed by a Major Laurence Leach, Jr., of Ellington Air Force Base, who deemed them to be very sincere and of sound judgement, stating, “There is no doubt in my mind that they definitely saw some unusual object or phenomenon.”
A couple of years later, in 1967 we have the account of patrolman Herb Schirmer, who was a police officer in Ashland, Nebraska. On the evening of December 3 of that year he was on his usual patrol and things were pretty routine until he noticed two red lights over Highway 63, which he at first took to be the lights of a big rig truck at first. Still, something felt off about it, and so he drove off towards the lights to investigate, soon realizing that this was no truck. According to Schirmer, the red lights were in fact emanating from what looked to be the portholes of a metallic, semi-spherical object hovering just over the highway in front of him. As he got closer he could see that it had a sort of walkway around it and some kind of landing gear dangling from the bottom. The object would then float upwards and speed off into the distance, and this is where things would get bizarre.
Although nothing else seemed to have happened at the time, a look at the clock showed that it was nearly 3 AM, which was odd because he had only just started approaching the object around 10 minutes before. As he drove back to the station that bewildering sense of lost time intruded upon his thoughts, and he also began to feel physically ill. Something was itchy on his neck, and he reached around to feel a large welt there that he could not explain. Schirmer would report the whole crazy encounter, and this caught the attention of a UFO research organization called the Condon Commission, who believed that he had possibly been abducted.
Image by Steve Baxter
A hypnosis session was organized, during which Schirmer described being rendered paralyzed and unable to remove his sidearm shortly after stopping his vehicle. He was then apparently beamed aboard the craft and telepathically communicated with by humanoid beings in uniforms bearing winged serpent insignias, who claimed to draw power from electrical lines and to be from the planet Venus. Schirmer would go on to quit the force several months later due to post traumatic stress from his experience and recurring physical problems. In the meantime, he was apparently the object of ridicule within the community and his wife eventually left him because he could not stop talking about the UFO he had seen.
From the 1970s we have the frightening encounter relayed by an officer Manuel Amparano, of Kerman, California. It was a little after 3:30 AM on May 13, 1978 when Amparano was on a routine patrol and noticed a “a circular-type thing, similar to a round fireball or a setting sun, about 100 to 150 feet off the ground.” Thinking that this was maybe a fire, he got closer to investigate and what he took to be a tree on fire suddenly lifted off of the ground. The amazed officer quickly trained his searchlight on the object, and was met with a bright blue flash, after which whatever it was sped off. That flash soon turned out to have been perhaps some sort of weapon, as officer Amparano claims he was left with burns on his face and chest, of which he would say:
It was like a sunburn when you fall asleep at the pool. There were white blisters on the parts of my body facing that light. I also had trouble with sunlight. It was like right after you have your eyes checked and they are sensitive to light. That lasted about a week.
Image by Steve Baxter
When doctors examined him, they came to the conclusion that these particular burns seemed to have been caused by microwaves, although no one could figure out how it had happened. An investigation of the area of the purported encounter would turn up a circle of dead vegetation, where it is claimed nothing would grow for years after, although now it is apparently an almond orchard. What happened here? Who knows?
The following year we have a somewhat similar type of encounter, reported by a Deputy Sheriff Val Johnson, of Marshall County, Minnesota. On August 27, 1979, Johnson was on patrol near the North Dakota border when he saw a strange light apparently off in the wilderness. As he took a side road to get closer, the light apparently began to approach his car at an amazing rate of speed. It seemed to almost be on a collision course, and Johnson lost consciousness after being blinded by a bright flash to the sound of breaking glass. When he came to he was still sitting in his stalled car, happy to be alive but alarmed that he could not see anything. Oddly, his car had travelled some distance from where the object had engaged him, and he would say of his bizarre experience:
I noticed a very bright, brilliant light, 8 to 12 inches in diameter, 3 to 4 feet off the ground. The edges were very defined. I thought perhaps at first that it could be an aircraft in trouble, as it appeared to be a landing light from an aircraft. I proceeded south on #220. I proceeded about a mile and three tenths or a mile and four tenths when the light intercepted my vehicle causing damage to a headlight, putting a dent in the hood, breaking the windshield and bending antennas on top of the vehicle.
At this point, at the interception of the light, I was rendered either unconscious, neutralized or unknowing for a period of approximately 39 minutes. From the point of intersection, my Police vehicle proceeded south in a straight line 854 feet, at which point the brakes were engaged by forces unknown to myself, as I do not remember doing this, and I left about approximately 99 feet of black marks on the highway before coming to rest sideways in the road with the grille of my hood facing in an easterly direction. At 2:19 a.m., I radioed a 10-88 (Officer Needs Assistance) to my dispatcher in Warren.
Image by Steve Baxter
The officer called on his radio for help, and he was rushed to the hospital with what looked like burns on his face and irritation of the eyes. Meanwhile, the patrol car he had been in was found to have a smashed in right side headlight, a crack in the windshield on the driver’s side, an unusual circular dent on the hood, also on the driver’s side, and a roof antenna that was bent over at a 60-degree angle. The windshield was particularly weird, as it seemed to have sustained “inward and outward forces acting almost simultaneously.” All of the damage was on the driver’s side of the vehicle. The interior clock was also found to be 14 minutes slow, and oddly Johnson’s wristwatch had the same anomaly. Experts who examined the vehicle would be unable to explain the peculiar damage it had incurred, and it did not seem to be any normal collision, with the official explanation being “mechanical forces of unknown origin.” Luckily his eyes would heal and he would regain his eyesight.
These have just been a few of the more remarkable and harrowing encounters that officers of the law have faced, although there are more where this came from. It is interesting to note that these are seasoned professionals out on patrol not looking for the mysterious and certainly more or less considered to be more reliable witnesses than most. We are left to wonder just what would cause them to risk their reputations and standing to come forward to report these things, and if they were simply tall tales why they would do such a thing. Considering the police pedigree of these cases, it certainly lends them a bit of added weight, and truly plunges them into the bizarre.
A special thanks to Steve Baxter for all of the amazing artwork he provided for this article.
As far as we know, we’re the only life in this solar system. While there are other places in the solar system where we think life could exist, nothing has been proven or even been close to proven. At this point we can’t say for sure it’s even possible for extraterrestrial life to exist outside our little bubble. That might soon change, however. Researchers claim that they have recently discovered the first-known extraterrestrial protein in a meteorite that fell to Earth 30 years ago.
Over the last few years, other building blocks of life have been discovered in meteorites from our Solar System. Cyanide, ribose, and amino acids have all been discovered in space rocks here on Earth. This latest find would be the first-ever whole extraterrestrial protein.
The paper detailing the discovery was uploaded to the preprint server arXiv, and it has yet to be peer-reviewed, so bear that in mind. The discovery sill has to be replicated by other scientists to prove that it is, in fact, an extraterrestrial protein. If it does check out, it would be a clue that there very well could be extraterrestrial life (of some sort) here in this solar system. While it wouldn’t be direct evidence of extraterrestrial life, proteins are necessary building blocks of life and it would show that they can form outside of Earth.
The meteorite that contains the alleged extraterrestrial protein fell in Algeria in 1990
The meteorite, named Acfer 086, landed in Algeria in 1990. Since then, it has been kept in a museum. It had been analyzed previously, but the authors of the paper decided to attack it again with “state-of-the-art” mass spectrometry. According to ScienceAlert, astronomer and chemist Chenoa Tremblay of CSIRO Astronomy & Space Science in Australia, who was not involved in the research says:
“In general, they’re taking a meteor that has been preserved by a museum and has been analysed previously. And they are modifying the techniques that they’re using in order to be able to detect amino acid inside of this meteor, but in a higher signal ratio.”
According to the paper, the researchers found the amino acid glycine, which had already been discovered in the meteorite, at a higher signal ratio than previously found. They also found that the glycine was bound to other elements including iron and lithium. After modeling the structure they realized that they had an entirely new alien protein, which they named hemolithin.
The protein has a chemical composition found in long-period comets.
While hemolithin is similar in structure to proteins found on Earth, its ratio of deuterium to hydrogen isn’t found on Earth. It is found, however, in long-period comets. The researchers argue that this protein likely formed in the proto-solar disc, some 4.6 billion years ago.
They do acknowledge that they may be completely wrong, although they don’t think it’s likely. Another explanation is that this isn’t a protein at all, but some other type of polymer, but the researchers say this is an outside possibility.
It’s a bit too early to get over-excited about this. After all, it still has to pass peer-review. But there’s a good chance that this is actually an extraterrestrial protein. That would mean that the chances of extraterrestrial life in our Solar System just became a bit more plausible.
A snapshot of a distant exoplanet gives astronomers an idea of what it looks like. A snapshot of a distant exoplanet as it passes in front of its sun and light shines around it gives astronomers an idea of what the planet and its atmosphere are made of. If we assume there’s intelligent life on some of these planets, we can also assume that they’re looking back at us and trying to figure out the same thing. If we could only look back from deep space at Earth as it passes in front of the Sun, we could see the signatures of life that would tell us if an exoplanet is our cosmic twin – identical or fraternal. Last year, astronomers figured out a way to do without the need for a spaceship looking back. Instead, they looked into a giant mirror during a lunar eclipse. Wait … what?
“Observations of the Earthshine off the Moon allow for the unique opportunity to measure the large-scale Earth atmosphere. Another opportunity is realized during a total lunar eclipse which, if seen from the Moon, is like a transit of the Earth in front of the Sun. We thus aim at transmission spectroscopy of an Earth transit by tracing the solar spectrum during the total lunar eclipse of January 21, 2019.”
As described in a paper published this week in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics and summarized in a press release, lead author Klaus Strassmeier from the Leibniz Institute for Astrophysics in Potsdam firgured out that a total lunar eclipse on January 21, 2019 – when the Earth passed directly between the Moon and the Sun — was a total ‘solar’ eclipse to anyone looking at the Sun (with protective glasses, of course) from the lunar surface. Since we know (or at least can confidently assume) that no one did that, Strassmeier and astronomers using the Large Binocular Telescope in Arizona took advantage of the dimmed yet reflective surface of the Moon and looked into a mirror image that showed Earth’s atmosphere as sunlight passed through it around the edges – a filtered light with the appropriate name “Earthshine.”
Large Binocular Telescope
(Credit: NASA)
“The Earth’s atmosphere contains many by-products of biological activity, such as oxygen and ozone in association with water vapor, methane and carbon dioxide. These biogenic molecules present attractive narrow molecular bands at optical and near infrared wavelengths for detection in atmospheres of other planets.”
Our Earthshine also showed traces of sodium, calcium and potassium — all elements generated by or needed by human life on the planet. A similar planetshine would thus indicate that an exoplanet has or is capable of hosting similar life forms or even humans, once we figure out how to travel that far.
Besides the Large Binocular Telescope, the astronomers needed the Potsdam Echelle Polarimetric and Spectroscopic Instrument (PEPSI) to separate tiny spectral-line absorptions of the Earth’s atmosphere from the normal solar spectrum. That combination allowed them to find two elements that don’t belong in Earth’s atmosphere — manganese and barium. Instead of from Earth, the astronomers believe these two chemicals came from the Sun.
Lunar eclipse
“To understand this phenomenon further, the researchers plan to study the Sun’s atmosphere more closely to trace those two conspicuous chemical elements. Doing so will reveal how they traveled from the center of the Sun to its limb, leaving an imprint on Earth’s upper atmosphere, the researchers say.”
In an interview with Inverse, the astronomers admitted they have much more to learn before they’ll feel confident identifying an exoplanet as a potential Earth clone. That should not take anything away from the fantastic accomplishment of using the Moon as a mirror to check ourselves out.
When astronomers decided that Pluto was no longer a planet, many who memorized the names of nine planets in in school and spent hours building models of them for science projects were upset that all of this high-quality education was for naught. This was never a concern with the Moon, which didn’t have a name to memorize nor any competition in orbit around the Earth … until recently. Astronomers have discovered the second known mini-moon circling the planet, and there’s probably more. Will there be time to add it before the next science fair? Will it still be around by then?
Kacper Wierzchos @WierzchosKacper Feb 25 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. https://twitter.com/i/status/1232460436634656769
On February 15, 2020, astronomers Kacper Wierzchos and Teddy Pruyne at the Catalina Sky Survey operating out of the University of Arizona’s Lunar and Planetary Laboratory in Tucson spotted what they believed to be a mini-moon orbiting Earth. They quickly made over 30 more observations in two days to confirm the discovery of a space rock measuring a mere 6 to 12 feet (1.9 to 3.5 meters) in diameter – so small that it may not have been discovered had it not been reflecting sunlight like its really big brother. They quickly commissioned a photographer and captured the first image of the mini-moon – now called 2020 CD3 or C26FED2 – and the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory’s Minor Planet Center announced it to the world.
“Orbit integrations indicate that 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.”
Wait … what? “Temporarily bound”? Maybe you should scrap the ‘Earth and its Moons’ project completely and go with an old reliable volcano. It turns out that 2020 CD3 and the only other mini-moon — 2006 RH120 – don’t stay in Earth orbit forever. In fact, they don’t even stay for a few years. 2006 RH120 was only in Earth orbit from September 2006 to June 2007, and 2020 CD3, while it’s been around since around 2017, will probably leave by April 2020. That’s no joke – merely a sign of what the two mini-moons really are — tiny near-Earth asteroids that get captured by Earth’s gravity for a short time before slipping back out into space or being consumed by the atmosphere.
Or are they something else?
“Although we still have no idea entirely what the object is, experts believe it is either a rare space rock or a manmade object that has become locked by our planet’s gravity.”
Curiosmos reports that the highly-reflective surface of 2020 CD3 has some questioning whether it’s truly a space rock or if it might be a missing satellite, rocket part or other piece of space junk. It may be difficult to identify 2020 CD3 before April because it’s moving away from Earth.
“It came just in time to witness humanity fight the coronavirus. Coincidence…I think not.”
If it’s not an NEO and not one of ours, Scott Waring of ET Data Base suggests it’s one of theirs – with ‘them’ being aliens monitoring the spread of the coronavirus on Earth. Farfetched? Not much more farther to fetch than the theory that the virus came to Earth on a recent meteor which traveled over Wuhan before crashing in China. Yes, most people would not reject ‘coincidence’ as fast as Waring does and the dots are pretty far apart. What would help is a better photo of 2020 CD3 or the discovery of more mini-moons – something astronomer Amy Mainzer sees happening as soon as the Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile is operational in 2022 and recording images of the entire sky every few days to produce a time-lapse movie of the universe.
“We can only see what we have the technology to see. And necessarily, that’s not everything all of the time.”
Type that up, put it on your ‘Earth and its Moons’ science project and maybe the judges will give you a break … this time
NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSSEen stukje van het scherpe panoramabeeld dat Curiosity maakte op Mars.
WETENSCHAP & PLANEETCuriosity, de robotjeep van NASA die de rode planeet Mars aan het onderzoeken is, heeft zijn scherpste panoramafoto ooit van het martiaanse oppervlak genomen. Opgebouwd uit meer dan 1.000 zorgvuldig samengestelde foto’s bevat het geheel maar liefst 1,8 miljard pixels aan Mars-landschap.
Curiosity Rover✔@MarsCuriosity
How’s this for 2020 vision? Over the holidays, I took a series of high-res photos of my hometown on #Mars. This panorama is made up of a crisp 1.8 billion pixels. It’s my most detailed view to date.
De foto’s werden genomen met de ‘Mastcam’ van de bekende rover, die zijn telefotolens gebruikte om het spectaculaire vergezicht vast te leggen. Een groothoeklens voegde een panorama van onder meer het dak van de Marsjeep en de robotarm toe, goed voor bijna 650 miljoen pixels. Beide panorama’s samen tonen ‘Glen Torridon’, een gebied aan de kant van Mount Sharp, de berg die Curiosity volop aan het bestuderen is.
Leuk detail: De beelden werden gemaakt tussen 24 november en 1 december vorig jaar, toen het bevoegde missieteam van het Amerikaanse ruimtevaartagentschap enkele dagen verlof had rond Thanksgiving. Met weinig taakjes voorhanden tijdens het wachten op de terugkeer van het team en nieuwe commando’s, had de Marsrover de zeldzame kans om af en toe even rustig achteruit te zakken en zijn omgeving vanuit exact hetzelfde punt te kieken.
(Lees verder onder de foto)
NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS
Focus
Uiteindelijk was Curiosity meer dan 6,5 uur - verspreid over 4 dagen - zoet met de speciale fotoshoot. Om een consistente verlichting te krijgen, werd telkens bewust enkel tussen de middag en 14 uur lokale Marstijd geklikt. Achter de goeie focus van het totaalplaatje zat een complex programma.
“Terwijl velen van ons team thuis kalkoen zaten te eten, maakte Curiosity dit feestmaal voor de ogen”, zegt projectwetenschapper Ashwin Vasavada.
Wil je Mars graag van nog wat dichterbij bekijken? Met deze speciale tool kan je verder inzoomen.
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Russia's Roswell, Alien Autopsy, Unexplained Abduction Cases Globally, Philip Mantle
Russia's Roswell, Alien Autopsy, Unexplained Abduction Cases Globally, Philip Mantle
Once Upon a Missing Time, About the Author
Philip Mantle is an international UFO researcher, lecturer and broadcaster. His books have been published in six different languages around the world. He is the former Director of Investigations for the British UFO Research Association and former MUFON representative for England.
Philip has written articles and features for numerous publications around the world and has been both editor and assistant editor of high street UFO publications.
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Nikola Tesla: 13,000 Year Old Black Knight Satellite UFO That NASA Knows About
Nikola Tesla: 13,000 Year Old Black Knight Satellite UFO That NASA Knows About
13,000 Year Old Black Knight Satellite UFO That NASA Knows About
Something highly secret is being monitored by NASA, an ancient satellite orbiting earth that’s not ours! First detected by Nikola Tesla and then by astronomers around the world, this strange polar orbiting craft may still be producing signals…
Presented by David Wilks at Awakening UFO & Conspicuous Life Expo, Manchester, UK.
Giant UFO Moves Through Or Solar System, NASA Footage, Video, UFO Sighting News.
Giant UFO Moves Through Or Solar System, NASA Footage, Video, UFO Sighting News.
Date of sighting: Feb 19-20, 2020 stereo A camera Location of sighting: Earths sun Source:NASA Here is a really interesting video of a circular craft with a diamond shaped center. It was moving through a NASA SOHO video and got caught. The UFO is there for only 4 seconds, but if slowed down, we can see its detail well. This is 100% proof that aliens are in our solar system right now. This ship is massive, moon size or bigger and moving incredibly fast. I'm sure NASA would never mention it because if they did, they would have to tell the public the truth about aliens existing. They don't want to cause any panic. So they wont. Scott C. Waring
Black UFO Seen In The Daytime Over Mexico, Video, UFO Sighting News.
Black UFO Seen In The Daytime Over Mexico, Video, UFO Sighting News.
Date of sighting: Feb 16, 2020 Location of sighting: Queretaro, Mexico This dark black UFO is moving over a central Mexico during the daylight which gives us great detail. The object is coming down behind some trees and appears to be interested in the surround area foliage. Past UFOs have been seen to do similar things...flying over the surface of water, bushes and trees. Perhaps its running biological tests on the plants. Awesome daytime raw footage. Scott C. Waring
Eyewitness states:
We do not know what it was. It was recorded in Querétaro, Mexico. A friend said that he looked like a flying vochito.
Do You believe the Earth is flat? 11 million Brazilians believe in the Flat Earth theory
Do You believe the Earth is flat? 11 million Brazilians believe in the Flat Earth theory
According to Anderson Neves, the Earth is flat and does not rotate, the sun and the moon are close to the world, within a large dome that surrounds our flattened planet.
A malignant pseudo-science has corrupted the education system around the world,It calls the idea of a round Earth "humankind's greatest lie, dictated by the global elite."
"Just look at the horizon. Climb a mountain and take pictures. You can see the Earth isn't curved," says Neves, clutching a level to illustrate his point.
The Flat-Earthers are brimming with counter-factual questions: If the Earth is rotating at 1,700 kilometers (1,000 miles) per hour at the equator, why doesn't the movement make everything fly off? If it's a sphere, why can't we see the curve from an airplane, reports Phys.org.
A recent survey out of Brazil suggests that around seven percent which is about 11 million residents in the country have become believers in the controversial concept.
Unidentified flying object changes shape next to the ISS before disappearing into space
Unidentified flying object changes shape next to the ISS before disappearing into space
An unidentified flying object appears close to the International Space Station on March 4, 2020. Then, The UFO changes shape, moves away from the ISS before it disappears into space.
Many UFOs and other strange space vehicles have been observed on the ISS live feed lately, they come and they go and nobody knows where they come from.
The Unexplained UFO Cover Up Cases and The End of Project Blue Book
The Unexplained UFO Cover Up Cases and The End of Project Blue Book
On December 17, 1969 the Secretary of the Air Force announced the termination of Project Blue Book, the Air Force program for the investigation of UFOs. The decision to discontinue UFO investigations was based on an evaluation of a report prepared by the University of Colorado entitled, “Scientific Study of Unidentified Flying Objects;” a review of the University of Colorado’s report by the National Academy of Sciences; past UFO studies; and Air Force experience investigating UFO reports during the past two decades.
Ever wonder what kinds of unusual objects pilots see from the air?
With a truly unique vantage point, they've reported a range of strange sightings, including UFOs, geoglyphs, and drones. But they've also had unobstructed views to some of nature's most incredible sights.
Here are 10 wild things that pilots have seen while flying.
1. Several pilots have claimed to have seen UFOs.
We might not have confirmation of any UFOs, but pilots have seen something. shanecotee/ iStock
Pilots have claimed to see UFOs (unidentified flying objects) for decades – sightings usually involve bright lights or objects flying in a formations. In June 1947, for example, pilot Kenneth Arnold said he saw nine glowing blue objects flying in a V over Mount Rainier in Seattle, Washington. In November 2018, pilots reported seeing UFOs off the coast of Ireland.
A satellite image shows Hurricane Florence off the eastern coast of the United States on Thursday, September 13, 2018. NOAA via AP
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Pilot Terry Lynch recalled his experience of flying near a hurricane to Popular Mechanics.
"I could see the lights of Charleston going out, and I knew they were catching hell down there. I'd much rather be in the air. When the wind pushes, a plane gives," he said of flying over the South Carolina coast during Hurricane Hugo in 1989.
Commercial flights typically go higher in the air than a hurricane, so aircraft can sometimes just fly over them. Meteorologist and pilot James Aydelott told The Points Guy, "Each storm is different, but down low, near the eye, where the C-130 and P-3 'Hurricane Hunter' flights fly, there is often turbulence. High above, from all accounts I've seen, the ride is smooth. As far as flying goes, there should be no issues flying above a hurricane in an aircraft equipped to monitor radar echo tops."
3. NASA pilots have seen rectangular-shaped icebergs.
It is unusual to see an iceberg that shape. Mario Tama/Getty Images
NASA pilots spotted a rectangular iceberg while flying over the northern Antarctic Peninsula. Such icebergs look as if they have been purposefully cut, and they are rarely seen. Of the experience, one pilot told Mysterious Universe:
"I thought it was pretty interesting; I often see icebergs with relatively straight edges, but I've not really seen one before with two corners at such right angles like this one had."
4. Some lucky pilots get to fly over pink lakes as part of their day job.
So many people want to see pink lakes that scenic flights over them are now offered. The most famous is Lake Hillier in Western Australia. There are also pink lakes in British Columbia, Spain, and Canada. The lakes get their pink color from a high level of salinity along with algae that make carotenoids, or organic pigments, turning the water pink. These lakes create such great amounts of salt that locals harvest and use it.
5. Geoglyphs can also be seen from the sky.
Geoglyphs can only be seen from the air. lovelypeace/ iStock
Geoglyphs are designs built into the natural landscape via mounds of earth. Most geoglyphs are large crosses, squares, and rings. Some geoglyphs can be as wide as 1,300 feet. The structural designs can be found in northern Kazakhstan, Russia, Brazil, Peru, and other places.
6. Pilots have experienced lightning striking their planes.
Some planes can fly better during lightening storms than others. Jurkos/ iStock
It's not uncommon for a plane to get hit by lightning. Aircraft are made of aluminum, which conducts electricity, but their design ensures the lightning current stays on the outside of the plane. Some private planes are not made of the same materials as commercial planes, so pilots flying those aircraft need to be cautious about getting near thunderstorms.
NASA pilot Conway Roberts described flying a jet into a cold front to the New York Times:
''I was flying at about 40,000 feet over Amarillo, when I first started seeing lightning from this front several hundred miles away. The thunderstorms that the front was generating were just like a picket fence. They had very little depth and were shoulder-to-shoulder, hundreds of them, and they all had almost continuous lightning.''
7. St. Elmo's Fire is a phenomenon similar to lightning.
A phenomenon that only some pilots are lucky enough to see, St. Elmo's Fire is similar to lightning.
It's a branch-shaped discharge of atmospheric electricity into the sky that's caused by heavy thunderstorms in combination with a plane flying through an exceptionally high-intensity electric field.
But how exactly does this phenomenon happen? When there is a difference in the concentration of electrons between two objects, the potential difference induces an electric field. This electric field can become so strong that air can no longer suppress it and electrons jump through the air creating a visual spark. This occurrence happens on a lesser scale when you touch a doorknob and give yourself a minor shock. But because thunderstorms create such a powerful electric field, there becomes a dramatic difference in charge between the air and the pointed tip of an airplane, that a continuous spark is created, namely St. Elmo's Fire.
Unlike lightning, St. Elmo's Fire isn't the movement of electricity, but the shot of electrons into the air, aka a "corona discharge."
The flashes in the sky look like dancing lightning bolts. St. Elmo's Fire is usually blue or purple in color, but can also appear to be green. It can also be heard "singing" on the plane's radio — a hissing sound that goes up and down the musical scale.
8. Some claim they have flown over rainbows.
It is technically impossible for a rainbow to appear in front of a plane. undefined undefined/ iStock
People have claimed to have flown over rainbows, but the laws of physics tell us that this is not possible. Rainbows are formed when sunlight hits water. The water splits the light into its various colors, reflecting them at an angle of 42 degrees. Since the rainbow is only seen when that consistent angle is maintained, it's impossible to see a rainbow in front of you and then also fly over it. It is possible, however, for a rainbow to appear to the side of or below a plane.
9. Balloons have appeared at high altitudes.
Helium balloons have obstructed flight sensors. jakkapan21/ iStock
High-altitude balloons have caused trouble for pilots and airports, since they can obstruct flight sensors and create other problems. A passenger flight over London (flying 10,000 feet over the city) once hit a helium balloon, but it did not have any adverse effects on the flight. However, these high-altitude balloons could potentially cause a collision — they are certainly not something a pilot wants to see at eye level when mid-flight.
10. Drones have also been getting a little too close to planes, according to pilots.
There are strict laws for drones, but sometimes they aren't followed. Naypong/ iStock
Pilots have seen drones get very close to their planes. In London earlier this year, a pilot reported spotting a drone flying just 20 feet below the plane. There are strict regulations for drones in flight – they can't come within 50 meters of people or structures or within a kilometer of airports, and can't get higher than 400 feet. The pilot reported the following, which was announced by the UK Airprox Board, according to ITV:
"He had no doubt that it was being deliberately flown under the flight path in an attempt to collide with an aircraft."
In 2018, a modest 3395 people in the U.S. and Canada submitted their accounts of UFO sightings to the National UFO Reporting Center. In 2019, that number jumped to 5971.
Apparently, aliens are especially fond of flying their aircrafts over California, Florida, and Washington; according to ABC News, they were the three most popular states for UFO sightings in 2019, with 485, 385, and 222 reports, respectively. Nevada, home of the infamous Area 51, totaled only about 70 for the year.
Peter Davenport, director of the Washington-based organization, told ABC News that he didn’t have any insight as to why the number had jumped nearly 76 percent in just one year.
"One of the mysteries of ufology is there is a fluctuation in the number of reports over the years," he said. "Some years it’s been low, but it’s gotten higher recently."
American Astronomical Society spokesman Rick Fienberg, on the other hand, offered a few ideas to ABC News: Not only were Jupiter and Venus extra-visible last year, but SpaceX sent a total of 180 new satellites into space. Since the National UFO Reporting Center simply catalogs reports—it doesn’t investigate them—it’s likely that many are actually planets, satellites, or other easily explainable phenomena. As Fienberg pointed out, the u in UFO stands for unidentified, not unidentifiable.
"If you’re not keeping up with the news and not familiar with the skyline, you might mistakenly see an unidentified flying object. It may be unidentified to you, but known to others," Fienberg said.
We’re not ruling out the possibility that extraterrestrial beings are getting more careless about concealing themselves and their vehicles as time goes on—they’ve supposedly been slipping up as far back as 1400 BCE. Find out about 12 notorious UFO sightings from history here.
In 1947, a pilot spotted a fleet of “saucer-like” aircrafts speeding across the sky. It was only a matter of time until paranoia set in.
IN 1947, KENNETH Arnold was flying his CallAir A-2 between Chehalis and Yakima, Washington, when he took a detour to search for a downed Marine Corps aircraft. There was a reward for anyone who could find the plane, and who couldn’t use $5,000?
Arnold flew around searching for a while, and accidentally found something else—something much stranger than what he’d actually been looking for. As he watched, rapt, nine objects flew through the air in formation.
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That’s nothing crazy, really. You’d call it a fleet and go on with your day. But the craft appeared to be traveling much faster than the jets of the time. Arnold allegedly clocked them, as they flew between Mount Rainier and Mount Adams, at significantly more than 1,000 miles per hour. When he landed back on the ground, he—he claimed later—told an East Oregonian reporter that the objects skipped like saucers on water, referring to their motion and not their shape. The reporter wrote, however, that the craft appeared “saucer-like.” That line soon rushed out on the AP wire. The term “flying saucer” showed up a day later—the first time of many times to come—when the Chicago Sun ran the headline “Supersonic Flying Saucers Sighted by Idaho Pilot.” The actual path of the saucer description, from Arnold’s mouth to our modern ears, is more complicated: The reporter held fast to the transcription, and as a National Aviation Reporting Center on Anomalous Phenomena analysis notes, Arnold had plenty of opportunities to correct the record earlier.
“It seems impossible, but there it is,” the article ended, quoting Arnold.
Arnold’s sighting marks the origin point of modern UFO lore and terminology. His story contains several archetypal characteristics (which it would, of course, itself being the archetype): lights in the sky, spotted by a pilot who knows the sky and what should be in it (what insiders call “a reliable observer”), moving fast and with erratic, intelligent-seeming choreography. You could almost swap Arnold with the pilots in the videos from the Pentagon’s Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, which ran secretly from around 2007 to 2012, and the military personnel who have come forward since, saying (probably honestly!) that they have seen quick, creepy, inexplicable things up there. Their status as hardened fighter jocks is what lends their stories credibility and unnerves the softer and less experienced rest of us.
For talking about his story, Arnold got more—and different—attention than he would have liked: People didn’t believe him. It was only a reflection on the glass, a meteor. He had made it all up. In his own book, Coming of the Saucers, Arnold wrote, “I have been subjected to ridicule, much loss of time and money, newspaper notoriety, magazine stories, reflections on my honesty, my character, my business dealings.” He was not happy about it, and according to the 1975 book The UFO Controversy in America, Arnold said: “If I saw a 10-story building flying through the air, I would never say a word about it.” (This statement, though, remains hard to reconcile with the fact that he published his own book, today’s edition complete with pulpy cover art showing bathing-suit-clad women holding pictures of outer space up for some saucer pilots to see.)
Arnold’s sighting, however he felt about it, began an epidemic. Soon, other people around the US started to see their saucers. The night sky opened up, kicking off a ufological period insiders refer to as a “flap”: a period of increased sightings. The term also has the contextual tinge of the word’s other definition, “an increased state of agitation.” Edward Ruppelt, an Air Force officer who would go on to be part of governmental UFO investigations, wrote that “in Air Force terminology a ‘flap’ is a condition, or situation, or state of being of a group of people characterized by an advanced degree of confusion that has not quite yet reached panic proportions.” In this case, the people were not yet panicking about strange sights in the sky.
If Arnold hadn’t said a word, history probably would have nevertheless been set on a similar course. Someone else’s sighting would likely have catalyzed a similar flap—a year later, maybe two, or five. All events unfold in a cultural medium, after all. And the medium of Arnold’s time—colored by the fear of outsiders, fear of invasions, and awe of technology, just like today—was fertile ufological ground. Perhaps, in a world without Arnold’s encounter, people would have described “the phenomenon” differently. Perhaps we wouldn’t have the term “flying saucer” at all. Maybe it would have been pancakes or spheres. But Arnold and saucers are what we’ve got. So the flap that followed—and, really, all flaps to follow—bear his imprint, however faint.
WHILE WE HUMANS like to feel that we choose our own actions autonomously, math and geometry can actually describe their collective nature quite well. So our waves of UFO sightings tend to take one of two distinct shapes: a sharp peak or a bell curve. The first type is explosive, with lots of people reporting lots of UFOs at once, and then sightings dropping off around the same time. The second has a more tame, tapered onset and a more gradual offset.
Maybe, during either kind of crest, more people really do see truly strange things, as could be the case if spaceships or air forces are actually descending. Or maybe the upsurge happens because of what social scientists call “perceptual contagion”—a catching disease, whose sole symptom is that you suddenly notice things that have always existed and interpret them differently because someone else pointed them out. It’s like if a friend said to you, “Everyone who wears Abercrombie and Fitch has something to prove.” Maybe you’d never noticed anyone in an Abercrombie and Fitch shirt before at all. Now, though, you not only see them but also feel like you know something about them.
Either way, a clear relationship also exists between flaps in the general population and the onset of government programs—a symbiosis that former NASA employee Diana Palmer Hoyt has mapped out. When you view the citizens’ sightings and the feds’ research side by side, she noted in a thesis paper on the topic, “the dose-response mechanism becomes clear”: When the population begins to see saucers, the press begins to say so in the papers. Faced with citizens who expect their leaders to demystify the potentially dangerous mystery, the government has historically tried to (not always in good faith). When the flaps were fierce, its agents looked into UFO cases, adding their investigations to the quotidian explanations for the majority of sightings. Citizens are meant to believe that whatever may fly by in the future has a similarly prosaic origin. Don’t worry: It’s just a weather balloon, a too-twinkly star, Venus, atmospheric physics at play.
When a big flap pops, in other words, codified programs crop up. You can see this happening today, when in April 2019, the Navy confirmed that, given the number of unauthorized or unidentified craft that military personnel had encountered recently, it was “updating and formalizing the process by which reports of any such suspected incursions can be made to the cognizant authorities,” as Politico reported. Long before that, the first official program came together the year after Arnold’s sighting. Like the two programs that would immediately follow, spanning more than two decades of federal effort, this initial effort aimed to soothe—and redirect—the masses, while also more quietly attempting to determine whether these saucers were something the military should worry about. The ethos in general? “Publicly debunk and treat the matter lightly,” Hoyt noted, “and privately investigate, and take the matter seriously.”
THE GOVERNMENT’S FIRST UFO investigation program began the year Scrabble became a game, and the year the US passed the Marshall Plan, an effort in part to stop the spread of communism in Europe. Also, it was around the time the country began rampant missile testing in New Mexico, thanks in no small part to the German scientists and engineers. After World War II, the government gave German scientists (often from the Nazi party) new identities and fresh lives in America, as part of an initiative called Operation Paperclip. It aimed to bring American rocketry to former German heights, while keeping that same achievement from the Soviet Union. With their Teutonic know-how, our aero-flight program could catch up with the Russians, who had also stolen some scientists from across the border.
Initially called Project Saucer (an obviously bad PR idea), the government quickly renamed its first UFO program Project Sign. It began in January of 1948 and ran for just one year. At the time, rockets from the Operation Paperclip scientists were not for spacefaring; they were weapons. But some of these stolen scientists (and their non-Paperclip peers) reasoned that with a little more thrust, the rockets could enter orbit. And with a little more oomph than that, they could leave orbit. Despite the less warlordy dream, the country wouldn’t send rockets to orbit till the late 1950s. It’s interesting that looking out into the universe, we saw our own future and foisted it onto others, already successful.
In the Arnold era of almost-kind-of spaceflight, fears about who might take over or destroy the world pervaded the US. The country had just gotten out of a war, using planet-destroying bombs that the Soviets would also soon possess. The globe felt cold and tenuous. And Project Sign attempted to find out whether the potential conquerors included experimental enemy aircraft or hostile aliens. We’re in a similar situation today, with worries about whether America will be overtaken by China, about the influence Russia has over our world-leading government. The shadow of international tension looms large, and it’s a little like those focused on the threat of UFOs have managed to capture and redirect our existential fear outward (way outward), while tinging it with awe.
Three months after Arnold’s sighting, Lieutenant General Nathan Twining sent a message called “AMC [Air Materiel Command] Opinion Concerning ‘Flying Discs’” to the commanding general of the Army Air Force.
The disputed document outlined the Lieutenant General’s belief that, while some may have been the result of “natural phenomena, such as meteors,” the objects reported were, in fact, real. Twining detailed the appearance of the objects—disc-like, and as large as a man-made aircraft—and suggested the possibility, based on reports of their movement, that “some of the objects are controlled either manually, automatically or remotely.”
These objects, he continued, tended toward the metallic, usually leaving no trail. They were normally soundless and fast. Given a lot of money and development time, the US could build aircraft with these characteristics, so maybe these UFOs were just UF-Ours, part of a classified project he wasn’t privy to. Also possible was that they were another country’s. But also possible: They didn’t exist at all.
The Air Force had undertaken low-level, unmandated investigation already, but Twining’s memo, some claim, ushered things into officialdom. A few months later, Project Sign was born. It hoovered in UFO reports and sent investigators to determine the hypothetical objects’ natures and their threat level.
As the investigations went on, the Sign group split into the two fervent factions, occupying different ends of the ideological spectrum and jockeying for power over the project. Some thought these UFOs weren’t really real, and so couldn’t be dangerous. This project was thus silly and inconsequential. Another subset of researchers, though, thought the opposite. And some of these believers soon developed what was later called the Extraterrestrial Hypothesis, a term that has stuck around since and whose meaning remains self-evident.
That leadership polarization—“it’s dumb” versus “it’s aliens”— has historically posed a problem for Air Force pilots who wanted to submit UFO reports. They never knew to which pole their case would go, or which way that pole’s boss was leaning. If one of the naysayers got their hands on it, they might think the pilot was mentally unfit—in general, and especially to be flying planes bearing guns and missiles. If their report went into the hands of an alien enthusiast, meanwhile, maybe the pilot would become known as one of them, and end up a Kenneth Arnold-type casualty.
IN 1953, IN response to the international climate and the rising tide of UFO reports, the CIA sponsored a four-day meeting called the Robertson Panel, whose findings echo ominously into the present day.
The panel’s conclusions, its very existence, and especially its CIA sponsorship remained classified at the time and for several years after. The agency didn’t want people to know the government worried about their worries about UFO reports. But they did worry, according to declassified copies of the report, which provide a cold-toned assessment of their fears. If foes could use UFOs—real or simply reported—to sow panic among the populace, causing chaos and distrust, that could prime the US for physical or psychological invasion. Imagine a hypothetical scenario in which the Russians saturate America with UFO sightings: They could launch a weapon and maybe no one would notice because the warning system would be busy chasing ghosts. Even without deliberate foreign malfeasance, if too many people got too amped and called in a panic about Venus, the government would have fewer available resources to sort the MiGs from the chaff.
Watch, the panel also advised, those UFO clubs, the civilian investigator groups that had cropped up. Should a flap occur, these groups might have the ears and minds of the people. Keep in mind “the possible use of such groups for subversive purposes.” To this day, some ufologists take this surveillance and disinformation suggestion as evidence of the virtues of their work. (If there’s nothing to worry about, why worry about us?)
Everything you need to know about SETI, the Drake equation, ’Oumuamua,
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BY SARAH SCOLES
The panel further reaffirmed some of the conclusions from Project Sign, which was later renamed Project Grudge—most notably that whatever UFOs were or were not, they did not seem to represent a national security threat. The overload was dangerous, as was the panic, along with the fact that soldiers might see a foreign spycraft and think it was merely one of those UFOs.
But we can fix this, suggested the panel. All they had to do was train people and do some very public debunking. Agencies could educate employees on how to recognize high-altitude balloons hit by moonlight, fireballs that look like floating orbs, noctilucent clouds that resemble extraterrestrial neural networks.
The debunking should happen in public. Mass media, the panelists said, could also illuminate real UFO stories and their mundane explanations. When people saw something strange, then they would assume it, like the fireball they saw on a prime-time special, was just a terrestrial phenomenon they weren’t yet acquainted with. If you want to know why people read malicious, secret-keeping intent into the Robertson Report and the investigation programs, you need only read some of the panel’s concluding statements, with an ear for their timbre: “The continued emphasis on the reporting of these phenomena does, in these perilous times, result in a threat to the orderly functioning of the protective organs of the body politic. ... National security agencies [should] take immediate steps to strip the Unidentified Flying Objects of the special status they have been given and the aura of mystery they have unfortunately acquired.”
Any time the government decides, behind closed doors, to strip something of any quality, that’s pretty much a propaganda campaign. And any time the government decides something might disrupt its tightly grasped order, that can read as a license to impose order. Given this, it’s understandable that the agency didn’t want word of its work to get out. It looked bad. It looked like something powerful had taken hold of the American public, and the government not only disliked it, but was going to finagle an end to it. If you believe UFOs are a “phenomenon,” you can read the report and see a cover-up campaign.
In keeping the panel secret, the CIA actually sowed the very seeds of distrust it had tried not to plant by keeping secrets in the first place. When word of the Robertson Panel’s existence came out years later, the public called for the report’s full release. At first, the CIA put out what National Reconnaissance Office historian Gerald Haines called a “sanitized” version. Later, the complete record was declassified. The UFO-verse was never the same again.
A new study from researchers in the Netherlands shows how scientists can detect exoplanets orbiting red dwarf stars, and learn about their environments, from the radio waves generated by auroras on those worlds.
Artist’s concept of the atmosphere of a rocky planet interacting with the strong magnetic field of its nearby red dwarf star. This would create auroras in the planet’s atmosphere powerful enough for their radio waves to be detected from Earth.
Exoplanets orbiting distant stars are hard to detect, but there are several ways to do it. The most popular method is to watch for a dip in a star’s light when an exoplanet transits in front of it. Other exoplanets are found via a tiny shift in a star’s movement through space, caused by the tug of an exoplanet’s gravity. Rarely, some exoplanets are found via direct imaging. Now there’s another novel technique that scientists are testing: finding radio waves from auroras caused by interaction between a planet and its star, red dwarf stars in particular. And now scientists using this new technique have their first candidate exoplanet.
Using the Low Frequency Array (LOFAR) radio telescope, scientists in the Netherlands have detected unusual radio waves coming from the nearby red dwarf star GJ1151. These radio waves are just what would be expected from auroras on a planet, caused by the interaction of the star and a strong magnetic field around a planetary body.
Harish Vedantham, the lead author of the study and a Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy (ASTRON) staff scientist, said in a statement:
The motion of the planet through a red dwarf’s strong magnetic field acts like an electric engine much in the same way a bicycle dynamo works. This generates a huge current that powers auroras and radio emission on the star.
Basically, the radio waves generated by auroras on a planet could be considered evidence that the planet exists, even if it hasn’t been detected yet by other methods. For this study, that would be planets orbiting red dwarf stars, since they have stronger magnetic fields that could generate auroras powerful enough to be detected.
Auroras at the poles of Jupiter on October 2, 2011. This image is a composite of data from the Chandra X-ray Observatory and the Hubble Space Telescope. Similar auroras would be more powerful on planets orbiting close to red dwarf stars and could be detected by their radio waves.
Image via NASA/ CXC/ UCL/ W. Dunn et al./ STScI/ Sci-News.
This doesn’t work in our own solar system, as the sun’s magnetic field is weaker and the currents generated in planets’ atmospheres are therefore not as strong. According to Joe Callingham, co-author of the study:
We adapted the knowledge from decades of radio observations of Jupiter to the case of this star. A scaled up version of Jupiter-Io has long been predicted to exist in the form of a star-planet system, and the emission we observed fits the theory very well.
The researchers now want to look at other red dwarfs for similar emissions. Many exoplanets have already been found orbiting red dwarfs, and red dwarfs are the most common type of star in our galaxy. It stands to reason then that many more exoplanets are waiting to be found around these stars. According to Callingham:
We now know that nearly every red dwarf hosts terrestrial planets, so there must be other stars showing similar emission. We want to know how this impacts our search for another Earth around another star.
Many planets orbiting close to red dwarf stars would likely be uninhabitable due to the strong solar radiation. But not all. The TRAPPIST-1 system has at least seven Earth-sized rocky planets, of which at least three are thought to be potentially habitable. This illustration compares them (artist’s concepts) to the four rocky planets in our solar system.
To do this, the researchers will use images from the ongoing survey of the northern sky called the LOFAR Two Metre Sky Survey (LoTSS), also called the LoTSS wide area survey. Tim Shimwell, co-author of the study, said:
With LOFAR’s sensitivity, we expect to find around 100 of such systems in the solar neighborhood. LOFAR will be the best game in town for such science until the Square Kilometre Array comes online.
Not only could this be a unique new way of detecting exoplanets, it could also help to better understand the environment of those planets. According to Vedantham:
The long-term aim is to determine what impact the star’s magnetic activity has on an exoplanet’s habitability, and radio emissions are a big piece of that puzzle. Our work has shown that this is viable with the new generation of radio telescopes, and puts us on an exciting path.
For many planets orbiting red dwarfs, habitability may be severely compromised. Red dwarfs, with their intense magnetic fields, generate powerful solar radiation, which can strip the atmospheres away from planets that are too close, rendering them uninhabitable, at least on the surface. But not all planets will necessarily suffer that fate, and there should still be planets that are far enough from their red dwarf stars to avoid that problem, while also being not too far away, allowing them to possibly have liquid water.
Harish Vedantham at ASTRON, lead author of the new study.
The TRAPPIST-1 system is a good example of this. There are at least seven Earth-sized rocky worlds orbiting this red dwarf, and at least three of them are thought to be potentially habitable with the possibility of having liquid water on their surfaces. It will be very interesting to see what further study of these worlds reveals.
Detecting planetary auroras by the radio waves they emit will be an exciting new way to find and study exoplanets, including ones that may be missed by other methods. Stay tuned!
Bottom line: A study from the Netherlands shows a new way scientists can detect exoplanets from the radio waves generated by auroras on those worlds.
Retired FBI Agent Reveals His UFO Experiences, One Involving Missing Time
Retired FBI Agent Reveals His UFO Experiences, One Involving Missing Time
He was later invited to discuss them at a meeting attended by other government employees and higher-ranking military personnel
ByRobert Hastings - The UFO Chronicles
In November 2019, Dr. Bob Jacobs and I published our book, Confession: Our Hidden Alien Encounters Revealed, in which we divulged our secret status as “experiencers”. Prior to this voluntary outing of ourselves, I was known for my investigations of nuclear weapons-related UFO cases—including incursions at ICBM sites during which the missiles were knocked offline—and Bob was publicly associated with one of the key events, the 1964 Big Sur Incident, when a UFO was inadvertently captured on motion picture film during the test launch of a dummy nuclear warhead. Almost unbelievably, the domed, disc-shaped craft was seen to circle the warhead and shoot it down with four beams of light! The film was quickly classified Top Secret and confiscated by two CIA officers.
Following our book’s publication Bob and I have each been contacted by other experiencers who wished to relate their own encounters to us. In early February 2020, I was approached by one such person, a retired FBI agent—whom I have vetted—who agreed to let me publish his account as long as he remained anonymous. He told me:
A “war baby,” I was born in 1942 while my Dad was flying missions against the Japanese in the South Pacific. Upon his return home and during my formative years, he steered me towards the U.S. Air Force—if not as a career, then at least the experience. And so upon completion of high school I enrolled in and eventually graduated from a military institution, was commissioned, and reported for active duty overseas with an Air Force flying unit in 1965.
Still single and while quartered in the base Bachelor Officers Quarters (BOQ) in 1966, I experienced the following: My suite consisted of a living room and a bedroom, connected by a bathroom. The living room and bedroom each had a door opening out into a long second floor hallway of the barracks/dormitory; my suite was approximately in the middle.
While asleep one night, tucked-in beneath my blanket, I awoke to what appeared to be a person standing beside the bed and to my immediate right. Because the room was darkened the image was indistinct. There was no sound and, since my arms were pinned beneath the blanket, I had no option but to stay still. The person/image moved away and out the nearby door. I immediately jumped out of the bed, moved to that door and opened it. There was no one in the hallway, which startled me because the second floor corridor was 50-75 feet long in either direction from my bedroom door.
Fast-forward to 1974. Upon completing four years active duty with the Air Force and returning to the United States following a combat tour in Southeast Asia, I had joined the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), completed new-agent training, and was assigned investigative duties at a large East Coast field office. Now married, but without children, and living in a single family residence just outside Mount Holly, New Jersey (McGuire AFB/Fort Dix were nearby), I experienced the following:
My wife, myself, and another couple had enjoyed a Saturday night dinner at our house and were in the finished basement recreation room area when someone called to our attention a strange light over the tree-line beyond the back yard, visible through the rear sliding glass door. Our friends—I’ll call them “Dave” and “Michelle”—were educated, responsible and professional. He was a former college quarterback and at that time a staff assistant to a highly respected college football coach. She was a schoolteacher, friend and colleague of my wife.
The “light” appeared highly strange and unrecognizable to me as any conventional aircraft and was moving in an erratic, unpredictable manner that alarmed us. Michelle immediately became highly agitated and demanded (to me) “get your gun!” I immediately ran upstairs to the master bedroom, retrieved my issue .357 sidearm, and ran back downstairs to where the other three had been standing at the doorway. However, strangely, I have no recollection as to what happened from that point forward until the following morning when, our friends apparently having returned to their home, my wife and I proceeded with our normal activities. Several weeks later, while dining out with the same couple, I mentioned the strange event, but none of the others could recall anything beyond seeing the light. I was the only one who could recall me leaving the group and returning to the basement armed.
Later, also in 1974, I had reconnected with an Air Force friend, formerly a maintenance officer in my old squadron. A chance meeting on a commuter train brought Jim and his wife Diane to our home, again on a Saturday night, where we had dinner followed by relaxation and conversation in the downstairs recreation room. I subsequently lost touch with Jim until, years later and after my transfer to FBI Headquarters in Washington, D.C., I got a call from him as he was in the capitol area for a business conference. We agreed to meet for lunch and a tour of the nearby Air and Space Museum. Afterward and while walking back across The Mall, I remarked to him that, while extensive and interesting, there was no reference to or displays of [NASA] spacecraft or the UFO phenomenon. He responded, and I’ll never forget, “Like that UFO we saw out in back of your house in New Jersey that night.” I then had and still have absolutely no recollection of the specific event to which he was referring, beyond the fact that he and Diane had actually visited us in Mt Holly.
(RH: The earlier incident involving the agent retrieving his gun clearly qualifies as a missing time event. However, as regards the second incident mentioned above, the agent only says that he could not, at a much later date, recall anything about it. One might argue that this memory lapse was mundane in nature due to the passage of time. That said, in my view it’s likely that it too involved missing time.)
Moving forward into the late 1980s, I was scheduled to travel to Connecticut on Bureau business, and was able to reconnect with our other friends, Dave and Michelle, who had by then relocated from New Jersey to the Hartford area. Upon my arrival and greeting them for dinner at a local restaurant, Michelle reminded me of “the UFO we saw that night” in Mt Holly. Once again, none of us could remember anything else about that event.
I asked the retired agent, “Did you or your wife ever find odd, unidentifiable marks or scars on your bodies at any point in time?” He responded, “No, nothing like that.”
Continuing, he then said something that I found absolutely remarkable:
Around the decade’s turn (1989-91), I was made aware of a meeting of ‘experiencers’, involving persons in government and/or the military who had experienced events involving unexplained lights/strange aircraft, missing time and memory failure. I proceeded to the meeting, held at a facility in Northern Virginia near but not at the Pentagon, which was attended by numerous others, most of whom appeared to be government officials and higher-ranking military officers. I was asked to tell my story—actually, stories—and was thereafter assured that I was “not alone” and that others present at the meeting had had similar if not identical past experiences. I was subsequently provided a list of publications to read to perhaps better understand the phenomena and, as I recall, at the top of that list was Communion by Whitley Strieber.
I then asked, “Who told you about the meeting?” He responded:
I cannot recall how I was advised about the meeting in Northern Virginia but information about it, as well as its location, was probably provided by an FBI associate as I had little or no contact with other government agency personnel during my 15-plus years at FBI Headquarters.
The strange experiences I had were something best left unsaid due to fear of ridicule and of job security concerns, not to mention curtailment of professional advancement. However, by the time of the meeting, I was nearing mandatory retirement age—at that time age 55 for all FBI Special Agents—and had “capped out” salary-wise so I had little to no concern regarding future administrative advancement. I had obviously told a colleague about my encounters and he in turn apparently told someone else who decided that I should attend the meeting.
I then asked, “Were you the only member of the audience to speak about your strange experiences?” He replied:
I do not recall any other specific stories, just that I did relate mine in detail to the group and was told afterward by one or more persons that they had experienced similar events. The purpose of the meeting was obviously to share similar experiences and information, perhaps in part to allay our fears, and by directing our attention to recent publications detailing the phenomena.
This account is stunning! Having interviewed 167 former/retired U.S. Air Force personnel over the years, I’ve never heard anything like it. Those veterans made clear that their commanders—and sometimes Air Force Office of Special Investigations agents—had sternly warned them not to share their nuclear weapons-related UFO encounters with others, even their spouses. Severe penalties were mentioned should a security breach occur.
However, in this case, we have a retired FBI Special Agent stating that he was asked by a colleague, presumably a superior, to address a gathering of government officials and higher-ranking members of the military regarding his strange, suggestive experiences. This implies that, as of the 1989-91 time-frame, some number of high-level persons in the U.S. intelligence community and the military were aware of reports involving the UFO abduction phenomenon—that were obviously considered credible—and had authorized certain presumably self-confessed experiencers within their own organizations to attend a meeting during which the subject would be openly discussed. If this were not enough, information about it—found in various books and articles—would be disseminated to the attendees. As far as I am aware, such an account is unprecedented! Was this gathering a one-off event or did this happen more than once over the years?
Any individual who has had a similar experience who wishes to speak with me about it may contact me at ufohastings@aol.com. Please note that I will ask such persons to provide records substantiating their former U.S. government employment or military service.
For the first time ever, astronomers have identified molecular oxygen in a galaxy outside the Milky Way.
The discovery was made by a team of astronomers at Shanghai Astronomical Observatory, led by Junzhi Wang.
The team identified the presence of molecular oxygen by analyzing light waves that had reached Earth from Markarian 231, a galaxy around 581 million light years away.
Light wave readings taken at the IRAM 30-meter telescope in Granada, Spain (pictured above) helped scientists detect signatures of molecular oxygen in the Markarian 231 galaxy, the first time the compound has been detected outside the Milky Way
Ironically, the presence of oxygen in our own atmosphere, along with other gases, have traditionally made it difficult to get accurate light wave readings from distant galaxies, according to a report in Vice.
Those light waves are typically absorbed or redirected by the various gas elements contained in our atmosphere, making it nearly impossible to get accurate readings.
The light waves from Markarian 231, however, came from what’s called a quasi stellar object, or QSO.
QSOs are distant objects that have a star-like appearance but emit light that’s been redshifted, traveling at a lower wave frequency than conventional.
Because the light readings from Markarian 231 originated from a QSO, they had a significantly lower wave frequency than standard light waves, which allowed them to pass through Earth’s atmosphere without any distorting effects.
The light wave readings were taken at two different locations: the IRAM 30-meter telescope in Granada, Spain, and the Northern Extended Millimeter Array telescope in the French Alps.
Markarian 231 is a galaxy 581 million light years away from Earth, and is believed to have 100 times as much oxygen as has so far been detected in the Milky Way
Based on the readings, the team estimates there could be more than 100 times as much oxygen in Markarian 231 galaxy as has so far been observed in the Milky Way.
Over the last 20 years, molecular oxygen has been detected on two other locations in the Milky Way: the Rho Ophiuchi cloud and the Orion nebula.
Humans can breathe pure oxygen for short periods--it's used as a common treatment for some health conditions, including people afflicted with the bends--but our respiratory systems depend on other elements in air, like nitrogen and carbon dioxide, to function normally.
Breathing pure oxygen for prolonged periods can cause permanent lung damage and oxygen toxicity, resulting from blood hemoglobin being overwhelmed with more oxygen molecules than it can carry.
Still, oxygen is believed to be one of the key elements necessary for the development of life.
The team believes further research could help them understand how oxygen distributions factor into the development of galaxies and how that can create some of the necessary preconditions for the formation of life.
For the first time in history, scientistshave discovered breathable oxygen in another galaxy.
A team of astronomers at Shanghai Astronomical Observatory made the incredible find, which points towards the potential for life elsewhere.
With oxygen being one of the most common elements known to man, scientists have long since believed it would be relatively easy to spot it in the universe. But until now, it had eluded them.
Using radio telescopes, researchers at the observatory spotted signs of it in a galaxy called Markarian 231, an incredible 560 million light-years away from Earth.
The telescopes showed radiation at a wavelength of 2.52 millimetres, which is the sign of breathable oxygen.
It's the first time oxygen has been found outside of the Milky Way. Credit: PA
Usually, oxygen is incredibly difficult to detect from Earth because the kinds of signals that should alert us to it are absorbed by the planet's atmosphere.
It was possible on this occasion because the light from Markarian 231 was redshifted, which means it was stretched into longer wavelengths as it travelled towards Earth, allowing it to pass through the atmosphere.
Writing about the discovery in the Astrophysical Journal, researchers confirmed it was the 'first detection of extragalactic molecular oxygen', and the most oxygen ever seen outside of our own solar system.
And while the idea of travelling to Markarian 231 is totally out of the question, it represents a potentially major breakthrough in the search for life.
However, one place where man has gone, and plans to go again, is the moon. And who knows, maybe you could go there soon.
Hiring next month, they will be training a bunch of newbies up to take part in future missions to the moon, with the aim of jetting off into space in just four years time.
Speaking about the recruitment drive, NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine said: "We're celebrating our 20th year of continuous presence aboard the International Space Station in low-Earth orbit this year, and we're on the verge of sending the first woman and next man to the Moon by 2024.
"For the handful of highly talented women and men we will hire to join our diverse astronaut corps, it's an incredible time in human spaceflight to be an astronaut.
"We're asking all eligible Americans if they have what it to takes to apply beginning 2 March."
However, before you get too excited about the chance of walking on the moon, the role comes with a fair few requirements - I mean, they're not just gonna let anyone go messing about in space, are they?
Firstly, you have to have US citizenship and have a master's degree from an accredited institution in any one of the following: computer science, mathematics, engineering, biological science or physical science.
And you may also need to have at least two years' experience in a PhD program related to science, in technology, engineering or mathematics.
You are also eligible if you have completed a doctorate in medicine or are a doctor of osteopathic medicine.
Bosses at NASA will even consider you if you have completed - or are set to complete - a nationally recognised test pilot school programme.
You must also have either at least two years of 'related, progressively responsible professional experience', or 1,000 hours of pilot-in-command time in jet.
All applicants must also pass NASA's long-duration spaceflight physical.
The surface of the Red Planet trembles with Marsquakes, scientists report, one of several first results from the NASA InSight lander’s visit to Mars.
“We’ve finally established for the first time that Mars is a seismically active planet,” said mission lead Bruce Banerdt, a planetary scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., during a February 20 news teleconference.
InSight landed on Mars on November 26, 2018, on a two-year mission to probe the planet’s interior (SN: 11/26/18). The goal is to reveal more of Mars’ history and answer questions about the formation of rocky planets in our solar system and beyond.
To achieve that goal, InSight carries three main science experiments. A temperature probe sunk several meters into the Martian soil will track heat welling up from far below (though that probe has been having trouble burrowing its way down). Radio transmissions track InSight’s position and hence how much the planet wobbles around its axis. Results from those experiments aren’t yet ready for prime time.
However, InSight’s seismic experiment, along with some ancillary equipment, has turned up a wealth of new intel. Mission scientists present results from the first 10 months of these experiments online February 24 in Nature Geoscience and Nature Communications.
It’s too early to know what all the new revelations mean. “We’re really in the same situation as geophysicists were for Earth in the early 1900s,” Banerdt said. “We’re in the wild west of understanding what’s going on.”
In the meantime, here are four things that InSight has revealed about Mars so far.
1. Mars likes to shake things up
InSight’s seismic probe is like a stethoscope listening to the surface of Mars for rumblings deep underground. While researchers have long suspected that quakes gently rattle the surface of Mars, no probe before InSight had definitively detected one (SN: 4/23/19). As of September 30, 2019, the lander had recorded 174 Marsquakes, likely caused by tectonic activity.
“The general cause of Marsquakes is the cooling of the planet,” Banerdt said. “The details of any particular Marsquake are still difficult to figure out.”
Mars appears to be more active than the moon but less active than Earth. The quakes have been very gentle, said Philippe Lognonné, a planetary scientist at Paris Diderot University, during the teleconference. Unless you were standing right over the epicenter with two feet firmly on the ground, he said, you’d probably not feel most of them.
Most of the quakes have been too subtle to pinpoint their origins. But two seemed to originate from a region known as Cerberus Fossae, a geologically young landscape about 1,600 kilometers east of InSight strewn with landslides, several-million-year-old volcanic flows and dried-up water channels.
And the quakes just keep on coming. To date, the lander has cataloged about 450 events, and the frequency is mysteriously increasing.
JPL-CALTECH/NASAInSight landed in a flat, smooth lava plain on Mars known as Elysium Planitia, about 600 kilometers north of the Curiosity rover’s landing site. The landing sites of other probes and rovers — most no longer active — are marked as well.
2. Mars has a highly magnetic personality
Unlike Earth, Mars no longer generates a magnetic field — but it did billions of years ago, and ghosts of that magnetic field remain imprinted in the planet’s rocks today.
Satellite images of InSight’s landing site indicate that the rocks there are too young to have been strongly magnetized by that ancient field. And yet, InSight measured a magnetic field coming from the surrounding rocks 10 times as strong as expected.
Given the age of the landscape, “the magnetization has to come from rocks beneath the surface,” said Catherine Johnson, a geophysicist at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. InSight’s measurements combined with satellite imagery suggest that the magnetic field is encased in 3.9-billion-year-old rocks buried up to 10 kilometers underground.
“The fact that we’re seeing a much larger magnetic feature near the surface means there’s a wealth of magnetization that has been invisible to us so far,” Banerdt said.
3. Mars feels a magnetic beat from space
InSight also picked up numerous magnetic “pulsations” — relatively quick changes in the strength of the ambient magnetic field. Some of these bursts, the first ever detected on Mars, last for just a second while others last for minutes. But unlike the anomalously high magnetization that comes from deep underground, these pulsations likely originate far above the atmosphere.
The researchers suspect that electrical fluctuations in a planetwide magnetic envelope induced by the sun — not the planet itself — is to blame. Intel from NASA’s MAVEN spacecraft, which is currently checking out Mars’ upper atmosphere, may help the team connect changes on the ground to changes in the planet’s space environment.
4. Beneath the surface, Mars is all broken up
Marsquakes can be used as probes of the Martian subsurface. Since different types of seismic waves are deflected and slowed down by underground materials in different ways, the Marsquakes act like a kind of planetary X-ray, revealing how far down the planet’s crust goes and the likely makeup of that material.
A disappointing lack in large Marsquakes has so far prevented the team from peering as deep as they’d like. But they are starting to get a picture of the upper 10 kilometers or so of the planet. There is likely water — not huge aquifers, but molecules clinging to solid mineral grains. And hidden beneath the top layers of soil, the crust appears to be fractured by eons of impacts from space.
The fracturing is “something that originally was thought to be the case for Mars,” said Suzanne Smrekar, a geophysicist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. But researchers moved away from that idea after evidence of now-dormant volcanism suggested that perhaps remnants of that pummeling had been largely smoothed over. InSight, she says, “is telling us that maybe [the crust] is a bit more broken up than people have thought recently.”
All five remaining instruments on NASA's venerableVoyager 2 spacecraft are back to gathering science data after power overuse in late January interrupted the probe's operations.
NASA made the announcement yesterday (March 3), over a month after the incident occurred. Troubleshooting for the spacecraft is a slow process because of its distance from Earth; it takes 17 hours for each command to reach the probe and for data indicating its efficacy to reach engineers.
"Voyager 2 has returned to normal operations following the anomaly on Jan. 25, 2020," NASA officials wrote in a statement. "The five operating science instruments, which were turned off by the spacecraft's fault protection routine, are back on and returning normal science data."
Voyager 2, like its twin Voyager 1, launched in August 1977 and has been exploring ever since. Such extensive space travel takes its toll; as the spacecraft have long exceeded their mission expectancy, engineers have needed to improvise ways to keep the probes going, particularly as their power supplies dwindle.
The January problem occurred when Voyager 2 missed a spin maneuver to calibrate its magnetic-field instrument. That glitch left two power-hungry systems on simultaneously; the spacecraft recognized the risk of the situation and triggered a preprogrammed fault-protection mode.
Since then, mission engineers have been working to turn off the power-sucking systems and to get Voyager 2's five remaining science instruments back to work. Those instruments are helping scientists understand what happens beyond the heliosphere, the bubble of space influenced by our sun. Voyager 2 left that bubble in November 2018, entering interstellar space.
If there’s one factor science fiction has taught us through the years, it’s that first contact is in all probability not going to go thoroughly. Now, that could be us people, a really war- and violence-oriented species, projecting ourselves on different potential inhabitants of the universe, however there are positively loads of examples on the market for us to peruse by which the aliens amongst us are lethal and terrifying killers.
However who’s the baddest of all of them? Effectively, with Alien: Covenant across the nook, we take a take a look at the historical past of invading forces within the worlds of science fiction in TV, movie, comics and video games and take a look at to find out who has the best physique rely.
20. Struggle of the Worlds: Martians
Approximate Kill Rely: Shockingly Low
Some of the well-known alien invasion tales has an incredibly low physique rely, as solely round 50 died when the Martians invaded in Struggle of the Worlds. The potential was very excessive, however because of Earth micro organism, all of us got here out okay from this one.
19. Aliens: Xenomorphs
Approximate Kill Rely: Full Planets, however solely round 50 on display screen
One other case of a a lot smaller on-screen kill rely than chances are you’ll anticipate – simply over 50 individuals have been killed on display screen by the Alien xenomorphs. Nonetheless, the implication (and expanded universe) is that these aliens are very lethal, having worn out full planets. Nonetheless, if we’re going by simply what we’ve really seen, they’re all bark and little or no chunk.
18. Marvel Studios: Chitauri
Approximate Kill Rely: A whole bunch, however Fewer Than 1,000
This one is closely contested, however in-universe, we’ve had numbers of each within the 80s and “Hundreds” listed or talked about on display screen. The latter is a bit extra plausible; sure, the Avengers had been actively working in the course of the Battle of New York to save lots of individuals whereas additionally preventing the Chitauri, however New Yorkers are manner too cussed to have evacuated that shortly. Belief us, we’ve been in NYC for blizzard and hurricane evacuation orders; a 10% compliance charge is likely to be excessive in some instances.
17. DC Comics: Darkseid and the Apokoliptians
Approximate Kill Rely: A whole bunch, Low Hundreds
One other one that will shock individuals with how few they’ve really killed is Darkseid and his military from Apokolips. Whereas his Parademons positive look scary and lethal as they fly by way of the air with their claws and tooth and razor-sharp steel wings, they don’t appear to drag off all that a lot within the precise killing division. Darkseid is extra inquisitive about controlling all life than ending it, in spite of everything, versus his Marvel counterpart we’ll get to later …
16. DC Movies: Kryptonians
Approximate Kill Rely: 129,000
The opposite current big-screen battle in superhero movies passed off in Man of Metal, the place the rogue Kryptonian criminals did some main harm. Whereas filmmakers tried to name the kill rely “around 5,000,” one inhabitants professional stated that primarily based on the buildings broken within the battle between Superman and Zod, plus the gravity weapon, the quantity is extra like 129,000 deaths. Now we’ve to see what Aquaman thinks of an enormous Kryptonian weapon falling into considered one of his oceans …
15. Independence Day Aliens
Approximate Kill Rely: Low Thousands and thousands
The preliminary assault from the aliens in Independence Day killed hundreds of thousands in main inhabitants facilities, however an ongoing evacuation effort prevented that quantity from being within the tens and even a whole bunch of hundreds of thousands. Comparatively talking, these guys weren’t all that efficient in doing way more than inspiring humanity!
The books and film universe are positively totally different right here, however within the books the Arachnids have a number of worlds, no less than a couple of of which had been conquered. This one is almost inconceivable to come back to a consensus rely to, however there’s absolute confidence that their swarm mentality, one thing we’ve seen throughout many mediums and universes in different aliens, would end result in near-total inhabitants dying of any populated planet they go to.
13. Falling Skies: The Espheni
Approximate Kill Rely: 6 Billion+ (Most of Human Inhabitants)
When the Espheni got here to Earth, they worn out the overwhelming majority of the human inhabitants. Primarily based on a present inhabitants of round 7.5 billion, meaning effectively over six billion died. With the enslaving of the rest, the lifeless could have been the fortunate ones.
The second DC Comics instance right here is the Dominators, who led the alien consortium in an invasion towards Earth (and had been just lately seen on TV within the CW four-show crossover). Whereas they solely kidnapped/enslaved/killed a couple of thousand people, their popularity was that in the event that they couldn’t dominate a world, they’d merely destroy it. They’ve achieved it to many planets through the years, which suggests they’ve taken out billions. They’re additionally probably the most scary-looking humanoid designs on the market.
11. Invader Zim: Irken Empire
Approximate Kill Rely: Excessive Billions (A number of planets)
Doomy doom doom doom doomy doom doom. That’s what the Irken deliver, and so they’ve destroyed a number of planets. Fortunate for Earth, our Invader was a bit much less harmful and a bit extra hilarious. They’re additionally by far the loveliest killers on this record. Doom.
10. BSG: Cylons
Approximate Kill Rely: Tens of Billions (Most of inhabitants of A number of Colony Planets)
All of this has occurred earlier than … however when Battlestar Galactica was rebooted, issues kicked off with one hell of a bang, because the people’ whole nuclear arsenal was set off on themselves, killing no less than tens of billions in a single fell swoop, stranding theoverwhelming majority of the survivors in a fleet in house.
09. Star Trek: Species 8472
Approximate Kill Rely: Tens of Billions (Borg alone)
This Star Trek Voyager species comes from “liquid space,” a side-dimension of kinds, which they’ve presumably fully conquered. When the Borg attempt to assimilate Species 8472, the species strikes again, killing tens of billions of the Collective. It’s extremely possible this will not be the one inhabitants they’ve decimated.
Ah, the large twist of The Flood – like the opposite ‘swarm’ aliens on this record, their devastation is almost unstoppable because of sheer numbers. Because of a number of the side-fiction of the Halo universe, this online game alien’s physique rely is numbered, no less than in the course of the occasions of the video games, at round 23 billion.
07. Mass Impact: The Reapers
Approximate Kill Rely: A whole bunch of Billions
Whereas the Reapers didn’t wipe out all life within the Milky Method Galaxy like they supposed, they positively destroyed whole worlds and colonies and prompted the near-extinction of a number of sentient races of their time. The brand new explorers in Andromeda going up towards the Kett don’t know the way good they’ve it in comparison with Commander Shepard and her crew again dwelling.
06. Dragon Ball Tremendous: Beerus
Approximate Kill Rely: A whole bunch of Billions
Okay, this one is dishonest a tiny bit, as Beerus is technically a god, not an alien per se (however hey, he lives on one other planet out on house, so it really works for us). Nonetheless, he’s an incredible trendy instance of destruction and extinction getting used as a pure plot system. The implication is that Beerus has been committing some straight-up genocide periodically for all of time. We see him actually cut up a planet in half with a snap in his earliest moments.
Maybe the final word realization of the ‘hive alien’ or ‘alien swarm’ (sorry, Marvel’s Annihilation Wave), the Tyranid Hive Fleet(s) from this tabletop recreation are unparalleled of their devastating energy. They’re stated to have killed a whole bunch of billions on conquered (or somewhat, devoured) worlds and if left unchecked might basically eat all the galaxy. Yowza.
04. Physician Who: Time Lords
Approximate Kill Rely: Trillions
The Time Lord often known as the Physician is the hero of Physician Who, however the Time Lords are additionally arguably the worst villains within the sequence. Through the Time Struggle, they worn out whole races just like the Zygons and Gelth, and it culminated ultimately of the Time Lords themselves, the Gallifreyans, in addition to an estimated a whole bunch of billions, if not trillions of Daleks. Don’t get on the unhealthy facet of a Time Lord, of us.
03. Star Wars: Yuuzhan Vong
Approximate Kill Rely: 365 trillion
The first villains of the “New Jedi Order” part of the Star Wars Expanded Universe, the Yuuzhan Vong had been alien invaders from exterior of the essential Star Wars galaxy. Their energy was completely devastating, they hated mechanical know-how and couldn’t be sensed by the Pressure. That every one led to the near-total destruction of the New Republic in these outdated Legends tales, with a dying toll of 365 trillion given in-universe, basically 49,000 Earths. Which will look like rather a lot, however astronomers estimate that there could also be anyplace from 18-40 billion Earth-like planets in liveable zones of stars within the Milky Method alone, so it’s really very believable. Regardless, that’s a lot of lifeless of us, however fortunately that continuity was worn out, so we are able to solely assume they’re all okay now.
02. Marvel Comics: Thanos, the Mad Titan
Approximate Kill Rely: Actually Half the Universe
The highest two deadliest aliens each come from comics, and are each primarily solo acts. First, from Marvel Comics is Thanos, who will star as the first villain in Avengers: Infinity Struggle and presumably once more in Avengers 4. This greatest of huge bads, when he bought his fingers on the Infinity Gauntlet and all six Infinity Gems (Stones within the MCU), he worn out half of all the Universe’s inhabitants straight away. For those who settle for that there are a theorized variety of planets within the septillions within the universe, and lowball it that 18% (18 billion out of the 100 billion Milky Method planets for our sake) are liveable, after which take Earth’s 7.5 billion inhabitants, that’s a common inhabitants of 1.35e+33, and a dying toll of 6.75e+32 – round 7 dectillion lifeless – a quantity so giant it’s basically inconceivable. Yeah, Thanos is a killer, and he does all of it within the title of affection (he simply occurs to be in love with the personification of Loss of life).
01. DC Comics: Krona of the Maltusians
Approximate Kill Rely: A number of Total Universes
The just one that might probably outdo Thanos, then, is Krona. One among the Maltusians, a race that turned the “Guardians of Oa/the Universe” – the little blue guys who make and provides out Inexperienced Lantern Rings – Krona was obsessive about determining, and witnessing, how the universe started. He was so obsessed that he wound up paging by way of universes like a e-book, destroying them in his wake. Sure, he killed a number of whole universes (after first killing mere particular person worlds as proven right here). Whereas different characters have achieved related feats, he’s the alien instance of this, and due to this fact has a very numerous dying toll on his résumé.
A woman was up early Thursday morning an went to her balcony and noticed some a bright blinding light in the sky. It was huge, she said. The lights seemed to be connected she said and it seemed to be coming for one craft. She says its a UFO and they she has never seen anything like that before. She said it was triangle shaped and it seemed to be releasing smaller metallic objects from it.
Now when I add light I do see that there are three objects close enough to appear to be a triangle, but they are separate. It looks like an aliens craft that breaks up into several parts, including a few small alien drones it made nearby. Look at the negative white screenshots below and see the true shape of the crafts. Its 100% alien tech. Its far too advanced...no done is that big. Did you see in the video where she zooms out and way from the UFO? Its huge! She was not kidding. This is absolute proof that aliens were in Mississippi on Thursday morning.
Scott C. Waring - Taiwan
Above is negative formate to see the detail. No connection between them.
Below is negative format, they are each separate parts, but they all belong to one whole craft.
We Can Send A Message To The Alien Probe In Orbit! UFO Sighting News.
We Can Send A Message To The Alien Probe In Orbit! UFO Sighting News.
Now NASA has announced that earth has a new moon orbiting us...yeah, that happens everyday...not. It arrived late last year in Nov or Dec of 2019...the exact same time the coronavirus emerged in Wuhan, China. Yes they have been fighting it that long, but hiding it until January of 2020.
I believe this city bus size moon (NASA says car size, but they always estimate down.) in earths orbit is actually an alien probe here to monitor how humanity survives or falls when this invasive lab created virus attacks the whole of humanity. They are watching, recording and trying to use that data to predict future reactions to future possible events. I decided to try to contact this probe in earths orbit. Since its monitoring us...I decided to send a message to the probe to ask for its assistance in destroying the coronavirus. My message is below.
"Welcome alien probe in Earths orbit. We have named you 2016 HO3, another name they call you is 469219 Kamoʻoalewa, NASA pretends that you are an astroid, but we the public know the truth. You are an alien probe sent to earth to monitor the existing coronavirus outbreak. Your assistance in stopping the virus would be much appreciated. This virus outbreak will kill millions of humans in the coming months with a death rate of 3.4-10% It will cause a lot of death. Your help is requested in stopping this coronavirus. Will you assist humanity on Earth? I repeat, will you assist humanity to stop this virus? I will assume your answer is YES. Scott C. Waring-Taiwan"
Now I used www.spacespeak.com to send the message. I copied the message three times each time I sent it. A repeated message has a greater chance of being noticed. Spacespeak uses a radio telescope to send messages into space for free. Messages travel at the speed of light and getting into earths orbit it takes less than a second. It is guaranteed that this alien probe will read the message. But the real question is...are they here to record only, or to offer help? Scott C. Waring - Taiwan
A high-resolution image of Earth’s new moon. Image Credit: The international Gemini Observatory/NSF’s National Optical-Infrared Astronomy Research Laboratory/AURA.
A new study from researchers in Tokyo helps explain how cosmic rays affect prebiotic organic chemistry in the atmosphere of Saturn’s moon Titan.
Titan and its thick, hazy atmosphere as seen by the Cassini spacecraft in 2013. Some of the methane/ethane lakes near the north pole can just be seen through the haze.
Image via NASA/ JPL-Caltech/ Space Science Institute.
Saturn’s largest moon, Titan, is rich in organic compounds, the chemical compounds upon which all known life is based. Both Titan’s surface and its atmosphere contain these compounds. Since Titan is thought to be similar to an early Earth, scientists are interested in how these molecules are formed.
Now, researchers say they’ve found a major clue about this prebiotic process, called abiogenesis, the process by which life arises from non-living matter. Using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), they have discovered a chemical footprint in Titan’s atmosphere, the result of cosmic rays – high-energy particles from deep space – hitting the atmosphere and affecting the formation of nitrogen-bearing organic molecules.
The new peer-reviewed results were announced by ALMA on February 14, 2020, and were published in The Astrophysical Journal on February 17, 2020.
This is the first time that such processes have been observed directly on Titan. The research team found faint, but firm signals of acetonitrile (CH3CN) and its rare isotopomer CH3C15N in the ALMA data. Takahiro Iino, of the University of Tokyo, is the study lead author. He said in a statement:
We found that the abundance of 14N in acetonitrile is higher than those in other nitrogen bearing species such as HCN and HC3N. It well matches the recent computer simulation of chemical processes with high energy cosmic rays.
ALMA spectra of CH3C14N and CH3C15N in Titan’s atmosphere. Dotted vertical lines indicate the frequency of emission lines of two molecules predicted by a theoretical model.
Image via Iino et al./ The University of Tokyo/ ALMA.
Chemical processes in Titan’s atmosphere can also be affected by ultraviolet light (radiation) from the sun. According to an ALMA statement about the research:
In the upper atmosphere, UV light selectively destroys nitrogen molecules containing 15N because the UV light with the specific wavelength that interacts with 14N14N is easily absorbed at that altitude. Thus, nitrogen-bearing species produced at that altitude tend to exhibit a high 15N abundance. On the other hand, cosmic rays penetrate deeper and interact with nitrogen molecules containing 14N. As a result, there is a difference in the abundance of molecules with 14N and 15N. The team revealed that acetonitrile in the stratosphere is more abundant in 14N than those of other previously measured nitrogen-bearing molecules.
Understanding how these chemical processes occur on Titan is important, the scientists say, because the current environment on Titan is considered to be a prebiotic laboratory in that it’s similar to our planet Earth just before, or when life started to evolve here. Some scientists theorize that there could be some form of primitive life on Titan, although this is far from being confirmed yet.
Stunning view of Titan in front of Saturn, as seen by Cassini.
Image via NASA/ JPL-Caltech/ Space Science Institute.
The processes in Titan’s atmosphere can also be extrapolated to other solar system bodies with atmospheres. According to Hideo Sagawa, an associate professor at Kyoto Sangyo University and another member of the research team:
The process could be universal, so understanding the role of cosmic rays in Titan is crucial in overall planetary science.
A large amount of Titan data has been stored in the ALMA Science Archive, and now that data will be calibrated to remove fluctuations due to variations of on-site weather and mechanical glitches.
Titan was studied extensively by NASA’s Cassini spacecraft and its lander, Huygens. The moon is obscured by a permanent thick orange-ish haze, but Cassini peered through it with radar. It found a world that is eerily Earth-like in appearance, with seas, lakes, rivers and sand dunes. It even rains on Titan.
The “water” on Titan, however, is liquid methane/ethane since it is far too cold for liquid water. There is, however, evidence for a liquid water ocean beneath the surface, much like Europa, Enceladus or Ganymede, among others. The sand dunes are composed of particles of hydrocarbon organics. The Huygens probe landed in an old streambed, and found smooth “rocks,” similar to river rocks on Earth, thought to be composed of solid water ice.
The upcoming Dragonfly mission will explore Titan with a drone-like probe that can land in multiple locations.
Image via Johns Hopkins University’s Applied Physics Lab/ IEEE Spectrum.
Superficially, Titan resembles Earth in many ways, yet it is also a uniquely alien world.
The next mission to Titan planned is Dragonfly, a drone-like probe that will be able to land in many different locations on Titan’s surface. In this way, it will be able to survey a much larger region of the Titanian landscape, unlike Huygens, which could only remain in one spot for a short amount of time. Dragonfly will launch in 2026 and arrive in 2034. As Thomas Zurbuchen, NASA’s associate administrator for science, explained:
Titan is unlike any other place in the solar system, and Dragonfly is like no other mission. It’s remarkable to think of this rotorcraft flying miles and miles across the organic sand dunes of Saturn’s largest moon, exploring the processes that shape this extraordinary environment. Dragonfly will visit a world filled with a wide variety of organic compounds, which are the building blocks of life and could teach us about the origin of life itself.
By understanding how prebiotic chemical processes can be affected by things like cosmic rays, scientists can learn more about the conditions on Titan that allow such prebiotic chemistry to occur. This has implications for not only the possibility of some form of life itself on this moon – even if seemingly remote – but also how life originated on Earth as well and the potential for life on other similar planets or moons orbiting other stars.
Bottom line: A new study from researchers in Tokyo helps explain how cosmic rays affect prebiotic chemistry in Titan’s atmosphere.
This image, taken with the Advanced Camera for Surveys aboard NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, shows the newly discovered planet, Fomalhaut b, orbiting its parent star, Fomalhaut.
The small white box at lower right pinpoints the planet's location. Fomalhaut b has carved a path along the inner edge of a vast, dusty debris ring encircling Fomalhaut that is 21.5 billion miles across. Fomalhaut b lies 1.8 billion miles inside the ring's inner edge and orbits 10.7 billion miles from its star.
The inset at bottom right is a composite image showing the planet's position during Hubble observations taken in 2004 and 2006. Astronomers have calculated that Fomalhaut b completes an orbit around its parent star every 872 years.
The white dot in the center of the image marks the star's location. The region around Fomalhaut's location is black because astronomers used the Advanced Camera's coronagraph to block out the star's bright glare so that the dim planet could be seen. Fomalhaut b is 1 billion times fainter than its star. The radial streaks are scattered starlight. The red dot at lower left is a background star.
The Fomalhaut system is 25 light-years away in the constellation Piscis Australis.
This false-color image was taken in October 2004 and July 2006.
Credit
NASA, ESA, P. Kalas, J. Graham, E. Chiang, E. Kite (University of California, Berkeley), M. Clampin (NASA Goddard Space Flight Center), M. Fitzgerald (Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory), and K. Stapelfeldt and J. Krist (NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory)
Chris Evers, 59, believes a UFO craft zoomed over Hull last Tuesday
(Image: Hull Live)
A UFO hunter is calling on witnesses who saw a "Tic Tac-shaped" spacecraft flying over rush hour traffic as he claims he has received a report multiple people seeing it.
Chris Evers, 59, says the UFO, which resembled the tiny oval-shaped mint, was seen by multiple witnesses flying vertically above a road in Hull.
Chris, who founded the Hull UFO Society in the 90s, said he received reports of the alien craft had been seen flying over the city at around 5.30pm on Tuesday last week.
He told HullLive: "I got a report through to me on Friday about a UFO seen over Hull.
"It was a large Tic Tac-shaped craft or device flying over the city at around 5.30pm, so it was during rush hour and apparently a lot of people saw it.
"It was flying upright, not horizontally, and there were two unusual protrusions at the bottom of the craft."
He now wants people to come forward with evidence of the sighting.
Chris Evers says it was 'Tic Tac-shaped' UFO with 'unusual protrusions' sticking out the bottom(Image: Hull Live)
"I've been told people took photos of it but I haven't seen any," he said.
Chris, runs the Outer Limits magazine which is released online to readers around the world, is a regular on Hull's UFO circuit.
His interest was first sparked by a seeing a strange object over Hull when he was 14.
"I've been interested in the subject since 1974 and that's older than my socks," Chris said.
"I've had an avid interest for a number of years now. In the 1990s I set up the Hull UFO society and my Outer Limits magazine has been going for four years this April."
According to Chris, the region is awash with strange activity, including a phenomenal incident involving UFO flying under the Humber Bridge.
He recalled: We were looking south over the Humber and a light came down over the hills towards the river. We watched it go right towards Goole and Snaith, we couldn't tell how big it was.
"Then it went under the Humber Bridge and split into two.
"And for that experience and others I'm still waiting for an explanation."
Although he says he is "sceptical believer", Chris knows one day aliens will communicate with humans.
"Even NASA say there's 4,000 solar planets they've found in the past 20 years and that shows that we're not just something strange in our solar system, but that it's a regular feature of other systems," he said.
"We've not found one we can communicate with yet but it will happen one day."
NASA HIRES SPACEX TO LAUNCH MISSION TO GIANT METAL ASTEROID
NASA HIRES SPACEX TO LAUNCH MISSION TO GIANT METAL ASTEROID
NASA
JON CHRISTIAN
Heavy Metal
NASA’s historic uncrewed mission to the metallic asteroid Psyche is now, also, a SpaceX jam. Elon Musk’s rocket company will be responsible for getting the probe launched onboard a Falcon Heavy.
“The Psyche mission will journey to a unique metal-rich asteroid, also named Psyche, which orbits the Sun between Mars and Jupiter,” reads a NASA press release about the collab. “The asteroid is considered unique, as it appears to largely be made of the exposed nickel-iron core of an early planet – one of the building blocks of our solar system.”
Power Launch Date
If all goes well, the mission will lift off in summer 2022 from Cape Canaveral.
The nimble Psyche probe — which, yes, confusingly has the same name as the asteroid it’s exploring — will be loaded with equipment from Earthling researchers, which it’ll use to investigate the asteroid’s composition.
Abnormal Psyche
According to one estimate, the materials that make up Psyche are worth a staggering $10,000 quadrillion — though, of course, it would be impractically expensive to bring them back to Earth with current-generation tech.
NASA’s goal, though, isn’t financial. Instead, it’s hoping that new data about Psyche will help explain the early history of the solar system.
When most people are asked to imagine what an alien looks like the first image that may pop into one’s head is the classic “grey alien.” You know the one one, small, thin, grey skin, a big head with almond shaped black eyes. For whatever reasons this is by far the most common conception of an alien being by the mainstream. Yet, there are so many alien encounter reports that describe something wholly different and altogether outlandish. Here I have compiled a few reports of some of the weirder alien reports out there, and there are no greys to be seen.
Our first weird case comes from 1973, in the U.S. state of Alabama near the small town of Falkville. On October 17, 1973, a panicked woman called into police to report that she had seen a UFO land in a field right outside of town, and an incredulous police officer named Jeff Greenhaw went off to investigate, no doubt thinking that he was dealing with some nutcase. He arrived at the scene at around 10 PM, not really expecting to find much, and at first he didn’t. The field held no spaceship, nor any sign of one, but the lady who had called was frantically insisting that not only had a UFO really landed, but that there was an alien running around out there in the woods.
Greenhaw thought that at the very least there might be in intruder prowling about, so he did a sweep of the area. Little did he know that this intruder would be far stranger than anything he had imagined. As he peered into the darkness and shone his flashlight about, he noticed someone standing off the side of the road, but when he looked in its direction he saw that this was no normal man. The figure seemed to be completely covered with some shiny substance that looked somewhat like tin foil, with an antenna on its head, and Greenhaw would even take a photo of it. He would say of the creature:
It looked like his head and neck were kind of made together… he was real bright, something like rubbing mercury on nickel, but just as smooth as glass; different angles give different lighting. I don’t believe it was aluminum foil.
Alleged photo of the “Tinfoil Man”
This figure seemed to move in a rather disjointed, mechanical way, giving the impression that it was almost robotic in nature, and wanting to see it in better light, Greenhaw trained his vehicle’s headlights on it. This apparently set the entity into a panic, and it ran off at great speed, after which Greehaw started up his car and pursued it right through a field. The officer went as fast as the terrain could allow, but the creature he had seen and was chasing was reportedly amazingly fast, far faster than any human, and he eventually lost it when it bolted off into some trees. In the days after his encounter, Greenhaw would come forward with his account, which would make him a laughing stock, the object of ridicule, and cost him his job.
Was this some sort of alien robot, perhaps used as a probe by its inscrutable handlers? It reminds me of a similar case of seemingly robotic aliens that is made all the odder in that it predates it by over 50 years. The bizarro case supposedly occurred in 1924, in Pasco County, in the state of Florida, and which was related in 1974 by an elderly witness named Evelyn Wendt, who claimed that this had happened to her when she was a girl. She said that she had been playing outside on the grounds of St. Joseph school when she had noticed an egg shaped object nearby that glowed so intensely and brightly that she had to cover her eyes at first, but it then supposedly suddenly dimmed to reveal some sort of saucer shaped metal craft. As she stood there staring wide-eyed at the strange sight, a small door suddenly opened to disgorge a procession of rather bizarre creatures, and Wendt would say of them thus:
Little people emerged. I think they were robots. I tried to count them, but they changed about so. They were smaller than I was and resembled animated flowers with faces where the bud would be.
These truly bizarre “robotic sunflowers” were apparently hoisting a sinister looking machine of some sort, which Wendt instinctively sensed was a weapon of some kind, and which they also seemed to be setting up to aim towards the school’s science building. It was at about this time that the witness claimed the entities communicated with her telepathically, telling her that they intended to destroy the science building because there were dangerous experiments going on in there behind closed doors. Bizarrely, they then suddenly changed their minds, and began to file back into the craft as they invited their human companion to come along. She refused, but they supposedly promised to come back for her in later years. Wendt would say of what happened:
They promised to come back for me in 35 years, but that was a long time ago and nothing happened that I know of. All I can remember now is that the saucer was leaden-looking and very pockmarked. Then, when it started up, its molecules expanded and it turned silvery bright. The UFO then went straight up, hovered a minute, and disappeared from sight.
UFO researchers in later years sought to bring out any other details through hypnosis, but Wendt proved impossible to hypnotize. Bizarrely, the science building of the school at one point was destroyed by unspecified means, leading one to think that maybe the robo-flowers had come back to finish the job. What in the world was going on here? Is this just a made-up delusion or is it at all real in any sense? If it really did happen, then what were these robotic flowers and why on earth did they want to blow up a junior high school’s science building? Who knows?
From the same year as Greenhaw’s account and also quite unusual is the encounter reported by two men named Charles Hickson and Calvin Parker, who on October 11, 1973, were fishing on the Pascagoula River in Mississippi. As they cast their lines out they suddenly began to hear a series of strange hissing, whirring noises coming from behind them. When they turned around to look, they apparently came face to face with an egg-shaped spacecraft hovering over the river not far away, and a door then opened to regurgitate forth baffling creatures that really defy any easy classification. There standing in the doorway of the craft were three 6-foot tall beings with grey leathery, wrinkled skin and thin, carrot-like protrusions jutting out of their heads. The hands and feet were said to be fused into pinchers, and the eyes and mouths were just slits.
Just as they were reeling from the shock of seeing such a thing, the men realized that they had been somehow paralyzed by an unseen force, which kept them glued to where they were. Stuck as they were, the two witnesses made easy pickings for the bizarre aliens, who plucked them up and dragged them aboard their unearthly vessel. Hickson would later claim that he was brought aboard the ship and brought to a room with a blinding light, in which he was subjected to an examination by an oval shaped robotic probe of some sort. After around 20 minutes, the two were deposited back onto the bank of the river and the mysterious craft floated off. Hickson then claimed that he had found Parker on the riverbank as well in a rather disheveled state, crying and praying to God.
The two went back to their car and sat there in shock for an undetermined amount of time, before heading home. They would later contact the Kessler Air Force Base and the local sheriff with their bizarre tale, which went about as well as you would expect. No one really took the eyebrow-raising story seriously, but the whole case inevitably became splashed about local newspapers soon after. Hickson in particular went on to entertain questions on the matter and even help publish a book about the whole incident called UFO Contact at Pascagoula, while Parker ducked out of the limelight, and eventually moved out of state to avoid the constant media attention. For is part, Parker claimed that he had passed out at the beginning of the ordeal and only come to after it was over, only recalling bits and pieces under hypnosis.
The case was picked apart by some of the most eminent UFO researchers at the time, who for the most part agreed that the men at least really believed that what they had seen was real. The case of the Pascagoula aliens has since been met with a good amount of skepticism. It has been called everything from a shared hallucination to a flat-out lie, which has only been made more complicated by the fact that Hickson’s account only seemed to get more and more bizarre and complex as time went on. It has been suggested that they had a shared imaginary experience, that they were drinking, or even that they were just tripping balls on LSD at the time, but no one really knows what happened except the two witnesses themselves.
Our next very strange case comes from December 6, 1978, when a night security guard by the name of Pier Zanfretta was doing his normal rounds in the small town of Torriglia, Italy, when he claims that his car suddenly died and would not start again. It was then that he noticed some strange lights piercing through the darkness around a nearby house, and his first thought was that these were trespassers. He grabbed his flashlight and sidearm and exited the vehicle to go investigate, creeping along a path towards the property, and as he made his way along he suddenly felt something fall upon his shoulder. The startled patrolman whipped around and this is where it would get very weird very fast.
There looking over him in the beam of his flashlight was a hideous, hulking humanoid creature standing at least 10 feet tall, with “undulating skin, as though he were very fat or dressed in a loose, grey tunic,” with two more of the beings standing out in the gloom behind it. They were described as having green skin, horns protruding from the sides of their faces, visible throbbing red veins in their foreheads, and yellow eyes, with each of the creatures wearing some sort of faintly glowing breathing apparatus over the mouth. Zanfretta did what most people would do in this situation, and ran as fast as he could the other way, back towards his car, where he then saw an enormous triangular UFO that blinded him with a very bright light and nearly knocked him over with a blast of hot air as it passed overhead. When others came to answer his panicked calls for back up there were found some odd horseshoe shapes embedded into the earth nearby that suggested something very heavy had rested there, and there would be numerous UFO reports from the village over the next few weeks.
Moving along, in 1989, a strange series of events unfolded in the wilds near Voronezh, Russia, beginning with numerous sightings by frightened locals who described a massive, red sphere floating over a park. When witnesses went to see what was going on, the object apparently dropped down to hover right over the ground, after which a hatch opened to disgorge several very bizarre entities. These creatures were purportedly 9 feet tall, dressed in silver outfits and most notable with neckless, domed heads holding three glowing eyes and a bright red device that spun around “like a radar.” These aliens reportedly swiveled their heads about to look around, and along with the aliens was a “box-like robot” that walked around with jerky movements and upon which the aliens occasionally adjusted instruments on its chest. These creatures were bizarrely described as walking around the park collecting soil samples and occasionally projecting multi-colored beams from disc like structures in their chests, and strangest of all they reportedly zapped a teenager who got to close with a tube-like weapon of some sort, which “dematerialized” the poor boy. Luckily the boy reappeared when the beings boarded their craft and left. What was going on here?
Even more recent, and perhaps even wilder and more spectacular than any of these we have looked at so far apparently happened in a rural area of the country of Brazil in 1996. On January 20, 1996, the fire department at the town of Varginha received several calls from distraught residents claiming that a “strange creature” was lurking about frightening people. Authorities thought it might just be some pranksters messing around, and went to check it out. When they arrived, they amazingly were able to quickly find the creature in question, which was described as being in some sort of a dazed state. The creature itself purportedly had short, stumpy legs, very long arms, oversized feet, and three stalks upon its head, and it also had set within its misshappen head set of glowing red eyes. The bizarre entity was apparently easily captured with a net, which elicited a buzzing sound from it, and it whisked off to who knows where.
Later that same day there was apparently another of the creatures seen, this time by three girls named Lilliane Fatima, Valquira Fatima, and Andrade Xavier as they were waking through a wooded area. It apparently looked exactly like the one that had been captured and left footprints and an obnoxious ammonia like stench in its wake. The creature or creatures were apparently sighted numerous times over the coming week, and another was supposedly captured. This specimen was apparently taken to the University of Campinas, and amazingly two more were also captured and brought to the University of Sao Paulo, where at least one of them died. There were allegedly many photographs taken of the autopsy, yet none have ever been made publicly available, if they even exist at all. Oddly, several of the people involved with capturing the creatures mysterious fell ill, exhibiting symptoms that could not be explained, with at least one of these people dying from their sickness.
The story created quite a stir at the time, with the Brazilian media reporting on it heavily, yet both the authorities and the universities that supposedly had harbored the “aliens” denied any knowledge of such creatures. The only hint that something might really be going on was a doctor allegedly involved with the autopsy of the dead creature, who simultaneously denied having any thing to do with it while also hinting that there was more to say on the matter that he was unable to release just yet. Considering that this all happened during a major UFO sightings flap in the region the public supposed that these might have been the occupants of these mysterious craft, but considering that no real evidence has come forward this will probably remain just another unverified enigmatic report that seems destined to be buried.
What is happening with cases like these? How are such numerous completely strange entities seen by so many? Are these aliens, interdimensional interlopers, the imagination, or something else altogether? Reports such as these and many more like them only serve to muddy the waters of UFO and alien encounters, because they are so completely surreal and typically describe entities that were only seen a single time or on very few occasions and never again, slipping off into whatever unknown weird realm they sprang from. It is not sure what these cases could represent, unclear as to their origins, but what is most certainly clear is that they represent some of the bizarre of the bizarre.
There are people who have supposedly had odd encounters with UFOs and aliens from all over the world, from all walks of life. Among these have often been those who have high social standing or are well-known by the general public, and these usually attract the most attention. After all, some random sighting from an unknown guy in Bumpsville is likely to be quickly forgotten, but what of when it is an icon who is a household name? Just as with tabloid reports these are the kinds of stories we can’t get enough of and are inexorably drawn to, and one in the UFO community that has shown staying power is the time the great American entertainer Jackie Gleason was purportedly shown alien bodies by former president Richard Nixon.
A lot of younger readers might not recognize the name, but in his day the comedian, actor, and writer Jackie Gleason (1916- 1987) was a legendary icon. Probably best known for his character Ralph Kramden in the hit television series The Honeymooners and his role as Sheriff Buford T. Justice in the Smokey and the Bandit series of films, Gleason had a long and storied career, appearing in countless movies and TV shows in the 1950s and 60s, including his own The Jackie Gleason Show, also launching successful music career, and he was a very famous and well-known stalwart of the entertainment industry and a household name. Behind the scenes, though, he had an array of unconventional hobbies that many people did not really know about and which he tried as much as possible to keep out of the public eye.
Jackie Gleason
You see, Jackie Gleason was a complete paranormal and UFO geek. He spent hours reading about all areas of parapsychology, Forteana, aliens, and the unexplained, and obsessively collected books on such things, in particular UFOs. Indeed, he is widely known as having had one of the largest private collections of books on UFOs in the country, which would be donated to the University of Miami after his death. In the biography The Life and Legend of Jackie Gleason, author William A. Henry III explains of this intense interest and fascination thusly:
Jackie Gleason had a lifelong fascination with the supernatural. He would spend small fortunes on everything from financing psychic research to buying a sealed box said to contain actual ectoplasm, the spirit of life itself. He would contact everyone from back-alley charlatans to serious researchers like J.B. Rhine of Duke University and, disdaining the elitism of the scholarly apparatus, would treat them all much the same way. Gleason was a frequent insomniac. He would stay up high the night reading (or rereading) some of the hundreds of (UFO and paranormal phenomena) volumes in his library.
He was hardcore, in other words, even once saying himself, “I’m kind of a nut on the subject.” It was partly this interest that led to his friendship with former president Richard Nixon, who was also interested in UFOs. Gleason had also long supported Nixon’s campaigns and was a staunch Republican, and as Nixon had a vacation compound not far away from Gleason’s Florida home the two would strike up a friendship to become frequent golfing buddies, chattering about UFOs and other weird stuff the whole time. It was after one of these golfing outings on February 19, 1973 that Nixon apparently showed up alone at Gleason’s door in the middle of the night and allegedly excitedly told Gleason to get dressed because he wanted to show him something, after which the comedian was taken to Homestead Air Force Base in Florida and guided by armed guards to a top-secret, highly secured remote installation. Things would purportedly get very strange from here.
Gleason was reportedly led into an underground area through sterile corridors and past several ominous laboratories, at one point passing a weird twisted metal mass encased in glass that Nixon told Gleason was the remains of a UFO. Gleason supposedly wasn’t sure what to think of this, and at first thought the president was just joking around, but he would soon find that this was no joke as he was led into a large chamber area where there were “six or eight of what looked like glass-topped Coke freezers.” Within each of these freezers was allegedly the mangled remains of tiny humanoid bodies, according to Gleason “only about two feet tall, with bald heads and disproportionately large ears.” These, he was told, were the remains of the occupants of a UFO that had crashed “nearby,” and to say it was shocking to the great comedian would be an understatement.
Jackie Gleason and Richard Nixon
Upon returning to his home he was apparently very unsettled, noticeably disturbed and panicked, and looking haggard. This was enough to alarm his wife at the time, his second wife Beverly McKittrick, and after at first denying that anything was wrong after several sleepless weeks, during which he could barely even eat, the shaken Gleason apparently came clean and told her everything, swearing her to secrecy in the process. Unfortunately for him, Gleason and Beverly’s marriage was on the rocks at the time, and she promptly broke her promise to keep it all secret, first writing of it in a book that she planned to publish on their marriage but never did, and then according to her recounting the tale in a high profile interview with Esquire magazine in 1974, something which purportedly greatly perturbed Gleason, to the point that according to her it directly led to their prompt divorce, as well as again in The National Enquirer in 1983.
The comedian himself would stay silent on the matter, neither confirming nor denying his wife’s tale, and only apparently coming clean in 1986, when UFO researcher Larry Warren claims Gleason himself confided in him to tell him it was all true, however, it is not clear if this meeting ever took place and Warren has been criticized for embellishing accounts in the past. How do we explain that nothing was heard from the comedian himself? Larry Bryant, the editor of a UFO newsletter called Just Cause, to which Gleason subscribed, and who also unsuccessfully tried to get records on the event from the military through Freedom of Information Act requests, says he tried to get an affidavit from Gleason on the matter, and says of his silence:
Though I never did hear from Gleason, I did learn that he had been contacted by a third party in the film industry. At this confrontation, Gleason chose to neither confirm nor deny the story, saying that he would prefer not to discuss it all. The way I see it Gleason easily could have set the record straight in reply to my proposal or in an explanation to the inquisitive film-industry representative. If the story was a fabrication or misinterpretation on the part of his wife, he now had every opportunity to say so. That he chose not to merely deepens the mystery.
This is one of the problems we face with this outlandish tale, that it is only officially known from the account given by Gleason’s ex-wife, who was not only writing a book at the time, but also was not too happy with the late comedian in general at that point, their relationship having gone very sour. It is very probable she made it all up out of spite or to sell books, but this hasn’t stopped a lot of researchers from trying to track down if there is any truth to the tale, and any truth there may be seems to be pretty thin on the ground.
It has been confirmed through Gleason’s personal diaries that he did in fact play a game of golf with Nixon on the day in question, and that they had spent about 10 minutes talking about UFOs, but that is about it. Gleason himself makes no mention of covert midnight meetings or of being whisked off to a secret base to be shown crashed spaceships and dead aliens, and he never publicly spoke about it, although the more conspiratorial minded among us will likely say that these entries were either redacted or were never written at all in order for Gleason to keep his secrecy on the matter. There is also absolutely no corroboration or records from the Air Force base that Gleason had ever been there at all, much less on the night of February 19, 1973, and even if he was, is it normal operating procedure to allow a civilian entertainer with no security clearance at all to just waltz into a top secret installation and show them whatever you want, including freaking dead aliens? Also, just how did Nixon get away from the constant presence of his Secret Service security detail, which usually shadowed his every move, to go traipsing off to a comedian’s house to tell him the truth about UFOs and aliens? It all makes the whole affair not a little suspicious, although then again the military might have covered it up, perhaps. Yet this is not the end of the strikes against this amazing tale.
Perhaps the most damning thing about it all is that the Esquire article that Beverly adamantly claims to have appeared in doesn’t actually seem to exist, narrowing down the only real known coverage of it to an article in The National Enquirer, not exactly known as the last bastion of journalistic integrity. Beverly for her part insisted that the Esquire article does exist in an interview with researcher Kenny Young in 2003, and sure maybe the Esquire article was “erased,” but the fact of the matter is that every article on the case can be essentially traced back to that National Enquirer article, which incidentally also happens to have painted Gleason in a very negative light, perfectly keeping in line with what one would think a vengeful ex-wife would write.
So was this the work of a conniving, spurned woman getting revenge? Maybe. Was she trying to drum up interest for her planned book that never came to fruition? Likely. Was a lot of this exaggerated and played up over the years? I wouldn’t doubt it. Did Richard Nixon shake off his security detail to randomly gather up a comedian in order to take him to a top secret military facility and show him dead alien bodies and the wreckage of a spaceship? Who knows? Does it make for an entertaining little historical oddity that has managed to worm its way into the UFO lore? Definitely.
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Enorme lichtflits aan de hemel boven Schilde en Nederland waargenomen - HLN.be
Enorme lichtflits aan de hemel boven Schilde en Nederland waargenomen - HLN.be
Printscreen videoLichtflits en vuurbal aan de hemel boven Schilde.
WETENSCHAP & PLANEETBoven Schilde was er maandagnacht rond 00.40 uur een gigantische lichtflits te zien. Ook in Nederland merkten ze het fenomeen op. Verschillende mensen legden de indrukwekkende beelden vast en postten hun filmpjes op sociale media. Volkssterrenwacht Mira meldt aan onze redactie dat het om een vallende ster gaat.
Het zou gaan om een vallende ster: een steente van ongeveer één centimeter dat de dampkring was binnengevlogen. Dit zorgde voor een felle lichtflits. “Vannacht was het helder weer. Op zo’n momenten gebeurt het weleens dat zo’n fenomeen mogelijk is. Het zijn immers lange nachten en korte dagen”, klinkt het bij Volkssterrenwacht Mira. “Het zonnestelsel bevat een ster: de zon. Daarrond draaien een heleboel planeten en andere hemellichamen. Daartussen is nog heel veel ruis, zoals schilfers metaal en brokjes steen die bewegen in het zonnestelsel.”
“Het gebeurt regelmatig dat er een brokje botst tegen de Aarde. Als zoiets van buitenaf door de lucht begint te klieven, dan gaat er door de wrijving tussen de luchtdeeltjes en de brokjes een hoge temperatuur ontstaan waarbij de indringers opbranden. De lucht zelf zal dan eventjes ontregeld zijn”, licht Volkssterrenwacht Mira verder toe.
“Het gaat met andere woorden om een opbrandend project dat langs het traject de luchtdeeltjes zal beroeren. Die gaan even een flits veroorzaken langs het traject van het opbrandende deel. Dat zien wij dan als een fel lijntje in de lucht. Vorige nacht was er sprake van een zeer felle flits. Dat heeft te maken met het feit dat het om een groter object gaat dan gewoonlijk. Als het iets is van een grootte van een knikker of een erwt gaat het voor een helderder fenomeen zorgen. Soms is het zelfs nog groter, zoals een vuist. Er blijft niets over van dat brandende deeltje. Het brandt op in de lucht, zoals hier het geval was. Het gebeurt zelden dat er iets neervalt op onze planeet. Zoiets noemen we dan een meteoriet.”
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- Gemiddelde waardering: 0/5 - (0 Stemmen) Categorie:HLN.be - Het Laatste Nieuws ( NL)
IS DE BEROEMDE JERUZALEM UFO TERUG?
IS DE BEROEMDE JERUZALEM UFO TERUG?
Op 28 januari 2011 daalde ’s avonds een UFO neer boven de Rotskoepel op de berg en schoot even later met een onvoorstelbare snelheid weer de lucht in. Nu duikt er een UFO op boven een klein dorp in Californië dat veel lijkt op die inmiddels beroemd geworden UFO uit 2011.
We hebben vandaag iets bijzonders dat begin vorige maand plaatsvond boven Porterville, een dorpje in de Amerikaanse staat Californië.
Er is een man die gewoon buiten loopt en in de verte boven de huizen van het dorp een vreemd cirkelvormig object waarneemt, dat stil in de lucht lijkt te hangen.
Volgens UFO onderzoeker Scott Waring lijkt dit ronde object als twee druppels water op de beroemde video die in januari 2011 boven de Rotskoepel in Jeruzalem verscheen.
De man dacht in eerste instantie aan een weerballon of een reclame object, maar kon niets ontdekken waaruit bleek dat dit object ergens mee was verbonden. Hij vertelt dat hij toen hij het object een tijdje had gefilmd hij koude handen kreeg en besloot te stoppen om later dichter bij huis nog eens te proberen.
En dan komt er inderdaad een tweede opname van nog wat dichterbij en wederom is daar totaal niets op te ontdekken waaruit zou blijken dat het ergens mee is verbonden. Het hangt volkomen stil in de lucht en als reclame object zou het ook weinig zin hebben volgens de filmer, want er staan maar een paar huizen in het dorp.
Wat helaas verder niet wordt vermeld is hoe en op wat voor manier het object vervolgens weer verdween, maar alle UFO onderzoekers die de opname hebben bekeken zijn het wel met elkaar eens dat daar daadwerkelijk iets hangt en dat niemand een verklaring heeft voor wat het dan wel is, waardoor het daarmee een UFO wordt.
Zoals gezegd is Scott Waring ervan overtuigd dat dit object veel overeenkomsten heeft met de ufo boven Jeruzalem uit 2011. Voor hen die vergeten zijn hoe die er ook alweer uit zag hierna een deel uit een eerder artikel over deze bijzondere UFO.
Heeft de Tempelberg misschien in een ver verleden ook een rol gespeeld bij de aanwezigheid van de Goden op aarde. Wordt er ook in de Tempelberg iets geactiveerd, net zoals bij de piramides?
In 2011 vond er nog een merkwaardig voorval plaats op de Tempelberg. Een gebeurtenis die door talloze mensen is gezien en vastgelegd en waarvan de mainstream-media niet wisten hoe snel ze dit tot hoax moesten verklaren.
Op 28 januari 2011 daalde ’s avonds een UFO neer boven de Rotskoepel op de berg en schoot even later met een onvoorstelbare snelheid weer de lucht in.
Voor de mainstream wereld zou het hier gaan om een hoax, in elkaar gezet door iemand die met zijn video zoveel mogelijk bezoekers wilde trekken om hiermee geld te verdienen, maar de werkelijkheid ligt ook hier zoals zo vaak wat anders.
Er is namelijk niet één opname van dit fenomeen gemaakt, maar meerdere, door verschillende mensen en vanaf verschillende posities. De kans dat deze opnames echt zijn, is dan ook veel groter dan dat ze allemaal nep zouden zijn.
Bovendien zijn er nog meer merkwaardigheden, zoals te zien in de volgende video:
Om te beginnen zegt hij dat ook hij uitgebreide analyses heeft uitgevoerd voor wat betreft de opnames van deze gebeurtenis en dat ze honderd procent echt zijn. Niet alleen zijn er door talloze verschillende mensen opnames gemaakt, het is daarnaast volgens hem nog gezien door ongeveer 10.000 ooggetuigen, bestaande uit een mix van toeristen en lokale bewoners.
Ook vertelt hij dat gedurende de kruistochten de Tempeliers een aantal heilige objecten hebben verborgen onder de Rotskoepel. Die objecten zouden dan onder andere zijn de Ark van het Verbonden de Heilige Graal.
Velen zullen zich afgevraagd hebben wat die UFO daar op dat moment te zoeken had, wetende dat ze zouden worden opgemerkt door duizenden mensen. Waarom kwam het juist naar beneden boven een tempel die duizenden jaren oud is?
Scott denkt dat hij het antwoord op die vraag heeft:
Ze noemen het niet voor niets Rotskoepel. De tempel uit die tijd werd gebouwd bovenop een rots die een heilige betekenis had. Het is een heilige rots voor zowel Joden als moslims.
Moslims zeggen dat de rots de plek is van de nachtreis van de profeet Mohammed. Op een nacht toen Mohammed lag te slapen in de buurt van Mekka kwam de engel Gabriël bij Mohammed en nam hem mee naar al-Mashjid al-Aqsa (de verste moskee) in Jeruzalem, gelegen op een steenworp afstand van de Rotskoepel.
Vanaf de rots reisde Mohammed samen met de engel Gabriël naar de hemel, waar hij andere profeten ontmoette zoals Jezus en Mozes. Ook zag hij daar zowel de hel als het paradijs en zag tenslotte God op zijn troon, omringd door engelen.
Scott zegt nu dat de UFO die we boven de Rotskoepel zien, niemand minder is dan de engel Gabriël.
De rots heeft volgens hem een heilige betekenis die heel ver teruggaat en bevat waarschijnlijk ook hele oude technologie, waarbij mensen snel konden reizen van de ene plek in het heelal naar de andere (teleportatie). Misschien kwam die UFO wel om dat dimensieportaal in de rots opnieuw te activeren. Of misschien was het Gabriël die daar nogmaals kwam ter gedachtenis aan het eerdere bezoek aan zijn goede vriend Mohammed.
De engel Gabriël was buitenaards, beschikte over vergevorderde technologie, waardoor mensen hem in die dagen alleen maar konden identificeren als een dienaar en/of boodschapper van God.
En dit is volgens Scott Waring het geheim achter de mysterieuze en tot op de dag van vandaag niet verklaarde UFO boven de Rotskoepel een aantal jaren geleden.
De ufologen zijn wel aardig met elkaar eens dat het object in Porterville een onverklaard verschijnsel is en dat het geen weer- of reclameballon is. Nu staat deze website erom bekend dat ze lezers heeft die meestal wel weten te ontrafelen wat het is, dus mocht dat dit keer ook zou zijn, laat ons weten.
Proof a Mysterious Lost Ancient Global Civilization Spanned Virtually the Entire Planet…
Proof a Mysterious Lost Ancient Global Civilization Spanned Virtually the Entire Planet…
This will likely blow your mind. 250+ photos and comparisons of ancient sites around the world, show that there is a LOT more to the story of our ancient past. Proof of a lost ancient global civilization that has been hiding in plain sight, for thousands of years.
Proof a Mysterious Lost Ancient Global Civilization Spanned Virtually the Entire Planet…
I’m Jimmy, and my channel is called Bright Insight. I intend to share interesting, and otherwise unknown information with as many as I can. I’m combining my unique background and life experience to make thought-provoking video presentations. I’m asking questions and creating conversations. My goal is to get people to think for themselves. The truth is found with an open mind, and the truth is stranger than fiction.
About Jimmy: – Independent researcher – Former Theft/Fraud Investigator – Army/Iraq war vet who woke up Education: – MBA w/Marketing focus – Bachelor of Communication & Sociology; Minor: Religious Studies – Thousands of hours of research in subjects such as, lost ancient civilizations, philosophy, spirituality, the cosmos and compelling examples of conspiracy theory.
Why Do We All Hear About UFO Sightings in the News?
Why Do We All Hear About UFO Sightings in the News?
Why do we all hear about UFO sightings in the news and there are always books, internet articles and reports on the subject? People who think they can answer this question should research a little more. They should first understand the concept of UFOs because they are hard to explain away with simple science.
Another factor is that we have been having so many wars since the 1940s and many think they are a factor or are they the driving force behind the world’s new energy technology. Why not look into all these things instead of worrying about UFOs?
There have been many different types of UFO sightings throughout history and all we are going to do is list some of them. I will be sure to give more information on each type, as time goes on.
We are all familiar with the ones reported by various military and other government agencies when dealing with these phenomena, the ones known as Extraterrestrial Space Travelers (sometimes also called Extra-Terrestrial (ET) Space Vehicles) or UFOs. These are the ones that fly around in your neighborhood and seem to be off in a totally different direction from where you live. So, one thing is for sure, no one is fooling around and they are real. You will never run out of stories about these crazy guys from outer space.
Also, the Extraterrestrial Telepathic Communication is another way these people from space to get in contact with humans. This may not be as well known or understood, but they have been recorded in many books on the subject.
If you are a skeptic you may think we are alone, but that would make a bunch of really strange creatures to be our friends, wouldn’t it? Why would these animals make up a civilization that is much more advanced than themselves and then go on to meet other intelligent civilizations that are thousands of years ahead of them? It just doesn’t make sense, does it?
Then there are the way too weird to be considered normal and even odd balls that pass through our atmosphere without the help of any rocket or aircraft that don’t leave a sign of their presence on earth. This craft may be a very curious but this is where we get into the topic of Alien Abduction’s.
Do you remember the one time when you were standing in line at a movie theater and then saw one UFO appear right above you and then suddenly zoom off into the distance and fly off into space? Well, this was only the start of one big UFO sighting story in history. Many people were complaining that it was too intense but most agree it was a very cool UFO sighting.
“We warned at the start of ZetaTalk, in 1995, that unpredictable weather extremes, switching about from drought to deluge, would occur and increase on a lineal basis up until the pole shift. Where this occurred steadily, it has only recently become undeniable. ZetaTalk, and only ZetaTalk, warned of these weather changes, at that early date. Our early warnings spoke to the issue of global heating from the core outward, hardly Global Warming, a surface or atmospheric issue, but caused by consternation in the core. Affected by the approach of Planet X, which was by then starting to zoom rapidly toward the inner solar system for its periodic passage, the core was churning, melting the permafrost and glaciers and riling up volcanoes. When the passage did not occur as expected in 2003 because Planet X had stalled in the inner solar system, we explained the increasing weather irregularities in the context of the global wobble that had ensued – weather wobbles where the Earth is suddenly forced under air masses, churning them. This evolved by 2005 into a looping jet stream, loops breaking away and turning like a tornado to affect the air masses underneath. Meanwhile, on Planet Earth, droughts had become more intractable and deluges positively frightening, temperature swings bringing snow in summer in the tropics and searing heat in Artic regions, with the violence of storms increasing in number and ferocity.”
The wobble seems to have changed, as the temperature in Europe suddenly plunged after being like an early Spring, Alaska has its coldest temps ever while the US and much of Canada is having an extremely mild winter. India went from fatal cold spell to balmy again. Has the Earth changed position vs a vs Planet X to cause this?[and from another]Bitter cold records broken in Alaska – all time coldest record nearly broken, but Murphy’s Law intervenes[Jan 30]http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/01/30/bitter-cold-records-broken-in-alaskaJim River, AK closed in on the all time record coldest temperature of -80°F set in 1971, which is not only the Alaska all-time record, but the record for the entire United States. Unfortunately, it seems the battery died in the weather station just at the critical moment. While the continental USA has a mild winter and has set a number of high temperature records in the last week and pundits ponder whether they will be blaming the dreaded “global warming” for those temperatures, Alaska and Canada have been suffering through some of the coldest temperatures on record during the last week.
There has been no change in the wobble pattern, the wobble has merely become more severe. Nancy noted a Figure 8 format when the Earth wobble first became noticeable, in early 2005, after Planet X moved into the inner solar system at the end of 2003. The Figure 8 shifted along to the east a bit on the globe between 2005 and 2009, (the last time Nancy took its measure) as Planet X came closer to the Earth, encountering the magnetic N Pole with a violent push earlier in the day. But the pattern of the Figure 8 remained essentially the same. So what changed recently that the weather patterns became noticeably different in late January, 2012?
The N Pole is pushed away when it comes over the horizon, when the noon Sun is centered over the Pacific. This regularly puts Alaska under colder air, with less sunlight, and thus the historically low temps there this January, 2012 as the wobble has gotten stronger. But by the time the Sun is positioned over India, the N Pole has swung during the Figure 8 so the globe tilts, and this tilt is visible in the weather maps from Asia. The tilt has forced the globe under the hot air closer to the Equator, warming the land along a discernable tilt demarcation line.
The next loop of the Figure 8 swings the globe so that the N Pole moves in the other direction, putting the globe again at a tilt but this time in the other direction. This tilt is discernable in weather maps of Europe, again along a diagonal line. Depending upon air pressure and temperature differences, the weather on either side of this diagonal line may be suddenly warm or suddenly cold. The tilt and diagonal line lingers to affect much of the US and Canada, but the Figure 8 changes at this point to be an up and down motion, pulling the geographic N Pole south so the US is experiencing a warmer than expected winter under a stronger Sun. Then the cycle repeats, with the magnetic N Pole of Earth pushed violently away again as the Sun is positioned over the Pacific.
Would the Zetas be able to let us know what is causing the early break-up of the Arctic Ice, the ice seems to have taken on a swirling pattern at the same time, would this be wobble related?[and from another]
The ice in Canada’s western Arctic ripped open in a massive “fracturing event” this spring that spread like a wave across 1,000 kilometres of the Beaufort Sea. Huge leads of water – some more than 500 kilometres long and as much as 70 kilometres across – opened up from Alaska to Canada’s Arctic islands as the massive ice sheet cracked as it was pushed around by strong winds and currents. It took just seven days for the fractures to progress across the entire area from west to east.[and from another]http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/IOTD/view.php?id=80752&src=iotdrss A high-pressure weather system was parked over the region, producing warmer temperatures and winds that flowed in a southwesterly direction. That fueled the Beaufort Gyre, a wind-driven ocean current that flows clockwise. The gyre was the key force pulling pieces of ice west past Point Barrow, the northern nub of Alaska that protrudes into the Beaufort Sea.
The Figure 8 formed by the N Pole during the daily Earth wobble has shifted somewhat to the East, due to Planet X positioned more to the right of the Earth during its approach. This was anticipated, and well described in ZetaTalk, the Earth crowding to the left in the cup to escape the approach of Planet X, so the angle between these two planets would change slightly. This shift of the Figure 8 to the East is due to the push against the Earth’s magnetic N Pole occurring sooner each day than prior. Thus instead of occurring when the Sun is high over the Pacific, over New Zealand, it is now occurring when the Sun is high over Alaska. All the wobble points have shifted eastward accordingly.
This has brought a lingering Winter to the western US, and a changed sloshing pattern to the Arctic waters. Instead of Pacific waters being pushed through the Bering Straits into the Arctic when the polar push occurs, the wobble is swinging the Arctic to the right, and then later to the left, creating a circular motion in the waters trapped in the Arctic. Since the Earth rotates counterclockwise, the motion also takes this path. This is yet another piece of evidence that the establishment is hard pressed to explain. They are attempting to ascribe this to high pressure and wind, all of which are not new to the Arctic, but this circular early breakup of ice in the Arctic is new.
I was looking at this Mars photo when I found a face looking out to the horizon. The face sits on the side of a hill and is made of a stone substance, much like the sphinx face made in Egypt. This face has softer edges and rounder cheeks, making me believe its a woman...probably a queen or important woman in their culture. You can see her hair flowing down the back and side of her face. Extraordinary and important evidence of ancient alien cultures on Mars. They don't look too much different than we do, do they? Scott C. Waring - Taiwan
Korean news shows UFO during coverage of fire in Los Angeles
Korean news shows UFO during coverage of fire in Los Angeles
South Korean news story shows some kind of solid unidentified flying object during coverage of fire and explosion in Los Angeles, California. This happened on 29th February 2020.
The scientists who discovered the object on Feb. 15 estimate that, because of the instability of its path through space, the minimoon will likely leave Earth's orbit sometime in April.
Astronomers know little about this minimoon — so little, in fact, that they can't even say if it's an artificial object, such as a dead satellite. However, they say, it's most likely a small asteroid. And although the object poses no danger to Earth, it does show how changeable our neighborhood is.
The international Gemini Observatory/NSF’s National Optical-Infrared Astronomy Research Laboratory/AURA/G. Fedorets (Image credit: The international Gemini Observatory/NSF’s National Optical-Infrared Astronomy Research Laboratory/AURA/G. Fedorets)
Information from the International Astronomical Union's Minor Planet Center, which keeps observation records for all known asteroids, shows that the orbit of the minimoon doesn't match the precise orbit of any known human-made object, Kacper Wierzchos, a senior research specialist for the Catalina Sky Survey and co-discoverer of the minimoon, told Space.com. The object's orbit didn't display any perturbations resulting from solar radiation pressure coming from the sun; such wiggles are common for human-made satellites in Earth's orbit.
But Wierzchos said he doesn't want to assume the minimoon is an asteroid quite yet. "The possibility it is artificial still exists, so I am trying to be cautious with every statement," he said. "I'd hate it to be artificial after [everyone is] making a fuss [about the discovery]."
The NASA-funded Catalina program at the University of Arizona is an automated survey that scans the sky for fast-moving objects. On discovery night, Wierzchos and Catalina research specialist Theodore Pruyne happened to be at the telescope, Wierzchos said. On a good night, the survey can study around 40 near-Earth asteroids, which are typically objects astronomers already know about. But on Feb. 15, something in Catalina's observations looked a little funny and didn't match anything known by astronomers. The duo submitted the discovery to the Minor Planet Center, and other astronomers soon confirmed the find.
Data from the Catalina Sky Survey shows the recently discovered minimoon currently orbiting Earth. (Image credit: K. Wierzchos/T. Pruyne/University of Arizona/Catalina Sky Survey)
The newly identified object, now known as 2020 CD3, was very faint when it was discovered, at only about magnitude 20. (The lower the magnitude, the brighter the object.) That faintness stretches the capabilities of Catalina and is beyond what most amateurs can see in their telescopes. (Since then, the object has faded to magnitude 23, making it visible only to the largest professional telescopes.)
In the nights after the discovery, Wierzchos and his collaborators kept following the object to try to determine its orbit. Their calculations showed that, most likely, the object was circling the sun and Earth's gravity snatched it into our planet's orbit sometime in 2017.
How did the minimoon go unnoticed for years? First, the sky is vast, and telescopes have limited time dedicated to searching for asteroids, Wierzchos said. He also cited the minimoon's faintness and highly variable orbit.
2020 CD3 has a "chaotic" orbit, he said, because it is pulled between the gravity of the moon and the gravity of Earth. Its distance to Earth varies between the equivalent of 0.2 and 4.5 Earth-moon distances (The average distance to the moon is roughly 239,000 miles, or 384,000 kilometers.) When Wierzchos last observed the minimoon, on Wednesday (Feb. 26), it was roughly 2.5 lunar distances away, he said.
Because the object's distance to Earth varies, so does its orbital period, or the time it takes the minimoon to circle Earth. Wierzchos said the object's orbital period is difficult to measure precisely, but it seems to be about a month.
Astronomers have observed 2020 CD3 only about six or seven times so far, so they don't have enough information yet to derive a "light curve," which shows the variation in an object's brightness. If they can get that data, Wierzchos said, it may help astronomers determine what kind of asteroid it is (if it is, indeed, an asteroid), how quickly it rotates and how big it is.
Assuming the object is a common type of asteroid called a carbonaceous asteroid, Wierzchos said, the minimoon is probably about the size of a car. Ideally, he hopes other telescopes will be able to observe the object before it drifts away. Telescopes he would like to see participate include Puerto Rico's Arecibo Observatory (which has radar optimized to get the shape and size of nearby asteroids) or large optical telescopes, such as the Keck Observatory in Hawaii.
Wierzchos is scouring past data from the Catalina Sky Survey to see if 2020 CD3 showed up in past imagery and went unnoticed. He hasn't found such observations yet, but he said it's possible that Catalina or other asteroid surveyors, such as the Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System, have that information in their archives.
Wierzchos hopes Catalina will be able to see 2020 CD3 again before it fades. But astronomers are racing against the gravitational tug-of-war between Earth and our traditional moon. Before long, they know, the minimoon will drift out of sight, bound for new adventures.
'Kevin Costner, eat your heart out – you may want to start planning the prequel,' said the research team.
'Early Earth, home to some of our planet's first lifeforms, may have been a real-life "waterworld" – without a continent in sight.
'It may even have looked a bit like the post-apocalyptic, and land-free, future imagined in Costner's infamous film Waterworld.'
In the film, humanity struggles to survive after the ice caps melt and inundate the planet with water.
But, unlike in the movie, there were no fish – only tiny aquatic organisms called cyanobacteria.
A vista of the Panorama district looking down from the top of the ancient ocean crust to its base
The discovery, reported in the journal Nature Geoscience, is based on an analysis of rocks from Northwestern Australia's outback.
They date back to a period known geologically as the 'Paleoarchean' – spanning a period 3,600 million to 3,200 million years ago – when life consisted of nothing more complex than bacteria.
'The history of life on Earth tracks available niches,' said co-author Professor Boswell Wing, of the University of Colorado Boulder.
'If you've got a waterworld, a world covered by ocean, then dry niches are just not going to be available.'
It was identified from the chemical signatures of an ocean in a chunk of crust that's been turned on its side in the Panorama desert in the Aussie outback.
It is possible to walk across what used to be the hard, outer shell of the planet in the space of a day.
Benjamin Johnson inspects an outcrop in the Panorama district by what was once an ancient hydrothermal vent
It will take you from the base to spots where water once bubbled up through the seafloor via hydrothermal vents.
The researchers described it as a 'once-in-a-lifetime opportunity' to pick up clues about the ocean water from billions of years ago.
'Today, there are these really scrubby and rolling hills that are cut through by dry river beds,' said lead author Dr Benjamin Johnson, now at at Iowa State University.
'It's a crazy place. There are no samples of really ancient ocean water lying around, but we do have rocks that interacted with that seawater and remembered that interaction.'
He likened it to looking at coffee grounds to gather information about the water that poured through it.
US post-apocalyptic action film Waterworld depicts a future in 2500 where every continent on Earth is now underwater, due to a rise sea levels. This projected future could resemble an early Earth
The researchers analysed data from more than 100 rock samples from across the dry terrain.
They were looking, in particular, for two different flavours, or 'isotopes', of oxygen trapped in stone – Oxygen-18 and the slightly less heavy Oxygen-16.
The ratio may have been a bit off in seawater 3.2 billion years ago – with just a tiny bit more Oxygen-18 than you'd see today.
Professor Wing said these are 'super sensitive' to the presence of continents.
Today's land masses are covered by clay-rich soils that disproportionately take up heavier oxygen isotopes from the water – like mineral vacuums for Oxygen-18, he explained.
Nostoc, a genus of cyanobacteria, under microscopic view. Cyanobacteria would have inhabited the early 'waterworld' of Earth 3.2 billion years ago
There simply weren't any soil-rich continents around to suck the isotopes up, but there could have been tiny spots of land dotted about.
'There's nothing in what we've done that says you can't have teeny, micro-continents sticking out of the oceans,' Professor Wing said.
'We just don't think there were global-scale formation of continental soils like we have today.'
The researchers are now planning to scour other, younger rock formations at sites from Arizona to South Africa to see if they can find when the land masses we know today first roared onto the scene.
'Trying to fill that gap is really important,' said Dr Johnson said.
A new study by researchers at Cambridge University suggests that the giant exoplanet K2-18b – a mini-Neptune – may be more potentially habitable than previously thought.
The red dot in the center represents the red dwarf star K2-18. The curved white lines represents the orbits of planet K2-18b and and another candidate planet, K2-18c. The broad green band is the system’s habitable zone.
Can giant exoplanets such as super-Earths or even mini-Neptunes be habitable? There’s currently a lot of debate about that question, but new findings about one such world suggest that some of them might indeed be able to support life. A research team from the University of Cambridge has announced that K2-18b, a planet a bit more than twice the size of Earth, could have liquid water and habitable conditions, even though it’s been classified as a mini-Neptune.
The peer-reviewed findings were published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters on February 27, 2020.
Water vapor had previously been detected in the atmosphere of K2-18b, as announced last September, but because the planet was classified by most scientists as a mini-Neptune, it was regarded to be very unlikely to be habitable. Planets like Neptune have deep hydrogen atmospheres and no real solid surface. Nikku Madhusudhan from Cambridge’s Institute of Astronomy, who led the research team, said in a statement:
Water vapor has been detected in the atmospheres of a number of exoplanets but, even if the planet is in the habitable zone, that doesn’t necessarily mean there are habitable conditions on the surface. To establish the prospects for habitability, it is important to obtain a unified understanding of the interior and atmospheric conditions on the planet, in particular, whether liquid water can exist beneath the atmosphere.
Artist’s concept of the mini-Neptune exoplanet K2-18b.
Image via mage via ESA/ Hubble, M. Kornmesser/ UCL News.
K2-18b is about 2.6 times the radius and 8.6 times the mass of Earth. It is 124 light-years away, orbiting within the habitable zone – the region where liquid water could exist – of a red dwarf star. There is also a second candidate planet closer to the star, K2-18c, but it has not been confirmed yet.
On mini-Neptunes, a thick hydrogen atmosphere is thought to surround a watery layer that then surrounds a rocky iron core. But under such conditions, the temperatures would be too high, and the water would be under too much pressure, for life to survive. This is similar to why Neptune or Uranus type worlds are uninhabitable, at least by earthly life standards, having deep atmospheres with crushing pressures, no solid rocky surface and no liquid water.
Given K2-18b’s large size, it has been assumed that it is more like a mini-Neptune than a super-Earth, which typically are a bit smaller, but still at least twice as large as Earth.
But that assessment might be changing a bit, if the researchers are right.
They found that K2-18b’s hydrogen atmosphere might not be too thick after all, and the water layer might actually be habitable, perhaps more like oceans on Earth. The researchers used the mass and radius of the planet, as well as previous observations of the atmosphere, to make a better determination of the composition and structure of both the atmosphere and deep interior. Detailed numerical models and statistical methods were used to help explain what conditions are actually like on this distant world.
There has been a lot of debate over whether K2-18b is a super-Earth or mini-Neptune. Most scientists now agree that it is a mini-Neptune.
Image via Patterson Clark/ Washington Post/ Quora.
The computer models showed that a range of conditions are possible in the planet’s interior. Those models used known atmospheric properties as constraints on which conditions are the most plausible. The potential habitability rests on just how extensive the hydrogen atmosphere is. According to study co-author Matthew Nixon at the Institute of Astronomy:
We wanted to know the thickness of the hydrogen envelope, how deep the hydrogen goes. While this is a question with multiple solutions, we’ve shown that you don’t need much hydrogen to explain all the observations together.
So what did the researchers find? According to their results, the maximum extent of the hydrogen atmosphere, or envelope, is only 6% of K2-18b’s mass. Some computer models showed it to be even less. The minimum amount of hydrogen is about one-millionth by mass, which is similar to that of Earth’s atmosphere. Under those conditions, the atmosphere would be more like that of a super-Earth, rather than a mini-Neptune.
Moreover, a number of the calculated models would allow for a world with a true ocean, not just a layer of water that is under extreme, unearthly pressure and temperature. In this scenario, the temperature and pressure would actually be similar to those in Earth’s oceans.
There’s another intriguing twist to this, as well. While the researchers did confirm the atmosphere to be composed mostly of hydrogen, with quite a bit of water vapor, as already known, they also found something puzzling. The levels of methane (CH4) and ammonia (NH3) were less than expected. According to the paper, this is evidence of chemical disequilibrium – or non-equilibrium thermodynamics – in the atmosphere, and, maybe, could even point to biological activity as a cause:
Furthermore, our constraints on CH4 and NH3 suggest chemical disequilibrium. Among other possibilities for chemical disequilibrium, e.g., photochemistry, the potential influence of biochemical processes may not be entirely ruled out. Future observations, e.g., with the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), will have the potential to refine our findings. We argue that planets such as K2-18b can indeed have the potential to approach habitable conditions and searches for biosignatures should not necessarily be restricted to smaller rocky planets.
On Earth, disequilibrium in the atmosphere – larger than normal amounts of oxygen and small amounts of methane – is caused by biological processes, and is a biosignature. For K2-18b however, it should be emphasized that this is just one of several possibilities, given that the planet is still much different from Earth in significant ways. As the paper stated, one other possibility is photochemistry; in this case, the chemical reactions in a planetary atmosphere caused by light or radiation from its star.
If these findings turn out to be accurate, that would greatly increase the number of potentially habitable planets out there, since worlds of this size are rather common.
Nikku Madhusudhan at Cambridge University, who led the new study.
This new paper is sure to cause some intense debate, much like last September when the water vapor detection was first reported, and most media outlets described K2-18b as a habitable super-Earth, which was misleading and premature.
Upcoming new space telescopes such as JWST and others will be able to analyze the atmospheres of planets like K2-18b and search for possible biosignatures, chemical signatures of life. That will help to determine whether any exoplanets like this, including super-Earths, could actually be habitable.
Bottom line: A new study suggests that the giant exoplanet K2-18b may be more potentially habitable than previously thought.
Some 10 billion years ago, the primitive Milky Way scarfed down a galaxy one-quarter of its own size, according to a new study.
The cannibalized galaxy, known as Gaia-Enceladus, helped to create the Milky Way (our home galaxy) and its digested remains contain clues about the origins and evolution of our cosmic surroundings.
Astronomers frequently observe mergers between distant galaxies, but it’s trickier to reconstruct the interactions that defined the modern Milky Way in part because we lack an outside perspective of our own galaxy. The Gaia spacecraft, launched by the European Space Agency (ESA) in 2013, has helped fill in some of these gaps by building the most precise star map ever produced.
The Gaia mission has made it easier to distinguish between stars that originated in the Milky Way, and those that were introduced by Gaia-Enceladus, which is named after the ESA mission. (It is also popularly known as the “Gaia Sausage” because of the sausage-shaped orbit some of its remnants follow around the galaxy’s core.)
Scientists led by Carme Gallart, an astronomer at the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias in Spain, found that some stars observed by Gaia are lower in metal content than others. Smaller galaxies are typically not as enriched with metals as larger ones, which suggests that the metal-poor stars may have originated in the Gaia-Enceladus galaxy.
The Milky Way dates back at least 13 billion years, almost to the beginnings of the known universe. Back in those early days, the galaxy was smaller and had a different structure, so Gallart and her colleagues refer to this version as the “Milky Way progenitor,” or the “primitive Milky Way,” which was distinct from its modern incarnation.
The team’s simulations predicted that once the merger occurred, many of this progenitor’s stars—which were relatively metal-rich—became heated by the influx of new galactic material. Some of the stars were thrown from the galaxy’s disk into the halo, which is a spherical structure that surrounds the entire galaxy.
Gaia’s observations confirm that these metal-rich stars are strewn through the halo, and that they had an upper age limit of about 10 billion years, suggesting that this was when the merger took place.
“A primitive Milky Way had been forming stars over a period of some [three billion years] when a smaller galaxy, which had been forming stars on a similar timescale but was less chemically enriched owing to its lower mass, was accreted into it,” Gallart’s team said in the study.
“Our age determination reveals that the stars heated to halo-like kinematics were among the first formed in the Milky Way,” they added, “just before the merger with Gaia-Enceladus took place.”
It took another two-to-four billion years for the Milky Way to absorb the smaller galaxy, the team said, and the fallout of this collision continues to spur star formation to this day.
The modern version of the galaxy we live in contains multitudes, much of which has been consumed from outside the borders of its earliest form.
Something mysterious is tugging at the hem of our galaxy, the Milky Way, which is causing a “galactic warp” at its outer edges, according to a study published on Monday in Nature Astronomy.
The Milky Way contains an estimated 250 billion stars, which cluster in spiral arms that swirl around a central supermassive black hole. But astronomers have caught glimpses of a different dynamic occurring out in the far reaches of the Milky Way, where the galactic disk appears to become flared, wobbly, or otherwise distorted by a variety of potential phenomena.
To figure out what might be causing the Milky Way’s outer warping, a team led by Eloisa Poggio, an astrophysicist at the Italian National Institute for Astrophysics in Turin, measured the motions of 12 million giant stars observed by the European Space Agency’s Gaia space telescope.
“Our Milky Way presents a unique case study for galactic warps, thanks to detailed knowledge of its stellar distribution and kinematics,” Poggio’s team said in the study. “However, the cause and dynamic nature of the warp of our Galaxy have remained unclear due to a lack of kinematic constraints.”
In other words, scientists only began to model the Milky Way’s outer warping in detail within the past few years, due to advances in observational techniques. In 2019, for instance, a team created a captivating 3D map of the galactic warp based on measurements of 2,300 Cepheids variables, which are a special type of ultra-radiant stars (their results were published in Science )
Poggio and her colleagues have now built on these models thanks to the second major data dump from the Gaia satellite, which was released in 2018. Gaia has been constructing the most comprehensive catalog of the observable universe ever made since it was launched in 2013.
The sheer volume of observations enabled Poggio and her colleagues to measure the motions of millions of giant stars to trace out the kinematic signature of the galaxy’s warp. “We measured the speed of the warp by comparing the data with our models,” Poggio said in an ESA statement.
“Based on the obtained velocity, the warp would complete one rotation around the centre of the Milky Way in 600 to 700 million years,” she added. “That’s much faster than what we expected based on predictions from other models.”
While other teams have also used Gaia’s 2018 data to probe our galaxy’s edges, the new study aims to constrain “the possible mechanisms responsible for the warp of the Milky Way,” the team said. Suggested explanations for the warp have included longstanding torques emerging from mismatched axial motions of the disk and the galactic halo, or perhaps tidal forces from satellite galaxies of the Milky Way, which could gravitationally yank at the disk.
By modeling the motions of giant Gaia stars over time, Poggio’s team showed that the pull of a satellite galaxy is the most likely cause of the warp.
“The direction and magnitude of the warp’s precession rate favor the scenario that the warp is the result of a recent or ongoing encounter with a satellite galaxy, rather than the relic of the ancient assembly history of the galaxy,” the study says.
This finding might corroborate other recent studies that reconstruct the Milky Way’s turbulent past with nearby galaxies, which can skim material from the galaxies edges or cause disturbances by colliding with it.
It will take more observations and research to confirm that the warp is mostly caused by satellite galaxies. “Nevertheless,” the team said, “our results suggest that external forces from interacting satellite galaxies are playing an important and ongoing role in shaping the outer disk of the Milky Way.”
Skinwalker Ranch & Cattle Mutilations, it's Scarier Than You Think, Christopher O'Brien
Skinwalker Ranch & Cattle Mutilations, it's Scarier Than You Think, Christopher O'Brien
Christopher O’Brien investigated over one thousand paranormal events reported in the San Luis Valley—located in south-central Colorado/north-central New Mexico. Working with law enforcement officials, ex-military, ranchers and an extensive network of skywatchers, he documented what may have been the most intense wave of unexplained activity ever seen in a single region of North America. His ten-year investigation resulted in the three books of his “mysterious valley” trilogy: The Mysterious Valley, Enter the Valley, and Secrets of the Mysterious Valley.
His meticulous field investigation of UFO reports, unexplained livestock deaths, haunted sites, Native American legends, cryptozoology, secret military activity and the folklore, found in the world’s largest alpine valley, has produced one of the largest databases of unusual occurrences gathered from a single geographic region. He is currently working with a team of specialists installing a high-tech video surveillance and hard-data monitoring system in and around the San Luis Valley. His latest book, Stalking the Herd, is being called the most important book ever written examining our relationship with cattle and how this has manifested into the modern “cattle mutilation” mystery.
Secrets of Ancient Cosmology, the Mysteries of the Dogon Tribe of Mali
Secrets of Ancient Cosmology, the Mysteries of the Dogon Tribe of Mali
COAST TO COAST AM – Laird Scranton is the author of a series of books and other writings on ancient cosmology and language. He shared compelling perspectives on how our universe and the dimensions of time and space are believed to emerge from a non-material place, and how seemingly scientific archaic concepts formed an enduring foundation for ancient and modern religion.
The Dogon, a priestly tribe from Mali, Africa, has a culture that combines elements from at least three different ancient traditions– rituals of Judaism, practices of ancient Egypt, and a symbolic cosmology that is a close match for Buddhism, he detailed. One of the intriguing things about the Dogon is that though they were non-technological, they knew about the binary Sirius star system, which would seemingly be impossible to individuate the second star without a telescope.
Sphere UFO During Sunset Over Porterville, CA Video, UFO Sighting News.
Sphere UFO During Sunset Over Porterville, CA Video, UFO Sighting News.
Date of sighting: February 1, 2020
Location of sighting: Porterville, California, USA
Here are two amazing videos of a black sphere UFO hovering over some homes in Porterville, CA a few weeks ago. The person recorded a sphere from 22 minutes away. Later he walked towards that area and realized it was hovering over some neighborhood homes, but no string, rope or advertising was noticeable. I made a screenshot (below) and enlarged it so that we could see its detail. The objects surface is not smooth, but sun like with ripples and waves to it. It reminds me of the UFO seen over Holy of holys, Dome of Rock Temple in Jerusalem. I will put that video below for you to compare shapes. It looks like this UFO is deeply interested in someone in one of those houses...they must be very important in some way for aliens to take notice.
Scott C. Waring
Eyewitness states:
22 minutes after the first video I walked closer to the suburbs to see if I could get a closer video of whatever it was. The object floated over the homes of my neighbors and moved a few times but stayed floating over a few houses. I thought it was a weather balloon at first but no strings were visible and it didn't move with the wind, as a balloon on a string would. Also, why would a weather balloon or advertisement float over suburban homes? I have no idea what it is.
Compare with shape of UFO seen over Jerusalem in 2011 by thousands of tourists.
Ancient Alien Face Seen From Space Station Camera! March 1, 2020, Video, UFO Sighting News.
Ancient Alien Face Seen From Space Station Camera! March 1, 2020, Video, UFO Sighting News.
Date of sighting: March 1, 2020 Location of sighting: Earths orbit, from ISS Source:NASA Live cams I was watching the live NASA cams again, but instead of a UFO, I noticed two giant faces on the far left of the screen. The first fat look human like, the second looks bird like. They look like they were made by Van Gogh using powerful swirls of clouds to form them. NASA is using the infrared filter over the camera, making it purple in color. Infrared is known for cutting out reflections and revealing any cloaked objects in the area. That first face...just amazing guys. I believe it was made by an alien whose thoughts were so powerful that his telepathy accidentally created the form he was thinking about. Clouds and smoke is the most easy to move for telepathic people so this does make sense. And since many alien species out there are highly evolved, they will use pictures in their head...not word to communicate with others. Telepathic communication is the transmitting of pictures more...and not words. Just something amazing I wanted to share with you. Watch the video for more detail and to see the other bird face behind the first face. Scott C. Waring
"To record, watch and research how humanity copes and tries to deal with Coronavirus. Aliens may know than we do about its capabilities. They may be here not just to witness humanity fight the virus, but to see if we can avoid a possible ELE (extinction level event)."
See first video of the huge amount of UFOs captured on February 27, 2020 HERE. Below the second video recorded on March 1, 2020.
If you’re still watching the stars, these are the alien docs to watch. We’ll be looking at the most popular and provocative alien documentaries ever made. We’re not saying it’s aliens but . . . you should check these out. Youtube’s WatchMojo ranks the best alien docs to watch. What do you think is the best alien doc? Let us know in the comments!
UFO's in ons land: waarheid of verzinsel? Het laat de gemoederen alvast niet ongeroerd. Wellicht vindt u het maar nonsens, of twijfelt u toch? Onze mysteriereporter Carl Bries zet de feiten op een rijtje. Aan u om te oordelen...
De feiten
Van 29 november 1989 tot begin 1991 was ons land in de ban van een zeer mysterieus fenomeen. Hoog in de lucht boven voornamelijk Wallonië werden toen vreemde objecten waargenomen. Tientallen tot later duizenden mensen bevestigden wat ze hadden gezien en ook officiële instanties konden er niet omheen.
De gebeurtenissen lokten zelfs de Britten en de Amerikanen naar informatie. Wat was er destijds precies waar van wat bekend staat als ‘de Belgische UFO-golf’?Eerste waarneming
De eerste keer dat men vreemde vliegende objecten boven ons land waarnam, was op 29 november 1989. Toen zagen twee rijkswachters in de Oostkantons een vreemd vliegend object zich traag door de lucht voortbewegen. Het toestel had een driehoekige vorm en felle lichten. In het midden scheen een oranjerood licht. Het bleef enkele minuten lang boven een weide zweven en vloog dan traag verder.
Vreemd, dachten de twee rijkswachters. En zij waren niet alleen. Nog tientallen anderen zouden die dag en de dagen nadien het object hebben zien rondzweven boven Eupen en het stuwmeer van Gilleppe. Later zouden nog meer getuigen opduiken die beweerden de lichten en het voertuig te hebben zien rondzweven. Vooral in Wallonië zouden ze opduiken in het luchtruim.
Onderzoek door leger
De vele getuigenissen wekten de interesse van het Belgisch leger. Die stelde een onderzoek in. Dat werd geleid door generaal-majoor Wilfried de Brouwer van de luchtmacht. Ook hij moest uiteindelijk toegeven dat er iets aan de hand was. Hij had namelijk zelf gezien dat er vreemde objecten in de lucht hingen, in zijn geval was dat boven Waver. Die waarnemingen werden overigens gestaafd door de radargegevens. Ook daarop waren de objecten te zien.
De Brouwer getuigde van het vreemde gedrag van de objecten die zonder enig geluid konden rondvliegen. Ook konden ze zeer traag rondzweven om er daarna pijlsnel vandoor te gaan. Zoiets had hij in zijn hele leven nog nooit gezien.
Hoogtepunt
Het hoogtepunt moest tegen dan echter nog komen. In de nacht van 30 op 31 maart 1990, zo’n half jaar na de eerste waarnemingen, waren er maar liefst zo’n 13.500 mensen die beweerden iets te hebben gezien.
Het begon rond 23 uur toen de toezichthouder van het controlecentrum (CRC) in het Waalse Glaaien meldingen ontving van ongewone lichten ten zuidoosten van Brussel. Deze lichten waren volgens getuigen helderder dan sterren en wisselden af tussen rood, geel en groen. Ze vormden een perfecte driehoek. De toezichthouder vroeg aan de gendarmerie van Waver om poolshoogte te gaan nemen.
Toen de gendarmes bevestigden wat de mensen hadden gemeld en er een tweede partij lichtjes werd waargenomen, vond het CRC het welletjes. Zij stuurden enkele F-16 jachtvliegtuigen de lucht in om zo beter zicht te krijgen op de vreemde fenomenen.
Ondertussen meldden getuigen dat nog een derde reeks lichtjes zich traag voortbewogen richting de provincie Namen. Het ging dit keer over gedimde lichtjes die zich even grillig gedroegen als de tweede partij lichtjes die eerder werden waargenomen.
De piloten van de F-16’s kregen helaas geen grip op de fenomenen. Een drietal lichtjes werden waargenomen op radar, maar die bewogen zich plotseling razendsnel vooruit zodat zelfs de jets niet konden volgen.
De eerste keer dat de radar de lichtjes vastlegde, haalden ze een snelheid van rond de 240 km/u. Maar meteen daarop schoten ze weg tegen 1770 km/u! Ook hun positie veranderde voortdurend: van 2700 meter tot 1500 meter en dan daarop stegen ze weer tot 3350 meter om wederom te dalen tot bijna het grondniveau. Die eerste afdaling bereikten ze overigens in amper twee seconden. Fenomenaal. De volgende keren dat ze op radar werden vastgelegd, haalden de lichtjes dezelfde indrukwekkende toeren uit. Terwijl ze duidelijk de geluidsbarrière doorbraken, hoorde men de hele tijd niks.
De laatste getuigenis kwam van de gendarmes van Waver die eerder die nacht waren uitgerukt om verslag te brengen. Zij zagen de lichtjes een vierkant patroon aannemen alvorens ze rond 1.30 uur alle vier een verschillende richting uitschoten en definitief verdwenen.
Foto’s en filmpjes
Er kwamen nadien heel wat mensen af die foto’s en filmpjes hadden genomen van de lichten, maar geen van allen bleken duidelijk genoeg te zijn. Er werd zelfs een professor natuurkunde bijgehaald om alles te bekijken, maar ook hij kon geen conclusies trekken. Het enige wat hij kon zeggen, was dat de wazigheid te wijten was aan infrarood licht.
Toch was er één goede foto die door iemand werd genomen in Petit-Rechain. Daarop was heel duidelijk een ufo te zien. Men kon niet anders concluderen dan dat het om een onbekend object ging.
Buitenlandse interesse & mogelijke verklaringen
Door alle heisa raakte de hele zaak ter ore bij de Britten en de Amerikanen. Die wilden uiteraard meer weten. De Belgische overheid vertelde dat er inderdaad ongewone objecten in het Belgisch luchtruim waren geweest en dat er mogelijk sprake was van ufo’s.
Ondertussen kwamen er allerlei mogelijke verklaringen naar voren. De Hongaar Michael Kuzmek, een uitvinder die op dat moment in Brussel woonde, zei dat hij verantwoordelijk was. Hij was toen aan het experimenteren met zelfgemaakte heliumballonnen waar hij driehoekige platformen aan het vastgehangen. Later trok hij die verklaring weer in.
Anderen dachten dan weer dat het ging om een geheim experiment van de Amerikanen. Die zouden ons luchtruim hebben uitgekozen om net als in bijvoorbeeld Roswell met nog verzwegen projecten zich bezig te houden.
Dan was er nog een groep die een veel directere verklaring had: ons land werd in die periode bezocht door buitenaardsen. Waarom ze het hier kwamen verkennen, werd door deze groep niet uitgelegd.
Vervalsing
Zullen we ooit de waarheid kennen over wat er in die periode in ons luchtruim zich bevond? Waren het echt buitenaardsen die ons land een bezoekje brachten? Of ging het om een geheim project van één of andere buitenlandse macht zoals de VS?
Eén ding is intussen wel zeker: de foto die een hype werd was een vervalsing. De man uit Petit-Rechain verklaarde in 2011 dat hij een grap had uitgehaald met iedereen. Het was namelijk geen ufo, maar een model uit piepschuim dat hij met lampen had versierd en zo een foto van gemaakt.
Carl Bries (1983) is een sociaal werker uit de Kempen met een passie voor mysteries over heel de wereld. Hij neemt in zijn vrije tijd allerhande mysteries, waar (bewust) weinig over gesproken wordt, onder de loep. Het is aan jou om samen met hem deze mysteries te ontrafelen of ze te laten voor wat ze zijn.
The BBC's One Show has recreated an infamous UFO encounter reported in West Lothianmore than 40 years ago.
Forestry worker Robert Taylor claimed he was attacked by strange extra-terrestrial objects in Dechmont Woods on November 9, 1979.
The "Robert Taylor incident" led to that part of West Lothian being known as the "twilight zone."
Robert died in 2007, but the One Show spoke to several people who were involved in the investigation of the unusual incident.
Author Malcolm Robinson even produced the pair of trousers Robert wore on the day, showing rips which he claimed were from the alien attackers.
He told the One Show's Matt Allwright Robert first saw a large dome-shaped object when he was out for a walk with his dog.
Two balls with prongs protruding from them then lowered from the dome and approached him.
Malcolm said: "[The balls] projected these spike towards his person - his hips. Pulled him very, very forcibly, slightly upwards and towards this larger object.
Here's Robert Taylor with a drawing of what he saw
"Bob said at this point he smelled a horrible burning smell.
"Then he heard a swishing sound and then bang, he lost consciousness."
An actor was used to recreate Robert's version of events. The forestry worker had tried to radio for help when he regained consciousness, but found he could not speak.
The One Show also spoke to a former Lothian and Borders police detective Ian Wark, who investigated the case. He said strange marks were found on the ground at the place Robert had pointed out.
The former detective constable said: "I've no doubt something landed there. What it was, I have no idea."
Obviously, many are skeptical of Robert's UFO story.
But it has proved an enduring story and West Lothian Council event marked out the spot on an information board.
Matt concludes by saying: "Something happened in those woods 40 years ago.
China’s moon rover revealed what lies beneath the lunar farside
China’s moon rover revealed what lies beneath the lunar farside
The farside of the moon is a lunar layer cake. New data from China’s Chang’e-4 lander and Yutu-2 rover reveal alternating layers of coarse rock and fine soil down to a depth of 40 meters, suggesting a history of violent impacts, scientists report February 26 in Science Advances.
“We know much of the moon’s nearside” from the Soviet Lunokhod and American Apollo programs, but little about the farside, says lunar scientist Yan Su of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing. “The Chang’e-4 mission revealed the first ‘ground-truth’ detailed subsurface stratigraphy … on the farside of the moon.”
Chang’e-4 and Yutu-2 became the first spacecraft to land on the farside in January 2019, touching down inside the 186-kilometer-wide Von Kármán crater (SN: 1/3/19). As Yutu-2 explored the crater, which lies within the 2,500-kilometer-wide South Pole–Aitken basin, the rover sent radar pulses into the ground to probe the material beneath its wheels.
Lunar scientist Chunlai Li, also of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and colleagues analyzed the 106-meter path that the rover took in its first two lunar days (about two Earth months) of collecting data. The team discovered a layer about 12 meters thick of fine soil, or regolith, closest to the surface.
“It’s like being on very clean sand,” says study coauthor Elena Pettinelli of Roma Tre University in Italy. “It’s like you’re on the beach.”
Below that fine soil, the rover found another layer of about 12 meters containing coarser material embedded with larger rocks, like cherries in a fruitcake. And lower still was a series of alternating coarse and fine materials, spanning depths of about 24 meters down to roughly 40 meters — the limit of the rover’s radar.
The Yutu-2 rover is using radar to probe the lunar subsurface (illustrated; the rover’s path from January to March 2019 shown in white double lines). So far, the rover has found three different subsurface layers: fine soil down to about 12 meters, coarser rock with boulders embedded in it up to about 12 meters below that, and sublayers of coarse and fine materials down to about 40 meters. What’s below that is a mystery, for now.C. Li et al/Science Advances 2020
Those layers were probably created by material ejected by successive impacts, the researchers say. The floor of Von Kármán crater is a smooth sheet of cooled lava from long-ago volcanic activity. But that lava has been pummeled repeatedly and covered up by material, called ejecta, that is scattered when objects like meteorites slam into the lunar surface and leave craters behind.
“That’s a really violent process,” says lunar geologist Daniel Moriarty of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., who was not involved in the study. Some of the ejecta could have come from as deep as the moon’s mantle (SN: 5/15/19).
The top layer of smooth sand is probably the result of the surface being pulverized by micrometeorites and cracked by extreme temperature shifts over time.
Chang’e-4’s view of the moon’s subsurface is different from its predecessors’. Chang’e-3 and its Yutu rover landed in Mare Imbrium on the nearside of the moon in 2013, and that rover’s radar was blocked by dense volcanic rock at a depth of just 10 meters or so (SN: 12/16/13). That’s probably because the nearside’s volcanic floodplains are closer to the surface than those on the farside.
“The subsurface structure at Chang’e-4’s landing site is more complex … and suggests a totally different geological context,” Su says. In fact, the lava basement of the Von Kármán crater may be too deep for Yutu-2 to sense at all, the researchers speculate.
Future work could help figure out why the moon’s nearside is awash in smooth plains of volcanic rock called mare, while the farside is more rugged and cratered.
“One of the biggest driving questions in lunar science for a while has been, why does the nearside look so different from the farside?” Moriarty says. “If people can use what they found to unravel some of the volcanic history of the farside, that would be helpful.”
In 1908, a sudden explosion flattened 2,000 square kilometers of Siberian forest, destroying 80 million trees. One hundred and twelve years later the exact cause remains a mystery. The Tunguska event is one of the most speculated-about anomalous events of all-time and, while scientists firmly believe that a meteor exploding some 5 to 10 kilometers above the Earth’s surface is to blame, they don’t have any direct evidence. This has led to the usual sort of wild and baseless (although extremely fun) speculation involving everything from aliens to secret weapons tests.
Scientists from four major Russian scientific institutes—the Novosibirsk Institute of Nuclear Physics, Novosibirsk Institute of Geology and Mineralogy, Tunguska Nature Reserve, and Krasnoyarsk Biophysics Institute—are now hoping to solve the Tunguska mystery once and for all. Dr. Arthur Meidus, deputy director of the Tunguska Nature Reserve, says:
“The mystery of the Tunguska Catastrophe worries both the scientists and the public. The meteorite is not here as a physical body, but the traces of the extremely powerful explosion are, which is what is currently studied by researchers. Many of us still hope to unravel the scenario of 1908 disaster.”
The general consensus is that a meteor caused the Tunguska explosion, but scientists have yet to find hard evidence.
To do this, the scientists are looking at the bottom of a lake. The sediments at the bottom of Lake Zapovednoye, approximately 40km away from the assumed epicenter of the blast, may contain evidence of a meteor explosion—if, in fact, one occurred. Dr. Meidus says:
“Although this lake is outside the territory that was affected in 1908, it is of great interest. It is deep, and silty sediments that have accumulated here, do not mix, or subside.
Spring-autumn waste waters and the Lakura River brought traces of the Tunguska catastrophe to this lake, because the event was accompanied by massive wildfires and emissions of both planet and space origin.”
Trees leveled by the Tunguska explosion.
Using fun science words like X-ray fluorescence and synchrotron radiation, the scientists hope to be able to detect particles of extraterrestrial origin in the layers of sediment that date to the Tunguska event. Dr. Meidus says they have already been able to determine which layers come from the year of the blast. They are looking specifically at the layers from 1908 through 1910, as meteor particles may have washed into the lake in the two years following the explosion. Dr. Meidus says:
“We discovered a distinguishing light-coloured layer in sediments of Lake Zapovednoye the content of which – an increased content of potassium, titanium, rubidium, yttrium, and zirconium – allows to tie it to the consequences of the Tunguska bolide explosion. This way we know which layer of sediments might contain particles of extraterrestrial origin.
‘The next stage implies search for micro-particles with unusual composition with the use of synchrotron radiation. Now we know where to look for them.
‘If there is extraterrestrial substance, it will be in the 1908-1910 layer.”
It will be interesting to see if they find what they’re looking for. If they do discover particles from some extraterrestrial object in the lake, it would put a damper on all the fun speculation. But they haven’t found it yet and mysteries like the Tunguska event seem to enjoy remaining mysteries.
On February 28, 1959, a Private First Class Gerry Irwin was on his way back to his duties as Nike missile technician at Fort Bliss in El Paso, Texas, after having just enjoyed a one-month leave in Nampa, Idaho. On this evening he was passing through a portion of southern Utah, near Cedar City, Utah, when there was a bright flash in the sky and he could make out a brilliant white light traveling across the night sky. It was apparently so bright that it lit up the desolate landscape around him, and Irwin actually stopped his car and got out to track its progress across the star-filled sky until it disappeared behind a ridge. At this point he was sure it had to be an aircraft going down, and it had been so alarmingly low that he was convinced he had witnessed a plane crash. He got in his car and scrawled out a note reading “Have gone to investigate possible plane crash, please call law enforcement officers,” which he left on his steering wheel, and he then wrote “STOP” across the side of his car with shoe polish before venturing out over the scrub-filled area towards that ridge and the unknown. And so would begin one of the earliest and weirdest alien abduction cases on record.
Thirty minutes passed before any other car came along on this remote stretch of road, and it happened to be a fish and game inspector, who found the note and quickly informed the Cedar City Sheriff’s Office. When authorities arrived that carried out a search of the area, and while there was no trace of a crashed plane they did find an unconscious Irwin sprawled out of the ground. He was totally unresponsive, unable to be revived, and was rushed to the nearest hospital, where it was found that there seemed to be nothing physically wrong with him other than the fact that nothing could seem to raise him from his stupor, remaining completely unable to be woken up.
Concerned medical staff did what they could and allowed the man to sleep, during which time we was allegedly heard by nurses to talk in his sleep and mumble what sounded like “jacket on bush.” The next morning he came to, and the first thing he wanted to know was if there were any survivors of the airplane crash. Doctors informed Irwin that there had been no plane crash, which seemed to surprise the young man, and he also seemed to really want to know where his jacket was, which he had not been wearing when he was brought in and had not been found by the search party. Although he was physically uninjured, Irwin claimed to remember absolutely nothing from the time he had left his car, and could not in any way explain how he had come to be passed out in the wilderness. He would be kept for a few days for observation, after which he was told that he was suffering hysteria of some sort and sent on his way. This would be just beginning of the strangeness.
In the days after his release, Irwin experienced several episodes in which he would just faint and fall to the ground. The first incident of this was as he was on duty on base, which he snapped out of quickly, and then it happened again as he was walking down a street in El Paso, this time putting him in the same deep state of sleep as before. This caused him to be brought in for another round of medical check-ups and psychiatric evaluations. Interestingly, after this second fainting he seems to have been reset somehow, waking up to ask about any survivors of the plane crash and thinking it was still February 28, as well as not recognizing the same medical staff who had tended to him before or remembering the past two weeks, and this was enough to have him kept for observation for a full month, during which time his memory of the preceding two weeks came trickling back to him. He would eventually be released again with a bill of good health.
Although he seemed normal, his thoughts were constantly invaded by the urge to return to the site where he had originally left his car in this strange odyssey, and so one day he was overcome by such a compulsion and left the base to go out to that lonely road to have a look around, apparently finding his jacket perched upon a bush untouched. Oddly there was a pencil with a noted wrapped around it jammed into one of the button holes, but he never did read it, instead overcome with the urge to burn the note instead. He then apparently snapped out of his daze and realized that he had not left the base in a legal fashion, and was basically AWOL.
He did the right thing, turning himself in, and was subsequently extensively questioned, strangely with large holes in his memory still missing and unable to explain what had possessed him to do what he had done. He was not jailed or disciplined severely, but it was enough to get his security clearance revoked and to be reassigned. Things take a turn for the odder when not long after this he one day just failed to report for duty, and indeed no one had heard from him. Nothing was found missing at his residence and he seemed to have just stepped off the face of the earth. A month later Irwin was still nowhere to be seen, and the lore goes that indeed he has not been seen since. The case would go on to become highly investigated by UFO researchers, and speculation swirled as to what actually happened to him. The main idea was that he was abducted by aliens and then slowly lost his mind, perhaps even be abducted one final time, this time for good. Other ideas included that he was part of some sort of government mind control program or that he simply wandered out into the wilderness to die.
Yet things got really interesting when researcher David Booher investigated the case for his book No Return – the Gerry Irwin story – UFO Abduction or Covert Operation? which has all sorts of interesting information contained within its pages and is one of the most comprehensive write-ups on the case there is. Booher apparently was able to actually track the “vanished” Irwin down, only to find that the man did not seem to remember much of anything of what had happened in 1959, but he was able to manage to shed some light on it all. He claimed that he did disappear for while to live out in the woods, but that he had finally been tracked down and disciplined, after which he was reassigned and sent to Germany, never at any point actually being discharged from the military. He also said that he was long beset by strange blackouts and behavioral issues, and that he had been involved in some top-secret assignment in Austria, although details remain vague. It is interesting to see that while in a lot of literature Gerry Irwin is reported as having vanished into thin air to never be seen again, he was very much alive and not vanished when Booher found him. What significance does this have on the whole strange case as a whole?
In the end it is all very perplexing. We have this military man who was suddenly found unconscious in the wilds after seeing a UFO, the missing time and lost memory, the sudden urge to just go AWOL, the disappearance that never seems to have been properly followed up on, the sending away of Irwin to Germany, almost as if to get him out of the way, and the strange blackouts and disrupted behavior. Is this someone who just lost his mind, an alien abduction, a strange government experiment, or what? Whatever the answers may be, the Gerry Irwin case has managed to gain a reputation as being one of the very first publicized “alien abduction” accounts, and has remained much talked about to this day.
NASA...Earth Has New Moon, I Say Its A Alien Probe Watching Humanity With Coronavirus. UFO Sighting News.
NASA...Earth Has New Moon, I Say Its A Alien Probe Watching Humanity With Coronavirus. UFO Sighting News.
Photo above is an extreme close up I made of the real photo from wiki. Never before seen this close before. This is it.
SCW
Scientists are announcing a mini moon now in earths orbit. The objects was noticed on Feb 15th. The object is said to have come from deep space, and settled into an orbit around earth. Well, I call that perfect timing. It came just in time to witness humanity fight the coronavirus. Coincidence...I think not. The object is said to be only 1.9-3.5 meters across but the accuracy of this is in question. I personally have seen many NEO (near earth objects) on the nasa site and they say the size...lets say 10 meters and when it comes closest to earth then leaves...the size is announced to be something closer to 25-35 meters. So we know this object in space is not 3.5 meters, but more likely closer to 10 meters across or more! NASA always downplays the size of objects out there. Whey now? Why did a UFO go into orbit around earth now? To record, watch and research how humanity copes and tries to deal with Coronavirus. Aliens may know than we do about its capabilities. They may be here not just to witness humanity fight the virus, but to see if we can avoid a possible ELE (extinction level event). You see, we don't really know the truth about the virus, its death rates are incredibly higher than the low estimate the US gov is give us. Its also possible that at the peak of the virus...when 20% of the worlds population has it...it could mutate, making itself immune to medicines that are being tested to work against it. Each virus creates a 1% mutation on each patient...if it finds a way to carry this mutation to the next person...then it could be a 100% death sentence. No one knows what will happen at its peak, everyone has been wrong so far...so, we need to consider other possibilities. An ELE is one of those we ethically need to consider. Scott Waring - Taiwan
The unusual earth orbit circling above our ancient past
The unusual earth orbit circling above our ancient past
When does our future meet our past? How does our scientific knowledge grow and change? A newly recognized type of Earth orbit can travel directly above a great circle formed by some of the oldest and most distinctive ancient human constructions on the surface of the Earth: the Giza pyramids, Machu Picchu, Easter Island, Angkor Wat, Mohenjo-Daro, and many others.
But is there any connection to all this? What do we need to learn - scientifically - to gain a greater understanding of the links between these sites, and the great changes that happened on our planet 12,800 years ago.
Fascinated by the mysteries of our ancient human past, and the many unanswered questions. Our scientific toolkit lets us push back the unknown to gain a clearer understanding of where we came from, who we are, and in turn - where we might be going.
Follow the adventures of a science writer and skeptic as he explores extraordinary coincidences, connections, and the evidence linking our modern world to our mysterious past.
The Roswell Flying Saucer Crash Incident and Government UFO Cover Up
The Roswell Flying Saucer Crash Incident and Government UFO Cover Up
On July 8, 1947 the Roswell Daily Record newspaper published a front page article with the headline “RAAF Captures Flying Saucer On Ranch in Roswell Region”, and the legend of America’s most famous brush with aliens was born. On the summer of 1947, a rancher discovered unidentifiable debris in his sheep pasture outside Roswell, New Mexico. Although officials from the local Air Force base asserted that it was a crashed weather balloon, many people believed it was the remains of an extraterrestrial flying saucer; a series of secret “dummy drops” in New Mexico during the 1950s heightened their suspicions. Nearly 50 years after the story of the mysterious debris broke, the U.S. military issued a report linking the incident to a top-secret atomic espionage project called Project Mogul. Still, many people continue to embrace the UFO theory, and hundreds of curiosity seekers visit Roswell and the crash site every year.
Unidentified flying objects (UFOs) have captured the public's attention over the decades. As exoplanet detection is on the rise, why not consider that star-hopping visitors from afar might be buzzing through our friendly skies by taking an interstellar off-ramp to Earth?
On the other hand, could those piloting UFOs be us — our future progeny that have mastered the landscape of time and space? Perhaps those reports of people coming into contact with strange beings represent our distant human descendants, returning from the future to study us in their own evolutionary past.
The book was written by Michael Masters, a professor of biological anthropology at Montana Technological University in Butte. Masters thinks that – given the accelerating pace of change in science, technology, and engineering – it is likely that humans of the distant future could develop the knowledge and machinery necessary to return to the past.
The objective of the book, Masters said, is to spur a new and more informed discussion among believers and skeptics alike.
"I took a multidisciplinary approach in order to try and understand the oddities of this phenomenon," Masters told Space.com. "Our job as scientists is to be asking big questions and try to find answers to unknown questions. There's something going on here, and we should be having a conversation about this. We should be at the forefront of trying to find out what it is."
Human evolution
Dubbing these purported visitors "extratempestrials," Masters notes that close-encounter accounts typically describe UFO tenants as bipedal, hairless, human-like beings with large brains, large eyes, small noses and small mouths. Further, the creatures are often said to have the ability to communicate with us in our own languages and possess technology advanced beyond, but clearly built upon, today's technological prowess.
Masters believes that through a comprehensive analysis of consistent patterns of long-term biocultural change throughout human evolution — as well as recent advances in our understanding of time and time travel — we may begin to consider this future possibility in the context of a currently unexplained phenomenon.
"The book ties together those known aspects of our evolutionary history with what is still an unproven, unverified aspect of UFOs and aliens," he said.
But why not argue that ET is actually a traveler from across the vastness of space, from a distant planet? Wouldn't that be a simpler answer?
"I would argue it's the opposite," Masters responded. "We know we're here. We know humans exist. We know that we've had a long evolutionary history on this planet. And we know our technology is going to be more advanced in the future. I think the simplest explanation, innately, is that it is us. I'm just trying to offer what is likely the most parsimonious explanation."
Artist's view of an aerial encounter with an unidentified flying object. (Image credit: MUFON)
Archaeological tourism
As an anthropologist who has worked on and directed numerous archaeological digs in Africa, France and throughout the United States, Masters observes that it is easy to conceptualize just how much more could be learned about our own evolutionary history if we currently possessed the technology to visit past periods of time.
"The alleged abduction accounts are mostly scientific in nature. It's probably future anthropologists, historians, linguists that are coming back to get information in a way that we currently can't without access to that technology," Masters said.
"That said, I do think that some component of it is also tourism," he added. "Undoubtedly in the future, there are those that will pay a lot of money to have the opportunity to go back and observe their favorite period in history. Some of the most popular tourist sites are the pyramids of Giza and Machu Picchu in Peru … old and prehistoric sites."
Masters calls his UFO research "an evolving project."
"There's certainly still missing pieces of the puzzle," he said. "There are aspects of time that we don't yet understand. Wanted is a theory of quantum gravity, and we can meld general relativity and quantum mechanics. I'm just trying to put forth the best model I can based on current scientific knowledge. Hopefully, over time, we can continue to build on this."
Solve this mystery
"Masters postulates that using a multidisciplinary scientific approach to the UFO phenomenon will be what it takes to solve this mystery once and for all, and I couldn't agree more," said Jan Harzan, executive director of the nonprofit Mutual UFO Network (MUFON).
"The premise that UFOs are us from the future is one of many possibilities that MUFON is exploring to explain the UFO phenomenon. All we know for sure is that we are not alone," Harzan added. "Now the question becomes, 'Who are they?' And Masters makes a great case for the time-traveler hypothesis."
Tic-Tac-shaped objects were recently reported zipping through the sky by jet-fighter pilots and radar operators. The Pentagon's Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP) was created to research and investigate Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP), including numerous videos of reported encounters, three of which were released to the public in 2017. (Image credit: U.S. Department of Defense/To The Stars Academy of Arts & Science)
'Highly dubious claim'
But not everybody is on board with the idea, as you might imagine.
"There is nothing in this book to take seriously, as it depends on the belief that 'time travel' is not only possible, but real," said Robert Sheaffer, a noted UFO skeptic.
Supposedly our distant descendants have mastered time travel, Sheaffer said, and have traveled back in time to visit us. "So, according to Masters, you just spin something fast enough and it will begin to warp space, and even send stuff backwards in time. This is a highly dubious claim," he said.
Moreover, Sheaffer said that Masters tries to deduce aliens' evolutionary history from witness descriptions, "suggesting that he takes such accounts far too literally."
David Darling is a British astronomer and science writer who has authored books on a sweeping array of topics – from gravity, Zen physics and astrobiology to teleportation and extraterrestrial life.
"I've often thought that if some UFOs are 'alien' craft, it's just as reasonable to suppose that they might be time machines from our own future than that they're spacecraft from other stars," Darling told Space.com. "The problem is the 'if.'
Darling said that, while some aerial phenomena have eluded easy identification, one of the least likely explanations, it seems to him, is that they're artificial and not of this world.
"Outside of the popular mythos of flying saucers and archetypal, big-brained aliens, there's precious little credible evidence that they exist," Darling said. "So, my issue with the book is not the ingenuity of its thesis, but the fact that there's really no need for such a thesis in the first place."
Reported UFOs take on all shapes and sizes. (Image credit: U.K. National Archives sightings chart, circa 1969)
Exotic physics?
Larry Lemke, a retired NASA aerospace engineer with an interest in the UFO phenomenon, finds the prospect of time-travelling visitors from the future intriguing.
"The one thing that has become clear over the decades of sightings, if you believe the reports, is that these objects don't seem to be obeying the usual laws of aerodynamics and Newtonian mechanics," Lemke said, referring to the relationship, in the natural world, between force, mass and motion.
Toss in for good measure Einstein's theory of general relativity and its consequences, like wormholes and black holes, along with other exotic physics ideas such as the Alcubierre warp-drive bubble.
"There's a group of thinkers in the field of UFOs that point out that phenomena reported around some UFOs do, in fact, look exactly like general relativity effects," Lemke said. Missing time is a very common one."
Lemke said that the idea that somebody has figured out how to manipulate space-time, on a local scale with a low-energy approach, would explain a lot of things across the UFO phenomenon, including those baffling Tic-Tac-shaped objects recently reported by jet-fighter pilots and radar operators.
"No matter how much knowledge we have, how much we think we know, there's always some frontier beyond," he said. "And to understand that frontier is getting more and more esoteric."
Leonard David is the author of the recently released book,"Moon Rush: The New Space Race" published by National Geographic in May 2019. A longtime writer for Space.com, David has been reporting on the space industry for more than five decades. Follow us on Twitter@SpacedotcomorFacebook.
Beste bezoeker, Heb je zelf al ooit een vreemde waarneming gedaan, laat dit dan even weten via email aan Frederick Delaere opwww.ufomeldpunt.be. Deze onderzoekers behandelen jouw melding in volledige anonimiteit en met alle respect voor jouw privacy. Ze zijn kritisch, objectief maar open minded aangelegd en zullen jou steeds een verklaring geven voor jouw waarneming! DUS AARZEL NIET, ALS JE EEN ANTWOORD OP JOUW VRAGEN WENST, CONTACTEER FREDERICK. BIJ VOORBAAT DANK...
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Over mijzelf
Ik ben Pieter, en gebruik soms ook wel de schuilnaam Peter2011.
Ik ben een man en woon in Linter (België) en mijn beroep is Ik ben op rust..
Ik ben geboren op 18/10/1950 en ben nu dus 73 jaar jong.
Mijn hobby's zijn: Ufologie en andere esoterische onderwerpen.
Op deze blog vind je onder artikels, werk van mezelf. Mijn dank gaat ook naar André, Ingrid, Oliver, Paul, Vincent, Georges Filer en MUFON voor de bijdragen voor de verschillende categorieën...
Veel leesplezier en geef je mening over deze blog.
![During the month of March, 2020, the three outer naked-eye planets, Saturn, Jupiter and Mars, all... [+] clustered together in the pre-sunrise skies. On March 18, they were joined by the waning crescent Moon. (Gary Hershorn/Getty Images)](https://thumbor.forbes.com/thumbor/960x0/https%3A%2F%2Fspecials-images.forbesimg.com%2Fdam%2Fimageserve%2F1213217329%2F960x0.jpg%3Ffit%3Dscale)
![On March 04, 2020, the planets Saturn, Jupiter, and Mars all appeared in an equally spaced line.... [+] Throughout the month, both Saturn and Jupiter have experienced relative apparent motion in our skies, but Mars has moved the fastest from west to east, passing between Jupiter and Saturn and eventually moving even eastward of Saturn.](https://thumbor.forbes.com/thumbor/960x0/https%3A%2F%2Fblogs-images.forbes.com%2Fstartswithabang%2Ffiles%2F2020%2F03%2FMarch-04-1200x713.jpg)
![By March 26, 2020, Mars had moved a total of approximately 12 degrees in the sky relative to its... [+] March 4 position, continuing its eastward migration and placing it roughly mid-way between Saturn and Jupiter.](https://thumbor.forbes.com/thumbor/960x0/https%3A%2F%2Fblogs-images.forbes.com%2Fstartswithabang%2Ffiles%2F2020%2F03%2FMarch-26-1200x585.jpg)
![The heliocentric model of the Solar System (R), along with Kepler's/Newton's laws, predicts that... [+] inner planets will orbit at faster speeds than progressively outer planets, explaining their apparent motions through the sky. The fact that planets are at different distances and move at different relative speeds with respect to Earth explains why these apparent celestial motions occur.](https://thumbor.forbes.com/thumbor/960x0/https%3A%2F%2Fblogs-images.forbes.com%2Fstartswithabang%2Ffiles%2F2020%2F03%2F1-12-Geocentric-Heliocentric-1200x759.jpg)
![When we place the known objects in the Solar System in order, four inner, rocky worlds and four,... [+] outer, giant worlds stand out. While fast-moving Mercury, the innermost world, takes just 88 Earth days to complete a revolution around the Sun at its speed of 47 km/s, outermost Neptune takes over 160 years, moving at just 5.4 km/s.](https://thumbor.forbes.com/thumbor/960x0/https%3A%2F%2Fblogs-images.forbes.com%2Fstartswithabang%2Ffiles%2F2018%2F05%2Fshot.jpg)
![An accurate model of how the planets orbit the Sun, which then moves through the galaxy in a... [+] different direction-of-motion. Note that the planets are all in the same plane, and are not dragging behind the Sun or forming a wake of any type. The planets change position relative to one another, making them change their apparent positions and brightnesses in the sky as seen from Earth.](https://blogs-images.forbes.com/startswithabang/files/2020/03/not-vortex-small.gif)
![In the pre-dawn hours on the morning of March 31, 2020, Mars and Saturn will make a very close... [+] approach to one another, coming within 0.9 degrees of each other, while Jupiter remains farther away at about 6 degrees separation from the close pair.](https://thumbor.forbes.com/thumbor/960x0/https%3A%2F%2Fblogs-images.forbes.com%2Fstartswithabang%2Ffiles%2F2020%2F03%2FMarch-31-1200x683.jpg)
![Mars, Jupiter and Saturn can often be seen together in the night sky, but only rarely do all three... [+] of these worlds cluster together. They also vary in brightness by large amounts. In March of 2020, Jupiter will be much brighter than either Mars or Saturn, which are somewhat comparable to one another, in contrast to this 2018 image, where Mars (at left) and Jupiter (at right) were both very bright, but Saturn (near the center) was much fainter. (VW Pics/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)](https://thumbor.forbes.com/thumbor/960x0/https%3A%2F%2Fspecials-images.forbesimg.com%2Fdam%2Fimageserve%2F1134061926%2F960x0.jpg%3Ffit%3Dscale)
![The seven extraterrestrial planets of the solar system: Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn,... [+] Uranus, Neptune. Photographed in 2019 with a Maksutov telescope from Mannheim and Stockach in Germany. The angular sizes and colors shown are accurate, but the brightnesses are not: Venus is some 63,000 times brighter than Neptune, or 12 astronomical magnitudes; the same difference as between the full Moon and a typical bright star like Vega or Capella.](https://thumbor.forbes.com/thumbor/960x0/https%3A%2F%2Fblogs-images.forbes.com%2Fstartswithabang%2Ffiles%2F2020%2F03%2Fexterrestrial-planets.jpg)
![If you were to hold up your little finger at arm's length on the morning of March 31, 2020, Mars and... [+] Saturn will be separated by merely the width of your pinkie's fingernail, the closest approach of these two worlds since 2008.](https://thumbor.forbes.com/thumbor/960x0/https%3A%2F%2Fblogs-images.forbes.com%2Fstartswithabang%2Ffiles%2F2020%2F03%2FClose-conjunction-1200x720.jpg)
![On the night of December 21, 2020, Jupiter and Saturn will appear so close to one another, just 0.1... [+] degrees apart, that these two worlds and many of their moons will be visible in the same field-of-view of a relatively high magnification telescope. This will be one of the most spectacular astronomical events of the decade.](https://thumbor.forbes.com/thumbor/960x0/https%3A%2F%2Fblogs-images.forbes.com%2Fstartswithabang%2Ffiles%2F2020%2F03%2FGreat-Conjunction-all-time.jpg)
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glacial archaeology
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Alien hunters are searching for signatures emitted from...
Alien life could be much more common than previously...
Men are far more likely than women to want a close encounter...
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Shocking satellite images reveal that 20 per cent of snow...
New tests under Antarctica's 'doomsday' Thwaites glacier...
Proof of aliens or another hoax? Conspiracy theorists claim...
Could this be the way to finally find ALIENS? European Space...
![NASA's Mars Odyssey spacecraft passes above Mars' south pole in this artist's concept illustration. The spacecraft has been orbiting Mars since October 24, 2001. The spacecraft will serve as a vital relay for NASA's Mars rover Curiosity's landing on Aug. 5, 2012. [Related: <a href=http://www.space.com/16385-curiosity-rover-mars-science-laboratory.html>Mars Rover Curiosity Landing Coverage</a>]](https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/6MxVQHVKZ6n7Q5tGsv2vjP-320-80.jpg)
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NASA reveals image of mysterious 'lava tube' beneat
NASA scientists launch fresh bid to probe Uranus and Neptune...
Jackpot rock: Elon Musk's SpaceX will launch a NASA mission...
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Large earthquakes make it hard for sperm whales to find food...
Facebook will pay for users' voice recordings after it was...
Fossilized 'devils trail' along southern Italian volcano was...
'Tunguska event' site scoured for traces of 'cosmic matter'...
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