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...
31-08-2021
LATEST UFO SIGHTINGS AND VIDEOS - 31 - 8 - 2021
LATEST UFO SIGHTINGS AND VIDEOS - 31 - 8 - 2021
UFOs Sighted Over Russia ( July 23, 2021 )
Impressive record of UFO activity that was sighted over the evening skies of Russia on July 23, 2021. Sighting was recorded in the Altai Republic in the Kosh-Agachsky District on the border of Russia and Kazakhstan.
UFO or Bolide
They are here !
credit : Anastasia Shpanova
RELATED VIDEO
UFOs Sighted Over Southwest Indiana ( August 30, 2021 )
UFOs were sighted over Southwestern Indiana Region on August 30, 2021 : captured by Former Captain and Retired police officer Douglas Daugherty
They are here !
UFOs Sighted Over Ontario, Canada ( August 27, 2021 )
Amazing recording of UFO activity that was sighted over the night skies of Ontario, Canada on August 27, 2021
They are everywhere !
credit : Stan Lawrence
UFOs Sighted Over Salt Lake City, Utah ( August 29, 2021 )
Impressive record of UFOs moving slowly Salt Lake City, Utah on August 29, 2021.
STATEMENT : Local Salt Lake City, Utah They are here !
Submitted
Cigar Shaped UFO Filmed Passing The Moon And Orbs Sighted From A Airplane & Over A City In Italy
The first clip: This was filmed on August 22, 2021 and the witness states the following: "This flight was entirely within the United States. We hadn’t yet officially begun our descent. I was flying from Las Vegas in Nevada to Omaha, Nebraska and just took a short video of the storm. I think we had crossed into Nebraska from Colorado when we hit turbulence and the storm. We were definitely north of Kansas. I didn’t notice the other fun stuff in the video until the next day. It was a pretty turbulent day for flying as I had hit Tropical storm Laura in between Hawaii and Las Vegas earlier and we all had experienced one of those “fun” sudden drops in altitude." Thanks to ExchangeParadox for allowing me the use of his footage and to view the original: https://www.reddit.com/r/UFOs/comment...
Second clip: This was filmed on August 21, 2021 and the witness state the following. " Sighting of formation of unidentified flying objects in Ravenna, at 18:00 in the park area of the post office in via Fiume abandoned." Thanks to LionFX for allowing me the use of this footage and to view the original: https://youtu.be/Qnlzp0K-HPQ
Third clip: "This was filmed on August 21, 2021 and the witness states the following: . It was taken in Mansfield, Texas on Saturday, August 21 at 8:52pm My husband is a pilot, he thought it could be an airplane but he is not convinced. We still don’t know what it was." Thanks to Anya Spackman for allowing me the use of her footage and to view the original: https://youtu.be/oHti9FNRmRI
Among all of the evidence presented for UFOs and aliens over the years, perhaps the most mysterious and compelling are those we never got to see. There are numerous cases of supposed lost photos or footage, lost witnesses, even lost alien bodies, all of which leave us lingering in a limbo of speculation and wonder. A curious case of this comes from 1973, when a hot shot Hollywood producer and his businessman investor happened across a tale of a supposedly amazing piece of footage of a UFO and alien contect, which has been lost and buried to perhaps never be seen again.
In 1973, a Los Angeles filmmaker, producer, and composer by the name of Robert Emenegger made his way out to Norton Air Force Base, in in San Bernardino County, California, along with a well-connected business man and partner by the name of Alan Sandler. Although an Air Force Base seems like a rather odd place for these two to be going, they had a very good reason, in that Emenegger was trying to put together a documentary on Air Force advanced research projects and technology, and had been invited there by the commander-in-chief of the Special Investigations Division and the head of the intelligence department, Paul Schartl in order to have a sit-down. It would soon get very weird indeed.
Robert Emenegger
The men allegedly spent some time discussing various research projects being carried out by the Air Force at the base and beyond, but things got really interesting when the topic of UFOs came up. The two officials then began weaving a very odd tale of a UFO that had allegedly landed at Holloman Air Force Base, New Mexico, in 1964. This craft had apparently come down to land at the base at 6 a.m., and not only that, but aliens had actually gotten off of the ship and talked with the top ranking commanders. In addition, the whole encounter had allegedly been filmed, and both of the officials at this meeting had seen the footage for themselves. Schartl would say of what was seen in the 16mm film footage:
Three flying objects in the shape of a disk arrived, one of which landed, and the other two flew away. On the landed UFO, a door opened, from which three creatures appeared. They were human-size. They had an odd, gray complexion and a pronounced nose. They wore tight fitting jump suits and thin headdresses that appeared to be communication devices, and in their hands they held a ‘translator.’ Their eyes had vertical slits like a cat’s, the nose was clearly defined, and their mouths were thin and slit like, with no chins. A Holloman base commander and other Air Force officers went out to meet them.
Schartl would also claim that they would continue meetings for several days, storing the spaceship in a hangar in the meantime, and that during the alien meeting the entities had eerily mentioned that they were monitoring an unfamiliar alien race that they did not know about. When Emenegger pushed for more information on what the aliens and commander had talked about, the officials clammed up and would only offer vague allusions to sharing technology and knowledge, and they also said that the aliens were “doctors, professional types.” It was all incredibly intriguing, so at this point Emenegger had already decided to do his documentary on UFOs and this amazing account. Much to his surprise, the Air Force officials even agreed to allow him to use 3,200 feet of the mysterious footage, and they even personally brought him to the site where the landing had allegedly happened, as well as the hangar where the UFO was kept and the buildings where the meetings with the aliens had supposedly been conducted.
It was all seemingly too good to be true, even though they were given the ominous caveat that the film should be made to look like a hypothetical scenario and that they were to in no way claim that any of it was actually real. Nevertheless, when Emenegger and Sandler left, they did so in high spirits, amazed that they would soon be able to see this mysterious footage for themselves. When days turned into weeks and weeks into months with no further word, Emenegger decided to go to Wright-Patterson AFB and talk to one of his military contacts, a Col. George Weinbrenner. When asked about what had happened to the footage, Weinbrenner allegedly began ranting about Soviet technology and the MIG 25, seemingly completely off-topic, and it was very odd, yet as he continued his tirade he apparently produced a signed a copy of J. Allen Hynek’s book The UFO Experience from a bookshelf and showed it to Emenegger with a nod. Emenegger would later explain that to him the odd monologue was just a cover to throw off anyone listening in through bugs in the room, and that the book was a silent confirmation that the footage did exist. However, he would never get to see it, it never arrived, and no one knows what ever became of it or even whether it exists or not.
Even without the promised film, Emenegger would release his documentary in 1974, called UFO’s Past, Present & Future, which would then become a book of the same name. In the end there are a lot of problems with this story. The first one is that we only have Emenegger’s word to go on. The primary source for this entire tale is three pages in his book, and that’s it. There is no corroboration, no way to verify any of it, you simply have to take his word for it. Another problem is the question of why would two high-ranking Air Force officials not only spill the beans on the whole thing to this Hollywood filmmaker, but also promise to release the film and then show him around the base where it all happened? In an area where secrecy and shadowy cover-ups are the order of the day, why were they so candid with these guys? Does that make any sense? In the end the footage has never been revealed — we don’t know if any of it was real or not, but if it was real I sure would like to see it.
ALL RELATED VIDEOS, selected and posted by peter2011
The International Space Station has suffered 'bad' cracks cosmonauts fear could widen, potentially putting its future at risk.
'Superficial fissures have been found in some places on the Zarya module,' Vladimir Solovyov, chief engineer of Russian rocket and space corporation Energia, told RIA news agency on Monday.
'This is bad and suggests that the fissures will begin to spread over time.'
Russian cosmonauts claim they have discovered new cracks on a key part of the International Space Station. Superficial fissures have been found in some places on the Zarya module
Vladimir Solovyov, chief engineer of rocket and space corporation Energia, said 'This is bad and suggests that the fissures will begin to spread over time'
Solovyov did not provide further detail if the cracks had caused any air to leak, and there is no suggestion that any of the astronauts on board are in danger.
NASA has yet to confirm the existence of the cracks on the Zarya module, also known as the Functional Cargo Block.
A NASA spokesman told DailyMail.com the agency was looking into the claim.
The Zarya module, also known as the Functional Cargo Block, was the first component launched for the ISS on November 20, 1998, according to NASA. It is 41.2 feet in length, 13.5 feet in diameter and weighs 42,600 pounds
The Functional Cargo Block was the first component launched for the ISS on November 20, 1998, according to the US space agency.
It is 41.2 feet in length, 13.5 feet in diameter and weighs 42,600 pounds.
Solovyov has said that a significant portion of the equipment on the ISS is aging, having previously warned there could be an 'avalanche' of broken equipment after 2025.
In March, two small cracks were sealed on the Zvezda module, which contains living quarters for two cosmonauts, according to Space.com.
In July, the ISS was thrown out of control when jet thrusters of the 22-ton Nauka research module inadvertently fired a few hours after it docked.
As a result of the inadvertent firing, NASA said the ISS backflipped and was left upside down, but the ISS's flight control team solved the issue.
It's unclear if Solovyov's comments are related to NASA's response earlier this month, in which it disputed a claim from Russian state news agency, TASS, that a NASA astronaut drilled a hole in the ISS three years ago.
Insiders from Roscosmos, Russia's space agency, claimed that NASA astronaut Serena Auñón-Chancellor drilled a hole in the ISS in August 2018 to force an early return to Earth due to a psychological crisis.
NASA Administrator Bill Nelson tweeted that he fully supports Auñón-Chancellor, adding context to a tweet from Kathy Leuders, the head of NASA's human spaceflight program.
NASA Administrator Bill Nelson tweeted that he fully supports NASA astronaut Serena Auñón-Chancellor, who was the subject of speculation in a report from Russian state news agency TASS that she drilled a hole in the ISS in August 2018 to force an early return to Earth due to a psychological crisis
Kathy Leuders, the head of NASA's human spaceflight program, also expressed support for Aunon-Chancellor
'NASA astronauts, including Serena Aunon-Chancellor, are extremely well-respected, serve their country and make invaluable contributions to the agency,' Leuders tweeted.
'We stand behind Serena and her professional conduct. We do not believe there is any credibility to these accusations.'
TASS, the Russian state news agency, cited the claim from Roscosmos insiders that there were multiple holes drilled by someone unfamiliar with the module design and without proper support to ensure accurate drilling in low gravity.
Roscosmos conducted an investigation into the hole in 2019 and compiled a dossier on the incident, but reports claim it will not disclose its findings.
The leak, a circular hole in the hull of the Russian Soyuz capsule as it joined the ISS, was the subject of headlines and speculation for months.
Claims of the cause have included a botched repair job by an engineer on Earth who drilled through the side of the spacecraft, issues in manufacturing and sabotage.
The hole in the Russian Soyuz spacecraft attached to the station was spotted on August 30, 2018, three months after it first docked, after crew spotted a decrease in air pressure, causing astronauts to rush to find the cause.
Just days prior to their return to Earth, the cosmonauts endured a grueling spacewalk that lasted almost eight hours to investigate the hole, using knives and shears to carve into the side of the space station itself.
The crew discovered a 2-millimeter (0.08 inches) hole which caused the leak and plugged it with epoxy and gauze.
NASA claimed the astronauts on board were never in danger of suffocation due to the 'lifeboat' spacecraft attached to the station to provide a return to Earth.
Later, images and further investigation revealed the hole had been made from the inside, ruling out space debris as the cause.
Cosmonaut Sergey Prokopyev and two other astronauts, NASA's Aunon-Chancellor and Alexander Gerst of the European Space Agency, were on board when it was detected.
Rogozin said in June that Russia would abandon the ISS in 2025 unless the US lifts sanctions that prevent it from launching satellites, DailyMail.com reported previously.
In April, Rogozin made a similar threat, saying Russia would quit the project by 2025.
'We are beginning negotiations with our NASA partners, we are formalizing them now,' Rogozin had said at the time.
'It does not mean that the station will be scrapped and dumped into the ocean immediately after 2025. We will simply hand over the responsibility for our segment to the partners.'
Russia has been under sanctions by the US since its annexation of Crimea in 2014, a move that western governments have condemned as an illegal occupation.
President Joe Biden recently added to those sanctions for what he described as attempts to interfere in US elections, state-sponsored hacking and other issues.
Relations soured even further when Biden agreed with the description of Russian President Vladimir Putin as 'a killer,' to which the Russian president retorted it 'takes one to known one.'
Amid the deterioration in relations, Russia has been increasingly turning towards China for support - including in space.
The two countries recently announced a joint project to build a base on the moon, saying it will 'promote the peaceful exploration and use of space for all of mankind'.
The project was announced after Russia rejected a US offer to join European partners in establishing their own base on the moon.
WHAT COULD HAVE CAUSED A HOLE IN THE ISS?
Theory one - it was caused by a small meteorite
A tiny hole appeared in a Russian space capsule locked to the ISS on 30th August.
The 'micro fracture' believed to be around 2mm wide in the $150 billion (£115 billion) space station was discovered after astronauts noticed a drop in pressure.
European Space Agency astronaut Alexander Gerst reportedly put his finger over the hole before crew patched it with tape.
The hole was confirmed repaired by Friday (31 August) after cabin pressure returned to normal.
It was initially believed to have been caused by a small meteorite and astronauts used tape to seal the leak after it caused a minor loss of pressure.
Theory two - it was made deliberately while in orbit
However, as the investigation went on it began to look like the hole was made from someone inside as opposed to outside, either back on Earth or in space, the Russian space agency claimed.
Roscosmos chief Dmitry Rogozin said in September that the hole could have been drilled during manufacturing or while in orbit with a 'wavering hand'.
He didn't say if he suspected any of the US crew, but the statement has caused some bewilderment.
Sources suggest the question of how to fix the hole may have strained relations between Moscow and Houston.
Rogozin has since reneged on his statement blaming the media for twisting his words and said that he 'never pointed the finger at U.S. astronauts'.
Theory three - it was caused by a worker at Energia
A leading theory from an unnamed source at Energia said the hole was made on the ground – potentially caused by 'deliberate interference' – with suggestions the person responsible may have already been identified.
Another anonymous source said the hole was drilled by a worker who hid their mistake with a seal instead of reporting it.
An unnamed source at Energia told the Russian news agency RIA Novosti that '[t]he hole was made on the ground'.
According to the source, '[t]he person responsible for the act of negligence has been identified'.
Another anonymous source said the hole was not made intentionally but by a worker who hid their mistake with a seal instead of reporting it.
The patchwork repair lasted the trip up to the ISS but after three weeks in orbit gradually peeled away.
The Russian space agency Roscosmos has been talking about building its own space station and moving out of the ISS, but it doesn’t seem to be in any hurry to do so. Perhaps it’s time for NASA to put some pressure on them … or possibly even send an eviction notice. Why? Well, after a pesky leak in the ISS in 2018 turned out to be a botched patch job on a docked Soyuz capsule, a leak in 2020 turned out to be a hole in the Zvezda service module (are you detecting a pattern here?), and the recently docked Nauka module accidently fired its jet thrusters and spun the entire ISS around, Russian cosmonauts have yet ANOTHER problem – this time they found cracks in the Zarya module. Good luck getting your security deposit back, Roscosmos!
“Superficial fissures have been found in some places on the Zarya module. This is bad and suggests that the fissures will begin to spread over time.”
Zarya launched atop a Russian Proton rocket
Vladimir Solovyov, chief engineer of rocket and space corporation Energia, delivered the bad news to the RIA news agency, which was picked up by Reuters. The Zarya module, known to the astronauts as the Functional Cargo Block is probably overdue for an overhaul – it was the first component launched for the International Space Station back in 1998. However, its history – and who is ultimately responsible for it – is complicated. Zarya, Russian for “sunrise” or “dawn,” was built in in Moscow by the Khrunichev State Research and Production Space Center under a subcontract to The Boeing Company for NASA. Zarya was launched in November 1998 on a Russian Proton rocket from the Baikonur Cosmodrome and was attached in December 1998 to the Unity module which connects the Russian and U.S. segments. The Zarya module had been originally designed for Russia Mir space station with a lifespan of 15 years, so the warrantee has obviously expired. As Reuters explains:
“The space official (Solovyov) has said previously that much of the International Space Station’s equipment is starting to age and has warned there could be an “avalanche” of broken equipment after 2025.”
Solovyov also stated that he didn’t know if the cracks were leaking any oxygen. Based on past history plus the age of the module, that would be a safe bet. Despite that, The Russian space agency, Roscosmos has said it will remain part of the ISS until 2024 and is open to staying longer. Meanwhile, the Chinese space agency is building a brand new space station and developing plans for an ultra-large kilometers-long mega-spacecraft that would be would be 10 times the length of the International Space Station and a little over three times the length of Star Trek’s USS Enterprise.
Zarya docking with Unity
These recent problems point out the obvious – the International Space Station is not aging gracefully and could become a dangerous place to live and work. Perhaps it’s time for NASA to move out too. But then what? Turn the business of space station operation over to private space companies? Ask Congress for funding to build a new one? Enter a new spirit of cooperation like it had with Russia in 1998 and join forces with China, the ESA and other space-faring nations to pool talent and resources so that humanity – not just nations – venture into space and benefit from it?
A leak is never a good thing in space. Maybe this one in the Zarya module will change that.
There are plenty of reports of UFOs up in the sky above our heads, and they can take many shapes and sizes, often inspiring debate, wonder, and awe. Yet even more amazing than such cases are those times when these enigmatic objects drop down from their place in the clouds to descend to earth and land, often entailing alien beings and a whole new list of high strangeness. UFO landing cases also go way back in time, and here we will look at some of the weirder ones from the 1960s.
On April 24, 1964, a farmer by the name of Gary Wilcox was doing his daily chores out on his rural 300-acre farm in Newark Valley, New York, on what was up until then a usual, uneventful day. At around 10 a.m., something very weird lying on the ground by the edge of the woods nearby caught his attention and he drove his tractor in that direction for a better look. Whatever it was looked somewhat oblong in shape, and about 20 feet long and 4 feet high, but most strangely of all was that it seemed to not be lying on the ground, but hovering just very slightly over it. Throwing all caution out the window, Wilcox apparently bravely approached it to find that it was smooth and metallic, and he even touched it and kicked at it, noticing there were no vibrations emanating from the mysterious device. This was when things would get bizarre.
According to Wilcox, two diminutive 4-foot-tall humanoids in white metallic overalls suddenly appeared from underneath the object, holding trays filled with what the farmer would say were “alfalfa, roots, soil, leaves and brush.” The beings spoke to him and told him not to be afraid, and Wilcox would describe their voices as singularly strange and beyond description. They then began interviewing him about the tractor, what he had been doing out in the field, and many other aspects of farming, especially about how fertilizer worked, allegedly talking to him for a full two hours before they made preparations to head out. Wilcox apparently asked them if he could go with them, but they informed him that he would not be able to survive on their world. They asked him for a bag of fertilizer but he had none on him at the time, so they merely nodded, climbed upon their craft, and shot up into the sky. That afternoon, he would leave a bag of fertilizer at the same spot and it would disappear by the following morning. What in the world was going on here? Why would they want fertilizer? Was this just the ramblings of a derailed mind or is there something more to it?
In 1965 we have a case from East Fort Myers, Florida, where on March 14 of that year a man named James Flynn was out hunting in the Everglades with his hunting dogs. That evening his dogs ran off into the wilderness in hot pursuit of something, perhaps a deer, and he shortly after heard a sound like a booming gunshot. Thinking that something had happened to his dogs, he went out to investigate and came across a large mysterious object like an upside-down cone, an estimated 200 feet in the air above some cypress trees in the near distance, which was slowly moving away. It then returned to hover over the wilderness before shooting away and then returning once again. It then seemed to drop down beyond the trees. Flynn crept closer and observed the craft through his binoculars, describing it as sitting upon the ground and being around 25 feet high and 50 feet in diameter, with four levels of windows along its side emanating a yellow glow. The bottom of the craft had a reddish light along it, which illuminated the ground below, but he couldn’t discern more than this because he suddenly blacked out and lost consciousness.
Flynn woke up on the muddy ground sometime later, experiencing blurry vision and unable to move. As he regained the function of his limbs and the vision came back to his eyes, he realized that it was now late afternoon and he had no recollection of what had happened during his lost time. When he got home and had his eyes checked, his vision was far worse than it had been before, and his right eye seemed to have no retina. Flynn also complained that he had numbness throughout his limbs but there could be found no physical cause for these symptoms. Out of curiosity, Flynn would return to the site of his encounter with some others to find that there was a burned circle in the earth measuring around 72 feet in diameter, and there were several cypress trees that had been scorched by a high heat. Although Flynn would believe that this must have been some sort of secret military experimental aircraft, it has never really been solved.
In July of 1965 a very weird series of events went down in the quaint region of Valensole, Alpes-de-Haute-Provence, France. It all started near the small village of Valensole, and on July 1, 1965, a farmer by the name of Maurice Masse was taking a cigarette break before starting his morning chores. As he puffed out wisps of smoke into the air, something caught his attention through the haze of cigarette smoke, and he could see some sort of strange object descend from the sky to land in a field of lavender flowers not too far away. At this point he did not take it to be a UFO, thinking it instead to be a helicopter, but when he extinguished his smoke and took a look out across the field, his eyes met with an oval shaped object perched up on four leg-like apparatuses. Stranger still was that there appeared to be two humanoid figures standing in front of it.
The figures were described as standing approximately 4 feet high, and dressed in tight gray-green clothes, seemingly not human. Their heads were oversized and bald, holding within them large, almond shaped eyes and small, pointed chins, and they seemed to be making some sort of low grumbling noise. As the farmer stood there mouth agape in awe, one of these curious figures allegedly turned to him and raised into the air a device of some kind, which looked cylindrical and “pencil-like” in nature. Before Masse could even really register what was going on he says that the device projected some sort of beam that caused him to lose all control of his limbs and go crumpling to the ground in a heap. He would claim that as he lay there in a daze the figures boarded their craft and then flew off at great speed. It would later be found that the ground had a deep indentation in it and a hardened area like concrete. It would also be found that Masse was honest, very sincere, and was considered to be telling the truth.
Moving along to 1966 there is a case from the children of Westall High School, in Melbourne, Australia. On this day the students were going about their daily business and out playing in the school yard. There was nothing at all that marked this as anything other than an ordinary day, until something very strange appeared in the sky above them. Coming in from the distance was a greyish saucer-shaped craft with a slight purple hue, also described as “a round humped object with a flat base,” which then came in low over the high school’s south-west corner to disappear behind a nearby stand of trees, beyond which was a paddock and an overgrown field and wilderness area called the Grange. After a few moments it then popped up over the trees again and moved off into the distance, with some witnesses later claiming that it was then pursued by what appeared to be several military aircraft, and the entire bizarre scene played out in front of over 300 students and teachers.
As more witnesses came forward, a clearer picture began to emerge about what happened. It would be discovered that some witnesses had actually seen more than one of the objects, and that it seemed as if the military craft had been chasing any trying to engage them, although there could be found no records of any aircraft scheduled to be in the area, either commercial or military. It was also found that the UFO had left a mark in the ground, which appeared as a circle of yellowed grass with a “swirly pattern,” and that some witnesses had seen official looking men in blue uniforms inspecting this mark. One of the most interesting pieces of the puzzle uncovered was during an interview with one of the witnesses at the time, a science teacher from the Westall school by the name of Andrew Greenwood. In a recorded interview with UFO researcher Dr. James E. McDonald, Greenwood would divulge a good amount of information on what was seen that day.
McDonald would describe what Greenwood had told him:
Greenwood told me the UFO was first brought to his attention by a hysterical child who ran into his classroom and told him there’s a flying saucer outside,” McDonald says on the recording. He thought this child had become deranged or something so he didn’t take any notice, but when the child insisted that this object was in the sky he decided to go out and have a look for himself. He called it the most amazing flying he had ever seen in his life. The planes were doing everything possible to approach the object and he said how they all avoided a collision he will never know. Every time they got too close to the object it would slowly accelerate, then rapidly accelerate and then move away from them and stop. Then they would take off after it again and the same thing would happen.
Greenwood would explain that the whole spectacle had lasted around 20 minutes, and that shortly after the headmaster had warned the faculty and students not to talk about what they had seen with anyone, even going so far as to threaten to fire or expel anyone who did. Some even spoke of some sort of military-looking figures lurking about. According to him, this was enough to get many of the witnesses to shut up about it all, and is one of the main reasons the whole story just sort of fell off the media’s radar, only really being unearthed years later. Yet, even now decades later, the witnesses have stuck to their stories and insist on what they saw, leaving us to try and figure out what it could have been. To this day one can still see an information board at the school commemorating the event, although it seems to be just as obscure a case as ever. What did these people see that day and why exactly were they so reluctant to talk about it? Did the military have some hand in trying to cover this up? There are not many answers, and it remains a very curious mass UFO sighting that has been sort of mostly forgotten.
A particularly harrowing case comes from 1966, in Roaring River, Missouri, where a landing UFO seems to have caused quite a lot of damage. On November 22, 1966, two hunters were out looking for deer in the wilderness of the area when they saw a strange object descend from the sky right onto their camp. They ran to see what was going on, and as they did, they could see smoke billowing up from the location. Upon reaching the camp, they saw that their tent and all of their equipment was either burned to a crisp, on fire, or still smoldering, with the aluminum cots in the tent having actually been warped and melted. Rather strangely, nothing else around the camp had been affected, the trees still in pristine condition. They then heard a low humming noise and saw the object rise up over the trees and shoot off out of sight. The witnesses would later claim that the object had intentionally wrecked their camp, although why this should be is something we will never know.
Such cases are certainly intriguing and spectacular, taking the UFO phenomenon down from the skies to plop it right down in front of our faces, often to completely bizarre results. What truth do any of these cases have and just what did these people see? Were these misidentified mundane phenomena, figments of the imagination, or something else? Whatever the case may be, reports of landing UFOs rank high among the most bizarre accounts of UFOs there are, and there are no solid answers.
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Astronomers Find Cosmic Boomerang in Coma Cluster Galaxy
Astronomers Find Cosmic Boomerang in Coma Cluster Galaxy
Using data from the Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA), the Combined Array for Research in Millimeter-Wave Astronomy (CARMA) and the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, astronomers have observed a cosmic boomerang effect — molecular gas streams that are stripped away from a galaxy only to circle back and return later — in the northwest quadrant of NGC 4921, a spiral galaxy in the Coma cluster. The observation offers new insights into the life cycle of galaxies and the structural formations within galaxies, as traced by molecular gas.
Zoomed in view of an ALMA (red/orange) and Hubble (optical) composite of NGC 4921; it highlights filament structures resulting from the effects of ram-pressure stripping.
Image credit: ALMA / ESO / NAOJ / NRAO / S. Dagnello, NRAO / NASA / ESA / Hubble / K. Cook, LLNL / L. Shatz.
The Coma cluster is a large group of galaxies approximately 330 million light-years away in the northern constellation of Coma Berenices.
Also known as Abell 1656, the cluster is a great environment to study the ram-pressure stripping — a process known to strip gas out of galaxies, leaving them without the material needed to form new stars — at high resolution.
An excellent member of the cluster to study the effects of this process on the dense interstellar medium is NGC 4921, a massive, nearly face-on spiral galaxy.
“Astronomers are interested in studying how galaxies grow, live, and die,” said Dr. William Cramer, a postdoctoral researcher at Arizona State University.
“Effects like ram pressure that can speed up the normal galaxy lifecycle are very important to understand for this reason.”
“Furthermore, the molecular gas in galaxies is the birthplace of new stars, and therefore studying the effect of ram pressure on it is of paramount importance.”
Using data gathered by ALMA, Dr. Cramer and colleagues created a high-resolution map of dense molecular gas in NGC 4921.
The map shows unusual structures that form in the ram pressure ‘wind’ — long filaments of heavy gas connected to newly-forming stars.
This dense, heavy gas is thought to be more resistant to ram-pressure stripping, perhaps due to magnetic fields holding it more firmly in place.
“When an external force like ram pressure disturbs a galaxy, it offers an opportunity to learn about the internal forces that operate in galaxies,” said Professor Jeffrey Kenney, a researcher at Yale University.
“The unusual filaments would not form without magnetic fields, so we also learn about the importance of magnetic fields in galaxies from this ram pressure interaction.”
The ALMA data clearly show filaments of molecular gas connected to NGC 4921 — the filaments are, indeed, resisting.
But then the astronomer spotted something else — some of the previously-stripped gas comes back.
“Instead of being thrown out never to return, some of this gas is moving like a boomerang, being ejected but then circling and falling back to its source. If this gas is recaptured into the galaxy, it can form new stars,” Dr. Cramer said.
“The boomerang effect is significant for several reasons. It provides hard evidence about the evolution of galaxies.”
“It confirms a long-held theory about galaxy development; and it aids astronomers trying to predict the birthrate of new stars.”
“The interstellar medium of galaxies is complex, with many variables that are hard to model.”
“This observation is important because it shows that fallback of gas can be detected and allows us to search more broadly to help characterize it.”
William J. Cramer et al. 2021. Molecular gas filaments and fallback in the ram pressure stripped Coma spiral NGC 4921. ApJ, in press; arXiv: 2107.11731
When my brother phoned at eleven one night, I panicked. Nick usually gives me a courtesy text before calling, so my mind went into crisis mode as I picked up the phone. I thought of potential family deaths or the kind of trauma he might come to me about first. I had visions of the night he walked away from a car crash, the only one of his group of four friends still conscious, our mom’s purple Acura a pile of twisted metal. I answered, bracing for the worst. But this felt like a prank. UFOs were the stuff of fantasy.
“Are you on anything?” I asked.
“I’m sober.”
Even as he meticulously explained the encounter, I couldn’t bring myself to accept his testimony. House-sitting for our parents, Nick had been looking out on the backyard under an April night sky when three bright lights, moving at a steady high speed, converged above the in-ground pool. They stopped, according to him, snapping into place and hovering in a triangle formation before beginning to rotate. The triangle’s spinning accelerated, it got smaller, and it vanished.
“I got a video of it,” he said, as if my disbelief radiated over the line. “Near the end. I didn’t record it all since I dropped my phone.”
He hung up and sent me a video over email. Sure enough, two static lights in the sky above our parents’ pool were joined by a third, moving in a direct line at a speed that reminded me of a marble rolling down a slightly uneven table and stopping on a divot. They revolved on an invisible axis, just like Nick said, and disappeared.
I played it over and over, a cold dread crawling up my spine, my muscles tensed ever so slightly in apprehension. My brain started doing gymnastics, trying to fit the image into a rational narrative. Consumer-grade drone technology wouldn’t be available for years, so my knee-jerk reaction was to believe it was a military aircraft. Already, I was in dangerous territory, the stuff of conspiracy theory, but any alternative explanations that came to mind were even more clichéd, if not any less likely to be true. Aliens. Robots. Atlanteans.
I had to admit I didn’t actually know enough about statistics to confidently say a secret government aircraft was any less probable than extraterrestrial visitation or the existence of a technologically sophisticated submarine species that lives in a sunken city that has somehow evaded human detection. If this was real, whatever real meant in that moment, then it would change everything. After all, the existence of UFOs should unite feuding nations in shared curiosity and fear, like in the ending of Alan Moore’s Watchmen, when a staged alien attack defuses Cold War tensions. Intelligent engineering of unknown origin is up there with climate change and pandemics on the list of big deals for the human race.
The next morning, at my customer-service call-centre job, I read the news in between answering phones. Apparently, there had been multiple UFO sightings the night before, all over southern Ontario. But reading about the encounters in print made the proposal of flying saucers difficult to square with my fluorescent nine-to-five present, working for an hourly wage in business-casual dress, selling tickets to the symphony. When I talked about Nick’s video with my coworkers at the coffee machine, needing to share my personal connection to the news du jour, I steeped my story in cynical disbelief. Only crazy people believe in UFOs, even when there’s video evidence. Especially when there are videos. The incident felt notable and dramatic, but I wasn’t ready, emotionally, to accept The X-Files as nonfiction.
AIRED FROM 1993 through 2002, The X-Files was among the most popular American television dramas of its decade. Following the investigations of Fox Mulder and Dana Scully, two outcast FBI agents working out of the bureau’s basement office, the show was a paranormal procedural that borrowed heavily from real supernatural lore to bring a sense of uncanny verisimilitude to its episodic format. Encountering vampires, haunted dolls, the Jersey Devil, and a time warp in the Bermuda Triangle, Mulder and Scully peppered their mystery-solving banter with spooky factoids and trivia along with a helping of fringe science that made even their goofier adventures seem just a little bit plausible. While the agents investigated every possible horror trope, sometimes twice (Scully fought off multiple Mulder doppelgängers in the nineties), they are best known as heroes tangled in an ongoing government conspiracy to prepare Earth for colonization by alien visitors.
Roughly six to eight hours of every twenty-something-episode season were dedicated to a semiserialized plot drawing from real military history and actual abduction accounts. These episodes built the popular mythology of UFOs, aliens, and evil men who smoke cigarettes in gloomy Pentagon offices while watching presidents die. The mythology is so dense, so popular, and so blended with reality that it became the main cultural touch point for UFO phenomena. Fiction co-opted the less-verifiable eyewitness parts of reality to build a realistic mythos, which became the foundation for how we understand unidentified flying objects: as fantasy rather than as an area of inquiry worth investigating. Mulder and Scully were science-fiction all-stars worth emulating only in allegory.
In a May 2000 LA Times cover story titled “Hangin’ Out with Rock’s Rude Boys,” staff writer Geoff Boucher chronicles a day spent with Blink-182 when the band was scheduled to appear on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno. A case of laryngitis contracted by the band’s co-frontman and bassist, Mark Hoppus, meant a last-minute set change that replaced the ultrapopular suicide ballad “Adam’s Song” with “Aliens Exist,” a Tom DeLonge–sung tune. “It’s about aliens that come down to Earth and fly up your butt,” DeLonge told the LA Times. “And it’s true.”
Despite DeLonge’s in-your-face allegation of extraterrestrial probing, “Aliens Exist” is played deadpan on Blink-182’s 1999 pop-punk landmark Enema of the State. The guitarist recites, “We all know conspiracies are dumb,” but that doesn’t stop him from abandoning the tongue-in-cheek, running-naked-through-the-street aesthetic that made his band famous. The song sounds like the frustrated confession of an obsessed young man, with nary a Uranus joke.
Fifteen years after the Tonight Show set, DeLonge’s earnestness on the topic became clear when he quit the band and began pursuing ufology, writing books about alien technology and exchanging emails with US government officials like John Podesta on topics such as Area 51 and the infamous Roswell incident. DeLonge even launched a company called To the Stars Academy of Arts & Science, a startup dedicated to harvesting and learning from UFO technology with the aim of sparking revolutions in science, engineering, entertainment, and consciousness. (While no mention of ESP research remains on the To the Stars website as of this writing, a 2017 preliminary-offering circular archived with the US Securities and Exchange Commission references the company’s research into telepathy.)
DeLonge came across as ridiculous because he was acting like a character from The X-Files. He might as well have joined the Church of Scientology, come out as a flat-earther, or asserted that he could speak with animals like Doctor Dolittle. Of all the things a person could possibly dedicate their life to, UFO research is among the most lethal to one’s public image.
But DeLonge and other ufologists and alleged abductees should have been exonerated on December 16, 2017, when the cover story of the New York Times Sunday edition exposed a clandestine Department of Defense program dedicated to the study of unidentified flying objects. The Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP) was started in 2007 by Democratic senator Harry Reid. Fuelled by $22 million of untraceable funding, the initiative investigated strange aerial phenomena that demonstrated motion capabilities far beyond the limits of human engineering and interfered with military weapons systems. Luis Elizondo, who ran the program from the Pentagon, characterized the objects as threats to national security that warranted serious research and analysis.
Despite documented video evidence of silvery shapes in the sky moving at impossible speeds and pivoting with grace, military personnel rarely reported close encounters for fear of ridicule. Such stigma seems to be the root cause of the program’s 2012 decommissioning. According to the New York Times’ sources, Department of Defense officials still independently investigate UFO reports, but they do so without departmental financial support. Frustrated with the continued secrecy, the defunding, and the overall lack of seriousness afforded a topic he still sees as high priority, Elizondo resigned from his government position to enter the private sector. He and two other former Pentagon officials now seek the truth alongside DeLonge at To the Stars Academy, corroborating the paranoid punk rocker’s radical and fantastical world view.
UFOs are real in the most clichéd sense, which makes them nearly impossible to believe in if you didn’t already entertain their existence before 2017. In borrowing from the highly stigmatized UFO-sighting subculture, The X-Files made us associate legitimate unknown phenomena with a very good but also extremely silly television drama. Now that AATIP has been dragged into the light of day, the UFO episodes of Mulder and Scully’s adventures almost play like historical fiction rather than sci-fi. Almost. Because the U in UFO is a scary U. The unidentified. The unknown. The unclassifiable.
BY THE END of its initial, nine-season run, The X-Files provided answers to all of its alien mysteries. In real life, Elizondo and DeLonge don’t have those answers. No one does. The narrative is unfinished, and it will remain that way if we can’t accept that the pariahs weren’t lying when they told us about the shining lights in the sky.
It’s ironic that The X-Files’ accuracy makes it so difficult to believe the assertions of UFO spotters. Not only did the show endeavour to portray abductees and witnesses in a sympathetic light—often to tear-jerking effect, as in the case of recurring character Max Fenig, who endures a lifetime of torture made all the worse by society’s unwillingness to accept his story—but, in the show’s finest hour, season three’s “Jose Chung’s ‘From Outer Space,’” Mulder shares a powerful monologue about the influence of popular culture on highly stigmatized communities. Urging author Jose Chung to abandon the writing of a nonfiction book about the alleged abduction of two teenagers by a lava monster named Lord Kinbote, who hails from the inner space of Earth’s core, Mulder says:
You perform a disservice to a field of inquiry that has always struggled for respectability. You’re a gifted writer, but no amount of talent could describe the events that occurred in any realistic vein because they deal with alternative realities that we have yet to comprehend, and when presented in the wrong way, in the wrong context, the incidents and the people involved in them can appear foolish, if not downright psychotic.
In the world of the show, Mulder is the voice of compassion. But, to a viewer, every episode of The X-Files functions like Chung’s book. Even when it’s serious, the show is still fantasy—created, presented, and consumed in a reality that largely dismisses the nonreligious paranormal. The X-Files uses its UFO mythos to teach us about faith, skepticism, human connection, and trust. But its most straightforward lesson, that we should take UFO sightings seriously, falls victim to our deeply ingrained reading habits regarding genre fiction. We dismiss it as an entertaining vehicle for a deeper meaning. Sci-fi isn’t supposed to be literal.
Even writing this, I feel torn between what I know from the news and my expectations of reality. I’ve seen video evidence of a UFO. I’ve read the New York Times exposé and subsequent reports. On their own, they should provide me with enough of an informed vantage point to accept our strange new skies. But, for some reason, I can’t fully accept this as one of Mulder’s “alternative realities.”
The truth is out there, and I’m filled with a DeLongean frustration that society is more concerned with the explainable earthbound threats facing the Pentagon and the increasingly rigid lines of partisan human-on-human conflict. We should be trying to figure out this UFO thing. We should be dedicating all of our time to searching for answers to skyborne unknowns. We should unite as a species out of shared curiosity and, possibly (if Elizondo is right about UFOs being a threat), self-preservation. I should quit my job and join To the Stars—but I can’t bring myself to put my money where my mouth is.
Fifty-one percent of my mind thinks buying stock in DeLonge’s firm would be a very funny joke but ultimately not worth the $350-minimum price tag—despite the US military’s continual validation of DeLonge’s views. Cynicism informed by pop culture always conquers fear. My paradigm is jammed by The X-Files. I want to believe, but I can’t.
Excerpted with permission from Be Scared of Everything: Horror Essays by Peter Counter (Invisible Publishing, 2021).
UFO is a four-part docu-series from J.J. Abrams’ Bad Robot and Glen Zipper exploring our fascination with unidentified flying objects, and what clandestine influence the American government, lucrative private companies and the military may have in shielding the truth behind extraterrestrial phenomena to further their own agendas.
Dedicated UFO followers have a term for when news of the phenomena breaks out into wider culture: flap.
It’s fitting, encompassing not only the idea of something springing open to let loose whatever is contained inside, but also calling to mind people running around with their hair on fire.
At the end of June, the Pentagon flapped open a report about engagements with UAP. The term UFO — unidentified flying object — has been changed to UAP — unidentified aerial phenomenon. It’s a more apt descriptor, as some of these things aren’t really objects at all, at least in the flying saucer mode of old, but lights, sensations and inexplicable happenings.
The most recent flap is a new limited documentary series UFO, produced by none other than J.J. Abrams, who knows a thing or two about outer space stuff, having directed a couple of Star War movies.
Abrams is good at building suspense. After I’d watched the first two episodes of the four-part series, it was already clear the production boasted an impressive parade of ex-military members, formers senators, award-winning journalists, New York Times reporters, and a couple of whackjobs to add some colour. But for the most part everyone is dead serious, occasionally tearful, and, most poignantly, desperate to be believed.
It’s almost impossible not to be drawn into the drama of people’s impassioned testimonies, in particular the former U.S. navy pilots and computer technicians who were party to the infamous USS Nimitz incident. This sighting has been well covered, but in short: on November 14, 2004, crew from the American aircraft carrier encountered something they couldn’t explain just off the Southern coast of California. Jets scrambled to intercept what pilots described as a Tic Tac-shaped object hovering just above the surface of the water, leaving a churning wake in its path. The craft was also recorded on infra-red camera.
As witnesses to the event tell their stories, something else comes to the fore: mortal humiliation.
In spite of being highly trained, responsible folk, in charge of one of the most powerful arsenals in the world, the men who came forward were treated like the village idiots. Kevin Day, a chief operations specialist for the U.S. navy, explains how being belittled, insulted and generally disbelieved had a profound effect on his life and the remainder of his career.
It’s a common experience among many people who claim to have seen something out of this world: being gaslit, derided or laughed at until they slunk away. The visible relief that someone might actually finally believe them is tangible.
Active betrayal is an ongoing theme in UFO, as evidenced by the infamous Phoenix Lights sighting. On March 13, 1997, thousands of people witnessed a series of bizarre lights over the city, including Fife Symington, then-governor of Arizona. Although Symington initially called for an investigation into the sighting, he later mysteriously recanted and turned the entire episode into a joke. Citizens of Phoenix who were convinced they’d seen something were outraged.
Other times, evidence of encounters simply disappeared. The crew of the USS Nimitz, for example, were met on-board by a group of plain-clothed men who required them to immediately hand over all documentation related to the event, and then vamoosed.
For all the talk of alien spacecraft and otherworldly visitations, one of the strangest aspects of the entire enterprise is this systematic discrediting — that anyone who claims to see something odd is laughed off the planet.
People believe all kinds of strange things, so the efforts to which UAP folks are denied credibility is itself a little odd.
But I’ve done it myself, after hearing from someone who claims to have been abducted, experimented upon or is missing a period of their life that they cannot in any reasonable way account for. Why, I’ve caught myself thinking, of all the billions of people on the planet, would aliens choose Bill?
But that’s the thing about aliens. They’re just so damn unpredictable. One moment they’re playing a game of chicken with the U.S. military and in the next, they’re hanging out next to a school yard in Zimbabwe.
One of the most believable accounts of a UAP encounter came from a group of eerily articulate school children who recounted for BBC cameras what they had witnessed. The uniformity of the children’s account tracked with other similar incidents, including a sighting in Wales when another group of schoolchildren witnessed something inexplicable.
But no matter what level of education, honourifics or body of work, even looking into the phenomenon is enough to brand one a kook. John E. Mack, the head of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, whose research into the experience of people who believed they had had an encounter with aliens, was subjected to an internal investigation for his work. The first ever such investigation undertaken for a tenured faculty member.
Other people, like journalist George Knapp, appear leery of having their reputations further tarred with sticky UFO conspiracy stuff. Knapp, whose work has garnered both Peabody and Edward R. Murrow Awards, stepped back from covering the topic, letting the New York Times break a story he’d been sitting on for years.
The New York Times 2017 exposé, as well as documentary features like The Phenomenon, interview some of the same people that are featured in Abrams’ series. The New Yorker took an even more in-depth approach to the subject through the experience of journalist Leslie Kean. Kean, who co-authored the Times’ story, sums up the experience of being systematically discredited from the very outset of her research into the subject. “That was the beginning of my education in the power of the stigma,” she told the New Yorker. Curiously enough, media coverage for Abrams’ UFO series has been quite respectful.
Although the production has more than its fair share of dramatic moments, lens flares and thudding orchestral accompaniment — you have to give the punters some old razzle dazzle — it also includes a lot of hardcore research.
But for all of its carefulness, some things in the series are just weird. The Guardian’s coverage cites a shadowy figure named Richard Doty, for example, who was the subject of an entire documentary feature called Mirage Men that offered an exhaustive explanation of how people who claimed to see UFOs were undermined and made to doubt their own experience.
Whether it’s government trickiness or something more prosaic like funding, dip one toe into the world of UAPs, and wheeeeee! The next thing you know, it’s impossible to know what is true, what is fabrication and why the space between these two things is so actively muddied.
Former Democratic Senate Majority leader Harry Reid, interviewed in UFO, explains how he came to procure more than $20 million for a little-known government department known as the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program. The former head of AATIP, one Luis Elizondo is something a strange character himself.
In the Abrams series, some of the people who are the most confused and uncertain are also the most compelling. There is genuine pain in being so thoroughly disbelieved, but also a need for answers. After the release of the Pentagon report, even deeply knowledgeable people admitted, sotto voce, that yes, UAPs were real, but they didn’t know what they were.
But all that might be changing, as more concrete research is underway in scientific circles.
The Galileo Project, launched out of Harvard, is one of the most fascinating to emerge.
When things are horrendous on planet Earth, it is a natural impulse to look to the stars and think about what else, or who else, might be up there. And can they help us, or are they going to just zip about in their nifty spacecraft? NYT journalist Leslie Kean, whose feature story in the paper arguably helped garner greater respect and acceptance of the idea of UAPs, summed it up succinctly: “To me, this just transcended the endless struggle of human beings... It was a planetary concern.”
Or as science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke put it: “Two possibilities exist: either we are alone in the Universe or we are not. Both are equally terrifying."
Huge-cigar shaped UFO filmed during a storm over Happy Jack, AZ 16-Aug-2021
Huge-cigar shaped UFO filmed during a storm over Happy Jack, AZ 16-Aug-2021
This huge cylindrical UFO was filmed during a storm by a security camera. Location: Happy Jack, Arizona.
Date:16th August 2021
Witness report:
Video captured light/object moving through clouds. Our motion-activated security camera was triggered by rain falling during a recent storm. About 10 seconds into the video, there is a horizontal beam of light that is flying in/out of the clouds at a steady speed and constant altitude that appears in the sky. The video has sound, but can only capture raindrops hitting the camera housing. The light/object was silent, as other videos we have recorded the same camera have captured the sound of jet engines, helicopters, people talking, etc. When the object is about to leave the frame, there appears to be water/cloud vapor dripping/rolling off the edge of it.
New ideas on what makes a planet habitable could reshape the search for life
New ideas on what makes a planet habitable could reshape the search for life
Some planets in the habitable zone are not good for life, but others outside it might be
A planet with a global ocean under a steamy hydrogen atmosphere, like the world shown in this artist’s illustration, could be a ripe place to search for life, researchers say.
When considering where to look for extraterrestrial life, astronomers have mostly stuck with what’s familiar. The best candidates for habitable planets are considered the ones most like Earth: small, rocky, with breathable atmospheres and a clement amount of warmth from their stars.
But as more planets outside the solar system have been discovered, astronomers have debated the usefulness of this definition (SN: 10/4/19). Some planets in the so-called habitable zone, where temperatures are right for liquid water, are probably not good for life at all. Others outside that designated area might be perfectly comfortable.
Now, two studies propose revising the concept of “habitable zone” to account for more of the planets that astronomers may encounter in the cosmos. One new definition brings more planets into the habitable fold; the other nudges some out.
“Both papers focus on questioning the classical idea of the habitable zone,” says astronomer Noah Tuchow of Penn State University. “We should extend the range of places that we look, so we don’t miss habitable planets.”
Some overlooked planets could be much bigger than Earth, and potentially receive no starlight at all. Astrophysicist Nikku Madhusudhan of the University of Cambridge and colleagues propose a new category of possibly habitable planet that could be found at almost any distance from any kind of star.
These hypothetical planets have a global liquid-water ocean nestled under a thick hydrogen-rich atmosphere (SN: 5/4/20). Madhusudhan calls them “Hycean” planets, for “hydrogen” and “ocean.” They could be up to 2.6 times the size of Earth and up to 10 times as massive, Madhusudhan and colleagues report August 25 in the Astrophysical Journal. That thick atmosphere could keep temperatures right for liquid water even with minimal input from a star, while the ocean could protect anything living from crushing atmospheric pressure.
“We want to expand beyond our fixated paradigm so far on Earthlike planets,” Madhusudhan says. “Everything we’ve learned about exoplanets so far is extremely diverse. Why restrict ourselves when it comes to life?”
In the search for alien life, Hycean planets would have several advantages over rocky planets in the habitable zone, the team says. Though it’s difficult to tell which worlds definitely have oceans and hydrogen atmospheres, there are many more known exoplanets in the mass and temperature ranges of Hycean planets than there are Earthlike planets. So the odds are good, Madhusudhan says.
And because they are generally larger and have more extended atmospheres than rocky planets, Hycean planets are easier to probe for biosignatures, molecular signs of life. Detectable biosignatures on Hycean planets could include rare molecules associated with life on Earth like dimethyl sulfide and carbonyl sulfide. These tend to be too low in concentration to detect in thin Earthlike atmospheres, but thicker Hycean atmospheres would show them more readily.
Best of all, existing or planned telescopes could detect those molecules within a few years, if they’re there. Madhusudhan already has plans to use NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, due to launch later this year, to observe the water-rich planet K2 18b (SN: 9/11/19).
That planet’s habitability was debated when it was reported in 2019. Madhusudhan says 20 hours of observations with JWST should solve the debate.
“Best-case scenario, we’ll detect life on K2 18b,” he says, though “I’m not holding my breath over it.”
Astronomer Laura Kreidberg of the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Heidelberg, Germany, thinks it probably won’t be that easy. Planets in the Hycean size range tend to have cloudy or hazy atmospheres, making biosignatures more difficult to pick up.
It’s also not clear if Hycean planets actually exist in nature. “It is a really fun idea,” she says. “But is it just a fun idea, or does it match up with reality? I think we absolutely don’t know yet.”
Rather than inventing a new way to bring exoplanets into the habitable family, Tuchow and fellow Penn State astronomer Jason Wright are kicking some apparently habitable planets out. The pair realized that the region of clement temperatures around a star changes as the star evolves and changes brightness.
Some planets are born in the habitable zone and stay there their entire lives. But some, possibly most, are born outside their star’s habitable zone and enter it later, as the star ages. In the August Research Notes of the American Astronomical Society, Tuchow and Wright suggest calling those worlds “belatedly habitable planets.”
When astronomers point their telescopes at a given star, the scientists are seeing only a snapshot of the star’s habitable zone, the pair say. “If you just look at a planet in the habitable zone in the present day, you have no idea how long it’s been there,” Tuchow says. It’s an open question whether planets that enter the habitable zone later in life can ever become habitable, he explains. If the planet started out too close to the star, it could have lost all its water to a greenhouse effect, like Venus did. Moving Venus to the position of Earth won’t give it its water back.
On the other end, a planet that was born farther from its star could be entirely covered in glaciers, which reflect sunlight. They may never melt, even when their stars brighten. Worse, their water could go straight from frozen to evaporated, a process known as sublimation. That scenario would leave the planet no time with even a cozy wet puddle for life to get started in.
These planets are “still in the habitable zone,” Tuchow says. “But it adds questions about whether or not being in the habitable zone actually means habitable.”
Sgt. Maj. Robert Dean - We Are Not Alone In The Universe
Sgt. Maj. Robert Dean - We Are Not Alone In The Universe
MAN WITH COSMIC TOP-SECRET CLEARANCE SAYS THERE ARE ETs ON EARTH
Sgt. Major Robert O. Dean broke his COSMIC TOP-SECRET clearance oath because he felt the public has a right to know that we are not alone in the universe and that some ETs look human and walk among us. He was in a position to know these things because he served as an intelligence analyst at the Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe (SHAPE) from 1963-67. In a seven-minute video, he talks about these things, and more, and shares his very positive view about mankind’s future.
For most of 2017 and 2018, the hot news out of Nazca, Peru, was not about the Nazca lines but some strange three-fingered mummies discovered in nearby caves. The group studying the mummies eventually became know as the Alien Project for obvious reasons – three fingers, three toes, a female carrying what appeared to eggs, DNA tests that showed they were not human nor any known mammal, bones similar to birds, and more. The Peruvian government and the World Congress on Mummies rightly got involved, to protect the dignity of the remains of past Peruvians, whatever they might be. After all of the research, hours-long video conferences with pictures, X-rays and experts to interpret them … the three-fingered mummies suddenly dropped off the face of the Earth or whatever planet they came from. Fortunately, UFO researcher Giorgio Piacenza has been staying on top of the three-fingered mummies (figuratively, of course) and finally has an update on their status. Drum roll, please.
“Hello everyone I’m Enrico, I am Italian and live in Ica in Peru in the city where the Tridattili Mummies of Nazca are kept. The bodies that have been found to date are divided into two completely distinct breeds, a high 160 with hybrid characteristics very similar to homo sapiens and a high only 60 cm with unique features never encountered before. Since these beings have been delivered to the University of Ica I have personally been in contact with the professors who are studying them and we have managed to donate with the Association of Italians in Peru of which I am a part (PeruItalia.com) the first 500 Dollars to help research. I was able on several occasions to see the bodies and even touch them while interviewing the study staff.”
Enrico Cantori is a mummy researcher in Ica, Peru, and he posted the above update on PeruItalia.com and on the Facebook page “Extraterrestrial mummies of Nazca” after appearing on a YouTube video interview with anthropologist Dr. Zuñiga Aviles, professor of the San Luis Gonzaga University of Ica and one of the researchers of the mummies “in situ”, and researcher Yosef de Salou to discuss the latest status of the mummies. It is also posted on Giorgio Piacenza’s Facebook page, and both have excellent photos of the mummies. His summary on Facebook is more detailed. (Rough Google translation)
“Breaking revelations! We have a first confirm even from the studious of why the Nazca aliene mummies were biological alive and complete. 60 cm small mummies were full and functional live with organs, possess internal structures and items. They were like us living and feeling.
The implant found in the pet of one of the small mummies cannot be any antical artifact created for aleation by the Paracas people in the modern ′′ homemade ′′ understanding ′′ cold transmutation “. É infacts composed by two supposed lamines that they create internal cells similar to the batteries odierns.
The perforation of a egg found into one of these beings (oviparies and submittilian nature) with an odontric instrument reveals that the internal has a non-omegena density compatible with the density of a mummified egg.
We also talked about a specular specular rotrovement or the strange 15 cm humanoid being found in the near desert of chile tacama. A sun dry and not mummified being studied confirming that even being a completely alive and functional being.”
According to Cantori, the researchers have confirmed that all of these beings were once alive. They actually inserted a needle into one of the alleged eggs in one female and it managed to penetrate it, allowing them to extract material – what it might be was not discussed. A barbell-shaped implant was found in the chest of that female did not appear to belong to the ancient Paracas people of Peru, but in another post Cantori says it was “consistent with the pre-Columbian era and is made up of 85% copper.” He also points out that the tomographs show “how the bones are evenly and harmoniously covered by the skin, joints and ligaments” – making it hard to believe some theories that the mummies were assembled by ancient hoaxers. Finally, they determined that a strange sun-dried body only 15 cm (6 inches) long was also once alive.
“The Peruvian state that before decreted that nazca’s mummies were fake now declared them national patrimony with the intention to the University of Ica that is studying them.”
Cantori also reveals that the Peruvian government is now interested in the three-fingered mummies – a change from their long-time stance that they were fake, protecting them only because they were national antiquities. What does the government think they are now? We’ll have to wait for an answer on that one.
Does this bring us any closer to determining what the three-fingered mummies of Nazca are? Perhaps a little. The new photographs show much more detail than previous ones, and the skeletons definitely look like they came from some strange thin, long-armed, big-headed, three-fingered beings. The ‘eggs’ would imply reptilian rather than mammalian, but the results of the needle biopsy were not revealed. Unfortunately, there appears to be no supporting evidence for these beings being aliens – no wall paintings of landings, no spaceship parts, no uniforms, no Nazca lines showing their arrival.
Ah, the Nazca lines. Some theories suggest they are messages to aliens or maps and directions to be seen when they fly over. Could these be those aliens?
On the other hand, none of the new information definitively proves this is a hoax. While the government or the researchers could be covering that up to keep the interest alive, this is an awful lot of effort to maintain a ruse.
Either way, the three-fingered mummies of Nazca remain an interesting story. Welcome back!
It might seem hard to believe in this day and age, but there was a time when photographs of UFOs held some amazement and awe, a rime before photoshop and video manipulation made fakes and hoaxes commonplace and ruined the veracity of photographic evidence in general. I have recently done some articles on UFO photos and footage from the 1950s, as well as from the 1960s, going back in time to a sort of golden era of UFO photography. Here we will look at a selection of some compelling such cases from the 1970s and the 1980s, still before the dawn of mass manipulation of photographs.
In 1970, an unnamed couple were out boating at Tagish Lake, in Yukon Territory, Canada, when they had a strange experience they would never forget. They were out on the lake with another couple in a separate boat, with the two men involved identified in the original report by just their first names, Jim and George, and at 10 a.m. Jim and his wife reportedly saw seven eerie glowing yellow spheres floating over the lake and on the mountainside, each one described as being around 4 feet in diameter. Three of the orbs were apparently hovering about further back on the mountain while the other four moved slowly over the water before joining the others, after which they moved off out of sight. Luckily, Jim was able to snap a photograph of the strange objects, but it would turn out that his friend George and his wife had not been paying attention and had not seen the objects.
Jim went about making slides of the photograph and gave one to George, who was amazed by what he saw and sent a duplicate to the Weather Office, who then submitted it the Department of National Defence in Ottawa, and after that this particular slide seems to have disappeared off the face of the earth. For a full year nothing more was heard on the matter, and when George contacted the Department of Defence to ask about what they had found in their analysis, they ominously told him it was classified and would say nothing more about it. Another slide was analyzed by the ufobc in great depth, and they were unable to explain it away as just a trick of light or reflections off the mountain rocks. As to what the photos show and what happened to the slide given to the Department of Defence, it remains unknown. You can read a detailed analysis of the photos here.
The Tagish Lake photo
Close-up of the alleged UFOs over Tagish Lake
From 1971 there is a curious photograph taken by a witness named Rudi Nagora, of Munich, Germany, who on May 23, 1971 was vacationing with his wife near St. Lorenzen, Austria, when he had a rather bizarre experience. At about 12:30 p.m., they stopped their car and Nagora got out to walk around a bit, and that’s when he allegedly heard a strange whizzing sounds from above. When he looked up to the sky, he saw a metallic silver disc reflecting the sunlight as it flew along in an erratic zig-zag pattern. It was weird enough that he quickly grabbed his camera and snapped a full roll of 12 exposures of the object before it suddenly shot up into a bank of clouds above it and disappeared. What would go on to be known as the Nagora photographs would go on to be widely touted as some of the best photos of a UFO ever taken and have never been fully explained.
One of the Nagora photos
Some of the most controversial UFO photos ever taken come from the 1970s, originating with a man named Eduard “Billie” Albert Meier. A purported alien contactee from the age of 5 years old, he claims that he had been regularly visited by humanoid aliens from the Pleiadian star cluster, taught about all manner of wisdom and wonders and assigned as their representative on Earth. Being a mediator for them seems to have had its perks, because according to him they regularly allowed him to photograph their spaceships, to the tune of a total of over a thousand crystal clear photographs of them. When they were first released they were impressive for their clarity and the sheer number of them, but of course they were picked apart by skeptics and quickly deemed to be a hoax. Meir himself has always defended them as genuine, and although today they are mostly regarded as fake even within the UFO community, at the time they were a big deal and caused a lot of waves, being perhaps the most instantly recognizable and most famous UFO photographs of not only the 1970s, but any era. You can read more about Billy Meir and his photos in much more detail in my article on it here.
One of Meir’s many, many photos
Going into the 80s we have another famous and very clear photograph taken by a Mrs. Hannah McRoberts, of Campbell River, British Columbia, Canada. In October of 1981, she was on vacation with her family on the rugged east coast of Vancouver Island, and their weeklong stay would turn out to be far from just a normal family trip. For the first few days, things went normally, they went hiking and took various photos of the surrounding scenery, but then on October 8 they looked out towards one of the mountains and noticed that there was something very odd about it, in that it seemed to have a crown of anomalous looking clouds at its peak, which reminded them of a “volcano issuing steam.” At the time they took a photograph of the strange sight and then didn’t think much of it, thinking it to just be an odd cloud formation. However, things would get very weird when the photos were developed.
When the picture of that cloud-wreathed mountain came back, they were astounded to see that the photograph had also captured an unidentified object to the right of and above the peak and the cloud. It was very clear in contrast to the blue sky, and appeared to be a disc-shaped solid object, not a camera artifact or trick of light, and it was very strange indeed. The photo would find its way to Richard F. Haines, Editor of the Journal of Scientific Exploration for analysis. Haines would deduce that indeed the object was not a result of “emulsion deformity or optical illusion of the camera’s inner mechanisms,” and he would not be able to find any evidence of trickery or of a hoax. Haines would also interview the family in depth and deem them to be reliable and unlikely to be perpetrating a hoax. Haines would say:
Analyses of the original negative included micro-densitometry, computer enhancements, and other measurements intent upon showing a support thread, atmospheric disturbance, or other evidence of a hoax. These analyses suggest that the disc was a three dimensional object located at a distance of at least 30 feet from the camera; the object’s surface albedo was diffuse and of lower luminance than a sunlit cloud. Extensive interviews with the photographer (who never saw the aerial object), her husband, and daughter and site survey tended to support the entire narrative account. If this event had been a deliberate hoax, it is more likely that some overt action to capitalize on it might have been taken soon after the disc had been discovered, and not almost a year later. Of course this is not a conclusive argument to support this contention. The author found the photographer and her husband to be middle-class, hard-working people. Their property was well kept. Nothing could be found which pointed to a deliberate hoax. Both displayed genuine puzzlement about the origin of the disc on the photograph. Mr. and Mrs. D.M. were not defensive nor did they ever attempt to cover up anything as far as could be determined. The identity of the disc object remains unidentified.
The Hannah McRoberts photo
Moving on to 1989 we have another very intriguing photograph supposedly taken by a photographer on the night of July 14, 1989 in Nashville, Tennessee. On this evening, the unnamed witness was driving along a remote rural road when he noticed a a bright illumination beyond the trees. Since this was the middle of nowhere and there was no town there, he stopped the car and got out to investigate this weird light, taking his camera along with him. As he drew closer, the light rose up over the trees around 4 miles away, showing itself to be a bright flying object with some sort of coronal discharge around it, as well as shooting beams or flames of some sort below it, before slowly moving towards him as he began taking pictures of the amazing sight until he was out of film, after which the object flew off and went behind a mountain. A report on the incident by the National UFO Center would say of it:
The photographer states, “I had a feeling that the craft was behind the mountain waiting for me and when it appeared it felt like I was in another world, the sounds were far, far away.” He looked at the object but could not see any definition, the light was far too bright and too far away. When he looked through the lens the craft was sharp and vivid. The craft was visible for more than five minutes, but less than ten. It seemed like forever. He changed the lens package from the T-90 to the AE-1 camera and continued shooting using all his film. He felt he was not in control of what was happening. He remembers constantly pushing the buttons on the back of the T-90, each time he made a change it sharpened the image. There were other witnesses, but they have been reluctant to come forward. They also were taking pictures, but the field around the craft interfered with the film as the craft moved away. They did not have high magnification lens so there was not enough definition to make the craft identifiable. The photographer has had a recent heart attack and an auto accident and does not want his name revealed.
One of the Tennessee photos
The photos would eventually by the photographer to his friend Commander Graham Bethune, of the US Navy, who would examine them and hold to them for a time before handing them over to the National UFO Center for their own analysis. The National UFO Center would deduce that the object was solid, about 100 feet in diameter, and at a distance of approximately 5 miles from the camera. One analysis describes the object in the photos as follows:
Analysis of the film shows unusual colors not normally seen in any lighted object. The colors indicate a coronal discharge similar to the Aurora Borealis (Northern Lights.) The photographs show a craft with approximately 32 red, white and blue perimeter lights. These lights are not used in normal aircraft configuration. At times they appear all red. At other times they are all white. Sometimes outer perimeter lights appear mixed in color indicating they may have the ability to change color. Inside the outer perimeter lights are panels of lights. These also appear to have the ability to change color. Although they are predominantly white they are sometimes seen as partially red or black. Assuming the craft is 100 feet in diameter these outer panels take up about 40 feet or 20 feet on each side. Below the center of craft there appears to be a crystal or lights with crystal like appearance. Generally, these lights appear blue. craft appears to rotate in the photos.
Graham gave me his word that these were authentic photographs of an actual flying craft to the best knowledge. He has known the photographer for 24 years and the man worked for him for ten years. He has always been known to tell the truth and was of high character. The lights themselves have an unusual depth of color. When you look at a colored light it is normally a white light covered by a lens of red, yellow, green, blue etc. The lights on the craft appear as if the light contain the actual color. There is a vividness of color that is difficult to describe that appears to be in these photos. The fog or plasma is penetrated by the powerful lights shining downward. The lights extend down for an estimated seventy-five feet to one hundred plus feet and seem to stop abruptly. Duplication of this capability is exceptionally difficult to accomplish with any normal lights. I have never seen lights that have these properties except on a UFO, nor have I seen comparable photography.
These have just been a selection of some of the more interesting supposed UFO photos coming out of the 1970s and 80s, still in an era when photo doctoring techniques like photo shop were not available and when pictures were taken more seriously than they are now. We are perhaps beyond the days when any photo of a UFO means any thing at all due to the ease with which they can be faked, and indeed those we have looked at here could very well be faked too, but it was an a different era when photos seemed to carry more weight. While those days are over it is interesting to look back at some of these photos and think that there was a time when these types of photos were not so common and not so easily faked. Real or not, they are a glimpse back in time to another age of ufology that is very much gone.
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A new report released by the National UFO Reporting Center (NUFORC) has revealed which states in America you would be most likely to witness a UFO. According to the report, the best place to see an unidentified flying object is on the west coast of the United States and the best time of year is during the spring.
For those living in California, you may want to keep your eyes on the sky as that state has the most UFO sightings with a jaw-dropping 619 encounters just in 2020. The first four sightings of last year were all on January 1st when someone in El Centro noticed a red orb floating in the sky before changing direction and vanishing; a person in Bakersfield spotted three yellow circles in the sky; an individual in Los Angeles saw a disk/saucer-shaped object over a forest; and someone in Cambria witnessed a dome-shaped cylinder over Highway 1. The last encounter of the year was on New Year’s Eve in Palm Springs where four orange lights located one behind the other were spotted before a fifth came into view. Then each of their lights turned off one by one.
People living in Florida, Washington State, Pennsylvania, and Texas may also want to keep a watchful eye on the sky as these states round out the top five with the most reported UFO sightings.
As for what time of year would be best to see an unidentified flying craft, the spring months seem to be the most active with 1,873 total sightings in the country between March and April of last year. Additionally, you have a better chance of spotting a visiting alien in between the hours of 8pm and midnight. The worst time of year to spot extraterrestrial activity is in the month of December as there were only 370 reports during that month in 2020. Perhaps the winter months are too cold for the aliens?
With that being said, if you wish to encounter a UFO, your best bet is to get to California during the spring months and stare up at the sky for 4 hours after it gets dark. On the other hand, if you have absolutely no interest in encountering a UFO, you may want to stick to Washington, D.C. as there was only one sighting there last year.
NUFORC’s full list of UFO sightings for each state can be read here.
National UFO Reporting Center Report Index by State / Province Click on links for details
UFO videos and footage have come and gone over the years, ranging from the somewhat compelling to the downright obviously fake. In more recent times the wide availability of photoshop and other means of doctoring photos and footage has made such evidence all but pointless, but there was a time before the advent of computer trickery, when photos and footage could be taken more at face value, and one of the more astounding of the pieces of footage of a UFO from the time is not only one of the earliest films of a UFO, but also one of the most intriguing and oft-discussed.
On August 15, 1950, an unassuming minor-league baseball manager by the name of Nick Mariana, of Great Falls, Montana, was going about a usual day. On this day he went to the baseball stadium to inspect the site before a big game for his team the Great Falls Electrics, and it was completely routine, no reason to suspect that the day was about to get very strange, indeed. He was there with his 19-year-old secretary, Virginia Raunig, and as they went about their inspection at around 11:30 a.m. a bright flash in the sky caught Mariana’s attention. When he looked up, he saw two bright silvery objects that seemed to be rotating and speeding along at an estimated speed of between 200 and 400 miles per hour, with each of the objects around 50 feet in diameter. Raunig had seen the strange objects as well, and for a few moments they just stared in disbelief. Incredibly, Mariana was able to overcome his awe and fascination to remember that he had a 16mm camera back at his car, and he ran to get it.
Upon returning to the field, the anomalous objects were still up there moving in a formation and keeping a steady distance of around 50 to 100 feet between them. Mariana started up his camera and was able to take 16 seconds of color footage of the mysterious objects, which the very next day was doing the rounds in the news, appearing in the local paper the Great Falls Tribune, and from there it would attract a great amount of attention from all over. The footage went on to get nationwide coverage, with Mariana further spreading the word through private showings at various local community groups. At the time, UFOs were a hot topic, with the late 1940s really kicking off the craze of “flying saucers” and stories about alien invasions all the rage, so what was being called the “Mariana footage” really hit a nerve and sparked much excitement, controversy, and fear. At the time the footage was a pretty big deal. You can see some of the footage here.
A shot from the Marianas footage
Among those who took an interest in the footage was the U.S. Air Force, and U.S. Air Force Captain John P. Brynildsen arrived in Great Falls to interview Mariana on the incident. He would learn that both of the witnesses had also seen two jet fighters fly over the stadium shortly after taking the footage, which they had assumed to be the military perhaps pursuing the objects. This was a curious detail, as it suggested to Brynildsen that perhaps what they had seen were just the two jets. He managed to procure a portion of the footage and send it to Wright-Patterson AFB for analysis, where it was quickly written off as merely the reflections of the two F-94 jet fighters that were officially confirmed to have been flying over at the time. However, this explanation did not sit well with everyone.
In 1952, the United States government had launched an official investigation into unidentified flying objects called Project Blue Book, which evolved from another study of UFOs started in 1949 called Project Grudge. Although Project Grudge had agreed that the Mariana footage was just fighter jets, when Air Force officer Edward J. Ruppelt took the reigns of the newly minted Project Blue Book, he wasn’t so sure, thinking that perhaps the footage had been written off prematurely. Interestingly, as all of this was going on, Mariana would complain that sections of the footage he had submitted to the Air Force were missing, specifically frames which proved that the objects were rotating or spinning, something the military denied.
Ruppelt was not only able to arrange for another, more detailed analysis to be done on the film, but also get Mariana’s permission to resubmit the footage again. This time, analysts came to the conclusion that the objects seen in the film were not birds, balloons, or meteors, and they also ruled out the original idea that these were just F-94 jets. Ruppelt was also able to ascertain that the jets were nowhere near the stadium at the time of the sighting, making it even less likely that they could have accounted for what was seen in the film. Whereas the first analysis had quickly explained it all away, this time the Air Force had no choice but to concede that it was “an unknown.” In 1954 the footage was under the microscope again when it was used in a UFO documentary for Greene-Rouse productions. The documentary hired a scientist and engineer for the Douglas Aircraft company by the name of M.L. Baker, Jr. to take a look at the film, who also rejected the hypothesis that the objects were reflections of fighter jets. Baker would conclude in a Congressional hearing on UFOs concerning the Mariana footage:
Preliminary analysis excluded most natural phenomena. More detailed study indicated that the only remaining natural phenomenon candidate for the Utah film was birds in flight, and for the Montana film it was airplane fuselage reflections of the sun. After about 18 months of rather detailed, albeit not continuous, study using various film-measuring equipment at Douglas and at UCLA, as well as analysis of a photogrammetric experiment, it appeared that neither of these hypothesized natural phenomena explanations had merit.
In the end, in Baker’s opinion, the objects were an unknown. For the next decade the Mariana footage was much discussed and debated, and then in 1966 it became the subject of another official investigation, this time by an Air Force funded study of the UFO phenomenon based at the University of Colorado at Boulder and run by the physicist Dr. Edward U. Condon. Called The Condon Report, the study looked at all manner of UFO reports, and this time they had their sights set on the Mariana footage. Condon recruited physicist Dr. Roy Craig and psychologist Dr. David Saunders to re-examine the footage and they would come up with mixed results. While Saunders thought the footage had merit, Craig was mostly skeptical of the whole thing, doubting several elements of Mariana’s story, including when it was actually taken and his claims that parts of the film had been taken by the Air Force. Another specialist called in by the Condon report was Dr. William Hartmann, an astronomer for the University of Arizona, who also analyzed the footage and could not rule out that the objects seen are airplanes.
Indeed, the identity of the objects in the Mariana footage has never been adequately resolved, and even now it is picked apart and debated. That a piece of footage from so many decades ago is still unsolved and discussed to this day is fairly impressive, especially since these were the days before photoshop and digital manipulation of film, and the Mariana footage is still of much interest in the UFO field. Copies of the film reside at the US National Archives and it still gets heavy play in UFO documentaries and TV shows, and whether real or not, it has earned a high place among the countless pieces of UFO footage out there. Real or not, the Marianas footage has its place in the UFO lore, and has never been fully explained.
For decades, astronomers have employed the most powerful telescopes in the world in search of answers to what may be the greatest scientific question of all: are we alone?
Evidence that life might exist elsewhere in the universe remains elusive, but scientists have not yet given up hope that within the next few decades, a definitive answer to this longstanding question may finally present itself.
However, some proponents of unidentified aerial phenomena–more commonly known since the 1950s as UFOs—maintain their convictions that evidence of extraterrestrial life may be found here within Earth’s atmosphere, rather than on distant worlds.
The extraterrestrial hypothesis—that is, the idea that UFOs might represent alien visitation, and thereby evidence of extraterrestrials lurking right beneath our noses—has remained a popular idea since the earliest days of UFO sightings. Beginning shortly after World War II, even as Kenneth Arnold’s story of sighting “saucers” over Mount Rainier, Washington, was making headlines, articles and opinion editorials had begun to appear which (often mockingly) poked fun at the idea of “Martians” or other extraterrestrial sources for the objects.
The idea continued to gain traction during the ensuing decade, and even today the extraterrestrial hypothesis remains a popular explanatory model that many proponents use in an attempt to explain what the UFO phenomenon might represent.
With the issuance of a preliminary assessment by the Navy’s UAP Task Force delivered to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) in late June, 2021, no explicit references to extraterrestrial craft were made in the document. Despite this, many pointed to the fact that although the words “alien” or “extraterrestrial” never made any appearances in the nine-page report, they couldn’t be ruled out either. Such logic had been the focus of a New York Times article published weeks before the report’s delivery to the ODNI, which stated that the U.S. government “could not definitively rule out theories that the phenomena observed by military pilots might be alien spacecraft.”
Of course, until proven otherwise, we are left with the presumption that some UFOs (or UAP, depending on what one prefers to call them) might indeed represent extraterrestrial craft, and that if so little as one instance of inexplicable aerial phenomena represented such a possibility, we could conclude that Earth has indeed been visited by other forms of intelligent life.
(Credit: Unsplash)
If so, another question that springs to mind is “why?”
We often tend to think of extraterrestrials in terms of the only other kinds of life forms we know about: earthlings. While it might seem reasonable to assume that alien life would take forms that at least bear a passing resemblance to organisms we recognize on Earth, this may not necessarily be the case at all. In fact, it could be far off base, and any number of different unforeseen factors might have influenced the stages that life on other worlds might go through over time. If any alien life persisted long enough to evolve into intelligent forms with technological capabilities comparable to, or even exceeding our own, their attitudes and appearance may end up being far different from anything we could imagine. Equally unpredictable are the kinds of motivations they might have for visiting Earth, although science fiction has done a fine job conditioning us into black and white thinking along the lines of friendly, “take me to your leader” space brothers, or violent invaders bent on capturing our planet.
Something else that seems apparent is the way that science fiction has influenced the attitudes of scientists who have weighed in on the matter of extraterrestrial visitation, and whether it seems likely that this is what UFOs might represent.
“If the aliens can actually come here – whatever their motivation – then they have technology that’s enormously beyond our own,” wrote SETI Institute senior astronomer Seth Shostak last August, who said that drawing comparisons between Earth technologies and those of aliens capable of reaching us “would be like comparing the U.S. Air Force to an Australopithecus raiding party.”
Shostak, drawing from the science fiction influence that permeates the UFO debate, goes on to ask, “do you honestly think Captain Picard would ever spend time checking out piles of slingshots or pikes on some primitive planet because, after all, those are state-of-the-art weapons for the local residents?”
In Shostak’s view, the current evidence being collected by the Navy is “actually an argument against visitors from another star system,” in that the fact that it appears so often around military sites betrays the likelihood that these objects belong to an adversarial nation like China or Russia.
Offering an alternative perspective, Robert Powell of the Scientific Coalition for UAP Studies, a scientific organization interested in the study of unidentified aerial phenomena, says that deductive reasoning leads one to conclude that the extraterrestrial hypothesis may be useful both in determining the origins of mysterious aerial objects, as well as what might bring them to Earth.
“We know that there are now thousands of extrasolar planets,” Powell recently said in an interview. “We know that many of those are in Earth ‘goldilocks’ type orbits. We believe that there is high likelihood that there is intelligence, and that life is ubiquitous throughout the universe, and even SETI agrees with that; that’s why they’re doing what they’re doing.
“So then, if you believe all that, the next thing you have to look at in deductive reasoning is ‘do they know we’re here?’ And the answer absolutely would be yes; if there’s life out there, it knows we exist.”
Powell says that in addition to evidence aliens would be capable of spotting from afar that would indicate Earth to be habitable, they would likely also be able to detect technosignatures representing the presence of intelligent life.
“Not only is there oxygen, but if they were looking back at us, they would see hydrocarbons that are artificially produced. They would see that there are isotopes of uranium and plutonium, which are artificial. They would know that there is life on this planet that is advanced to a certain extent.”
As far as what, precisely, would bring alien life to Earth, it’s anybody’s guess. Although if they are anything at all like us, the range of possibilities might include scientific studies, perhaps by extraterrestrial researchers wishing to observe—but not interfere—with Earthly happenings. This scenario might even account for why UFOs appear to remain so evasive; it could be that they do not wish to have direct communication with Earthlings, or perhaps even that they have reasons for fearing what might happen if they did.
While questions may remain about whether alien life have ever visited, and what might have brought them here if so, the longstanding UFO issue seems to present a good case for why exploring that possibility is more important now than at any time previously.
“The only question left is, ‘can they get here?’,” says Powell.
“By deductive reasoning it would make sense that we start looking out in our solar system, out in our outer atmosphere to say, is anyone observing us?”
In fact, given the calamity that often ensues on our planet, aliens may require no other reason for visiting than merely to observe us. One only needs to read the news any given day of the week to see Earthlings would have no problem providing all the entertainment they’d ever need.
Throughout the decades there have been many photos presented as evidence of UFOs and aliens. Such photos and films are countless, and they go way back through time, to before any sort of the photo manipulation methods we have at out disposal today. Here we will look at a selection of curious photos from the 1960s, which real or not have managed to make their mark.
In 1960 there is a case from the country of Argentina, which would soon become one of the most well-known UFO incidents in a country already considered a hotspot for the phenomenon. On July 3, 1960, Hugo F. Niotti, then a captain of the Argentinean Air Force (AAF), assigned to the Air Force School for Sub-officers located in the city of Cordoba, was out driving from Yacanto toward Cordoba when near the area of Villa General Belgrano he noticed a bizarre object hovering off the side of the road to his right. Niotti stopped his car and had the presence of mind to snap off a single photograph of the object before it suddenly shot off at astounding speed out of sight. He would say of what he had seen;
The object was conical in shape, with a height of 7-8 meters and a base diameter of 3-4 meters, with its axis almost parallel to the ground and its base facing the witness. The color of the object was a uniform dark gray. The surface was perfectly smooth without joints or rivets and had a definite metallic aspect. It was at a distance of 80 to 100 meters from his location and moving very slowly toward the south, perhaps at 10 KPH, always parallel to the ground. It was rotating, also very slowly. It then accelerated very rapidly, attaining a speed of perhaps 200 KPH in 3 or 4 seconds, and disappeared into the low cloud bank. This sudden acceleration without any sound was inexplicable.
The Yacanto photograph
The confused and awed Niotti would continue on to Cordoba, turning over what he had seen in his head over and over along the way, and as soon as he arrived, he had his film processed. What he saw in the picture astounded him, but he was not willing to release it because he did not want to tarnish his military reputation and career, but he eventually was persuaded to release it to the Servicio de Informaciones de Aeronautica (SIA), which deemed them to be authentic and then passed them along to the Air Force. The photos gradually leaked to the public and were widely dissected and discussed. UFO Dr. Willy Smith would conclude that the photograph was very compelling, and would give his own thoughts as follows:
A case with a single witness usually is not even considered, but in this instance we have two circumstances that allow an exception to the rule. First, we have a competent witness, trained by his profession to observe details, who did not lose his presence of mind when confronted with the unknown. On the contrary, he reacted promptly, snatching his camera and jumping out of his car to obtain a unique graphic document. And second, the photograph by itself lends enough credibility to the case to make it deserve serious consideration. Not only has the photo repeatedly been shown to be genuine, but it is inconceivable that the Air Force officer would compromise his career with a fabrication that would bring him nothing but problems and discredit. For those who know Vice-commodore Niotti, this option is unthinkable.
What does this photo show? Is it a hoax, and if so, why would a well-respected, high ranking military official do that? Or perhaps he was hoaxed himself? We may never know for sure. In 1965 there is another piece of photographic evidence from a traditionally reliable source. On August 2, 1965 in Sherman, Texas, a television cameraman named Robert Campbell was interviewing policeman Peter McCollum in the wake of a spate of sightings in the area of a massive glowing UFO that had caused a deluge of calls from panicked residents. Campbell had been alerted to this through scanning short wave radio conversations between two police highway patrols. Before long, during that interview the two men saw it for themselves as the glowing cylindrical object hovered in a stationary position nearby. Campbell was able to get a series of four photographs of the thing before it flew off. Unfortunately, the photos would come out overexposed, but no explanation has been forthcoming. Interestingly, the object was witnessed by numerous solid witnesses, including Highway patrolman Bill Quires and Department of Public Safety Dispatcher Jim Faglia. What does the photo show? It is hard to say.
The Sherman, Texas photo
Rather weirdly, just the following day there was another unrelated case from Tulsa, Oklahoma, where at 1:30 a.m. a Mr. A. L. Smith, his 14-year-old son Alan, and three other witnesses saw a brightly glowing, multicolored object in the sky. The mysterious object moved slowly towards the witnesses, before hovering nearby as if watching them, and it is then that Smith would snap off a photo of it before it shot off into the night. The resulting photo would heavily make the rounds at the time, appearing in Life Magazine and generating a lot of excitement due to its clarity, and many analyses done on it have been unable to conclude what it actually is.
The Oklahoma photograph
The 1960s can also claim perhaps one of the most famous supposed alien images ever taken. On 24th May 1964, Jim Templeton, a fireman in Carlisle in the North of England, was out with his wife and young daughter at a place called Solway Firth. They would report that the day had been a bit odd in that they had been constantly aware of a sort of electrical charge in the air, almost like a storm was coming despite the clear, calm weather at the time. The spent the day there taking various photos but despite that creepy electrical charge they didn’t see anything out of the ordinary. It was only when they got home and had the film developed that things would get weird.
In the photo was seen to be a figure in some sort of silvery white “space suit” looming in the background over the daughter as she sits there holding a bunch of flowers smiling and completely oblivious to its presence. It was completely odd, as the Templetons would insist that there had been no one else there at the time and no rational explanation for it. When police were notified and the photo was examined, it was found to not be a double exposure, making it all very mysterious indeed. Making it even weirder still is that Templeton would claim that he was being visited by shadowy men who would pass by his house wearing black suits and driving a black car, and eventually come to his doorstep. These two men would act bizarrely, refer to each other with numbers, and allegedly ask Templeton about the photograph and the conditions that it was taken under, before telling him that he had merely taken a picture of a guy walking by to essentially photobomb the shot, something Templeton denied. The two mysterious men then became agitated and drove off in their unmarked car.
The Solway Firth Spaceman
The photo has since been widely picked apart and is mostly thought of as a hoax or a shot of someone simply walking by in the background, but what has come to be called the “Solway Firth Spaceman” has nevertheless gone on to be one of the most instantly recognizable and iconic supposed photos of an alien there is. It joins the ranks of mysterious photographs that have, whether real or not, set the stage for supposed photographic evidence from then on out, and whatever one wants to believe we can expect photos like this to continue coming in for the foreseeable future.
UAP / UFO Sighted Hovering Over Los Angles Water ( August 27, 2021 )
Impressive sighting of a slow-moving UAP / UFO that was sighted hovering over water in Los Angles on August 27, 2021
Every day ′′ They ′′ are closer and more evident
credit : Marcvs Drake
Project Blue Beam ? South of Nashville, Tennessee ( August 26, 2021 )
Project Blue Beam ? sighted south of Nashville, Tennessee on August 26, 2021
STATEMENT : I've never seen anything like this in my life! South of Nashville.
They are here !
credit : U.S.F
UFO Fleet Sighted Over Shanghai, China ( August 23, 2021 )
This ′′ extraordinary ′′ record of the demonstration and activity of a UFO fleet was held in Shanghai, China on the night of August 23, 2021.
Here I present the original
Every day ′′ They ′′ are closer and more evident
credit : : M.W.
Multiple UFOs Sighted On ISS Live Stream ( August 27, 2021 )
Multiple UFOs were sighted by Queen of the Night Eye in the Sky from the ISS HD Earth Viewing Experiment on August 27, 2021. STATEMENT : I will tell you what it was got to get the info from my friend
They are here !
credit : Queen of the Night Eye in the Sky
UFOs Sighted Over Gulf Shores, Alabama ( August 14, 2021 )
Impressive UFO record was sighted over Gulf Shores, Alabama on Alabama's Gulf Coast : Gulf State Park on August 14, 2021
At the heart of NASA's Artemis mission, which aims to land humans on the lunar surface by 2024, is the spacecraft Orion. Jenn Walter shows how engineers are preparing for its maiden voyage:
November 2021 will be a big month for NASA. The Artemis I team is gearing up to launch the spacecraft Orion to the Moon and back for an uncrewed test flight. Artemis I lays the groundwork for NASA’s first crewed mission to the Moon since the Apollo days — with the ultimate goal of using Orion to land humans on the lunar surface in 2024.
Space.com's Tariq Malik tours the interior of NASA's Orion spacecraft mock-up at Johnson Space Center in Houston, TX.
ORION - NASA's Deep Space Exploration Spacecraft - Explained in Detail
NASA's new deep space exploration spacecraft called Orion which will take humans farther into space than ever before including landing on an asteroid, the moons of Mars, and Mars itself. Space launch system. Background music can be found at https://www.shockwave-sound.com/a/4be...
Apollo vs Orion Finally Explained
NASA has two spacecraft that were born fifty years apart but look like they were separated at birth – I’m talking, of course, about the historic Apollo command module and NASA’s new Orion spacecraft as part of the Artemis Program. Both share a similar shape, but their similarities end there.
WATCH: WHY BLUE ORIGIN IS STILL LAUNCHING LUNAR LANDING TECHNOLOGY
WATCH: WHY BLUE ORIGIN IS STILL LAUNCHING LUNAR LANDING TECHNOLOGY
Blue Origin successfully launched its 17th New Shepard suborbital spaceflight.
BLUE ORIGINlaunched its 17th New Shepard mission Thursday morning, sending a payload of experiments and an art installation on a sub-orbital trip from the space company’s Launch Site One in West Texas.
The uncrewed payload mission was the fourth flight for the reusable New Shepard rocket so far this year — including the July 20 flight that took Blue Origin founderJeff Bezos to space.
It was a clean launch, with an easy landing made by both booster and capsule. This New Shepard mission also served as an opportunity to test technology that may prove to be crucial for future trips to the Moon — even though Blue Origin rival SpaceX is helping NASA get there first.
Blue Origin’s New Shepard rocket lifts off from West Texas on August 26, 2021. Blue Origin
HOW DID THE LAUNCH GO?
After two lengthy holds due to payload readiness issues, New Shephard finally lifted off at 10:31 a.m. EST, just more than an hour later than originally scheduled.
New Shepard lifts off from West Texas on August 26, 2021. Blue Origin
The vehicle reached the Karman line and crossed into space proper just four minutes later at 10:35 a.m. After separation, the crew capsule reached its highest point away from Earth’s surface at 10:36 a.m.
Capsule and rocket booster separation during the Blue Origin New Shepard flight of August 26, 2021. Blue Origin
The reusable New Shepard rocket booster fell quickly back to Earth, firing its rockets in the final moments of its flight to touch down softly on the concrete pad bearing the Blue Origin feather logo on a circular blue field at 10:39 a.m.
Blue Origin’s reusable New Shepard booster touches down in West Texas on August 26, 2021. Blue Origin
The uncrewed crew capsule followed shortly after, swaying beneath red and blue parachutes in front of the West Texas hills before picking up the desert dust at 10:42 a.m.
Blue Origin’s New Shepard payload capsule drifts to Earth under its main parachutes in West Texas.Blue Origin
The total time elapsed from launch to space and back again was 10 minutes and 38 seconds.
WHAT DID BLUE ORIGIN LAUNCH?
The New Shephard capsule flew to a peak altitude of 347,430 feet while carrying 20 payloads. This included:
A biological imaging experiment put together by researchers at the University of Florida
Another experiment demonstrating a new technique for measuring spacecraft propellant levels
But the premier payload on the flight was definitely the test of a lunar landing Deorbit, Descent and Landing (DDL) sensor, and a suite of related technologies developed by NASA and flown by Blue Origin.
First flown on New Shephard during an October 13, 2020 flight, the DDL sensor aids a lidar and landing computer system that helps determine a spacecraft’s speed and location as it approaches the lunar surface. According to Blue Origin, this technology will allow future lunar missions to land on more varied terrain than was possible during the Apollo missions.
The data collected from the 2020 flight is open source and available at data.nasa.gov. The data from Thursday's flight will eventually be added to the dataset as well.
“We got phenomenal data from the first flight and we have learned from it,” John Carson, principal investigator of NASA’s Safe and Precise Landing – Integrated Capabilities Evolution, or SPLICE program, said during a pre-launch briefing hosted on the Blue Origin website. “It’s been very valuable data.”
WHY IS BLUE ORIGIN STILL LAUNCHING NEW SHEPARD?
Now that Jeff Bezos has (possibly) earned his astronaut wings, why is Blue Origin still launching the suborbital New Shepard vehicle? And why work on flying lunar landing technologies when NASA has already awarded the lunar lander contract for its Artemis III moon mission to Blue Origin rival SpaceX?
There are several reasons to keep flying New Shepard, but the first is the simplest: Why wouldn’t they?
“The goal of New Shepard wasn't to fly Jeff Bezos to space,” Laura Seward Forczyk, the founder of space consulting firm Astralytical, tells Inverse. “It's operational space hardware so why not use it?”
Foczyk says that Blue Origin’s CEO Bob Smith has said the company makes money from every flight. Since they have several contracts to fly payloads, “there’s no downside to flying,” she said.
“The great thing about the suborbital R&D market is that it’s diversified compared to tourism,” a Blue Origin company spokesperson, tells Inverse.
The company has federal, international, and private clients purchasing spots for their payloads, and many are repeat customers. “About half our customers currently are returning and our top users are coming back for their 8th or 10th payloads,” the spokesperson explains.
Many of the payloads for Thursday’s flight were paid for by NASA through the space agency’s NASA Flight Opportunities Program, while the lunar landing technology test was part of a NASA Tipping Point partnership — a way for the space agency to foster the development of promising technologies that could benefit both NASA and commercial space missions.
The Tipping Point partnership with Blue Origin dates back to 2018, Clare Skelly, a NASA spokesperson, tells Inverse. This was before the competition for the lunar lander, which is why it still makes sense for Blue Origin to be flying such a payload.
There’s also the fact that New Shepard is still a relatively new technology.
“Seventeen flights are still so few,” Forczyk says. “The more Blue Origin flies New Shepard, the more it learns to improve their technology for both suborbital and orbital spaceflight.”
WHAT’S NEXT
Speaking of orbital spaceflight, that’s another reason to keep launching New Shepard: New Glenn, Blue Origin’s orbital spacecraft, isn’t expected to fly until the final quarter of 2022, according to the Blue Origin spokesperson.
That said, there is value for NASA and other customers in suborbital flights, even when there are orbital launch vehicles available. During the preflight briefing, Carson noted that for testing things like lunar landing sensors, a suborbital flight is actually ideal.
“Before suborbital testing abilities were available to the community, the first time we did the types of integrated, system-level descent and landing testing was on the actual mission entry, descent, and landing,” he said. That’s a risky proposition for billion-dollar missions.
“The advent of suborbital vehicles enables us to combine systems together and test them in relevant conditions and ultimately retire the risk.”
Astronomers using the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope have imaged HH 111, one of the most well-known Herbig-Haro objects.
This Hubble image shows a Herbig-Haro object labeled HH 111.
Image credit: NASA / ESA / Hubble / B. Nisini.
HH 111 is located approximately1,360 light-years (417 parsecs) in the constellation of Orion.
The object is deeply embedded in a cometary molecular cloud called L1617.
At the center of HH 111, there are two sources, VLA 1 and VLA 2, with a projected separation of 1,200 AU and the former driving the prominent jet.
“Herbig-Haro objects are formed under very specific circumstances,” Hubble astronomers said.
“Newly-formed stars are often very active, and in some cases they expel very narrow jets of rapidly moving ionized gas — gas that is so hot that its molecules and atoms have lost their electrons, making the gas highly charged.”
“The streams of ionized gas then collide with the clouds of gas and dust surrounding newly-formed stars at speeds of hundreds of kilometers per second.”
“It is these energetic collisions that create Herbig-Haro objects such as HH111.”
The new image of HH 111 was made from separate exposures taken in the infrared region of the spectrum with Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3).
Four filters were used to sample various wavelengths. The color results from assigning different hues to each monochromatic image associated with an individual filter.
“WFC3 takes images at optical and infrared wavelengths, which means that it observes objects at a wavelength range similar to the range that human eyes are sensitive to optical and a range of wavelengths that are slightly too long to be detected by human eyes,” the astronomers said.
“Herbig-Haro objects actually release a lot of light at optical wavelengths, but they are difficult to observe because their surrounding dust and gas absorb much of the visible light.”
“Therefore, the WFC3’s ability to observe at infrared wavelengths — where observations are not as affected by gas and dust — is crucial to observing Herbo-Haro objects successfully.”
The bright blueshifted jet of HH 111 seen by the ground-based telescope NTT
The world of ghosts and demons hasEd and Lorraine Warren. The world of aliens and unidentified flying objects has Betty and Barney Hill. Their names may not be immediately familiar to you, but their alleged encounter with extra-terrestrial beings in September of 1961 was the first documented instance of a purported alien abduction, which profoundly changed the course of ufology and how it was perceived by the public.
The fourth and final episode of Showtime's UFO docu-series, which aired earlier this evening, reveals that the first psychiatrist who examined the Hills initially concluded that their supposed close encounter of the fourth kind "stemmed from the social pressures of being an interracial couple" in a time when such a union was frowned upon in the United States. Six months later, however, that same psychiatrist came to believe that the husband and wife were indeed telling the truth.
"My wife and I were driving along Route 3 when we saw what looked like a bright star in the heavens. And surprisingly, it began coming in my direction," Barney states in Episode 4 via old recordings. "I could see what I thought was approximately 9 to 11 men looking down through this series of windows. Well, this was too much for me and I made a hasty retreat to the car, screaming to the wife that they had seen me, that they had seen us. My god, they're going to capture us!"
At first, the husband and wife duo only recalled being followed by a strange light in the sky as they drove to their home in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. Later put into hypnotic trances, both said they remembered being led onto a ship by strange beings with bulbous eyes who examined them before wiping their memories blank. The purported encounter eventually drew the attention of J. Allen Hynek (founder of the Center for UFO Studies and former director of the Air Force's Project Blue Book), who consulted on the case.
"The real abductions are totally different from what you see on TV," Betty once remarked during an interview with the Fortean Times. "The UFO people now, I don't say 'aliens' are people, but they're different from us. There are certain fundamental, physical characteristics which are different. And if a person has really seen one, they know it. And the real abductees have never had any need for therapy. And not only that, but every one of them has had changes in their lives. Of benefit to them. It's been a very positive experience."
Last summer, it was announced that Bryce and Jackie Zabel (the writing duo behind Hallmark's Pandemic series from 2007) had been tapped to write Captured, a television drama inspired by the Hills' famous experience. The series (originally planned as a movie) will draw inspiration from Stanton T. Friedman and Kathleen Marden's 2007 biographical publication, Captured! The Betty and Barney Hill UFO Experience: The True Story of the World's First Documented Alien Abduction.
John G. Fuller was the first author to document the story in 1975's The Interrupted Journey.
Credit: Bettmann/Getty
The Hills' experience has already been adapted once into the 1975 television movie titled The UFO Incident, which starred a young James Earl Jones (aka the voice of Darth Vader and Mufasa) as Barney. Sadly, Barney passed away in 1969 at the age of 46. Betty died over three decades later in 2004 at the age of 85. She never wavered in her story and continued to research UFOs until her passing.
As Allison Quang of the Appalachian Mountain Club blog puts it: "Before the Hills' experience, aliens were portrayed as friendly creatures who would commute back and forth between Earth and their home planets. However, after the Hills shared their story, alien abductions became better known for their mystery and intrigue."
Showtime subscribers with access to the network's official app can stream all four episodes of UFO (executive-produced by J.J. Abrams) right now. The premiere is currently free to watch on YouTube, Showtime.com, and Sho.com.
If you believe in the existence of aliens, some might consider you a crackpot with a tinfoil hat. If you're a Harvard professor with a PhD who believes in the existence of aliens ... well, let's just say that might raise even more eyebrows. One academic, however, dared to fly in the face of everything to study alien abduction cases. That would be John E. Mack, whose fascinating story takes center stage in the fourth and final episode of Showtime's UFO docu-series, which aired earlier this evening.
Born John Edward Mack in 1929, the future academic attended Oberlin College as an undergraduate before pursuing his medical degree at Harvard, where he would later work and teach as a psychiatrist. In fact, he founded the department of psychiatry at the university's Cambridge Hospital, running the unit for close to a decade. Early on in his career, Mack studied dreams and psychological ramifications of the Cold War (particularly the constant threat of nuclear annihilation). He also won the Pulitzer Prize for A Prince of Our Disorder, an acclaimed biography of T.E. Lawrence.
By the early 1990s, Mack found himself interested in studying individuals who claimed to have been abducted by extra-terrestrials (people he dubbed “experiencers”). He believed them when no one else would. With a grant from Laurance Rockefeller, he began the Program for Extraordinary Experience Research.
His contemporaries were skeptical, but he forged on, determined to bring UFOs and aliens into the world of modern science. To be fair, though, Mack himself was also skeptical at first (like any good scientist would be). He admitted to being raised in a materialist household, but ultimately found that formative philosopHy turned on its head once he began interviewing experiencers.
"When I heard about this phenomenon in 1990, I was very doubtful. I thought it must be some kind of mental illness," he told The Washington Post during an interview conducted in the mid-'90s. "I came gradually to the conclusion that I could not find any psychiatric explanation or other explanation except that some kind of trauma happened to them."
His findings led to the publication of two books: Abduction: Human Encounters with Aliens in 1994 and Passport to the Cosmos: Human Transformation and Alien Encounters in 1999. "I've been criticized for it," he added to the Post. "But on the other hand, this is a matter that is important to the public at large as well as the professional community. In academic circles, one can look askance when a professor goes on a popular national television show like that."
Credit: Bettmann/Getty Images
"These people suffered from no obvious psychiatric disorder, except the effects of traumatic experience, and were reporting with powerful emotion what to them were utterly real experiences," he wrote in Abduction (via Vanity Fair). "Furthermore, these experiences were sometimes associated with UFO sightings by friends, family members, or others in the community, including media reporters and journalists, and frequently left physical traces on the individuals’ bodies, such as cuts and small ulcers that would tend to heal rapidly and followed no apparent psychodynamically identifiable pattern as do, for example, religious stigmata. In short, I was dealing with a phenomenon that I felt could not be explained psychiatrically, yet was simply not possible within the framework of the Western scientific worldview.”
Mack died at the age of 74 when he was hit by a drunk driver while crossing the street in London in 2004. This led some to believe that the doctor was assassinated by shadowy elements because he was getting a little too close to the truth. Of course, no evidence supporting this conspiracy theory has been unearthed.
Mack's life and career were documented in the biography The Believer: Alien Encounters, Hard Science, and the Passion of John Mack. The book was written by Ralph Blumenthal, one of the journalists behind the 2017 New York Times article that blew the whistle on the U.S. government's top-secret UFO program.
“There was something cavalier about the way he didn't seem to care much about what the consequences were of what he was doing,” Blumenthal said to the San Antonio Express-News earlier this summer. “And that was both a blessing and a curse.”
Showtime subscribers with access to the network's official app can stream all four episodes of UFO (executive-produced by J.J. Abrams) right now. The premiere is currently free to watch on YouTube, Showtime.com, and Sho.com.
ALL RELATED VIDEOS, selected and posted by peter2011
MUFON CASE : 117614Morphing UAP / UFO Sighted Over Gaithersburg, Maryland ( August 8, 2021 )
Morphing UAP / UFO Sighted Over Gaithersburg, Maryland on August 8, 2021
STATEMENT : A morphing drone or craft?
This is MUFON CASE : 117614 : Long Description of Sighting Report - Case 117614
Entered I-270 south from Quince Orchard Rd and immediately saw slow moving (approx 30 mph) object which was so BIG I pulled over on narrow shoulder. I wouldn't have done this for a small toy or consumer drone. It seemed to be flying northwest first over Montgomery County Fairgrounds then as it crossed the 270 then flying west into sun.. On a UFO Facebook page many people were sure it was mylar star balloons. But the edges of the moving appendages had hard angular edges and whole thing seemed mechanical moving by its own propulsion. It was definitely spinning while the 4 to 6 appendages were moving up and down as if the whole thing was revolving around a rubix cube like axis. The red lights on bottom were much brighter than in video I shot and I recalled they were alternately flashing or strobing as appendages moved up and down. Some said it was morphing. The exterior shell or hull seemed hard and rigid, and appeared both dark gray and red as it moved. The lights seemed encasrd in the shell of craft.. One person even claimed I'd faked it, that original vid was manipulated. That is false. Please tell me if you can identify this. I was there and saw it and the strangeness of it was so much more uncanny than in video. Thank You, Steve Hay
Date Submitted : 2021-08-28 Date of Event : 2021-08-08 MUFON SUBMITTER FILE : 20210808181313.mp4
MUFON CASE : 117607 Mastic Beach, New York ( August 28, 2021 )
Mutual UFO Network : MUFON SUBMISSIONS : Four bright orange/amber objects appeared on the west side of Narrow Bay. They shot over the SW horizon in rapid succession like bursts from a Roman c Long Description of Sighting Report - Case 117607
I was standing on the deck of my cottage which overlooks Narrow Bay in Mastic Beach. Four bright orange/amber objects silently shot up over the SW horizon like bursts from a Roman candle in a rapid succession. The first object gained altitude and moved steadily in a North, Northeast direction. I attempted to get a better look through a pair of cheap binoculars, but all I could see was orange/amber light traveling more rapidly than any aircraft I had ever observed. The first object faded to a pinpoint in the northern cloud cover before disappearing altogether. The three remaining objects followed close afterwards appearing to maintain equal distances between them before fading and disappearing out of sight. I managed to get my phone and video record 1minute and 14seconds of the event.
Date Submitted : 2021-08-28 Date of Event : 2021-08-24 MUFON SUBMITTER FILE : 20210824214947.mp4
Strange UFO was sighted over the skies of California on August 27, 2021
STATEMENT : In California today (UFO )
They are here !
credit : Poland News
Morphing UAP / UFO Sighted Over Gaithersburg, Maryland ( August 8, 2021 )
Morphing UAP / UFO Sighted Over Gaithersburg, Maryland on August 8, 2021
STATEMENT : A morphing drone or craft?
This is MUFON CASE : 117614 : Long Description of Sighting Report - Case 117614
Entered I-270 south from Quince Orchard Rd and immediately saw slow moving (approx 30 mph) object which was so BIG I pulled over on narrow shoulder. I wouldn't have done this for a small toy or consumer drone. It seemed to be flying northwest first over Montgomery County Fairgrounds then as it crossed the 270 then flying west into sun.. On a UFO Facebook page many people were sure it was mylar star balloons. But the edges of the moving appendages had hard angular edges and whole thing seemed mechanical moving by its own propulsion. It was definitely spinning while the 4 to 6 appendages were moving up and down as if the whole thing was revolving around a rubix cube like axis. The red lights on bottom were much brighter than in video I shot and I recalled they were alternately flashing or strobing as appendages moved up and down. Some said it was morphing. The exterior shell or hull seemed hard and rigid, and appeared both dark gray and red as it moved. The lights seemed encasrd in the shell of craft.. One person even claimed I'd faked it, that original vid was manipulated. That is false. Please tell me if you can identify this. I was there and saw it and the strangeness of it was so much more uncanny than in video. Thank You, Steve Hay
Date Submitted : 2021-08-28 Date of Event : 2021-08-08 MUFON SUBMITTER FILE : 20210808181313.mp4
Strange Rotating UFO Cloud Sighted Over Monroe, Louisiana ( August 26, 2021 )
STATEMENT : It's just a cloud.... ′′ If you want an unexplainable KILLER video of what some claim to be a UFO and others say is a glitch in the Matrix, look no further, watch this video filmed in Monroe Louisiana ′′ 🇺🇸 26 August 2021.
Filer’s Files 34 2021 - F-89 Disappearance - PART I
Major George A. Filer III ret. USAF
New Jersey State Director
MUFON Eastern Region Director
In special reports, this week’s files cover: Astronaut Gordon Cooper saw UFOs,
Special Reports are Japan’s Former First Lady Miyuki Hatoyamaan Abducted, F89 Disappearance, Virginia Interceptors, Most UFO Sightings Are Near Water, UFO Observational Evidence Is Very Important, Canada Encounter, World Leaders Condemn Biden, And Strange Craft
Unidentified Aerial Phenomena sightings were reported over California, Colorado, Connecticut, Florida, Illinois, Maryland, Nebraska, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.
Unidentified Aerial Phenomena sightings were reported over Canada, Chili, Czech Republic, Greenland, Myanmar, South Africa, and England in the United Kingdom.
The Filer Research Institute feels the scientific study of UFOs is for the benefit of humankind and is an important endeavor. The US Air Force investigated UFOs publicly for more than twenty years under Project Blue Book; and I continue this advanced research. I believe the God of the universe has spread life throughout the cosmos and UFOs are visiting us in ever-increasing numbers.
Forward these files to your friends and neighbors.
Special Projects
Japan’s Former First Lady Miyuki Hatoyamaan Abducted
Hatoyama Miyuki, born June 28, 1943) is the wife of former Prime Minister of Japan Yukio Hatoyama was an actress in the all-female Takarazuka Revue during the 1960s. She quit the troupe and her stage career when she was in her mid-20s and moved to the United States.
Hatoyama has authored several cookbooks. Among her books authored is Spiritual Food, which focuses on macrobiotic recipes. She has since published another book titled Very Strange Things I’ve Encountered.
In the book, she claims “While my body was asleep, I think my soul rode on a Triangular shaped UFO and went to Venus. It was a very beautiful place, and it was very green.”
Miyuki met her future husband, Yukio Hatanaka in San Francisco, while Yukio was a student at Stanford University. Miyuki and Yukio married in 1975 and the couple has one son, Kiichiro, who is currently an engineer.
F89 Disappearance
F-89 Interceptor Disappears in 1953. Yukio Hatanaka is a former Japanese politician who served as Prime Minister of Japan from 16 September 2009 to 8 June 2010. He was the first Prime Minister from the modern Democratic Party of Japan.
One well known example of aircraft loses to a UFO was the F-89 C Scorpion with tail number 51-5853A, piloted by 1st Lt. Felix Moncla Jr, with Second Lt. Robert L. Wilson as the Radar Intercept Officer. I spoke with a radar operator who worked in the Air Defense Command radar site on November 23, 1953. During the evening, radar picked up an unidentified target over Lake Superior and alerted the 433rd Fighter Interceptor Squadron at Truax Field, in Wisconsin.
Red is flight of F-89
Lt. Moncla in his F-89 C all-weather interceptor was scrambled and instructed to intercept the target. The F-89 diving steeply down intercepted the target at 8,000 feet, and radar operators watched as the “blips” of the UFO and the F-89 merged on their scopes, in an apparent collision, and disappeared. No trace of the plane was ever found. You can visit Lt. Moncla’ s memorial headstone at Sacred Heart Catholic Cemetery in Moreauville, Louisiana, which reads:
Lt. Felix Moncla a Lt. Robert Wilson
Two F 89 aircraft from the 433 Fighter Interceptor Squadron was lost the same day on 23 November of 1953. Shortly after noon an F-89 Scorpion, from Truax Air Base in Madison, Wisconsin with Lt. John Schmidt, and Capt. Glenn Collins aboard, took off, witnesses below reported hearing an explosion, and then the jet crashed into a marsh in the Arboretum, killing the crew. Less than six hours later radar operators on Michigan’s Upper Peninsula spotted a UFO in restricted air space over the Soo Locks at Sault Ste-Marie. An F-89c flown by pilot Lt. Felix Moncla and 2Lt. Robert Wilson was the Radar Intercept Officer was scrambled to intercept a large UFO that headed west over Lake Superior… Lt. Moncla’ s last words from the cockpit were, “I’m going in for another look.” The radar operator claims “The F-89 jet was followed on the radar screen until its image merged with the UFO blip, – then it was lost. The odd radar image seemed to show the UFO swallow the F-89. There was an apparent collision or capture no trace of the plane was ever found. The U.S. Air Force claimed the F-89 was launched to intercept a Royal Canadian Air Force C-47, and the fighter jet had collided with the Canadian transport plane. The Canadians deny any of their planes were over the lake on that date or were involved. A headstone at Sacred Heart Catholic Cemetery in Moreauville, Louisiana, which reads:
Editor’s Note: Assuming the radar report is correct that the two craft merged over Lake Michigan it is quite possible thy crashed together or that the UFO captured the F-89. I have seen huge UFOs that could easily fit a dozen F-89s inside or hang it on the outside. During 1953 the Air Force lost 2075 planes according to General Benjamin Chidlaw.
The destruction or disappearance of military aircraft during interceptions of UFOs continued apace.” As General Benjamin Chidlaw, former commanding general of the Air Defense Command told Robert C. Gardener (ex USAF) in 1953: “We have stack of reports of flying saucers. We take them seriously, when you consider we have lost many men and planes trying to intercept them.” Leonard Springfield, the former Air Force intelligence officer and later a UFO investigator was told by a reliable source in the 1950s that the “Air Force was losing about a plane a day to the UFOs.” The facts are that numerous UFOs exist and attempts to shoot them down have generally been unsuccessful.
UFO F-106 Interceptors
F-106s
I was stationed at Langley Air Force Base and flew tankers and C-130s. I played bridge with several pilots from the 48th Fighter Interceptor Squadron. One pilot crashed his plane the following day.
Langley Air Force Base, Hampton — I was in the Air Force in the 48th Fighter Interceptor Squadron when late one night in March of 1972, at about 8:00 PM, a blimp appeared on radar that caused our two-armed aircraft to be scrambled. The planes were out about an hour, when one of the pilots began screaming over the radio that they were confronting a UFO. It was an orb and seemingly clear. The ranking officer ordered to fire missiles at the UFO. The squadron was put on immediate lock down! The armed Security Police immediately escorted the operator who developed the gun camera film.
When the two aircraft returned to base, the pilots came inside. One was clearly in shock, and just kept repeating, over and over, “A dam flying saucer! We fired at it, but they just went right through it”. Several men in AF long coats, entered the building and immediately began debriefing both pilots in the command post. A man in glasses came into my shop and asked me, if I had spoken to either pilot. My response was, “No.” The next morning both pilots had been transferred during the night. One went to the Pentagon the other was assigned out west. I never saw either pilot again, or film from the nosecones of their aircraft was confiscated. My immediate NCOIC, told me to keep my mouth shut if I didn’t want to be reassigned. So, I kept quiet.
According to US Defense Department figures, from 1952 until the end of October 1956, there were 18,662 major accidents of Air Force and Navy military aircraft. Thanks to MUFON CMS
Of this astonishing four-year total of 18,662 US jaircraft losses, most involved fast new jets (such as those scrambled in UFO interceptions), of which 56.2 per cent were found to be caused by pilot error; 8.1 per cent by ground-crew or other personnel failure; 23.4 per cent by failure of parts and equipment in the aircraft; 2.8 per cent by various unsafe conditions, and 9.5 per cent (1,773) were due to unknown factors. Thanks to Timothy Good new book, “Need to Know” P.172
F-86 Sabre Frequently Lost
Comments: When I chased a UFO, we exceeded the red lined aircraft air speed by 20 knots. In the excitement of the chase, it is easy to exceed aircraft capabilities and often some part of the aircraft may fail. Many stories are told of firing missiles and making direct hits on the UFOs that were unharmed only to have them return the fire and destroy the interceptor
UFO Observational Evidence Is Very Important
British UFO
Jack Sarfattti writes “Let me be very clear all this observational evidence is very important, and I applaud the efforts of those who gather it. A theoretical physicist is like a defense lawyer. My job is if tic tac reports are true, how are we to understand it? I have solved that problem with elementary physics – with Keith wander’s collaboration on important details. This is no mystery. Elizondo, Mellon, Davis et-al are misleading the pentagon not intentionally perhaps. Therefore, they are damaging us national security because Vladimir Putin’s men take my ideas very seriously on this issue and they are running with my ball. They are not stupid.”
Note: The Soviet’s would pay big money to get any UFO data while they wouldn’t pay much for our latest aircraft data.
Hawaii UFO Looked Like a Wayward Missile
Mothership
MAUI — On August 15, 2006, we saw bright slow-moving objects moving and then vanishing. Right next to them we would see what looked like a falling star following the vanishing. Then we saw two “flashes” in the sky. No lights, no stars, just flashes, they looked like explosions not meteorites, as they were occurring at the same spot for about 2 minutes. Then, we noticed the two flashes were moving closer to each other until they were upon each other. The flashes seemed to increase and there were moving lights as well around the general location, unlike anything I’d ever seen. Thanks to Kathryn and Lee Guilmette Chin.Hilo — On August 15, 2006, a silver tubular flying object buzzed Hilo Airport on the Big Island and looked a lot like a missile. Officials at the Pohakuloa Training Area told the Honolulu Star-Bulletin that there were no military exercises involving missiles taking place when the object was spotted Tuesday. Witnesses told the newspaper the silver object emitted a vapor trail; but had no apparent fins or markings on it and was very loud. The object didn’t threaten any air traffic. Thanks to the Honolulu Star-Bulletin.
UFOs Often Underwatered
UFO Comes Out of the Water
Coastal areas and Great Lakes over the interior, except for Colorado, New Mexico, and Arizona have numerous sightings near water. The concentrations of sightings would indicate that the UFOs have under water bases off our coasts and perhaps lakes or rivers in the Rocky Mountains. I have tried to contact people who spend time at sea such as fisherman. Many have observed UFOs often taking sea life.
I and my son and many of my neighbors have seen UFOs in or over lakes in the New Jersey area.
Ron Hannivig reports he has two credible, separate reports of UFOs diving into small lakes up in the Thompson/Ararat Township, Pennsylvania. I personally saw one come out of a small lake in 1980. In past years, thousands of people visited Wanaque Reservoir in North Jersey to watch UFOs come in and out of the water. They had beautiful blinking spinning lights kind of like plasmas or UFOs.
Canada Encounter
Disc 25 feet in Diameter
Mike Plunkett writes, in 1967 Canadian Stephen Michalak of Winnipeg, Manitoba decided to relax by doing some prospecting in the Whiteshell Provincial Park. A mechanic by trade, Michalak had been an amateur geologist had found several quartz veins near Falcon Lake that were associated with silver deposits. Up early on May 1, 2021, 19th, Michalak had located a vein of the precious material after only a few hours of prospecting, stopped for a quick lunch break, then resumed his digging.
Shortly after noon, he heard geese flying overhead. Looking up to catch a glimpse he was caught off guard to see two elongated red glowing objects, one of which was slowly descending. The closer it came it took on a disc-like appearance. He watched in awe as the 1st object hovered defiantly in the air while the second object settled down on a large rock 150 feet away. The hovering disc then quickly changed color from red to orange, then grey as it disappeared in a cloud bank.
Michalak stood transfixed in the same spot for some 30-minutes, in that time having the presence of mind to quickly sketch the landed saucer. Overcome with curiosity, and sensing no immediate threat, Michalak approached the craft. An opening suddenly appeared by the time he was within a few yards of the vehicle. Able to see into the craft from that vantage point, he saw what appeared to be an array of colorful lights like a lit Christmas tree. At the opened doorway of the craft, Michalak heard what he took for some type of spoken communication in a foreign but indistinct language. Peering cautiously inside, he noted a series of panels emitting lights. Looking around he saw no pilot or sign of life. The strange sound that he took for language had stopped the moment he had peered inside the craft.
Disc 25 feet in Diameter Developed Sudden Heat
Suddenly fearful, he backed out of the doorway a split second before three panels suddenly closed in an unexpected fashion, closing, and eliminating any sign of the doorway. Examining the exterior of the craft, he reached out to touch it. He described it as highly polished colored glass with no breaks or seams in its surface. When he contacted the craft, his glove was melted from its heat. Suddenly a vented opening about nine inches tall by six inches appeared. Heat emitted from the strange vent caught Michalak’s shirt and set it afire. Removing his shirt quickly he was overcome by extreme pain. He watched the saucer take off and ascend into the clouds and a vacuum of air could be felt as it left the ground. He found himself in immediate need of medical attention, his chest badly burned and suffering from a sudden spell of dizziness. Before leaving the area, he tried to make a landmark by piling up debris and rocks. Suffering from a bad headache, he quickly broke into a cold sweat and violently vomited. He eventually made his way to the highway and was found by the police who transported him to a local hospital where he was treated for his severe burns, dizziness, and debilitating headache. Stephen Michalak was a hardworking, reliable, and honest man not given to tall tales. The burns on his chest are a matter of public record. His health declined sharply in the years after his claimed strange encounter. A subsequent visit to the location by the local authorities in the days and weeks after the alleged event showed a distinct sharp increase in radiation levels in and around the spot where the craft had allegedly landed.
By late June 1967, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) had taken an interest in Michalak’s claims. They could not identify the site on their own, and on June 1st Michalak accompanied them. On June 26, Michalak had located the site and recovered personal belongings he had left there. The RCMP obtained soil samples which they tested for radioactivity. On July 28, Michalak and RCMP officers together identified a semicircle on the rock face at the scene, 15 feet in diameter, where the moss had been somehow removed. There were traces of radiation in a fault in the rock across the center of the landing spot. No trace of radiation was found around the outer perimeter of the circle or in the moss.
Michalak’s Burns from UFO
World Leaders Condemn Biden
The location of Michalak’s encounter was investigated by the RCMP, the Royal Canadian Air Force, Condon Committee, as well as other respected government and civilian UFO groups. There was nothing left to investigate, yet nothing was found to debunk his story. It should be noted that Michalak paid all his own medical expenses. He later wrote a booklet of his alleged experience at Falcon Lake. Stephen Michalak is one of the few people to claim physical injury from contact with a UFO. Today, his account of the encounter at Falcon Lake is widely considered legitimate. Stephen Michalak died in 1999 at age 83. Today the Canadian Government identifies the Falcon Lake case as unsolved. Thanks to RSR UFO Files
Joe Biden’s disastrous handling of the defeat in Afghanistan and his remarks on the debacle continue to reverberate around the world. NATO countries urged the U.S.. to stay in Afghanistan. The British Daily Telegraph reports that America’s closest ally and Parliament are roundly condemning Biden and holding him in contempt n its headlines questioning its relationship with the United States. World leaders are speaking out about their disappointment with the security situation in Afghanistan. British Prime Minister Boris Johnson going so far as to pin the blame on President Joe Biden and the United States.
“Nobody wants Afghanistan once again to be a breeding ground for terrorist attacks and we don’t think it is in the interests of the people of Afghanistan that it should lapse back into that pre-2001 status,” Johnson told Sky News.
” Trudeau said. “We are heartbroken at the situation the Afghan people find themselves in today.” Trudeau said the “security and safety” of Canadians in the country remain his top priority, as the country moved to suspend diplomatic operations in Afghanistan and shuttered its embassy in Kabul.
Meanwhile, Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison said his government would “redouble” efforts to evacuate people in Afghanistan that have aided the Australian effort in the country.
It seems obvious that there should have been an exit strategy pulling out of the Middle East knowing the Taliban do not fight in the winter. It’s like you can’t reverse Trump’s border policies without implementing new ones or defund the police without having a new system already in place.
Unprecedented Dishonor: Many nations Hold Biden in Contempt for ‘Shameful, cowardly, and ‘Catastrophic’ Afghanistan Withdrawal costing the lives of thousands.
On Thursday, and daughter of the late Sen. John McCain said she has “been physically ill” and filled with “pure rage and anger” since the withdrawal of U.S. troops.
Megan McCain
McCain had strongly campaigned for Biden’s election , a f close family friend of Biden but now she argued the way Afghanistan unfolded was “one of the greatest foreign policy catastrophes of my lifetime.”
“I am furious our President was so incompetent not to see what every expert on the planet could have seen coming,” she wrote. “I am furious for my friends and family who have been fighting in these wars. I am furious seeing our allies and innocent Afghan citizens who trusted us are being left to be slaughtered or so desperate to escape the pure evil the Taliban will bring in that they are falling out of f—— planes. This is not who America is, this is not the values this country was founded in.”
McCain, 36, continued, she insisted that “the shame, dishonor and embarrassment the Biden administration has brought to our country will take generations to undo. Not to mention our standing in the world and the cruel reality that the likelihood of another significant domestic terror attack has now risen to the highest levels since 9/11 and will usher in Isis 3.0.”
“I am furious our President was so incompetent not to see what every expert on the planet could have seen coming,” she wrote. Afghan citizens who trusted us are being left to be slaughtered or so desperate to escape the pure evil the Taliban will bring in that they are falling out of f—— planes. This is not who America is, this is not the values this country was founded in.” ..
She insisted that “the shame, dishonor and embarrassment the Biden administration has brought to our country will take generations to undo. How many are being killed in the interior of the country and in the streets of Kabul.? Afghan Christians are totally vulnerable with no political power. They have no-one to appeal to. Some 229 Christian missionaries have been sentenced to death eliminate women ‘s education throughout the country.
They don’t even generally qualify for special immigrant visas to the United States and expect to be slaughtered.
Taliban and AL Qaeda Capture Afghanistan
The Taliban are calling the shots and are keeping allies from entering Kabul Airport and frequently firing their weapons.
Taliban are going house to house killing Christians, Army and police, and interpreters. The US Administration is not going after its people like both the French and British Special forces are going into Kabul and recovering both British and Americans. The biggest humiliation in the history of the United States.
We went in Afghanistan to defeat Al-Qaeda an Islamist group founded between 1988 and 1990 by Osama Bin Laden and Mohammed Atef and is believed responsible for attacking New York City on 9/11 and now can do it again. Al-Qaeda has been gaining strength and will likely continue to conduct arson as many of the 40.000 fires already set in the U.S. this year.
Why Did the Afghanistan Army stop fighting? The Afghan Army was taught to fight with good intelligence and with 90% of the US close air support that Biden stopped last month in probably the biggest mistake of the entire war. He also stopped the small Afghan Air Force.
A good Afghan unit was surrounded in a Taliban force and was holding well when resupplied early last July by commandoes. For a month they used up their ammunition, food and water and were eventually defeated. This was well known throughout Afghanistan and the various War Lords gave up their cities rather than fight because they had no air support air intelligence.
In the end, President Biden got all the troops out by July Fourth, but a small force that was there to guard the U.S. Embassy.
Trump left 2500 US soldiers that were pulled out by July 4. Well, not only did the U.S. withdraw all the forces from Afghanistan, but we also took out all the contractors that were there to help the Afghans with their maintenance and their logistics of their vehicles and helicopters and airplanes. We stopped providing, in any meaningful sense, all the close air support, the air support that the Afghan military was accustomed to having when they fought the Taliban. Then also, we stopped with some of the other intelligence-sharing mechanisms as well. This really left the Afghan army high and dry and unable to fight effectively.
the Taliban sensed this, and they decided to act. You already alluded to the timeline here, during about 72 hours, the Taliban captured essentially the whole country without barely a shot being fired. This was an insurgency that for the past two decades was unable to capture even one of the 34 provincial capital cities in Afghanistan, but then out of nowhere, they sweep across the whole country and they’re sitting in the presidential palace in Kabul. It’s an utter disgrace and an extreme loss of prestige of the United States that President Biden allowed this to happen. I seriously wonder if his plan seems to be to destroy the United States
Tom Tugendhat, UK chairman of the Foreign Affairs select committee, who served as a British soldier in the Afghanistan war. “The tragedy of Afghanistan is that we are swapping that patient achievement for a second fire and a second. war.”
The True Story of an Air Force Intelligence Officer’s Life with UFOs
U.S. Air Force Major George Filer belongs to the generation of pilots and airmen who first became aware of the strange aircraft showing up in the Earth’s atmosphere after World War II. These men – military professionals who flew planes, served as radar operators and air traffic controllers at airfields around the world – began to whisper amongst themselves about encounters with suspected extraterrestrial aircraft.
During secret debriefings at U.S. bases, pilots and air crew told their commanders of seeing UFOs off their plane’s wings. Award-winning investigative author John Guerra spent four years interviewing Filer, a decorated intelligence officer.
From objects in the skies over Cold War Europe to a UFOs over during the Cuban Missile Crisis to lights over the DMZ in Vietnam Filer leaves nothing out about his Air Force UFO encounters,
Filer’s most memorable case – the shooting of an alien at Fort Dix Army Base in 1978 – is fully recounted for the first time in this book. As a member of the Disclosure Project, military experts, astronauts, and scientists urge the U.S. government to release all it knows about UFOs to the public. Filer describes his UFO encounters in this incredible book. By John L. Guerra. https://amzn.to/2SK3SIQ
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Filer’s Files 34 2021 - F-89 Disappearance - PART II
UFO over Laguna Niguel on July 24, 2021
Filer’s Files 34 2021 - F-89 Disappearance - PART II
Major George A. Filer III ret. USAF
New Jersey State Director
MUFON Eastern Region Director
In special reports, this week’s files cover: Astronaut Gordon Cooper saw UFOs,
Special Reports are Japan’s Former First Lady Miyuki Hatoyamaan Abducted, F89 Disappearance, Virginia Interceptors, Most UFO Sightings Are Near Water, UFO Observational Evidence Is Very Important, Canada Encounter, World Leaders Condemn Biden, And Strange Craft
Unidentified Aerial Phenomena sightings were reported over California, Colorado, Connecticut, Florida, Illinois, Maryland, Nebraska, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.
Unidentified Aerial Phenomena sightings were reported over Canada, Chili, Czech Republic, Greenland, Myanmar, South Africa, and England in the United Kingdom.
The Filer Research Institute feels the scientific study of UFOs is for the benefit of humankind and is an important endeavor. The US Air Force investigated UFOs publicly for more than twenty years under Project Blue Book; and I continue this advanced research. I believe the God of the universe has spread life throughout the cosmos and UFOs are visiting us in ever-increasing numbers.
Forward these files to your friends and neighbors.
UFO Sightings in the United States
Sightings are from MUFON CMS
California Object
Laguna Niguel– on July 24, 2021, witnessed these objects while walking the county park, at first, they were almost directly above me floating downward. They moved away to the north that is when I decided to take some pictures with my mobile phone. There was with no sound, no props, no lights and floated up and down like hang gliders, there were several 5 or 6 maybe more. They were not hang gliders, or drones. It was saucer shaped with a circular dome under the saucer, in that same picture there is another cigar shaped object to the left above the trees.
Colorado Lights
Thornton on July 4, 2021, I noticed one dot of light slowly, dropping straight down then out of sight! That’s when these three lights appeared from the same direction, joined by a fourth within a few seconds! There were silent abrupt changes in direction as well as very clear flame trails!
Connecticut Lights
Hartford– on August 10, 2021, these objects are not fireworks, and it looks like they were shooting at one another like they were in a big battle.
Delaware Object
Hagelstad – on August 15, 2021, about 11:00 hours I suddenly noticed a strong flash in western direction. This repeated at intervals of seconds. I estimated the distance in the range 10 – 20 km. At first there was air turbulence around the location of the flash. The flashing object then continued to move at the same altitude in a general southerly direction. The flashing and flare did not subside.
I got my 8x binoculars and could see that it was a solid object. One side flashed in the sunlight; the other side showed a brown-black color. a good 10 meters in diameter for a sphere. Sincerely Hubert Muckel Colonel (ret)
Florida Object
Cocoa– on June 30, 2021, there are sound waves in the photos, a tower that evaporated and then doubled, many flying objects. There are no towers or wires in the area. A source or beam was coming down at the same time.
Illinois Light
East Peoria– on July 15, 2021, this photo was captured on a Trail Camera with a coyote in the lower left and an object in the air. We did not sight the object, the camera did. Note: The apparent object could be due to a lens flare or reflection. Thanks to Will ucket/www.ufosnw.com/newsite.
Maryland Object
Lavale– on August 11, 2021, about 8:55pm I was watching the sunset while waiting in line. I noticed a low oval cloud much lower than the high streaming clouds. It was somewhat dark on the bottom but appears bright on the upper portion. I took a quick photo with my Android phone that shows a definite outline of a pearl-like object. It flew SW against the wind and the object disappeared.
Nebraska Light
Sioux City– on August 14, 2021, my wife and I were enjoying the sunset by the Marriot waterfront. I took a picture of the bridge and notice a light in the picture so that I zoomed in and saw this object.
New Jersey Lights
Lawrence Harbor – on August 14, 2021, I brought my grandkids to a festival and when I got home and looked at my 30 pictures, I noticed this strange white object in one.
Trenton – on August 13, 2021, while out watching meteor showers I spotted this object southwest of Stony Plain at about 12:57 A.M. It was the largest thing I have ever witnessed, moving very slowly, then turned east. The body was cylindrical with a v shape top. I woke my wife to witness it. It was just t like standing silent in a vacuum.
New York Lights
Brooklyn– on August 9, 2021, recorded from cell phone which turned off for no reason. Giant blue UFO ejecting smaller UFOs
Queens– on August 18, 2021, flew left to right at low altitude. Flew over my house four times in College Point
Ohio Object
Medina — on July 17, 2021, I was with my niece and nephew outside enjoying the sunset at 8:40pm. I heard a passenger jet coming over heading to Cleveland Hopkins Airport. I was able to capture on video, a white glowing Tic Tac object following the jet.
Pennsylvania Object
Smithfield — on August 13, 2021, taking pictures of a lightning storm using my iPhone and enhanced the image and discovered object changing shape and moving in all directions. It changed shape from spherical to square.
Wisconsin Objects
Milwaukee – on August 15, 2021, I witnessed these 2 objects spinning around each other. Initially they hovered, then moved west, then up and away, out of sight. They are seemingly red bodies with amber lights. I’m a mile from a Great Lake. Photos are from a Canon Rebel and telephoto lens.
Worldwide UFO Sightings
Canada Triangle
Stony Plain — on August 15, 2021, while out watching a meteor shower at 12:57 A.M. I saw largest thing I have ever witnessed, moving very slowly first from the south, then turned east. The body was cylindrical with a V shape top. The dark body was visible but was cloaking as you could see stars through it. I woke my wife to witness a large blinking octagon shaped lights were on each end of it, then was gone in a huge blast of light.
Green Island Cove – on August 9, 2021, this is a remote part of Newfoundland near the ocean. As I drove south on The Viking Highway, I noticed a high-level aircraft, that wasn’t moving. As a private pilot, I noticed it had a vapor trail, that is created by thrust. I pulled over as moved upwards at a 45-degree angle until I couldn’t see it any longer.
Chile Disc
Constitution— on September 22, 2017, I saw chrome color metallic object passing over Quivolgo Nursery. I have more than 300 photos that verify and demonstrate a UFO flight route over Constitution at the same height, flying north to south.
Czech Republic Light
Zlín– on July 9, 2021, my boyfriend and I wanted to watch the stars and noticed a star glowing and flickering, but then it began to move slowly. I believe it was a UFO. We took the binoculars and at that moment we both saw the movement clearly. I decided to make a video of it; so, I took the binoculars, pressed it to my phone, and zoomed to the maximum. Seeing with my own eyes something, that could really prove their existence and have a record of it is an indescribable feeling.
Greece Tic Tac
Athens, Glyfada– on August 15, 2021, observed a Silent Tic Tac shaped craft fly past silent and slowly without wings, tail, lights, or windows. It was flying slow so. I was able to record on my iPhone 7. This is the second time I’ve seen this identical craft. Navy depiction of craft
Greenland Object
Photo of a large strange, shaped object taken by pilot.
60 Miles East of Greenland – in June 2021, at 5:30 PM GMT. The photo was taken from 36,000 feet making the object perhaps miles across. Notice the shadows on the icebergs going beneath the object and the swirl in the ice flow as if the object had moved. I was the pilot flying the aircraft for a major US airline and spotted object that caused disturbance in the ice flow. I’ve had many other pilots look at the picture some intelligence and MIT types and no one thinks it’s natural. The upper surface is smooth and gray and less reflective than ice. Other huge icebergs can be seen around with the reflective edges. It looks likes it is just above the icebergs”. The two uniform “intakes” or shadows on the top are also quite interesting. I am a former Air Force pilot, and this was very strange.
Note:The aircraft was flying to the west at 539 MPH at an altitude of 36,000 feet. The first officer was also an ex-Air Force pilot. The pilot has provided the date of the sighting, but it is not published in this report to not reveal the identity of the pilot and first officer.
Myanmar Light
Yangon– on May 22, 2021, I saw a small white flying thing when I looked beside the moon. It flew from north to south, so I took videos. As long as I was taking video, it became smaller and disappeared.
South Africa Triangle
Johannesburg – on January 3, 2015, being an avid amateur astronomer, I am familiar with the night sky, and assume that this was a UAP. I was in the process of setting up my telescope gazing south when I realized that a large section of the sky was completely “blacked out” due to an enormous triangle shaped object. The triangle was completely black, seamless, silent, and like liquid mercury. Intermittently it became translucent, allowing the stars to shine through. When directly above me, it completely blacked out the visible sky. It then proceeded to disappear in a northerly direction. https://uforsa.co.za/black-triangle-in-pretoria/
UK/England Light
Whittingham– on August 8, 2021, I took photos and videos
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Filer’s Files salutes our fighting men and women Georgie Filer and Eddie Pedrick my grandsons who both drowned. These files could not be published without the help of my beloved wife who cooks, cleans, washes, etc., and handles the finances. We pray that God will bless those who read these files spiritually
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The story behind the supposed reptilian city found under Los Angeles
The story behind the supposed reptilian city found under Los Angeles
When Warren Shufelt was inspecting near downtown Los Angeles for oil, gold and other minerals with a device of his invention, he accidentally stumbled upon a so-called “underground reptilian city.”
Los Angeles Times article that talks about the city.
What is true in the news about an underground reptilian city in Los Angeles? Well, in 1933, the engineer Warren Shufelt used a device invented by himself to take soil readings. Their target was oil, gold, or any kind of valuable material.
However, from one moment to the next, the instrument began to show a series of “voids” under the ground . He quickly realized that it was a network of underground tunnels, so he wasted no time and drew a map of his find.
Everything seemed to indicate that it had been built with a work plan . With rooms at every certain distance and warehouses that led to other tunnels .
An underground city in Los Angeles?
Shufelt deduced that some of the tunnels were up to 30 kilometers underground . At first he thought they were ventilation pipes.
However, he never thought that these tunnels connected to a much larger city , which was submerged under the Pacific Ocean thousands of years ago, during a terrible earthquake and subsequent floods.
According to later investigations, the complex discovered by Shufelt was used as emergencies, with a capacity to house up to 5000 individuals .
The so-called “reptilian city stored supplies of non-perishable plants used for food and in sufficient quantities to feed the survivors. Or at least until it was time to return to the surface. “
“It also had a supposed complex where documents, artifacts and ancient treasures would be kept .”
The engineer investigated the tunnel network on his own , which led him to meet a member of the Hopi , known as Chief Little Green Leaf.
The Legend of the Lizard People
He commented on the existence of an ancient race of “Lizard People.” The story went that about 5000 years ago, a meteor shower fell on the west coast. A proof of this is the Winslow crater , north of Arizona.
Thousands of people died that day. Miles of fertile land and forests were lost. An unprecedented catastrophe.
The few survivors gathered on the west coast to come up with a plan and build safe areas. However, the sky sentinels appeared and indicated that it was time to return to the underground shelters.
Place where the excavation began.
Thus, the Lizard People closed the access tunnels, saving themselves from another meteor shower that swept the west coast this time.
But despite having survived the catastrophe, the toxic gas leaked into the bunkers , causing them to perish.
Digging for the city
Both men were convinced that this legend was real . If the information captured by Shufelt’s device is added to that , all was said.
On February 21, 1933, they got permission from the County Board of Supervisors for the excavation to begin. Any treasure found was to be 50% shared with the City of Los Angeles.
Shufelt was convinced that the labyrinth was about 300 meters deep . So he could find the rooms of 2.5 square kilometers. Where the most valuable treasures were hidden.
The legend about this reptilian city tells how the rooms sheltered historical tables of gold . In them were important engravings on the origins of humanity . These boards were 1 meter long and 35 centimeters wide.
Shufelt mapped out the ideal place to dig as his device had located the empty areas of the tunnels and dark areas where the gold was found .
When the excavation began, the water had seeped into several tunnels. Arriving to flood several rooms.
The journey of both subjects had reached the media. In early February 1934 the first reports came out of the “Lost Land of the Lizard People.”
By that time , 100 meters had been dug in one of the five pits being dug at the same time.
However, when there was more attention on the underground reptilian city, the project was stopped at any moment. The excavation was abandoned and on March 5, the pits were backfilled once more.
Shufelt continued to reside in Los Angeles, passing away in November 57. Leaving a legacy that, despite his continuous legal struggles, he could never continue.
My Favorite Martian Image: Helicopter Sees Potential Rover Road Ahead
My Favorite Martian Image: Helicopter Sees Potential Rover Road Ahead
This image of the South Séítah region of Jezero Crater was captured by NASA's Ingenuity Mars Helicopter during its 12th flight at Mars, on August 16, 2021.
Perseverance scientist impressed with aerial images of location considered for rover exploration.
Ask any space explorer, and they’ll have a favorite photograph or two from their mission. For Ken Farley, the project scientist for NASA’s Perseverance rover, one of his current favorites is a color image of “South Seítah,” an area the mission’s science team had considered potentially worthy of a rover visit. The agency’s Ingenuity Mars Helicopter took the image during its 12th and most recent flight, on Aug. 16.
Prior to Ingenuity’s latest flight, the majority of what the Perseverance science team knew of the southern portion of the Seítah feature came from orbiter images. Based on that data, they believed the site could possibly be a treasure trove of complex geology, providing information that could play a valuable role as the rover team searches for signs of ancient microbial life and attempts to characterize the geology of the area and to understand the area’s history.
They used the rotorcraft’s images to look for signs of layered, sedimentary rock that could have been deposited in water, intriguing rocky outcrops accessible to the rover, and safe routes the rover could take into and back out of the area.
“From a science perspective, these images of South Seítah are the most valuable Ingenuity has taken to date,” said Farley, who’s based at Caltech. “And part of their value may be in what they are not showing. Sedimentary layers in rocks are not readily apparent in the image, and there may be areas that could be difficult to negotiate with the rover. There is work to do by our science and rover driving teams to understand better how to respond to the new data.”
Ingenuity obtained 10 images of the area as it flew into and then back out of South Seítah at an altitude of 33 feet (10 meters). The flight was one of the most complicated the helicopter team has executed so far – the longest-duration flight to date (169.5 seconds) with multiple waypoints as it flew from relatively non-descript terrain outside South Seítah into much more varied terrain inside, and then back out again.
“What this image may be saying is, we don’t need to drive further west to obtain the best geologic variety of this first science campaign,” said Farley. “If we decide to make the trip to South Seítah, we’ve got some valuable intel on what we’ll encounter. And if the decision is to stick around ‘Artuby Ridge,’ the rover’s current location, we’ll have saved valuable time. It’s a win-win.”
More About Ingenuity
The Ingenuity Mars Helicopter was built by JPL, which also manages the operations demonstration activity during its extended mission for NASA Headquarters. It is supported by NASA’s Science, Aeronautics Research, and Space Technology mission directorates. NASA’s Ames Research Center in California’s Silicon Valley, and NASA’s Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia, provided significant flight performance analysis and technical assistance during Ingenuity’s development. AeroVironment Inc., Qualcomm, and SolAero also provided design assistance and major vehicle components. Lockheed Martin Space designed and manufactured the Mars Helicopter Delivery System.
More About Perseverance
A key objective for Perseverance’s mission on Mars is astrobiology, including the search for signs of ancient microbial life. The rover will characterize the planet’s geology and past climate, pave the way for human exploration of the Red Planet, and be the first mission to collect and cache Martian rock and regolith.
Subsequent NASA missions, in cooperation with ESA (European Space Agency), would send spacecraft to Mars to collect these sealed samples from the surface and return them to Earth for in-depth analysis.
The Mars 2020 Perseverance mission is part of NASA’s Moon to Mars exploration approach, which includes Artemis missions to the Moon that will help prepare for human exploration of the Red Planet.
JPL, which is managed for NASA by Caltech in Pasadena, California, built and manages operations of the Perseverance rover.
The discovery of more than 100 sealed coffins containing mummies, at the Saqqara archaeological site in Egypt, was one of the biggest archaeology stories of 2020.
(Image credit: Egyptian Ministry of Antiquities)
With the pandemic and accompanying economic recession clouding 2020, it goes without saying that the year will not go down as the happiest for humanity. The archaeology world also felt the effects, as numerous digs were canceled or curtailed as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. Despite the difficult year, many archaeological and historical discoveries came to light, including a sprawling geoglyph in Peru, a trove of mummies, the tomb of the legendary Romulus and more.
1. Cat revealed at Nazca
(Image credit: Johny Isla/Ministerio de Cultura)
A 120-foot-long geoglyph of a cat discovered in Peru in 2020 is the most recent example of a Nazca Line to be found. The geoglyph was heavily eroded and barely visible, but conservation work revealed a more complete picture of the cat, which looks a bit like a child's doodle. Archaeologists estimate that the geoglyph was constructed sometime between 200 B.C. and 100 B.C., a time when many Nazca Lines were being built.
2. Amazon ice-age art
(Image credit: Marie-Claire Thomas/Wild Blue Media)
In 2020, archaeologists announced the discovery of an 8-mile-long (12.9 kilometers) "canvas" of ice-age art that dates back 11,800 to 12,600 years. Drawn using ocher, the images include depictions of mastodons, giant sloths and other now-extinct beasts that lived at the time. The images were drawn in the hills above three rock shelters in the Colombian Amazon.
The drawings also include human handprints, geometric designs, and images of deer, tapirs, alligators, bats, monkeys, turtles, serpents, porcupines, camelids and horses, among other animals. There are also drawings showing people hunting animals and interacting with plants and trees. The excavations were made possible thanks to a 2016 peace treaty that put an end to hostilities between the Colombian government and FARC, a rebel guerrilla group. With the onset of peace, the region became accessible to archaeologists.
3. Mummies galore!
(Image credit: Egyptian Ministry of Antiquities)
More than 100 sealed coffins with mummies have been found at Saqqara, in Egypt. Excavations are ongoing, and more mummies will likely be found.)
Since summer 2020, Egyptian archaeologists have been excavating a series of burial shafts at the site of Saqqara and have found an ever-growing number of sealed coffins with mummies inside. As of Nov. 14, the count was up to over 100 coffins containing mummies, and as the excavations continue, more will likely be found. In Egypt, tombs were frequently robbed in both ancient and modern times, and to find so many undisturbed, sealed coffins with mummies is a remarkable find.
Numerous artifacts have been found within the coffins, including 40 statues that depict Ptah-Soker, a deity who was an amalgamation of Ptah, the god of Memphis, andSoker (also spelled Sokar and Seker), who was the god of Saqqara. All of the finds date to between roughly 712 B.C. and 30 B.C., a time when Egypt was often controlled by foreign groups, such as the Assyrians, Persians and Greeks.
4. Tomb of Romulus
(Image credit: Parco Colosseo)
In February 2020, archaeologists announced the discovery of the tomb of Romulus beneath the Roman Forum's Senate House. According to legend, Romulus founded Rome in the eighth century B.C. He and his brother Remus were supposedly abandoned as infants and raised by a she-wolf. When they reached adulthood, the two brothers got into a dispute over which hill Rome should be built on, and Romulus killed Remus. Today, most historians regard the story as mythological and doubt that Romulus really existed. However, the ancient Romans took it seriously and placed his tomb beneath the Senate House, the heart of Roman politics.
Inside the tomb, archaeologists found an empty 4.5-foot-long (1.4 m) sarcophagus made of a light volcanic stone, called tuff, that was quarried from the Capitoline Hill beneath the Roman Forum. The tomb has been 3D laser scanned, and future excavations may reveal more details about it.
5. Female hunters
(Image credit: Matthew Verdolivo (UC Davis IET Academic Technology Services))
In 2020, the idea that males did all of the big-game hunting while females gathered herbs and plants was proved wrong, as archaeologists found a 9,000-year-old burial of a female hunter in Peru. She was buried with a hunter tool kit that included projectile points and flakes, and she may have hunted vicuñas, wild ancestors of alpacas.
The archaeologists who excavated the woman's remains do not believe she was an unusual case. When they analyzed over 400 skeletons that had been previously excavated in the Western Hemisphere, the archaeologists found that 27 were buried with tools suitable for hunting big game and 11 of those individuals were female, suggesting that females often hunted big game in the Western Hemisphere.
6. Polynesians meet Native Americans around A.D. 1150
(Image credit: Ruben Ramos-Mendoza)
A large study that involved gathering DNA from 807 Indigenous individuals from Polynesia and the Pacific coast of South America has revealed that Polynesians and native peoples of Colombia not only made contact but also bred with one another around A.D. 1150. It's not clear how the groups met; the Polynesians may have sailed to South America or vice versa.
Either way, their descendants were living in the Marquesas Islands — about 4,350 miles (7,000 km) from the coast of Colombia — by A.D. 1200, and gradually branched out to other islands in Polynesia.
The biggest prehistoric monument in the U.K. was revealed in 2020. Dating to around 4,500 years ago, during the Neolithic period, it consists of 20 giant holes that appear to mark the boundaries of an earlier enclosure circle. Each of the holes is 32 feet (10 m) in diameter and 16 feet (5 m) deep. The holes form a circle stretching 1.2 miles (2 km) and covering an area larger than 1.2 square miles (3.1 square km). It's so large that it has Durrington Walls, the largest henge in the U.K., at its center.
It's not clear why the giant circle of holes was created. It's possible that it formed a symbolic barrier that told certain members of society how close they could get to Durrington Walls. Another possibility is that the holes were used to hold water during the wet season. In any case, the circle of holes is one of a kind, with no comparable prehistoric monuments known elsewhere, archaeologists said.
8. Assyrian rock panels
(Image credit: Alberto Savioli/Land of Nineveh Archaeological Project/University of Udine)
Ten ancient Assyrian rock panels showing carvings of Assyrian deities were discovered at a canal that dates back more than 2,700 years. They include carvings of Ashur, the main Assyrian god, who is shown on a dragon. They also show Ashur's wife, Mullissu, who is seated on a decorated throne supported by a lion. Other depictions include the sun god Shamash on a horse and the moon god Sin on a horned lion. All of the deities face in the direction of the water that flowed in the canal.
The panels and canal were likely built during the reign of the Assyrian king Sargon II, who ruled from 722 B.C. to 705 B.C. In the rock panels, Sargon II is shown at the beginning and end of the procession of deities.
Archaeologists announced the discovery of the canal and rock panels, found near Mosul, Iraq, in January 2020. Work on uncovering the panels began in 2012, but when the terrorist organization ISIL (also known as ISIS or Daesh) approached the region,archaeologists hid the panels to prevent their destruction by ISIL. As a result the panels were not fully uncovered until recently.
9. Rich ninth-century Viking longhouse on Iceland
(Image credit: Bjarni Einarsson)
In June 2020, archaeologists in Iceland announced the discovery of a 130-foot-long (40 m) longhouse that was built in the ninth century. It is one of the earliest Viking structures in Iceland to be discovered and has lavish hoard of ornamental beads and coins archaeologists found.
The finds include Roman and Middle Eastern silver coins, as well as "hacksilver" — cut and bent pieces of silver that the Vikings and other peoples used as bullion or currency. The hoards also contained glass beads, rings, weights and a tiny fragment of gold. The Vikings who lived there may have acquired the goods by trading whale and seal meat and skins for them.
10. Mammoth structure
(Image credit: Alex Pryor)
A circular structure constructed out of the remains of at least 60 mammoths was discovered in Russia. Bones from reindeer, horses, bears, wolves, red foxes and arctic foxes, among other animals, were also used to build the structure, archaeologists said. Dating back around 20,000 years, the structure is 36 feet (11 m) in diameter and may have had a roof made of animal hides, the researchers said.
The purpose of the structure is a bit of a mystery. It might have been used for rituals, or possibly food storage. At the time, pieces of animal meat were still attached to the bones, which would have made the structure smelly. Archaeologists could tell that they had meat on them because some of the bones were articulated (joined together) in a way that could only have been done if flesh was still on them.
An ancient “pre-human” civilization was destroyed by a comet (Video)
An ancient “pre-human” civilization was destroyed by a comet (Video)
The evidence that our planet harbored intelligent life before humans is increasingly evident. Now, one theory could reveal that a comet destroyed an ancient civilization more than 13,000 years ago.
A comet would have created a cataclysm similar to the one that destroyed the dinosaurs.
Graham Hancock , one of the most controversial researchers of recent years, wrote a book entitled “Wizards of the Gods: The Forgotten Wisdom of Earth’s Lost Civilization.”
In it, he mentions an ancient pre-human civilization on Earth and how it was destroyed by a giant comet more than 13,000 years ago.
An ancient civilization died out before mankind was born
The remains of a giant comet pierced the atmosphere, generating a global cataclysm similar to that of the destruction of the dinosaurs.
Hancock says that at least eight fragments of the huge comet hit the North American ice sheet , and others hit northern Europe.
The heat generated by the approach of the giant fireballs, at more than 150,000 kilometers per hour, melted millions of square kilometers of ice instantly.
As a consequence, the earth’s crust was destabilized like never before and a global flood was generated that destroyed an ancient civilization . This cataclysm was named in different myths of ancient cultures, including the bible .
This theory was ignored for decades as it was considered “unlikely.” In fact, several experts pointed out that it was impossible for a developed civilization to live on Earth thousands of years ago .
Some even ridiculed the researcher, as always happens when an alternative history is proposed for humanity
Evidence of the comet impact is found at Göbekli Tepe.
It is not a simple theory
In order to find such an ancient catastrophic event , one has to search the oldest known remains of an ancient civilization. And that’s Göbekli Tepe .
Archaeologists from the School of Engineering of the University of Edinburgh, carried out an investigation in these ruins.
Apparently, evidence was found that a comet collided with Earth in 11,000 BC. C. approximately. This cataclysm generated drastic changes that exterminated an advanced civilization.
Based on that investigation, Hancock added that such an event could occur again . Earth will be in the path of a meteor shower in 2030 .
It should be noted that the oldest layer of Göbekli Tepe dates from the year 9600 BC. C. , this means that it is 7000 years older than the pyramids of Egypt .
There were stone carvings with astronomical symbols linked to a global catastrophe that occurred in 10,950 BC. C., as explained by Dr. Martin Suetman .
This artifact was called the “Vulture Stone” and clearly shows human suffering through symbols.
This means that an ancient civilization, with astronomical and mathematical knowledge, as well as civilized, existed long before human beings.
A NASA image shows 9 of the 13 cubesats originally planned to fly on the Artemis 1 mission installed in their payload adapters. At least one cubesat will not be ready in time for the mission. Credit: NASA/Cory Huston
COLORADO SPRINGS — While most of the cubesats manifested to launch as secondary payloads on the first Space Launch System mission have arrived, at least one of them will miss its flight.
NASA selected 13 cubesats several years ago to fly as secondary payloads on the Artemis 1 mission, launching no earlier than November. The cubesats, each six units in size, come from a mix of NASA, international and academic developers.
NASA released an image Aug. 11 showing the Orion stage adapter, the component that links the Orion spacecraft to the SLS second stage and which hosts the cubesats that will be deployed during the mission. The image shows nine cubesats installed on the adapter and the other four slots still unoccupied.
One of those four slots will be filled by BioSentinel, a NASA cubesat that will study the long-term effects of radiation in deep space on organisms, in this case yeast. That spacecraft has arrived at the Kennedy Space Center, NASA spokesperson Shannon Segovia said Aug. 19, but will be installed on the adapter last to preserve the biological samples onboard.
Two of the other three cubesats are part of NASA’s Cube Quest Challenge, a competition held by the agency’s Centennial Challenges prize program. NASA spokesperson Molly Porter said that one of them, CU-3E from the University of Colorado Boulder, is still expected to arrive in time for the Artemis 1 launch, but that the other, Cislunar Explorers from Cornell University, will not be ready for the flight. A third Cube Quest cubesat, Team Miles, has been installed on the stage adapter.
The other cubesat is Lunar Flashlight, being developed at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory to look for water ice deposits on the moon using lasers. That spacecraft is in danger of missing the Artemis 1 because of delays in the development of its propulsion system, JPL spokesperson Ian O’Neill said Aug. 20.
“Due to significant issues during testing of the originally procured Lunar Flashlight propulsion system, the mission switched to development of an alternative. This change occurred late in the project and delayed mission readiness,” NASA said in a statement about the cubesat. The pandemic then slowed development of the new propulsion system, which uses a “green” nontoxic propellant, by a group led by the Georgia Institute of Technology.
JPL has received the propulsion system, but O’Neill said it wasn’t clear that the system would be fully integrated and tested in time to launch on Artemis 1. “NASA is also exploring several near-term commercial launch opportunities for Lunar Flashlight in case it does not make Artemis 1,” the agency stated.
Exactly how much time CU-3E and Lunar Flashlight have to make Artemis 1 isn’t clear. Segovia said the cubesats must arrive in time to be installed on the Orion stage adapter before that adapter is installed on the SLS. NASA KSC spokesperson Tiffany Fairley said that installation is currently scheduled for early fall.
During a panel discussion at the AIAA Propulsion and Energy Forum Aug. 10, David Reynolds of NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center said that the pandemic had caused some of the secondary payloads to fall behind schedule. “We’re trying to give them some opportunity to get caught up,” he said.
NASA is doing so by delaying the installation of the Orion stage adapter for as long as possible, using a mass simulator in its place for tests inside the Vehicle Assembly Building at KSC. “That will allow them to load in some of those secondary payloads for another month and a half,” he said.
Reynolds noted that the current planning date for the Artemis 1 launch is Nov. 26. “I wouldn’t book nonrefundable flights just yet,” he added.
HONOLULU (HawaiiNewsNow) - The Mars 2020 Perseverance rover has been exploring new frontiers for science since it landed on the Red Planet in February in an area called Jezero crater.
“The main goal of the mission is to seek out the signs of ancient life ― life that once existed on Mars. We’re talking about microbial life, very small basic life,” researcher Sarah Fagents said.
Fagents is with the University of Hawaii’s Institute of Geophysics and Planetology. She’s on the team of about of about 30 scientists, engineers and graduate students that controls the rover’s Mastcam-Z.
The imaging system captures high-resolution photographs and video of the Martian landscape.
UH doctoral student Eleni Ravanis is also a team member.
“We’re looking at places that scientists have been looking at from orbit for a long time. It’s really exciting to get up close and test some of the hypotheses that people have come up with,” she said.
The work is rewarding and a challenge logistically. The Mastcam team is spread out all over the world and a Martian day is 40 minutes longer than an Earth day. Team members work round-the-clock to send Rover work orders that it receives during the Martian night.
“When the Rover wakes up in the morning, during the Martian day, it can do everything we told it to do,” Fagents said.
The Mastcam is one of seven instruments on the rover. They have their own teams of scientists who assigned specific tasks that include collecting samples of rocks and soil.
Eventually, Perserverance wlll move to another part of the Jezero crater.
“It used to have a lake in it. We can tell that from the types of deposits that we can see in there from orbit,” Fagents said.
The spacecraft will operate until it dies. The goal is to get the samples back to earth.
“There’s a lot more work that we can do in a big specialist laboratory that we have on earth compared to what we can do at Mars,” Ravanis said.
Other mission scientists with UH ties include Jim Bell, the principal investigator of the Mastcam-Z instrument, and Shiv Sharma who is the co-investigator on the Supercam instrument.
Fagents said she’s thrilled to be working on the Mars project.
“It’s the next best thing to being their with your own boots on the ground.”
If all goes well, in 2023, Perseverance will climb out of the crater to explore more of the Red Planet.
Copyright 2021 Hawaii News Now. All rights reserved.
FORTY YEARS AGO, NASA SCIENTIST LINDA SPILKER started sleeping at the office. It was her first job out of college, but she wasn’t camping out because she was over-worked and chained to her desk. Instead, she was waiting for an exquisite moment in human history: The first time Voyager 2 would fly by Saturn and its moons, and, critically, the images it would return to Earth of the distinctive ringed planet.
“I’d bring my sleeping bag into my office, and I’d have like a timeline of when the pictures would come back to the Earth,” she recalls for Inverse. “A lot of people did this, so you could sometimes go into somebody’s office, and you might see a pair of feet sticking out from under the desk.”
Voyager 2’s flyby wasn’t the first time a spacecraft gave scientists a close-up view of the gas giant and its moons — that privilege went to its sister spacecraft Voyager 1, which entered the Saturn system on November 12, 1980.
But the flyby, which took place on August 26, 1981, provided scientists here on Earth with important observations that, combined with those of Voyager 1, have informed every NASA mission to the Saturn system since.
“WE COULD GO IN AND TWEAK THE DESIGNS AND THE OBSERVATIONS FOR VOYAGER 2.”
NASA’s Cassini, Huygens, and, importantly, the upcoming Dragonfly mission to Saturn’s moon Titan to search for signs of life all owe a debt to this moment in history.
WHAT VOYAGER 2 DISCOVERED AROUND SATURN
When Spilker graduated with a bachelor’s degree in physics and went to work for NASA in 1977, they gave her a choice of missions., including a brand new mission set to launch that year — Voyager.
“When they told me that Voyager was headed to Jupiter and Saturn, and possibly onto Uranus, and Neptune, I said, ‘Sign me up,’” she says.
Spilker watched Voyager 2 launch in August of 1977 and then settled into her role on the science team for both space probes until they reached the Saturn system. Voyager 1 made it on November 12, 1980, and just a little shy of one year later, Voyager 2 entered the Saturn system on August 26, 1981.
“The first flyby was unique in that we found so many interesting new things. We got to see the detailed structure, for instance, in Saturn’s rings,” Spilker says. With these data in hand, the scientists on the ground could plan for the next flyby — and what they wanted to find.
“We could go in and tweak the designs and the observations for Voyager 2,” Spilker says.
Voyager 2 took a closer look at Saturn’s rings, particularly the narrow, outermost “F” ring.
“We saw a lot of changes in that ring, in particular, these sorts of kinks and braids that we could see in that ring,” Spilker says.
Voyager 2 revealed that Saturn’s rings are anything but “bland sheets of material,” but rather intricate, detailed, and dynamic structures. Spilker would later use Voyager 2’s stellar and radio occultation data — measurements of how starlight and radio waves were influenced by the rings while passing through them — to complete her Ph.D. in geophysics and space physics.
“The way the waves damp out tell you something about the surface mass density and about the densities of particles,” she says.
“WE SAW EVIDENCE OF TECTONIC FRACTURES, SOFTENED CRATERS.”
“I was always a big fan of the rings after having used so much ring data for my thesis.”
IDENTIFYING HABITABLE WORLDS
Less visually beautiful, but perhaps more intellectually curious, were the observations collected by Voyager 2 of two of Saturn’s moons, Titan and Enceladus. These data would inform both later NASA missions and the scientific search for alien life.
Enceladus is now known to harbor a global liquid water ocean beneath its icy crust, making it a prime candidate target to search for extraterrestrial life. But before the Voyager craft made it to Saturn, scientists were not even sure the small, 500-kilometer diameter world was geologically active — a key ingredient for life.
“What was really astonishing was to see Enceladus and just how bright and pristine this world looked,” Spilker says.
“We saw evidence of tectonic fractures, softened craters,” she recalls.
Saturn’s moon Enceladus as captured by Voyager 2. NASA
NASA’s 2005 Cassini mission conducted multiple flybys of the little moon and took images of geysers erupting from Enceladus’s southern polar region. Cassini even flew through the geysers’ plumes, sampling what is believed to be water spewing up from the subsurface ocean.
Meanwhile, the surface of Saturn’s largest moon, Titan, remained obscured by haze during the Voyager missions. But the data Voyager 1 and 2 collected was then used to better equip the Cassini spacecraft and the Huygens lander, which separated from Cassini to land on Titan on January 14, 2005.
Saturn’s largest moon Titan as imaged by Voyager 2. NASA
Together, they revealed a world of hydrocarbon lakes and water ice. Titan, scientists confirmed, was another intriguing candidate for hosting extraterrestrial life.
“All the things we learned with Voyager informed us and helped us build the Huygens probe,” Spilker says. She would know, as she joined the Cassini team in 1988.
“Had we not had that information from Voyager, it might have been much harder to put together.”
HOW VOYAGER 2 STILL INFLUENCES NASA MISSIONS TO SATURN
Voyager to Cassini and Huygens — each science mission informs the next, according to Planetary Scientist Elizabeth Turtle. Turtle is the primary investigator on the upcoming Dragonfly mission to Titan set to launch in the mid-2030s.
“TITAN HAS BEEN DOING PREBIOTIC CHEMISTRY EXPERIMENTS FOR US.”
“Each mission provides information that is the basis for future missions,” she says. “But each mission also raises questions, and those become the questions the next missions try to tackle.”
One of the big mysteries about Titan following the Voyager mission’s flyby was what lay on the moon’s surface. Cassini and Huygens answered that question, making observations that revealed a dense atmosphere rich in complex carbon molecules and a surface made of water ice. Turtle says these could include the ingredients necessary for the chemical reactions that could lead to the genesis of life.
Dragonfly on Titan, as imagined by an artist.NASA/JHU-APL
Now it’s Dragonfly’s turn to answer the follow-up question as to whether or not those ingredients are indicative of signs of life on Titan.
An octocopter drone, Dragonfly will fly from place to place to sample the surface of Titan.
“Titan has been doing prebiotic chemistry experiments for us,” Turtle says. “What dragonfly is designed to do is to get there and pick up the results of those experiments and tell us whether there are biologically relevant compounds on the surface of Titan.”
HOW VOYAGER 2 KEEPS ON KEEPING ON
As for Voyager and Spilker, they have both left planetary science far behind. Earlier this year, Spilker rejoined the Voyager 2 mission as its deputy project scientist. Only now, instead of studying Saturn's rings, she’s studying the interstellar medium 150 astronomical units from the Sun: Voyager 2 officially left the Solar System on November 5, 2018.
“I think the goal is to keep taking as much science data for as long as we can,” Spilker says of the Voyager 2 spacecraft, which is now in its 44th year of operations.
“It’s gonna be a long time until we ever get another mission as far from the Sun as Voyager.”
Spilker recalls a statement made by Richard Laeser, then the Voyager project manager, after the Saturn flyby. “Voyager is in its post-retirement years,” Laeser said, and “is very healthy for its age.”
“I just had to chuckle,” Spilker says, “Because that was in 1985, and here we are in 2021, and the Voyagers — both of them are still going strong.”
We’veWe’ve been destroying the earth for a long time, and because sci-fi cinema has distilled and explored those concerns for decades (from Soylent Green to Waterworld to WALL-E to Snowpiercer), the genre has become a kind of echo chamber. Our planet becomes uninhabitable. Humanity travels elsewhere to start again. Were we the problem all along? The repetitive setup of these concerns, and a lack of creativity in considering them, results in films like director and co-writer Tim Fehlbaum’s The Colony.
Visually gorgeous but narratively inert, The Colony tips its hat toward fellow genre classics like Aliens and Children of Men with questions about reproduction, colonialism, and communal responsibility. Its protagonist, Blake (Nora Arnezeder), evokes Sigourney Weaver’s Ripley with her physical strength, her steely stare, and her tenderness toward children. The film’s characters are divided into warring factions fighting over who should control the planet’s scant resources, with Earth’s natives being dismissed as backward and unsophisticated. The allure of space, and the potential it holds, is discussed at length. But for all the time The Colony spends on wistful, melancholy rumination over these ideas, it falls short of offering a singular perspective about any of them.
Intertitles inform us that because of climate change, pandemics, and war, “the ruling elite” escaped Earth to settle on the distant planet Kepler 209. But the planet isn’t perfect: There are no large bodies of water, but there is widespread radioactivity, making survival difficult. Most importantly, people are losing the ability to naturally conceive. With the potential end of humanity looming, the Kepler-ians begin an astronaut program to return to Earth. The first spaceship they send back, Ulysses 1, disappears without ever sending back a return transmission. A generation later, Kepler launches Ulysses 2, and puts all their hope on the shoulders of this three-person crew, including Blake.
Photo: Saban Films
Can you recognize a place where you’ve never lived? Does that kind of knowledge exist as an existential inheritance? As Blake wanders around a humid, foggy beach, lifting up horseshoe crabs and poking at jellyfish, Arnezeder exudes both confusion and familiarity. Her expressive face reflects those conflicting emotions well, and her lithe physicality captures a warrior and explorer accustomed to tension and trained to analyze the unknown. But even with all that preparation, Blake is caught off guard when ambushed by the planet’s survivors, led by a woman named Narvik (Sarah-Sofie Boussnina). They speak in a mishmash of languages, they carry weapons and live nomadically, and unlike the humans on Kepler, they have children. Among the youngsters is a girl named Maila (Bella Bading), whom Blake befriends — and who is kidnapped when this group of survivors is attacked by another heavily armed group who takes what they want, including all the female children.
Blake’s primary mission is to send a message back to Kepler to let them know that reproduction still works on Earth, but when Maila is taken, her Aliens-style protectiveness kicks in. When she follows that second group of survivors to their enclave of gigantic, abandoned cargo ships and aircraft carriers caught on the beach, Fehlbaum gets another chance to show off visually. But when he shifts the film into action mode, The Colony becomes reactive rather than proactive. And while the secrets Blake learns from Gibson (Iain Glen), the second community’s leader, connect to her childhood back on Kepler and provide some solid character development, The Colony then follows a fairly predictable path regarding what Blake chooses to do now that she’s on Earth.
In its early scenes, The Colony works as a plaintive visual exploration of what survival might look like if we continue on our ruinous climate path: constant flooding and swirling waters, movable cities built on rickety ships, nomadic people wrapped in outfits that protect them from the elements and allow for ease of movement. Cinematographer Markus Förderer and production designer Julian R. Wagner create a haunting world, but The Colony is sometimes too literal. Fehlbaum’s presentation of loneliness is packed with thuddingly obvious imagery (Blake alone on the beach, Blake alone in a well flooding with tidewater), but its first 20 or so minutes are a disquieting visualization of loss.
But The Colony isn’t nearly as thoughtful in its character development, and it doesn’t push far enough. So much remains unexplored: How long have the different groups of survivors been at war? What effect does the return of people from Kepler have? How does Blake feel about the societal demand of reproduction? What is the rest of Earth like? Why is a science fiction film, supposedly about exploring a possible future, so incurious about the details?
Photo: Saban Films
The film’s offhanded descriptions of death, like “Flood took him” in describing a missing character, suggest a life of endless hardship. But because The Colony sticks so firmly with Blake’s perspective, it doesn’t make much space for anyone else. The film suggests a class analysis with that “ruling elite” intertitle, but does nothing with it. And while Arnezeder and Boussnina have unbelievable chemistry, The Colony doesn’t allow for any queer subtext, and isn’t actually interested in person-to-person human emotions like romantic love.
Its considerations are loftier: Is world peace realistic between people who were able to leave a dying planet, and those forced to stay behind? What about “coming home” could spark physical changes? Especially recently, as we sail past the deadline for preventive action to combat climate change — with the August 2021 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report describing climate change as “widespread, rapid, and intensifying” — nearly every sci-fi film seems to be revisiting the end of Earth as we know it. But similar to Chaos Walking, Settlers, and Voyagers, The Colony sidesteps the hard work needed to fix or reverse the devastation we have wrought. These characters move in a world that is stunningly visualized but superficially conceived, and The Colony embodies a genre that seems — perhaps like humanity itself — unable to take a step forward in imagining a different future.
The Colony opens on August 27 in theaters, on VOD, and on digital rental platforms like Amazon and Vudu.
The strange vehicle was reportedly seen on Florida Turnpike, with at least one social media user joking that “even a UFO can’t afford the Sunpass toll.”
A video showing what looks like a flying saucer-shaped vehicle cruising along a road in Florida emerged on social media this week.
The footage, posted on Instagram by a media company called Only in Dade, was apparently recorded by a driver who passed the "UFO."
According to Fox News, Only in Dade told them in an email: "It was on the Florida Turnpike and no it wasn’t photoshopped."
At least one social media user who commented on the video suggested that “people will say it's photo shopped.”
Others seemed more amused than perplexed by the spectacle, with one netizen jokingly inquiring “Where is Marvin the Martian?” while another mused that “even a UFO can’t afford the Sunpass toll.”
This UFO sighting video was just submitted to me through our Facebook page. It happened just a few hours ago (29th August 2021) over Carson, a city in Los Angeles County, California in the south bay region of Los Angeles.
Photographic evidence of UFOs has always been pretty shaky at best. Among all of the videos and photos of supposed UFOs there are the hoaxes and fakes, and this has only become more pronounced in recent years with the advent of advanced means to fake photos such as Photoshop. Yet controversial photos and video footage of UFOs go way back in time, to the days before Photoshop and computer manipulation, back to the simpler times of the 1950s.
By far the most famous and iconic purported UFO photos from the 1950s were taken by a couple by the name of Mr. and Mrs. Paul Trent, in rural McMinnville, Oregon. On May 11, 1950, Mrs. Trent was out on their farm when she allegedly noticed a strange, disc-like object flying out over their property. She immediately called out in a panic to her husband, who ran over to see it as well, managing to take two photographs of it before it shot off. These photos would hit the media, including Life Magazine and create quite the stir at the time. They were the clearest photographs ever seen of a “flying saucer,” which was a concept that was at the time just starting to really take off in the mainstream. For a long time, these photographs were widely discussed and debated, going on to become iconic in the UFO field, but it wasn’t until nearly two decades later that the Trent photographs would be subjected to any detailed analysis, by an astronomer from the University of Arizona, William K. Hartmann. After performing a painstakingly meticulous investigation of the photos, using various scientific photographic analysis techniques and photometric measurements with the original negatives, he came to the conclusion that they were the real deal, saying:
It appears significant that the simplest most direct interpretation of the photographs confirms precisely what the witnesses said they saw. To the extent that the photometric analysis is reliable, (and the measurements appear to be consistent), the photographs indicate an object with a bright shiny surface at considerable distance and on the order of tens of meters in diameter. While it would be exaggerating to say that we have positively ruled out a fabrication, it appears significant that the simplest most direct interpretation of the photographs confirms precisely what the witnesses said they saw, and that an extraordinary flying object, silvery, metallic, disc-shaped, tens of meters in diameter, and evidently artificial, flew within sight of [the] two witnesses.
One of the Trent photos
Of course, not everyone agreed, with more skeptical photographic analyses coming to the conclusion that the UFO was faked, which is not really hard to guess since looking back on the photos now they are obviously a hoax. However, experts continued to defend them as genuine, including optical physicist Dr. Bruce Maccabee, who did his own analysis and insisted that it was an object “over 1 kilometer away, and about 30 meters in diameter and 4 meters thick,” while also debunking many of the skeptical arguments. The Trent photographs are now widely considered to be faked, but they are an interesting case of early UFO photographs astounding everyone when they were first released.
Another set of photos that made waves in their day were taken in 1952, in Barra da Tijuca, Brazil. On May 7, 1952, press photographer Ed Keffel and reporter Joao Martins were in the area on an assignment when they spotted a strange object in the sky moving very fast at approximately 4:30 p.m. They at first thought it was a plane, but soon realized that this was something else, as it was flying too fast and in a very odd manner. It looked like some sort of flying disc, and Keffel was able to shake off his astonishment enough to take a series of five photographs of the object before it disappeared. These photos would later appear in O Cruzeiro magazine in its May 24, 1952 issue, where they immediately earned wide acclaim for being among the best photographic evidence of UFOs ever taken. The Brazilian Air Force would even conduct a full analysis of the photos and deem them to be genuine, but of course skeptics say it is all a hoax, citing inconsistencies in the lighting and shadows that contradict the witness claims, but Keffel and Martins have always defended the photographs, with Marin saying:
I herewith confirm that in May 1952, I saw an “unidentified aerial object” at Barra da Tijuca, as was published, with every detail, in the review [magazine] 0 Cruzeiro at the time. Together with me was the photographer-reporter Ed Keffel, an exemplary professional, well-succeeded and well-respected for his honesty and seriousness, who obtained a series of photos of the above-referred object. These photos were also published by the above-mentioned review, for which both of us worked at the time. Besides being a journalist, I am also an engineer; and I also have a large experience and knowledge of meteorological, astronomical, and optical phenomena. I have experience of all known types of aircraft and can state that the referred object cannot be framed in any natural phenomena or aircraft of my knowledge.
Neither I nor Ed Keffel tried to derive any financial profit from the fact. We were at the time exclusively contracted by that review [0 Cruzeiro], and there we handed in our report and the photos, without receiving any extra bonus for either. Neither did we receive-nor did we wish to-any payment from anybody, either for the account or for the photos or for the appearances we were practically obliged to make on different occasions on television… I narrated the fact in free talks to military authorities and university auditoriums. I do not know what that object was, and because of this, I classified it in the category of “unidentified flying object”, commonly called a “flying saucer.” The incident, besides the annoyances it entailed, contrived to call my attention on the subject as an only advantage, and consequently I have done research on the subject with the greatest detachment, both in sightings here in Brazil and abroad.
The Brazil photo
Also from 1952 is an actual color film taken of a supposed UFO in the U.S. state of Utah. On this occasion, Warrant Officer D.C. Newhouse was out with his wife in the vicinity of Tremonton, Utah, when they witnessed a formation of flat and circular disc-shaped flying craft flying across the sky in broad daylight. Newhouse happened to have a 16mm color camera with a 3-inch telephoto lens, with which he was able to film the mysterious objects as they traversed the sky. The excited Newhouse would perhaps foolishly submit the film to the Air force, who later returned the film with sections and frames mysteriously missing. The Air Force concluded that the film was of out of focus seagulls, but if this were the case, then why had portions of the film been removed? This was never explained. Other experts who looked at the film debunked the seabird theory, such as Dr. Robert M.L. Baker, Jr., Douglas Aircraft Corporation, who said:
The motion of the objects is not exactly what one would expect from a flock of soaring birds, not the slightest indication of a decrease in brightness due to periodic turning with the wind or flapping. The evidence remains rather contradictory and no single hypothesis of a natural phenomenon yet suggested seems to completely account for the UFO involved.
What did Newhouse film out there? You can see the footage here and decide for yourself. Another photo of a UFO from the same year comes to us from the country of Peru, where on the afternoon of July 19 of that year a Sr. Domingo Troncoso, then with the Peruvian Customs Office at Puerto Maldonado on the jungle choked Bolivian border, saw a gigantic cigar-shaped object soaring over the rainforest leaving a trail of smoke or mist behind it. Troncoso was able to take a single photo of the object before it shot off out of sight. Apparently at the same time, other witnesses in the region had seen it as well, and one Peruvian UFO researcher would tell the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena (NICAP) of this:
In Lima I met Senior Pedro Bardi, who is an agricultural engineer. On July 19, 1952, while on a farm in the Madre de Dios section of Peru, he and others saw a saucer. It was about 4.30 p.m. and they were talking to Lima by radio. Suddenly, according to Bardi, the radio went dead. They looked out the window and saw a round object going by at high speed. (The witnesses included Pedro Arellano, owner of the farm). The object had passed; it was at an estimated 100 meters altitude and was a little smaller than a DC-3, according to Bardi. It made a buzzing sound as it went by.
The object’s speed was determined by a report that it was seen four minutes later near Porto Maldonado, 120 kilometers distant. This speed was computed at 1117 miles per hour. The photograph was secured from a customs administrator named Domingo Troncosco, who said he had taken it as the object flew near the port. Though the photo shows a cigar-shaped object instead of the round shape Bardi described, this could possibly have been due to an elongated effect caused by speed. It seems obvious to me that the photo is genuine. Incidentally, I strongly doubt if this particular saucer was anything but earth-made. The object traveled from left to right at about airplane speed. When the trail settled to ground it turned out to be a mass of thin fibrous threads.
Troncoso’s photograph
Moving ahead to 1957, there is a curious set of photographs taken from the British ship S.S. Ramsay by a radio officer named Thad Fogl. At the time, the ship was near the coast of California when Fogle was called to the deck by the excited 2nd Officer at around 2:30 p.m. When he arrived on deck, he found other crew members staring in awe at a massive disc hanging in the sky. He would later tell Flying Saucer Review Magazine of what happened next:
Without being told twice, I grabbed my Yashica C reflex camera from my wardrobe and dashed on the side of the bridge. Sure enough, there was a queer looking object hovering in the distance. It was suitable for a shot so I waited. In the meantime, I tried to keep under control my shaking knees and hands, and watched the disc. It made no noise and was not more than a mile away. It was silver and black. There was no smoke or any gases coming from it. However, under the disc, a red light pulsated.
We thought it tried to signal, so the 2nd Officer grabbed the Aldis and flicked back, but there was no response. At last the disc came down near enough and I got one shot. Then it turned and I shot again. The disc was rather thick, and had a flat dome. There were no ports. However, there were some black marks, and I wonder if they were not some sort of exhausts. Then we noticed a ladder! Whether it really was a ladder I can’t say. It could be some depression in the craft. The object moved very slowly and stayed with us for a few minutes. Then it shot with quick acceleration towards a rugged mountain, and the desert coast of sun-baked California.
One of Fogle’s photographs
The photographs would turn out to be incredibly clear and showed something that seemed decidedly otherworldly. These photos would be published in several high-profile publications, including The London Illustrated News and Life magazine, earning Fogle much unwanted publicity, much of it negative. His photos were widely derided as clear fakes, and seeking to avoid any more embarrassment, he would say that he had indeed hoaxed them, although he would later claim that this was just to dispel all of the negative publicity being aimed at him and to get everyone off his back. After that he refused to talk on the matter anymore, even though there were plenty of believers who suspected that the photos were actually real. Indeed, we are left to ask if any of these could possibly be real, but real or not, they form the first stirrings of a wave of the proposed photographic UFO evidence that was to come, and have their own place within the world of Ufology.
New Crop Circle Found At Little Nutford, Dorset, England ( August 23, 2021 )
Another Crop Circle was reported in Little Nutford, near Blandford Forum, Dorset, England on August 23, 2021.
These mysterious patterns in fields crop up overnight.
Credit : Stonehenge Dronescapes
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UFO Fleet Sighted Over Chicago ( July 9, 2021 )
Unquestionable and undisputed record of a fleet of UFOs in Chicago Columbus (Christopher) Park, on July 9, 2021. : It's over 30 UFOs!
Description:
′′ I had a once in a lifetime experience. Leaving Expressway 290 Austin Avenue saw UFOs from my sunroof at Austin traffic light and Jackson-Columbus park. I stopped and filmed an unquestionable proof that the UFO phenomenon is real! You will see over 30 UFOs in heaven. A jet goes flying too. These objects are stationary and move in pairs.
MUFON CASE : 117571 Snoqualmie Pass, Washington ( August 27, 2021)
Mutual UFO Network : MUFON SUBMISSIONS : Something seemed to be hovering and darting across a mountain lake.
Long Description of Sighting Report - Case 117571
I hiked up to Granite Mountain Firelookout near Snoqualmie Pass and before leaving the area. I decided to walk to a view point overlooking 2 lakes North of the Firelookout. One of the two lakes caught my attention, the one nearest to me. The one in question is named Crystal Lake. I wouldn't know how far this lake was from where I stood but it was far but close enough that I could see something darting back and fourth across the surface of the lake. My phone has decent zoom and I was able to capture 3 videos of this object. Because of the distance and quality of the zoomed in video its hard to say if it was some kind of UFO or an entity of some type... whatever the case. This object moved nothing like an animal or man made craft. When I 1st spotted this object it was moving erratically above the surface of the lake and it sure seemed like it spotted me. Realizing it was being watched it slowed down and started to move in a straight line towards me but still seemingly hovering above the water. That is when I started to record the 2nd video.( the 1st video I took unknowingly before I spotted it over the lake) I only recorded for 13 seconds when I decided to switch to camera mode because in that mode I would be able to zoom in a little bit more. I took a series of photos where this object without a doubt moved with intention. It made its way towards a dark spot in the lake and as it got closer to this spot a white tail like protrusion appears out of nowhere. It seems like this object lands on this black spot and that's when I switch back to video mode and record 42 seconds of it making its way towards the shoreline very slowly. As I watch and rewatch these videos I am able to zoom in even more to the object and there are some distinct shapes this object forms. From wing like features to a circle, dome like structure. At one point it looks like a stingray gliding/hovering above the surface of the lake.
Date Submitted : 2021-08-27 Date of Event : 2021-08-26 MUFON SUBMITTER FILES :
PENTAGON DOCUMENT TELLS HOW TO ANSWER QUESTIONS ABOUT “EXTRATERRESTRIAL TECHNOLOGY”
PENTAGON DOCUMENT TELLS HOW TO ANSWER QUESTIONS ABOUT “EXTRATERRESTRIAL TECHNOLOGY”
HERE’S EXACTLY WHAT’S IN IT.
Talking Points
The Department of Defense (DOD) has released a document of talking points for how government officials should respond to questions about UFOs.
The document — known as a “briefing card” — was obtained via a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request by The Black Vault, an online database of declassified government documents. The briefing card itself is filled with messaging and talking points to help public affairs officials navigate tricky questions such as “Has the Department found any evidence of extraterrestrial technology?” and “Why can’t you tell us anything about UAPs or what the [UAP Task Force] is doing?”
You can check out the entire three-page memo below:
Top Line Messages
The Office of the Secretary of Defense’s public affairs received the card on May 17, in anticipation of the (frankly disappointing) UFO report to Congress that came out the next month. It shows that the Pentagon was — at the very least — keenly aware of public interest in the report and the government’s knowledge of UFOs in general.
There’s not a whole lot of new information to be gleaned from the document as it sticks to what we’ve already heard from the Pentagon in the past regarding UFOs. However, the fact that they created the briefing card at all is a testament to how much they wanted to control the messaging surrounding the topic.
This summer’s blockbuster read was a congressionally mandated government reportfrom the Office of the Director of National Intelligence titled Preliminary Assessment: Unidentified Aerial Phenomena.
It had a little something for the UFO believer and nonbeliever alike — a minimal something, but something nonetheless.
The U.S. government has spent decades scoffing at UFO reports, often dismissing them as hoaxes, spoofs, or optical illusions.
The Pentagon even renamed UFOs as UAPs, “Unidentified Aerial Phenomena,” to indicate the uncertainly about whether what people were seeing were actually “objects” that were “flying” or simply something that looked like a flying object.
The nine-page declassified report to Congress examined 144 documented reports since 2004, mostly from U.S. military pilots, and concluded that at least 80 of the sightings, including three recorded on cockpit videos by Navy pilots “probably do represent physical objects,” noting that they “registered across multiple sensors,” including radar, infrared, electro-optical, weapon seekers, and visual observation.
And in 18 cases, the objects also appeared to “exhibit unusual flight characteristics” with the ability to “maneuver abruptly, or move at considerable speed, without discernable means of propulsion.”
In other words, they’re real, but real what?
Aside from that singular, albeit significant finding, the report reached no definitive conclusions and included numerous caveats that undercut the certainty of its judgments.
For instance, it noted the targeting sensors on fighter aircraft “are not generally suited for identifying UAP” and that the appearance of objects moving in ways that defy known technology “could be the result of sensor errors, spoofing, or observer misperception.”
And while the review found no evidence flying objects were attributable to secret programs by either the U.S. or its adversaries, it didn’t rule out that Russia orChina could be working on some “breakthrough or disruptive technology.”
In fact, the report didn’t rule out any plausible explanation, including birds, balloons, recreational drones, plastic bags, or natural atmospheric phenomena such as ice crystals, moisture, and thermal fluctuations.
And it solved only a single case, tracing the sighting to a deflating balloon.
The report also makes no mention of the most popular and widely held belief among UFO enthusiasts that some UFOs could be alien spacecraft.
“If and when individual UAP incidents are resolved, they will fall into one of five potential explanatory categories: airborne clutter, natural atmospheric phenomena, USG or industry developmental programs, foreign adversary systems, and a catchall ‘other’ bin,” the report concludes.
It's that “catchall ‘other’ bin” that has UFOlogists intrigued.
For while there is no evidence whatsoever that the unexplained aerial objects are extraterrestrial, in the absence of disproving evidence, one could argue, however unlikely, anything is possible.
Or, as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes put it, “Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth.”
The truth may be out there, but the truth is that nobody knows what it is.
Meanwhile, the intelligence report is helping to change the culture of ridicule for “out there” theories, with senior members of the scientific, policy, military, and intelligence communities beginning to take the topic more seriously.
“We don’t know what these things are. We have no evidence to suggest that they are from outer space, but at the same time, we have no evidence to suggest that they’re not,” said Luis Elizondo, the former director of the Pentagon’s once-secret Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, in a recent online discussion .
“We are quite convinced that we’re dealing with a technology that is multigenerational, several generations ahead of what we consider next-generation technology … something that could be anywhere between 50 to 1,000 years ahead of us.”
It’s this area of exploration that has captured the interest of the Pentagon’s Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force, which said it intends to focus future analysis on the small number of cases in which UAPs “appeared to display unusual flight characteristics.”
As for what the Tic Tac-shaped objects might be, Elizondo said he has a pretty open mind.
“There’s a lot of options out there. This could be something that is extrahyperdimensional. Now, I don’t mean extradimensional in a woo-woo sense. I mean extradimensional in a quantum physics sense,” Elizondo said, expanding on theories about alternate universes.
“If we already know that 99% of the universe we cannot perceive or interact with, then there may be other options here,” he suggested. “This may not necessarily be something from outer space. In fact, this could be something as natural to our very own planet as us; we’re just now at a point we’re beginning to technologically be able to interact and collect data.”
While it’s true that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, it is not evidence of presence, either.
“If anything is possible, then nothing is disprovable. And if it ain’t disprovable, it’s arguably at the very outer limits of what science can deal with,” said Joel Achenbach, science writer for the Washington Post and author of the 1999 book Captured by Aliens.
“The alien explanation for UFOs requires a massive infrastructure of presumptions, not least of which is that the aliens, whatever their motivation, have found a way to get here,” Achenbach wrote in a recent essay in the WashingtonPost magazine.
“The nearest star is about 25 trillion miles away, and although this sounds like hyperbole, it is, in fact, the correct number. So, to do space travel, you really need warp drive. And there is no such thing as warp drive.”
“We're still living in a sort of atmosphere of ambiguity,” said Greg Eghigian, a professor of history at Pennsylvania State University who is writing a book on the history of UFO sightings and claims of alien contact.
“This is also the nature of this phenomenon, right?” Eghigian said at an online event sponsored by the Washington Post.
“Is it an ‘it’? Is it a ‘they’? Is it some ‘thing’? It's always been and, I think will be, shrouded in deep ideas and notions of mystery.”
Still, any claim that UFOs are interstellar visitors from across the galaxy will have to meet what’s known as the "Sagan standard," named for the late astronomer Carl Sagan, who famously said, “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence."
Jamie McIntyre is the Washington Examiner’s senior writer on defense and national security. His morning newsletter, “Jamie McIntyre’s Daily on Defense,” is free and available by email subscription at dailyondefense.com.
Far from being a throw-away genre trope, the unresolved puzzle of extra-terrestrial visitors gives us unique insights into the nature of thought, communication and memory.
Vintage colour photograph of a flying saucer. Credit: Found Image Holdings/Corbis via Getty Images
The much–anticipated release earlier this summer of a US government report about unidentified flying objects – or ‘Unidentified Aerial Phenomena’ (UAPs), as they are termed in the publication – may have, on the surface at least, brought UFOs out of the realm of science-fiction and into the arena of mainstream science.
As well as the report, ordered by Congress, military films of various incidents of UAPs were released. The report concludes that while objects have been seen, there is no evidence for (nor against) these being of extra-terrestrial provenance. This combination of elements – aerial sightings, political interest for defence reasons, the possibility of unearthly origins, raised but neither endorsed nor quashed – has been repeated at intervals during the last seventy years. The pattern remains remarkably constant, both in the form of the question – are these UFOs from another planet? – and in the lack of any clear answer, for there is no incontrovertible evidence on either side of the debate.
In an unresolved puzzle of this enduring kind, we might ask about the categories in which the question is posed: what kind of thinking allows the problem to be termed in the way it has, and when did it come into existence? What allows us to think in terms of UFOs and their possibility or impossibility?
The media revolution
The crux lies in the changes associated with new forms of media. A series of new technologies, dating from the end of the nineteenth century and extending to the present, have permitted new experiences and new forms of imagination. The gramophone, for example, allows the experience of being addressed directly by an absent person, even a dead person. Radio, a later development, though not by much, permits us to hear disembodied voices from far away. Both, initially, had an uncanny quality; they abolished differences of time and space. Photographs, likewise, made present images of elsewhere, never encountered in experience, or brought before us images of people we may have known, even loved, but who had lives in other places. And motion pictures multiply novelties of these kinds: they not only present records of stretches of other times and places, but – through recording and replaying – create new perspectives and new angles on scenes, not only allowing new things to be seen but fresh details to emerge, reframing incidents, calling attention to hitherto unperceived moments of significance, and presenting short sequences that may alter the meaning of an encounter. In short, we might say that new media create new kinds of experience and possibilities, and turn our lives into new sorts of narrative.
New media have always had this kind of effect. But the means of recording, storage and replaying developed from the 1880s on were particularly striking both in their effects and in the widespread nature of their impact, touching not simply an elite few, but almost everyone, through radio and cinema, altering the nature of experience and memory, creating new shared ways of being in the world. As a population, we perceive everyday life in categories that derive from these experiences, these vivid enactments of things that are not there. The world in which we live has changed, and these new ways of grasping life as it is lived operate at several levels. For instance, we anticipate the sudden presence of minds from elsewhere; we can receive direct communication from absent friends; we can conceive of new perspectives on situations, modelled often on shots from above that reveal patterns of behaviour or shots from below that reveal relations of power, and, most of all, we can conceive of ourselves as caught up in stories, or being touched by other stories, unknown to us but going on in the same space. Our life is, to a degree, cinematic, shaped by audio-visual images. And once collectively we have glimpsed the power of media in this regard, we can conceive of the world as being ordered by codes, and can imagine it is constructed by invisible means and controlled by unknown people whose intentions are hidden from us. A world shaped by experience of film is also, potentially, a paranoid world.
Flying saucers arrive
Flying saucers are a small feature of the imaginative space created within these new technological frames. They can be dated quite precisely: spaceships appear in fiction contemporary with the development of radio and, like radio waves, travel through space, hiding their origin. The motives behind the appearance of spaceships are also often hidden – they make unexpected contact, and convey messages with implications that are hard to evaluate. These ideas were elaborated in early science fiction, a branch of pulp publishing popularised in the first half of the twentieth century, which drew on theosophical speculations for many of its details, describing spirit forms travelling between planets, organising cosmic evolution, and aiding the development of the human race. These works offered a meditation on the contemporary human condition, confronted with the expansion of scientific knowledge and of the technology that accompanied it, and laid down most of the ground rules that apply in modern UFO sightings. In this fashion, science fiction provided content for a form arising independently.
But flying saucers only became a reality in the context of the Second World War and its transmutation into the Cold War; they co-existed with the extraordinary acceleration of technological development associated with the notion of ‘total war,’ with the invention of atomic weapons, rocketry and supersonic flight, together with a range of other industries, including those concerned with communications – radio, radar, and the rapid transmission and analysis of information through what became known as information technology. Weapons and communications form a single complex and define the modern world we still precariously inhabit.
When they first appeared in the late 1940s, flying saucers were an amalgam of characteristics drawn from contemporary research projects – silent flight, radical circular designs, alternative power sources – and exhibited powers of manoeuvrability, acceleration and hovering that resembled images on screen, and showed evidence of interest in human military and industrial sites, with sightings concentrated around military testing grounds, nuclear stations, electrical plants and so forth. They were of interest to military intelligence and, since many of the sightings of daytime objects or night-time lights were by United States Air Force pilots, a unit was set up by the Air Force (newly separated from the Army) in 1947, a small part of the intelligence operation concerned with the properties of new enemy aircraft. This unit had a varied history, only being reabsorbed into other projects in 1968. Its concerns were precisely those of the recent report to Congress.
Going supersonic
The report looks at recent sightings of UAPs – fast moving objects filmed by aircraft or from naval vessels, objects which show extraordinary manoeuvrability and which exhibit intelligent behaviour, apparently investigating ships and accelerating away when approached by aircraft, shooting into the sky or, sometimes, plunging into the sea. The question of their origin is an important one: they might be supersonic weapons systems produced by other countries, yet their performance appears vastly advanced and beyond any known technology, with acceleration and deceleration powers that would destroy any human pilot. Discussions of the report have led to renewed theorising about potential interstellar origins, possible life-bearing planets in other solar systems, the conditions for development of other technological civilisations on such planets, and speculation concerning projects of observation and communication carried out by artificial intelligence – robots perhaps launched thousands of years ago but capable of undertaking research in our locality and in real time. The report, however, is far more circumspect, confining itself to reviewing the evidence but eschewing conclusions about extra-terrestrial origins.
All this discussion shows an underlying concern not only with technological innovation – the latest military hardware and developments in information technology, not to mention the findings of radio astronomy – but also with a certain conception of communication, understood as the central characteristic of intention and therefore of intelligent life, human or otherwise. Communication is understood in this sense: that ideas may be conveyed without distortion or interruption between minds – effectively, a bodiless voice speaking straight to the receiver’s ear, for which radio offers a model. This idea is far older than the Second World War, but it takes a new form in the late 1940s, linked with the appearance of the technical concept of ‘information’ emerging from considerations concerning transmission of signals and encrypting (and decoding) messages. In practice, conveying precise information in an undistorted form over distances is only a small part of complex common enterprises, whether in war or peacetime. But in the post-war period, the concept of information has come to be considered a sufficient key to describe all kinds of processes, in nature and in every aspect of human activity: not only genetics and cell biology, but economics, diplomacy, social life, personal relations and therapy have all been expressed in terms of the unimpeded exchange of information. And using this concept, the communication of information from one mind to another has been central to imagining the purposes and actions of visitors from other planets. Speculation concerning their aims in showing themselves, their possible agenda, what they might be seeking to exchange, and our anticipation of the appropriate forms of contact (the search for signals, construing and constructing alien languages), are all cast in terms of the exchange of information. Without the concept of information and the ambition of its pure (bodiless) communication, we would have no frame within which to make sense of our hopes of encounter.
Alien encounters
Although it appears to take us some way from the content of the recent Congress report – unidentified objects seen, defence concerns, the source(s) of the objects in question – it is worth adding that ‘information’, which is a structuring concern of the report, links up with a particular understanding of ‘memory.’ This is memory conceived as the retention of accurate information; the recovery of a particular significant encounter in the past and therefore an accurate record retained with all its significance intact, capable of being re-lived and explored in full. This is memory as film. This idea is vital for the potential memory recovery in alien abduction cases, but it is also needed to give character and purpose to the possible alien visitors, who may be future forms of life derived from the human race, bearing an understanding of the past (which for us, means our future history) and so are able to help guide us through threats and crises. Again, although the idea of memory has a long history, the concept only gained its present possibilities, that of access to accurate and complete records, recently, with new recording technologies and the focus on the ideal of transparent communication of information between minds. Hence the play with artificial intelligence in satellites, monitoring us and, perhaps, relaying information home.
The basic materials, then, for understanding the continuing life of sightings of unidentified flying objects are these. First, the close mutual implication of weapons technology and media images, together with the taking up in these images of theosophical ideas, transmitted through science fiction, of minds ‘out there’ concerned with human contributions to cosmic evolution. Then, an over-reliance on the ideal of direct communication between minds, taken up and elaborated in the idea that information constitutes a key to the intelligibility of the human and natural worlds alike. And last, a notion of memory as the recall of exact information. These three clusters of interrelated ideas have remained relatively constant, although developing, over the past eighty years. And once this complex was initiated, around the end of Second World War, it was inevitable that something like flying saucers would make an appearance in a world exhausted by warfare, dominated by security concerns, and obliged to place its hope of survival in the continuous development of new and extraordinary technologies. The categories still generate UFO sightings of the kind that prompt questions: ‘Are they true? Or error? Or fiction?’. This creates accompanying dilemmas for politicians and strategists responsible for national security; providing material for experts, commentators and amateur speculators.
The formula has been put to work by the wider population; it has become a key to popular thinking about the centrality of the military-industrial complex to American public life, whether in the ongoing role of media representations that simultaneously display some aspects of that centrality (NASA, for example,) and occlude others (such as DARPA), or, more generally, in the play of information, memory, and forgetting which appears both in widespread public distrust of the state and in a vast range of therapies, whether concerned with recovered memory or with clearing obstacles to communication with self or others. In short, this complex of ideas is well instantiated in the modern world, part of the fabric of our imagination, continually evolving, but with certain constant features.
We shall not, then, cease to be confronted with reports of UFOs (or UAPs) and their unresolvable dilemmas until a profound shift occurs in the way in which we make sense of novelties of many kinds. Turning the theory on its head, the continuing, if also mutating, life of flying saucers offers a reliable clue to central questions about the world in which we find ourselves.
August 27, 2021
Tim Jenkins
Tim Jenkins retired from the University of Cambridge, where he taught anthropology and religion, in October 2019. Since then, he has been writing a book on reports of flying saucer sightings, provisional title Images of Elsewhere, which is near completion. Previous publications include Religion in English Everyday Life (1999), The Life of Property (2010), and Of Flying Saucers and Social Scientists (2013). He lives in Cambridge.
Aphoto taken by the Mars Perseverance Sol 184: Right Mastcam-Z Camera on Aug. 26, 2021 reveals what looks like a mars rat sitting between rocks.
Recognizable are the eyes, nose, legs and it's long tail.
It is not the first time a mars rat or rodent has been found in a mars image. In a photo, taken by the Curiosity rover on Sept. 28, 2012 a mars rat or rodent can be seen sitting between small rocks.
Pareidolia? Or this is proof that there is life on Mars?
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- Gemiddelde waardering: 0/5 - (0 Stemmen) Categorie:Ruins, strange artifacts on other planets, moons, ed ( Fr, EN, NL )
The Black Triangle Patent – US PATENT 20060145019A1
The Black Triangle Patent – US PATENT 20060145019A1
The whole patent and schematics are here. The designer is/was John Quincy St. Clair who was a very busy bee for a few years. There’s a list of his other patents here. This one was issued back in 2006.
The guy might have been eccentric. A crazy conspiracy idea I’ve just had is he could have been applying for the patents to see what response he got. For example, someone from the patent office saying the technology has already been patented would be fun.
1. A spacecraft comprised of the following components:
(a) a triangular hull in the form of an equilateral triangle;
(b) two copper plates attached on opposite vertical sides at each of the three corners of the hull (1a) such that a sharp vertical edge is formed where they come together;
(c) an electrostatic generator used to charge the back two copper-cladded corners (1b) to a high positive voltage, and the third forward copper-cladded corner to a high negative voltage;
(d) a horizontal slot antenna array mounted-on the sides of the hull; and (e) a frequency generator, antenna and coaxial cables to drive the antenna array (1d).
2. To create, by claims (1a, 1b, 1c), an intense vertical line charge at the corners (1b) and a horizontal electric field that that is parallel to the sides of the hull (1a);
3. To create, by claims (1d,1e), an electromagnetic wave with a vertically polarized electric field traveling outward from the side of the hull (1a); and
4. To create, by claims (2,3), an interaction of the electrostatic field (2) with the electromagnetic wave (3) such that a combined spacetime curvature pressure is generated on the hull in the upward and forward direction to produce lift and propulsion respectively.
Just when you think you haven’t heard of a mysterious cattle mutilation in a while, a mysterious case of cattle mutilations pops up in the current mutilation capitol of the U.S. – Oregon — and in Argentina, South America’s cattle mutilation hotspot. Are they related? Has anyone checked if their latitudes match?
Let’s start in Oregon, where the Thomas Angus Ranch reported finding a prize purebred Black Angus bull, valued at $4,500, dead and mutilated on Aug. 14 at the Greenbar Ranch in Wheeler County. As in most mutilation cases, the owner found the bull missing its nose, tongue, left cheek, ear, eye, reproductive organs and part of its tail – all removed with what appeared to be precise surgical cuts. A necropsy could not be performed because the bull was decomposed, having been dead for more than 24 hours.
Capital Press reports this is the fifth case of a cattle mutilation in Wheeler County in the past 20 months, while nearby Harney County has had five cases in the past four years, two this year in May and July, and adjoining Crook County had some in early 2021. The sheriff departments in all counties are sharing information, but Deputy Jeremiah Holmes of the Wheeler County Sheriff’s Office, who has investigated a number of them, says all ten cases in Wheeler and Harney counties are still open, and all ten are “eerily similar.” Before you ask, they’ve notified the FBI but have been disappointed in its prior responses.
This is making me very angry.
“In recent weeks, unusual occurrences of mutilated animals have appeared in the province. In Hasenkamp a producer found a heifer of about 400 kilos with strange mutilations, it was missing the udder, genitals, part of the jaw, tongue and eyes. Meanwhile in Isletas, Diamante department, a cattle family found one of their mutilated goats, only missing the complete tongue, two eyes, one ear and the jawbone. The teeth were bare, down to the bone.” (Google translation)
While Oregon is the Northern Hemisphere’s cattle mutilation hotspot, Argentina holds that dubious honor south of the equator. El Once reports on two recent occurrences in Entre Ríos Province in north-eastern Argentina with the same types of mutilations as seen in Oregon. While the Chupacabra is sometimes blamed for mutilations in Argentina, El Once contacted UFO investigator Andrea Pérez Simondini, who says mysterious lights are often seen around the time of these mutations and thinks they have a “direct relationship” to each other.
“50% of the complaints are accompanied by sightings of lights and physical alterations in the animal, lack of large volumes of water in the area, such as in Australian tanks, power outages and when we measure the time and shape, a kind of alteration in the ground with electrical conductivity. We are very interested in these types of cases, because we recognized a type of cut and it is called ‘sawn’; which is a kind of saw and thanks to the photos we were able to identify it in the goat’s jaw.” (Google translation)
Pérez Simondini says that type of saw is used in genetic research and has been trying to get authorities to look at these mutilations as possible alien genetic samplings for years.
As with cattle and livestock mutilations in general, it’s difficult to fathom why extraterrestrials would only sample cows, goats and other field animals, and not humans or other livestock or wildlife. There are many who believe this is secret genetic research done by humans, either in the massive and competitive cattle business or in government, where they might be doing undercover disease research.
How about teaching all cattle to do this?
On the latitude question, the Argentine mutilations were in the southern 32nd parallel while those in Oregon were in the northern 44th parallel. Some researchers in the U.S. plotted UFO sightings and cattle mutilations on a map and found a high concentration along the northern 37th parallel, which runs from California through Nevada, Colorado, Kansas, Missouri, Illinois, Kentucky and across to Virginia, and includes Area 51 in Nevada, the alleged secret underground alien base at Dulce, New Mexico, as Taos, New Mexico, home of many mysteries including its famous hum. Is the UFO highway expanding beyond the 37th parallel and opening a southern corridor? Can it be blamed on climate change?
Cattle and livestock mutilations around the world look like a crime that should be easily solved. Why haven’t they been? The mystery continues.
Over the decades there have been all manner of reports of encounters with beings and entities from beyond our understanding. These have taken many forms, including the familiar “grey aliens,” more reptilian creatures, and even insectoids. Yet some reports get even weirder than these, way weirder in fact, completely evading all reason and classification. Here we will look at a selection of various encounters with alien entities that are just about the most bizarre and bonkers there have ever been.
Starting in the 1950s, we have a really weird account from 1954, at an unspecified location in the country of Canada. On July 2 of that year, a 23-year-old Canadian miner named Ennio La Sarza was out in the wilds when he saw a spherical object about 25-feet in diameter, and with a set of portholes around the edge and “pieces of landing gear and something like a retractable antenna on top of it” land in a nearby clearing to disgorge three completely bizarre entities. They were described as being 13 feet tall, with bluish-green skin and glowing bodies. Their heads held antennae on top and a single eye set within them, and had six evenly distributed sets of arms tipped with crab-like pincers that clattered open and shut. The leader of the group apparently rushed La Sarza and hit him with a “psychic blow” that knocked him to the ground, before they all got back into their craft and headed off at great speed.
From 1957 we have the strange case of a retired teacher Mrs. Mary M. Starr. She claims that on December 16, 1957, she was in her home near Old Saybrook, Connecticut, when she was woken at around 3 a.m. by a very bright light outside of her room. When she looked outside, she could see a large hovering craft with big square windows hovering over her clothesline, and as she looked on, she could see entities moving about within. These truly bizarre creatures were about 4 feet tall, with arms but no hands and transparent cubes for heads with some sort of red core ensconced within and rubbery bodies that surrounded them like skirts. The creatures ran about in front of the windows for a time waving about their handless arms, before the windows suddenly vanished as if never there and whole craft began to glow brightly and they silently shot off into the night to leave her standing there in awe.
The late author Brad Steiger covered in his book Strangers from the Skies the case of Hans Gustafsson and 30-year-old Stig Rydberg, who on December 20, 1958 were were on their way along Route 45 from Höganäs to Heisenberg in Sweden in the early morning hours along a foggy road that had such poor visibility that the two friends decided to pull over near the rural village of Domsten. As they walked about outside the vehicle, they soon noticed through the haze that there was some sort of glow emanating from the surrounding forest nearby. The two decided to hike off into the darkened, glow frosted trees to try and see where the light was coming from, and after penetrating around 150 feet into the woods they allegedly came across the source of the glow, which proved to be far more bizarre than they had anticipated. There before them was a disc-like object resting on two legs around two feet long, the whole of which cast a scintillating glow of ever-changing colors. Even odder than the sight of this apparent flying saucer was what could be seen cavorting about the vicinity, which were 3-foot-long amorphous blobs that Rydberg would describe as follows:
They were like protozoa, just a bit darker than most, sort of a bluish color, hopping and jumping around the saucer like globs of animated jelly.
Nowhere on the bodies were any visible limbs or sensory organs, nor any other discernible features, and it was as if they were just pulsating gobs of gelatinous goo that could somehow levitate over the ground. Things got rather tense very quickly when these unusual entities suddenly surrounded the two puzzled men and purportedly began to engulf their limbs within their throbbing masses, described as feeling like “magnetic dough,” while at the same time exuding a terrible stench like “ether and burnt sausage.” No matter how much the men kicked and lashed out at these mysterious entities, they were able to either dodge or absorb the blows to little effect, as if they were made of jelly. It seemed as if the blob-like creatures were trying to drag the increasingly terrified witnesses towards the glimmering disc, and no matter how hard the two witnesses fought back and struggled it did little good.
By chance, Rydberg finally managed to tear himself free and run back towards their car with the alien blobs in hot pursuit. When he reached the vehicle he leaned heavily on the car’s horn, piercing the night with a wall of noise in an effort to draw anyone’s attention to their plight, but which also seemed to have the effect of startling the creatures enough to let go of Gustafsson. The blobs then huddled under their craft, filed inside it, and shot off away into the night sky, leaving behind a screeching whistling blare, that nauseating stink, and two very shaken men who found that they were covered in strange bruises and cuts.
Gustafsson and Rydberg perhaps understandably kept the story to themselves for some time, but when it finally came out it became a minor sensation in Sweden. The two witnesses were also interviewed by police, and although the story was without a doubt off-the-wall, they could find no sign of any hoaxing going on, and even when the two were secretly monitored when they thought they were alone, they did not let on that there was any lying or trickery going on. Gustafsson and Rydberg were also found to be in fine physical and psychological health, and in the end, police concluded that the men really seemed to have been traumatized by what they at least truly believed they had seen, whatever that was. It is difficult to ascertain just what it was that these two men saw, or at least thought they saw, and with no other accounts anywhere near it we will probably never know.
Moving into the next decade, we have the extremely weird encounter of an unidentified business man in France, who in November of 1962 was purportedly driving along a lonely rural road in the region of Var, France, when he had an amazing encounter that would change his life. At the tome it was allegedly raining profusely, when he saw something rather odd in the gloom ahead. There through the slashing rain he saw huddled in the road a group of figures that he at first took to be people, but which would soon prove to be far stranger. He would say of the encounter:
Rounding the bend, I saw, 80-meters [just over 260-feet] ahead, a group of figures clustered in the middle of the road. I slowed down to avoid the group, and at the same moment it split into two parts, suddenly and jerkily. My window was down and I leaned my head out slightly to see what was the matter; it was then that I saw beasts, some kind of bizarre animals, with the heads of birds, and covered with some sort of plumage, which were hurling themselves from two sides towards my car. Terrified, I wound up my window, accelerated like a mad man, and the stopped 150-meters [approximately 500-feet] further on. I turned round and saw these things, these beasts, these nightmarish sort of beings, which were heading, with a sort of flapping of wings, towards a luminous dark-blue object, which hung in the air over a field on the other side of the road.
As if all of this wasn’t odd enough, he would claim that as the menacing humanoids flew up towards the object they were literally “sucked up” into it “as if by a whirlwind,” after which the craft shot off at breathtaking speed. What was going on here? In 1965 we have the rather odd experience of 25 year-old Geoffrey Maskey, Mavis Fordyce and Michael Johnson, who on the evening of September 20, 1965 were driving along a remote road near Felixstowe, England when things would get truly weird, indeed. They apparently pulled over to the side of the road to have a chat, when Johnson suddenly and inexplicably got out of the car to go wandering off into the gloom. The others assumed he had just gone off to do nature’s business, but the two young men then heard a “high-pitched humming sound” coming from the surrounding wilderness. As they looked around for the source of the unsettling noise, they saw an oval-shaped UFO hovering about 90 feet over their car, surrounded by a creepy orange glow.
It would not be until the next day that Johnson would arrive and tell them of how the evening had gone. He would claim that he had been commanded by some unknown force to get out of the vehicle and go into those woods, and that when he had ventured out into the trees, he had encountered a strange creature that had large eyes and was “Engulfed by orange flames.” As soon as he had seen this flaming beast, he had blacked out completely. He would say that he had no memories of what had happened next, and had woken up the next day in a hospital bed, only to make his way back to his friends with his incredible story.
Perhaps even weirder than all of this is a story form the winter of 1967, when a farmer in Missouri had a rather harrowing and otherworldly experience with what he would call “Green Space Penguins.” 64-year-old Claude Edwards would claim that he had gotten up to do his farm work like any other day, when he walked across one of his fields and saw sitting there a “massive, grayish-green, mushroom- like object which was perched atop a circular tube.” As he stared on in awe, he noticed a group of diminutive figures waddling about below the object, and he noticed that all of this was seriously spooking his cows. For some reason, perhaps out of curiosity, Edwards started to approach the strange creatures, and he could see that they were 3 feet high, with grayish-green skin and no hands, tiny feet, and no necks. On their beaked heads they wore goggles of some type, and the whole of it caused him to describe them as little green penguins, which he said swarmed about the bottom of the UFO and seemed to ignore the farmer at first.
As he drew closer, Edwards claimed that he had picked up some rocks in a plan to lob them in their direction, but when he got within 15 feet, he was abruptly stopped by some sort of force field that prevented him from going any further. He even threw a rock at it, only to see it bounce off of some unseen barrier and drop uselessly to the ground. However, he could now see the mysterious flying object in more detail, describing it as having a smooth metallic texture like “shiny silk,” with no seams and with some oval portholes of some type with a surreal display of multi-colored lights playing out beyond them. He would say of this bizarre craft:
The object just looked like a big shell, grayish-green looking outfit. And underneath there were oblong holes where the lights were coming out. They were so bright you couldn’t see when you got up there… as if a color wheel was turning inside the thing. The whole thing took over five minutes, maybe ten. I have never seen anything like it. It looked like shiny silk or something. I couldn’t tell. I was going to tell though if I could have hit it with that rock.
Perhaps foolishly, Edwards threw another rock at it even harder than the first, and although this stone also bounced off, it managed to capture the attention of the “Space Penguins.” The creatures all looked to him in unison, before scurrying behind the craft and then enter the craft through a portal. The object then began to ascend into the air, shooting off at an amazing speed to vanish.
Another downright bizarre cases comes to us from the U.S. state of West Virginia, where in July of 1968 a local man by the name of Jennings Frederick was out bowhunting in the rural backwoods just outside outside of Fairmont, West Virginia. At some point he allegedly heard a high pitched, unearthly sound that he would describe as sounding like “a recording running at exaggerated speed.” Curious, Jennings searched about for the origin of this surreal noise, and this was when he would come across a very strange sight indeed. There in the brush stood a 7-foot tall, semi-humanoid entity, with an exceedingly thin, almost skeletal frame, long ears, and stalk-like arms that were almost like tendrils and which ended in slender, 7-inch long fingers tipped with some sort of needles or thorns, as well as suction cups. The whole of the anomalous creature was described as green and very plant-like in nature, as if it were part animal and part plant. The whole time Frederick watched it that incessant chattering sound reverberated around him, and he suddenly realized that he could make out words within the alien noise, like glimpses of meaning from white noise, which he took to say:
You need not fear me. I wish to communicate. I come as a friend. We know of you all. I come in peace. I wish medical assistance. I need your help.
As Frederick stood there wide-mouthed in bewilderment, the mysterious being purportedly suddenly lashed out with one of its stalk-like arms with blinding speed to wrap him in an iron grip. The needles or thorns on its fingers then apparently pierced the startled man’s skin and began to draw blood, but rather than the pain he found himself drawn to the thing’s eyes, which seemed to rapidly switch back and forth from red to yellow in a hypnotizing, oscillating cycle that held him in thrall and dulled his senses. After about two minutes of this, the otherworldly plant-monster reportedly let him go and took off in a sprint up a nearby embankment in great 25-foot long bounds, followed shortly after by a deep thrumming noise that Frederick would later speculate to have been the sound of the creature’s space ship. For years Frederick kept this undoubtedly absurd-sounding story to himself out of fear of ridicule, but in 1976 he would relate it to the paranormal researcher Gray Barker, who would then include it in his newsletter. The story would be brought to even greater attention when it was mentioned in the late Brad Steiger’s 1978 book Alien Meetings. Was this an alien, some sort of cryptid, or what? Whatever it was, the “Vegetable Man” of West Virginia is certainly one of the more bizarre encounters on record.
From 1974 we have the very weird story from Bald Mountain, in Washington state, in the United States, just about reportedly 20 miles east of Chehalis, Washington. On November 14th, 1974, a fiery object was witnessed to fall from the sky in the area, and after that several motorists started reporting seeing a very strange entity prowling about the region. Witnesses reported seeing a horse-sized beast with tentacles and an antenna and emanating a neon green glow, which would shamble about the wilderness and would be sighted on more than one occasion. One witness would say of it:
It was horse-sized, covered with scales and standing on four rubbery legs with suckers like octopus tentacles. Its head was football-shaped with an antenna sticking up…The thing gave off this green, iridescent light.
As reports like this came in and began to make the rounds in the news, Lewis County Sheriff William H. Wiester began an investigation to try to get to the bottom of it, but was allegedly stopped by shadowy individuals claiming to represent both NASA and the United States Air Force. These people, often dressed in dark suits, told the sheriff in no uncertain terms that he was to drop the investigation and that they had it under control. His own investigation team was then replaced by what he describes as “a special NASA team, including a heavily armed military unit wearing uniforms with no insignia.” After that, the case of what has been referred to as the Bald Mountain “Crazy Critter” just sort of faded away into obscurity. What was going on here and what was this thing? Had it somehow crashed in its ship and was now wandering around aimlessly trying to figure out what to do? There are no answers.
Moving along to yet another whacky case, we have a report from September 15, 1977, in the town of Paciencia, Brazil. On this day a bus driver by the name of Antonio La Rubia was allegedly walking to work when he spied a rather strange object shaped like an “enormous wide hat” sitting in a field, measuring an impressive 250 feet across. Soon after he noticed the giant mysterious craft, it lashed out with a thin, bright beam of light, which caught La Rubia and whisked him away to a room of pure white. Within this room were various mechanical-looking beings with bright scales and arms like tentacles, as well as egg-shaped bodies and heads adorned with what appeared to be antenna. Instead of legs, the strange creatures reportedly sat upon rigid pedestals of some sort.
After this initial meeting, the frightened La Rubia claims that he shouted at the creatures, which seemed to have the effect of making them cower in fear. He lost consciousness again, and when he awoke, he says that he was now subjected to a series of images projected onto the wall, including various surreal scenes such as a dog being melted and a train entering a tunnel, the meaning of which could not be discerned. At one point during this screening of oddities and grotesqueries one of the robot beings apparently reached out to draw blood from one of La Rubia’s fingers, after which it splashed it across a wall to form a pattern of three circles and an “L” shape. At this point, La Rubia claims he lost consciousness once more, and when he awoke, he was purportedly back in his car, vomiting and dizzy from the whole puzzling ordeal. He would later remember fighting back and actually knocking one of the creatures to the ground, allowing him to escape.
Finally, and perhaps the weirdest of all, we come to a case from the year 2002, with a witness named Jean F. and Nelson C, of Villa San Rafael in Calama, Chile. This particular case starts out weird enough, and then goes off the deep end into the completely bonkers. On January 12, 2002, Nelson apparently lost his pet snake, a boa constrictor, and so he went out with a friend to go try and find it. As they looked around, the man’s two dogs started getting very agitated, barking and snarling uncontrollably. As the two men tried to figure out what was spooking the dogs, they then saw what they at first thought to be a stray dog on the trail before them. They shouted and threw some stones at it to scare it off, but the animal just stood there and did not react, its features still unclear. It then began to walk towards them even as they screamed at it, and as it did they could see that it was an otherworldly creature that resembled a “rugby football with legs,” and then it suddenly stood up to walk on two legs. The two men then felt an “energy” like “like an electrical shock in the stomach.” One of the witnesses would describe the completely outlandish creature:
Its head was like the one of a large dog and it had a flat nose like a bulldog. Its eyes were slanted and pale-red in color, which could only be seen when the creature turned its head from side to side like small lizards do. Its ears were flat, round and large. Its arms were short, they had elbows and the hands had three fingers. It had hair like the one on a wild pig. Its legs were like the ones from a goat. The feet had also three fingers and a membrane like ducks, but somewhat shorter.
The back of the beast was also covered with a mane of thick hair, and it had a short tail tipped in white. Most bizarrely of all, the thing suddenly stopped its advance, stared at them for a moment, and then gave them a powerful telepathic message that boomed through their minds and said, “don’t stare, just run away.” The two young men did exactly that, and the thing was never seen again. It is just one more case among many that really doesn’t seem to make sense, and defies normal categorization. Was it a cryptid, alien, a figment of the imagination? Who knows? These have been just a few cases among many others that really cause us to scratch our heads and wonder just what could possibly be going on here. These are all completely weird and one-off encounters, meaning these various monstrosities have only been witnessed in one specific time-frame and then never again. They exist as completely unique accounts, and that makes it hard to figure out how they fit into the world of UFOs or cryptozoology as a whole. What were these utterly bizarre entities? Were they aliens, some sort of interdimensional interlopers bleeding through some veil between realities, or something else? For now it is hard to say, and these baffling reports rank among the strangest of the strange,
Telescopen vangen signalen op van mysterieuze flitsen in ver sterrenstelsel
Twee Nederlandse radiotelescopen hebben tegelijkertijd signalen opgevangen van mysterieuze flitsen − een soort kosmische stroboscoop − in een ver sterrenstelsel, op bijna een half miljard lichtjaar afstand. Maar de nieuwe metingen, deze week gepubliceerd in Nature, lijken meer vragen op te werpen dan te beantwoorden, bericht De Volkskrant.
Eén populaire verklaring voor de raadselachtige bron van de repeterende radioflitsen kan in elk geval de prullenbak in, volgens Joeri van Leeuwen van Astron, het Nederlands instituut voor radioastronomie. “Het is een hele puzzel”, zegt hij.
‘Snelle radioflitsen’ werden in 2007 voor het eerst ontdekt. Ze duren maar een duizendste van een seconde, maar in die korte tijd komt evenveel energie vrij als de zon in een paar dagen produceert. Vermoedelijk zijn het explosies op zogeheten neutronensterren: enorm compacte sterretjes van nog geen 25 kilometer groot, maar zwaarder dan de zon, en met een gigantisch sterk magneetveld. Sterrenkundigen hopen dat onderzoek aan snelle radioflitsen meer inzicht oplevert in de meest extreme materievormen in de natuur.
Inmiddels zijn er honderden van die flitsen waargenomen, voornamelijk door de relatief nieuwe Chime-telescoop in Canada. De meeste flitsen zijn eenmalig, maar er zitten ook een aantal repeterende exemplaren tussen. En één daarvan, FRB20180916B geheten (FRB staat voor fast radio burst), vertoont een voorspelbare regelmaat: elke 16,3 dagen staat de ‘stroboscoop’ een paar dagen achtereen ‘aan’; tussendoor is er niets te zien.
‘Sterrenwind’
Volgens Inés Pastor-Marazuela, eerste auteur van het Nature-artikel, werd tot nu toe algemeen aangenomen dat de flitsende neutronenster vergezeld wordt door een gewone ster, die er eens in de 16,3 dagen omheen draait en die veel gas de ruimte in blaast. “Die ‘sterrenwind’ absorbeert de radiostraling, waardoor de flitsen alleen te zien zijn als de gewone ster zich – van ons uit gezien – achter de neutronenster bevindt”, legt ze uit.
Maar de nieuwe waarnemingen, simultaan verricht met de schotels van de Westerbork-radiotelescoop en de antennes van de Lofar-telescoop, zijn met dat model niet te verklaren. Lofar ‘kijkt’ op veel lagere frequenties dan Westerbork, en je zou verwachten dat die laagfrequente flitsen gedurende kortere tijd zichtbaar zijn dan de hoogfrequente, omdat ze sterker worden geabsorbeerd. Het tegenovergestelde blijkt echter het geval te zijn. Er zijn zelfs helemaal geen aanwijzingen voor absorberend gas in de omgeving. “Dat klopt dus allemaal niet met het dubbelster-model”, aldus Pastor-Marazuela.
“Heel raadselachtig”, zegt Victoria Kaspi, die snelle radioflitsen bestudeert met de Chime-telescoop. Kaspi heeft ook de Lofar-metingen van FRB20180916B bestudeerd, maar was niet betrokken bij de Westerbork-waarnemingen. Ze is er nog niet echt van overtuigd dat het dubbelster-idee helemaal heeft afgedaan, maar noemt de Nature-publicatie “een nieuw stukje in de puzzel. Bij snelle radioflitsen zijn er bijna evenveel verrassende twists als nieuwe resultaten.”
Kosmische flitspaal
Hoe is het regelmatige gedrag van de kosmische flitspaal dan wél te verklaren? Misschien gaat het om een eenzame neutronenster die eens in de 16,3 dagen om zijn as draait, zegt Pastor-Marazuela. Als de flitsen afkomstig zijn van een klein gebiedje op de ster, zien we ze alleen als hij ons de juiste kant toe keert. Probleem is wel dat de meeste neutronensterren tientallen, honderden of zelfs een paar duizend omwentelingen per minuut maken; een rotatieperiode van ruim twee weken is dan wel onwaarschijnlijk traag.
“Misschien is FRB20180916B wel een heel uitzonderlijk exemplaar”, zegt Van Leeuwen. “Maar ik vergelijk het met het werk van neuroloog Oliver Sacks: onderzoek aan heel bijzondere patiënten biedt veel algemene informatie over het menselijk brein. Zo kan dit object ons hopelijk ook veel leren over de minder opmerkelijke radioflitsen.”
Artistieke weergave van de zogeheten Superterp van LOFAR in Drenthe waar de lage radiogolven van de snelle radioflitser FRB20180916B werden opgevangen. De flitser bevindt zich in een spiraalvormig sterrenstelsel op 500 miljoen lichtjaar van de aarde.
(c) Daniëlle Futselaar/ASTRON/HST
Artistieke weergave van de Effelsbergtelescoop die zijn schotel richt op het sterrenstel op 500 miljoen lichtjaar van de aarde waar de beroemde snelle radioflitser FRB20180916B met regelmaat uitbarstingen van flitsen verstuurt.
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The truth is out there! More than 40% of Americans now believe some UFO sightings are alien spacecraft - up from just a third of the country two years ago
The truth is out there! More than 40% of Americans now believe some UFO sightings are alien spacecraft - up from just a third of the country two years ago
Gallup survey says 41% of respondents believe some UFOs 'involve alien spacecraft,' up from 33% in 2019
College graduates are now more likely to believe in aliens than two years ago, at 37% compared to 27% in 2019
Those with 'some college education' also are more likely to believe in aliens, at 49% vs 40% in 2019
Men are more likely than women to believe there is life outside of Earth, at 44% of males compared to 38% for women
In June, the Pentagon report offered no explanation for 140 of the 144 UAP observations dating back to 2004
More than two-fifths of all Americans now believe that some UFOs are alien spacecraft, up significantly since 2019, according to a newly published poll.
According to a Gallup poll conducted between July 6-21, 41 percent of people now believe some UFOs 'involve alien spacecraft from other planets,' up from 33 percent in 2019.
Conversely, just half of all Americans, down from 60 percent in 2019, are skeptical, saying these unexplained sightings can be answered via human activity or natural phenomena.
Significantly more Americans now believe that some UFOs are spacecraft, up significantly since 2019, according to a new poll
According to a Gallup poll conducted between July 6-21, 41% of people now believe some UFOs 'involve alien spacecraft from other planets,' up from 33% in 2019
Those who had no opinion rose slightly to nine percent in 2021, compared to seven percent in 2019.
'With more mainstream news coverage of UFOs in recent years, and the government taking sightings more seriously, the idea that UFOs could be alien spacecraft doesn't seem as far-fetched to Americans as it did even two years ago,' Gallup wrote in the release.
'Meanwhile, the government seems more focused on determining if the threat is coming from foreign governments rather than other planets, and half of Americans continue to presume there is an Earth-based explanation for all such sightings.'
Breaking down the data further, 37% of college graduates believe that some UFOs are alien craft, up from 27% in 2019. Forty-nine percent of respondents with 'some college education' believe the objects are from another world, up from 40% and those with no college education rose four points to 39%
Gallup polled 1,007 US adults for the survey approximately two weeks after the Pentagon released its highly controversial report on unidentified aerial phenomena.
Breaking down the data further, college graduates - who used to be the most skeptical in believers of extraterrestrial life - want to believe.
Now, 37 percent of college graduates believe that some UFOs are alien craft, up from 27 percent in 2019.
Forty-nine percent of respondents with 'some college education' believe the objects are from another world, up from 40 percent two years ago.
Those with no college education rose four points to 39 percent, which Gallup said is 'not a statistically significant change.'
Men are becoming more likely than women to believe there is life outside of Earth, with 44 percent of males believing UFOs are alien craft, up from 34 percent in 2019.
Thirty-eight percent of women now believe UFOs are from another world, up from 33 percent in 2019.
Men are more likely than women to believe there is life outside of Earth, at 44% of males compared to 38% for women, the survey found
Amongst age groups, 18-34-year-olds and 35-54-year-olds are the most likely to believe Earth has been visited by an extraterrestrial craft, at 45 percent, up 13 percent since 2019.
Thirty-seven percent of those who are 55 and older believe the objects are alien in nature.
A similar survey published in July said two-thirds of all Americans believe extraterrestrial life exists, but almost 90 percent believe they are not a threat.
In June, Pentagon released its report on the subject of 'unidentified aerial phenomenon' (UAPs), however it offered no explanation for 140 of the 144 observations dating back to 2004.
The declassified June 25 report, which came from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, added that it lacks sufficient data to determine the nature of mysterious flying objects.
'In 18 incidents, described in 21 reports, observers reported unusual UAP movement patterns or flight characteristics,' the report reads.
'Some UAP appeared to remain stationary in winds aloft, move against the wind, maneuver abruptly, or move at considerable speed, without discernable means of propulsion. In a small number of cases, military aircraft systems processed radio frequency (RF) energy associated with UAP sightings.
'The UAPTF holds a small amount of data that appear to show UAP demonstrating acceleration or a degree of signature management. Additional rigorous analysis are necessary by multiple teams or groups of technical experts to determine the nature and validity of these data.
'We are conducting further analysis to determine if breakthrough technologies were demonstrated.'
The term UFO has been more recently replaced by unidentified aerial phenomenon, especially in light of the US Pentagon declassifying three videos in April 2020.
The footage had been previously acknowledged as real by the Navy, and captured what pilots recorded on their video sensors during training flights in 2004 and 2015.
Two of the clips were first published in 2017 by the New York Times and the third by the To The Stars Academy in 2018 - a group that specializes in unexplained phenomenon and was founded by Blink-182 guitarist Tom DeLonge.
Only one of 144 reports of UFOs - or Unidentified Aerial Phenomena as the government calls them - can be explained while the others can barely be classified
The government report says there are 144 reported UFOs - or UAPs - between 2004 and 2021.
These reports include a spherical flying object buzzing over Navy warships and disappearing into the Pacific ocean, a tic-tac shaped flying object mimicking Super Hornet pilots' maneuvers and pyramid-shaped flying objects.
The only one that can be explained with 'high confidence' is a deflated balloon.
Because the reported UAPs showed unusual flight characteristics and displayed a range of appearances and behaviors, the report groups the UAPs into five categories.
1. Airborne clutter - These objects include birds, balloons, recreational unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) or airborne debris like plastic bags that muddle a scene and affect an operator’s ability to identify true targets, such as enemy aircraft.
2. Natural atmospheric phenomena - Natural atmospheric phenomena includes ice crystals, moisture and thermal fluctuations that may register on some infrared and radar systems.
3. USG or U.S. industry developmental programs - Some UAP observations could be attributable to developments and classified programs by U.S. entities. The report states, 'We were unable to confirm, however, that these systems accounted for any of the UAP reports we collected.'
4. Foreign adversary systems - Some UAP may be technologies deployed by China, Russia, another nation, or a non-governmental entity but the report says the US is unaware that any nation has technology that's been reported.
5. A catchall 'other' bin - Most of the UAP described in the dataset probably remain unidentified due to limited data or challenges to collection processing or analysis and may require additional scientific knowledge and advances to categorize them. 'The UAPTF intends to focus additional analysis on the small number of cases where a UAP appeared to display unusual flight characteristics or signature management,' according to the report.
13 strange things about the new tapejarid, ‘Tupandactylus navigans’ GP/2E 9266
13 strange things about the new tapejarid, ‘Tupandactylus navigans’ GP/2E 9266£
It’s always wonderful to see a new, complete pterosaur skeleton. This one comes with a backstory that is making the rounds. Here we’ll talk about the specimen itself, GP/2E 9266 (Beccari et al. 2021; Early Cretaceous; Figs. 1-5), presently assigned to the name Tupandactylus navigans, a putatitve relative of Tupandactylus imperator.
Figure 1. The new Tupandactylus compared to the old Tupandactylus to scale. Both are considered adults. Note the similarity between Brazilian and Chinese tapejarids.
The first strange thing about GP/2E 9266 is how much it resembles Tupandactylus (known from a partial skull only)… except for size (Fig. 1). The authors considered both to be adults. From the abstract: “The specimen can be assigned to Tupa. [= Tupandactylus] navigans due to its vertical supra-premaxillary bony process and short and rounded parietal crest.” Let’s stop assigning taxa based on a few traits. That’s “Pulling a Larry Martin“. Case in point: See the next paragraph.
The second strange thing about GP/2E 9266 is how it doesn’t nest with Tupandactylus in the Large Pterosaur Tree (LPT, 260 taxa). Instead it nests with a similarly-sized Chinese taxon, ZMNH M 8131 (Fig. 1), closer to the base of the Tapejaridae.
Figure 2. Tupandacatylus navigans (GP/2E 9266) in situ and µCT scans produced by Beccari et al. 2021. Note the lack of a prepubis and the extremely slender ventral process of the pubis, likely incapable of supporting a prepubis.
The third strange thing about GP/2E 9266 is that tall headcrest. It leans anteriorly, distinct from other, otherwise similar, crests. The authors found no posteriorly projecting process, but this is often broken off in fossils. There is an impression that matches the missing bone (Fig. 3). Speculative, but there it is, an impression.
Figure 3. Skull of Tupandactylus navigans (GP/2E 9266) from Beccari et al. 202. Colors added here. Compare to the original identity of skull bones by Beccari et al. in figure 2.
The fourth and fifth strange things about GP/2E 9266 is it has one parasagittally expanded neural spine. The authors report that five vertebrae form a notarium, different than any other tapejarid… and the medial scapula is not modified to articulate with it. Likewise the ventral coracoid is not expanded, as in related taxa.
The sixth and seventh strange thing about GP/2E 9266 is the lack of a prepubis… and the extremely slender ventral process of the pubis, likely incapable of supporting a prepubis.
Figure 4. The pes of the GP/2E 9266 specimen as originally figured by Beccari et al. 2021 and revised here. Comparison to the other metatarsus shows the correct lengths overlooked by Beccari et al. who also renamed the phalanges on toe 4, not realizing that two phalanges were fused to become one.
The eighth strange thing about GP/2E 9266 is the fusion of pedal phalanges 4.2 and 4.3 (Fig. 4). Beccari et al. also overlooked the fifth metatarsal and its two digits. The authors mistakenly wrote: “As in all later-diverging pterodactyloids, there are only four pedal digits.”
BTW, I’ve never seen distal tarsals on any tetrapod or pterosaurs like those shown in Beccari et al. (red elements in Fig. 4). Let’s leave those be for the time being.
Figure 5. Wing of the GP/2E 9266 specimen as originally illustrated by Beccari et al. (left) and repaired here (right).
The ninth strange thing about GP/2E 9266 is the authors flipped the wing finger upside-down with the leading edge trailing (Fig. 5). They also did not create horizontal stabilizers of the sprawling hind limbs (Fig. 6). Pterosaurs are such perfect natural inventions. Don’t leave the hind limbs dangling uselessly. Remember Sharovipteryx
Figure 6. The GP/2E 9266 specimen reconstructed in dorsal view by Beccari et al 2021 and modified here (top half) to reflect the sprawling femora.
The tenth strange thingabout GP/2E 9266 is the odd quadrupedal pose Beccari et al. put their reconstruction into (Fig. 7). Sure some pterosaurs walked around quadrupedally and left tracks. These were all beachcombers, seeking food in shallow waters. Tapedjarids are not members of those clades. Don’t generalize and make all pterosaurs awkward quadrupeds. Look at each one individually. Bipedal pterosaur ancestors were able to flap before they were pterosaurs. That was the initial attraction, together with crests.
Figure 7. Pterosaurs were like birds, right? Able to flap their forelimbs since before they were pterosaurs. A Tapejara prepubis is added here, but is not present in the GP/2E 9266 specimen.
The eleventh strange thing about GP/2E 9266 is the gracile pteroid. Really slender, more so than I’ve seen in pterosaurs.
The twelfth strange thng about GP/2E 9266 is the longer than typical phalanx 4.1, extending to the proximal ulna when the wing is folded (Fig. 7). Beccari et al. got things mixed up when they reported, “first wing phalanx length to metacarpal IV length in GP/ 2E 9266 = 0.58.”
The thirteenth strange thing about GP/2E 9266 is the tiny size of the foot.
Beccari et al. performed a phylogenetic analysis (unfortunately, derived from previous studies). The authors reported, “The holotype of Tupa. navigans SMNK PAL 2344 was initially coded as a separate OUT, but no character differed from the scoring of GP/2E 9266. Therefore, the phylogenetic position of Tupa. navigans was accessed through the scoring of GP/2E 9266 using the character-taxon matrix of, composed by 64 taxa (including the new specimen) and 150 discrete characters.” This is why convergence can be so difficult to deal with. What can be scored of the two skulls are virtually identical. In the Beccari et al. analysis the Huaxiapterus corollatus specimen ZMNH M8131 (Fig. 1) nests in a polytomy with other Chinese pterosaurs separate from a sister polytomy of Brazilian pterosaurs. Since no one in Beccari et al. published comparable reconstructions or figures of related taxa (as in Fig. 1), other than some colorful silhouettes, we can assume they did as they said they did: borrowed data, never traced taxa, trusted scores and taxon lists.
Beccari et al. have outdated notions regarding pterosaur ontogeny and bone fusion. They seek the fusion of elements as a ‘sign’ of maturity, as in the archosaurs and dinosaurs in their outdated cladogram. Adding taxa shows this notion is false. Fusion is entirely phylogenetic. When you look at enough taxa you learn that immature and late-stage embryo pterosaurs are identical to adults, except for an 8x difference in overall size, as in the lepidosaurs missing from the Beccari et al. cladogram.
Flight? The authors report, “The relatively longer forelimbs and the long cervical series may argue for a terrestrial foraging lifestyle.” “This could indicate that the aberrant crest may have restricted Tupa. navigans to short-distance flights, such as to flee from predators.” Sure the wing finger is skinny and phalanx 4.4 is short, but this taxon is far from flightless.
References
Beccari V, Pinheiro FL, Nunes I, Anelli LE, Mateus O and Costa FR 2021. Osteology of an exceptionally well-preserved tapejarid skeleton from Brazil: Revealing the anatomy of a curious pterodactyloid clade. PLoS ONE 16(8): e0254789. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0254789
MUFON CASE : 117561 Pflugerville. Texas ( August 26, 2021 )
Mutual UFO Network : MUFON SUBMISSIONS : Tumbling object flying in straight line. Second one came from above
Long Description of Sighting Report - Case 117561
A fast moving, tumbling object, flying through the clouds. A second one came from above. Both made no noise and left no trail.
Date Submitted : 2021-08-28 Date of Event : 2021-08-28 MUFON SUBMITTER FILE :
trim.F1B503D59ED24AB48F52B45F11C6C08B.MOV : no audio
MUFON CASE : 117559 San Juan, Puerto Rico ( August 26, 2021 )
Mutual UFO Network : MUFON SUBMISSIONS : White cylinder object that during early sunny morning traveled and crossed airplane route approaching SJU airport at about 2,000 ft altitude. Long Description of Sighting Report - Case 117559
I was returning to work from a trip to the post office, I parked and when I start walking I notice this small but shiny object that seemed to reflect sunlight at certain points as if it were slowly spinning around its vertical axis. I took out my phone and took as many pictures as I could as it looked very weird. Its altitude was well below clouds but high enough to need to look carefully to find it when not reflecting. Seemed to reflect every 10-15 seconds. I also took videos but hard to point at since it was very small. Yet an airplane 4-5 miles away from landing passed by and the object kept its movement sort of linear but constant. The object moved further from my sight and the airplane flight pass was in front of the object when I took the pictures. Later on I went to Google earth as I know my location and I also used an Flight APP (Flight Radar 24) to know the plane flight route. with this information I calculate the object had to be taller than the airplane cabin, probably from 10-15 feet tall. It seemed to have an appendage dropping down from the main cylinder shape. I also drew all my calculations on the Google Earth map. I put all the info that is backed by these apps in order to reach my conclusions.
Date Submitted : 2021-08-26 Date of Event : 2021-08-17 MUFON SUBMITTER FILES :
Shapeshifting UAP / UFO Sighted Over Chicago, Illinois ( August 26, 2021 )
Amazing Shapeshifting UAP / UFO was sighted over Chicago, Illinois on August 26, 2021
STATEMENT : INEXPLICABLE!! Aliens in the sky THERE ARE ALREADY VIDEOS OF THIS FLYING IN CHICAGO AND EVEN HAVE NOT SAID IT IS HAS ANYONE ELSE SEEN HIM IN HEAVEN
They are here!
credit : Francisco Villa
UFO Sighted Over Central Minnesota ( August 26, 2021 )
Impressive UFO was sighted over Central Minnesota on August 26, 2021
A great short video on the two major school encounters
A great short video on the two major school encounters
One of the most common reasons that alleged encounters with Unidentified Flying Objects are often dismissed, is that they usually involve only one or two witnesses. But how has society reacted when such occurrences have taken place involving large groups of onlookers? This week, we examine one such incident. Join us, as we delve into the mysteries of, the Ariel School Encounter.
Scientists have speculated for years that the human brain features a 'God spot,' one distinct area of the brain responsible for spirituality.
Now, University of Missouri researchers have completed research that indicates spirituality is a complex phenomenon and that multiple areas of the brain are responsible for the many aspects of spiritual experiences.
The new work is based on a previously published study that indicated spiritual transcendence is associated with decreased right parietal lobe functioning,
New research has indicated that there is no one God-spot in the human brain and that in fact spirituality is stimulated across all lobes in the brain
Missouri University (MU) researchers replicated their findings. In addition, the researchers determined that other aspects of spiritual functioning are related to increased activity in the frontal lobe.
'We have found a neuropsychological basis for spirituality, but it’s not isolated to one specific area of the brain,' said Brick Johnstone, professor of health psychology in the School of Health Professions.
'Spirituality is a much more dynamic concept that uses many parts of the brain.'
'Certain parts of the brain play more predominant roles, but they all work together to facilitate individuals’ spiritual experiences.'
Previous research had pointed to the existence of a single God-spot that was stimulated by religious experience but a new study claims that is not the case
In the most recent study, Johnstone studied 20 people with traumatic brain injuries affecting the right parietal lobe, the area of the brain situated a few inches above the right ear.
He surveyed participants on characteristics of spirituality, such as how close they felt to a higher power and if they felt their lives were part of a divine plan.
He found that the participants with more significant injury to their right parietal lobe showed an increased feeling of closeness to a higher power.
'Neuropsychology researchers consistently have shown that impairment on the right side of the brain decreases one’s focus on the self,' said Johnstone.
'Since our research shows that people with this impairment are more spiritual, this suggests spiritual experiences are associated with a decreased focus on the self.
Professor Brick Johnstone of Missouri University's study sees no difference in the mind of a Buddhist or Christian when religious experiences occur
'This is is consistent with many religious texts that suggest people should concentrate on the well-being of others rather than on themselves.'
Johnstone says the right side of the brain is associated with self-orientation, whereas the left side is associated with how individuals relate to others.
Although Johnstone studied people with brain injury, previous studies of Buddhist meditators and Franciscan nuns with normal brain function have shown that people can learn to minimize the functioning of the right side of their brains to increase their spiritual connections during meditation and prayer.
Professor Johnstone's findings claim that even the mind of world-renowned atheist Richard Dawkins is stimulated in the same way as a Christian or Muslim when they experience their minds version of spirituality
In addition, Johnstone measured the frequency of participants’ religious practices, such as how often they attended church or listened to religious programs.
He measured activity in the frontal lobe and found a correlation between increased activity in this part of the brain and increased participation in religious practices.
The research indicated that there are all kinds of spiritual experiences that Christians might call closeness to God and atheists might call an awareness of themselves.
'This finding indicates that spiritual experiences are likely associated with different parts of the brain,” said Johnstone.
Scientists have long sought a specific location in the human brain responsible for spirituality – a concept that eventually became known as the God Spot. Brian scientists have found regions responsible for human feelings of love, fear, compassion and criminality, but spirituality remained elusive, despite many humans spending more time in religious activities and spirituality than other experiences. In 1989, neuroscientist Michael Persinger developed a “God Helmet” to control communication between the right and left temporal lobes in hopes of finding the God Spot, but it eluded him. Now, a group of researchers using “lesion network mapping” think they’ve finally hit the God Spot. Will this finally bring science and spirituality together … or will it put an end to religion?
“Over 80% of the global population consider themselves religious with even more identifying as spiritual, but the neural substrates of spirituality and religiosity remain unresolved. In two independent brain lesion datasets (N1=88; N2=105), we apply lesion network mapping to test whether lesion locations associated with spiritual and religious belief map to a specific human brain circuit.”
In a study published in Biological Psychiatry, researchers Michael A. Ferguson from the Center for Brain Circuit Therapeutics at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston and others explain how previous studies used brain scans and functional neuroimaging to see what areas of the brain light up when a person experiences spirituality. Results have been mixed and inconclusive, so Ferguson and his team switched to lesion network mapping which links complex human behaviors to specific brain circuits based on the locations of brain lesions in patients. Their datasets consisted of 88 neurosurgical patients who were undergoing surgery to remove a brain tumor and had lesions throughout their brains, and 105 patients with lesions caused by penetrating head trauma from combat during the Vietnam War.
Of the 88 neurosurgical patients questioned before and after surgery, 30 showed a decrease in self-reported spiritual belief, 29 showed an increase, and 29 showed no change. Using lesion network mapping, the team found that self-reported spirituality mapped to a specific brain circuit centered on the periaqueductal gray (PAG), a brainstem region that has been linked to feelings of fear, pain, altruism and love. As noted in the study press release, results on religiosity from the second dataset aligned with these findings.
Some aspects of the study may not sit well with religious leaders. Lesion locations associated with other neurological and psychiatric symptoms – including parkinsonism (movement abnormalities seen in Parkinson’s disease), delusions and alien limb syndrome intersected with areas of the PAG circuit. More importantly, the two datasets were predominantly Christians but did not give any information on the patient’s upbringing or spiritual training. Ferguson wants to do more research in these areas.
“Only recently have medicine and spirituality been fractionated from one another. There seems to be this perennial union between healing and spirituality across cultures and civilizations. I’m interested in the degree to which our understanding of brain circuits could help craft scientifically grounded, clinically-translatable questions about how healing and spirituality can co-inform each other.”
One doesn’t need to dig too deeply into any religion’s holy books to find references to healing. Perhaps there really is a God Spot in the human brain that both science and religion can agree upon.
We’ll know for certain when medical insurance companies begin offering coverage.
Planet Earth is host to a remarkably diverse range of organisms. The variety that exists between different life forms, while very real, may at times be superficial in that some scientists argue whether the differences between humans and other mammals are really so great.
Nonetheless, the uniqueness of at least a few traits that set humans aside from other organisms cannot be so easily debated. Even while certain other species display the use of tools, as well as the rudiments of what were once considered cultural concepts exclusive to humans, no other species on Earth has developed such capabilities to the advanced degree that we have.
Herein lies a great mystery. How is it that humans could have developed so differently–and so much–from other species, enough so that we eventually emerged as the dominant force on this planet?
In 1980, one study carried out at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in England took its analysis of this question to the microscopic level, looking at what clues might be found in human genetic material.
Appearing in Nature, the paper, titled “Distinctive sequence of human mitochondrial ribosomal RNA genes” by I. C. Eperon, S. Anderson and D. P. Nierlich, called human mitochondria a “radical departure” from that of other organisms,” a conclusion with rather novel implications in terms of the mysterious origins of humanity.
“The nucleotide sequence spanning the ribosomal RNA (rRNA) genes of cloned human mitochondrial DNA reveals an extremely compact genome organization,” the study’s authors wrote in the paper’s abstract, “wherein the putative tRNA genes are probably ‘butt-jointed’ around the two rRNA genes.”
“The sequences of the rRNA genes are significantly homologous in some regions to eukaryotic and prokaryotic sequences, but distinctive” they added, noting that “the tRNA genes also have unusual nucleotide sequences.”
For those among us who aren’t molecular biologists, what the study’s authors present here may seem convoluted. However, the final line of the study’s abstract brought into rather stark focus what the authors interpreted this all to mean.
“It seems that human mitochondria did not originate from recognizable relatives of present-day organisms,” they concluded. But if not “recognizable” ancestors to the kinds of organisms present on Earth today, then what kinds of organisms had they been talking about?
Inherent to the structure of all living cells in higher organisms are mitochondria. These organelles are the areas within cells where functions like respiration and generation of energy take place. Since mitochondria possess their own unique genetic material, scientists have suggested that they might represent the aftermath of an invasion that occurred in the ancient world, in which bacteria stormed the cells of ancient organisms and took up residence within them. The question is, what kind of bacteria might have caused the “radically different” mitochondria found today in modern humans?
The study by Eperon, et al, raises several questions. One has to do with the undeniably unique traits that humans appear to possess when compared with other species on our planet; might it be the case that mitochondria is actually at the root of these distinctions? Another question has to do with whether mitochondrial changes occurring in ancient organisms might have spearheaded the evolutionary trends that eventually led to our ancient hominid ancestors and, eventually, resulted in Homo sapiens.
Other theories exist as well, which give consideration to speculative ideas about the appearance of novel kinds of bacteria from unusual places—possibly even from space—which might have arrived on Earth after being carried over great distances on cosmic debris. This theory that novel kinds of bacteria or viruses could arrive from space, while challenged by most in the scientific community, formed the basis of astronomer Fred Hoyle and his colleague Chandra Wickramasinghe’s theory of panspermia or “Cosmic Ancestry,” which entails that all life on Earth may actually have origins in outer space.
Even if ready-made bacteria had not been brought to Earth on cosmic debris, many astrobiologists have entertained the notion that the building blocks of life might have been brought to Earth from elsewhere long ago, having eventually formed into complex proteins over time, and eventually giving rise to simple life forms that evolved over the eons into the biodiversity we see on our planet today.
Is it also possible that some of the evolutionary mysteries about human origins could have been influenced by such cosmic sources at some point in the distant past? Such questions raise a number of possibilities about the likelihood of life existing elsewhere in the cosmos, and whether or not it might differ entirely from what we have come to expect of life on Earth.
In fact, if Earth organisms actually do have their roots in outer space, any prospective aliens out there might not only resemble us, but they might actually be cousins of ours, in a sense. In other words, we Earthlings might be far more “alien” than we even realize.
It’s difficult to tell how large the starship Enterprise is in the original Star Trek series, so seeing the shuttlecraft exiting it helped put its massive size into perspective. That fictional USS Enterprise (XCV 330) was 300 meters (980 feet) in length, which seemed immense at the time, but would be dwarfed by the mega-starship China is currently planning. Is it possible? How soon?
“The National Natural Science Foundation of China has called on scientists to join a five-year project to study the mechanics of an “ultra-large spacecraft spanning kilometers”.”
The South China Morning Post revealed the project announced by the National Natural Science Foundation of China as part of its 14th Five-Year Plan (2021-25). To show how serious China’s space program is about assembling a megaship in space and flying it around the Earth, this is first major space project announced. To put its size in perspective, even at one kilometer (3281 feet) in length, it would be 10 times the length of the International Space Station and a little over three times the length of the USS Enterprise.
“It took the ISS 12 years – from 1998 to 2010 – to finally complete the construction. And by the time of completion, the first module that was launched more than a decade prior had almost reached its lifespan. So it can be speculated that the kilometer-level spacecraft will take even longer to build, and will have much higher requirements for the lifespan of its core components, and the ability to replace components flexibly.”
Speaking of the ISS, Pang Zhihao, a Beijing space expert and retired researcher from the China Academy of Space Technology, told the Global Times that even if the plans were approved today, it would take a while for this ultra-large spacecraft to be built. A comparison to the ISS might be unfair based on current technology – China’s Tiangong space station’s core module was launched in 2021 and two more modules are scheduled for 2022. Also, the ISS assembly managers didn’t have the benefit of the super-heavy rockets being tested today for Moon and Mars launches so its modules were much smaller. Size is still a concern, so one of the hurdles facing the ultra-spacecraft’s builders is weight.
Another concern is overall budget – even China is concerned about spending on space projects when there’s so much needed on Earth. There’s also safety issues – not just protecting this huge target from collisions with satellites and space debris but also protecting Earth from space construction fallout.
The magnitude of this project could be compared to the development of the Hoover Dam or the Three Gorges Dam – major and expensive long-term projects but with major benefits in power generation. A possible beneficial use of this ultra-large spaceship could be as a space factory or a space generator beaming power down to Earth. While it’s not discussed in the announcement articles, its use as a space weapon or space military base cannot be ignored either.
China is already spending money ($2.3 Million) on plans for a kilometers-long ultra-large spaceship. What’s your country building?
A Long March-2F carrier rocket, carrying the Shenzhou-12 spacecraft for the first Chinese crewed mission to its new space station, sits behind the characters for China at a satellite launch centre in the Gobi Desert on June 16.
In a surprising new discovery, astronomers found that the closest neighbor to the sun is not Mercury but instead a fast-moving asteroid. This newly identified asteroid, which has been named 2021 PH27, zips around our sun at such an incredible speed that it completes a full orbit of the star in just 113 Earth days. In fact, it is by far the fastest orbiting asteroid that has ever been discovered in our Solar System and the second shortest orbital period among all space bodies as Mercury completes a full orbit in 88 days.
But unlike Mercury, 2021 PH27 orbits the sun in an elliptical path which brings it much closer to the star at an estimated distance of just 12.4 million miles (20 million kilometers) during its closest approach. To put this into better perspective, Mercury’s closest approach to the sun is at a distance of 29 million miles (47 million kilometers). When 2021 PH27 gets close to the sun, the surface temperature on the asteroid heats up to a whopping 900 degrees Fahrenheit (482 degrees Celsius) – hot enough to melt lead.
2021 PH27 orbits the sun closer than Mercury.
With that being said, the asteroid will not continue on this orbit as it will probably crash into the sun, Mercury, or Venus in approximately a few million years. On the other hand, it could be thrown out of orbit by gravitational interaction. But as of right now, it is zipping around our sun at exceptional speeds.
The asteroid was discovered on August 13th by astronomers who were using the Dark Energy Camera (DEC) on the Víctor M. Blanco 4-meter Telescope at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile. Based on their observations, the researchers believe that 2021 PH27 measures approximately 0.6 miles in width (1 kilometer).
As for how it ended up so close to the sun, it might have gotten thrown inwards out of the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. Another observation they made was that it has a 32 degree tilt in its orbit which may indicate that it is an extinct comet that was once located in the far areas of our Solar System and was pulled inwards when it traveled by one of the rocky planets.
(Not 2021 PH27)
For now, 2021 PH27 is moving behind the sun and won’t be visible again from Earth until the early part of next year. At that point, researchers will be able to study the asteroid in further detail.
An artist’s illustration of 2021 PH27 can be seen here.
Using the powerful 570-megapixel Dark Energy Camera (DECam) in Chile, astronomers just ten days ago discovered an asteroid with the shortest orbital period of any known asteroid in the Solar System. The orbit of the approximately 1-kilometer-diameter asteroid takes it as close as 20 million kilometers (12 million miles or 0.13 au), from the Sun every 113 days. Asteroid 2021 PH27, revealed in images acquired during twilight, also has the smallest mean distance (semi-major axis) of any known asteroid in our Solar System — only Mercury has a shorter period and smaller semi-major axis. The asteroid is so close to the Sun’s massive gravitational field, it experiences the largest general relativistic effects of any known Solar System object.
If one of the items on your bucket list is “Traveling through a wormhole and exiting alive,” your chance to check it off may be sooner than you think. A researcher in Portugal claims he’s found the secret to building a stable, traversable one which would also allow the wormhole to check off “no longer theoretical” from ITS bucket list. Ready for the ride of a lifetime?
“Any traveler trying to cross a wormhole that does not satisfy this will be crushed inside as the tunnel collapses.”
In his preprint paper, “Double gravitational layer traversable wormholes in hybrid metric-Palatini gravity,” João Luís Rosa, a physicist at Aveiro University in Portugal, dives right into Einstein’s general theory of relativity, which has been the bible on gravity and spacetime for over 100 years. As Live Science points out in its interview with Rosa, theoretical wormholes are possible under general relativity but they’re not traversable because they’re behind one-way event horizons, and they’re unstable, collapsing as soon as even a photon enters one. One solution is to build the wormhole using matter with negative mass, which is possible but has never been found in the universe, or with negative energy, which to date has only been achieved at quantum scale. Rosa has a solution that solves all of these challenges.
“What happens is that these gravitational effects needed to guarantee the traversability of the wormhole happen naturally if one modifies gravity, and exotic matter [matter with negative mass] is no longer needed to serve this purpose.”
There you go. Modify gravity and you can safely travel through a wormhole to whatever lies at the other end. High five!
Wait a minute, you say. How does Rosa plan to modify gravity?
“We start by showing that for a particular quadratic-linear form of the action, the junction conditions on the continuity of the Ricci scalar R and the Palatini Ricci scalar R of the theory can be discarded without the appearance of undefined distribution terms in the field equations. As a consequence, a double gravitational layer thin-shell arises at the separation hypersurface. We then outline a general method to find traversable wormhole solutions satisfying the NEC at the throat and provide an example. Finally, we use the previously derived junction conditions to match the interior wormhole solution to an exterior vacuum and asymptotic flat solution, thus obtaining a full traversable wormhole solution supported by a double gravitational layer thin-shell and satisfying the NEC.”
Rosa satisfies the NEC (Null Energy Condition), which causes wormholes to collapse, by using a modification of general relativity called generalized hybrid metric-Palatini gravity, which allows more flexibility between matter and energy, and space and time. He found this theory gets around the negative energy problem with a simple very thin double layer of regular matter in front of the wormhole’s ends, which can be passed through safely while preventing negative energy collapsing the wormhole while you’re in it hoping to exit the other side and meet yourself in the past so you can give yourself the good news.
Are you sure about this?
Wait a minute, you say. This is all still theoretical and still requires a tweak in the old reliable general relativity theory, right?
That’s true. Rosa now plans to search the Milky Way for stars near its supermassive black hole center in hopes of finding examples of this modified gravity. Since we still haven’t found negative mass or negative energy yet, his chances are not high – but not impossible.
Don’t go checking off Traveling through a wormhole and exiting alive” just yet, but keep your pencil handy.
There are plenty of reports of UFOs to go around, and they are mostly described as mechanical craft of some sort, whether that be alien, manmade, or something else. But there is a subspecies of UFO reports that doesn’t get nearly as much attention, and that is of strange things in the sky that seem to almost be living, bioluminescent creatures of some sort. Such creatures have appeared sporadically throughout the history of UFO sightings, and typically appear as glowing, translucent jellyfish, squid, or other creatures that seem to belong in the domain of the deep rather than the air, and here we will look at a selection of such completely bizarre sightings.
Sightings like these have supposedly gone back for years. In the 1950s a police man in England claimed to have had a run in with a low flying “sky jellyfish” as he was riding his bicycle on patrol. He claimed that it drifted right down in front of him and that he actually bumped up against it, describing the sensation as similar to brushing up against a soft blanket, and that it had a slightly unpleasant smell of mildew. In 1958 there was also report from Florida, where a policeman named Faustin Galegos found a translucent purple blob about the size of a soccer ball outside of his house. He claimed that when he had approached it seemed to be some sort of dying creature, and when he picked it up the thing just sort of evaporated in his hands.
From the same era, a very odd claim was posted on the site Norcalblogs, from a commenter calling himself Pie Guevara, who claims that his uncle, an Oscar Guevera, had taken part in a scientific survey of these sorts of creatures in the 1950s and 60s. The remote areas north of San Fransisco had apparently experienced a spate of sightings for over a decade of what were usually referred to as “Space Jellies,” which would congregate in the upper atmosphere along the coast, after which they would soar up into the upper atmosphere out of sight. Pie provides a letter that he allegedly received from his uncle, which outlines the phenomenon and his study of it, and reads:
This coalescence of “space jellies”, as we called them, was assumed to be part of a seasonal migration pattern in and about the western Pacific. With a small joint grant fund from several philanthropic scientific organizations (which shall remain unnamed), I developed a small, high altitude, long distance ultralight aircraft (the first of its kind) assisted by an in-flight deployable and detachable ovoid helium balloon. This platform was developed as it had become evident through observation and experimentation that the behavior of these creatures was disturbed by the approach of larger aircraft. It was not by coincidence that the craft bore a distinct resemblance to the large, presumably mature form, of “space jelly” creatures themselves.
Working within a shoe-string budget, I deployed a modified aqualung attached to a motorcycle helmet and a small forge bellows that was fashioned into a crude but effective and light weight re-breathing system for high altitudes. For warmth I wore a gorilla suit (procured from a costumer’s auction in Emeryville) and had it fitted with a lining of goose down. From below the aircraft was lowered a fair sized grappling hook with several large mackerels tied to it with bailing wire. Inside of six weeks in the fall of 1973 I had snagged most of these diaphanous jelly fish like buggers. None of the captured survived the experience and within minutes dissolved into an odd steamy smoke. On my final expedition, as per standard operating procedure, I reached the specified location at an altitude of 9500 feet, deployed the balloon, and floated up into the remaining few of these creatures which, apparently, died of fright on the spot, dissolving into threadlike wisps before me.
Besides the regrettable loss of the subjects under study there was one more unfortunate circumstance. On the last mission, after jettisoning the balloon, I was flying in from the Pacific over the Farallons at about 5000 feet towards my hidden base of operations in a remote area of [redacted]. I was spotted by a US Navy crew on a practice and shakedown cruise flying a restored antique Consolidated Vultee PB2Y Coronado that was to be displayed in a few days at a Fleet Week exposition near Fisherman’s wharf. They veered off course, followed me, and executed a close and slow pass-by over San Francisco Bay. So close I could see the faces of the pilot and crew. The flying boat then abruptly dropped altitude and beached near the Mare Island Naval Shipyard in what, for all intents and purposes, appeared to be an emergency landing. Weeks later I learned, through some Navy sources in Vallejo who hung out Fridays at the [redacted] Bar and Grill, that the pilot and crew recovered from the plane had babbled incoherently and for days all they could get out of them was, “Flying fish bear … flying fish bear …” Needless to say this story has never been declassified and likely never will be. The only reason I relate it now is lay to rest any fears that may still exist about these creatures and confident in the knowledge that no one in their right mind would ever actually believe it.
This is truly a far-out and spectacular account, and one can’t help but wonder how much veracity any of it holds. A guy in a gorilla suit collecting flying jellyfish from the upper atmosphere? Flying Fish Bears? It is all quite beyond bizarre. You can’t make this stuff up, folks. One quite strange sighting from later years that is really hard to classify but seems to be a type of sky squid allegedly occurred on December 24, 1999, in the country of Belarus. On this day, two witnesses in the remote Vitebsk region saw in the sky an enormous cigar-shaped object that was blue and red in color like “the color of a clouds at sunset,” with a slightly angular quality to it and with a round and asymmetric front and a rear section that was described as blurry. It appeared as brighter than the early evening sky and looked to be slightly fluorescent, semi-transparent, and seemed to pulsate as it moved along, as if swimming rather than flying, completely silent the whole time. The sky was otherwise completely clear, and the witnesses both described having the feeling that they were not looking at any type of aircraft, but rather a living creature of some sort. Rather oddly, after observing the object for a short time, one of the witnesses would say that it had suddenly seemed to “disintegrate into dots” before vanishing. In an interesting twist, there would be another report by an Aeroflot pilot who claimed to have seen the same thing while flying over the area in 1985.
From the area of Groningen, Netherlands, we have the case of a similarly bizarre object seen by a witness by the name of Harry Perton, who was outside of his home taking pictures of the sky at the time. It was apparently just after a storm, and the clouds and sky had been beautiful, but something stood out as very odd. Moving across the sky was a pulsing, flashing green light that appeared for a short time and vanished. At first he thought it must have been just a weird-looking lightning strike, some remnant from the retreating storm, but when he got home and checked his photos he saw that one of them had actually picked up a strange object in the sky that looked like a jellyfish with an eerie green luminosity around it. The picture was soon doing the rounds online, sparking much speculation as to what it could be, including that it is a camera artifact, lens flare, a small meteorite, space debris, some meteorological phenomenon, or even a hoax, although the photographer himself has stated that he thinks there is a rational explanation for it and has made no effort to play it up as some sort of UFO. It hasn’t been explained.
Harry Perton’s Sky Squid
Another mysterious photo was captured in Andenesm, Norway by witness and amateur photographer named Per-Arne Milkalsen. As he was going through photographs he had taken of the Northern Lights, he noticed in one of the images a strange green glowing jelly-fish shaped object hovering over the landscape, and it did not seem to be a lens artifact or trick of light, but rather a solid floating object in the sky. It was so strange that he posted the photograph online, and a deluge of responses came in, with many suggesting that it was the Northern Lights reflecting off of something such as a satellite or cloud, but it was also pointed out that such a reflection was unlikely to be green. It still hasn’t completely been solved, and Mikalsen himself has said “I have never seen an object like this before, and I am eager to find an explanation to the phenomenon.”
In 1998 there was a mass sighting of some sort of sky jellyfish in China. On October 19 of that year, four military radar stations in Hebei province picked up a strange radar signature hovering near a military flight training school in Changzhou, about 90 miles northwest of Shanghai. When no other known civilian or military aircraft were shown to be in the area, it was alarming enough that a Jianjiao 6 jet fighter was scrambled and sent to investigate, and when they approached both the pilot and radar officer on the jet would claim they saw a mushroom or jellyfish shaped object with a bottom section “covered with bright, dangling lights.” Whatever it was proved to be very evasive, suddenly beginning to ascend as the fighter approached, with the pilot even at one point requesting permission to fire on it, which was denied. The object seemed to toy with the jet before suddenly ascending at a rapid pace, and the jet then chased it to an altitude of 39,600 feet before being forced to return to base due to lack of fuel. Two more jets were sent out, but by the time they arrived on the scene the object was gone. It would later turn out that 140 witnesses on the ground had seen the object as well, including many cadets and officers at the flight school, all of who described the exact same thing. Considering that the original report ran in a respected newspaper, the Hebei Daily, it is considered to be credible due to the fact that mainstream Chinese newspapers hardly ever mention anything to do with UFOs or the supernatural.
A very weird report comes to us from December 3, 2004, from two witnesses who were driving from Point Pleasant to Huntington, West Virginia, along the Ohio River, when they saw something that is really hard to categorize. As they drove along in the early evening, they noticed a movement over the road in front of them, before out of the gloom came a “greyish, smooth-winged shape” that they described as looking like a “flying manta ray,” with grey translucent skin and a wingspan “wider than a 2 lane road.” The outlandish beast sort of glided towards them and then performed a figure eight maneuver and swooped right over their car to disappear. Not long after this sighting there would be a separate report from a woman and her daughter near Blackwater River, who also saw what they called a “manta ray -shaped creature” glide over their car on a lonely rural road. What could this have possibly been? Who knows? A more recent account was given on the site Phantoms and Monsters, and comes from a witness in Perth, Australia, who is referred to merely as “BD.” The witness claims that in 2012 he was out in front of his house one evening having a cigarette when his attention was drawn to the curious sight of the light patterns of the stars being disrupted by something passing over them. At first he thought it might be a plane, but it soon became apparent that this was no aircraft. The witness explains:
As it got closer, the way it moved resembled the way a jellyfish would swim if it was horizontal. It was hard to describe, but it looked to be expanding at the front like a balloon, then using that air to propel itself along. It was roughly 100 meters above me and I watched it for 10 minutes. After that it was out of sight. This was during a clear night sky in Australia. I am very familiar with aircraft as I live relatively close to Jandakot airport and we see/hear them all the time. It was certainly not a machine of any kind. I yelled out to my Mother-in-Law who was staying at the time to come out and look. She also saw it. I filmed it on my smartphone, but being 8pm at night it was pitch black and you couldn’t see anything. If I had to guess, I would say the feeling I was left with is that it was some kind of creature. It moved gracefully and gradually in large deliberate movements. Like a large bird would do with a large flap of its wings, then gliding for a bit, although this was unlike anything I could describe. It appeared to be translucent in parts and remained at the same altitude and speed but just completely silent.
Amazingly, there was a follow up report from a different witness, who claims that he and a friend saw what appears to have been the same or a similar creature around Perth at around the same time as this sighting. The witness says of the creature:
I would like to confirm the story of the flying jellyfish like creature as described on your forum by “BD,” There were two of us actually not just myself. We were in Perth CBD actually having a glass of wine on a quite loud jazz music playing balcony about 10 meters from the ground. I am so thrilled to find out there is another person who has seen this. The creature was behaving exactly as described by “BD” so basically like jellyfish but without any long tentacles – about a size of a balloon. It was kind of changing according to the different colored lighting attached to the balcony and it was flying upwards so effortlessly. It is really precious I have finally found this. I have been searching for so long. I have to be honest I don’t recall the exact day but it must have been the same night as “BD” mentioned. We had seen it around 9-10pm either friday or saturday. The creature wasn’t too shy either meaning it didn’t fly in a hurry. Would gladly put my hand on my heart on this one and now may actually try to find it again, but who knows how often do they appear.
What could such creatures be? One idea is that they are a type of theoretical organism known as an “atmospheric beast.” Atmospheric beasts, or atmospheric life-forms, as they are often called, are said to be organisms that live their entire lives floating high in the atmosphere, undetected by humans. These creatures are most often described as having bodies that are semi-solid, or almost insubstantial, with some reports even claiming that they are able to adjust their density from almost immaterial and invisible to more solid, depending on as yet unknown factors. Numerous theories have been posited as to how such seemingly fantastical organisms could manage to stay adrift in the air, such as air bladders or very low body densities.
The appearance of these atmospheric beasts varies wildly. Accounts have variously described them as amorphous and cloud-like behemoths, finned squid-like creatures, floating jellyfish, translucent, vaporous blobs, flitting rods, amoeba-like organisms, gelatinous oddities, and even dragons. The sizes of atmospheric beasts likewise run the gamut from tiny and bird-like, to gargantuan monsters hundreds of feet long. Although these enigmatic creatures are said to typically lurk too high in the atmosphere or to be too insubstantial to see with the naked eye, there are instances when one might become observable for some reason. Indeed, there has been a substantial amount of sightings reports over the years from all over the world describing unusual flying monsters that do not fit into the typical mold of UFOs, thunderbirds, or other flying cryptids. Are these anomalies some type of lifeform? Or are these some sort of rare type of alien craft, an atmospheric phenomenon, or something else altogether? It is hard to say, and such cases remain lodged into the very fringes of the world of the weird.
From the “This can’t be good news” file comes a new study which found that there are more supermassive black holes wandering the universe that once thought – perhaps even outnumbering the number of supermassive lacks holes found in their usual place in the center of a galaxy. This increases the chances of them colliding with each other as well as consuming stars and planets in their way. The good news is, there are less of these wandering black holes now that at the birth of the universe. The bad news is, they’re difficult to detect. Should we be worried?
“Romulus predicts that many supermassive black hole binaries form after several billions of years of orbital evolution, while some SMBHs will never make it to the center. As a result, Milky Way-mass galaxies in Romulus are found to host an average of 12 supermassive black holes, which typically wander the halo far from the galactic center.”
Romulus in this case is not the legendary first emperor of Rome or the home of Star Trek’s Romulans but a modeling tool developed by Michael Tremmel of Yale to help astronomers simulate the evolution of different regions of the universe from just after the Big Bang until the present day. Tremmel was one of the co-authors of the study, published in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, which found that in today’s universe about 10% of the mass in black holes might be in wanderers. With Milky Way-mass galaxies having an average of 12 supermassive black holes, that means their 11 wanderers aren’t as massive as the big one in the center. However, some with higher redshifts (the displacement of spectral lines toward longer wavelengths) both outweigh and outshine their central supermassive counterparts.
“Most wandering black holes, we find, remain close to the seed mass and originate from the centers of previously disrupted satellite galaxies. While most do not retain a resolved stellar counterpart, those that do are situated farther out at larger fractions of the virial radius. Wanderers with higher luminosities are preferentially at lower radius, more massive, and either closer to their host’s mid-planes or associated with a stellar overdensity.”
While these black holes wander, the bigger ones tend to stay close to the center of their galaxy. They also grow at about the same rate as their galaxies, so they stay the same size in relative terms. Finally, many of the wandering supermassive black holes are not active, which is good news for stars and planets in their paths, which makes them very difficult to spot, which is bad news for astronomers trying to discover and track them in order to learn more about their development and the development of the universe in general.
Should we be worried? Well, astronomers in 2018 detected a Jupiter-sized black hole with 30,000 times the mass of the Sun wandering through the Milky Way. That makes it a medium-sized black hole and it’s no danger to us. In fact, even though we can’t see them and are just now learning how to detect them, wandering supermassive black holes are no danger to Earth now or for probably a few billion years.
UFO Sighted Over Tonalá, Mexico ( August 25, 2021 )
UFO was sighted over Tonalá a city and municipality within the Guadalajara Metropolitan Area in the state of Jalisco in Mexico on August 25, 2021
STATEMENT :
Este pequeño video que tome para un estado de whuatsapp despues de ponerlo me percate de algo que se mira lo mostre a varios conocidos y coinsidimos ustedes que opinan ? Esto fue en Tonala, Jalisco.
TRANSLATE :
This little video that I took for a status of whatsapp after putting it I noticed something you look at I showed it to several acquaintances and coinsidimos what do you think? This was in Tonalá, Jalisco. : Here I present the original and in the wake with approach. They are everywhere
More evident every day
credit : Alberto Estrada Nevarez
UAP / UFO Sighted Over Hertfordshire, England ( August 24, 2021 )
STATEMENT : Probably explainable but unsure as can't find any pictures of blimps, weather balloons, airships, drones, ultralights, ionize non propella planes, 3d map drones, Google’s loon program, Renault Float, TF-X and the like, nothing matched what it looked like. Size of smart car (so no not party balloon on the loose ), no sound, no propellers smooth, white, black screen that rotated 360 and up and down. Moved up and down in the sky etc. 6pm, countryside rural area. Hertfordshire. What you recon is? Most likely a drone or thought maybe electroaerodynamic-powered but which new tech - can you find an image matching?
Spinning Rotating UFO Sighted Over Boca Raton, Florida ( August 24, 2021 )
Spinning Rotating UFO was sighted over Boca Raton, Florida on August 24, 2021 : This is MUFON CASE : 117512 : Mutual UFO Network : MUFON SUBMISSIONS : Description Spinning rotating moving object
Long Description of Sighting Report - Case 117512
This is the 2nd time we have witnessed this event. Today this object caught my attention because it was pulsating and spinning/rotating in the corner of my eye higher than a plane flys. Started NW and slowly headed N higher and higher. At First it wasn't moving then slowly moved higher. The first time we witnessed this we watched the same event but a 2nd object came and met together probably covering a distance of 10miles from S to N within 5secs and both just faded away slowly.
Date Submitted : 2021-08-24 Date of Event : 2018-08-24 MUFON SUBMITTER FILE : 20210824184300.mp4
UFO Sighted From ISS Over South Atlantic ( August 15, 2021 )
Amazing video of UFO activity caught from the external camera on the International Space Station NASA UStream on August 15, 2021 : NASA and the ISS have clearly monitored this UFO over the South Atlantic.
They are here !
credit : Isaak Clark : ISS on UStream
note : no audio
UFO Sighted Over Vietnam ( August 23, 2021 )
UFO was sighted over the night skies of Vietnam on August 23, 2021 : Video footage was taken by Tri Nguyen
STATEMENT : In Vietnam 23/08/2021
They are here !
credit : Tri Nguyen
Strange Activity Above Us!!(UFO SIGHTINGS)
Three unexplainable videos! Take a look and see if you can explain it?
Video Source's 1st video takes place in Franklin, Tennessee MUFON case # 116824 2nd video takes place in Philadelphia, PA MUFON case # 117138 3rd video takes place in Washington DC MUFON case # 112878
Spinning Rotating UFO Sighted Over Boca Raton, Florida ( August 24, 2021 )
Spinning Rotating UFO was sighted over Boca Raton, Florida on August 24, 2021 : This is MUFON CASE : 117512 : Mutual UFO Network : MUFON SUBMISSIONS : Description Spinning rotating moving object
Long Description of Sighting Report - Case 117512
This is the 2nd time we have witnessed this event. Today this object caught my attention because it was pulsating and spinning/rotating in the corner of my eye higher than a plane flys. Started NW and slowly headed N higher and higher. At First it wasn't moving then slowly moved higher. The first time we witnessed this we watched the same event but a 2nd object came and met together probably covering a distance of 10miles from S to N within 5secs and both just faded away slowly.
Date Submitted : 2021-08-24 Date of Event : 2018-08-24 MUFON SUBMITTER FILE : 20210824184300.mp4
UFO Sighted From ISS Over South Atlantic ( August 15, 2021 )
Amazing video of UFO activity caught from the external camera on the International Space Station NASA UStream on August 15, 2021 : NASA and the ISS have clearly monitored this UFO over the South Atlantic.
They are here !
credit : Isaak Clark : ISS on UStream
note : no audio
UFO Sighted Over Vietnam ( August 23, 2021 )
UFO was sighted over the night skies of Vietnam on August 23, 2021 : Video footage was taken by Tri Nguyen
STATEMENT : In Vietnam 23/08/2021
They are here !
credit : Tri Nguyen
Strange Activity Above Us!!(UFO SIGHTINGS)
Three unexplainable videos! Take a look and see if you can explain it?
Video Source's 1st video takes place in Franklin, Tennessee MUFON case # 116824 2nd video takes place in Philadelphia, PA MUFON case # 117138 3rd video takes place in Washington DC MUFON case # 112878
Spinning Rotating UFO Sighted Over Boca Raton, Florida ( August 24, 2021 )
Spinning Rotating UFO was sighted over Boca Raton, Florida on August 24, 2021 : This is MUFON CASE : 117512 : Mutual UFO Network : MUFON SUBMISSIONS : Description Spinning rotating moving object
Long Description of Sighting Report - Case 117512
This is the 2nd time we have witnessed this event. Today this object caught my attention because it was pulsating and spinning/rotating in the corner of my eye higher than a plane flys. Started NW and slowly headed N higher and higher. At First it wasn't moving then slowly moved higher. The first time we witnessed this we watched the same event but a 2nd object came and met together probably covering a distance of 10miles from S to N within 5secs and both just faded away slowly.
Date Submitted : 2021-08-24 Date of Event : 2018-08-24 MUFON SUBMITTER FILE : 20210824184300.mp4
UFO Sighted From ISS Over South Atlantic ( August 15, 2021 )
Amazing video of UFO activity caught from the external camera on the International Space Station NASA UStream on August 15, 2021 : NASA and the ISS have clearly monitored this UFO over the South Atlantic.
They are here !
credit : Isaak Clark : ISS on UStream
note : no audio
UFO Sighted Over Vietnam ( August 23, 2021 )
UFO was sighted over the night skies of Vietnam on August 23, 2021 : Video footage was taken by Tri Nguyen
STATEMENT : In Vietnam 23/08/2021
They are here !
credit : Tri Nguyen
Strange Activity Above Us!!(UFO SIGHTINGS)
Three unexplainable videos! Take a look and see if you can explain it?
Video Source's 1st video takes place in Franklin, Tennessee MUFON case # 116824 2nd video takes place in Philadelphia, PA MUFON case # 117138 3rd video takes place in Washington DC MUFON case # 112878
A Merseyside woman who stopped to take a picture on a night time drive believes she's captured a UFO hovering in the sky on camera.
Last night, at around 10pm, Levi Highcock was out on a drive with her friend when they stopped the car to take a picture of the evening sky in Clockface area of St Helens.
Levi Highcock, 24, from St Helens
(Image: Levi Highcock)
Levi, 24, said she attempted to take a picture of the moon on Snapchat, but due to the lighting decided to take another on her phone camera using the night time mode.
But when she looked closer at the picture, Levi said and her friend were shocked when they spotted something blue in the sky similar to that of a UFO.
Levi told the ECHO: "I was taking a picture on snapchat and I couldn't see anything in the snap so I took a picture with the night mode on my camera and I could see this blue thing in the sky.
"I couldn't see any lights around it or anything, you can just see the blue thing in the sky. I was just taking a picture of the moon while we were out because I thought it looked nice.
"I was just out for a drive with my friend."
Levi said she was initially shocked by what she discovered and later posted the picture to a local Facebook group to see if anyone agreed with what she saw or had spotted it themselves.
Levi Highcock took a picture of what she believes to be a UFO in the Clockface area(Image: Levi Highcock)
She said: "We were just like oh, my god, it does look like a UFO. It does look like a ship, it doesn't look like a plane or a light, it looks like a UFO.
"I sort of believe in them. I'm not a strong believer but I do believe there are aliens out there and stuff like that.
Have you spotted anything similar or unusual in Merseyside? Let us know in the comments section.
"It’s interesting. You can see it but it was strange. I believe more now I can see it."
A new class of 'waterworld' exoplanets have been found by astronomers, who say that despite being hot, ocean-covered and hydrogen-rich - could support life.
They have been dubbed 'Hycean' world's by the team from the University of Cambridge, who say they 'greatly increase our chance of finding alien life.'
In the search for life elsewhere, researchers have mostly looked for planets of a similar size, mass, temperature and atmospheric composition to Earth.
Astronomers now say there may be more promising candidates out there, and these Hycean worlds are more numerous than Earth-like planets.
The habitable exoplanets are hot, ocean-covered worlds with hydrogen-rich atmospheres, and are more observable than Earth-like planets due to their temperature, making them easier to detect with current telescopes.
According to the scientists, the findings could mean the discovery of biosignatures of life outside our Solar System is a real possibility within the next two or three years.
A new class of 'waterworld' exoplanets have been found by astronomers, who say that despite being hot, ocean-covered and hydrogen-rich - could support life
HYCEAN PLANETS: WATERWORLDS LARGER THAN EARTH
Many of the prime Hycean candidates identified by the researchers are bigger and hotter than Earth.
However, they still have the characteristics to host large oceans that could support microbial life.
This is similar to the forms of life that are found in some of Earth’s most extreme aquatic environments.
These planets also allow for a far wider habitable zone, or ‘Goldilocks zone’, compared to Earth-like planets.
This means that they could still support life even though they lie outside the range where a planet similar to Earth would need to be in order to be habitable.
The vast majority are planets between the sizes of Earth and Neptune and are often referred to as ‘super-Earths’ or ‘mini-Neptunes’.
They can be predominantly rocky or ice giants with hydrogen-rich atmospheres.
Most mini-Neptunes are over 1.6 times the size of Earth: smaller than Neptune but too big to have rocky interiors.
A recent study on the mini-Neptune K2-18b found that in certain conditions these planets could support life.
The result led to a detailed investigation into the full range of planetary and stellar properties for which these conditions are possible, which known exoplanets may satisfy those conditions, and whether their biosignatures may be observable.
Hycean planets can be up to 2.6 times larger than Earth and have atmospheric temperatures up to nearly 200 degrees Celsius (392F).
Dr Nikku Madhusudhan from Cambridge's Institute of Astronomy, who led the research, said they open a whole new avenue of search for life elsewhere.
Many of the prime candidates of these planets identified by the researchers are bigger and hotter than Earth.
However, they still have the characteristics to host large oceans that could support microbial life similar to that found in some of Earth's most extreme aquatic environments, researchers suggested.
The planets also allow for a far wider habitable zone, or Goldilocks zone, compared to Earth-like planets.
This means that they could still support life even though they lie outside the range where a planet similar to Earth would need to be in order to be habitable.
Since the first exoplanet was discovered 30 years ago, thousands of other planets have been discovered outside of our Solar System.
The majority are planets between the sizes of Earth and Neptune, often referred to as super-Earths or mini-Neptunes.
They can be predominantly rocky or ice giants with hydrogen-rich atmospheres, or something in between.
Earlier studies of such planets found that the pressure and temperature beneath their hydrogen-rich atmospheres would be too high to support life.
However, a recent study on the mini-Neptune K2-18b by Dr Madhusudhan's team found that in certain conditions these planets could support life.
This prompted detailed investigation into the full range of planetary and stellar properties for which these conditions are possible.
It also looked at which known exoplanets may satisfy those conditions, and whether their biosignatures may be observable in the near future.
The investigation led researchers to identify a new class of planets, Hycean planets, with massive planet-wide oceans beneath hydrogen-rich atmospheres.
Hycean planets can be up to 2.6 times larger than Earth and have atmospheric temperatures up to nearly 200 degrees Celsius (392F).
The astronomers suggest such planets also include tidally locked 'dark' Hycean worlds that may have habitable conditions only on their permanent night sides, and 'cold' Hycean worlds that receive little radiation from their stars.
Size alone is not enough to determine whether a planet is Hycean, and other aspects such as mass, temperature and atmospheric properties are required to confirm.
Dr Madhusudhan said: 'Essentially, when we've been looking for these various molecular signatures, we have been focusing on planets similar to Earth, which is a reasonable place to start.
'But we think Hycean planets offer a better chance of finding several trace biosignatures.'
The habitable exoplanets are hot, ocean-covered worlds with hydrogen-rich atmospheres, and are more observable than Earth-like planets due to their temperature, making them easier to detect with current telescopes
Co-author Anjali Piette, also from the university of Cambridge, added: 'It's exciting that habitable conditions could exist on planets so different from Earth.'
The team has identified a sizeable sample of potential Hycean worlds which are prime candidates for detailed study with next-generation telescopes, such as the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), which is due to be launched later this year.
These planets all orbit red dwarf stars between 35-150 light years away - close by astronomical standards.
It is thought that planned JWST observations of the most promising candidate, K2-18b, could lead to the detection of one or more biosignature molecules.
Astronomers hope to be able to use the James Webb Space Telescope (pictured), that launches early next year, to find biosignatures in these alien worlds
HYCEAN PLANETS OBSERVED FROM THE EARTH THAT 'COULD' CONTAIN ALIEN LIFE WITHIN ITS PLANET WIDE OCEAN
NAME
MASS (xEarth)
RADIUS (xEarth)
TEMPERATURE (K)
TEMPERATURE (F)
K2-18 b
8.63
2.51
250
-9.67
K2-3 c
2.14
1.74
286
55.13
TOI-1266 c
2.2
1.56
291
64.13
TOI-732 c
6.29
2.42
305
89.33
TOI-270 d
4.78
2.01
327
128.93
TOI-175 d
2.31
1.57
341
154.13
TOI-776 c
5.3
2.02
350
170.33
LTT 1445 A b
2.2
1.38
367
200.93
K2-3 b
6.48
2.12
384
231.53
TOI-270 c
6.14
2.33
413
283.73
TOI-776 b
4
1.85
434
321.53
'A biosignature detection would transform our understanding of life in the universe,' said Dr Madhusudhan.
Adding: 'We need to be open about where we expect to find life and what form that life could take, as nature continues to surprise us in often unimaginable ways.'
Most often, these biosignatures are oxygen, ozone, methane and nitrous oxide, which are all present on Earth.
There are also a number of other biomarkers, such as methyl chloride and dimethyl sulphide, that are less abundant on Earth but can be promising indicators of life on planets with hydrogen-rich atmospheres.
On these planets, life could be supported despite oxygen or ozone not as abundant.
Scientists study the atmosphere of distant exoplanets using enormous space satellites like Hubble
Distant stars and their orbiting planets often have conditions unlike anything we see in our atmosphere.
To understand these new world's, and what they are made of, scientists need to be able to detect what their atmospheres consist of.
They often do this by using a telescope similar to Nasa's Hubble Telescope.
These enormous satellites scan the sky and lock on to exoplanets that Nasa think may be of interest.
Here, the sensors on board perform different forms of analysis.
One of the most important and useful is called absorption spectroscopy.
This form of analysis measures the light that is coming out of a planet's atmosphere.
Every gas absorbs a slightly different wavelength of light, and when this happens a black line appears on a complete spectrum.
These lines correspond to a very specific molecule, which indicates it's presence on the planet.
They are often called Fraunhofer lines after the German astronomer and physicist that first discovered them in 1814.
By combining all the different wavelengths of lights, scientists can determine all the chemicals that make up the atmosphere of a planet.
The key is that what is missing, provides the clues to find out what is present.
It is vitally important that this is done by space telescopes, as the atmosphere of Earth would then interfere.
Absorption from chemicals in our atmosphere would skew the sample, which is why it is important to study the light before it has had chance to reach Earth.
This is often used to look for helium, sodium and even oxygen in alien atmospheres.
This diagram shows how light passing from a star and through the atmosphere of an exoplanet produces Fraunhofer lines indicating the presence of key compounds such as sodium or helium
A new class of exoplanet very different to our own, but which could support life, has been ... [+]
AMANDA SMITH, NIKKU MADHUSUDHAN
Alien life may exist on planets that have been hiding in plan sight, previously dismissed as astronomers as being incapable of hosting life.
That’s the conclusion of a study published today in The Astrophysical Journal in which a team from the University of Cambridge identify a new class of habitable exoplanets they’ve dubbed “Hycean.”
“Hycean” planets aren’t rocky like Earth, instead having oceans and hydrogen-rich atmospheres.
It’s thought that the new classification could accelerate the search for life outside our Solar System for one simple reason: planets that fulfil the criteria to be “Hycean” already dominate the known exoplanet population, which is approaching 4,500.
Such planets are also larger than Earth and many are relatively close to us, so much easier to find and study than tiny Earth-like planets.
So life could be hiding in plain sight.
The researchers singled out one particular exoplanet, called K2-18b, which tops a list of exoplanets that they say should be investigated by the massive James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), which launches this October.
“Hycean planets open a whole new avenue in our search for life elsewhere,” said Dr. Nikku Madhusudhan from Cambridge’s Institute of Astronomy, who led the research. He thinks that we should be looking for trace gases in these planets’ atmospheres that have previously been overlooked, but could be as valid a “biosignature”—a suggestion of life—as the typically searched-for oxygen, ozone, methane and nitrous oxide.
“A biosignature detection would transform our understanding of life in the universe,” said Madhusudhan.
Here’s everything you need to know about “Hycean” planets:
What are ‘Hycean’ planets?
They’re hot, ocean-covered planets with hydrogen-rich atmospheres, mostly bigger and hotter than Earth. That makes them rocky “Super Earths” or “Mini Neptunes” with hydrogen-rich atmospheres, which have thus far been ignored as exoplanets capable of hosting Earth-like life. There are no planets like them in our Solar System.
However, the researchers claim that some of them could host large oceans that could support microbial life similar to the extremophiles found around vents in Earth’s oceans.
Hycean planets can:
be up to 2.6 times larger than Earth.
have atmospheric temperatures up to nearly 200 degrees Celsius.
be ocean worlds conducive for microbial life in Earth’s oceans.
be tidally locked planets with a permanent night-side.
be far from their stars that receive little sunlight.
This artist’s impression shows the planet K2-18b, it’s host star and an accompanying planet in this ... [+]
ESA/HUBBLE, M. KORNMESSER
Why have ‘Hycean’ planets so far been overlooked?
In their search for an “Earth 2.0” astronomers usually focus on planets of a similar size, mass, temperature and atmospheric composition to Earth.
They also look only in the “habitable zone” of a star—that region between the snow-line and the star where liquid water could exist on the surface.
As well as widening the search for life beyond Earth analogs, “Hycean” planets could redefine how wide a habitable zone can be—i.e. where a planet’s oceans could be much hotter or colder than on Earth and still potentially host forms of life.
Welcome to K2-18b
Situated 124 light-years away in the constellation of Leo, K2-18b is a mini-Neptune planet orbiting a red dwarf star. JWST will definitely study its atmosphere and look for biosignatures because water vapor was discovered in its atmosphere.
However, it’s regarded by most astronomers as being too big to have a rocky interior like Earth, so very unlikely to host any kind of life. It’s also thought that the planet would have both a surface temperature and surface pressure too high to support life.
But Madhusudhan’s team found that in certain conditions K2-18b and planets like it could support life, specifically by because they may host other biomarker molecules like methyl chloride and dimethyl sulphide.
The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST or Webb) will study the atmospheres of exoplanets and search ... [+]
GETTY
The hunt for new ‘Hycean’ biomarkers
Such molecules are less abundant on Earth, but the researchers say that they could be indicators of life on planets with hydrogen-rich atmospheres, where oxygen or ozone may not be as abundant.
“Essentially, when we’ve been looking for these various molecular signatures, we have been focusing on planets similar to Earth, which is a reasonable place to start,” said Madhusudhan. “But we think Hycean planets offer a better chance of finding several trace biosignatures.”
“We need to be open about where we expect to find life and what form that life could take, as nature continues to surprise us in often unimaginable ways,” said Madhusudhan.
The ‘Hycean’ hit-list
Investigating which other known exoplanets may boast similar conditions and properties as K2-18b, the team produced a shortlist of 11 “Hycean” exoplanets with promising properties for JWST to study in the hope of turning up these or other biosignatures.
All of them orbit red dwarf stars between 35-150 light years away—super-close to us in galactic terms.
Bob Salas claims he himself saw a UFO, while he was on missile alert duty at the Malmstrom military base in Montana in 1967. He said a "glowing red object" hovered over a launch control capsule and then "shot a beam of light at the warhead" that left ten Minuteman intercontinental ballistic missiles disabled.
Ex-US Air Force Captain Bob Salas has demanded the government release all information it has on UFO incidents at nuclear sites in the United States. Salas has started a campaign to raise money in order to hold a press conference to draw the public's attention to the issue of UFOs and nuclear weapons.
According to a statement posted on the GoFundMe website, the money will also be used for lobbying activities in Washington, DC.
"It is time for the US Congress to hold public hearings on the Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon (UAP). There are many ex-military witnesses who can verify UFO incidents of nuclear weapons bases. The current period in time represents a unique opportunity to promote open and public disclosure of long held secrets by government agencies", reads the statement.
At the moment of writing Salas' campaign has received $5,700 of the $10,000 intended goal.
One individual, who donated $500, wrote the following statement.
"I had first heard about UFO incursions on nuclear weapon sites from a Physics Professor at Montana State University when I was a graduate student in 1988. The whole thing sounded ridiculous to me then. But it was the 2010 National Press Club conference that I saw on YouTube in 2016, which convinced me that this was real and important and that I needed to do something about it. This is one way I hope that I can give back! This is a global issue, and quite possibly one of the most important issues facing humanity".
Another person, who donated $200, wrote that his father "was a witness to a UFO interfering with the United States nuclear arsenal and he would have liked to have heard what our government knows about who or what was behind it".
Bob Salas is not the only person to speak about the need for government officials to investigate UFO sightings at nuclear facilities. Senator Harry Reid spoke about the issue in the documentary "The Phenomenon", made by ufologist James Fox. Reid, who in 2007 secured funding for the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Programme, a Pentagon project that examined the US military's encounters with UFOs, alleged that there have been numerous reports of mysterious objects flying above US nuclear facilities over the years.
Do aliens zealously want to learn about US nuclear programme? The Pentagon has given an ambiguous answer. In its recently released dossier on UFOs the Defence Department revealed that there have been over 140 sightings of mysterious objects with no possible explanation, but it stopped short of calling UFOs extraterrestrial ships. The Pentagon said that the eerie objects could belong to rival powers such as Russia or China.
There are enough conspiracy theories online to keep you reading for a lifetime — and trust us, you don't want to fall down that rabbit hole. But what does it mean when some of the rumors and secrets are actually confirmed? Thanks to declassified documents, government leaks, and revealing reports, we've learned more about our government's secret programs than ever before. From the FBI's file on Bigfoot to the CIA's covert dragonfly, sometimes the truth can be stranger than fiction.
Father And Sons Close Encounter With A Very Strange Alien Craft
Father And Sons Close Encounter With A Very Strange Alien Craft
AUGUST 17, 2021 …………….GARDEN VALLEY CALIFORNIA
My young son and I were outside watching the Perseid meteor shower and the smoke in the sky from the large wild fire in our county. To the northeast is a regular flight pattern of aircraft far off in the distant to the NE the craft fly from the east to the west and just look like small lights in the sky. On this occasion a craft flew from the NE straight in my direction, directly over my house to the SE. I had put a large shop light outside facing the NE to keep the critters away because my dogs bark all night. I think the craft was seeing what my light was. It moved very slowly and I could hear no noise until it was directly over my house. As it approached it had a huge white light and red lights around the top and sides. I thought it was a helicopter at first buy it was too large and didn’t make that kind of sound.
As it got closer the lights looked different. I could see it had a small red blinking light on the right side and a large blue light on the left side. The red light was the only blinking light on the craft and the blue light was constant and didn’t blink. The blue light was not as large as the white light in the middle. The nose of the craft was flat where the huge white light was on the front. The craft was shaped like a huge carrier jet and cigar shaped but a lot smaller than a cargo jet. It was just above tree top level and made a slight jet sound but very quietly as it flew over my house very slowly. I don’t know how it was flying so slowly and staying in the sky. I didn’t see any windows. It was shorter than the length of my house but the width and girth was larger than my house. It had two small wings to the front of the craft that didn’t look large enough for the craft. The small blinking red light and the blue light were on its wings. There were no jet engines on the wings or on the sides of the craft. It had no propellers.
I could not tell if or where any engines were on the craft. The body of the craft came to a smaller point to the rear and as if passed by I could see 2 huge tail wings that were on the craft in a vertical direction, huge rectangular shaped. The rear wings were very large and thick with each having a huge white rectangular light on the middle of the wing shining directly behind the craft. These rear lights were larger than the white light in the front. The wings looked like the wings on the star wars movie tie fighter but they were rectangular. I guess they are called v wings but these structures on the craft would not have benefited air flow around the craft. These rear vertical things on the back were taller than the body of the craft but did not hang down below the belly of the craft and were thick like giant blocks. The craft as a whole didn’t look like any jet I’ve ever seen, it looked like a space ship that could have turned straight up and went into space. I stood there with my mouth open saying “what is that” over and over again. My son is too young to say what he saw fly over the house. I have looked all over the internet but cannot find anything that looks remotely like what I saw. I didn’t think it was aliens although I guess I don’t know what one of their ships really looks like, but; I felt like it was ours. I turned off the bright light outside and haven’t turned it on since. I was half expecting the military to show up at my house because of the light but that didn’t happen, thank goodness. Apparently there are space craft on this planet that us regular people don’t know anything about. NOTE: The above image is real but from another case file.
Drone Captures What No One Was Supposed to See via Missing Files
Drone Captures What No One Was Supposed to See via Missing Files
Drone Captures What No One Was Supposed to See via Missing Files
A couple of decades ago, drones were merely a science fiction idea from the future! Nowadays, everyone and their dog has a drone, and they seem to be a regular fixture in our skies! Whether people are filming their hometown or capturing mind blowing footageon vacation, there is a whole world of incredible drone footage out there! However, not everyone loves being filmed by drones, and sometimes their pilots capture things they were never supposed to see. Yep, turns out there is a dark side to drones!
From the haunting birds eye view of one of the most infamous and deadly ghost towns on the planet, to the extreme footage that gets closer to a raging tornado than anyone ever has before in human history, these are the Drone Captures What No One Was Supposed to See
De onbemande sonde had eigenlijk in oktober moeten vertrekken maar liep al uitstel op naar mei 2022. Het is de eerste lancering van een maanverkenner door Moskou sinds de jaren 70, toen de Sovjet-Russische ruimtevaartindustrie voor fierheid zorgde.
Bouwer van de sonde is het bedrijf NPO Lavotsjkin dat in de jaren 60, 70 en deels in de jaren 80 de industriële pijler vormde van de interplanetaire verkenning door Moskou. Volgens zijn directeur Aleksandr Tsjetsjakov heeft het nieuwe uitstel te maken met “sommige problemen die tijdens tests zijn opgedoken”, meer specifiek om “een absoluut veilig landingssysteem op punt te stellen voor een zachte landing”.
“In feite hebben wij onvoldoende tijd. Wij hebben meer nodig om de ontwikkeling van het ruimtetuig af te ronden”, aldus de directeur, geciteerd door de Russische persbureaus.
De Loena-25 moet vanop de Russische ruimtehaven Vostotsjni met een Sojoez-2.1b/Fregat vertrekken en nabij de zuidelijke pool van de maan landen.
Serie Russische maanmissies
Het is de eerste etappe van een serie Russische maanmissies, met het oog op een eventuele basis in een baan rond het hemellichaam, of - in samenwerking met China - de constructie van een basis op het oppervlak van de maan.
De laatste maanmissie van Moskou was de Loena-24. Die maakte in augustus 1976 een zachte landing op de maan, nam er bodemmonsters, en bracht ze naar onze planeet.
Hersenen van octopussen tonen verrassende gelijkenissen met die van mensen
Hoewel octopussen al zowat 600 miljoen jaar een andere evolutionaire weg bewandelen, vertoont de vorming van hun hersencellen verrassende gelijkenissen met die van de mens. Dat blijkt uit onderzoek van ontwikkelingsbiologen aan de KU Leuven.
Bijzonder aan de ontwikkeling van onze menselijke hersencellen is dat ze niet gebeurt op de plaats waar ze hun functie vervullen. Hersencellen ontwikkelen vanuit hersenstamcellen die, wanneer ze uitgroeien tot functionele hersencellen, nog een reis moeten ondernemen tot hun finale plaats in de hersenen.
“Dit bijzondere fenomeen is zichtbaar in de hersenen van gewervelde dieren zoals de mens, maar we hadden geen idee of dit migratieproces belangrijk is voor complexe hersenvorming in het algemeen”, zegt Eve Seuntjes, professor ontwikkelingsbiologie aan de KU Leuven. “Om die vraag te beantwoorden, moet je op zoek naar een dier met even complexe hersenen dat evolutionair zo ver mogelijk van onszelf verwijderd is. Pas wanneer er gelijkenissen zijn tussen dieren met een compleet ander evolutionair vertrekpunt, wijst dit erop dat deze manier van hersenontwikkeling geen toevalligheid is.”
De achtarmige octopussen bleken het antwoord te zijn op deze vraag. Ze hebben een complexe hersenstructuur die ze bovendien nuttig gebruiken. Octopussen zijn in staat om te spelen, te dromen, voorwerpen te gebruiken en zelfs vooruit te plannen. Deze ongewervelde dieren hebben een compleet ander evolutionair vertrekpunt dat op één of andere manier toch geleid heeft tot een gedrag dat wij als mensen herkennen.
Doorzichtige eieren
“In het lab bouwden we een ideale omgeving waarin octopuseieren kunnen ontwikkelen. Doordat de eieren doorzichtig zijn, konden we elke fase van de ontwikkeling goed opvolgen”, vertelt postdoctoraal onderzoeker Astrid Deryckere. “Tot onze grote verbazing vertonen hersencellen bij octopussen hetzelfde migratiegedrag als menselijke hersencellen. Dit bewijst dat migratie van hersencellen fundamenteel is om complexe hersenen te vormen.”
“In een volgende fase zullen we proberen te achterhalen hoe je van deze ingenieuze opbouw tot effectieve hersenactiviteit gaat en hoe dit dan verder leidt tot bepaalde gedragingen”, besluit Seuntjens.
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24-08-2021
LATEST UFO SIGHTINGS AND VIDEOS - 24 - 8 - 2021
LATEST UFO SIGHTINGS AND VIDEOS - 24 - 8 - 2021
UFO Sighted Over Campinas, São Paulo, Brazil ( August 22, 2021 )
Again it happened over Brazil : Fire dripping UFO? or UFO releasing small craft ....Sighted Over Campinas, São Paulo, Brazil on August 22, 2021 and resembling Mooca, São Paulo, Brazil sighting on August 8, 2021 ...They are back !
STATEMENT : Filmed last night in Campinas-SP. Look at the bright spot climb, right to left, diagonally. It's on the 8nd second of the footage. Sadly, was without the tripod.
ORIGINAL : Filmei ontem a noite, em Campinas-SP. Vejam a subida de ponto luminoso, da direita para a esquerda, em diagonal. É no 8° segundo da filmagem. Infelizmente, estava sem o tripé.
Impressive record of Unidentified Flying Objects or UFOs that were sighted over the night skies of Indonesia,
They are here !
note : no audio
credit : U.S.F
UFO Creatures Sighted Over Baku, Azerbaijan ( August 20, 2021 )
Multiple unknown black UFO creatures appeared in Azerbaijan sky on August 20, 2021. The video was shot in Baku, near Elmlar AK
They are everywhere!
credit : UMDGUDF
UAP ORB Sighted Over Victoria, Australia ( August 22, 2021 )
Incredible Australian ORB UAP sighting ! This stunning video of an ORB UAP was captured by Chris K, in Victoria, Australia. This is one of the most fascinating videos you can ever see of a clear pulsating UAP Orb captured at twilight. All details withheld
credit : Chris K
The Lake Superior UFO Event ? ( August 22, 2021 )
Is the Pentagon Investigating this one ??? The Lake Superior Event ! An unidentified pair of lights appeared and hovered above a freighter travelling across Lake Superior. Erik Rintamaki was travelling though Paradise, Michigan, when he spotted a couple of bright lights in the sky above him. Whipping out his camera to film, one of the lights dipped out of view before appearing minutes later. The bright yellow orbs continued to float high above the freighter for more than an hour as Erik watched on stunned. Of course there is more! Watch !!! Are we getting close to a revelation ? Lanterns ? ISS ? Lol !!?
The video description states that there are “no signs of CGI or video editing,” and that it appears to be a “real and legitimate” UFO.
While some viewers are convinced the object is not of this world, others have denounced it as nothing more than a balloon—specifically one of Mr. Peanut.
The later theory came about after a photo, allegedly of the same flying object but from a different angle, surfaced on Reddit.
Regardless of the object’s true nature, it is—at least for now—an unidentified flying object.
Key Point: Conceived as a stealthy surveillance plane with a discrete Low Probability of Intercept Radar, Tacit Blue instead pioneered the use of computer-engineered curved surfaces in stealth aircraft which heavily informed Northrop’s forthcomingB-2 stealth bomber.
Despite the countless dubious conspiracy theories attributed to the site also known as “Dreamland” or “Groom Lake,” there’s no doubt that for over six decades the base hosted all sorts of “black project” aircraft whose existence was not formally disclosed by the Pentagon.
His article first appeared in July 2019. It is being republished due to reader interest.
Though the CIA only obliquely admitted to the site’s existence in 2013, we actually know a fair bit about how Area 51 came to be—and even how it first became a subject of juicy UFO stories.
A Private Testing Ground for Eisenhower’s Top-Secret Spy Plane
In the early 1950s, the United States was super keen on monitoring the Soviet Union’s rapidly developing nuclear ballistic missile program. As the first spy satellites remained a few years away from being launched, the only way to reliably spy on these sights was to fly above them and snap pictures with giant cameras. But by the early 1950s, the Soviet Union’s new air defense system and high-flying jet interceptors made spy flights excessively risky.
To overcome these defenses, Lockheed engineer Kelly Johnson proposed a glide-liker spy plane that would simply fly too high to be intercepted at over 70,000 feet. This still involved illegally violating Soviet airspace—but as long as the spy planes couldn’t be shot down, Moscow couldn’t prove the spy flights were happening at all.
In November 1954, Eisenhower approved the development of this U-2 spy plane in a program known as “Project Aquatone” to be operated by the CIA. While the plane would be built at Lockheed’s famous Skunkworks facility, an aircraft designed for illegal spy overflights needed to be tested somewhere more discrete.
Johnson asked Lockheed test pilot Tony LeVier to find a suitably clandestine airfield. As described in the bookDark Eagles by Curtis Peebles, test pilot Tony LeVier departed from the Skunkworks facility in Palmdale, California flying a Beechcraft Bonanza light plane, ostensibly on a “hunting trip.” In reality, they proceeded to survey 50 decertified sites in Arizona, California, and Nevada over two weeks—but none seemed sufficiently remote.
However, Air Force liaison Col. Osmond Ritland recalled an abandoned X-shaped landing strip that had served as a gunnery field during World War II.
CIA officers Richard Bissell, LeVier, and Johnson flew down to inspect the strip, which lay next to a dry Nevada salt flat called Groom Lake. Bissell described the site as “…a perfect natural landing field… as smooth as a billiard table without anything being done to it.”
Johnson indicated “We’ll put it right there. That’s the hangar.”
A fake company called CLJ, created to obscure Lockheed’s involvement, recruited contractors to build up the facilities in the sweltering summer of 1955 at a cost of $800,000.
The desolate site, deceptively nicknamed “Paradise Ranch,” started out with a nearly mile-long runway, two hangars, a control tower, fuel and water storage tanks, an access road, and trailers for onsite personnel. LeVier personally road about the lakebed to clear it of debris and spent shell casings to make it safe for landing.
Finally, on July 24, 1955, the prototype U-2, dubbed Article 341, was disassembled and stowed into a hulking C-124 Globemaster transport plane, which transported it to the “Ranch”—landing with deflated tires so as not to break through the thin runway.
LeVier took the gawky aircraft around on taxi tests, hitting 80 miles per hour on the runway—only for the aircraft’s lengthy wings to lift his plane twenty feet into the air during his second run. The U-2 flew over a quarter-mile before LeVier was able to get the lift-prone aircraft back down on the lakebed on his second attempt—though the hard landing caused one of the jet’s tires to burst and catch fire.
The U-2 went on to see several successful flight tests and in a matter of months was deployed on spy flights over the Soviet Union with CIA pilots.
Civilian airline pilots and air traffic controllers began spotting the silvery U-2s flying at supposedly impossible heights. Given that the Air Force couldn’t explain the sightings by telling the truth, it devised weather-related incidents to explain them away. These often unconvincing explanations only fed the fervor of conspiracy theorists.
The Blackbirds: A-12, D-21, and SR-71
When a Soviet S-75 surface-to-air missile blasted Gary Powers’s U-2 in 1960, and he subsequently confessed to performing espionage flights) it became clear that altitude alone would not provide an adequate defense. Kelly Johnson had already anticipated this vulnerability in 1958, when he began exploring a new spy plane concept: combining high altitude with sustained speeds exceeding three times the speed of sound, and radar-stealth—hopefully making the jet too high and fast to ever intercept.
This CIA-Lockheed “black project”—codenamed “Project Oxcart”—spawned the futuristic-looking A-12 single-seat spy plane, the progenitor of the famous (and unclassified) two-seat SR-71 Blackbird flown by the U.S. Air Force.
The Groom Lake facility at this time acquired the designation “Area 51” as it expanded and developed specialized facilities for the striking supersonic jets: larger additional hangars, a longer 10,000 foot runway, safer backup landing areas, over 130 housing units for personnel, and enlarged fuel stores for the exotic high-temperature JP-7 fuel used in the A-12.
The first A-12s arrived in 1962 along with elite military pilots temporarily discharged and placed in the employ of the CIA, a protocol known as “sheep-dipping.” Though the White House never dispatched A-12s on overflights of the Soviet Union, they did fly thirty-two missions over Vietnam and North Korea in Project Blackshield before being retired in favor of the Air Force’s SR-71s, which had side-looking cameras that didn’t require overflight of hostile airspace.
Lockheed also devised a D-21 spy drone that resembled a miniature, single-engined Blackbird, carried on top of a Blackbird-derived carrier aircraft called the M-21.
Tragically, one of the piggybacked D-21 drones collided with its M-21 carrier during a test launch. Though both of the M-21’s crew ejected, one drowned before he could be rescued, and Johnson canceled M-21 program.
However, the CIA did later try to make use of the D-21s by launching them from B-52 bombers to snap footage of Chinese nuclear test sites. However, a series of mishaps meant the Air Force was unable to recover footage from any of the five drone missions it dispatched.
Birthplace of the Stealth Jet
While the A-12 and Blackbird had limited stealth characteristics, by the 1970s, the Air Force was interested in taking another crack at a low-radar-observable jet, this time with combat application.
In 1977, the Skunk Works used new computer modeling technology to design and build two pale aircraft with diamond-like faceted surfaces coated with radar-absorbent iron ball paint. These “Have Blue” aircraft was disassembled and flown to Area 51 in a giant C-5 cargo jet on November 16, then rebuilt and test flown.
Lo and behold, the Have Blues did exhibit drastically reduced radar cross-sections—but they were also highly aerodynamically unstable, and both crashed in 1979.
Lockheed evolved Have Blue into the F-117 Nighthawk attack jet, which used computer fly-by-wire systems to correct the aircraft’s inherent instability. A YF-117 prototype too made its first flight at Groom Lake on June 17, 1981. Production F-117s were then stationed at Area 51 before being redeployed to the nearby Tonopah Test Range.
Though the Pentagon admitted to the existence of a stealth jet in 1983, the secrecy surrounding the F-117 was so effective that the public never had any inkling of the Nighthawk’s true appearance, nor even its designation (widely believed to be the “F-19”) until was finally unveiled in 1988.
Meanwhile, Northrop, too, began refining its stealth technology with the Tacit Blue demonstrator, dubbed the “whale” or “alien school bus” for its decidedly unglamorous appearance. This made its first flight at Groom Lake in February 1982—the first of 135 in all before the demonstrator was retired in 1985.
Conceived as a stealthy surveillance plane with a discrete Low Probability of Intercept Radar, Tacit Blue instead pioneered the use of computer-engineered curved surfaces in stealth aircraft which heavily informed Northrop’s forthcoming B-2 stealth bomber.
Sébastien Roblin holds a master’s degree in conflict resolution from Georgetown University and served as a university instructor for the Peace Corps in China. He has also worked in education, editing, and refugee resettlement in France and the United States. He currently writes on security and military history for War Is Boring.
His article first appeared in July 2019. It is being republished due to reader interest.
ALL RELATED VIDEOS, selected and posted by peter2011
There appears to be a nexus between unidentified aerial phenomena-aligned activity and U.S. nuclear technology sites, a former fed said.
Provisions included in the Intelligence Authorization Act for fiscal 2022, which the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence recently passed via a unanimous bipartisan vote, would direct members of the intelligence community to further explore unidentified aerial phenomena, or the modern term for UFOs.
The work would build on efforts led by the Defense Department’s UAP Task Force, a group formed to study unexplainable happenings in the sky registered by military members or sensors. Those involved produced a preliminary assessment of such occurrences for U.S. IC and other government leaders earlier this year.
Two long-time advocates for more transparency in federal UAP pursuits said the IAA inclusions mark some of many elements needed to ensure America is on top of these sky-based national security concerns.
“I'm glad that Congress is doing something. My only hope is that it won't be a ‘once and it's over with.’ There must be an ongoing spending of taxpayer dollars to scientifically look and determine what these things are. Because right now, we don't know. The more we learn, the more we don't know,” former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., told Nextgov. “Now the American people can handle this. I’m not worried about that—what I'm worried about is the government trying to hide the information they get. We must be transparent.”
During his time as a top lawmaker, Reid secured millions in funding to back the Pentagon’s Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, or AATIP. An unclassified but unpublicized precursor to the UAPTF, AATIP operated for less than a decade conducting UFO sighting-aligned research before it was disbanded in the mid-aughts.
Reid and former AATIP Director Luis Elizondo discussed those prior and existing programs during Nextgov’s Emerging Tech Summit last week, and pointed to the directions they’d like to see feds move on this going forward.
More to Know
Representing a state that’s home to many UFO sightings, Reid became interested in this topic years ago out of curiosity and leaned into it during his time in the Senate. “I wanted to find out if there was anything to this,” he explained. The lawmaker worked with Sens. Ted Stevens, R-Alaska, and Daniel Inouye, D-Hawaii—who he said “controlled dark money in the Defense budget”—to put funds toward government-led scientific studies into the reported sightings.
When Reid expressed his aims, Stevens immediately brought up an experience he had as a pilot in World War II. An unidentifiable object flew to his left, followed him, and his aircraft got low on fuel. Stevens landed and asked the air traffic controller what was flying alongside him, and they had no idea anything had been there. Based on that experience, Reid said the AATIP ask was “such an easy sell.”
Ultimately, the lawmakers were looking to put a hard number to exactly how many people had witnessed the “unusual sightings,” Reid noted. As it turned out, there were thousands of them.
“We have counts going for 70 years of people seeing these phenomena. Now, it's becoming even more apparent that these unidentified flying phenomena exist—but what they are, we don't know,” Reid explained. “The more we study, the less we know what they are. But what we do know is that things are developing.”
Observations often included air and watercraft moving at remarkable speeds. Reid said at a military base in the Dakotas, personnel reported communications systems being shut off when UAPs were observed in the area. “The same thing happened on a Navy ship off the coast of San Diego,” Reid noted, “so it's something we better stay to hell on top of, because to let it go is not good for the security of this nation.”
Offering another example, the former Senate leader said on the Pacific Ocean-based USS Omaha, officials saw a football field-sized object that was shaped like a football hover around the massive cruiser and then suddenly disappear into the water.
“There were people who saw this with their eyes—and for the first time—through radar, sonar and other new equipment, we have pictures that are scientifically saved,” Reid said.
The short, unclassified version of a larger intelligence document released by the Pentagon’s UAPTF this summer confirmed more than 100 reports of such phenomena originating from government sources—80 of which involved observations with multiple sensors. Still, the review also noted that data and collection capabilities were limited.
Reid said he was happy to see further proof through technology and that the government was still looking into this. At the same time, he wants feds to ensure that the public continues to get information about the results of their work in this space. He and Elizondo noted France, China, Russia, among others, are likely investing in this space.
“Someone asked me, ‘what if it shows it's coming from someplace else?’ So what? They asked the same question to President Obama and he said, ‘look, we are just this small speck in this great universe.’ And I wouldn't be surprised if there's something else from someplace else,” Reid noted. “So that's where we are. I'm glad I got to start this—but it's not gonna end by the fact that we got something started. Something must be ongoing, and transparent to the American people.”
Elizondo over the last few years has also been pushing for more openness about the government’s knowledge of UAPs. Previously, he was a career intelligence officer and counterintelligence special agent, who worked to “hunt and catch terrorists and spies.” He spent much of that time abroad, and then the last 10 or so years of that work at the Pentagon. There, he was put in charge of the AATIP.
“I had no idea what the effort was about until once I was in. It was one of those, I guess, Hollywood moments where you watch a movie and they say, ‘hey, we want you to be part of something—but it's so secret we can't tell you what it is. Sign here,” Elizondo said. “So, wisely or foolishly I went ahead and signed, and it turned out that that effort was looking at UFOs.”
He was asked to steer the work in 2010 and did so until around 2017, when he resigned.
“A lot of people will say, ‘you resigned out of disloyalty to the Department of Defense and the intelligence community.’ That's not at all the case,” Elizondo said. “I actually resigned out of loyalty. We were receiving information that needed to be reported to senior leadership, but there was no mechanism in place. The bureaucracy wouldn't allow this information, because of the topic, to be reported.”
Drawing on his time in the program and the latest task force report, he reflected on some notable features of spotted UAPs.
“There does indeed seem to be some sort of nexus between UAP activity and our critical nuclear technology—whether it's propulsion, or weapons systems and whatnot,” Elizondo said. “It's not just our observations, other countries have observed this as well.”
The former defense official added there also “seems to be some sort of weird nexus between UAP activity and large bodies of water.”
He further elaborated on how technology is used by government officials during and in the aftermath of sightings, to make sense of them. Witnesses are often well-trained pilots, and their testimonies are vital. There are also electro-optical devices like gun cameras and infrared footage, smartphones and radar data to track such happenings.
“We've never been in such a golden era of technology and capabilities,” Elizondo said. He noted that with camera-enabled mobile phones, “every human being is a potential information collector.” There’s also now ground-, sea- and space-based capabilities and radar to capture information.
“In the ‘50s, we hadn't really made it into the upper limits of our atmosphere. Now, we have geosynchronous satellites, we have low-Earth orbit satellites, we've got mid-orbit satellites,” Elizondo explained, “all looking at the same spots on Earth through a different lens.”
‘As Important as a New Military Aircraft’
The 345th section of the intelligence authorization act for the next fiscal year is titled “Support for and Oversight of the Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force.” Specifically, the legislation would mandate the Defense secretary and national intelligence director to “require each element of the intelligence community and the Department of Defense with data relating to unidentified aerial phenomena to make such data available immediately to the Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force and to the National Air and Space Intelligence Center.”
This bill would expand the task force’s and Air Force’s data and information collection regarding such incidents. If passed, it would also direct quarterly reports to Congress on the unfolding efforts.
Senate Select Committee on Intelligence Chairman Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., introduced the bill.
The legislation awaits action on the Senate floor, a spokesperson from Warner’s office confirmed. Generally, the recurring act is attached to another piece of relevant legislation, like the National Defense Authorization Agreement.
New, forward-looking Congressional language such as this could further affirm and reinforce the task force’s establishment, according to Elizondo. Looking ahead, he said a Pentagon Inspector General-led look into the hiccups DOD has had with UAP reporting and transparency might also make sense. He mentioned knowing of people on the Hill who are also pushing for public hearings on the topic.
“I think that's part of transparency—I'm certainly not against it. And if I'm asked to testify, you better believe I'm going to testify,” Elizondo said. “But that's not the only way to do it. I’d be concerned about creating some sort of spectacle or circus. My effort is not to blame anybody.”
He agreed with Reid that the government should continue to fund work to figure out this perplexing phenomena.
“We spend more on a new military airplane than we are spending on this—and we’ve got to realize that this is just as important as a new military aircraft,” Reid noted.
Despite hearing “all the arguments against this,” and naysayers, the Nevadan remains firm in his aims.
“My own staff told me to stay away from this. People would think I was a little demented—looking into flying saucers, so to speak. But frankly, I can go here in Las Vegas on the strip, and somebody will say, ‘are you Harry Reid? Yeah? Thank you for doing the work’ on, well they usually say flying saucers, but I know what they're talking about,” Reid said. “So I'm glad that I got it started. I'm really convinced that it was the right thing to do.
The past few years have seen a big change in how UFOs are perceived, both by the public and by government officials.
A still from a U.S. Navy video of a UFO sighting.
(Image credit: U.S. Navy)
Leslie Kean is a veteran investigative reporter who has spent over 20 years delving into the once-taboo topic of unidentified flying objects (UFOs). UFOs are now established as real, she says. Furthermore, despite observations using highly advanced technologies, we have no idea what they are or where they come from.
While Kean has never seen a UFO, her own close encounters with hundreds of government documents, aviation reports, radar data and case studies with corroborating physical evidence, as well as interviews of dozens of high-level officials and aviation witnesses from around the world, have bolstered her belief that UFOs are worthy of scientific study. "I believe we may have finally arrived at the threshold of a new paradigm," Kean said.
Kean is author of the New York Times bestseller "UFOs: Generals, Pilots and Government Officials Go on the Record (Harmony Books/The Crown Publishing Group, 2010). More recently, she co-authored eye-opening articles in The New York Times that focused on sightings of UFOs, which the U.S. military has recently rebranded as unidentified aerial phenomenon (UAPs), and the government programs to investigate them. She also wrote "UFOs: Shifting the narrative from threat to science," an article published on The Debrief earlier this month.
Space.com recently caught up with Kean to discuss what she thinks is in the offing concerning UFOs, what stands in the way of the scientific community's taking on the challenge of discovering if any UFOs are extraterrestrial, and more.
Journalist and author Leslie Kean. (Image credit: Tatiana Daubek)
Space.com: How do you best characterize where we are today, given your NY Times co-authored piece that catapulted things into public view?
Kean: We have seen a major sea change since our December 2017 New York Times story that included two Navy videos. The government has acknowledged the reality of UFOs and the fact that they impact national security, and that alone is a major shift. We have more Navy videos of unexplained objects, an official UAP Task Force, and most recently a government report on UAP which was requested by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.
The report stated there is no evidence that UAP are ours, Russian or Chinese. It forced many stove-piped agencies to pool information for the first time and gained further attention for UAP from policymakers, with some calling for open congressional hearings. Even before the June 2021 UAP report, high level officials have made statements as to the need for further investigation of these unexplained objects exhibiting technology beyond what we possess. The taboo against taking the subject seriously is diminishing, and scientists have come out of the woodwork advocating for studies on UAP in Scientific American. These events are unprecedented. And the media can't get enough of UFOs. Recently, for the first time, UFOs were covered by both The New Yorker and the CBS show, "60 Minutes."
Space.com: Do you believe the "UAP" focus is the same as decades of "UFO" reports? Are they one and the same or not, in your view?
Kean: I don't think there's any difference in how the reports describe the phenomenon. Government documents such as the famous 1947 Twining Memo describe the behavior of the objects in the same way as later documents did, and in the same way they are reported today. The difference is that today we have better cameras, radar, satellite and sensor technology than we had decades ago, increasing the specificity of data on UAP (which remains classified).
The term "UAP" has gradually become the preferred term used by the government and military, because it encompasses a broader range of phenomena than the term "UFO." But since "UAP" came into use primarily to avoid the stigma and baggage associated with "UFO," there really isn't much difference between the two other than the impression the acronym creates. One seems more cultural, the other more official. "UAP" removes any association with conspiracy theories, or shows like "The X-Files," or the fringe element. Even so, the term "UFO" has been around forever and has a wider appeal. In my reporting I use the terms interchangeably, depending on the context.
Leslie Kean met with former U.S. Sen. Harry Reid (D-Nev.) recently at his home in Nevada. (Image credit: Leslie Kean)
Space.com: Given your long and productive research on the UFO issue, what has surprised you the most? Similarly, what has disappointed you the most?
Kean: Especially in the early years of my reporting, I was most surprised by the lack of curiosity among scientists and policymakers about UFOs. I was also surprised by how entrenched and powerful the stigma was in the media and in the culture in general. It mystified me why just about everyone was not impacted by the potential implications of the evidence for this phenomenon. It didn't take long for me to realize that most people in a position to make a difference were uninformed and understandably had other priorities. Still, given how fascinated I was with this and given what it might mean if even one UFO was extraterrestrial, I found this apathy and disinterest hard to understand.
Many times I was amazed that accomplished investigative journalists did not jump on board and take a deep dive into this subject. As a freelancer, I couldn't open the same doors as The Washington Post, The New York Times or The New Yorker. Yet they were essentially silent. That was frustrating to me. But of course it has all changed now.
I was also frustrated that there was no government agency in place to receive reports from police officers, commercial pilots and other credible witnesses, and to conduct investigations when necessary. You can imagine my surprise when I learned about the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP) program in 2017. However, being limited only to military cases and being secret, it was not exactly what I had been hoping for.
Space.com: With all the chatter now about UAPs, the UAP preliminary report, etc., where are we now, and what's next?
Kean: We have made tremendous progress in the last three and a half years. There was a lot of momentum which built up prior to the release of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) UAP report on June 25, and we have to keep the momentum going. But when things get quiet, I am aware that there is still a lot going on behind the scenes. For our next steps, we need to have a well-funded task force with expanded staff that can access information from all government agencies and consolidate it. The best experts from many fields need to analyze this data. We need to understand the root of the intelligence failure which has stymied a meaningful government investigation into UAP. Task force reports for the public and Senate committees need to continue to be published on a regular basis. And of course I believe that much more information should be released to the public.
There are videos and photographs in DOD [Department of Defense] files which are vastly superior to the ones we have seen so far. I think the public has a right to this and other data, as stated by [former U.S.] Senator Harry Reid who initiated the [AATIP] government program. The secrecy is excessive here, despite the need for some classification on grounds of national security.
Perhaps we will be fortunate enough to see open congressional hearings on UAP. And eventually, we may be issued a definitive statement that these objects are not Russian or Chinese. It has been established that they are not ours, but the door on UAP being technology from a foreign adversary has not been completely closed. Some in a position to know have stated that these objects are not created by Russia or China. That needs to be stated as fact in one of the subsequent written reports. Perhaps one day those two countries will join with the United States to acknowledge this reality. At that point we will have crossed a line into a new world.
Space.com: In my view, the public is experiencing a new wave of UFO frenzy — something I saw in the 1950s. There are charlatans in this arena hard at work to make money. There are dedicated investigators trying to unravel this saga. What are your thoughts on how the public should be wary but still remain open to getting to the bottom of the UFO story?
Kean: I would advise the public to be careful about whom they listen to. Focus on official information, provided by current and former government officials and others with credentials that are in a position to have knowledge. They often speak in generalities because they have been exposed to much classified information and can only go so far in what they can say publicly. But their words carry a lot of weight and should be taken seriously. I recommend paying attention to in-depth investigations, such as those from The Debrief and The Drive.
Fortunately, this subject transcends politics, and we have to keep it that way. We must all be wary of people with extreme conspiratorial views who are trying to influence the public for their own gain. Any such claims must be backed up with facts, names and documents that can be corroborated, or they are worthless. I encourage people to bear this in mind when they come across what you describe as "charlatans."
Space.com: Do you expect "full disclosure" regarding UFOs in the near term? If so, is the public ready for this disclosure and the related add-on of possibly distrusting the government?
Kean: It depends on what you mean by "full disclosure." Some people think this means that government officials will stand up and announce that we have been visited by extraterrestrial craft for over 70 years and we knew about it all along. I don't think this is ever going to happen.
However, if we get to a point where it becomes an official, stated fact — universally accepted — that these objects are not ours, Russian, Chinese, or made by any country on Earth, this would be disclosure of at least some UFOs originating off this planet. At the same time, I suspect that tagged on to any admission along these lines would be the caveat that we don't know what they are, where they are from or why they are here. Such clarity will not necessarily be established in the near term.
It all goes in steps, sometimes small ones, and it takes time. I think the process will continue to be gradual disclosure, and this will help minimize distrust in government. It gives all of us time to absorb and explore — and challenge — each step along the way. We are closer than ever before to a new level of confirmation. Yet I am sure there is plenty of resistance to such a paradigm shift.
Space.com: Lastly, is there a need to "internationalize" this UAP/UFO dialogue?
Kean: Definitely. Sources have told me that other countries have reached out to us since the June UAP report was released. China has established its own UAP task force. South America is active in investigating UAP. International cooperation among government officials and among scientists is crucial in moving forward. And I believe that scientists need to follow the lead of Harvard's Avi Loeb and become more involved, initiating their own independent, international explorations of this phenomenon. They might be able to tell us more about it than our government, because they can make their results public.
Leonard David is 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 @Spacedotcom, Facebook.
Glowing Disk over Peruvian Andes near Machu Picchu
Glowing Disk over Peruvian Andes near Machu Picchu
Some believe that ancient Machu Picchu in Peru and the Teotihuacan Pyramid of the Moon in New Mexico are not only archaeological wonders, but also evidence that ancient astronauts visited these areas and may still visit these places given the many unexplained objects in the sky that appeared above or near these locations over the years.
Unexplained objects like a glowing disk over Peruvian Andes near Machu Picchu, the disk has a copper color which gives off a glow and looks very geometric and does not resemble a reflection. Or a strange object, that is best described as a humanoid figure sitting on an aerial vehicle, that appeared above Teotihuacan Pyramid of the Moon, New Mexico, or a strange colorful object and a UFO-like anomaly that both appeared over Machu Picchu.
US Navy Chief Yeoman saw secret documents of retrieved alien bodies dead and ALIVE!
US Navy Chief Yeoman saw secret documents of retrieved alien bodies dead and ALIVE!
On Thanksgiving night, 1976, Thomas Colman Sheppard and two other Navy men saw photographs and documents in a TOP SECRET/MAJIC file about extraterrestrial biological entities. The location was a classified vault at White Beach Naval Facility in Okinawa, Japan.
Linda Moulton Howe presents her exclusive interview with retired US Navy Chief Yeoman Sheppard referencing an aerial disc technology described by government documents as "interplanetary;" military attacks and disc retaliations; and the strict American policy of denial about the disc intelligences in the interest of national security.
He also described seeing some highly classified “Roswell file photographs” of crashed UFOs and retrieved alien bodies — dead and alive.
The rover will continue exploring a potential ancient ocean floor on the Red Planet
A panoramic camera image showing the terrain ahead of China's Zhurong Mars rover around Aug. 15, 2021
(Image credit: CNSA/PEC)
China's Zhurong roverhas completed its primary three-month-long expedition on Mars but is set to continue exploring the Red Planet.
Zhurong completed its 90-sol mission in Mars' Utopia Planitia on Aug. 15, according to the China National Space Administration (CNSA). (One sol, or Mars day, lasts about 24 hours and 40 minutes. So 90 sols is about 92 Earth days.)
Since landing on May 14, the rover has taken selfies with its landing platform and driven 2,917 feet (889 meters) across the surface, visiting its own discarded landing equipment and analyzing different rocks, dunes and other features as it went.
A hazard avoidance camera shot showing fresh Zhurong tracks in the Martian surface. (Image credit: CNSA/PEC)
New images from the rover show the terrain that it most recently reached. Zhurong will continue to cross this area, which is thought to be below the shoreline of an ancient ocean in southern Utopia Planitia.
CNSA says Zhurong's six scientific instruments are working well and that the rover has, with the help of the Tianwen 1 orbiter acting as a relay, sent back 10 gigabytes of raw science data. That information could help scientists better understand Mars and its history, Liu Jianjun, chief designer of the Tianwen 1 ground application system, told CCTV.
"Hopefully, by providing these data to our scientists, we can get a deeper understanding of the geology of Mars, and then even see if we can find evidence of the existence of an ancient ocean in Utopia Planitia," Liu said.
The Tianwen 1 orbiter has been passing over Zhurong's position once a day to relay data back home. Both spacecraft will go into safe mode from mid-September through late October, however, because of a solar conjunction preventing communications between Earth and Mars.
With Mars on the far side of the sun from Earth, our view of the Red Planet is obscured by the sun. Charged particles given off by the star interfere with radio communications between the planets, meaning Zhurong will need to operate autonomously, and in a limited capacity, for safety reasons. NASA's Curiosityand Perseverance rovers will also be operating on their own between Oct. 2 and Oct.14for the same reason.
Map charting the Chinese Mars rover Zhurong's travels from its landing platform toward the south. (Image credit: CNSA)
When fully active again, Zhurong will continue toward a feature described as a "groove" just over 1 mile (1.6 kilometers) away.
"If it is possible for us to see from the top to the bottom [of the groove], or if there are disparities of rock types and compositions, we could learn about what has happened in its geological history. So, this is what we're going to focus on in the near future," Liu said.
TIanwen 1, meanwhile, will sometime after the conjunction switch its orbit to allow it to begin a global survey of Mars with its own seven science payloads. Teams are devising an orbit that will allow the orbiter to begin its own detections while still assisting Zhurong, which has only limited data transmission capabilities.
Tianwen 1 launched in July 2020 and is China's first independent interplanetary mission. The spacecraft entered Mars orbit in February of this year, and Zhurong separated from the orbiter and made its successful landing in May.
Multiple UAP ORBs Sighted Over Washington, D.C. ( August 22, 2021 )
The Washington DC UAP Orbs! : Impressive capture of Hundreds of fast moving bright UAP Orbs witnessed by family in broad daylight on August 22, 2021 over Washington, D.C.
They are here !
credit : UFO Sightings Footage
UFO Does Sharp Manoeuvres Over Wakefield, England ( August 22, 2021 )
Stars don’t do 90 degree turns or wild manoeuvres like this! Wakefield West Yorkshire UK!
STATEMENT : we had a crop circle appear last Thursday near an old castle! Unusual always Wiltshire!
They are here !
credit : Carl Smith
UFO Sighted Over College Point, New York ( August 18, 2021 )
Amazing this UFO sighting that was in College Point, a neighborhood in New York City, New York on the night of August 18, 2021 : 11:30 PM
They are everywhere
credit : U.S.F
Ghost Of Child Playing On Swing? Filmed At A Local Farmers Market In British Columbia, Canada.
The witness states the following: " I was just wanting to show how long this went for. I recorded this after an hour of the swing moving by itself. At first I hardly even noticed it thinking someone has pushed it, but then I realized that it was still going even after an hour. This happened between the hours of 6-7:30 at least what a remember. I didn’t feel scared, mostly weirded out. There was no wind or children near by at the time. I just found this just weirdo." The witness went on to add, "For those who are wondering I zoomed in during the video, mainly the reason I wasn’t scared was because I come from a culture which believe to not be afraid when you see strange stuff like this. If you wish which kind of culture, I am First Nation. I mainly wanted the video to be longer, but I had to head back to my work. I did speak with my co workers and he said he saw something." The witness also added, "To make it clear this take place in Canada, I wouldn’t be saying the clear location has I still work there. Again it wasn’t that windy at all that morning." Thanks to FuzzyBuns for allowing me the use of this footage and to view the original : https://www.reddit.com/r/Ghosts/comme....
MUFON CASE : 117454 Peabody, Massachusetts ( August 22, 2021 )
Mutual UFO Network : MUFON SUBMISSIONS : Saw 3 UAP’s flying north overhead while attending a fundraiser outside and it happened so fast!
Long Description of Sighting Report - Case 117454
I saw 3 Uap’s the night of August 6th 2021 I took three video’s the first is two UAP’s traveling north - north east up the coastline precisely at 9:30 there was a huge fireworks display it was loud and it lit up the sky as they were finished with the finale these objects appeared right after it had stopped!
The second video shows a single object following the same flight path as the other 2 trying to catch up with them.
The last video is of a plane that’s heading south- southeast on the coastline u can see it is all illuminated by standard plane lights! But these orbs or UAP’s were pulsating and changing flight patterns that planes cannot physically do! all while pulsating and changing colors and morphing or changing patterns! Thanks for checking this out
Date Submitted : 2021-08-22 Date of Event : 2021-08-08 MUFON SUBMITTER FILES :
They capture a mysterious luminous UFO under the waters of Miami
They capture a mysterious luminous UFO under the waters of Miami
Mysterious images appeared on the web of a green luminous object moving underwater. As it moved, “the object shone and changed shape.”
An underwater UFO sighting off the coast of Miami has recently been reported. An underwater and luminous object that surprised viewers of social networks.
The famous ufologist Scott Waring has published mysterious images in which a glowing object of green luminosity moves under the surface of the water.
As it moved, the object glowed green and changed shape. According to Waring, UFOs are capable of moving underwater just as easily as they are through the air.
And the green light comes from the propulsion systems of an unidentified object.
This is far from an isolated case of O V NIs entering and leaving the ocean.
Many people probably remember the videos of a UFO entering the water, filmed by the crew of an American destroyer.
The ufologist is convinced that in the places where such objects are found, extraterrestrial bases could be located at a depth of several kilometers.
Some researchers believe that these bases are not the main ones, but rather the transit bases for beings from other worlds that could live underwater and why not, underground. What do you think?
In many ways the 1940s were a sort of golden era for UFOs, and ushered in the phenomenon as we know it today, as well as the term “flying saucers.” Beginning with the Foo Fighters of World War II, which were strange lights in the sky observed by both sides of the war, from there the phenomenon would really take off. While World War II had its Foo Fighters, most pilot encounters with UFOs were still obscure, and only really started to appear shortly after perhaps the most famous pilot encounter in history, when private pilot Kenneth Arnold claimed to have seen a line of nine shiny fast-moving objects at Mt. Rainier, Washington on June 24, 1947. The sighting would launch the idea of “flying saucers” into the public consciousness, and although there had been UFOs sightings much earlier than this, Arnold’s account was the first one to really hit the mainstream news, and is largely credited with launching the mainstream UFO phenomenon as we know it today. After this there would be a string of similar reports of pilots encountering UFOs throughout the 1940s, and here we will look at a selection of these, ranging from the odd to the harrowing.
On July 16, 1947, just a month after the Arnold encounter, a witness and pilot stationed with the Aircraft Distribution Officer of the Far East Air Materiel Command in Fuchu, Japan had a rather strange sighting. On this occasion he was not actually flying the plane, but rather riding along on a mission to bring a B-17 aircraft to Middletown Air Depot, Pennsylvania in order for it to undergo various modifications to make it into an air rescue craft, mostly equipping it with features for sea rescues. This went through as planned smoothly, and then they made the return trip headed back to Japan, and this is where things would get strange. The witness says that he was at the nose of the craft as they headed out over the area of Promontory Point, Utah, when he observed some strange objects that seemed to be ascending from the Salt Flats. He said of what happened:
At first I thought they were big white birds but they were coming towards our aircraft at such great speed that I became alarmed. However, in just a few moments they veered to the left of our aircraft, but close enough for me to identify them as nine round disks, approximately 40-60 feet in diameter with light blue underbellies. They were in what appeared to be a V formation of three, three, and three. They passed off the left wing of our aircraft in a climbing flight. I immediately made my way to the cockpit to advise the pilot of my sighting. He had not seen them. However, the flight engineer, Technical Sergeant GJH (name withheld), Serial Number AFxxxxxxxx, did see them and confirmed my sighting. We only differed on one thing. He saw them as they were a little lower than our aircraft and he described the top of them as sand colored. I had been in the Philippines Islands and Japan for approximately for 18 months and had not been aware of the UFO excitement in the States at that time. The weather over the sighting area was perfectly clear and there was no way that I could have been mistaken about what I had seen.
B-17
He made a report of the odd incident but after that it seems to have just been quietly filed away to be forgotten. In that same year, a Mr. John H. Janssen was flying his private plane from Morristown Airport in New Jersey on the morning of July 10, 1947, when he saw in the sky above him “six, luminous spherical craft with hazy rings around them” apparently flying in a tight formation. He claimed to have managed to take a photo of the objects before they disappeared from sight. Then on July 23, he saw the objects again in the same area as he was flying at an altitude of 6,000 feet. He would say in a report to NICAP of this sighting and the strange events that would play out:
While my eyes played over the horizon, I became aware of a shaft of light that seemed like that of a photographer’s flash bulb. It came from aloft, very high up. It was above that position over my plane’s nose that flier’s call 11 O’clock. At first, I thought it was merely the reflected sun bouncing off the sides of an exceedingly high flying aircraft. I gave it no more thought. But then the engine of my own plane began to perform peculiarly. It coughed and sputtered spasmodically. So I pulled on the carburetor heat and gave it full throttle hoping to thaw any ice that might be accumulating in the carburetor. The engine emitted one final wheezing cough and then quit. Now, the nose of my plane, instead of dropping to a normal glide, remained… rigid… fixed on the horizon, in its normal level flight attitude.
Abruptly, I became aware that my plane was now defying the basic law of gravity. I became frightened and close to panic at so weird a predicament. I saw that the airspeed indicator was at zero! There was now an odd prickling, electric-like sensation coursing through my body. I had an eerie feeling that I was being watched and examined by something that minutely studied my features, my clothing, and my airplane… I flicked a cold bead of perspiration from my eye. Then I saw it! Above and slightly beyond my left wing tip was a strange wraith-like craft, one of the flying objects! Its flanged and protecting rim was dotted on either side with steamer-like portholes. It seemed to radiate a dull metallic hue that conveyed an impression of natural strength, and a super-intelligence not of this planet. It was motionless. Perhaps a quarter of a mile away… beyond, and slightly higher, I could see another (similar) object, seemingly fixed in the sky. I assumed that the second strange ship was but waiting for the one nearest me to complete its examination. Then I had the most unaccountable urge to reach up and snap on the magneto switch. I had turned it off when the engine quit. I switched both magnetos to the on position. Slowly the propeller began to turn… then the engine burst into a steady rhythmic roar. The plane nosed up into a stall, dropped off, picked up airspeed and steadied under control.
It is quite a frightening case, since the object seemed to have had the ability to affect his aircraft, to potentially dangerous effect. One of the most famous, well-publicized, and allegedly deadliest UFO pilot encounters supposedly happened the following year, in January of 1948. It revolves around Kentucky Air National Guard Pilot Captain Thomas F. Mantell, who was an experienced WWII ace pilot and a war hero, being the recipient of awards such as the Distinguished Flying Cross and an Air Medal for his brave actions and heroism during the war. In other words, he was no rookie and no nut job, and on January 7, 1948 Mantell was piloting a F-51D Mustang along with three other pilots from the 165th Fighter Squadron of the Kentucky Air National Guard, in the area of Godman Field, at Fort Knox, Kentucky on a training exercise, when a strange series of events began to unfold.
It started with a report to Godman field from a Kentucky highway patrolman warning that he had seen a large circular object about 300 feet in diameter in the sky near Maysville, Kentucky, after which several other reports came in of people seeing the same thing in the vicinity of Owensboro and Irvington. Shortly after this, at approximately 1:45 PM, a Sgt. Quinton Blackwell at Fort Knox made visual contact with the object along with two other personnel in the tower, and it was described as being “very white” with a red border at the bottom. It was also seen at Clinton County Army Air Field in Ohio, with the witnesses saying it had “the appearance of a flaming red cone trailing a gaseous green mist,” and an observer at Lockbourne Army Air Field in Ohio reported that it had dipped all the way down to the ground, only to suddenly soar to an altitude of 10,000 feet and speed off.
Seeing the object as a potential threat to air traffic in the area and looking to find out exactly what it was, Mantell and the other pilots in the air in the area at the time were ordered to go investigate. One of them had to return to base after he ran low on fuel, but the other three dutifully approached the mysterious object, and Mantell would make visual confirmation, reportedly telling air traffic control that it was “metallic and of tremendous size.” The other pilots would give a slightly different description, saying that they could not exactly make out what it was as it was too indistinct at the time. They advised Mantell to hold off on pursuing it until they could more concretely identify what it was, but the WWII fighter ace ignored this and tore off after it in hot pursuit.
The other two pilots followed him as he gained altitude, but were then forced to abort because one of the pilots had a low oxygen supply and the other had no oxygen mask at all, so they were unable to climb too high. They were forced to break off and head back as Mantell continued to chase the anomalous object, which seemed to be retreating upwards, passing an altitude of 22,500 feet. As he passed this threshold, it seems that Mantell must have blacked out from a lack of oxygen, as his plane was seen to stop its ascent and then begin a spiraling, circular fall towards the earth. The out-of-control descent ended with Mantell’s aircraft careening down to crash into a farm south of Franklin, Kentucky at 3:18 PM, and emergency crews were immediately sent out to the site. The UFO itself then vanished from view and was not seen again.
Image by Steve Baxter
It wasn’t thought that Mantell could have possibly survived the horrific crash, and this was indeed correct. The pilot was found dead and burned in the wreckage, and there were some odd clues found in that the seatbelt had been shredded and his watch had stopped at exactly the time that the plane had come down. It is uncertain what else was found there, but considering that a UFO had been involved and the story began getting splashed all over the media, rumors would soon begin to fly. Various rumors said such myriad mysterious things as that Mantell’s body had been found unburned and fully intact, that it had been full of bullet holes or alternately tiny burned holes indicative of some unknown laser weapon, or that there had been no body at all, as well as that the entire plane had actually been disintegrated in mid-air, or that the wreckage had been magnetized or radioactive. There was absolutely no evidence for any of this, but the public ate it up and it created an added mystique to it all. One witness who claims to have actually visited the crash site is Captain James F. Duesler, who was one of several military officers at Godman at the time, and would come forward in 1997 to say of what he saw at the site:
The wings and tail section had broken off on impact with the ground, and were a short distance from the plane, he recalled. There was no damage to the surrounding trees and it was obvious that there had been no forward or sideways motion when the plane had come down. It just appeared to have “belly flopped” into the clearing. There was very little damaged to the fuselage, which was in one piece, and no signs of blood whatsoever in the cockpit. “There was no scratching on the body of the fuselage to indicate any forward movement and the propeller blade bore no telltale scratch marks to show it had been rotating at the time of impact, and one blade had been embedded into the ground. The damage pattern was not consistent with an aircraft of this type crashing at high speed into the ground. Because of the large engine in the nose of the plane, it would come down nose first and hit the ground at an angle. Even if it had managed to glide in, it would have cut a swath through the trees and a channel into the ground. None of these signs were present. All indications were that it had just belly-flopped into the clearing. I must admit, I found this very strange.
Theories at the time ran amok that he had been shot down by a top-secret air craft or even a UFO. As far as the military was concerned, it was a classified issue, but many Air Force officials said that they believed that Mantell had died after misidentifying the planet Venus for an unidentified object and then losing oxygen as he got too high in his pursuit of it. However, this hypothesis seems pretty odd, as according to astronomers Venus at the time was not bright enough to be seen, at most as a vague pinpoint of light, let alone mistaken for an enormous metallic craft like that described. The official stance would change when it was found that the Navy had been carrying out a top-secret program called Project Skyhook at the time, which entailed testing the use of special high-altitude meteorological balloons for the purpose of intelligence gathering. The idea was that the balloon could have been mistaken for a mysterious craft, and then foolishly pursued by Mantell. Of course, considering that the official stance is rarely completely trusted by the public, there is of course the idea that he really did chase an alien UFO.
There are a few problems with the balloon theory, such as why such an experienced pilot would not recognize it for what it was, and the fact that the object was also tracked by numerous other trained sources who also did not recognize it as a balloon, and the fact that no one seems to be able to tell if there was even one of those balloons in the area at the time. It also seems to have displayed very non-weather balloon-like behavior with the report of the object dipping down to ground level and shooting up to the sky, as well as displaying amazing acceleration. Whatever it was that Mantell chased or thought he was chasing, it has never really been satisfactorily explained, and nothing really matches all of the details, the experience of the pilot, and the preceding sightings by numerous other observers before the incident. It has gone on to have the distinction of being the first known death of a pilot directly as a result of a UFO, in this case not necessarily an alien craft, but an unidentified object. In the end, it is a weird tale with many unanswered questions, and has become perhaps the most well-known case of a pilot engaging an unidentified flying object.
The year 1948 seems to have been the year for this sort of thing, because another very similar case allegedly occurred in October of that year, this time in the skies over Fargo, North Dakota, in the United States. On October 1, 1948, a veteran fighter pilot of the Second World War by the name of George Gorman was on a cross country flight as a second lieutenant in the North Dakota Air National Guard. On this day he was travelling as a part of a squadron of P-51 Mustangs on a training flight, and they made their scheduled destination of Fargo at 8 PM that evening. While the other pilots landed, Gorman went off to do some night flight practice in the clear weather. After 1 hour of this, at 9 PM Gorman would report that he had seen a bright blinking light that did not seem to have a fuselage or to be a normal airplane in any sense that he could tell. He radioed in the strange object to Fargo’s Hector Airport, and it turned out that no other aircraft was in the area except him and a small Piper Cub that Gorman could see even as he witnessed the mysterious light. It soon became apparent that the Piper Club was also witnessing the anomalous object, and this was enough to make Gorman decide to approach it to see what it was, soon finding that it was moving very rapidly, and it seemed to be evading his attempts to close in on it even as it seemed to taunt him, at one point whizzing by a mere 500 feet away. However, because of this he was able to get a closer visual, and would explain that it was little more than an intensely bright light only perhaps around 8 inches in diameter, and that it got brighter whenever it slowed down. He would say of this encounter:
It was about six to eight inches in diameter, clear white, and completely round without fuzz at the edges [i.e., sharp and clear]. It was blinking on and off. As I approached, however, the light suddenly became steady and pulled into a sharp left bank. I thought it was making a pass at the tower. I dived after it and brought my manifold pressure up to sixty inches but I couldn’t catch up with the thing. It started gaining altitude and again made a left bank, I put my F-51 into a sharp turn and tried to cut the light off in its turn. By then we were at about 7,000 feet. Suddenly it made a sharp right turn and we headed straight at each other. Just when we were about to collide, I guess I got scared. I went into a dive and the light passed over my canopy at about 500 feet. Then, it made a left circle about 1,000 feet above, and I gave chase again.
Gorman on the left
Gorman would proceed to doggedly pursue the object, which climbed and dropped at a rapid pace, sometimes drawing the pilot to such an altitude that his plane stalled, moved with incredible dexterity, circled around him, and on several occasions buzzed by dangerously close. This “dogfight” brought them directly over the Fargo Airport, where it was also clearly witnessed by air traffic control and ground personnel, who also watched as Gorman’s plane chased it right past them to the southwest. One of the air traffic controllers at the time would say of what he saw:
After passing to the east of the airport it seemed to take a northwest heading, The object seemed to be at about 2,000 feet and appeared to be traveling at quite an excessive speed compared to a Piper Cub that was east of the field at the time. No definite outline could be identified. Both objects [the UFO and the Piper Cub] were sighted at the same time. It was an object or a light traveling at a high rate of speed, apparently on a southwest heading. The F-51 [Gorman’s plane] was some distance behind and the object was traveling fast enough to increase the spacing between itself and the fighter. The object appeared to be only a round light, perfectly formed, with no fuzzy edges or rays leaving its body. The edges were clear cut. No other shape was observed. The main identifying characteristic was the high rate of speed at which it was apparently traveling.
Gorman would continue his pursuit, managing to get above the object and make a dive on it, after which he claims that it made a sudden vertical maneuver to go shooting past and disappear up into higher altitudes. Unable to get another visual on the object, Gorman gave up and flew back to the airport to land, where he would go on to give a formal account of what happened, saying:
I am convinced that there was definite thought behind its maneuvers. I am further convinced that the object was governed by the laws of inertia because its acceleration was rapid but not immediate and although it was able to turn fairly tight at considerable speed, it still followed a natural curve. When I attempted to turn with the object I blacked out temporarily due to excessive speed. I am in fairly good physical condition and I do not believe that there are many if any pilots who could withstand the turn and speed effected by the object, and remain conscious. The object was not only able to out turn and out speed my aircraft … but was able to attain a far steeper climb and was able to maintain a constant rate of climb far in excess of my aircraft.
P-51 Mustangs
Gorman, the pilot of the Piper Cub, and other witnesses to the incident would be intensively questioned by the Air Force and the aircraft involved extensively checked for radiation or magnetism, finding Gorman’s plane to be significantly more radioactive than it should have been. At first the Air Force were forced to concede that “something remarkable had occurred,” but perhaps not surprisingly to the conspiracy minded they soon changed their tune. Their new theory? It was a weather balloon. Not only that, but to make it more bizarre they claimed that not only had Gorman frantically chased this balloon, but that he had then mistaken the planet Venus for the object and chased that as well. Remember, this was a war hero ace pilot we are talking about, so does this really make sense? Whether it does or not, this would be the official explanation and still is. We are still left to ask, does a trained and experienced fighter pilot mistake a balloon and Venus for something zipping around doing circles around him and taunting him? It seems odd. Of course, this has been picked apart within the UFO community, and probably will be a mystery for some time to come.
The following year we have another rather well-known case that supposedly played out on July 24 1948 over Montgomery, Alabama. On this day, Captain Clarence S. Chiles, and co-pilot John B. Whitted were flying an Eastern Airlines DC-3 in routine flight from Houston, Texas to Atlanta, Georgia when things would get bizarre. As they were cruising at an altitude of 5,000 over the city of Montgomery, they suddenly noticed a reddish light that appeared to be headed directly at them. Whatever it was passed them in close proximity and at high speed off their starboard side, and both the pilot and c-pilot could see that the object was cigar-shaped, about the size of a B-29 bomber, and had no wings or tail section. It also had two rows of portholes or windows that were glowing brightly like “burning magnesium,” and they also noticed a bluish glow from the bottom of the craft and some sort of fiery exhaust from its rear section. The object was then seen to make a sharp vertical ascent after the near-collision. Both of the witnesses would later claim that they had felt no turbulence as the massive object had passed and heard no sound, although some passengers would report having felt the plane tremble as the object had passed, as well as a sound “like a rocket.” It is a very unusual case that you can read about in far more detail in my article about it here.
From the 1940s, the notion of flying saucers was fully entrenched in the public imagination, and would from there show no signs of letting up, with some of the more perplexing and believable accounts being from the pilots flying around up there with these things. Reading such accounts, it would seem that we are sharing our airspace with something beyond our understanding and ability to rationalize into the universe we think we know. Over the decades there would be numerous other such accounts, and it all really seems to have truly begun in earnest in the 1940s.
Special thanks to Steve Baxter for his artwork and the cover image.
Talk about a blast from the past! Comet ATLAS may be a remnant of a mysterious fireball that swept within 23 million miles of the sun 5,000 years ago, study finds
Talk about a blast from the past! Comet ATLAS may be a remnant of a mysterious fireball that swept within 23 million miles of the sun 5,000 years ago, study finds
Researchers observed data from Comet ATLAS as it broke apart in May 2020
Using Hubble images they found parts took days to break, others took weeks
They compared it to the Great Comet of 1844 visible in the southern hemisphere
This revealed a common ancestor between ATLAS and the 1844 Great Comet
The unnamed ancient comet travelled through the inner solar system 5,000 years ago and may have appeared as a giant fireball to Stone Age civilisations
Comet ATLAS may be the remnant of a 'mysterious fireball' that swept within 23 million miles of the sun 5,000 years ago, according to a new study.
During its most recent appearance in the inner solar system early in 2020, Comet ATLAS met an untimely death when it disintegrated into a cascade of icy pieces, according to the team from the University of Maryland in College Park.
In this new study, using Hubble Space Telescope data, they found it broke off from an ancient giant comet that last came to the inner solar system 5,000 years ago.
This same comet gave birth to at least two smaller comets, ATLAS which visited in 2020, and its sibling, the Great Comet that was last seen from Earth in 1844.
When the parent comet visited the inner solar system it came closer to the sun than Mercury, about 23 million miles away, and would have presented a 'spectacular sight' to Stone Age civilisations in Eurasia and North Africa, according to the team.
Comet ATLAS may be the remnant of a 'mysterious fireball' that swept within 23 million miles of the sun 5,000 years ago, according to a new study
During its most recent appearance in the inner solar system early in 2020, Comet ATLAS met an untimely death when it disintegrated into a cascade of icy pieces, according to the team from the University of Maryland in College Park
COMET ATLAS (C/2019 Y4)
ATLAS (C/2019 Y4) was first detected by the Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System (ATLAS), operated by the University of Hawaii in 2019.
Early observations suggested it may become a very bright naked eye comet with a zero magnitude.
However, as it came closer to the sun it began to disintegrate and only reached a magnitude of seven - the naked eye can see mag 6 and higher.
Follow up studies suggest ATLAS was a sibling of the Great Comet of 1844 and born from a very large comet that passed the Earth 5,000 years ago.
The ESA Solar Orbiter flew through the tail of ATLAS between May 31 and June 1 and the dust tail on June 6.
Facts and Figures
- Aphelion: 660 AU
- Perihelion: 0.2528 AU
- Epoch: March 7, 2020
- Orbital period: 6,011 years
- Discovered by: Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System (ATLAS)
- Discovery date: December 28, 2019
There is no historic record of the fireball streaking through the sky as the comet passed the Earth around 3000 BC.
However, the Maryland team speculated on what our ancestors may have seen by exploring the path its child, ATLAS, took around the sun in 2020.
They also compared it to the path the Great Comet of 1844 took - a bright naked eye comet seen by Victorian-era astornomers.
ATLAS (C/2019 Y4) was first detected by the Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System (ATLAS), operated by the University of Hawaii in 2019.
Early predictions, based on how quickly it was getting brighter, suggested it might reach magnitude zero, which would make it easily visible to the naked eye.
However, this wasn't to be, as on March 22, 2020, the comet began to disintegrate under the heat of the sun, breaking into small fragments by May 2020.
Now, in a new study exploring its origins, astronomer Quanzhi Ye of the University of Maryland discovered it was a broken-off piece of a much larger ancient comet.
Ye and colleagues confirmed ATLAS came from this larger, unnamed comet that last entered the inner solar system 5,000 years ago, because of the orbital path.
Essentially, ATLAS follows the same orbital 'railroad track' as that of a comet seen in 1844, meaning the two are likely siblings from the same parent comet that broke apart centuries earlier, according to the team behind the study.
The 'Great Comet' of 1844 was nearly as bright as the brightest naked-eye star, Sirius, but won't be seen in the inner solar system until the 50th Century.
In this new study, using Hubble Space Telescope data, they found it broke off from an ancient giant comet that last came to the inner solar system 5,000 years ago
The link between the two comets, ATLAS and the Great Comet of 1844, was first noted by German astronomer and comet hunter Maik Meyer.
Such comet families are common, according to Ye, and the most dramatic visual example was in 1994 when the doomed comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 (SL9) was pulled into a string of pieces by Jupiter's gravitational pull.
This 'comet train' was short-lived, he explained, as it fell piece by piece into Jupiter in July 1994, with no evidence of existence remaining after it fell.
But comet ATLAS is just 'weird,' says Ye, who observed it with Hubble about the time of the breakup in May 2020.
This same comet gave birth to at least two smaller comets, ATLAS which visited in 2020, and its sibling, the Great Comet that was last seen from Earth in 1844
C/1844 Y1: GREAT SOUTHERN HEMISPHERE COMET
C/1844 Y1 was a 'Great Comet' seen from Southern Hemisphere in 1844.
It was visible to the naked eye but there are only second hand reports of its discovery, from a year after it appeared in the night sky.
The comet was said to have been first observed in Guyana at dusk on December 16, 1844.
Reports also show evidence of sightings in Australia, South Africa and New Zealand in the following days.
Recent studies suggest this was related to Comet ATLAS which disintegrated in the inner solar system in 2020 after showing promise as a bright 'naked eye' comet.
C/1844 Y1 isn't due to come near the sun again until the 50th Century.
Facts and Figures
Perihelion: 0.250 AU
Aphelion: 717.6 AU
Discovered: December 16, 1844
Visible: Southern hemisphere
Unlike its hypothesised parent comet, ATLAS disintegrated while it was farther from the sun than Earth, at a distance of over 100 million miles.
This was much farther than the distance where its parent passed the sun, which further 'emphasises its strangeness,' said Ye.
'If it broke up this far from the sun, how did it survive the last passage around the sun 5,000 years ago? This is the big question,' the study author said.
'It's very unusual because we wouldn't expect it. This is the first time a long-period comet family member was seen breaking up before passing closer to the sun.'
Being able to observe the breakup of the fragments of the comet with a telescope like Hubble gave clues to how the parent comet was first put together, Ye said.
The conventional wisdom is that comets are fragile agglomerations of dust and ice, and that they may be 'lumpy, like raisin pudding.'
After one year of analysis Ye and colleagues found that one fragment of ATLAS disintegrated in a matter of days, while another piece lasted for weeks.
'This tells us that part of the nucleus was stronger than the other part,' he said.
One possibility is that streamers of ejected material may have spun up the comet so fast that centrifugal forces tore it apart.
An alternative explanation is that it has so-called super-volatile ices that just blew the piece apart like an exploding aerial firework.
'It is complicated because we start to see these hierarchies and evolution of comet fragmentation. Comet ATLAS's behaviour is interesting but hard to explain.'
Comet ATLAS (also known as C/2019 Y4) made headlines last year when it was predicted to make its closest approach to the sun on May 31, 2020 at a distance of 23.5 million miles (37.8 million kilometers). Since it was increasing in brightness, it would have been about as bright as the moon and visible to us on Earth by using a small telescope or a pair of decent binoculars. However, just weeks before the highly anticipated sky show, astronomers announced that the comet had broken apart.
Astronomers did get the chance to study the comet while it passed through space and they have revealed new information regarding its origins. It is believed that the comet was a fragment of a much larger body that people living on Earth about 5,000 years ago might have witnessed traveling through space – specifically those living in Eurasia and North Africa.
Astronomer Quanzhi Ye from the University of Maryland in College Park analyzed data collected by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope and found that Comet ATLAS was a piece that broke off a larger comet that came within 23 million miles from the sun at the end of the Stone Age. Furthermore, it followed the same “railroad track” as a comet that was witnessed back in 1844 which indicates that the two of them were probably fragments that came from the same parent comet. Scientists won’t be able to study ATLAS’ sibling for quite a while as it won’t make another approach until the 50th century.
Ye described Comet ATLAS as being “weird” based on the fact that it broke apart more than 100 million miles from the sun. “If it broke up this far from the Sun, how did it survive the last passage around the Sun 5,000 years ago? This is the big question.” “It’s very unusual because we wouldn’t expect it. This is the first time a long-period comet family member was seen breaking up before passing closer to the Sun.” “This emphasizes its strangeness.”
By observing the comet breaking apart – one piece disintegrated in just days while another part lasted for several weeks – the researchers were able to determine that “…part of the nucleus was stronger than the other part.” (Pictures of Comet ATLAS breaking apart can be seen here.)
This pair of Hubble Space Telescope images of comet C/2019 Y4 (ATLAS), taken on April 20 and April 23, 2020, reveal the breakup of the solid nucleus of the comet. Hubble photos identify as many as 30 separate fragments. The comet was approximately 91 million miles from Earth when the images were taken. The comet may be a broken off piece of a larger comet that swung by the Sun 5,000 years ago. The comet has been artificially colored in this view to enhance details for analysis.
Credits: Science: NASA, ESA, Quanzhi Ye (UMD); Image Processing: Alyssa Pagan (STScI)
This pair of Hubble images of comet C/2019 Y4 (ATLAS), taken on April 20 and April 23, 2020, reveal the breakup of the solid nucleus of the comet.
Image credit: NASA / ESA / Quanzhi Ye, University of Maryland / Alyssa Pagan, STScI.
(Not Comet ATLAS)
They went on to explain that the ejected materials could have caused the comet to spin so fast that it ended up breaking apart. Another theory was that it contained super-volatile ices that exploded, causing the comet to tear apart. “It is complicated because we start to see these hierarchies and evolution of comet fragmentation. Comet ATLAS’ behavior is interesting but hard to explain.”
Their research was published in the Astronomical Journal where it can be read in full.
In recent years, Unidentified Flying Object (UFO) sightings seem to be occurring more often, thanks to modern technologies and the ability of almost everyone to film these phenomena and share them on social networks.
Netizens are questioning whether they saw multiple alien spacecraft in the early hours of the morning after seeing bright lights flashing in the sky above "Music City," and the center for country music in particular.
CallMeClinton, a Reddit member, uploaded a video of what he felt was a UFO sighting from Nashville. In that video, quite a few bright spots can be seen moving rather chaotically in the night sky, however, it is hard to tell the distance between them and the cameraman, or how high they were.
"Anyone in Nashville seeing these lights right now? I feel like I’m not lucky enough to be seeing a ufo so I need a second eye," the user wrote as he asked other Redditors to take a look.
The lights were moving in "what seems to be random flight patterns" and "suddenly accelerating around," according to the witness, who was touring Tennessee's capital.
"Some will go really high up and behind clouds. This is pointing SW towards the airport but I can’t think of anything that moves like this," they added. "Also sorry for the s**tty phone camera I don’t have a fancy one. They are mostly solid lights unless they go too far but the camera is making it look like they’re fading in and out."
Reddit users reacted positively to the video, with nearly 500 comments praising the poster for his unexpected discovery. One Redditor praised the quality of the video and the camera skills, saying: "Provided that this is not doctored in any way, I must say, one of the better videos I have seen as of late." Another user congratulated the poster for such a rare feat - capturing a UFO phenomenon on camera.
"There's a whole fleet of them," commented an excited viewer, who was later corrected by another, adding that there was a "flock" instead.
Others, on the other hand, were skeptical that the film actually depicted extraterrestrial life.
"I'm not sure why people always make the first assumption that this type of video has captured some sort of alien craft. I'm sorry, but they DO move like bats," a perceptive viewer said in response to the footage, while the next poster stated that the sighting appears to be birds flying over upward light sources, possibly downtown buildings.
In the US, increased interest in UFO sightings has been observed especially in light of a recently published government report on these unexplained phenomena. However, US authorities did not confirm the existence of extraterrestrial tourists on our planet. But those who want to believe continue to look for signs of life from other worlds.
WAS 1947'S UFO INCIDENT AT ROSWELL SIMPLY THE RESULT OF A SECRET BALLOON EXPERIMENT?
Credit: Universal History Archive/ Universal Images Group via Getty Images
WAS 1947'S UFO INCIDENT AT ROSWELL SIMPLY THE RESULT OF A SECRET BALLOON EXPERIMENT?
No place in the United States screams "ALIENS!!!" more thanRoswell, New Mexico. The small town in the middle of America's southwestern desert is, without question, the epicenter of UFO conspiracy theories within this country. It has captivated our collective cultural imagination (manifesting itself over and over in film, television, and literature) for a little over seven decades — ever since an alleged alien vessel crash-landed there in the early summer of 1947.
But what really landed in the dehydrated scrub all those years ago? Was it actually a spaceship piloted by a life-form from beyond the stars or was it simply part of a top-secret balloon experiment conducted by the U.S. Air Force? Showtime's UFO docu-program (executive produced by the prolific J.J. Abrams under his Bad Robot banner) attempts to get to the bottom of the matter in the third and penultimate episode of the limited television series.
Episode 3 plays a clip from Air Force Colonel John Haynes, who postulated that the Roswell incident was nothing more than Project Mogul, an intelligence operation that involved sending high-altitude balloons into the atmosphere, so as to spy on Russian nuclear tests. (Let's not forget that the Cold War was in full swing at the time). UFO seems to imply that the government tacitly encouraged the alien story — which eventually grew like a wildfire in the middle of a California summer — with vague language and certain denials in order to throw the Soviets off the scent of what they were really up to.
What's really ironic is that the wreckage was not found in Roswell, but on a ranch near Corona, which is almost 100 miles northwest of Roswell. The town became inextricably tied to the event because the Roswell Daily Record was the first news outlet to break the story.
Credit: Universal History Archive/ Universal Images Group via Getty Images
Since the project was still classified in '47, the Army had to try and pass it off as "a harmless high-altitude weather balloon" and not "a grounded flying disk" as some were claiming (see the article above). In 1995, half a century after Roswell became synonymous with little green men and flying saucers, the Air Force published a nearly 1,000-page report, which concluded that the wreckage was not a UFO, but most likely remnants of a Mogul test.
"Although that project was top-secret at the time, there was also no specific indication found to indicate an official preplanned cover story was in place to explain an event such as that which ultimately happened," reads the document. "It appears that the identification of the wreckage as being part of a weather balloon device, as reported in the newspapers at the time, was based on the fact that there was no physical difference in the radar targets and the neoprene balloons (other than the numbers and configuration) between MOGUL balloons and normal weather balloons. Additionally, it seems that there was overreaction by Colonel Blanchard and Major Marcel in originally reporting that a 'flying disc' had been recovered when, at that time, nobody knew for sure what that term even meant, since it had only been in use for a couple of weeks."
By the mid-1990s however, the damage was already done. Roswell was embedded so deep into the American psyche, that one might think it was originally put there by a sharp alien probe. What's more: the shaky trust in federal authority that came out of the counterculture movement of the '60s and '70s pretty much assured that many citizens were no longer willing to take the federal government at its word anymore.
For many of us, the true story can only be found in the "Book of Secrets" passed down from president to president...what's that, you say? The book was made up for National Treasure 2? Fair enough. Still, every POTUS is made aware of many national secrets most of us will never know about in our lifetimes. Before he left office, for example, Donald Trump said he claimed that he was privy to some "very interesting" information about Roswell, but refused to go into detail.
“Government secrecy has acted as a spur toward conspiratorial thinking, and it has aggravated that tendency in some sectors of the American public,” Steven Aftergood, an expert on government secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists, told The New York Times earlier this summer. “It’s not just limited to UFOs.”
Showtime subscribers with access to the network's official app can stream all four episodes of UFO right now. If you'd prefer to pace yourself, the fourth and final episode airs next Sunday (Aug. 29) at 9 p.m. EST. The premiere is currently free to watch on YouTube, Showtime.com, and Sho.com.
Looking for something out of this world? Download SYFY's free app to see full episodes of Resident Alien and tons of extras.
WAS 1947'S UFO INCIDENT AT ROSWELL SIMPLY THE RESULT OF A SECRET BALLOON EXPERIMENT?
Credit: Universal History Archive/ Universal Images Group via Getty Images
WAS 1947'S UFO INCIDENT AT ROSWELL SIMPLY THE RESULT OF A SECRET BALLOON EXPERIMENT?
No place in the United States screams "ALIENS!!!" more thanRoswell, New Mexico. The small town in the middle of America's southwestern desert is, without question, the epicenter of UFO conspiracy theories within this country. It has captivated our collective cultural imagination (manifesting itself over and over in film, television, and literature) for a little over seven decades — ever since an alleged alien vessel crash-landed there in the early summer of 1947.
But what really landed in the dehydrated scrub all those years ago? Was it actually a spaceship piloted by a life-form from beyond the stars or was it simply part of a top-secret balloon experiment conducted by the U.S. Air Force? Showtime's UFO docu-program (executive produced by the prolific J.J. Abrams under his Bad Robot banner) attempts to get to the bottom of the matter in the third and penultimate episode of the limited television series.
Episode 3 plays a clip from Air Force Colonel John Haynes, who postulated that the Roswell incident was nothing more than Project Mogul, an intelligence operation that involved sending high-altitude balloons into the atmosphere, so as to spy on Russian nuclear tests. (Let's not forget that the Cold War was in full swing at the time). UFO seems to imply that the government tacitly encouraged the alien story — which eventually grew like a wildfire in the middle of a California summer — with vague language and certain denials in order to throw the Soviets off the scent of what they were really up to.
What's really ironic is that the wreckage was not found in Roswell, but on a ranch near Corona, which is almost 100 miles northwest of Roswell. The town became inextricably tied to the event because the Roswell Daily Record was the first news outlet to break the story.
Credit: Universal History Archive/ Universal Images Group via Getty Images
Since the project was still classified in '47, the Army had to try and pass it off as "a harmless high-altitude weather balloon" and not "a grounded flying disk" as some were claiming (see the article above). In 1995, half a century after Roswell became synonymous with little green men and flying saucers, the Air Force published a nearly 1,000-page report, which concluded that the wreckage was not a UFO, but most likely remnants of a Mogul test.
"Although that project was top-secret at the time, there was also no specific indication found to indicate an official preplanned cover story was in place to explain an event such as that which ultimately happened," reads the document. "It appears that the identification of the wreckage as being part of a weather balloon device, as reported in the newspapers at the time, was based on the fact that there was no physical difference in the radar targets and the neoprene balloons (other than the numbers and configuration) between MOGUL balloons and normal weather balloons. Additionally, it seems that there was overreaction by Colonel Blanchard and Major Marcel in originally reporting that a 'flying disc' had been recovered when, at that time, nobody knew for sure what that term even meant, since it had only been in use for a couple of weeks."
By the mid-1990s however, the damage was already done. Roswell was embedded so deep into the American psyche, that one might think it was originally put there by a sharp alien probe. What's more: the shaky trust in federal authority that came out of the counterculture movement of the '60s and '70s pretty much assured that many citizens were no longer willing to take the federal government at its word anymore.
For many of us, the true story can only be found in the "Book of Secrets" passed down from president to president...what's that, you say? The book was made up for National Treasure 2? Fair enough. Still, every POTUS is made aware of many national secrets most of us will never know about in our lifetimes. Before he left office, for example, Donald Trump said he claimed that he was privy to some "very interesting" information about Roswell, but refused to go into detail.
“Government secrecy has acted as a spur toward conspiratorial thinking, and it has aggravated that tendency in some sectors of the American public,” Steven Aftergood, an expert on government secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists, told The New York Times earlier this summer. “It’s not just limited to UFOs.”
Showtime subscribers with access to the network's official app can stream all four episodes of UFO right now. If you'd prefer to pace yourself, the fourth and final episode airs next Sunday (Aug. 29) at 9 p.m. EST. The premiere is currently free to watch on YouTube, Showtime.com, and Sho.com.
Looking for something out of this world? Download SYFY's free app to see full episodes of Resident Alien and tons of extras.
US military guy filmed triangle UFO over West Rutland, Vermont 21-Aug-2021
US military guy filmed triangle UFO over West Rutland, Vermont 21-Aug-2021
This triangular formation was filmed in the sky above West Rutland, Vermont on Saturday, 21st August 2021.
Witness report:
Inwas going out with my girlfriend to gonto the quorey to try my new night vision out and we witnessed somthing we both can not explain i have a video. I have a military background and currently hold a profesional liscence.
Filer’s Files 33, 2021 - Life and water on Mars - PART I
Craft spotted over Warsaw, Poland on August 8, 2021
Filer’s Files 33, 2021 - Life and water on Mars - PART I
Major George A. Filer III ret. USAF
New Jersey State Director
MUFON Eastern Region Director
Www.nationalUFOcenter.com. Now receiving 3 to 4 million hits a month
Sending out 32,000 emails a week
In special reports, this week’s files cover: Astronaut Gordon Cooper saw UFOs,
Special Reports regarding: Dr. Hermann Oberth Father of Rocketry says UFOs Are Real, Life on Mars, Numerous New Jersey Sightings, Let’s Fight the Tornados,
,Unidentified Aerial Phenomena sightings were reported over California, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Texas, Virginia, and Washington.
Unidentified Aerial Phenomena sightings were reported over Canada, Czech Republic. Poland, Spain, and England in the United Kingdom.
The Filer Research Institute feels the scientific study of UFOs is for the benefit of humankind and is an important endeavor. The US Air Force investigated UFOs publicly for more than twenty years under Project Blue Book; and I continue this advanced research. I believe the God of the universe has spread life throughout the cosmos and UFOs are visiting us in ever-increasing numbers.
Forward these files to your friends and neighbors.
Special Projects
Dr. Hermann Oberth Father of Rocketry says UFOs Are Real
Dr. Hermann Oberth
Dr. Oberth was an Austro-Hungarian-born German physicist and engineer. He is considered one of the founding fathers of rocketry and astronautics, at Kennedy Space Center. Oberth constructed his first model rocket as a school student at the age of 14. In his youthful experiments, he arrived independently at the concept of the multi –stage rocket.
Von Braun said of him:
Hermann Oberth was the first, who when thinking about the possibility of spaceships grabbed a slide rule and presented mathematically analyzed concepts and designs… I, myself, owe to him not only the guiding-star of my life, but also my first contact with the theoretical and practical aspects of rocketry and space travel. A place of honor should be reserved in the history of science and technology for his ground-breaking contributions in the field of astronautics.[3]
During the 1950s and 1960s, Oberth offered his opinions regarding (UFOs). He was a supporter of the Exterrestrials hypothesis for the origin of the UFOs that were seen from Earth. For example, in an article in The American Weekly magazine of 24 October 1954, Oberth stated, “It is my thesis that flying saucers are real, and that they are spaceships from another solar system. I think that they possibly are manned by intelligent observers who are members of a race that may have been investigating our earth for centuries…”
NASA 25-year Engineer Clark McClelland said, “Dr. Hermann Oberth and I discussed whether life would be found on Mars, and other worlds? Oberth agreed life would be found to have existed on Mars when we arrive on that planet in the future. He said that subsurface water would be discovered during future missions as would structures of other than natural origin.” Since that statement was made, evidence of water has been verified on Mars and structures that appear not made by normal geologic means have been observed on its surface.”
Engineer Clark McClelland states. “I was fortunate to interview many famous people during my long career at Cape Canaveral and the Kennedy Space Center, Florida. The German rocket scientist Dr. Hermann Oberth was one of them. He disclosed many exciting historic events to me and identified one space race that has been here from deep space and is still among us. I guarantee reading this chapter that the present USA Government will not allow me to publish will prove to many why they are afraid of the truth I have written.”
Mars Structures, Water and Life
Structures in shape of Z and E at top left
The way it is laid out, it appears to be a settlement at the edge of the Hale Crater on Mars. Richard Buchli writes, Hale Crater73 10S 93 08 E if you look closely you will see like a chunk of the base was broken off and that section of the building was lost at the same time. We can assume the aliens use underground bases and are likely conducting mining operations on the moon. Thanks to Richard and Dorothy Buchli D.V.M.
Sol 1109 front camera of the Spirit Rover bulldozer picks up a strange looking head like shaped object. Thanks to Mars Uncensored
Two lakes nestled in a forest of tree like vegetation.
Composite of images taken at the Kimberley formation has evidence of ancient lakes. This photo shows two lakes nestled in an apparent forest of tree like vegetation. According to a set of images from Mars, there is an extensive area with vegetation and lakes covering the surface of the ‘Red Planet’. It seems that after all, Mars isn’t as red as we once believed. Images were taken by NASA’s Mars Global Surveyor Probe display fascinating images that eerily look like extensive areas with lakes, and vegetation on the surface of Mars. NASA Mars equator in summer is 92-degree Fahrenheit Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech.
NASA’s Curiosity rover has been exploring our neighboring planet Mars since 2012. To be more precise, Curiosity is exploring Gale Crater, which is ideally located between the northern flatlands of the red planet and the southern hemisphere’s crater landscape. Gale Crater is an ancient crater, about 154 kilometers (96 Miles) in diameter, and probably formed more than 3.5 billion years ago. Mount Aeolis Mons, a mountain about five kilometers (3 miles) high, rises in the middle.
NASA scientists chose Curiosity’s landing site carefully: satellite images indicated that Gale crater was once filled with water. A dry lake on Mars looked promising: perhaps one could find traces of life there once there. Liquid water is essential in finding it. But now a research team has published in The journal Science Advances published a studyWho claims: Gale Crater may not have been filled with a huge deep lake – but at most a shallow pool.
In 2012, Curiosity landed in the northeastern part of Gale Crater, and has been exploring the sides of Aeolis Mons since 2014. The rover is decomposing sediments and sediments. Mudstone layers have been evaluated by other researchers as remnants of a pre-existing lake, as these indicate interactions between rocks and water. Over time, the mudstone deposited itself in the lake in the form of sediments.
Wet pale climate of Mars revealed by ancient lakes at Gale Crater.
Mars: Crater with Waterfall and Dam-Like Structure
Norman Bryden writes, “This is an interesting image of a crater taken by the Mars Global Surveyor. The crater has what looks like a modified wall to the lower right. You can see the cut-out portion and it looks as if it is a dam-like structure, with possibly water tumbling over the edge. The formation looks to be more than a random formation. I have seen several structures that look like walls and dams, and I believe that they are water reservoirs intelligently created to intentionally harness the water supply on Mars. More craters in the full image you can download from the links below seem to have modified walls, and other interesting features.
Mars Endurance Crater Has Water Reservoir and Hieroglyphics Below
Engineer Harold Carver writes, “While looking at images that the Rover Opportunity took, I noticed Endurance Crater lacks the profile of a crater, yet everything about it suggests that it was built to hold a body of water.
This water flows out of the sides of the crater into a reservoir. The angles are too precise to be a freak of nature and are suggestive of a purpose. Mars photos are at left and compare to a dam and spillway on Earth. The entire walls and floor of Endurance image seem to be made of fitted slabs of rock neatly put together. There is also evidence of artificially made spillways used for the collection of water.
Editor’s Note: I was looking at some of Carver’s JPL photos and noticed numerous petroglyphs on the crater walls that seem to depict writing or symbols. This is a JPL image taken by the Opportunity Rover of Burns Cliff inside Endurance Crater that show symbols like:
T, P, Y, I, A, I V, K
Photo thanks to NASA/JPL
Mars Symbols Similar to Egypt
Richard Buchli D.V.M. writes, Google Earths shows an Amundsen Crater Moon structure from NASA and JAXA satellites at 83 18 32.12 S 71 05’34.84 E above. I have sent you pictures of five subsurface building locations I have located. I have been researching the NASA, ASU, JAXA images on the Moon over 10 hours today and anticipate being able to send you a whole fleet in the future. Google Earth/Moon streams show a series of newly released structures and craft on the Moon. Thanks to Richard Buchli D.V.M. and Dorothy Buchli W.B.W.
Editor’s Note:To find the images these images for yourself. Go to (http://earth.google.com) download Google Earth; then Look under View, then hit Explore, and click the Moon and put in the coordinates.
Schiaparelli’s Mars Astronomer Drawings in 1877
Among Schiaparelli’s contributions are his telescopic observations of Mars. In his initial observations, he named the “seas” and “continents” of Mars. During the planet’s “Great Opposition” of 1877, he observed a dense network of linear structures on the surface of Mars which he called “canali” in Italian, meaning “channels”. These were straight dark canal like lines were visible all over Mars. Observers soon decided that these could only be channels built by intelligent creatures living on a distant planet. Images sent back from the Mariner and Viking missions of the 1960s and 1970s revealed a desert landscape that did not show much evidence for water on Mars. The lines drawn by the expert astronomer may have been the Mars Tube or Tunnel system that is quite extensive and shown below.
Percival Lowell an American Astronomer made similar Mars map and his 1906 book Mars and its Canals that showed similar lines like Schiaparelli’s indicating they were both seeing what we now believe are tubes or tunneling.
Rich Richard Buchli D.V.M. writes, “We have here what appears to be a huge network of closed tubes. These tubes range from 500 to over a thousand feet in diameter just think of what could be transported within such a network. It is logical for an intelligence to build tunnel like structures to keep the atmosphere, water, and methods of transportation and agriculture. The tubes of various kinds are prevalent throughout Mars. Thanks to Richard Buchli D.V.M.
Editor’s Note: A civilization on Mars is likely to have gone underground because of meteorite bombardment the loss of much of the atmosphere. Subway tubes would likely be used to transport water and supplies between underground facilities. The bombardments of meteorites probably made Earth and Mars more habitable by modifying their atmosphere. When a meteorite enters a planet’s atmosphere, extreme heat causes some of the minerals and organic matter on its outer crust to be released as water and carbon dioxide that traps more energy from sunlight to sustain liquid oceans.
These tubes appear to be constructed with ribs holding up glass or clear Plexiglas’s to accept the rays of the sun.
Some tubes are large enough to hold New York city’s Manhattan
Notice the Tubes run in various directions and sizes.
Solar Winds, solar flares, coronal mass ejections (CME), gamma ray bursts (GRB) and galactic cosmic rays (GCR) may have caused havoc on Mars. “These rats can destroy life on a planet.” Once the magnetic field slowly or suddenly gets stripped away, a live planets protection is gone. But there is another possibility. A more sinister event which no ones like to ponder writes Mitch Battros……
The lead culprit for the killer of Mars is the Sun’s radiance of solar winds. All planets in our solar system are constantly blasted by the solar wind – a thin stream of electrically charged gas that continuously blows from the Sun’s surface into space. On Earth, our planet’s global magnetic field shields our atmosphere by diverting most of the solar wind around it. The solar wind’s electrically charged particles, ions, and electrons, have difficulty crossing magnetic fields.
“Mars can’t protect itself from the solar wind because it no longer has a shield, the planet’s global magnetic field is dead,” said Bruce Jakosky of the University of Colorado. The second and close runner-up to Mars death is by collision with another planet or large asteroid. Mars has more than 20 ancient craters larger than 600 miles across, scars from giant impacts by asteroids the size of small moons. This bombardment could have blasted large amounts of the Martian atmosphere into space. Protection with giant tubes or tunnels seems to be a logical alternative for an intelligent society as well as heading for a new planet like Earth.
19LF Mars Lockyer Crater
There it appears writing at the bottom edge of this crater on Mars. Thanks to Richard Buchli D.V.M… Ph.D. Dorothy Buchli W.B.W.
Norman Bryden sends the image of a transportation system on Mars in image R08-01749 located at 71.70 S 1.72 W Mars Global Surveyor Mars Orbiter Camera Image Gallery … Possible alien or Martian cities are visibly. Thanks to Norman Bryden www.marsstructures.com/ –
Just in time for Football Season Stadium Opens
Note Writing on side of Wall
Mars Inca City as named by NASA/JPL Note Tubing that apparently carries water and transportation vehicles to the city from upper left.
P. Skipper writes,I suspect you’re looking mostly for civilization evidence as that is the most dramatic, exciting, and entertaining from the public’s point of view. However, in my opinion, this is also where most of the science community resistance is the hardest with MUFON waging a fight that is just too much uphill from the science community’s blind living in denial point of view.
In my opinion, the evidence presentations need to concentrate on something more at a fundamental and basic level. That is one of the reasons why my presentations concentrate on surface water in a liquid state and biological life taking advantage of it. In my opinion, this may have a slightly better chance of being eventually understood and accepted at science and academia community level because it is viewed as a bit less threatening. The way the mainstream public behaves, this is necessary because they follow mainstream leaders that they recognize as such and everyone else is passed off as just a rogue element. Some of the scientists have a very narrow viewpoint and have not noticed life can flourish almost anywhere and likely underground.
Mars Echus Chasma with liquid water that forms the boundary between the Tharsis volcanoes to the west and Lunae Planum to the east. Echus Chasma is 4 Kilometers (2.48 miles) deep in this region,
Spirit Navigation Camera took this image of possible lizard.
In my opinion, the evidence presentations need to concentrate on something more at a fundamental and basic level. That is one of the reasons why my presentations concentrate on surface water in a liquid state and biological life taking advantage of it. In my opinion, this may have a slightly better chance of being eventually understood and accepted at science and academia community level because it is viewed as a bit less threatening. The way the mainstream public behaves, this is necessary because they follow mainstream leaders that they recognize as such and everyone else is passed off as just a rogue element. Some of the scientists have a very narrow viewpoint and have not noticed life can flourish almost anywhere and likely underground.
Editor’s Note:Some scientists at both JPL and NAASA have told me, “They believe there has been intelligent life on Mars and it may continue but it’s classified information they cannot reveal.”
Numerous New Jersey Sightings
East Hampton, New Jersey has numerous UFO reports virtually nightly for several months.
Additionally underground sounds are reported nightly in Smith’s Woods Park. UFOs are often seen above High-Power lines and in Smithville Lake. The area is eleven miles from McGuire Air Force Base where an alien was killed. A dump to the left of this photo and the Walmart have had frequent sighting of disc craft. Homeowners report underground sounds of digging or tunneling, Susan Hughes writes, “I took this picture on June 13, 2021, at 12:57pm. After the helicopter sniffed this area out. Then UFO’S started going over head and to the park to besides the park.
And the strangest thing is when our so-called moon is being kept over in that area on the ground. Something is wrong and is being covered up. This UFO I took a picture of with my very small other phone. I transferred it to this android phone to send it to you.;
Another ORB UFO taking part in covering our Sun. I took this photo at 3:03pm on March 11, 2021
I took this photo on March 11, 2021, at 10:21am. Our Sun is being covered by artificial clouds, like usual and an ORB shaped UFO is right there
I took this photo on June 4,2021 at 9:00am. I truly think I was seeing something I wasn’t supposed to be seeing. I told you I reported it to the State Police & found out it charged at someone else the day before me, that I looked it up and I think it is a retired BELL-407 that was supposed to be retired and the United States sold these to Iraq. I’m not sure.
I took this photo on July 5, 2021, at 10:13pm
I took this photo on March 1, 2021, at 8:50pm
This photo was taken on May10, 2021 at 9:54pm
This photo was taken on May 1, 2021, 25, 2021 at 9:34pm
taken on June 4, 2021. Thanks to Susan Hughes
Let’s Fight the Tornados
A man stands amid the wreckage left by a tornado that struck Moore, Okla., May 20, 2021, The tornado touched down outside Oklahoma City leaving a 20-mile path of death and destruction.
I have seen a tornado form as the clouds move in and a violently rotating column of air occurred about a thousand feet above me. I always felt if I had a rocket or a radar beam weapon, I could have stopped it from forming. The Filer family joins the rest of the country world in grieving the loss of life and massive destruction in the Midwest. Tornadoes and thunderstorms claimed at least six lives in Oklahoma and Kansas. In Joplin, Missouri, 124 died in a tornado Sunday, with hundreds missing.. 2011 marked a huge spike in tornado activity in the United States. 1,704 confirmed tornadoes killed 553 people. Aug 13, 2021 ·Five of the tornadoes measured at least an F3 in intensity, and according to the Building Safety Journal, over 250 people were injured and over 50 were killed as a result of the 11 other tornadoes alone. Because tornados kill people and wreck property, costing billions of dollars yearly, a force of tornado fighters should be developed! They could be set up like tornado chasers with weapons to defeat the tornados.
We know tornadoes need a source of instability (heat, moisture, etc.) and a larger-scale property of rotation (vorticity) to keep going. One process around a thunderstorm which can rob the tornado of either instability is relatively cold outflow–the flow of wind out of the precipitation area of a shower or thunderstorm. Many tornadoes have been observed to go away soon after being hit by outflow. Tornados generally form when “warm moist Gulf air meets cold Canadian air and dry air from the Rockies. The most destructive tornadoes occur from supercells–which are rotating thunderstorms with a well-defined radar circulation called a mesocyclone. Recent theories and results from the VORTEX program suggest that once a mesocyclone is underway, tornado development is related to the temperature differences across the edge of downdraft air wrapping around the mesocyclone.
Tornado fighters set up west of towns could use small exact distance rockets to strategically place and detonate safe, yet cloud dispersing explosives or chemicals. Various methods could be tested to determine what effects the super cell that forms the tornado. Perhaps a radar beam could be focused and tuned to ruin the magnetic lattice of the tornado. The military owns microwave beam technology that might be effective in stopping the forming of a tornado. We can now produce clouds that create rain; perhaps these machines operating in a reverse mode would take the energy out of the clouds. I’m not sure what would work effectively but now is the time to start developing procedures to defeat the tornados. A method is needed for stopping the swirling action that leads to the formation of the tornado. With experimentation we might find a simple solution. Doppler radar and sophisticated computer graphics storm chasers have been intercepting tornados for years. It’s not an exact science yet but towns are often given several hours warning time.
Ground or air-based units could intercept suspicious tornado forming clouds before they touch down’ Dumping dry ice into a cloud may be effective in cooling its energy. Large aircraft can dump tons of ice, coal dust, or cloud damping products at minimal cost. High explosives dropped or shot into the clouds may be effective in stopping the swirling action. It’s time to study and experiment. C-5 or C-17 aircraft could drop tons of dry ice or smaller conventional weaponry into critical super cells. It would certainly be worth trying as an experiment. Congress would have to deny any legal problems that might occur.
A tornado’s vortex can reach speeds of over 300 miles per hour and travel at 75 MPH. I have flown in hurricanes and winds well above a hundred knots. Tornados are fragile and if any variable is changed it becomes unstable and will disintegrate of its own volition. Military transports or tankers might be able to calm our skies. Talk to your congressman about developing a way to fight tornadoes and hurricanes… http://science.howstuffworks.com/nature/climate-weather/storms/tornado.htm
Tornado Safety Tips
Look & listen for large hail, heavy rain, strong winds, frequent intense lightning …bulge with a rotary motion at the base of the thunderstorm cloud …loud roar like the sound of a jet or train.
…
Seek Safe Shelter
A basement is best. Otherwise choose ground-floor center rooms surrounded by other rooms. Never choose upstairs locations because tornado wind speeds increase with height above the ground.
Choose rooms on the north and east sides of your shelter if no interior rooms are available. Stay near the innermost walls. Avoid rooms on the south and west, because tornados usually travel from southwest to northeast.
Choose a small closet or bathroom, because small rooms are less susceptible to collapse. Take shelter within the bathtub if there are no glass tub enclosures or large mirrors nearby.
How to Protect Yourself and Your Family
Stay calm. Seek shelter IMMEDIATELY! Keep a portable TV/radio and flashlight in your shelter. Wear shoes to protect your feet from broken glass and other debris left by the storm. Protect head and chest- crouch, face to floor, hands behind head. Cover yourself with blankets, pillows or coats. Hide under sturdy furniture. Avoid candles, gas lanterns and oil lamps.In schools and offices: seek designated shelter in interior rooms or hallway’s on ground floor, or lowest floor possible. Avoid auditoriums and gymnasiums. In shopping malls, seek the smaller interior shops on the ground floor. In shopping centers, avoid large open rooms as well as the south and west walls. Evacuate mobile homes and vehicles! Seek shelter in substantial structure, ditch, or culvert.
Oregon No Reading, Writing, or Math Proficiency
Openly bisexual Oregon Governor Kate Brown quietly signed a bill last month that removed the requirement for graduating high school children in the state to be proficient in reading, writing, and math, to aid “students of color.” Brown signed Senate Bill 744 on July 14, but did not issue a press release or hold a ceremony to mark the occasion, instead opting to pass the bill into law as quietly as possible, according to the Oregonian. The bill also wasn’t entered into a legislative database until two weeks after its signing – an abnormality, as bills are typically entered on the same day.
Though Brown was quiet about the bill, the governor’s deputy communications director, Charles Boyle, told the Oregonian that suspending the reading, writing, and math proficiency requirements would benefit “students of color” while the state comes up with a new set of “equitable” graduation standards.
Until then, the suspension will apparently help those who are “Black, Latino, Latina, Latinx, Boyle said that “leaders from those communities have advocated time and again for equitable graduation standards, along with expanded learning opportunities and supports.” However, lawmakers reportedly have not passed any actual concrete support this year to help those groups.
Any new graduation requirements that do pass will reportedly not take effect until 2027, meaning five years of classes could graduate without knowing how to read, write or do math. The diploma will be meaningless So parents or business leaders will not know how schools are doing. This also takes any motivation to learn away from the students. The idea of course is to make them wards of the state.
Bottom line it’s not the requirements are raciest. It’s the assumption that specific groups can’t meet the standards and takes pressure off teachers to teach.
Editor’s Note: I taught Reserve Office’ Training and the black kids when motivated were just as smart as white kids, but those who played basketball all day rather than attend classes failed. Now they can get a worthless diploma and sell drugs and support the politicians. It seems to me if you can’t believe a black kid can read or write, I suggest you are the racist.
In Afghanistan of twenty years of fighting we lost 1,800 killed in combat. This Biden retreat could be a slaughter if the Taliban start shelling the airfield and Embassy.
Strange Craft
The True Story of an Air Force Intelligence Officer’s Life with UFOs
U.S. Air Force Major George Filer belongs to the generation of pilots and airmen who first became aware of the strange aircraft showing up in the Earth’s atmosphere after World War II. These men – military professionals who flew planes, served as radar operators and air traffic controllers at airfields around the world – began to whisper amongst themselves about encounters with suspected extraterrestrial aircraft.
During secret debriefings at U.S. bases, pilots and air crew told their commanders of seeing UFOs off their plane’s wings. Award-winning investigative author John Guerra spent four years interviewing Filer, a decorated intelligence officer.
From objects in the skies over Cold War Europe to a UFOs over during the Cuban Missile Crisis to lights over the DMZ in Vietnam Filer leaves nothing out about his Air Force UFO encounters,
Filer’s most memorable case – the shooting of an alien at Fort Dix Army Base in 1978 – is fully recounted for the first time in this book. As a member of the Disclosure Project, military experts, astronauts, and scientists urge the U.S. government to release all it knows about UFOs to the public.
Filer describes his UFO encounters in this incredible book. By John L. Guerra.https://amzn.to/2SK3SIQ
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Filer’s Files 33, 2021 - Life and water on Mars - PART II
Craft spotted over Warsaw, Poland on August 8, 2021
Filer’s Files 33, 2021 - Life and water on Mars - PART II
Major George A. Filer III ret. USAF
New Jersey State Director
MUFON Eastern Region Director
Www.nationalUFOcenter.com. Now receiving 3 to 4 million hits a month
Sending out 32,000 emails a week
In special reports, this week’s files cover: Astronaut Gordon Cooper saw UFOs,
Special Reports regarding: Dr. Hermann Oberth Father of Rocketry says UFOs Are Real, Life on Mars, Numerous New Jersey Sightings, Let’s Fight the Tornados,
,Unidentified Aerial Phenomena sightings were reported over California, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Texas, Virginia, and Washington.
Unidentified Aerial Phenomena sightings were reported over Canada, Czech Republic. Poland, Spain, and England in the United Kingdom.
The Filer Research Institute feels the scientific study of UFOs is for the benefit of humankind and is an important endeavor. The US Air Force investigated UFOs publicly for more than twenty years under Project Blue Book; and I continue this advanced research. I believe the God of the universe has spread life throughout the cosmos and UFOs are visiting us in ever-increasing numbers.
Forward these files to your friends and neighbors.
UFO Sightings in the United States
Sightings are from MUFON CMS
California Object
Los Angeles– on August 8, 2021, as you can see in the video it’s not an airplane because there was one in the video. It stopped and looked like it was starting to land then I ran inside my house.
Florida Lights
Melbourne – on July 29, 2021, white, thin cigar shaped object photographed from an airplane at about 15,000 feet over the coast of Florida.
Georgia Object
Blairsville –on July 14, 2021, my daughter took this photo standing on the dam of the lake in Vogel State Park. The photo was pretty much taken in a southerly direction. In the attached photo it’s in the distance center left frame right above the ridge. If you zoom in, you can see it. I zoomed in to something that at least in my opinion is unidentified.
Illinois Light
Palos Heights – on August 8, 2021, I was outside and see a plane heading to Midway Airport, but I then look further east and see this cylindrical glowing object. It was not a normal plan and was flying on a steady path but was FAR OUT in the atmosphere. This video was slowed down recording on my iPhone 11 Pro.
Annapolis – on February 1, 2021, Photo, and video with U.S.N.A. Stadium in the background. I didn’t realize I had the orb on video. I was deleting photos when I saw it.
Massachusetts Object
Nahant –on August 8, 2021, this dull gray metallic looking object with small antennae made forward steady movement while descending 1000-2500 feet away. It looked to us to be 30 feet long and had an almost small dirigible like motion. It was silent but very close to the path of aircraft at Logan Airport. Like a short helicopter fuselage with no rotors or sounds. It was fascinating.
.New Jersey Lights
West Milford– on August 6, 2021, at 7:35 p.m. my wife and I pulled in the parking lot of Shop right and noticed three white flying Tic Tac object in a triangle formation. I pointed out the objects to my wife and asked her to film. We watched them for 30 seconds, moving Southwest towards Newfoundland, NJ. One object moved behind the leading object. The distance between them was 500 yards. The objects moved at a leisurely speed. The Tic Tac following the lead began emitting a mist into the air. It looked like the 2014 video taken by the Chilean Navy. A Piper Cub aircraft flew in between the two objects. My wife and I testify before God, this is the first have witnessed in my 55 years. Depiction of sighting based on Chili 2014.
Trenton—on August 12, 2021, it was too hot to sleep so I went outside and saw 3 massive orbs just hovering in the sky. I could not resist to record them using a tripod from my balcony. The Delaware River is next to Trenton and UFOs are often reported going in and out of the water.
New York Lights
Manhattan – on August 3, 2021, large UFO at right ejects smaller light
Manhattan – on August 5, 2021, a disc is moving right to left above clouds with orbs moving in formation. All descend into clouds.
Fairless Hill – on August 8, 2021, object comes out from behind trees and climbs from :25 seconds to about :30 seconds. Editor’s Note: The NY, and PA sightings are 90 miles apart while NJ is about 45 miles from either city. https://mufoncms.com/last_20_report.html
Philadelphia – on August 11, 2021, witnessed by 4 persons who were yelling in excitement that his was not a balloon or drone. UFO was sighted around the neighborhood last night. Case 117236A
Texas Lights
Kermit– on March 16th, 2021, observed UFO flying low with no sound due south at 10 pm, and. snapped 2 photos. At 4am stationary disk-shaped object seemingly materialized, that was backlit with a red-light aura around the object. I observed 6 tube shaped red lights emitted from the underside of the object. The object was clearly observable for 5 minutes. Notified two coworkers who were able to observe. The silent triangular aircraft has been spotted recently at low altitude.
Virginia Object
Norfolk– 0n July 29, 2021, I was only taking a picture of the sunset not the UFO. Later when I wanted to look at the photo of the sunset I took, I saw a UFO.
Note:The object may not be real and could be a reflection. Thanks to Will Pucket/www.ufosnw.com/newsite/
Washington Lights
Seattle – on August 4, 2021, I was looking west and saw a seaplane landing. Instead, it then flew up and then again along the horizon, south towards SeaTac just north of the Space Needle. It was dark in color and flew relatively fast. Note: The video could be of a regular aircraft, but it is difficult to tell for sure. Thanks to Will Pucket/www.ufosnw.com/newsite/
Worldwide UFO Sightings
Canada Lights
Richmond – on July 26, 1991, I had a sleepover at my friend’s place, and we were laying on his trampoline after sunset we both saw a larger craft with two smaller crafts fly at an incredible speed fly past us, directly overhead, northwest. The smaller craft were positioned slightly behind, and all were glowing bright. We both made drawings separately that are like this Photoshop creation.
Czech Republic Objects
Týniště nad Orlicí– on August 12, 2021, it looked like an elongated thin blimp with two short thick jet engines, one on each side. The engines were connected just with metal rods. It flew over me slowly in a straight path and didn’t make a single sound.
Poland Object
Warsaw–I took footage of this object on the 8th of August 2020, the sky was clear, and while taking the picture I didn’t notice anything strange. After I zoomed in on the picture a lot more details showed up and I noticed two very weird creatures, looking like “greys”, standing close to each other, and looking in my direction.
Spain Light
Barcelona – on August 2, 2021, the stationary of the craft called my attention as we were at the terrace at 10:15 pm, and I first saw the ship with red lights hovering that changed to white and then to green. It then began to zigzag and fly 5 miles away at a speed of MILLION KILOMETRES PER HOUR. It stopped and returned just as fast. It then disappeared behind a building.
UK/England Object
Barwell – on May 29, 2021, I was sitting in my garden at the time the photos were taken which was 19:56 hours when I saw a very prominent triangular shadow in the sky. The sun was high in the sky. I live on the edge of a village, and it is open countryside between my house and where the sun was. The shadow seems to have a serrated edge to the rear of the triangle. The photos were taken on my Samsung J6 mobile phone.
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Filer’s Files salutes our fighting men and women Georgie Filer and Eddie Pedrick my grandsons who both drowned. These files could not be published without the help of my beloved wife who cooks, cleans, washes, etc., and handles the finances. We pray that God will bless those who read these files spiritually
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Filer’s Files 31, 2021 - CIA Director UFOs are Real - PART I
Filer’s Files 31, 2021 - CIA Director UFOs are Real -PART I
Major George A. Filer III ret. USAF
New Jersey State Director
MUFON Eastern Region Director
Special Reports include First CIA Director UFOs are Rea, Alien Technological Civilizations, The Sky People,Apollo 11 Moon flight spots Alien UFOs, Communist China Wuhan Lab Engineered COVID 19, C-60 and Strange Craft Book’
Unidentified Aerial Phenomena sightings were reported over California, Florida, Missouri, New Jersey, Oklahoma, Tennessee, and Washington.
Unidentified Aerial Phenomena sightings were reported over Canada, Italy, Norway, and England in the United Kingdom.
The Filer Research Institute feels the scientific study of UFOs is for the benefit of humankind and is an important endeavor. The US Air Force investigated UFOs publicly for more than twenty years under Project Blue Book; and I continue this advanced research. I believe the God of the universe has spread life throughout the cosmos and UFO’s are visiting us in ever-increasing numbers.
Forward these files to your friends and neighbors.
Special Projects
First CIA Director UFOs are Real
Admiral Roscoe Hillenkoetter stated
“It is time for the truth to be brought out… Behind the scenes high-ranking Air Force officers are soberly concerned about the UFOs. But through official secrecy and ridicule, many citizens are led to believe the unknown flying objects are nonsense…. I urge immediate Congressional action to reduce the dangers from secrecy about unidentified flying objects._
Former CIA Director Vice Admiral Roscoe Hillenkoetter, signed statement to Congress, August 22, 1960. Admiral Hillenkoetter and NICAP pressed Congress to have a Congressional Investigation concerning UFOs.
Advance Flying Saucer probe declaring the craft are being operated by intelligence.
Roscoe Henry Hillenkoetter (May 8, 1897 – June 18, 1982) was the third director of the post–World War II United States Central Intelligence Group (CIG), the third Director of Central Intelligence (DCI), and the first director of the Central Intelligence Agency created by the Nautical Security Act of 1947. He served as DCI and director of the CIG and the CIA from May 1, 1947, to October 7, 1950. His retirement from the US Navy came on 1 May 1957. Since his retirement, he was a member of the board of the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena (NICAP) from 1957 to 1962.
Black Book
From 1948 to 1950, Roscoe H. Hillenkoetter prepared weekly UFO sighting reports, of cases that he thought were the most essential for US Present Truman’s viewing, into physical Black Booklets. According to Majestic after Hillenkoetter’s replacement as DCI, the Watch Commander assumed tracking the “Black Book” UFO events. The Watch Committee’s involvement in tracking auspicious activity is noted in the Wilson meeting 2002 notes that were leaked in 2017.
CIA
Langley, Virginia CIA Headquarters
Hillenkoetter expressed doubt that the newly formed CIA (September 1947) could be effective at both covert action and intelligence analysis.[3] As DCI, Hillenkoetter was periodically called to testify before US Congress. One instance concerned the CIA’s first major Soviet intelligence failure, the failure to predict the Soviet atomic bomb test on August 29, 1949. Hillenkoetter imprecisely replied that the CIA knew it would take the Soviets approximately five years to build the bomb, but the CIA misjudged when they started. The JCAE was not satisfied with Hillenkoetter’s answer, and his and the CIA’s reputation suffered among government heads in Washington.[4]
NICAP
After his retirement from the US Navy, Hillenkoetter was on NICAP’s board of governors from about 1957 until 1962. Donald E. Keyhoe, NICAP director and Hillenkoetter’s Naval Academy classmate, wrote that Hillenkoetter wanted public disclosure of UFO evidence.[
He did everything a retired officer can do to get the latest reports from the military and was a great help to NICAP in making them an important UFO organization. He was helpful in obtaining donations to pay important scientists to study the UFO problem.
Two years after Hillenkoetter’s death, a Majestic Document surfaced in 1984. It listed Hillenkoetter’s name as one of the Majestic 12 back in the year 1947. UFO enthusiasts of the early 1990s viewed Hillenkoetter with suspicion, as an MJ12 operative who probably steered. It ought to be noted that Hillenkoetter’s best-known statement on the subject of UFOs, was in 1960 in a letter to Congress, as reported in NICAP and is on record as stating: “Unknown objects are operating under intelligent control. It is imperative that we learn where UFOs come from and what their purpose is.” He resigned from the NICAP Board in Feb 1962
Alien Technological Civilizations
Millions of Planets around the Stars
The Classical 1961 Drake Equation estimated there were 3,500 advanced civilizations existing in the Milky Way with numerous stars having multiple planets.. Italian Astronomer Claudio Maccone updated the equations in 2010, based on the 1000 planets found outside our Solar System and added more than 1,000 civilizations to the previous estimate. He calculates our galaxy may harbor 4,590 extraterrestrial civilizations with closest about two light years away. Using the standard variation concept, which shows how much variation exists from the average value the estimate is 11,195 advanced civilizations. In other words, besides human society, zero to 15,785 advanced technological societies could exist in the Milky Way. Scientists are to acknowledge that large numbers of advanced technological civilizations exist but feel they could not reach us due to the great distances. An advanced civilization would like have Time Travel an able to reach Earth in a few hours or days.
Bill McDonald’s Depiction of Roswell Craft
However, various scientists, engineers, cosmonauts, and astronaut’s claim we are being visited by some of these advanced civilizations. It is slowly being considered by the scientific community as at least a possibility. The hundreds of contactless and abductees sworn statements are generally ignored. The government has spent billions building aircraft based on alien technology as confirmed by Ben Rich the Director of the Lockheed Skunk works. Rich Andrews a close friend of Ben Rich claims he was told ‘An’ item“ — as opposed to “‘The’ item” — was recovered near the world’s only combat operational atom bomb base (Roswell AAF) in 1947.
The hull design, aerodynamic measurements and propulsion info was passed directly to Jack Northrop and Kelly Johnson, beginning in 1950, with a major block of data being passed on from Wright Patterson AFB’s Foreign Technologies Division in 1952. “‘The’ item” refers to the top secret designation of Kelly’s original variant of the U-2 (TR-1) spy plane in Congressional and Pentagon budgets in the 1950s.
Nearly all “Biomorphic” aerospace designs were inspired by the Roswell spacecraft, from Kelly’s SR-71 Blackbird onward to today’s drones, UCAVs, and aerospace craft. The inward canted vertical stabilizers of the F-19, the Have Blue, many drones, some UCAVs, and the SR-71 matched the 30 degree inward cant of the Roswell spacecraft’s shark fin-shaped pair of vertical stabilizers or “Winglets.” The same goes for the wing camber to fuselage “Blend” of the airframe designs. The outward cants of the F-22 Raptor, the F-117, the McDonnell Douglas YF- 23, and the stealth concept prototypes perform similar aerodynamic functions for stability in high performance flight.
SR-71
The Roswell ship was a winged metallic crystalline multilayered aerospace craft that could slam its way through the atmosphere riding its own shock wave just as the top secret aerospace “Wave riders” from Skunk works are able to do. Ben Rich claimed publicly before his death, “We now have the technology to take ET home”.
The Sky People from these super-civilizations could initiate a series of open, public, dramatically-obvious demonstrations-of-presence such that the Government will then be compelled to publicly acknowledge alien visitors as a reality. During last summer 2000 UFO reports were recorded each month indicating a more brazen attitude by the visitors. A landing or low pass at a stadium with a popular athletic event covered with national television coverage would likely convince millions of the reality of UFOs and alien visitors.
She decided to follow in the footsteps of two 19th-century explorers, John L. Stephens, and Frederick Catherwood, who brought the ancient Maya cities to the world’s attention.
Star Gods or Sky people.
Dr. Clarke set out on a seven-year adventure (from 2003 through 2010) through Belize, Honduras, Guatemala, and Mexico, driving 12,000 miles, visiting 89 archaeological sites.
Dr. Clarke collected stories of encounters, sky gods, giants, little people, and aliens among the indigenous people.
Many indigenous peoples told Dr. Clarke stories of beings from the stars but few pseudo-scientists have given credence to their stories. Science assumed superiority of thought over the collective memory of humanity.
The Enlightenment’s insistence on an objective, sterile, and amoral investigation marshaled in a new era that valued supposed rationality. The authority of truth that was once regulated to truth was regulated to myth and legend. Even stories told universally in tribal cultures across the world were ignored and not recognized as legitimate. Now it turns out that almost all the world’s history that is based on carbon dating turns out to be highly inaccurate. The earth is likely much younger that science tells us.
Science claims we came from the primordial soup millions of years ago and by a series of chances we became apes and eventually homo-sapiens. Beliefs of many world cultures claim we are in fact the offspring of the
The ancient Mayans were great astronomers, built pyramids and observatories.
Temple of Inscriptions, Palenque
Pakal the Great, 8 Ahau and Sun Shield (March 603 – August 683), was ruler of the Maya city-state of Palenque in the Late Classic period of Mesoamerican chronology. He acceded to the throne in July 615 and ruled until his death. During a reign of 68 years—the fifth longest of any sovereign monarch in history, the longest in world history for more than a millennium,[and still the second longest in the history of the Americas—Pakal was responsible for the construction or extension of some of Palenque’s most notable surviving inscriptions and monumental architecture. Pakal is perhaps best-known in popular culture for his depiction on the carved lid of his sarcophagus, which has become the subject of speculations. Thanks to Wikipedia
The carved stone sarcophagus lid of Pascal in the Temple of Inscriptions
This is a unique piece of Classic Mayan Art Ichnographically, around the edges of the lid is a band with cosmological signs, including those for sun, moon, and star, as well as the heads of six named noblemen. UFOs are frequently seen in the area and seems to be of interest to the alien visitors.
The central image is that of a cruciform huge world tree that in many religions holds up the heavens. Beneath Pakal is one of the heads of a celestial two-headed serpent viewed frontally. Both the king and the serpent head on which he seems to rest are framed by the open jaws of a funerary serpent, a common iconographic device for signaling entrance into, or residence in, the realm(s) of the dead. The king himself wears the attributes of the Tonsured maize god – in particular a turtle ornament on the breast – and is shown in a peculiar posture that may denote rebirth. Interpretation of the lid has raised controversy. Linda Schele saw Pakal falling down the Milky Way into the southern horizon.[
Pseudoarchaeology.
Erich Von Däniken reproduced a drawing of the sarcophagus lid and comparing Pakal’s pose to that of Project Mercury astronauts in the 1960s. Von Däniken interprets drawings underneath him as rockets, and offers it as possible evidence of a influence on the ancient Maya.
Maya elder who claims he Flew in Alien Disc
Dr Clarke visits a Maya elder who claims the Mayans had a star map of the universe with the planets of other civilizations. The Mayans were brought here from a home planet that has a jungle climate and mountains like Guatemala. Even today their prayers and chants allow them to speak to the Sky People.
The stories were told by people from all walks of life. Some had graduate degrees; others had never attended school. Some were adept at technology; others had never used a cell phone, owned a computer or a television set. A few of the stories were about events that occurred before the 1947 Roswell incident, however, the majority of the events took place between 1990 and 2010. This book contributes to the knowledge about UFOs from a group that until now have mostly remained silent. For readers, it is likely they will never look at the UFO/Alien phenomenon in the same way again.
This Mayan elder claims he has met the Sky People and flown in their craft to distant places. They warned of great catastrophe, that a great volcano will open under the sea and all the land connecting North and South America will drop into the ocean. The next decade will bring great suffering on Earth. The Maya will be taken by the Sky People to safety and later some will be returned to Earth and to other planets. The book provides fascinating stories from Mayans and Meso-American people who have close encounters with the Sky People. The book is certainly worth reading and ties in to similar stories from American Indians. https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=Sky+People+book
”’ Apollo 11 Moon flight spots Alien UFOs
Alleged Unidentified Spotted by Apollo Crew
Alleged Unidentified Spotted by Apollo Crew
There are several interesting stories that have surfaced about UFOs and the Moon Flights. Astronaut Buzz Aldrin apparently feels it was not a UFO they saw on the way to the moon and the Science Channel gave or more exciting version than what really happened. It is true that the Apollo 11 crew spotted an unidentified object moving with the spacecraft as they approached the Moon. They contacted mission control to confirm this mystery object was not Apollo 11’s large rocket upper stage, which was about 6,000 miles away.
Ejected panels could continue moving relatively close to the Apollo spacecraft. Aldrin now feels his remarks were taken out of context to imply they had seen a UFO and likely he was warned NASA to explain his sighting has something mundane.
The Science Channel, nor the astronauts can only speculate on what was being witnessed. The TV program suggests. ‘without explicitly lying’ that Aldrin and his crewmates saw an alien spacecraft.
New data indicates the unmanned Soviet Luna 15 spacecraft was trying was trying to collect samples of lunar soil and rock and then return to Earth before the US mission. Newly released recordings from Jodrell’s Lovell radio telescope, which were hidden in archives until researchers found them, show the Russian craft orbited the Moon and crash-landed onto its surface at 15:50 on July 21, 1969.
Maurice Chatelain
In 1979 Maurice Chatelain former chief of NASA Communications Systems confirmed that Astronaut Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin had indeed reported seeing UFOs on the rim of a crater. Chatelain believes that some UFOs may come from our own solar system – specifically Titan.
NASA Engineer William Tomkins Drawing of UFOs on Tranquility Crater
Chatelain further claims “all Apollo and Gemini flights were followed, both at a distance and sometimes also quite closely, by space vehicles of extraterrestrial origin – flying saucers, or UFOs, if you want to call them by that name. Every time it occurred, the astronauts informed Mission Control, who then ordered absolute silence.”
“Walter Schirra aboard Mercury 8 was the first astronaut to use the code name ‘Santa Claus’ to indicate the presence of flying saucers next to space capsules. However, his announcements were barely noticed by the public.
Astronaut James Lovell
It was a little different when James Lovell on board the Apollo 8 command module came out from behind the moon and said for everybody to hear: ‘PLEASE BE INFORMED THAT THERE IS A SANTA CLAUS.’ Even though this happened on Christmas Day 1968, many people sensed a hidden meaning in those words.” The rumors persist.
NASA may well be a civilian agency, but many of its programs are funded by the defense budget and most of the astronauts are subject to military security regulations and sign oaths not to reveal information on UFOs and alien life. Apart from the fact that the National Security Agency screens all films and probably radio communications as well. We have the statements by Otto Binder, Dr. Garry Henderson, and Maurice Chatelain that the astronauts were under strict orders not to discuss their sightings.
And Gordon Cooper has testified to a United Nations committee that one of the astronauts witnessed a UFO on the ground. If there is no secrecy, why has this sighting not been made public?
Lockheed Skunkworks engineer Don Phillips while we were at the Disclosure Project told us, “During the Apollo landing, Neil Armstrong says, “They’re here. They are right over there and look at the size of those ships. And, it is obvious they don’t like us being here”. When I was working with the Skunkworks with Kelly Johnson, we signed an agreement with the government to keep very quiet about this. “The encounter was common knowledge in NASA,” he revealed.
Nearly four decades after astronaut Neil Armstrong walked on the moon, the U.S. is about to return at a cost of $579-million to find the best site for Earth’s first off-world colony. The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter is expected to produce detailed topographic maps of the moon, and glimpse inside craters at the poles where scientists hope to find frozen water. Using a second spacecraft — the Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite.
Navy Clementine shot of Tyco Crater with Possible Structures
NASA is planning to crash into the moon on October 9, 2009, with the spent second stage of the rocket as a to create and a 6-mile-high plume and a crater 66 feet wide by 13 feet deep to search for water. Assuming ET is on the moon, this may trigger a conflict with superior forces.
Also, Air Force Sgt. Karl Wolfe was told while at Langley Air Force Base enhanced imagery had clearly shown structures on the far side of the Moon. These structures were not created by natural forces-they were made by intelligent beings who were apparently conducting mining operations.
US Navy Clementine images show UFOs and Moon structures.
To help solve this problem of what is the truth the US Navy on January 25, 1994, the Deep Space Program Science Experiment (DSPSE) (better known as Clementine) was launched from Vandenberg Air Force Base, California, on a mission designed to test lightweight miniature sensors and advanced spacecraft components by exposing them, over a long period of time, to the difficult environment of outer space. In addition to testing the various sensors, Clementine was given the complex task of mapping the moon. The mission results were spectacular.
Between February 26 and April 22, 1994, Clementine was able to deliver more than 1.8 million digital images of the moon. These photos were provided by Jose Escamilla in his “Moon Rising” DVD. http://moonrising-themovie.com/
It is interesting to note Astronaut Dr. Buzz Aldrin rejects global warming fears: ‘Climate has been changing for billions of years’ A record cool summer has descended upon many parts of the U.S. after predictions of the year without a summer.”
These US Navy Clementine images show possible UFO Moon structures.
Mr Dean said: “Ladies and gentlemen, my government, NASA, which many of us in the United States say stands for Never A Straight Answer, proceeded to erase 40 rolls of film of the Apollo Program — the flight to the Moon, the flight around the Moon, the landings on the Moon, the walking guys here and there.
“They erased, 40 rolls of film of those events some of themost important ones in the history of mankind.”
However, it was Dr Steven Greer, founder of The Disclosure Project and The Center for the Study of Extraterrestrial Intelligence (CSETI), who added fuel to the alien theory fire, as he claimed to have had secret discussions with close acquaintances with Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin.
Dr Greer claimed in a blog post that people close to the first Moon Landers admitted that the duo did see evidence of aliens while on the historic missions.
Apollo 11 LM Lander
Moon landing: NASA deleted evidence of aliens in Apollo 11 mission – shock claim
Dr Greer wrote: “Close friends and very close family members of both Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin have separately told me that indeed there were numerous, large UFOs around the crater where the Lunar Module landed and that these were seen by both Armstrong and Aldrin.
“I have also spoken to military officers that have seen the footage of this event- but it has never been made public.”
However, Buzz Aldrin has directly addressed claims he saw UFOs saying he saw lights, but did not think they were of alien origin.
Apollo 11 mission crew Armstrong, Collins ,Aldrin
Dr Aldrin said in a 2014 Q&A: “On Apollo 11 in route to the Moon, I observed a light out the window that appeared to be moving alongside us.
“There were many explanations of what that could be, other than another spacecraft from another country or another world – it was the 4 panels that moved away when we extracted the Lander from the rocket and we were nose to nose with the two spacecraft.
“So in the close vicinity, moving away, were four panels. RELATED ARTICLES
Commander Graham Bethune is a retired Navy Pilot and a good friend. During his 26 years of active duty he qualified in over 100 different models of aircraft. In February 5, 1951, he and two other Navy Pilots were sent to Keflavik, Iceland on a Secret mission to meet with the Icelandic Government and Lockheed Overseas, who managed the Airport.
On February 10, 1951, while Piloting a four engine Navy R5D Transport returning from Keflavik, to Argentia, Newfoundland, he had an eight minute encounter with an “Unidentified Flying Object” that was 300 feet in diameter. The first chapter of Major Keyhoe’s book “Flying Saucers Top Secret” is devoted to this famous encounter.
During the Disclosure Project, Commander Bethune revealed his Flight 124 from Keflavik, Iceland was involved with a near miss of a UFO in 1951, about 300 miles outside of Argentia, Newfoundland, over the Atlantic Ocean flying a R5D aircraft. Here is Graham’s account of his sighting.
“My name is Graham Bethune. I am a commander, retired pilot from the Navy and I went through the regular Navy program of training pilots. I graduated in 1943 from Pensacola Academy Air. All Navy pilots are trained navigators.
He and his crew and passengers had an important sighting over the North Atlantic Ocean.
When we landed at Argentia, an Air Force officer interrogated us and showed us photos of UFOs asking me to choose the type we had seen. He made a good report, which went to the headquarters of the Air Force in Washington, D.C. He was transferred to fly the top military VIP unit.
Commander Bethune flew Naval Transports for 12 years, and was a “VIP Transport Plane Commander,” and held a “Top Secret” clearance. He was a test pilot and served six years with the Naval Bureau of Aeronautics.
Commander Bethune mentioned he flew high ranking officers to Utah where a 100 foot’ in diameter and slightly oval craft had crashed. There were US Air Force, Army and Navy officers in attendance as well as scientists and academics from various stateside universities. Both discs were retrieved and brought back to Wright Patterson.
Alleged Utah Crashed Oval Disc
He accumulated over 10,000 Navy and civilian flying hours. He flew the Secretary of the Navy, Secretary of the Army, Chief of Naval Operations, Commandant of the Marine Corps, the Supreme Allied Commander, and the NATO Commander Admiral McCormick, and numerous admirals. If a UFO crashed or an important meeting concerning UFOs occurred he would be chosen to pilot the VIPs to their destination because of his sighting.
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Lt Colonel Ware Holding Time Alien Article
Col. Donald Ware shared, “Graham personally told me that he flew General George Marshall and high ranking Naval personal and scientists to two crash retrievals – one in Iceland and one in Utah.
Graham was informed by Admiral Forney himself and Graham never doubted that a ploy was set-up to divert attention away from the Navy. Graham also claimed we had a base on the moon and we had a Navy space shuttle fleet. He felt truth is often stranger than science fiction that ET movies are supported by the government to create acceptance.
Graham confide in Donald M. Ware, Lt Colonel USAF (Ret), who was for ten years Florida State MUFON Director and former Eastern Regional Director before me— then 18 years as a Director of the International UFO Congress. They discussed Alien-Human Hybrids, underground bases, and the levels of consciousness to contact alien spirits.
Lt. Colonel Donald Ware mentions that Commander Bethune had informed Ware that he had flown Admiral Byrd to Antarctica in 1945 in a secret mission to a German Base On this flight were US Navy high ranking personnel, British Naval officers/scientists, and some US scientists.
Prior to World War II the Germans had disc technology provided by Off Planet Visitors. The Germans weaponized the discs by putting machine guns and cannons on the craft. ‘
German Haunebu-alien built craft
However, the Visitors interceded stating – that this technology violated a prime directive – that it could not be used for purposes of warfare. The Visitors told the Germans that they could use this technology but not for World War II and were given the option of moving the discs to a base in Antarctica, which is what they did with Hitler’s approval.
Admiral Byrd had explored over much of the North and South Poles and was awarded the Medal of Honor. When Admiral Byrd reached Antarctica he attempted to negotiate with the German scientists to participate in a cooperative sharing their advanced technologies! The meetings went very badly and the Germans absolutely refused to share any technology with the US and British governments.
Admiral Byrd
Graham told Colonel Ware that Admiral Byrd needed to get this awful turn of events back to the Pentagon – to report directly to those who tasked Byrd with this mission. Graham flew Byrd back to the Pentagon, wherein he told of the non-cooperation by the Germans. The resulting failure of that initial meeting with the Germans in Antarctica set into motion the gears for a naval military action to force the Germans to share the technology after, the World War II was over in Operation Highjump. .
Communist China Wuhan Lab Engineered COVID 19
Communist Chinese Wuhan Institute Laboratory
WASHINGTON — GOP Senator. Rand Paul on Tuesday stepped up his months-long fight with the nation’s top infectious disease expert, Dr. Anthony Fauci, suggesting he lied to Congress about whether the National Institutes of Health funded gain-of-function research of almost a million dollars at the Communist Chinese Wuhan Institute of Virology, and triggering an angry shouting match.
At a Senate Health Committee hearing meant to update lawmakers on the country’s COVID-19 response, the Kentucky Republican began by asking Fauci, if he’s aware that it’s a crime to lie to Congress.
“On May 11, you stated that NIH has not ever and does not now fund gain-of-function research in the Wuhan, China Institute of Virology,” Paul said. He claimed that gain-of-function research — which could, in theory, enhance the transmissibility of a virus — was engineered in the lab and referred to an academic paper by a Chinese scientist, which he then asked to be entered into the record and for a copy to be given to Fauci.
“Dr. Fauci, knowing that it is a crime to lie to Congress, do you wish to retract your statement of May 11, where you claimed at the NIH never funded gain-of-function research and move on?” Paul said, Tthe deaths of four million people are tied to the Wufan lab and spreading the disease with millions of Chinese travelers flying at low flight cost around the world while forbidding travel in China .
Wufan has a population over 11 + million and allegedly 5 million left to fly anywhere in the world for a couple hundred dollars,
Fuci Under Attack
Dr. Anthony Fauci,
Fauci flatly rejected Senator Paul’s suggestion stating, “Sen. Paul, I have never lied before the Congress. And I do not retract that statement,” he said.
The Senator is claiming Fauci worked closely with the Communist Military run Wuhan Lab and provided almost a million dollars of US funds to study the dangerous Corona Virus’. ‘If anybody is lying here, senator, it is you,’ Fauci tells Congress.
A series of Fauci emails were recovered by the Washington Postt News that suggests Fauci was naive to trust the Communists..
In a March 28, 2020, email, George Gao, director of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, apologized to Fauci for saying the US and other countries were making a “big mistake” by not encouraging people to wear masks from the get-go.’
Chen Wei is called the Wolf Warrior is a MajorGeneral in the Communist People’s Liberation Army
Major General Chen Wei apparently took over the key position in the Wuhan Institute for the military as an epidemiologist and virologist specializing in biodefense. Biodefense is frequently discussed in the context of biowar or bioterrorism, and is generally considered a military or emergency response term. It is likely she became in charge of the Corona Virus as early as August 2019, and either accidentally or purposely conducted biowarfare. China had an effective vaccine a year ahead of the US.
Brig. General Robert Spalding who lived in China for many years claims the Communist Party and government is controlled by the Commonest military and the spread of the disease was Bio-warfare to weaken Democratic Countries in his book “Stealth War.”
Strange Craft
The True Story of an Air Force Intelligence Officer’s Life with UFOs
U.S. Air Force Major George Filer belongs to the generation of pilots and airmen who first became aware of the strange aircraft showing up in the Earth’s atmosphere after World War II. These men – military professionals who flew planes, served as radar operators and air traffic controllers at air fields around the world – began to whisper amongst themselves about encounters with suspected extraterrestrial aircraft.
During secret debriefings at U.S. bases, pilots and air crew told their commanders of seeing UFOs off their plane’s wings. Award-winning investigative author John Guerra spent four years interviewing Filer, a decorated intelligence officer.
From objects in the skies over Cold War Europe to a UFOs over during the Cuban Missile Crisis to lights over the DMZ in Vietnam Filer leaves nothing out about his Air Force UFO encounters,
Filer’s most memorable case – the shooting of an alien at Fort Dix Army Base in 1978 – is fully recounted for the first time in this book. As a member of the Disclosure Project, military experts, astronauts, and scientists urge the U.S. government to release all it knows about UFOs to the public.
Filer describes his UFO encounters in this incredible book. By John L. Guerra. https://amzn.to/2SK3SIQ
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Filer’s Files 31, 2021 - CIA Director UFOs are Real - PART II
Filer’s Files 31, 2021 - CIA Director UFOs are Real - PART II
Major George A. Filer III ret. USAF
New Jersey State Director
MUFON Eastern Region Director
Special Reports include First CIA Director UFOs are Rea, Alien Technological Civilizations, The Sky People,Apollo 11 Moon flight spots Alien UFOs, Communist China Wuhan Lab Engineered COVID 19, C-60 and Strange Craft Book’
Unidentified Aerial Phenomena sightings were reported over California, Florida, Missouri, New Jersey, Oklahoma, Tennessee, and Washington.
Unidentified Aerial Phenomena sightings were reported over Canada, Italy, Norway, and England in the United Kingdom.
The Filer Research Institute feels the scientific study of UFOs is for the benefit of humankind and is an important endeavor. The US Air Force investigated UFOs publicly for more than twenty years under Project Blue Book; and I continue this advanced research. I believe the God of the universe has spread life throughout the cosmos and UFO’s are visiting us in ever-increasing numbers.
Forward these files to your friends and neighbors.
UFO Sightings in the United States
Sightings are from MUFON CMS
California Object
Vacaville–t on July 26, 2021, the object was black with four lights in a row like these periods . It could just barely be seen because of the Moon shining on it. That’s how my son spotted it. It was huge in comparison with Moon as it gave a good size comparison. Also it almost had a cloaking look to it and when it disappeared instantly perhaps cloaking. It was truly an awesome experience for my 16 year old son and me as retired USAF Senior NCO currently working as an FAA inspector.
Note:The photo of the object by the moon is not a camera artifact. The witnesses saw the object. Thanks to Will Pucket/www.ufosnw.com/newsite/
Florida Object
Sarasota – on June 1, 2021, it only states to look at the pictures.
Some kind of objects’ are floating above the water.
Missouri Light
Branson— On July 25, 2021 around 11 pm I was taking video and pictures of the Moon and the bright star above it. Didn’t see the triangle of light with the naked eye. When I looked at my motion photo I could hear a static noise just before the next second photo when a triangle of light appeared in the next photo.
New Jersey Lights
Wayne – on July 27, 2021, I witnessed an incredibly bright light that was slowly moving across the sky. It was almost as bright as the sun which made it difficult to look at and caused us to initially mistake it for sun. Recorded 25 seconds of video which shows a trail behind it. The object never made a sound and disappeared after roughly 5 minutes.
Oklahoma Object
Lawton—September 27, 2015 I snapped a photo of a friend atop Mt. Scott and possibly caught something in the frame by accident. When the photo was taken there were NO aircraft in the sky visible.. This photo was shot on an IPhone and immediately after I snapped it I saw something over Lake Lawtonka.
Tennessee Light
”Nashville–on July 10 , 2021, I drive for a ride-share company. I was working and pulled into s Richland Creek Greenway Trailhead. I stepped out of my car, and noticed a very bright light low in eastern sky At that moment I heard a rocket sound coming from the north east. The white light kept moving closer. I then see 3 red lights under two white lights like head lights. It looked triangular then more rectangular now. I am now seeing 2 rows of horizontal lights. A top deck and a lower deck. These lights were square and looked like LED lights
Washington Lights
Sequim– on July 20, 2021, I go outside every night for a smoke when a flash of light caught my eye. It just didn’t look right, so I took a photo on night shot of cylinder. I went east it until out of sight.
Worldwide UFO Sightings
Canada Cigar
Franksville– on June 26, 2021, about 6 am I was taking my dog out and I observed a shiny silver cigar-shaped object low in the sky just above the trees. It seemed to be reflecting the sun. I found it strange that it was so low in the sky and appeared to have no wings and making no noise. I kept watching it in amazement and it seemed to be hovering. Cigar Depiction.
Columbia Object
Medallin, – on July 25, 2021 –YouTube video was provided by a friend. No details are known about the video. The object on the video is very strange. As of today (July 29, 2021) there were nearly 22,000 views of the footage. A few commenter’s feel that the object could be a kite. Inversion of the image did not reveal any string attached to the object. The object was unlikely to have been a kite. ‘’ Thanks to Will Pucket/www.ufosnw.com/newsite/
Italy Light
Belpasso, Sicily– today, 28 July 2021, I was on the top roof of my house when I clearly saw a “beaming red ball” ebb in the night sky. It was suspended and changed into a bright green after a couple of seconds and, then into a bright orange. All the time beaming rays of light moved vertically downwards and disappeared.
Norway Light
Svalbar – on September 1, 2017, three objects that were glowing orange appear to be tracking a boat in the Nordvest-Spitsbergen National Park, This boat travels several miles and runs a Google Maps Street view. When you look directly overhead, you will see what look like one or two burned out pixels.
Spain Object
Barcelona– on May 20, 2021, UFO I saw had a huge halo in the sky. I decided to record, as it was moving, so I zoomed in and saw a long cigar shaped object followed by flame. Looks like falling space debris or Comet.
UK/England Object
Fort William– on July 17, 2021, the photos show the sun shining on one long slim one with what looked like lots of port windows. They are huge ones, the long one above was massive in the photo and there’s a golf ball shape just coming off it. They were not visible to the naked eye but my mobile took two excellent photos.
RAF Bentwaters – on May 1,1984, I was a munitions transporter working overnight and drove a forklift out to our next location. It was a moonless night and many stars were visible and noticed 3 brighter stars that formed a perfect triangle directly overhead. I was ruling out stars when they suddenly started rotating around the center of the triangle. They made almost a full rotation then each one made a right corner turn and shot out to the horizon, in three different directions. I watched one until it faded into the lights of the flight line, Later, the crew arrived but they had not seen anything.
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August Conference August 27 to 29, 2021 in Las Vegas
Filer’s Files is copyrighted 2021 by George A. Filer, all rights reserved. Readers may post the COMPLETE files on their Web Sites if they credit the newsletter and its editor by name, and list the date of issue. These reports and comments are not necessarily the OFFICIAL MUFON viewpoint. Send your letters to Majorstar@verizon.net
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Filer’s Files salutes our fighting men and women Georgie Filer and Eddie Pedrick my grandsons who both drowned. These files could not be published without the help of my beloved wife who cooks, cleans, washes, etc, and handles the finances. We pray that God will bless those who read these files spiritually
Long Description of Sighting Report - Case 117442 Orb appeared in distance while filming donkeys. Filmed in 2018 didnt realize it was there till recently.
Date Submitted : 2021-08-21 Date of Event : 2018-07-10 MUFON SUBMITTER FILE : 2397616529683597570595882454418499127243789n.mp4
SOHO Captures UFO Entering The Sun ( August 21, 2021 )
SOHO Captures UFO Entering The Sun On August 21, 2021 : SOHO Solar UFO images Enters Solar Activity : UFO captured on the P.C using SpaceWeatherLive.
Real-time solar images. SOHO. The ESA/NASA Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) mission consists of one spacecraft in a halo orbit around the Sun–Earth ...
In this series we are exploring the weird and wonderful world of astronomy jargon! If only there was a way to measure the distance to today’s topic: standard candles!
Measuring distances to stuff in space is really, really hard. One technique is to use parallax, the observed wiggle in stellar positions over the course of a year. That technique is fantastic as long as the star isn’t too far away. At a certain distance, your telescope simply won’t be able to accurately measure the wiggle, and you’ll be out of luck.
The key is to find something called a standard candle. If you could look out at a distant object and know for sure exactly how bright it is (in other words, you could know its luminosity), then you could compare that measurement to how bright it appears to be. Using a little bit of trigonometry, you could then calculate a distance.
As an example, if you knew for sure that the brand of flashlight that I had was the exact same as the flashlight that you had, then if I was far away you could measure the brightness of my flashlight versus the brightness of your flashlight and figure out my distance.
Now all we need are some flashlights.
Thankfully, nature has given us a few. The first known were the Cepheids, a kind of star that varies in brightness. Astronomer Henrietta Swan Leavitt discovered that the longer a Cepheid takes to cycle, the brighter it is. By calibrating a few Cepheids using parallax, you can then go out and find any Cepheid you want and figure out how far away it is.
In 1998, two teams of astronomers discovered dark energy – the unexplained accelerated expansion of the universe – by looking at another standard candle: Type-1a supernovae. These kinds of supernovae all go off in roughly the same way, and so it’s possible to compute their true brightness.
Today, astronomers employ a variety of standard candles, from Mira variables to red giant branch stars. But no matter the method, the underlying technique is the same: know the brightness, know the distance.
“The alien probe that visited us in 2017 left a message for the scientific community”
“The alien probe that visited us in 2017 left a message for the scientific community”
Harvard professor Avi Loeb believes that an alien probe visited our star system in 2017, and it brought “a message” to the academic community
It was an unremarkable day in October 2017 when Canadian astronomer Robert Weryk made an astonishing discovery.
Thanks to data from the University of Hawaii’s Pan-STARRS1 telescope at the Kaleakala Observatory in Hawaii, Weryk saw an unusual, elongated object about the size of a football field, screaming through the solar system 196,000 miles away. hour.
The strangest thing of all was that it seemed to be speeding up slightly, pushed by an invisible force that has yet to be fully explained.
Its highly unusual trajectory caused it to pass our Sun, leading scientists to believe that the space object, later referred to as “‘Oumuamua” or “explorer” in Hawaiian, was the first visitor from outside our solar system to be observed directly.
Over the past three years, countless attempts have been made to explain the unprecedented features of ‘Oumuamua. Some speculated that it was a hydrogen iceberg, while others suggested that it was a traveling space rock covered in a layer of “organic sunscreen.”
For Avi Loeb, an astrophysicist and professor of science at Harvard University, the answer could be tantalizing.
Their controversial argument is that ‘Oumuamua may have been a probe sent by an alien civilization, an explanation that has attracted enormous media attention and, unsurprisingly, proved divisive among experts.
In his new book, entitled “Alien: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth,” Loeb explores his provocative hypothesis, using the story of ‘Oumuamua to lay the groundwork for a much larger conversation:
The struggle to be taken seriously within a scientific community that has historically maintained the discussion around the search for the existence of remote terrestrial intelligence.
During an interview with Futurism, Loeb argued that the scientists ‘explanations fell short of explaining the many quirks and eccentricities of’ Oumuamua. The scientific community “advocated for something we’ve never seen before,” he said.
An example of this was what Loeb called the “dust rabbit” hypothesis, which theorized that ‘Oumuamua’s strange trajectory could be explained by very low density.
“The problem with that is, I don’t think something the size of a football field that is a dust bunny would survive a journey of millions of years through interstellar space,” Loeb said, aspirating that hypothesis. “I mean, I just don’t think it can stick together.”
For Loeb, the scientific explanations that tried to include ‘Oumuamua in an existing scientific framework simply did not make sense.
“The point is, on the one hand, you can’t say it’s natural,” argued Loeb, “and then when you try to explain it with natural processes, you come up with something we’ve never seen before.”
And that’s how it ended up in aliens. The root of Loeb’s alien theory is that ‘Oumuamua may have been a solar sail sent to us from another star system.
In the simplest terms, a solar or dinghy sail is a form of propulsion of a spacecraft that converts the low pressure of solar radiation into motion.
Earth scientists have already experimented with the concept; In 2019, the nonprofit Planetary Society launched a craft called LightSail-2, which uses 340 square feet of an extremely thin layer of reflective polyester film to gradually propel itself.
For Loeb, a solar sail pushed by starlight could explain the unexpected acceleration of ‘Oumuamua.
If it is solid and not a dust rabbit, the astrophysicist concluded that the interstellar visitor must also be surprisingly thin, perhaps, by his calculations, “less than a millimeter thick.”
For the astronomer, the conclusion of the solar sail was to follow “steps, like Detective Sherlock Holmes. When you rule out all other possibilities, whatever you have left must be the truth. “
That conclusion is an exaggeration for many astronomers in the field, who have repeatedly challenged Loeb’s conclusion.
In a 2019 study published in the journal Nature Astronomy, an international team of researchers argued that they found “no compelling evidence to favor an extraterrestrial explanation” for ‘Oumuamua.
“‘ Oumuamua’s properties are consistent with a natural origin,” University of Maryland astronomer Matthew Knight, a co-author of the study, told Reuters at the time, “and an extraterrestrial explanation is not warranted.”
Their argument was that ‘Oumuamua is a “planetesimal,” or a small fragment of a planetary building block that has just drifted through our star system.
Weryk, who discovered the object in the first place, had no kind words for Loeb’s hypothesis. “Honestly, that’s a bit of wild speculation,” he told CBC in 2018.
“I think it is a remnant of another solar system,” added Weryk. “It’s just something that happened to us by chance, and we were very lucky to have been operating the telescope that night and looking in that direction.”
These rebuttals appear to have emboldened Loeb’s investigations into ‘Oumuamua’s extraterrestrial origins, as well as leading him to make a passionate plea to the scientific community, as outlined in his book, to take SETI research seriously.
For Loeb, it’s about reading the stars with an open mind.
“My guiding principle is modesty,” he told Futurism. “If we are not arrogant, if we are modest, we would say that life, as we have it, must be common.”
“We now know from the Kepler satellite data that about half of the Sun-like stars have a planet like Earth, roughly the same distance, so it can have liquid water and the chemistry of life as we know it.” , Loeb said, referring to the “habitable zone” of a star system within which life could theoretically be supported.
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Spherical object flying over mountain range Arizona
Spherical object flying over mountain range Arizona
Spherical object flying over a mountain range in Greenwood, Arizona, witness did not noticed the sphere while filming donkeys.
Furthermore, spherical object photographed from airplane at 16000 feet altitude south of Jacksonville, Florida and a Unidentified Flying Object that changed, accelerated and then slowed down again until it disappeared captured over Zlín, Czechia.
A compilation of the internet’s most divisive UFO videos
A compilation of the internet’s most divisive UFO videos
The Pentagon has released a report all but confirming the existence of UFOs. And there has been no shortage of sightings in the past few years. These are some of the UFO videos that have divided the internet. This UFO sightings compilation is a must-watch, These people claim their videos are real. Others think they’re easily explained away. Do you agree? Let us know.
Some of the best and most close proximity UFO encounters are reported from the pilots who are right up there in the skies with these mysterious objects. I have recently done a series of articles covering some of these cases, spanning the 1950s, the 1970s, oninto the 1980s, and most recently the 1990s, only really hitting the tip of the iceberg on such reports, which are numerous. Of course it goes beyond even that, well into the present day, and pilots continue to come into contact with things up there that cannot be easily explained. Here let us look at a selection of very odd pilot UFO encounters from the year 2000 and onwards.
One strange case comes from the files of UFO researcher Scott Corrales, with the Institute of Hispanic Ufology (IHU), and involves a bizarre UFO encounter experienced by a Mexican military Merlin C26/A jet belonging to the Secretariat of National Defense (SEDENA). On March 5, 2004, the jet was on maneuvers to patrol for drug runners in the area of Ciudad del Carmen, Campeche, when the pilot picked up a radar hit for an unknown object at an altitude of around 3,500 meters. The very fast-moving object was also seen on the its infrared equipment (FLIR), and the jet followed it only to lose it in the clouds. After that, they then detected more of the objects, 11 in total, which appeared from the clouds to follow and surround the jet. At the time there were eight witnesses to this surreal event, including the pilot, radar operator, FLIR operator, and other monitoring specialists, and they were able to take video footage of some of the objects through the FLIR. Oddly, the objects were only picked up on radar and FLIR, and were not witnessed with the naked eye. All of the crew insisted that these could not have possibly been any normal aircraft. The footage was shown on Mexican news outlets and created quite a stir at the time, although it is a relatively obscure case outside of Spanish speaking sources.
One of the FLIR images of the objects
From the same year is a case from San Francisco, California, involving a passenger airliner making its final approach to San Francisco International Airport on November 3, 2004. As the plane was making its approaching descent, the pilot and co-pilot observed a bright orange light flashing to the west, and it then began to change colors from orange to white in an alternating pattern. They at first thought this must be another plane, but the object soon was behaving in an erratic manner that showed that it was no normal aircraft. The pilot would say of what happened next:
It then began to move in a northeasterly direction. Once again, being in an airplane, it is very easy to think an object is moving, from small corrections the autopilot makes. I found a handful of stars to serve as a reference point and verified that the object was slowly moving north. It moved about 30 degrees and then stopped. Then, it made a slight tangent to the right and continued moving for about 20 more degrees. It stopped and turned again to the right and continued for 10 degrees, then stopped again and disappeared. The whole sighting ran about two minutes or so from start to finish. It was difficult to judge the actual distance and speed. When I talk about ‘moving in degrees and turning,’ I am talking about my cockpit viewpoint and compass degrees. The UFO’s size was very small, about the size of the stars and planets you see in the sky. There were two of us in the cockpit, and we both witnessed the same thing. We were both in awe. I have been flying for 14 years have never witnessed something like this before.
From the following year we have a report from the files of the National UFO Reporting Center (NUFORC), concerning a not a report from the pilot themselves, but rather from a witness on the ground that saw what appears to have been a harrowing encounter between a fighter jet and UFO. On May 27, 2005, the witness was taking a walk at around 11:30 p.m. on a clear, calm night, when his attention was drawn to something very strange playing out in the sky above., which appeared to be a fighter jet engaging with some sort of triangular UFO. The witness says of what he saw:
The craft’s speed was about 500 knots. The craft was perfectly silent and moving rapidly. Several miles behind the craft was what appeared to be a fighter jet moving very rapidly, 600 to 700 knots. As the jet was chasing the craft they both where flying toward my position. I could begin to hear the engines of the jet at that time. It appeared as thought the triangular craft was toying with the jet in that as the jet got closer to the craft, the craft would speed up somewhat and leave the jet behind. As the craft and jet got nearly directly over my location, the triangular craft made a sharp right hand turn the west. The jet was unable to make the turn at the same angle as the craft. The jet’s turn was much more pronounced and made a much wider loop. Due to that, the jet lost quite a bit of ground on the craft during the turn, yet again as both craft began traversing in a straight line toward the west-northwest the craft again appeared to toy with the pursuing jet in the same manner aforementioned. After a few seconds it appeared that the craft accelerated dramatically and left the jet behind. I observed the jet make one tight loop several miles from my position and then turn off to the north-northeast and flew out of my line of sight.
One thing that was odd about the triangular craft was the three lights making up the triangular pattern were not equal in distance. Referencing the wingspan of the jet, two of the lights on the craft were about 50 to 75 feet apart and the third light was approximately 100 to 150 feet from the other two lights. Additionally, the two lights closer together were at the front and the other further away light was at the rear facing the pursuing jet. This made the craft to appear to be moving in reverse. It should be noted, that the color of the triangular craft lights were an unusual milky white color, nothing like that of the very bright red, green and white lights observed on the jet. Tinker Air Force Base, which does have fighters, is located about 25 miles east of my house.
Image by Steve Baxter
Unfortunately, despite an investigation into the alleged incident by NUFORC, they were unable to find any further witnesses to the event, and furthermore the military of course denied that such an event had happened or that it even had any jet in the area at the time at all. It would be very interesting to hear an account from the pilot of that jet, but this seems as if it will never happen, and we are forced to wonder what was going on here. Moving to the year 2007, we come to a report from the Alderney Coast of the UK, where two seasoned airline pilots on two separate unrelated flights both saw something very odd in the sky on April 26 of that year. One of the witnesses was a Captain Ray Bowyer, a pilot for Aurigny Airlines, who says he first noticed a bright yellow light at 3 p.m. around 30 miles from the coast during a flight from Southampton. He would describe it as follows:
It was a very sharp, thin yellow object with a green area. It was 2,000ft up and stationary. I thought it was about 10 miles away, although I later realized it was approximately 40 miles from us. At first, I thought it was the size of a 737. But it must have been much bigger because of how far away it was. It could have been as much as a mile wide It was exactly the same but looked smaller because it was further away. It was closer to Guernsey. I can’t explain it. At first, I thought it might have been a reflection from a vinery in Guernsey, but that would have disappeared quickly. This was clearly visual for about nine minutes. As I got closer to it, it became clear to me that it was tangible. I was in two minds about going towards it to have a closer look but decided against it because of the size of it. I had to think of the safety of the passengers first. I’m certainly not saying that it was something of another world. All I’m saying is that I have never seen anything like it before in all my years of flying.
Another pilot with Blue Island Airlines also reported something very similar in the same area at the same time, yet air traffic control were unable to get a radar signature for what was being reported. One of the air traffic controllers on duty at the time would explain:
The pilot from Blue Islands was en route to Jersey at the same time and as he went past Sark he described an object behind him to his left. The description was very similar to Captain Bowyer’s and they described it as being in exactly the same place. But they were looking at it from opposite sides. The Blue Islands plane was at 3,500ft at the time so, again, both pilots placed it at the same altitude. If the object was stationary, our equipment would not have picked it up because the radar would have screened it out.
The incident was apparently investigated by the Ministry of Defense, but it is unknown what became of it. From the country of Greece, we have an incident from 2009 that involves both civilian airline pilots and fighter jets. On October 11, 2009, Olympic Airways flight 266 was on a routine flight from Athens to London, when at approximately 3:20 a.m. the pilot noticed a very bright object with a “constantly shifting shape” to the west of Athens. At the same time, two other airliners, Olympic Airways flights 730 to Kos and flight 700 to Rhodes, saw the same thing, and it was also witnessed by personnel at the Athens Airport control tower.
As all of this was going on, the Greek Air Force was tracking the object, and considering the object was not responding to efforts to contact it by radio and was violating Greek airspace, two F-16 fighter jets were scrambled and sent to intercept. The fighters approached the location of the mysterious object, but as they drew closer it is reported as having shot off at breathtaking speed to disappear from sight. Very unusually, although the object had been visually identified on the ground and by the pilots, it had at no point actually shown up on radar. After this, Greek officials would try to cover it all up, but the case eventually leaked to the media, after which the Greek Air Force explained it away as a misidentification of the planet Venus. Case closed, yet the several experienced pilots who observed the object dispute this, saying it was no planet, nor any known aircraft they have ever seen. What was going on here? We may never know for sure.
Image by Steve Baxter
Our final and most recent case we will look at comes from 2012, in the country of Scotland. On December 21 of that year, a passenger Airbus 320 with 220 people aboard was about 13 miles outside Glasgow Airport and making preparations to land when a glowing blue and yellow object sped out of nowhere to narrowly miss the plane, whizzing by just 300 feet below it, a hair’s breadth in respect to aviation. It was so close that the pilots had prepared to take evasive action, but it passed by so quickly they had no time to react. The pilot would later report that there had been “a high risk of collision” with the unidentified object, but ground radar picked up nothing. The pilot and co-pilot would both describe the mysterious object as “blue and yellow or silver in color with a small frontal area.” Part of the transcript between the pilot and ground control during the incident reads:
A320: ‘Er yeah we just had something pass underneath us quite close and nothing on TCAS. Have you got anything on in our area?
Control: ‘Er negative er we’ve got nothing on er radar and we’re n-not talking to any traffic either’
A320: ‘Er not quite sure what it was but it definitely er quite large and it’s blue and yellow’
Control: ‘OK that’s understood, do you have a an estimate for the height?’
A320: ‘Maybe er yeah we were probably about four hundred to five hundred feet above it so it’s probably about three and a half thousand feet. We seemed to only miss it by a couple of hundred feet it went directly beneath us … wherever we were when we called it in it was within about ten seconds… couldn’t tell what direction it was going but it went right underneath us’
An official investigation would be carried out into the matter, which looked into several possible explanations for what had happened, but they were ultimately forced to conclude that it was unexplainable. Part of the official conclusion reads:
The board initially considered likely candidates for the untraced aircraft. The A320 crew had not been able to assimilate any information regarding the form of the untraced aircraft in the fleeting glimpse they had, reporting only a likely colour. Members were of the opinion that, in the absence of a primary radar return, it was unlikely that the untraced aircraft was a fixed-wing or rotary-wing aircraft or man-carrying balloon. It was considered that a meteorological balloon would be radar significant and unlikely to be released in the area of the Airprox. A glider could not be discounted but it was felt unlikely that one would be operating in that area, both due to the constrained airspace and the lack of thermal activity due to the low temperature. Similarly, the board considered that a hang-glider or para-motor would be radar significant and that conditions precluded them, as they did para-gliders or parascenders. Members were unable to reach a conclusion as to a likely candidate for the conflicting aircraft and it was therefore felt that the Board had insufficient information to determine a cause or risk.
Indeed, for all of these cases there seems to be no rational explanation that can trump the experience and observational skills of these pilots. Sadly, most reports like this will never come properly to light, partly because pilots are afraid to put their reputations on the line to file such things, and partly because many of the reports that are made are just explained away and brushed off, often to the disagreement of the witnesses themselves. We are left with some very intriguing accounts by some very credible witnesses who are right up there with the phenomena, often practically rubbing elbows with it, hinting at something very strange going on up in our skies. Whatever that might possibly be remains to be seen.
Now and again I get asked about so-called “Balls of Light.” Or, as some people call them: Orbs. Others just refer to them as BOLs. It’s not a particularly well-known thing that BOLs pop up in just about nearly all sorts of different aspects of the paranormal: Ufology, Cryptozoology, alien encounters, life after death, Crop Circles and more. And there’s no evidence to show they’re all interlinked. Although, there certainly could be. With that said, let’s get into it. I’ll begin with Bigfoot. While the BOL phenomenon isn’t particularly well-connected to Cryptozoology, there is a link. Much of that connection can be found in Texas’ Big Thicket. For decades, people have seen small, floating balls of light in the Big Thicket, mainly in the area appropriately called Ghost Road. Much less well-known is the fact that the late Rob Riggs – who was the expert on Big Thicket weirdness – collected a number of accounts of people seeing large, Bigfoot creatures in the Thicket, but they were very different to other cases. In this handful of reports Rob had in the BOL category, he told me that people had seen strange, approximately tennis-ball-sized BOLs, fluttering around the Bigfoot animals like butterflies might around a person. Rob had no clear theory for the cause of these “Bigfoot BOLs,” except to say that it led him to believe (even more) that there was something very strange about Bigfoot.
(Nick Redfern with the late Bigfoot-seeker, Rob Riggs)
Now, let’s get onto the matter of Crop Circles. If you know your Crop Circle lore and history, you’ll know that BOLs and Orbs are often seen above the intricately-formations. Very early on in his Crop Circle research, Matthew Williams (both a creator and a researcher of Crop Circles) came to realize something deeply strange and highly intriguing. Namely, that many people who make the formations experience unusual phenomena in the fields – and on numerous occasions in the formations of their very own making. For example, Matt has experienced (as have a number of other, well-known Circle-makers; more than a few of who are reluctant to speak on the record) a wealth of weird phenomena in Crop Circles that he himself created. That included seeing small, aerial balls of light zipping around, detecting unexplained animal-like growls and howls, and even experiencing significant periods of missing time.
(Nick Redfern)
Now, onto the 1950s-era Contactees and their “buddies,” the Space Brothers. There are numerous reports of the Contactees having encounters with BOLs. We’ll begin with Daniel Fry, the author of The White Sands Incident. According to Fry he saw, on his first encounter, what looked like an “especially bright group of stars” that “seemed to beckon me.” Truman Bethurum claimed amusing and outrageous encounters with a curvy, stacked-to-the-max, hot-looking babe from the stars who announced herself as Captain Aura Rhanes, of the planet Clarion. Interestingly, Bethurum said that prior to his meetings with the captain, he would often see “a small flare”or what appeared to be “a meteor falling though the starlit purple night.” Orfeo Angeulcci – the author of (among others) The Secret of the Saucers – said that his main encounter with a pair of human-looking aliens involved the appearance of a red, glowing, oval-shaped light that was “about five times as large as the red portion of a traffic light.” The sound of a male voice was soon heard, which was “strong,” and had “well-modulated tones and speaking perfect English.” The voice from the lights assured Angelucci that “they” were “friends from another world.”
Still on the matter of Space Brothers and BOLs: Decades ago, a man named Ralph Lael claimed amazing encounters with the Space Brothers on Brown Mountain, North Carolina. Just like those characters above, Lael reported seeing – in close proximity – eerie balls of light. In Lael’s case, the BOLs were around twelve feet in circumference. Lael felt, as one of the BOLs approached him, that “it was alive and had intelligence.” Bob Short was a Contactee who I met on several occasions – a couple of times at the UFO Congress in Laughlin, Nevada in the late 1990s, and at the Retro UFO gig, which is now no longer around. I often saw people poke fun at Bob and his Contactee-driven claims, but they really shouldn’t have. Bob’s encounters, too, began with the sudden appearances of multiple BOLs. Bob wrote (in his book, Out of the Stars: A Message from Extraterrestrial Intelligence) that he often saw, specifically before an encounter of the Space Brother kind, “luminous ephemeral spheres of light.”
Bob also said that the BOLs were “so dazzling” that “the actual form behind the light is masked and cannot be scrutinized visually.” How about BOLs being the souls of the dead? More than a few people have claimed to have seen small, BOLs in the aftermath of the death of a relative or of a close friend. Are we looking at just one phenomenon that is somehow tied into all manner of strange things: ghosts, monsters, aliens, UFOs, Crop Circles and more? Are there multiple different types of BOLs and Orbs? Do they interact with us when the time, the location, and the nature of the phenomenon come together? Absolute definitive answers are short. Theories? There’s a bunch of them out there.
Some of the most spectacular and believable UFO accounts come from pilots of all types. These are those witnesses who are experienced with the skies above our heads and who tend to know what they are looking at, so when they report UFO phenomena, people tend to pay attention. There have been numerous pilot UFO encounters reported across the decades, and here we will look at a selection of accounts from the 1990s.
Our first case here takes us back to January 28, 1994, when Air-France flight AF-3532 had a rather bizarre encounter on its way from Nice, France, to London, England, along with the pilot and commander of the flight, Jean-Charles Duboc, copilot Valerie Chauffour, and 24 passengers on board. At the time the flight was in excellent weather conditions, with high visibility and clear skies, and the flight had gone smoothly until they reached an area somewhere above Coulommiers, France, where they saw something out the window that they at first took to be a weather balloon or another aircraft, but soon proved to be anything but. Duboc would later say of what they saw:
I first identified it like an aircraft facing us, at approximately 45 km (25 Nm), at an altitude of approximately 10500 meters (25 Nm) and at an angle close to 45°. I found this slope absolutely abnormal because aircraft are not inclined at this altitude beyond 30 degrees without risking to fall down. This object seemed to us then absolutely abnormal by its size which seemed immense, its dark red color and of the fuzzy edges. I had the impression to observe a gigantic lens in evolution. It did not resemble anything we had seen in our flying careers. This object, this phenomenon, remained motionless while we left it on our left side, still at an approximate distance of 45 km. We observed it during a good minute, conscious that we were seeing something utterly anomalous. We continued to observe it when it gradually merged with the environment. We saw it becoming translucent, transparent, diluted in space. That was absolutely amazing.
At the time they did not have radar operational because the radar was typically only used to locate storms, but they nevertheless contacted ground control at Rheims to report what they had seen and that was that. Duboc would not file any written report at the time for fear of tarnishing his reputation, but would later change his mind. He would say of this:
In the immediate, the continuations were non-existent, because I did not submit a written report to avoid being ridiculed. It was three years later, as I read an article from Paris Match, which described how a UFO has been detected above Paris, that I made the connection between this UFO and that what I had seen. I then submitted a report to the Gendarmerie Nationale (French police, having an SOP for collection of UFO reports). I barely speak about this encounter, and I had the surprise to note that about one out of ten pilot had observed a unidentified flying phenomenon
After discussing about the observation, we concluded that the object was approximately 300 meters in diameter. I took note of the radar recordings by the CODED (Operational Center of Air Defense). There is a very curious characteristic for the trajectory of the UFO, as it shows that it would have almost collided with us. The minimal distance on the recording is less than 1 Nm, that is to say 10 seconds of flight. This kind of observation is traditional in electronic war. The modern military aircraft are furtive, and at the same time able to synthesize a virtual image of themselves by delaying the radar echo. If a missile had been drawn on this UFO, which was above Paris, it would be our A320 which would probably have been hit by the missile. I think that it is not desirable to shoot fire at this kind of phenomenon.
The following year we have the strange case of a commercial Boeing 737 that was flying towards Manchester Airport, in England on January 6, when a series of very odd and at times harrowing events played out. On the plane’s final approach, the pilot and co-pilot saw a bright light careening towards them at great speed, and before they even could react the object shot by the plane in very close proximity, such that they instinctively ducked and braced for impact. As it passed, they could see that it was “wedge-shaped with what could have been a black stripe down the side” and that it had “a number of small white lights, rather like a Christmas tree.” They also were perplexed that there was no sound at all from the craft, and even more oddly no turbulence caused by its passing. Also strange was that ground control at the airport could find no radar signature of the alleged object. A transcript of the pilot’s conversation with ground control reads:
B737 (1848) – ‘c/s we just had something go down the RHS just above us very fast.’
Manchester – ‘Well, there’s nothing seen on radar. Was it er an ac?
B737 – ‘Well, it had lights, it went down the starboard side very quick.’
Manchester – ‘And above you?’
B737 – ‘er, just slightly above us, yeah.
Manchester – ‘Keep an eye out for something, er, I can’t see anything at all at the moment so, er, must have, er, been very fast or gone down very quickly after it passed you I think.’
B737 – ‘OK. Well, there you go!’
Image by Steve Baxter
At the time there was no known air traffic in the vicinity, and the lack of radar contact caused speculation that it had been a hang glider, paraglider or microlight, but a later investigation by the Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) would deem these possibilities to be very unlikely. The idea that there had been some sort of military test going on was also dismissed because it was deemed highly unlikely such a thing would have been conducted so close to an international airport, and furthermore the RAF denied having anything to so with it. There was also a lack of any radar contact, which should have happened with a military craft. Oddly, there were no reported sightings from any one on the ground, making the investigation more difficult to get to the bottom of. In the end, the CAA would conclude:
Usually, activity of this kind is accompanied by a rash of ground sightings in the same geographic area; in this case, as far as is known, there were no other reports and therefore the incident has to be viewed in isolation, with no other witnesses. The resources normally available when investigating airmisses are pilots’ reports, corroborated by radar and RT recordings. Often these will provide all the clues necessary, but in this case there is no ‘reported pilot’, and radar recordings do not show any unknown contacts. The lack of a radar contact is not necessarily unusual if weather suppressors are in use on radar, particularly if the object generates a poor radar response.
In these conditions the radar an interpret a non-transponding (primary) contact as weather, and therefore disregards it. Enquiries into military activity did not reveal any ac in the area at the time, and it was considered inconceivable that such activity would take place so close to a busy airport without some sort of prior notification. members put forward other suggestions, such as large model aircraft or commercially operated remotely controlled craft, such as those which are used for survey or photographic work. Considering the prevailing conditions – darkness, high ground, strong NW wind and the proximity of a major international airport – the Group felt that this kind of activity, together with the hang glider/microlight theory, could not be regarded as a realistic possibility.
That same year there was a report from an America West B-757 passenger airliner flying over the panhandle of Texas, in the United States near Bovina, Texas, when First Officer John J. Waller and a flight attendant noticed a “row of white lights” that were flashing in a left to right pattern. These lights were somewhere below their position, but when ground control was notified, there could be found no radar target in the area, although one of the controllers contacted the North American Air Defense Command (NORAD), and was told that they were tracking an unidentified object. In the meantime, the pilot and co-pilot could now see that the object was cigar-shaped and massive, an estimated 300 to 400 feet long. The whole of it then moved out of sight. When NORAD was contacted again about what they had picked up, they claimed that the thing had made several very fast accelerations and decelerations at speeds of between 1,000 and 1,400 mph. UFO researcher Walter N. Webb would take great interest in the case and not only procure transcripts of the pilot’s conversation with ground control, but also file several Freedom of Information Act requests and search military records, but nothing could be found that could account for what had been seen. It remains a mystery. You can read the transcripts on the case here.
Image by Steve Baxter
Also in 1995 is a report from Long Island, New York, where on November 18 of that year airliner Lufthansa 405, an Airbus A-340, was on its way overseas to Germany. At some point the pilot called Boston Air Traffic Control to report a “long, cylindrical object with a white flashing light on its front, and a long, green, comet-like tail,” which was also seen by British Airways Flight 226 on a flight from London. The large mysterious object apparently sped by both airliners, but ground control could find no scheduled air traffic in the region to account for it. Part of the transcript between the Lufthansa flight (LUFT) ground control (FAA) and the British Airways flight (BRIT) reads as follows:
LUFT: Uh, Boston, Lufthansa 405/Heavy.
FAA: Lufthansa 405, go ahead.
LUFT: Uh, we just passed traffic on the left wing, uh, about 2,000 to 3,000 feet above us. What traffic was it?
FAA Is this Lufthansa 405?
LUFT: Affirmative, Lufthansa 405. We had opposite traffic on the left wing. Can you confirm this?
FAA: Lufthansa 405, negative. I show no traffic in your area within, uh, 20 or 30 miles.
LUFT: It should be now on our tail, about 10 miles… We passed it just one minute ago, and it was looking strange.
BRIT: Speed Bird 226 confirms that. It was just above us on our left-hand side about 3 minutes ago.
FAA What altitude does it appear to be at, Lufthansa 405?
LUFT: It was only 2 or 3 thousand feet above us. We are now passing (Flight) Level 260. That’s confirmed, or not? Lufthansa.
FAA: Lufthansa 405, roger.
BRIT: Speed Bird 226, we confirm that. We had something go past us about two, well…about one to two thousand feet above on the left hand side. Uh, looked like a green trail on it, and a very bright light on the front of it. We assumed it was an opposite traffic.
FAA: Speed Bird 226, roger that.
LUFT: ((Garbled))..Lufthansa 405/Heavy. we are right now about 26 miles east of “Hotel Tango Oscar ((Hampton??)).” And the Speed Bird is now ahead, or behind us ((or where)?
FAA: Lufthansa 405, the Speed Bird is in your 12:00 o’clock, and about 30 miles, 40 miles.
LUFT: That was not our traffic. Lufthansa 405 Heavy.
FAA: Lufthansa 405, roger. And the heading of the traffic, was it the same direction, or opposite direction?
LUFT: Exactly opposite. Lufthansa 405/Heavy.
FAA: Roger. Did it pass off your right side?
LUFT: Uh, left side.
FAA: Roger.
BRIT: Yea, Speed Bird 226 confirms that. We saw the same thing. It certainly looked like an aircraft initially, but it may not have been one.
LUFT: ((We can’t tell then??)) It was looking very strange, with a long, uh, light, in the tail.
BRIT: Yea, a big bright white light on the front, and a greenish tail coming out the back.
FAA: Speed Bird 226, did it go over…did it go overhead. The traffic go overhead you, or was it below you?
BRIT: It was overhead and off to the left, much the same as ((garbled)). It actually looked about…opposite traffic, 2000 feet above. That’s what it initially looked like. But then it did have a very strong trail to it…a vapor trail, which looked more like smoke. And the light on the front was very, very bright, and as it went past us, it seemed to ((just?)) disappear and ((went)) 5 miles behind us.
LUFT: Can you confirm this, Lufthansa 405/Heavy.
FAA: OK, Lufthansa 405, Speed Bird 226. Thanks, we’ll look into it.
LUFT: It was pretty close, and like Speed Bird said, it looked like ((four??)) or three thousand feet above on the left wing, just one mile and, uh, on opposite track… It doesn’t have, …it didn’t have any uh, lights…((normal)) lights, beacon lights, or red or green lights. Only a white light in the front, and with a long green light. It looked like a U-F-O.
FAA: Lufthansa 405, roger that. Like I said, we had nothing flying in the area. You are just north of a military operating area, but the traffic shouldn’t have varied out that far out,…out of the area.
LUFT: Must have been a military. Lufthansa 405/Heavy.
FAA: Roger. Giant Killer, ((garbled)) 59.
GK: Giant Killer.
FAA: Hey, you got anything flying out in the area?
GK: Negative, ((105 is??)) turned over. 0300.
FAA: Well, I just received a couple of UFO reports.
GK: Oh, is that right?
FAA? Yea, I had a couple of guys that reported lights, just moved all over their heads. I have no traffic whatsoever in the area. They said it passed within a mile of them, like at 2-3 thousand feet above them, opposite direction. ((Garbled)) green trail out the back.
What was going on here? Who knows? Our next case comes from the following year, when on February 28, 1996, the crew of Air Shuttle flight 5959 reported something bizarre while flying near Cleveland, Ohio, in the United States. It was reported that the crew witnessed a bright light below them, which soon began flashing with multi-colored lights a few thousand feet below their plane. The strange lights were also seen by another aircraft, a Mesaba Airlines flight 3179, but Cleveland Air Traffic Control were unable to pick the object up on radar. Flight 5959 decided to descend to get a closer look at what they were seeing, and the pilot reported that it was spinning and pulsating, with “a rotating light around it like a Frisbee type thing that’s going around it,” and in the meantime Mesaba 3179 flashed its lights at the UFO in an effort to communicate to no effect. Apparently, some passengers took photographs of the UFO, but happened to these remains as mysterious as the identity of the object.
The following year there would be another case involving what are called “near-misses,” when a UFO passes within dangerously close distance of an aircraft. The report comes from August 9, 1997, when a Swissair Boeing 747 was on a short flight from Philadelphia International Airport to Boston Logan International Airport. At approximately 5:07 p.m., both the pilot, Capt. Phil Bobet, and his co-pilot saw an unidentified bright light go speeding past them the opposite direction at close proximity, “like a rocket” and too fast to be another plane. The object apparently came out of nowhere and disappeared just as fast. There has never been any explanation.
On February 3, 1999, there is the spectacular case of several pilots off the Danish coast above the North Sea reporting having been buzzed by a massive cylindrical UFO “as big as a battleship.” One of the pilot reports in particular stands out, that of the pilot of a Debonair BAe146 aircraft who claimed that the object had approached extremely close and lit up the plane with an “incandescent light.” A spokesperson with the CAA would say of the incident:
The captain reported seeing an unnatural bright light below his aircraft while flying at 28,000 ft. The area below him was illuminated for about 10 seconds by incandescent light and it was certainly not a light from another plane. Three other aircraft saw it moving at a high speed or static. However, air traffic control were informed and they confirmed that there were no other planes in the vicinity. Then, five minutes later, there was a brief radar return from a spot 75 miles away. We believe there was no danger involved.
The case would later sort of be brushed off and the military would not comment, despite the fact that it was reported that a military radar station in Yorkshire had tracked it after it had entered UK air space. This case, like all the others mentioned here, has gone on to be unexplained, and we are left to wonder what we are dealing with. What is zipping about up in out airspace menacing these aircraft? Is there some rational explanation, or is there something more mysterious at work? It remains to be seen.
Strange UFO Sighted Over Ipswich, England ( August 19, 2021 )
Strange moving UFO was sighted over Ipswich, England on August 19, 2021
STATEMENT : Something strange in the sky over Ipswich right now
They are here !
credit : Garry Simmonds
UFO Hovers Over Milton Keynes, England ( August 11, 2021 )
UFO was sighted hovering over a paddock near Milton Keynes, England on August 11, 2021
STATEMENT : This was over Milton Keynes - there were two of them - they were their for about 10 mins (that I saw) : Here I present the original and in the wake with approach.
They are everywhere
More evident every day
credit : Steve Warren
Fast UFO Moves Across Sorocaba, Brazil ( August 8, 2021 )
Fast moving UFO was sighted and filmed around 18:16 : Sorocaba state of São Paulo, Brazil on August 8, 2021 : Here I present the original and in the wake with approach. They are everywhere
More evident every day
credit : Ademilson Cristiano
UFOs Sighted Over Los Angeles, California ( August 15, 2021 )
Impressive display of three UFOs that were sighted in the city Los Angeles, California on the night of August 15, 2021
More evident every day
credit : Y.K.L.
UFOs Sighted Over Cape Town, South Africa ( August 9, 2021 )
Impressive UFO Sighting in Cape Town, South Africa on August 9, 2021
STATEMENT : UFO sighting has the city in Panic
They are Here !
credit : Rudie Basson
RELATED VIDEO
UFO Sighted From ISS ( August 17, 2021 )
Amazing UFO Footage from the NASA live stream from ISS using the ISS Live Video App : UFO Sighted on August 17, 2021 : Here I present the original and in the wake with approach.
They are everywhere
More evident every day
note : no audio
Massive UFO Sighted Over Los Angeles, California ( August 17, 2021 )
Impressive sighting of a large UFO or Unidentified Flying Object that was sighted over the city of Los Angeles, California on August 17, 2021 : Clear footage : UFO ? : Here I present the original video that was released on August 17, 2021 . They are everywhere
A compilation of the internet’s most divisive UFO videos
A compilation of the internet’s most divisive UFO videos
The Pentagon has released a report all but confirming the existence of UFOs. And there has been no shortage of sightings in the past few years. These are some of the UFO videos that have divided the internet. This UFO sightings compilation is a must-watch, These people claim their videos are real. Others think they’re easily explained away. Do you agree? Let us know.
MYSTERIEUZE RUIMTESTEEN LICHT OP IN DE NABIJHEID VAN DE ZON - EN ONDERZOEKERS DENKEN NU TE WETEN WAAROM
MYSTERIEUZE RUIMTESTEEN LICHT OP IN DE NABIJHEID VAN DE ZON - EN ONDERZOEKERS DENKEN NU TE WETEN WAAROM
Caroline Kraaijvanger
De ruimtesteen Phaethon is geen komeet, maar gedraagt zich wel zo. Die identiteitscrisis lijkt nu echter eindelijk verklaarbaar.
Kometen bestaan uit puin en ijs. En wanneer ze de zon naderen en opwarmen, verdampt het ijs dat net onder het oppervlak schuilgaat. Waterdamp haast zich weg van de komeet en voert bovenliggend stof en gesteente met zich mee. Zo ontstaat de zo kenmerkende komeetstaart. Ook neemt de komeet in helderheid toe, doordat al dat vrijgekomen gas en stof er omheen zonlicht reflecteert
Planetoïden Maar naast kometen zijn er ook planetoïden. En ook die wagen zich soms nabij de zon, maar geven dan geen spectaculaire show weg. Ze bestaan immers voornamelijk uit steen en herbergen geen of hooguit een klein beetje ijs. En dus valt er weinig te verdampen, ontstaat er geen staartje en licht de steen ook niet op.
Phaethon Het is een logisch verhaal. Maar dan is daar Phaethon. Een 5,8 kilometer grote planetoïde die wél helderder wordt als deze bij onze moederster in de buurt komt. “Phaethon is een eigenaardig object dat actief wordt als het de zon nadert,” stelt onderzoeker Joseph Masiero.
Natrium Hoe is dat mogelijk? Phaethon doet er slechts 524 dagen over om een rondje om de zon te cirkelen en heeft dat dus al vaak gedaan. Daarbij waagt de ruimtesteen zich zelfs binnen de baan van Mercurius en warmt het oppervlak op tot zo’n 750 graden Celsius. Al het water-, koolstofdioxide- of koolstofmonoxide-ijs dat ooit misschien op het oppervlak te vinden was, moet dan ook al lang verdampt zijn. En toch geeft deze ruimtesteen die geen of amper ijs herbergt, in de nabijheid van de zon iets af, waardoor de helderheid toeneemt. En Masiero en collega’s denken nu te weten wat het is: natrium.
Onder het oppervlak Natrium komt vrij overvloedig in planetoïden voor. En kan bij de temperaturen waar Phaethon in nabijheid van de zon aan wordt blootgesteld, gemakkelijk verdampen. Waarschijnlijk is al het aan het oppervlak gelegen natrium op deze manier lang geleden al verloren gegaan. Maar diep in de planetoïde zit nog natrium dat in nabijheid van de zon opwarmt, verdampt en via scheuren in Phaethons korst een weg naar buiten weet te vinden.
Puin En wanneer dat natrium zich van Phaethon vandaan haast, voert het waarschijnlijk stof en puin met zich mee. “Planetoïden zoals Phaethon hebben een zwakke zwaartekracht, dus er is niet veel kracht voor nodig om puin van het oppervlak of een losgebroken steentje mee te voeren,” aldus onderzoeker Björn Daviddson. “Onze modellen suggereren dat heel kleine hoeveelheden natrium hiervoor al genoeg zijn.”
Geminiden En zo kan de door de aanwezigheid van natrium ingegeven activiteit van Phaethon mogelijk ook één van de bekendste meteorenzwermen helpen verklaren: de Geminiden. Het is al langer bekend dat deze meteorenzwerm die elk jaar in december acte de présence geeft, te herleiden is naar Phaethon. De ruimtesteen laat in zijn baan puin en stof achter en wanneer de aarde daar doorheen beweegt, dringen die puindeeltjes de atmosfeer binnen, waar ze grote weerstand ondervinden, waardoor de lucht eromheen opwarmt en licht gaat geven. Vanaf het aardoppervlak zien we dat als een bliksemsnel streepje licht aan de nachthemel dat in de volksmond ook wel een vallende ster wordt genoemd. Het nieuwe onderzoek suggereert nu dat deze puindeeltjes door verdamping van het dieper gelegen natrium loskomen van Phaethon.
Experimenten Het vermoeden dat natrium verantwoordelijk is voor de activiteit op Phaethon wordt onderschreven door experimenten. De onderzoekers namen kleine stukjes van een meteoriet die in 1969 in Mexico neerkwam en afkomstig lijkt te zijn van een planetoïde die op Phaethon lijkt. Vervolgens stelden ze die stukjes meteoriet bloot aan de temperaturen waar Phaethon in nabijheid van de zon mee te maken krijgt. En jawel; natrium ging verloren, terwijl andere elementen achterbleven. “Het suggereert dat hetzelfde op Phaethon gebeurt,” aldus onderzoeker Yang Liu.
Het onderzoek zet de classificatie van kleine objecten in ons zonnestelsel verder onder druk. Nu worden die objecten afhankelijk van de hoeveelheid ijs die ze herbergen als planetoïde of komeet bestempeld. Maar misschien moeten we niet alleen kijken naar ijs, maar ook naar andere elementen die bij hoge temperaturen verdampen. “Onze laatste ontdekking is dat – als de omstandigheden gunstig zijn – natrium de aard van sommige actieve planetoïden kan verklaren,” aldus Masiero. “En daarmee is het spectrum tussen planetoïden en kometen nog complexer dan we dachten.”
Life is associated with different pigmentation around different stars.
WHAT WOULD EARTH look like if it were orbiting a different star?
Our very existence is shaped by the amount of light and radiation we receive from the Sun. If Earth were to orbit around a different star, our concept of “life” would be dramatically altered.
This idea is exemplified by a recent study that explores the relationship between photosynthesis, color, and the hunt for extraterrestrial life.
During photosynthesis, cells within vegetation take in carbon dioxide and energy from the Sun and make sugar molecules and oxygen. Photosynthesis, in turn, leaves a distinct signature on the wavelengths reflected by the Earth, known as the “red edge.”
A paper published in the journal Frontiers in Astronomy and Space Sciences suggests that on other planets, the red edge would not be red — if those planets don’t contain life. As scientists hunt for planets that could host alien life, observing the color of the planets’ wavelengths may be a clear indication there’s life existing beyond Earth.
WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW FIRST
Roughly 3 billion years ago, life on Earth was vastly different than today.
Back then, the only living things were microbes — like bacteria. A particular kind of bacteria, cyanobacteria, developed a unique adaptation: it could produce energy from sunlight, becoming the first photosynthetic organism.
Before cyanobacteria, Earth’s atmosphere was unsuitable for life. Through photosynthesis, cyanobacteria produced oxygen — transforming Earth’s atmosphere and paving the way for increasingly complex beings, like plants, fungi, and eventually, animals.
It's through photosynthesis that Earth’s surface is covered in green vegetation. This green is key to a fascinating process: in the visible light spectrum — a portion of the electromagnetic spectrum that the human eye can see — it ever so slightly reflects green photons.
But beyond, in visible near-infrared wavelengths, vegetation reflects red — something known as the “red edge.” It’s a result of red photons being absorbed by the green surface.
It’s considered a spectral biosignature and indicates the presence of a planet’s vegetation. Scientists think it could serve as a model for detecting biosignatures on Earth-like exoplanets.
“If photosynthetic organisms around other stars exhibit similar edge-like spectral reflectance features, we might expect red edge analogs to occur on the long-wavelength side of the optimal pigment absorption,” the study team writes.
WHAT’S NEW — The study team wanted to see how this effect would look like on different planets orbiting around different types of stars.
In order to do that, they created a model of the Earth if it were orbiting around different stars to predict that alien worlds with living organisms would look like.
The Sun is a yellow dwarf star, converting about 4 million tons of matter into energy every second.
There are seven main types of stars, in order of decreasing temperature from O, B, A, F, G, K, and M. The study focused on F through late M.
The model Earths orbiting around F-type stars tend to reflect more towards a blue color while those orbiting around G, K, and early M type stars reflect red.
“Future exoplanet observations may search for a vegetative red edge equivalent, a spectral signature due to sharp lope in the reflectance of photosynthetic organisms,” the team observes.
WHY THIS MATTERS
Since the detection of the first exoplanet in 1992, scientists have found more than 4,000 of these alien worlds. Using Earth-bound and space telescopes, astronomers observe the exoplanets in search of signs of life.
Scientists searching for life beyond Earth look for habitable environments on other planets or biosignatures — certain chemicals that may have been produced by some form of past or present life, be it microbes or alien fish.
But the new study adds a new way to detect potential life on alien planets in the form of wavelengths reflected by the process of photosynthesis.
Future alien hunters can now search for the equivalent to Earth’s “red edge” on other Earth-like planets with similar lifeforms to us.
Abstract:
In the search for life on other planets, the presence of photosynthetic surface vegetation may be detectable from the colors of light it reflects. On the modern Earth, this spectral reflectance is characterized by a steep increase in reflectance between the red and near‐infrared wavelengths, a signature known as the “red edge”. This edge-like signature occurs at wavelengths of peak photon absorbance, which are the result of adaptations of the phototroph to their spectral environment. On planets orbiting different stellar types, red edge analogs may occur at other colors than red. Thus, knowing the wavelengths at which photosynthetic organisms preferentially absorb and reflect photons is necessary to detect red edge analogs on other planets. Using a numerical model that predicts the absorbance spectrum of extant photosynthetic pigments on Earth from Marosvölgyi and van Gorkom (2010), we calculate the absorbance spectrum for pigments on an Earth-like planet around F through late M type stars that are adapted for maximal energy production. In this model, cellular energy production is maximized when pigments are tuned to absorb at the wavelength that maximizes energy input from incident photons while minimizing energy losses due to thermal emission and building cellular photosynthetic apparatus. We find that peak photon absorption for photosynthetic organisms around F type stars tends to be in the blue while for G, K, and early M type stars, red or just beyond is preferred. Around the coolest M type stars, these organisms may preferentially absorb in the near-infrared, possibly past one micron. These predictions are consistent with previous, qualitative estimates of pigment absorptance. Our predicted absorbance spectra for photosynthetic surface organisms depend on both the stellar type and planetary atmospheric composition, especially atmospheric water vapor concentrations, which alter the availability of surface photons and thus the predicted pigment absorption. By constraining the absorbance spectra of alien, photosynthetic organisms, future observations may be better equipped to detect the weak spectral signal of red edge analogs.
MOREHEAD, Ky. (WTVQ/MSU) – Morehead State is joining the largest and most sensitive scientific telecommunications system in the world as its 21-meter tracking antenna becomes a NASA Deep Space Network (DSN) affiliate.
Officials from NASA visited MSU’s Space Science Center Thursday, Aug. 12, to conduct an operational readiness review for the antenna.
The MSU site will be the first non-NASA Deep Space Network affiliated node.
The DNS includes antennas in Barstow, California; Madrid, Spain; and Canberra, Australia.
Operated by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), the DSN supports NASA’s interplanetary missions.
The DSN also provides radar and radio astronomy observations that improve the scientific understanding of the solar system and universe.
The DSN sites are spaced roughly 120 degrees longitude apart, permitting constant communication with spacecraft as Earth rotates. Before a distant spacecraft sinks below the horizon at one DSN site, another site can pick up the signal and carry on communicating.
The review will verify that personnel, systems and equipment are trained and ready to support deep space exploration missions. Jeff Kruth, space systems engineer and the technical lead and Dr. Ben Malphrus, principal investigator, led the review for Morehead State University.
“This tells us that on the day of the launch, everybody is going to be just waiting for this rocket to get off the ground, and everyone’s going to be ready to support the missions,” said Andres Martinez, program executive of Advanced Exploration Systems with NASA. “This is a chance for the students and their professors to showcase all of their work for us and to get feedback from us.”
Brad Arnold, project manager of the DNS for JPL, said the partnership between NASA and MSU is mutually beneficial.
“There’s a fantastic synergy here,” Arnold said. “These are the next generation of engineers and scientists that will be performing space exploration, so that synergy is vital. If we can’t motivate and inspire the young people out there, the program’s dead.”
MSU and NASA have a long-standing partnership. The 21-meter antenna at MSU has been operational since 2006, allowing students to gain valuable skills and experience in researching astrophysics, satellite telecommunications, RF and electrical engineering, and software development.
NASA and MSU have also partnered on numerous missions involving CubeSats, small satellites designed, built and tested by MSU students and space systems engineering faculty.
One such CubeSat, Lunar IceCube, will be a secondary payload on NASA’s Artemis I mission to the moon later this year. Martinez said today’s MSU students are tomorrow’s aerospace engineers.
“The students are going through an experience that not many students get to do,” Martinez said. “One of the missions of NASA is to prepare the next generation. Over the last five to seven years, some of (MSU’S) students have come into the NASA workforce; they’ve gone into the industry, working on projects for us. ”
Becoming an affiliated node on the NASA DSN represents a major milestone for the Space Science Center faculty, staff and students. The initiative has been supported by NASA’s Advanced Exploration Systems (AES) and NASA’s Human Exploration and Operations Mission Directorate.
They launch missiles at “4 UFOs” that flew over Afghanistan
They launch missiles at “4 UFOs” that flew over Afghanistan
Something intriguing was published recently. A video allegedly taken by an infrared technology camera (FLIR) “captured 4 UFOs” above the sky over Afghanistan.
At one point, two of these unidentified flying objects are hit by a missile, but it does not appear to affect the UFOs. The video would have been “leaked” to the Internet from the US military archives.
The nightly military video (below) shows what appears to be an airstrike on several UFOs hovering over Afghanistan’s Kandahar province.
The objects, captured at FLIR, were allegedly spotted by the 10th Mountain Light Infantry Division during its 2011 deployment to that region.
In the video, the UFOs are seen in a static position “dripping some unknown substance onto the ground” before being hit by a sidewinder missile, fired from an A-10 Warthog, and causing no apparent damage to the UFOs.
The Pentagon has not yet confirmed or ruled on this particular video. Without more information, it is difficult to tell if the video is real, or if it is not.
If we hypothesize that the images are real, a big question comes to us, what were these strange UFOs doing on the battlefield, floating in the sky and dripping something unknown on the ground?
It is also interesting to note that a missile appears to hit two of the UFOs in a single pass, where four objects were in formation.
They seem to explode the moment the missile collides with them, but once the explosion wears off they are still up there … intact.
The odds of hitting a small floating object with an air-to-air missile are high… the odds of hitting 2 with a single shot? 0% ..
One of the closest hypotheses may be magnesium flares used in a training exercise with live fire.
That would explain the magnesium dripping onto the ground. They look like flares, held in place with a small parachute and slowly descending until they hit the ground.
But according to some experts there may be two possibilities:
1) some kind of energy shield has deflected the direct hit 2) an extra-dimensional series of probes. A reflection of that dimension in our domain.
Cases have been documented during conflicts in Iraq, Soviet / American Afghanistan, Vietnam, Korea, WWII, and other conflicts such as Rhodesia / S. Africa, Congo and during the Serbian affair.
It is definitely worth investigating and as viewers it is not simulated CoD FLiR game footage. Pixel and resolution are not clear enough and no game has made the Image Transition FLiR effect that good.
It should be remembered once again that UFO (Unidentified Flying Object) does not necessarily mean “extraterrestrial spacecraft”, it can also be something of human or natural origin that does not have a clear explanation of its nature.
What are we really up to? Alien technology or terrestrial experiments?
Watch the following video and leave us your comment below.
For a lot of people, Crop Circles are the work of hoaxers or aliens. The truth is that Crop Circles don’t fall into either category. That doesn’t mean they aren’t strange – even paranormal, though – as you’ll now find out why. The fact is, there is some genuinely weird activity in Crop Circles, but there’s no definitive data to suggest it’s the work of extraterrestrials. Even in the slightest. It was back in the 1980s when I first heard about Crop Circles. And it was in the 1990s – in my twenties – when I first took a trip down to Wiltshire, England, where most of the Crop Circles were seen. That’s still the case to this day, for the most part. Now, let’s look at some of the weirdness that surrounds the Crop Circle puzzle, and why there aren’t any E.T.’s in sight. As one example of the strangeness, there’s the matter of an ancient castle and one of those circular creations, as you’ll see. I spent most of 2006 back in England, and in the latter part of July of that year, I received a telephone call late one night from deep in the heart of the county of Wiltshire. It was my good friend Matt Williams – one of just a handful of people in the world who, thus far, that have been arrested, charged and duly convicted for making under cover of darkness a “Pictogram”-style Crop Circle . In reality, the charge, as it usually is, was of causing damage to private property: a field. Blah-blah-blah. Whatever.
(Nick Redfern)
Did I know, Matt asked me in somewhat excited tones, that a fairly complex Crop Circle design had appeared only days earlier next to Chartley Castle? No, I did not, I told him. But, I soon hit the road to have a look at it, as it wasn’t far from my dad’s place. And with that information now digested, I will acquaint you with the next player in the odd saga. Jane Adams is a devotee of Wicca who I first met in a Wiltshire Crop Circle back in August 1997. She has an intriguing theory to account for the presence of those out of place feathers. She is of the opinion that the presence of the feathers at Chartley Castle is evidence that the people she believes are guilty of making the formations in the crops use the peacock’s “Evil Eye” in what she describes as “black ceremonies.” Interestingly, peacock feathers were all over the place. Now, onto Crop Circles and large black cats. In the summer of 2007, I spoke with Marcus Matthews, a researcher of mysterious, large cats in Britain, who told me that he was then currently investigating a case involving a person who had seen a “huge black cat” sitting inside the confines of a Wiltshire Crop Circle. Precisely how we explain these rogue cases that suggest a link between Crop Circles and exotic beasts and unknown animals, I have no firm idea. However, I am inclined to think we have not heard the last of such tales.
(Nick Redfern)
How about other strange things in Crop Circles? There’s plenty of them. Matthew Williams told me: “There was one time, I’d rather not say when or where exactly, as I could get into trouble for admitting I trespassed on the farmer’s land and made the formation. Plus, I had a friend named Paul helping me with this one. We were making this circle when we noticed these three bright lights – small balls of light coming towards the field. We watched them; we were fascinated.” That’s right: the strange phenomena that Matt encountered was in the very crop formation that he had created. Matt has an explanation for that: “I was given countless tales of UFO activity and even strange synchronicities which took place in the man-made Crop Circles, and which made the Crop Circle makers wonder if they were being influenced by a higher, guiding hand – perhaps at the design stage, or out in the field. I believe that the human Crop Circle makers may be guided by a connection to a higher intelligence, a gestalt or group mind; and the symbols that are put down are deep-routed subconscious expressions. This would explain why some telepaths or psychics claim to have seen Crop Circle designs before they appear – because we are all dialed into the same group-mind ‘internet.'”
An Avebury, Wiltshire Stone
(Nick Redfern)
Even more amazing, Matt told me: “The synchronistic events which happen each year in the unfolding designs that the Crop Circle makers come out with are often remarked as being too much of a coincidence. Crop Circle designs have been repeated in different parts of the country by teams who didn’t share designs beforehand. There have even been teams who have gone out on the same night to the same field, made designs, not knowing the other team was present, and their designs have had similarities.” Matt continued: “Why do Crop Circles have power? I know that crop is a living medium. Unlike any other type of canvas that an artist may use, crop has a life-force energy which, when used on such a large scale, makes crops blend natural Earth-energy magic with human-energy magic. What Crop Circle-makers may have rediscovered is the ancient art of natural magic – working with large emblems as part of the energy system of the Earth. Take sacred sites such as stone-circles: these were erected as temples for people to visit, perhaps as part of a sacred quest seeking answers. Today, Crop Circles fill a similar role, attracting people who ask questions and putting visitors closer to paranormal sources.”
My view on all of this? Yes, there is a real Crop Circle enigma. But, as all of the above demonstrates, that same enigma has zero to do with visiting aliens. It’s wilder.
Twee Chinese astronauten hebben vrijdag een nieuwe ruimtewandeling gemaakt in het kader van de assemblage van het ruimtestation dat China aan het bouwen is.
Nie Haisheng en Liu Boming zweefden naar buiten om de montage af te ronden van een robotarm op de Tianhe, de basismodule van dat station, dat de naam Tiangong draagt. Het duo moest ook een panoramische camera installeren. Het uitje heeft in totaal ongeveer zes uur geduurd, met zowat een uur voorsprong op het schema. Het Chinese Agentschap voor Bemande Missies (CMSA) noemde de ruimtewandeling een succes, aldus het staatspersbureau Xinhua (Nieuw China).
Het was de tweede ruimtewandeling in twee maanden tijd voor de Chinese astronauten en was rechtstreeks te volgen op de staatstelevisie. De eerste vond op 4 juli plaats. De twee ruimtewandelaars zijn samen met nog een astronaut, Tang Hongbo, op 17 juni naar de Tianhe gevlogen. Deze Shenzhou-12 missie is de langste die China ooit heeft uitgevoerd, want het trio moet in totaal drie maanden in de ruimte blijven.
Nog nooit zijn Chinezen zo lang aan een stuk in de ruimte geweest. “Deze missie duurt langer en we moeten niet alleen de kern, ons huis in de ruimte, installeren maar we moeten ook een paar belangrijke technische tests doen. Deze missie is moeilijker en de uitdagingen zijn groter”, zei Nie bij de laatste persconferentie voor vertrek. Liu sprak van een “extreem complexe en zware missie”, ook vanwege de ruimtewandelingen.
Het ambitieuze China werkt in de ruimtevaart niet of nauwelijks samen met andere landen. Als het ruimtestation rond 2023 klaar is, kan daar wel wat verandering in komen. “In de nabije toekomst zullen we zowel Chinese als buitenlandse astronauten samen in het Chinese ruimtestation zien”, liet een bestuurder van het Chinese ruimtevaartprogramma eerder weten.
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LATEST UFO SIGHTINGS AND VIDEOS - 20 - 8 - 2021
LATEST UFO SIGHTINGS AND VIDEOS - 20 - 8 - 2021
Mysterious UFO ORBs Sighted Over Elham, Kent, England ( June 1, 2021 )
STATEMENT : I took photos then realised film of it. there was 12 over 10 mins ish on june the 1st 2021 in Elham Kent uk.. Any ideas; Govenors of the Earth! It was mind blowing and my dog Basil just barked and barked untill it ended.. animals are very in tune.. unlike some humans... they will slowly see, give them time... they just need proof, i hope this helps cheers Jae
They are here !
Video Submitted : 19, August 2021
credit : Jae Wheaton
UFO Sighted Over Atlixco, Puebla, Mexico ( August 14, 2021 )
UFO Sighted Over Atlixco, Puebla, Mexico On August 14, 2021. LOCATION : Atlixco Marconi Point. This point, located in the state of Puebla, is regarded as one of the seven locations worldwide with the most UFO sightings.
Video Submitted
RELATED VIDEO
Slow Moving UFO Sighted Over Maiden Rock, Wisconsin ( July 23, 2021 )
Impressive video of a slow moving UFO that was sighted over Maiden Rock village in Pierce County, Wisconsin on July 23, 2021
A PURPORTED PHOTO OF A UFO, RELEASED IN 1957 BY THE AERIAL PHENOMENA RESEARCH ORGANIZATION, A NOW-DEFUNCT UFO RESEARCH GROUP ACTIVE FROM 1952 TO THE LATE 1980S.
PHOTO VIA GETTY IMAGES.
At a time of ongoing, slow-moving apocalypse and increasingly violent political division, it’s reassuring to know that Americans may, one day soon, finally band together to admit that aliens are real. Anew poll from the public opinion polling company Gallup shows that the number of Americans who think UFOs could be literal alien craft from outer space has substantially increased, especially among people with college educations.
“These sightings were, I think, very intriguing” to the public, Lydia Saad told Motherboard. She’s the director of U.S. social research, and was referring to the ongoing UFO renaissance, which began in earnest in 2017 when the New York Times released a blockbuster report on the Pentagon’s Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, which had been secretly investigating reports of unidentified aerial phenomena, or UAPs, for years. In 2020, the Navy finally formally released three UFO videos first made public by the Times and former Blink-182 frontman Tom DeLonge’s To the Stars Academy. (Also in 2020, Christopher Mellon, the former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Intelligence, who’d gone on to work for To The Stars, claimed he’d been the source who gave those videos to the Times. Mellon said he received them from a Defense Department Deep Throat who handed them over in a Pentagon parking garage.) In 2019, the Navy began formulating new guidelines for its pilots to report UFO sightings, signaling a move to destigmatize them. And in June of this year, another long-awaited Pentagon report concluded that a small number of craft that have been sighted "appeared to display unusual flight characteristics or signature management.” The Pentagon concluded that those craft will require further scientific research to understand or explain them.
All of this is to say that UFOs have been in the news, and people reading that news might reasonably conclude there’s more here than necessarily has an earthly explanation, Saad said. “There’s certainly a credible basis in those reports and the way they initially came out. If you’re someone who would like to believe in UFOs, you say, ‘Here’s some evidence.’ It’s not just unreliable reports.”
Gallup has been on top of the silent, hovering, Tic-Tac shaped UFO trend for several years: In 2019, due to a substantial increase in public interest, they decided it was time to ask Americans about them for the first time in decades. The new 2021 poll results, which were shared exclusively with Motherboard last week, are based on one question. As Gallup phrased it, it read: “Which comes closer to your view: some UFOs have been alien spacecraft visiting earth from other planets or galaxies, or all UFO sightings can be explained by human activity on earth or other natural phenomena?”
The results show that most Americans are in fact still skeptical that UFOs have an unearthly origin. But that’s changing fast. “When asked which of two theories better explains UFO sightings,” Gallup wrote in a news release, “41% of adults now believe some UFOs involve alien spacecraft from other planets, up eight points from 33% in 2019.” Half of Americans are still skeptical of that premise, saying all UFO sightings can be explained by human activity or natural phenomena. (Nine percent of those polled refused to guess, likely because they were, one must firmly conclude, of alien origin themselves and unwilling to give the game away.)
The new poll results also showed that the belief that alien craft have visited Earth have risen slightly more among certain sectors of the population, namely men and people with at least some college education. “We saw an eight point increase overall, which is significant, and it’s driven by people who have had some college,” Saad said. “My interpretation is that is they may be more familiar with the news; college educated people are more likely to read the news in newspapers and online, so they are more likely to have been exposed to this news.”
There is, of course, still reason for extreme caution here. The world of UFOs has always been rife with government misinformation, flim-flam men with stratospherically tall tales, misdirection, and general semiotic chaos. (The science writer Sarah Scoles has cautioned against what an Atlantic headline termed “The UFO Trap,” where media outlets display less skepticism or rigor when it comes to UFO reporting.) But the poll results, according to Saad, appear to show a clear indication of the ways in which American beliefs around aliens and UFOs are changing, which is significant in itself.
“This is such a hot button issue, I think it’s important that we know where the public stands on it,” she said. (Gallup, she pointed out, has also polled the public on whether they believe crystals have healing powers, as well as heaven, hell, the devil, and paranormal beliefs.) Overall, she said, polling on “fringe” topics serves to help us understand “the spiritual life of humans as well as their work and family lives.”
The increase means that Gallup will likely ask about again in the near future “either on an every two-year cadence,” Saad said, or sooner “if something big were to come out either way.” Right now, she said, referring not necessarily to aliens who walk among us and patrol our skies, but to our evolving belief in the same, “I have every confidence that what we’re seeing is real.”
The recent change spans a period when UFOs have received significant coverage in mainstream news publications. This includes a spate of articles in 2019 focused on leaked footage of mysterious flying objects taken by Navy pilots. While the Department of Defense has not suggested these or any UFOs involve alien visitors, the Navy has acknowledged the leaked video is authentic, and in 2020, it commissioned a task force to study "unidentified aerial phenomena" (UAP).
The latest Gallup results are based on a telephone poll conducted July 6-21. This was less than a month after the Office of the Director of National Intelligence issued its preliminary report on UAPs, stating that the various types of incidents examined likely fall into one of five categories: "airborne clutter, natural atmospheric phenomena, [U.S. government] or U.S. industry development programs, foreign adversary systems and a catchall 'other' bin." The 2019 survey was conducted Aug. 1-14, several months after the Navy UFO footage was first leaked.
Gallup's History of Measuring Americans' Views on UFOs
From 1973 to 2019, Gallup tracked whether Americans thought UFO sightings involved "something real," as opposed to "just people's imaginations." This wording found between 47% and 57% believing they were real, including 56% in 2019. However, it wasn't clear from the question whether "real" meant people thought UFOs involved alien visitors or earthly objects such as drones, military planes or unusual cloud formations.
To address that uncertainty, in a separate 2019 poll, Gallup first asked whether any UFOs have been alien spacecraft, with no questions about UFOs immediately preceding it in the survey. Today's update replicated that methodology, thus providing a reliable trend.
Americans' Views on Explanation for UFOs
We have a question about Unidentified Flying Objects, also known as UFOs. Which comes closer to your view -- [ some UFOs have been alien spacecraft visiting Earth from other planets or galaxies, (or) all UFO sightings can be explained by human activity on Earth or natural phenomenon]?
Aug 1-14, 2019
Jul 6-21, 2021
Change
%
%
pct. pts.
Some have been alien spacecraft
33
41
+8
All explained by human activity/natural phenomenon
60
50
-10
No opinion
7
9
+2
GALLUP
College Graduates No Longer the Most Skeptical
Belief that alien spacecraft have visited Earth has risen among most societal subgroups since 2019, with slightly larger increases seen among men and among middle-aged and college-educated adults compared with their counterparts.
The rise in this view among college-educated adults is particularly notable because it may reflect their greater attention to news compared with adults who are not college educated.
The percentage of college graduates believing some UFOs have been alien spacecraft is up 10 points, from 27% in 2019 -- the lowest that year for any major demographic group -- to 37% today.
Adults with some college education show a similar, nine-point increase in belief -- from 40% to 49%.
Belief rose just four points -- not a statistically significant change -- to 39% among those with no college education.
The net effect of these UFO-alien spacecraft findings is that college graduates have gone from being the least likely educational group to believe this in 2019 to being on par with adults who have no college education today. Adults with some college experience (but no degree) remain the most likely to be persuaded.
FBI agents in Blackhawk helicopters swoop on the Sunspot Solar Observatory in New Mexico and close the facility down for ten days. They claim this drastic action was taken because of an employee misusing the internet, but others suspect there is a more frightening reason for the mysterious lockdown, linked to the facilities’ observations of our deadly neighbor: the Sun.
There seems to be something very strange going on up in the skies above our heads. Something is operating up there with technology that seems to be far beyond what we are currently capable of, and such reports have gone back through the decades. One type of report that is especially relevant is those from aircraft pilots. After all, they are the ones up there, with observational skills and expertise that allows them to soberly judge what they see up in the clouds, and sometimes what they see is rather bizarre. Here we will look at a selection of very strange pilot UFO reports from the decade of the 1980s, which show that the skies are full of some pretty weird things.
In 1981, a Captain Phil Schultz was flying a TWA passenger jet on a routine flight over Lake Michigan, in the United States under ideal conditions. The flight had up until then been completely smooth, but then things would get strange. Both Schultz and his co-pilot suddenly saw in the near distance a “large, round, silver metal object with six jet black “portholes” equally spaced around the circumference,” which had apparently rapidly dropped from somewhere above them. The object was so large and in such close proximity that a collision seemed imminent, and Schultz, a veteran US Navy fighter pilot in the Korean War, took evasive action. The mysterious object then made a sharp turn and shot off out of sight. Schultz would later talk extensively with a Dr. Richard Haines, former senior scientist with NASA, about the incident, and although he had always been skeptical of similar reports by other pilots, he insisted that what he had seen was “a spaceship.”
Image by Steve Baxter
In the following year we have the case of airline captain Júlio Miguel Guerra, who in 1982 was working as a flight instructor for the Portuguese Air Force, and on this day was making a routine flight aboard a small DHC-1 Chipmunk aircraft. As he flew along, he noticed an unusual object come out of the blue to begin circling his plane and doing amazing aerial maneuvers not consistent with a normal aircraft. He would describe the object as follows:
At various times the object had been very close to me and I was able to verify that it was round with two halves shaped like two tight-fitting skullcaps. I carefully looked at the lower one, which seemed to be somewhere between red and brown with a hole or dark spot in the center. The center band looked like it had some kind of a grid, and possibly a few lights, but it was hard to tell since the sun was so bright and was reflected. It flew at a fantastic speed in a large elliptical orbit to the left, between 5,000 feet to the South and approximately 10,000 feet to the North, always from left to right, repeating this route over and over. I tried to keep it in sight.
In the meantime, he called in the incident, and two other pilots were soon in the air closing inn on his location to investigate. They also saw the object doing its inscrutable circuit, and it would then begin weaving in between the three planes, easily outmaneuvering them and moving at a speed in excess of 1,550 mph. The size of the object was estimated as being 10 feet in diameter, and after around 15 minutes of this aerial show it sped off out of sight. All three pilots would file a report on the matter, but after this the case has largely been forgotten.
From 1983 we have the rather spectacular account of an alleged UFO chase over the country of Poland. It began at approximately 11:26 a.m. on July 6, 1983, with an anomalous radar signature picked up at the Slupsk Military Airport, which appeared to be a fast-moving object blatantly invading Polish airspace. When all efforts to make radio contact with the mysterious aircraft failed, an alert was issued and a fighter jet scrambled to go up and intercept, piloted by a Cpt. Praszczalek. The pilot soon made visual contact with the object, describing it as “steel in color, rotating around its axis, ‘throwing’ as a boomerang,” and with no noticeable windows, seams, or propulsion system. This was strange and alarming enough that the order was given for the pilot to fire on the object, but just as he was about to do so it made a sudden sharp turn and disappeared from view. After this, ground control would apparently be inundated with numerous unexplained radar signals, causing panic and more jets to be scrambled, but no further visual confirmation was made. What was going on here? We may never know, because shortly after this it appears the Polish Air Force more or less buried the report, with only one of the eyewitnesses, a radar operator at the time, coming forward with the bizarre tale to Polish UFO researcher Marcin Wawrzak.
Image by Steve Baxter
A case from 1985 comes to us from the former Soviet Union, where in the early morning at around 4:10 a.m. an Aeroflot flight 8352 made visual contact with an anomalous yellow light while flying in clear and calm conditions. It was reported by the crew that this light then shot two cones of light from underneath, along with what appeared to be some sort of “blob.” These cones of light were described as being light beams or lasers of some kind, and were so bright that they were hard to look at directly and illuminated the landscape far below. As the crew looked on in astonishment, one of the beams of light veered up to train right on the airliner, as several multicolored lights approached them. The larger object from which all of these lights had apparently detached was described as “lit up like a Christmas tree,” and at around this time ground control was picking this all up on radar. The pilot would report that there was a vapor pervading the area, and would make the rather odd description of what he was seeing:
There were multiple lights of different colors and fiery zig-zags that crossed the vapor. It developed an appendage and then became a wingless cloud-aircraft with a pointed tail. The yellow and green glow, like phosphorescence, was eerily intertwined. The object seemed to change shape.
A second aircraft passing by would also confirm sighting the object, but what happened after this is anyone’s guess, and there is little further information on it. One of the most spectacular pilot encounters with a UFO from the 1980s comes to us from the year 1986, with Japan Airlines Flight 1628. On November 17, 1986, Flight 1628 was making a flight that was meant to take it from Paris to Reykjavik, Iceland, after which it was scheduled to move from Canada to Anchorage, Alaska, and finally back to its base in Tokyo, Japan. On board were veteran Captain Kenju Terauchi, co-pilot Takanori Tamefuji, and flight engineer Yoshio Tsukuba, and on this occasion, they had no passengers, but rather a cargo of fine French wine. They made it as far as Canada without incident, but then things would take a turn for the weird.
As the flight passed over Alaska, Terauchi noticed the lights of an unidentified aircraft somewhere below them to the left, about 2,000 feet below their position. It was at first judged that this was just another plane, but the captain noticed that these lights seemed to be pacing them, after which they suddenly and inexplicably ascended very rapidly to appear right in front of them, “shooting off lights” that were so intense the cockpit actually warmed up. The two lights were described as being “amber and whitish” in color, and were rocking back and forth, matching their speed and changing from a top-down formation to a tight formation side-by-side one. Each light was described as having what appeared to be exhaust ports that intermittently shot off flames and sparks. The lights seemed to be pulsating, but they were too bright to see their overall shape. The crew notified Anchorage Air Traffic Control, who were unable to make radar confirmation of the objects. During this time, the plane experienced radio interference, and then the lights flew off to their left, and the captain would say:
There was a pale white flat light in the direction where the ships flew away, moving in a line along with us, in the same direction and same speed and at the same altitude as we were. I thought it would be impossible to find anything on an aircraft radar if a large ground radar did not show anything, but I judged the distance of the object visually and it was not very far. I set the digital weather radar distance to 20 (nautical) miles, radar angle to horizon (i.e., no depression angle). There it was on the screen. A large green and round object had appeared at 7 or 8 miles (13 km to 15 km) away, where the direction of the object was. We reported to Anchorage center that our radar caught the object within 7 or 8 miles in the 10 o’clock position. We asked them if they could catch it on ground radar, but it did not seem they could catch it at all.
Image by Steve Baxter
It was at around this time that military radar at Elmendorf Regional Operational Control Center managed to make contact with the mysterious objects, and then Flight 1628 would make visual contact with a very large unidentified object as they neared Fairbanks, of which Terauchi would say:
The lights of the city were extremely bright to eyes that were used to the dark. The cockpit lights had been turned off to eliminate window reflections of internal lights. We were just above the bright city lights and we checked the pale white light behind us. Alas! There was a silhouette of a gigantic spaceship. We must run away quickly! Anchorage Center.
Another airliner, a United Airlines passenger flight, took a look as they approached the JAL flight, but were unable to see the UFO, which by this time had apparently flown off. JAL Flight 1628 then made a landing at Anchorage at 6:20 p.m. and an investigation was launched of the strange incident. It was ultimately officially announced that the UFO was light reflecting off of clouds of ice crystals, and that the anomalous radar signatures were merely spilt radar returns from the plane itself. Terauchi and his crew would deny this, but the case was considered to be “explained” and filed away. What happened to JAL Flight 1628? You can read a more detailed account of the case I have written here.
Also from 1985 is the case of British pilot David Hastings, who in September of that year was making a flight over the Mojave Desert of the United States in a Cessna Skymaster along with his co-pilot, David Paterson. As they flew along, they noticed something out over the horizon. It at first appeared as just a speck, but this speck would soon turn out to be something far more bizarre than anything the two of them could have imagined. Hastings would say:
This speck suddenly grew extremely quickly until we saw this huge shadow go over the top of us. But the most amazing thing about it was there was no noise and absolutely no movement or turbulence at all. We looked at each other, saying, ‘What the hell was that?’
Hastings would grab his camera and snap two photographs through the window in the direction he believed the mysterious craft to be, and when they were developed one of the photos would show a cigar-shaped craft of some sort. The case has never been fully explained. Indeed, none of these cases have ever really been explained, and their mysteries are only further propelled by the fact that they come from extremely reliable witnesses in the form of seasoned pilots. These are people who have no reason to lie, and indeed who often opt not to report their strange experiences for fear of tarnishing their reputations. Indeed, this is one reason for why so many pilot UFO encounters have been lost, because they simply don’t want to deal with it and are silenced. What is going on in the skies and what are these pilots experiencing up there? There may come a time when we have some answers, but for now it remains a perplexing enigma.
Over the years (decades, in fact) there have been more than a few reports of people supposedly murdered for what they knew about UFOs. Intriguing and interesting, for sure. But, how much truth is there to these high-profile claims? That’s the theme of today’s article. We’ll begin with one of the most high-profile deaths in Ufology: that of the late alien abduction investigator-researcher-writer Professor John E. Mack. I’ll come straight to the point: Mack was not wiped out by some kind of ruthless hit-team. Anyone who thinks that such a thing could have happened is an idiot. No, hang on, that’s an insult to an idiot. Mack died because of an unfortunate set of circumstances on the night of September 27, 2004 in bustling London, England. Let’s get things into perspective: it was late at night. It was dark. And when he was hit by a vehicle – as he crossed the road by foot, no less – on a busy London road Mack had no chance of survival. There’s something else, too; something very important that many might not think of. Almost certainly, when Mack crossed the road he looked the wrong way. In the U.K. we drive on the left, while in the U.S. it’s the right. That’s what sealed Mack’s death. And not the Men in Black. Mack’s life was snuffed out all because of the way he turned his head at the wrong time. Worse still, the driver who hit Mack was under the influence of booze. Sometimes, a series of events come together – in the worst ways possible – and lead to the death of a well-known figure. In this case, Mack.
Dr John E. Mack, pioneering researcher of the abduction phenomenon.
Now, let’s look at Morris K. Jessup. He was someone who was well-known in Ufology in the 1950s. His books included The Case for the UFO and The Expanding Case for the UFO. His interests involved ancient levitation, modern-day Saucer stories, and the so-called “Philadelphia Experiment.” You know the one: the invisible ship that spawned an entire phenomenon. And a couple of movies. The first movie, in 1984, was good fun and entertainment. The follow-up was total garbage. As for Jessup, his life ended in 1959. In the early evening of April 20, the lifeless body of Jessup was found in his car, which was parked in the Matheson Hammock Park in Miami, Florida. The car’s engine was still running and a hosepipe, affixed to the exhaust, had been fed through the driver’s side window. Jessup was dead from the effects of carbon-monoxide. Jessup’s body was found by a man named John Goode, who worked at the park. Shocked at the sight before him, Goode quickly called the police, who arrived in no time at all. It was all too late. It didn’t take long before ufologists were saying Jessup’s death was not just suspicious, but extremely suspicious. We need to look into Jessup’s private life for the answers. All of us have our lives away from things like Bigfoot, Nessie and aliens. And, sometimes, those lives don’t go well. That’s exactly what happened with Jessup. As the mid-to-late 1950s progressed, Jessup’s marriage began having problems. He had a car accident, something that played on him for a long time. His publisher turned down several of his ideas for future books. Paranoia set in that he was being watched. And, finally, the time came when Jessup couldn’t take it anymore. He took his life. No assassination. No murder. Just a tragic death provoked by a man whose turmoil became out of control.
Morris K. Jessup
That all said, there are some deaths in Ufology that I do think could have had suspicious endings. Take, for example, Miriam Bush, a figure in the world’s most famous UFO case: Roswell, of course. Miriam knew the truth of what happened back in 1947 on the Foster Ranch, saw the damaged bodies (human or alien), and was told to stay quiet. Or else. It didn’t stop her from telling her family of at least some parts of the story. And she started to take to the booze. To a significant degree. Unfortunately, Miriam was never really able to get rid of that ufological albatross. In the final month of 1989, Miriam headed off to San Jose, California. She had fears she was being watched. She probably was. The day after she hit the road, Miriam was found dead in her motel-room. A plastic bag was covered her head. The conclusion: suicide. Yeah, right. For me, the death of Miriam Bush is one that we should take a very close and careful look at.
Moving onto the 1990s, there was the death of Danny Casolaro. It was midway through 1991 when the lifeless corpse of a middle-aged man was found in a hotel room in the Martinsburg, West Virginia Sheraton Inn. Specifically, his body was lying in the shower. It was a grim sight for the maid that made the discovery. The man, it seemed, had committed suicide: his wrists were cut deep, something which effectively meant that without anyone to help him, the man was doomed. And, he was. It didn’t take more than a few moments for hotel staff to figure out who, exactly, the man was. He was identified by the person on the front-desk as Danny Casolaro. He was an investigative journalist of the Woodward and Bernstein variety. At the time, Casolaro was pursuing a dangerous group of people that he called “The Octopus.” Supposedly, they engineered the JFK assassination, Watergate, the Lockerbie, Scotland Jumbo Jet 747 crash over Scotland in 1988, and much more. As Casolaro continued his research, he found himself finding more and more UFO links to the Octopus, such as tales of UFOs, alien autopsies, Area 51 and much more. Casolaro was right on the edge of writing a book on all of this when death decided to come along. Two cases that I suspect were suspicious and two that weren’t. In other words, we have to be very careful as to how we handle such delicate events and incidents. Just because someone in Ufology dies, it doesn’t mean it has to be under suspicious circumstances. But, on the other side of the coin, we shouldn’t ignore such grim possibilities.
For centuries, since the very first ships started making their way towards the horizon and to the edges of our own maps, there have been strange phenomena reported from the vast unknown expanses of our oceans. All manner of stories of sea creatures, unusual anomalies, and others have been brought back by vessels, and one of the more intriguing types of stories has been that of something apparently under intelligent control operating beneath the waves. Called USOs, or “Unidentified Submerged Objects,” these are mysterious objects and lights moving about underwater and inspiring awe just as their aerial brethren the UFOs do in the skies above our heads. Some of the more spectacular such accounts of USOs come from various ships at sea of all types, and here we will look at one of the more unusual and unexplained mysteries of the ocean depths.
A very early encounter with something strange in the water comes to us from way back in 1902, with a ship called the SS Fort Salisbury. In October of that year, the vessel was cruising off the rugged coast of West Africa through the Gulf of Guinea in calm seas when something very strange would occur at around 3:05 a.m. It was then that the crew was alerted by a lookout to a massive dark object a few hundred feet off their starboard side. When an officer by the name of Andrew Rayner came to look, he could see that whatever it was, it was truly huge, an estimated 500 to 600 feet in length. He would also note that “it had two lights, one at each end, a mechanism of some kind, or perhaps fins, and was making a commotion in the water.” He also noticed that it had a metallic surface. He would write of the object in his journal as follows:
n drawing nearer, dark mass and lights sank below the surface. Prepared to examine the wake in passing with binoculars. Passed about forty to fifty yards on port side of wake, and discovered it was the scaled back of some huge monster slowly disappearing below the surface. Darkness of the night prevented determining its exact nature, but scales of apparently 1 ft. diameter, and dotted in places with barnacle growth, were plainly discernible.
This was about all he was able to see, because the enormous mechanical anomalous object then slowly sank into the black depths below. Considering that there would have been no submarines like that at the time, it is hard to tell just what this ship could have observed. It has been suggested it may have been a large sinking ship, but there was no report of such a lost vessel reported in the Lloyds Registry, and no record of a ship going missing, something that would have certainly shown up in the records for something so massive. The strange case remains unexplained.
Another odd report comes from 1947, off the coast of Malta. In June of that year, an unnamed fishing vessel was about 20 miles off the southern coast, engaged in the routine business of pulling in their nets. As the nets came up, one of the crew alerted the others to something strange bobbing about out on the water’s surface, which appeared to be what they described as a “black submarine” floating about in the waves. It was an unsettling enough sight that the crew finished hauling in their nets and went about starting up the engines to get out of there, and at that moment there was a bright flash of light from the anomalous black shape. This light was bright enough to illuminate the object and the surrounding vicinity, showing it to be smooth, black, and metallic, and there were also small figures now visible upon it, which seemed to be wearing some type of apparatus around their waists and were described as “little men.” As the frightened fishermen looked on, these diminutive figures, described as about the size of 10-year-old children, seemed to scramble into the craft, after which it began to glow so brightly that they could barely look directly at it. The object and is bizarre crew then quickly submerged and disappeared under the waves to not be seen again.
In 1963, we have the case of the Thrift, a collier from Aberdeen, Scotland, which on November 22 of that year was travelling through the area with a load of coal off the Girdle Ness peninsula, just south of the entrance to Aberdeen’s harbor, in Scotland. The crew noticed a flashing red light that seemed to be travelling around 20 feet over the waves in the near distance, going at a high rate of speed past their port side. As the astonished crew looked on at this curious sight, the light then did a sudden vertical ascent into the water with a splash, after which it could be seen to travel down through the water out of sight into the dim depths. Thinking that an aircraft had gone down and sunk, the Thrift sent a lifeboat and search crew to the spot where it had gone down, but no trace of debris could be found. What did this crew see out there? Who knows?
One very strange encounter between a vessel and a USO involved an actual alleged collision with the unidentified object. On February 3, 1965, the 70-ton trawler Star of Freedom was about 15 miles southeast of the island of Barra, in in the Outer Hebrides, Scotland, traveling at about 9 knots at the time, when the entire vessel was rocked by a collision with something beneath the surface. It was obviously something very large, as the collision actually lifted the massive ship’s bow from the water and left a huge hole in the hull. A distress call was immediately made, and efforts to pump the water put into effect, but the vessel was eventually beached at Castlebay Harbor. It was a major collision, but the object that they hit remained hidden beneath he waves. At the time, the ship’s captain, a George Wood, thought they must have surely hit a submarine, but both the U.S. and British Navies denied having any subs in the area at the time. Considering this, and the fact that they were nowhere near land at the time, what could they have possibly hit that would so severely damage a 70-ton vessel and lift it out of the water? It remains unknown.
In more recent years we have a case from 1991, off the west coast of South America. The case, which was reported to the files of the site UFO Casebook, comes from a witness who claims that at the time he had been an operations and intelligence petty officer serving aboard the Knox-class destroyer escort the USS Kirk FF1087, and that they had been part of a drug interdiction force, which consisted of the USS Kirk and three other Naval vessels. Their primary mission was to patrol using a network of radar to track and then intercept drug-running aircraft flying out of Columbia, Panama and Guatemala, as well as to engage any smuggling ships they were able to find. The witness says that his primary duties took place within the CIC, or the Combat Information Center, which he and 22 other specialists manned 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, with them rotating between two 11-man shifts.
USS Kirk FF1087
The witness claims that he was on CIC duty at 2 a.m. on the morning of December 16, and it was a quiet night with nothing going on. He says he took a break to go up to the ship’s bridge, and at the time the entire vessel was in a state called “darkened ship,” with all of the exterior lights turned off, as well as those on the bridge, meaning the area was only faintly illuminated by instrument panels. He began talking casually with the officer of the deck, and this is when things would suddenly get weird. He says:
All of a sudden and out of nowhere, like a huge flash from a camera, emanating from the starboard bow sea level upward was a huge flash of red glowing light, which lit up our entire ship. It only lit up our ship, not the surrounding ocean, just our ship. It happened so fast, that the OOD, the navigator and I were speechless for about 5 seconds, at which time I looked at the OOD and asked him if he just saw that light. He stated yes in a sullen voice. I then asked the navigator and he replied yes. I then took the navigator’s sound powered headset, and asked the forward and aft look outs, if they had just seen the same red flash, to which the forward look out stated, “YES! WHAT THE HELL WAS THAT?” Aft lookout said yes as well. I then immediately contacted CIC, and asked the CIC officer if we had any aircraft or surface ships in our vicinity, to which he replied clear as a whistle. I asked if we had any submarine activity in the area, to which he replied, no.
What had just happened did not make any sense. The flash emanated from the sea, directly off of our starboard bow (like it was touching our bow), and ascended upwardly so rapidly, creating the effect of the bright red flash. The other weird aspect of this event was that only our ship was lit up within the red flash, not the surrounding sea, but our vessel only. Up until this event, I did not believe in UFOs or USOs. I have no doubt that our ship, steaming along at 12 knots, came right up on a submerged unidentifiable aircraft. I don’t think the aircraft or USO had any idea we were sailing up to them. I think whatever it was, took off in a very unplanned and fast manner, and wanted to quickly identify us, thus the flash.
In the end, after much consideration they decided not to wake the captain, merely logging it as an “unexplained phenomenon.” Indeed, all of these cases could be filed away as such, and there has never been any solid explanation for any of them. We are left to wonder just what these vessels might have encountered out there on the water and beneath it. What is going on in reports such as these and can we make any sense of it? Are there forces that are beyond our comprehension using the oceans or our world for some inscrutable purpose? There is no way to really know for sure, and in the meantime cases of USOs keep coming in. Perhaps in our quest for answers to the UFO phenomenon, in addition to watching the skies, we should also watch below the waves.
Fast Moving UFO Sighted Over Vera Cruz, Brazil ( August 8, 2021 )
Fast moving UFO was sighted Oover Vera Cruz, Brazil on August 8, 2021
STATEMENT : Filmagem no dia 08/08/2021 17h, no município de Vera Cruz/RS Objeto não identificado passa próximo a drone em trajetória reta. Seria um Avião? Outro Drone? Um Pássaro? Ou outra coisa?
Filming on 08/08/2021 17h, in the city of Vera Cruz / RS Unidentified object passes close to drone in straight path. Was it an Airplane? Another Drone? A bird? Or something else?
TITLED : DRONE GRAVA OVNI NO INTERIOR DO RIO GRANDE DO SUL DRONE RECORDS UFO IN THE INTERIOR OF RIO GRANDE DO SUL ORIGINAL VIDEO OWNER : Fabricio Bullerjahn ORIGINAL VIDEO URL :https://youtu.be/_v20x74tBOs
Bright UFO Disappears Over Santiago de Querétaro, Mexico ( July 7, 2021 )
his brightly lit UFO was sighted beside a highway in Santiago de Querétaro, Mexico on July 7, 2021
STATEMENT : Mexico - Queretaro
Here I present the original and an approximate analysis.
Closer and more evident every day
credit : Incomparable Tigre Toño
UFO Releases Orbs Over São Gonçalo, Brazil ( August 17, 2021 )
Another Sighting of a UFO Releasing Light Orbs or Craft : This video made on August 17 by Alan Rondon, in São Gonçalo, Brazil : Very interesting video of a UFO Releasing Light Orbs Over São Gonçalo, Brazil on August 17, 2021 : very similar to other videos,
STATEMENT : it stood for a long time in the same place then it started moving and releasing several lights Managed to enlarge and stabilize the image
They are here !
UFO Sighted Over Kissimmee, Florida ( August 18, 2021 )
Tonight few hours ago this Amazing close up video of a spectacular UFO in was taken in Kissimmee in central Florida's Osceola County, just south of Orlando. : Close up video was captured by Alexis Bey on August 18, 2021 showing a UFO Type Craft with multiple lights.
More evident every day
UFO Sighted In (Dew) Directed-Energy Weapon Experiment?
What is this Strange Object ? Is this a UFO flying around. And is this a failed Directed-Energy Weapon Experiment (DEW) is ranged on the city of São Paulo-Brazil. A DEW is a weapon that destroys, damages or incapacitates its target with highly focused energy, including laser, microwaves or particle beams.
UFOs Sighted From Commercial Jet Over Brazil ( August 17, 2021 )
mpressive Sighting from a Commercial Jet showing of a group of UFOs. Sighted over Brazil on August 17, 2021 : What are these Lights. Are these UFOs or something else ? Video was captured by Ernesto Cesares Trapelli on August 16, 2021
STATEMENT : Mais um flagrante : Another flagra
They are here !
credit : Ernesto Cesares Trapelli
UFO or New TR3B Stingray? Sighted Over England ( August 16, 2021 )
UFO or New TR3B Stingray? Sighted Over England on August 16, 2021 : ...Black triangle UFO or US spy craft. Video shows large, silent, hovering, triangular shaped craft. Is ths a TR3B. Are the US Air Force carrying out covert tests over UK ? of a fabled top-secret stealth aircraft built using alien technology .... Is ths a TR3B? . Video released on U.S.F on August 16, 2021.: No details. Is the highly pressured mercury accelerated nuclear energy produced to form a plasma that creates a field of anti-gravity around the ship interfering with the video ?
Linda Moulton Howe: Antarctica Alien Secrets Beneath the Ice
Linda Moulton Howe: Antarctica Alien Secrets Beneath the Ice
Antarctica: Alien Secrets Beneath the Ice
There is a huge secret hidden beneath the ice in Antarctica. Military whistleblowers report large alien structures under two miles of Antarctic ice.
Navy Seal Spartan 1 walked an alien hallway inscribed with mysterious hieroglyphs and tells investigative reporter Linda Moulton Howe that Antarctica’s alien presence spans centuries, linked to Star Gate portals around Earth and beyond our solar system.
Welcome to the official YouTube Channel for Linda Moulton Howe and Earthfiles News. Subscribe today to get the latest videos, interviews and event happenings. Follow Linda Moulton Howe on Facebook @EarthfilesNews and Twitter @Earthfiles.
Linda Moulton Howe is a distinguished author, speaker and writer in the UFO community. She is a graduate of Stanford University with a Masters Degree in Communication. She has devoted her documentary film, television, radio, writing and reporting career to productions concerning science, medicine and the environment. Ms. Howe has received local, national and international awards, including three regional Emmys, a national Emmy nomination and was an honored producer for medical and science programming in a WCVB Boston Station Peabody award.
Alive Aliens UFO Crash Filmed by Cops - Alleged 100% Real UFO FBI Proof
Alive Aliens UFO Crash Filmed by Cops - Alleged 100% Real UFO FBI Proof
Alive Aliens UFO Crash Filmed By Cops – Alleged 100% Real UFO FBI Proof
The Federal Bureau of Investigation is the domestic intelligence and security service of the United States and its principal federal law enforcement agency. Wikipedia
What do you think about this video? Kinda weird. If fake it sure is well done. Let us know what you think in the comments section.
Is this real footage? I dunno but certainly interesting. Curious to what others think regarding this. Thanks for stopping by.
Barney and Betty Hill holding a newspaper reporting their alleged alien abduction in the White Mountains on September 19, 1961.
September in New Hampshire is UFO season. Not in the sense that it’s our busiest month for UFO sightings. That, like most states, is June or July, when more people are outdoors. Not that sightings are much worth sighting anymore. We’re in a New UFO Reality, one where the government releases as much blurry footage of UFOs as do UFO conspiracists on YouTube. One where terrestrial drones of every shape and LED configuration zigzag the skies like they’re auditioning for Lady Gaga’s next Super Bowl appearance. One where that strange craft in the sky is probably just a billionaire playing “Brewster’s Millions” with his cash.
UFOs ain’t what they used to be. Once upon a time, a strange light in the sky could shake up a town, empty a police headquarters, get picked up in newspapers across the world, and make a small town famous. Once upon a time, a UFO would invite you inside and provide you with enough IP to go straight to Hollywood with that irresistible “based on a true story” hook. Once upon a time is a strange phrase to use when you’re talking about extraterrestrials.
That’s why, in New Hampshire, we celebrate our classic sightings. And September is our month for that. Because September was when two towering tentpoles of UFO lore happened here.
On September 19, 1961, husband and wife Betty and Barney Hill were driving home to Portsmouth after a vacation in Canada. It was almost midnight when they hit the dark hole in the state that is the White Mountains at night. That’s when they saw the light in the sky. One of those shake-up-a-town kind of lights in the sky. It seemed to be coming after them. Barney took a peek at it through binoculars, and what he saw terrified him into stomping the gas pedal.
But his 1957 Chevy Bel Air couldn’t outdrive the kind of technology that can cross interstellar space. He and his wife were stopped by the disc-shaped craft, and then disappointingly human-like aliens in shiny black uniforms took them inside to perform inscrutable medical-type tests on their bodies before letting them go. That’s the simple version, anyway. If you want all the details, you can read the popular book by John G. Fuller called “The Interrupted Journey” or watch the movie based on the story starring James Earl Jones and New Hampshire’s own Estelle Parsons (a Lakes Region seasonal lifeform) called “The UFO Incident.” Although you can probably guess the details yourself — after all, this alien abduction story set the template for every alien abduction story of the modern era.
Four years later, on the night of September 3, 1965, 18-year-old Norman Muscarello was at the end of a long hitchhike to his home in Exeter, just a town or two away from the home of the Hills in Portsmouth. He was thumbing down Route 150 when he saw five red lights blinking in sequence in the sky on what seemed to be a craft the size of a house. When the lights moved toward him, he dodged them in a ditch. Eventually, he made it into town and headed right for the police. Officer Eugene Bertrand returned with him to the site to check it out. It was the second report Bertrand had received that night about a UFO. Earlier, two women claimed that a red craft had chased them while they were driving.
The 1975 film “The UFO Incident” tells the story of Barney (portrayed by James Earl Jones) and Betty Hill (portrayed by Academy Award-winner Estelle Parsons), a couple from Portsmouth who encounter a UFO but decline to talk about it. Years later, their secret has put a strain on both themselves and their marriage. They visit a psychiatrist and, under hypnosis, deliver remarkably similar stories about what they say happened to them on that fateful night.
The first twist in the story is that, when Muscarello and Bertrand arrived, they both saw the red lights hovering over a farm. Bertrand radioed for backup and Officer David Hunt joined. The second twist is that he also saw the lights. The third twist is that, for the next few weeks, scores of UFO reports poured in. The Exeter Incident would become one of the most documented sightings in the lore. It also got a popular book by John G. Fuller, this one called “The Incident at Exeter.” No movie, though.
But the Hills’ experience and the Exeter flyover aren’t the only talking points for UFOs in New Hampshire. There’s the Derry Fairy, a short, loose-skinned Spielbergian creature witnessed in 1956 by Alfred Horne in the woods of Derry. He tried to catch it, but it screamed and got away (Reese’s Pieces wouldn’t be invented for another two decades). And there’s Daymond Steer of the Conway Daily Sun, who, in full accord with his journalistic duties, keeps asking presidential candidates where they stand on UFOs when they stump through the state. (Hillary Clinton said she would look into it before losing to Donald Trump.) For a while, people thought that the oldest UFO photo in the world was taken in New Hampshire. It dated to 1870 and depicted a cigar-shaped form against what looked like clouds above Mount Washington. The craft turned out to be a ruler in a snowbank.
UFOs sightings are still happening today in the state — a black speck racing above the Robert Frost Homestead in Derry, a silver orb in the clouds above Canterbury, a gray triangle hovering ten stories above Somersworth. But these days you have to dig deep into the digital to learn about those sightings. And they’re probably just drones. Or billionaires.
So what do we do in New Hampshire during UFO season besides look longingly at the sky (not for UFOs necessarily but out of nostalgia)? We can retrace the route of Betty and Barney Hill, all the way down old Route 3 to the sign in Lincoln that immortalizes their story and on to their graves in Kingston where their epitaphs still tout their encounter. And in Exeter, we can buy alien T-shirts and listen to UFO lectures at the annual Exeter UFO Festival. Well, we usually can. Covid has taken it down two years running. But it’ll be back. Until then, we’ll dream about the good ol’ days of UFOs.
I was 23 when I saw them, like three glass lenses examining the edge of a high cloud. Then something started to fall from them, tiny dark spots fluttering hundreds of feet until I could tell what they were: leaves.
That’s my UFO story in its briefest form. I’ve told it a number of times and would have told it more often if it made any sense. Glass lenses examining a cloud? That’s how I remember it. Leaves? Yep, plain old leaves. They fell close to the place we were — my girlfriend of the time and I — but too far away for us to retrieve any before they settled in the nearby woods.
This was in rural Northwest Florida, by the way, in 1975. Yes, the girlfriend remembers it (sort of). Yes, it was the 1970s with all that might imply. So it was probably a “temperature inversion” or something. Who knows? I’ve just never forgotten it.
There’s a lot of interesting stuff in this issue that might have inspired my monthly preliminary essay, but I guess I’ve always wanted to “reveal” my big UFO mystery and can’t think of a better time than September (UFO month in New Hampshire) in the year in which the Navy finally admits it’s got a real UFO problem with our floating-city battleships being pestered by what they tactfully describe as Unidentified Aerial Phenomena.
I was a childhood “buff” regarding UFOs. I can still remember the pulp smell of the sensational magazines I’d buy at the drugstore filled with grainy photos of glowing hubcaps over farms. Like all childish things, I put my UFO magazines away at a point and got on with my life, adopting a skeptical mindset that whatever was happening to those hapless fishermen or drivers on lonely roads, it was probably happening inside the heads of the viewers more than in the sky.
Then, this year, a 2004 video (yes, grainy) shot by the targeting radar of an F/A-18 Super Hornet fighting jet flown by Cmdr. David Fravor of N.H. was made public and a slumbering hunk my 23-year-old self was reawakened just long enough to go, “Whoa.”
If you somehow haven’t seen it, Google Nimitz Tic Tac and enjoy the ride. Fravor, by the way, is just the latest in a long string of connections that the Granite State has to UFO history. Chances are you’ve heard about the Betty and Barney Hill abduction story and the Incident at Exeter. If not, please enjoy writer J.W. Ocher’s excellent summary starting on page 24 But, for true UFO investigators, the connections run even deeper.
The Hill’s hypnosis-restored memories of their abduction have become the standard blueprint for too-close-for-comfort encounters with aliens. The Exeter “incident” typifies another trope of UFO activity: Flying saucers seem to be attracted to nuclear technology like moths to a porchlight. At the time, nearby Pease Air Force Base was home to the 509th Bombardment Wing, a Strategic Air Command unit originally created just to drop an atom bomb on Japan.
But UFO secrets seem to pop up everywhere you look in New Hampshire and just a little digging in this fertile field tends to turn up new (at least to me) stories.
In October 1967, when a hypnotized Barney Hill was asked to describe his alien abductors, the man who captured it on a sketchpad was the late Jackson poet and artist David Baker — a local character who deserves his own feature (one of these days). Baker knew the Hills because of a shared love of jazz music.
His rough sketches, currently in the possession of the UNH Library, clearly reveal the now-iconic alien features: big heads, huge eyes, small mouths and nose slits. Baker explained that he took Barney’s description and embellished it a bit to add “the known laws of bone structure.”
Baker ran a popular roadside gallery in Jackson and was famous for his “vitreous flux” watercolor technique. His works still sell for thousands of dollars. His alien sketches, once for sale for a few hundred bucks, are now priceless artifacts of our state’s cosmic connections.
Observation of unknown bright objects in the sky continues
Observation of unknown bright objects in the sky continues
Many unknown bright objects, often without wings, no sound or any sign of exhaust, flying through our sky and they are often very hard to see with the naked eye.
These kinds of objects remain a mystery. Next clips show some of these hard-to-see objects.
Deep Underground Military Bases (D.U.M.B.) are Military installations that are set ether inside of a mountain or deep underground. Base 211 is the name used to refer to an alleged German Base built in Antarctica.
Crust of Dwarf Planet Ceres is Rich in Water Ice, New Research Confirms
Crust of Dwarf Planet Ceres is Rich in Water Ice, New Research Confirms
Using high spatial-resolution data gathered by the Gamma Ray and Neutron Detector (GRaND) aboard NASA’s Dawn spacecraft, planetary researchers have detected elevated concentrations of hydrogen in and around Occator crater, which containsCeres’ most prominent bright spots.
This false-color image shows the dwarf planet Ceres.
“The dwarf planet Ceres, the largest body in the main asteroid belt, is water-rich,” said Dr. Tom Prettyman, a senior scientist at the Planetary Science Institute, and his colleagues.
“Ceres’ average interior structure consists of a rocky mantle and a 40-km- (25-mile) thick crust, dominated by the frozen remnants of an ancient, global ocean.”
“Rheological constraints indicate that the crust is volatile-rich, containing water ice, phyllosilicates, salts, and possibly clathrate hydrates.”
“The outermost meter of Ceres contains water ice that is gradually sublimating in response to heating of the surface by sunlight,” they said.
“Since Ceres’ axis of rotation is nearly perpendicular to the Sun’s rays, ice has receded to greater depths at the equator than the poles.”
“We hypothesized that impacts can bring water ice from the outer crust to the surface, replenishing the regolith with ice,” they added.
“As such, the distribution of near surface water ice in the upper few decimeters of the regolith as sensed by GRaND is shaped both by large impacts and long-term insolation-driven sublimation.”
“We tested this hypothesis with high-spatial-resolution GRaND data acquired in Dawn’s final mission phase.”
Impact processes as a partial control on the global distribution of hydrogen on Ceres: (a) a map of the density of large craters is compared to the global distribution of hydrogen measured by the Gamma Ray and Neutron Detector (GRaND) (white contours); a density of one indicates craters fully cover the surface within GRaND’s field of view; for context, the map is superimposed on shaded relief and excluded basins with diameters greater than 100 km (62 miles) are outlined (black); (b) a possible scenario for enrichment of surficial ice by large impacts is illustrated; a portion of the ice excavated from the crust survives during crater formation and cooling of the melt sheet and ejecta blanket, enriching the regolith in water ice; the surviving ice retreats in response to solar insolation.
Image credit: Prettyman et al., doi: 10.1029/2021GL094223.
The GRaND neutron spectrometer detected elevated hydrogen concentrations in the outermost meter of the surface of Occator, a young, 90-km- (56-mile) diameter, complex crater located at 19.82 °N where near-surface ice is not expected.
“The excess hydrogen is in the form of water ice,” the researchers said.
“The results confirm Ceres outer crust is ice rich and that water ice can survive within impact ejecta on airless, icy bodies.”
The data imply partial control of the distribution of near-surface ice by large impacts and provide constraints on surface age and regolith thermophysical properties.
“We think that ice has survived in the shallow subsurface during the roughly 20 million years following the formation of Occator,” Dr. Prettyman said.
“Similarities between the global distribution of hydrogen and the pattern of large craters suggest impact processes have delivered ice to the surface elsewhere on Ceres.”
“This process is accompanied by the loss of ice by sublimation caused by heating of the surface by sunlight.”
“The impact that formed Occator would have excavated crustal materials as deep as 10 km (6 miles),” he said.
“So, observed enhancements in the concentration of hydrogen within the crater and ejecta blanket support our interpretation that the crust is ice rich.”
“The findings reinforce the emerging consensus that Ceres is a differentiated body in which ice separated from rock to form an icy outer shell and subcrustal ocean.”
“Smaller, water-rich bodies, including the parent bodies of the carbonaceous chondrite meteorites, may not have experienced differentiation.”
“So, the findings could have implications for the evolution of icy bodies, small and large.”
“More broadly, as an ocean world, Ceres could be habitable and is therefore an attractive target for future missions.”
The results are published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.
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T.H. Prettyman et al. Replenishment of Near-Surface Water Ice by Impacts Into Ceres’ Volatile-Rich Crust: Observations by Dawn’s Gamma Ray and Neutron Detector. Geophysical Research Letters, published online July 21, 2021; doi: 10.1029/2021GL094223
Capture a “UFO flotilla” during a live broadcast of the ISS
Capture a “UFO flotilla” during a live broadcast of the ISS
Many people relax watching the ISS (International Space Station) from their computer or mobile device or spend night observation evenings in front of telescopes.
On January 21, 2021, the live broadcast of the ISS (International Space Station) captured a fleet of UFOs flying through and below our atmosphere.
While watching the live broadcast of the ISS on television, the witness noticed that several UFOs were flying through and under the ISS.
It was when he decided to pick up his phone to record the remarkable event.
Then all of a sudden the live feed switched to another camera and stayed off for a while afterwards, something that often happens when UFOs show up.
It is not the first time that the ISS has managed to detect unidentified flying objects near our planet
Last August, the Russian astronaut Iván Vágner, shared some images recorded by him from the International Space Station in which five unidentified flying objects could be seen flying over the south pole of the Earth.
A space enthusiast has asked NASA to clarify whether or not he witnessed the appearance of a UFO while watching the live broadcast of the International Space Station.
Experts consider that it could be Starlink satellites, of the American company SpaceX .. What do you think about it?
UAP / UFO Sighted Over Turkey During Fires ( August 15, 2021 )
UAP / UFO Sighted Over Turkey During Fires on August 15, 2021
STATEMENT : During the fires in Turkey, this appeared in the sky, what is it?
They are here !
note : no audio
credit : H.R.M
UFO Sighted On Flight From Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky = Las Vegas ( August 16, 2021 )
UFO is similar to kerry forides sighting of Mar 22, 2018 : UFO Institute was view 7 : comment 2 : 1st for permission and 1st to publish.This video sighted on August 16, 2021
STATEMENT : I know this is not a crop circle, but can anyone explain this? was flying from CVG to LAS. : Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky International AirportI to Las Vegas, (LAS) : Here I present the original and in the wake with approach. They are everywhere
We think of the Milky Way galaxy as having well-defined spiral arms swooping around it, starting near the galactic center and smoothly stretching to the outer reaches.
However, a team of astronomers has found a big surprise: By examining stars in a nearby spiral arm they’ve discovered a new structure that sticks out from it like an unruly cowlick, and amazingly one that contains some of the most celebrated and best-studied nebulae in the galaxy. It was hidden in plain sight all along, like finding a secret treasure-filled chamber in a house you’ve lived in all your life.
The Milky Way is a barred spiral galaxy: It has an elongated Tic Tac-shaped center (called the bar) and two major spiral arms sweeping out from it. There are also a number of thinner minor arms as well, including the Orion Arm, which is the one our Sun and solar system are currently in, and another closer to the galactic center called the Sagittarius Arm. These arms are common in galaxies, though how they form and are maintained is an open question. We do know they contain lots of gas clouds (nebulae) that form stars, many of which are hot and luminous, making the spiral arms of a galaxy pretty obvious.
A map of the Milky Way galaxy showing the Sun’s position (center) in the thin, minor Orion arm. The minor Sagittarius arm starts on the other side of the galaxy (upper left) and curves around between the galactic center and the Sun.
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/R. Hurt (SSC/Caltech)
Models of the Milky Way structure show these arms to be well formed and relatively smooth in shape. However this new discovery throws a monkey into that particular wrench.
They then turned to the Gaia mission, which has mapped the entire sky and found highly accurate positions, distances, and motions of well over a billion stars in the galaxy. From this they created a 3D map of the Sagittarius Arm, and that’s when the new structure suddenly popped up.
A new structure has been found in the Milky Way: An elongated feature that sticks out from the thin Sagittarius spiral arm at an abrupt angle and which contains many famous objects like Eagle, Omega, Trifid, and Lagoon Nebulae.
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
It’s shaped like a shoebox, roughly 3,000 light years long — long enough to stretch into the region of space between spiral arms — and centered about 5,000 light years from the Sun toward the galactic center. The motions of the stars inside it are all consistent with each other, indicating this structure is indeed real and not some perspective effect.
It really does stick out, too. We talk about the pitch angle of a spiral arm, meaning the angle at which it opens (deviating away from a circle, which would have a pitch angle of 0). The Sagittarius arm has a gentle pitch angle of 12°, but this new feature juts away at a sharp 56°.
Four bright and easily observed nebulae are in the new Sagittarius arm spur: the Eagle, Omega, Trifid, and Lagoon Nebulae, seen here (L-R) in infrared by the Spitzer Space Telescope.
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
I was shocked to read that this structure contains four of the most prominent and celebrated objects in the sky: The Eagle, Omega, Trifid, and Lagoon Nebulae. These are all close and bright star-forming gas clouds, easily visible in binoculars, and ones I’ve spent some time observing myself with my own telescope. The Eagle includes the famous “Pillars of Creation,” a heavily studied object; the others are well observed too, so it’s a little surprising this feature has been missed.
However, distances to objects like nebulae can be hard to determine. This new work identifies stars in the nebulae (the groups mentioned above) and uses their distances as proxies for the distances to the nebulae.
A Hubble image of the magnificent “Pillars of Creation”, a star-forming region in the Eagle Nebula. Credit: NASA, ESA/Hubble and the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)
This new structure looks very much like a spur to me, the name given to straight(ish) features that stick out from spiral arms and which are extremely common in other galaxies. However, nothing like this has been seen before in the Milky Way!
That may be a selection effect, an observational bias because we’re inside the Milky Way, making it hard to map out the structure. All those huge clouds of gas and dust in the galaxy block our view in visible light, so we have to go to infrared and radio wavelengths to see them. Even then, getting distances can be tricky, which you need to know to determine where a specific structure might be. Gaia data have revolutionized our ability to do this.
Because of that I suspect that while this structure is a first for the Milky Way, it won’t be the last. I’d bet decent money more will be found as more data are analyzed in this way.
The big question is, what formed this? It’s not clear. If there’s a lot of mass concentrated into one spot in a spiral arm it can become unstable and get stretched out by shear forces, and the math works out for this structure, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that’s what caused it.
More observations are needed to see just what’s in this specific structure and if there are others like it in other arms. If trends can be found then perhaps its formation mechanism can be teased out.
It’s really pretty surprising to find such a big feature that’s so close and so obvious once it’s mapped out, especially one that has so many bright and fantastic nebulae in it.
Just when you think you know a galaxy, something like this comes along. I hope a lot more do, too. The Milky Way is an enormous object. We’ve only just started to begin to explore it.
In unfortunate news, astronomers checking up on the overall status of our Milky Way galaxy discovered that at some point in ancient history, the galaxy broke one of its arms, and uh never quite healed. Kind of.
If you think of the galaxy’s structure like a skeleton, the break in a spiral NASA scientists found and described in research published last month in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics is like a fragment of bone, jutting off to the side. But as Space.com reports, this is less of cosmic medical imagery (who do we even call about this?) and more of an opportunity to uncover another chapter in the long, mysterious history of our corner of the universe.
Cosmic Forensics
NASA, understandably, had a less gruesome perspective on the whole thing, comparing the broken spiral arm to a splinter in a piece of wood in a new press release. This all started after scientists took a new look at data from NASA’s retired Spitzer Space Telescope and the ESA’s Gaia mission, which were being used to try and improve NASA’s current 3D map of the galaxy.
One of the biggest challenges in mapping the cosmos is accurately determining the distance between two objects. It’s not like we can just head out with a tape measurer. And this closer look showed us part of a spiral arm is… actually jutting way off to the side. Probing that “injury” further, then, may answer lingering questions about what happened — did the galaxy assemble itself wrong, or was it somehow damaged? — and why.
“Ultimately, this is a reminder that there are many uncertainties about the large-scale structure of the Milky Way, and we need to look at the details if we want to understand that bigger picture,” University of Wisconsin-Whitewater astrophysicist and study coauthor Robert Benjamin said in the press release. “This structure is a small piece of the Milky Way, but it could tell us something significant about the galaxy as a whole.”
In the meantime, for the love of god, someone call a galaxy doctor.
Surveillance footage at Skinwalker Ranch catches an inexplicable image: a UFO passing overhead right as bizarre events happen on the ground, in this scene from Season 1, “Surveillance.”
Een nieuwe robot kan van kleur veranderen zoals een kameleon. Dat doet die door een combinatie van nanodraadnetwerken en kleursensoren te gebruiken.
Artificiële camouflage imiteert de natuurlijke camouflage die te vinden is bij verschillende diersoorten. Een van de voorwaarden om artificiële camouflage goed te laten werken, is dat het een grote hoeveelheid kleuren moet kunnen weergeven en op bevel van kleur kan veranderen. Tot nu toe was dat een moeilijke opgave.
Seung Hwan Ko is professor aan het laboratorium voor toegepaste nano- en thermowetenschappen aan de Nationale Universiteit van Seoul in Korea. Hij past een nieuwe strategie1 toe door gebruik te maken van vloeibare kristallagen met nanodraadnetwerken. De kristallagen vangen licht op en reflecteren dat als verschillende kleuren. Samen met kleurensensoren en terugkoppelingscontrolesystemen maakten de professor een kunstmatige kameleonhuid en zette die op een robot. Het resultaat is een robot die in real time van kleur kan veranderen.
Er is nog meer onderzoek nodig om verschillende soorten textuur te kunnen herkennen en correct weer te kunnen geven. Deze ontdekking kan gevolgen hebben voor de volgende generatie van draagbare camouflagetechnologie.
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- Gemiddelde waardering: 0/5 - (0 Stemmen) Categorie:SF-snufjes }, Robotics and A.I. Artificiel Intelligence ( E, F en NL )
Hoe zal België eruitzien als de aarde blijft opwarmen?
Hoe zal België eruitzien als de aarde blijft opwarmen?
Wat betekent het voor België als de aardopwarming zich verder doorzet? Klimatoloog en glacioloog Philippe Huybrechts geeft antwoord. 'De ergste gevolgen voelen we over honderd jaar. Zo ongelooflijk ver is dat niet.'
In een spraakmakend rapport bevestigde het IPCC onlangs de link tussen klimaatverandering en weersextremen, zoals hittegolven, extreme neerslag en droogte. Philippe Huybrechts, professor klimatologie en glaciologie aan de Vrije Universiteit Brussel, werkte mee aan het rapport.
Welke gevolgen heeft de aardopwarming voor het klimaat in deze contreien?
‘Ongeveer tot het midden van de eeuw ligt dat al vast. Wat we ook doen met de uitstoot van broeikgasgassen, tot 2050 ligt het klimaat al vast. Daarna, aan het einde van de eeuw, zal het een groot verschil maken of we gestopt zijn broeikasgassen uit te stoten of niet. Op het einde van het IPCC-rapport vind je er een interactieve atlas waar je kunt zien wat de projecties zijn per regio. Dat is dan niet specifiek voor België, maar voor de regio West- en Centraal-Europa.’
'Vooral het stijgende zeeniveau is voor ons een probleem'
‘De atlas wordt voorgesteld ten opzichte van het globale warming level. Dat is de globale temperatuursverandering ten opzichte van de periode 1850-1900. Vandaag zitten we op een warming level van 1,1 graad. De andere belangrijke levels staan op 1,5 graden, 2 graden en 4 graden.'
‘De temperatuur zal in West-Europa altijd meer stijgen dan het globale gemiddelde. Dat komt omdat West-Europa vasteland is. Land warmt nu eenmaal sneller op dan de oceaan. In de projecties liggen we altijd ongeveer een graad hoger dan het gemiddelde. Hoeveel de temperatuur exact zal stijgen, hangt af van hoe we omgaan met broeikasgassen.’
Het probleem is niet alleen dat de temperatuur in het algemeen stijgt, maar dat de extremen ook vaker voorkomen?
‘We zullen inderdaad vaker extremen zien, en ze zullen intenser zijn. De patronen die we zien bij een opwarming van 1 graad, zien we ook bij 2 en 4 graden, alleen veel sterker.’
'Hoe warmer de temperatuur van de lucht, hoe meer neerslag die kan bevatten'
‘Een hittegolf die in de 19de eeuw één keer om de vijftig jaar voorkwam, zal bij een opwarming van 1 graad al vijf keer in vijftig jaar tijd voorkomen. Voor een opwarming van 2 graden komt die bijna veertien keer in vijftig jaar voor. Bij een opwarming van 4 graden is dat nog meer: bijna veertig keer per halve eeuw.’
‘De hittegolven worden intenser. Een hittegolf die maar één keer in vijftig jaar voorkomt, is bij 1 graad globale opwarming al 1,2 graden warmer, maar bij een algemene opwarming van 4 graden worden de hittegolven liefst 5,3 graden warmer.’
Krijgen we dan ook meer koudegolven?
‘Nee, we krijgen minder vorst en minder koudegolven. Dat is vandaag al het geval, en het zal zich in alle scenario's doorzetten. We krijgen meer hittegolven en minder koudegolven.’
Zullen de verschillen tussen seizoenen vervagen?
‘De seizoenen worden bepaald door de baan van de aarde rond de zon. Dat zal niet veranderen. Zelfs als de aarde met 3 graden opwarmt, dan nog zul je een temperatuurverschil zien tussen zomer en winter. Het is trouwens ook niet uitgesloten dat er geen koudere winters meer zullen zijn. Misschien dat er ooit nog een Elfstedentocht komt, maar de kans wordt alsmaar kleiner.’
'Je krijgt overstromingen als het langdurig hard regent. En die kans stijgt'
Hoe zit het met de neerslag?
‘In deze contreien zullen we weinig verschil zien in de gemiddelde jaarlijkse hoeveelheid neerslag. Dat is niet zo in Noord-Europa, waar er veel meer neerslag zal zijn. En in Zuid-Europa zal er net veel minder neerslag zijn. Voor ons is het een nuloperatie, al wordt de neerslag wel anders verdeeld. We krijgen er meer in de winter en minder in de zomer. In beide gevallen zullen we een verschil zien van ongeveer 10 procent. We krijgen langere droge periodes, maar als het eens regent, zullen de buien heviger zijn.’
'De dagelijkse maximale hoeveelheid neerslag zal toenemen. De extremen worden dus extremer. Ze zullen ook vaker voorkomen. Een zogeheten heavy precipitation event dat maar één keer voorkwam tussen 1850 en 1900 komt nu al 1,3 keer meer voor. Bij een opwarming van 2 graden zal dat 1,7 keer zijn. En bij een opwarming van 4 graden stijgt dat cijfer tot 2,7.’
'De ergste gevolgen voelen we over 100 jaar. Zo ongelooflijk ver is dat niet. De mensen die nu geboren worden, maken het mogelijk nog mee'
‘De intensiteit versterkt ook. Dat is een puur fysisch verschijnsel. Het heeft te maken met de hoeveelheid water die de lucht kan bevatten. Hoe warmer de luchttemperatuur, hoe meer vocht die kan bevatten. Die heavy precipitation events komen dan niet alleen vaker voor, ze worden ook natter.’
Krijgen we straks meer overstromingen te slikken?
‘Ja, het risico op overstromingen stijgt. Ik heb het dan wel over onze regio. In het Middellandse Zeegebied is dat bijvoorbeeld niet zo. Daar gaat alles sterk verdrogen.’
Wat gebeurt er met het zeeniveau?
‘Uit waarnemingen blijkt dat het niveau aan de Belgische kust ongeveer evenveel zal stijgen als het globale gemiddelde. Sinds 1900 is het globale zeeniveau met ongeveer 20 cm gestegen, dat is ook aan onze kust zo. Bij zwaar stormweer zal het niveau nog hoger liggen, wat het overstromingsrisico verder vergroot.’
'Het is niet dat een bos brand vat gewoon omdat het droog staat. Er moet ook een vonk zijn en dat is vaak het gevolg van mensen'
‘Als we bij een globale opwarming van 1,5 graden kunnen blijven, zal het zeeniveau deze eeuw nog met zo’n 30 centimeter stijgen. Als de aarde sterker opwarmt, dan kan het niveau stijgen met 1 meter, of meer. In het allerslechtste geval begint tegen het einde van deze eeuw de West-Antarctische ijskap in te storten. Dan kan het zeeniveau met 2 meter stijgen. Maar dat is geen deel van de projecties.'
‘Het zeeniveau reageert langzaam op klimaatverandering. De stijging zal daarom nog honderden of duizenden jaren blijven doorgaan. Als we de opwarming kunnen beperken tot 1,5 graden, dan stijgt het zeeniveau aan het einde van de eeuw weliswaar met ongeveer 30 centimeter, maar na tweeduizend jaar zal het alsnog zijn gestegen met 2 tot 6 meter.'
‘En als de opwarming zich doorzet, dan zal het water nog verder stijgen. Dat is de verandering die mij het meeste zorgen baart. De stijging zal traag gaan, maar ze zal niet te stoppen zijn - wat we ook doen. Alleen een volgende ijstijd kan daar dan verandering in brengen.’
Hoezeer zou het zeeniveau moeten stijgen voordat in de Lage Landen overstromingsgevaar dreigt?
‘Met de huidige dijken hebben we niet zoveel overschot. Misschien een halve meter. Dijkverhogingen en andere maatregelen zijn hoe dan ook noodzakelijk.'
Krijgen we straks in de Ardennen bosbranden zoals die in Griekenland en de Verenigde Staten?
‘We kunnen er zelfs in Vlaanderen mee worden geconfronteerd. Dat gebied is minder bosrijk, maar er is genoeg heide die snel vuur kan vatten.’
‘Er zijn drie factoren die moeten samenspelen om een bos gevoelig te maken voor brand. Het moet heel warm zijn. Het moet lang droog geweest zijn. En er moet een felle wind zijn. De eerste twee elementen zullen vaker voorkomen in de toekomst. Dat is al voldoende om het risico op bosbranden te doen stijgen.’
'Vlaanderen heeft niet zoveel bos, maar wel heide die snel in brand vliegt'
‘Het probleem is wel iets ingewikkelder dan dat. Het is niet dat een bos brand vat gewoon omdat het droog staat. Er moet ook een vonk zijn en dat is vaak het gevolg van mensen. Kijk maar naar wat er recent gebeurde in Brecht, nadat het Belgische leger er oefende met brandbare tracers. De hele heide vatte vlam.’
‘Goed bosbeheer kan het risico op bosbranden reduceren. Dat kan, bijvoorbeeld, door droge takken op te rapen. Ook corridors in de bossen maken helpt. Op die manier kan het vuur niet zo gemakkelijk overslaan naar andere delen van het bos. Dat is zo in de Ardennen.’
Waarop mogen we hopen voor België als we voldoende maatregelen treffen?
‘België is maar een klein land. We moeten globaal actie ondernemen. Als we er wereldwijd in slagen om tegen 2050 geen broeikasgassen meer uit te stoten en misschien zelfs een negatieve emissie realiseren door CO2 uit de lucht te halen, dan kunnen we de opwarming beperken tot 1,5 graden. Nu zitten we op 1,1 graden - veel marge is er niet meer. Bij een opwarming van 1,5 graden wordt het iets warmer dan vandaag, iets extremer. Je ziet nu al hoeveel schade dat kan veroorzaken: vorige zomer droogde alles op, en deze zomer loopt alles onder.’
Wat gebeurt er als we niets doen?
‘Als we naar een opwarming van 4 graden zouden gaan, komen we in een hele andere wereld terecht. Die kan ik mij niet goed voorstellen. Dan wordt het in ieder geval erg. We krijgen zeer extreem weer in alle richtingen. Vooral het zeeniveau wordt dan een probleem. Ik denk dat we Vlaanderen dan uiteindelijk zullen moeten ontruimen. Grote stukken van de wereld zullen onleefbaar worden door de combinatie van zeer extreme hitte en hoge vochtigheid.’
'België is maar een kleine speler. Er moet globaal actie ondernomen worden'
‘En, ja, dat is pas over 100 jaar, maar de mensen die nu geboren worden, leven waarschijnlijk nog in 2100. Zo ongelooflijk ver is het niet.’
Kunnen wij op individueel vlaak genoeg doen om een impact hebben?
‘Ik zal daar het volgende op zeggen: ik denk niet dat we er gaan geraken door alleen een beroep te doen op individuele verantwoordelijkheid. Minder vlees eten en met de fiets gaan, kan natuurlijk geen kwaad, maar dat is niet de grote oplossing.’
‘Om van die uitstoot af te geraken, hebben we vooral een sterk beleid nodig. We hebben een overheid nodig die regels oplegt en ons gedrag stuurt. De mensen moeten er wel ontvankelijk voor zijn. Ze moeten meewerken in het verhaal. Ik zeg altijd dat het meest effectieve is om op de juiste mensen te stemmen, degenen met het krachtigste klimaatbeleid. Door er een individuele verantwoordelijkheid van te maken, geef je mensen alleen maar schuldgevoelens. Mensen maken keuzes die voor hen het meest voordelig of gemakkelijk zijn. De overheid moet dus de juiste keuzes het meest aantrekkelijk te maken. Maak, bijvoorbeeld, de treinverbindingen beter en goedkoper zodat er minder met vliegtuigen wordt gevlogen.’
In een ideale situatie, wat zijn de beste stappen die de overheid kan nemen?
‘Dat gaat over zoveel zaken. Als we kijken naar België: waar zit de grote uitstoot? Die zit in transport, in de verwarming van de huizen, in de opwekking van elektriciteit en in de industrie. In de industrie wordt dat aangepakt door er een prijs op te plakken met de Koolstofmarkt. Als je warmte met fossiele brandstoffen opwekt, moet je daar een boete voor betalen. Dat stimuleert om het productieproces zodanig te veranderen dat je die boete kan vermijden.’
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A Super Civilization Existed in Prehistory, then Something BIG Happened
A Super Civilization Existed in Prehistory, then Something BIG Happened
Intelligent people lived up to 100,000 years ago.
Evidence found in ancient documents maps appears to suggest the existence in remote times, before the rise of the known cultures, of a truly worldwide culture.
Now we know what happened to them and where we might find remnants of their culture!
Looking up at the night sky and its beauty can be baffling and intriguing experience for many.
But aside from this beauty, there can be something scary out there? Or maybe not scary. As Arthur C. Clarke said, “We are either alone in this universe or we are not.
“What do you think is the strangest-looking cryptid creature?” That was pretty much the question put to me a few weeks ago while doing radio. It’s a good question! After all, there are multiple creatures in the field of Cryptozoology. I have to admit, though that some are much stranger than others. Let’s have a look at some of them. Their weirdness just might surprise you! Sometimes a monster is described as being so incredibly strange that we can do very little beyond than relate the facts – chiefly because the available facts are so strange and near-unfathomable, in terms of what they might represent. A perfect example of just such a uniquely weird case dates back to the 1950s. In terms of the location, all we know for sure is that it was somewhere in the vicinity of Falls City, Richardson County, Nebraska. As for the witness, we know him only as “John Hanks,” an admitted pseudonym that the man in question chose to use to protect his real identity. When you read the details of his experience, you will undoubtedly realize why the man was determined to protect his real name from prying, inquiring eyes. It’s a case that was carefully investigated by one of the world’s foremost experts on bizarre, flying beasts, Ken Gerhard.
It was late one night, at some point in the latter part of 1956, said Hanks, when he came face to face with a true giant; a creature in excess of nine feet in height, one that was humanoid in shape, but which most certainly could never be termed a member of the human race. That much, at least, we can ascertain from Hanks’ description. Ken Gerhard says, with a great deal of justification, that “[Hanks’] description of the creature sounds reminiscent of something out of an H.P. Lovecraft story.” Ken is not wrong in suggesting that Hanks’ monster would have found itself right at home in the pages of one of the legendary horror maestro’s novels. In fact, Gerhard is right on target. Hanks’ nightmarish thing had a pair of fifteen-foot-wide wings that, rather oddly, appeared to be made of bright, shining, aluminum! It was soon gone, high into the sky, and gone. That case has to be near the top of the weird list!
Dragons on the Loose!
Now, onto another strange one: a fascinating story of nothing less than a real-life dragon can be found in the pages of Charles Igglesden’s 1906 book, A Saunter Through Kent With Pen & Pencil. Kent being a county in southern England. Of a dragon reportedly seen in Cranbrook, Kent, centuries earlier, Igglesden wrote: “The magnificently wooded park of a hundred and fifty acres is richly watered by a huge lake made in 1812 and a smaller one within the grounds, while further west is an old mill pond that rejoices in a curious legend. It is an old one and the subject of it is very ancient indeed and as rare as it is horrible.” He continued that nothing less than a flying dragon was said to haunt the pond but that “on certain – or uncertain – nights of the year it wings its flight over the park and pays a visit to the big lake yonder. But he always returns to the Mill Pond and it is said to pay special attention of a vicious kind to young men and women who have jilted their lovers. A legend with a moral is this. But a winged dragon! A dragon of the ordinary kind is bad enough. But a flying dragon! Augh!”
An undeniably odd beast with paranormal abilities is the Bunyip. It’s a “thing” that hides in the swamps of Australia. Back in the mid-1800s, the staff of the Geelong Advertiser gave its readers a description of the weird-whatsit: “The Bunyip, then, is represented as uniting the characteristics of a bird and of an alligator. It has a head resembling an emu, with a long bill, at the extremity of which is a transverse projection on each side, with serrated edges like the bone of the stingray. Its body and legs partake of the nature of the alligator. The hind legs are remarkably thick and strong, and the fore legs are much longer, but still of great strength. The extremities are furnished with long claws, but the blacks say its usual method of killing its prey is by hugging it to death. When in the water it swims like a frog, and when on shore it walks on its hind legs with its head erect, in which position it measures twelve or thirteen feet in height.”
Beware of the Bunyip
And, finally: make mention of UFOs and it will likely conjure up imagery of flying saucers and diminutive, black-eyed, large headed ETs, and alien abductions. At least some UFOs, however, may have absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with visitors from far away solar-systems and galaxies. Welcome to the world of a man named Trevor James Constable. Having investigated the UFO phenomenon extensively, Constable penned two books on the subject. They Live in the Sky was published in 1958 and Sky Creatures followed two decades later. In deeply studying the UFO phenomenon, Constable came to a fascinating conclusion concerning what he believed to be the truth of the mystery surrounding flying saucers. Constable’s conclusion was that UFOs are not nuts-and-bolts craft from distant worlds, but living creatures that inhabit the highest levels of the Earth’s atmosphere. While many UFO investigators scoffed at Constable’s undeniably unique ideas, none could deny that his theory was well thought out. To be sure, the field of Cryptozoology is filled with bizarre and mysterious beasts!
Anunnaki Kings 2021 | The Devil & War Of The Gods - Dragons & Serpents In The Bible via The 5th Kind
Anunnaki Kings 2021 | The Devil & War Of The Gods - Dragons & Serpents In The Bible via The 5th Kind
Anunnaki Kings 2021 | The Devil. War Of The Gods – Dragons & Serpents In The Bible via The 5th Kind
Annunaki – 450,000 years ago our ancestors descended from the heavens to engineer the first human beings. To us they were Giants that ruled as Gods over mankind. Now new evidence and scientific research acknowledges their existence on earth but reveals when they will return.
The truth of their real origin and purpose is much more bizarre and amazing than anything previously believed. From the Garden of Eden to the Great Flood; from the God of the Bible to the secrets of Enoch all shall be revealed. 2017 Philip Gardener
What is it? Something Bizarre in the Sky Sighted Over Anaheim, California
What is it? Something Bizarre in the Sky Sighted Over Anaheim, California
In Anaheim, California , residents have been thrown into a fright after a bizarre story emerged regarding peoples being scared at a street location by what has been described as a “strange UFO”.
That and more strange events caught on tape. Real or fake?
The debate over extraterrestrial life has shifted from fringe to mainstream.
The belief that humans eventually will encounter aliens is based on two assumptions: (a) life evolves easily, and (b) interstellar travel is possible and practical.
Neither of these assumptions is likely to be true.
When I was a kid, there was an older guy who frequented our local McDonald's and always carried around a box full of random papers and a fly swatter. He was an archetype of the UFO enthusiast — sort of a kook but a lot of fun to talk to.
In the 1990s, there was something of an alien abduction craze that swept the country. The popular show Unsolved Mysteries featured them, and an entire TV series, The X-Files, was built around the belief that extraterrestrial life had taken a keen (and perhaps malevolent) interest in Earth. (Of course, the aliens were also working in collaboration with the U.S. federal government.)
However, outside of popular culture, few serious intellectuals took the notion of aliens seriously. It certainly was not a major academic topic. The prevailing view was that life is uncommon throughout the universe, and Earth just might be the only planet lucky enough to have it.
Today, the exact opposite view prevails. Thanks to advances in astrophysics, we now know that there are billions of exoplanets in the Milky Way alone, leading most of the scientific community to conclude that life probably does exist elsewhere in the universe. Those who do not believe so are now considered the kooks. And while alien abductions are still not in the mainstream, UFOs are — so much so that the U.S. intelligence community just issued a report on them.
It does not matter if intelligent alien life exists elsewhere in the universe. We will never find them, and they will never find us. In other words, we are effectively alone in the universe.
The academic debate now is not whether life exists but in what form. Many scientists assume that the commonest form of life is microbial — a fair assumption, given that on Earth, humans are a relatively modern invention while microbes have been around for 3.5 billion years — so many astrobiologists are spending their days examining the atmospheres of exoplanets for telltale signs of bacteria-like creatures.
Still, others have gone further and pontificated on what, if it exists, alien intelligent life might be like. The late Stephen Hawking argued that contacting aliens is not wise because, just like in the movie Independence Day, they are probably plotting to come to Earth, break our stuff, and steal our resources. Dr. Hawking warned, "One day we might receive a signal from a planet like Gliese 832c, but we should be wary of answering back."
I suppose this is all fun to think and talk about, but the alien debate suffers from a serious lack of perspective. If there is any chance of humans encountering alien life, at least two extremely unlikely things must be true:
Life evolves easily. Decades of research have yielded little in the way of identifying the mechanism of abiogenesis — the formation of life from non-living matter. There are several different theories on the origin of life, and none of them are any good. In the laboratory, we have had some success in creating biomolecules such as amino acids from gaseous precursors; the Miller-Urey experiment is the most famous of these. But scientists have yet to come even close to reproducing life in the laboratory. This strongly implies that life does not evolve easily.
But even if we were to cede the point that life can evolve easily given enough time, there is another problem: the vast majority of exoplanets are inhospitable to life. New research suggests that most stars are incapable of supporting plant life via photosynthesis. Harvesting a star's energy is the first step for the evolution of life, but evolution cannot even get started if there is not enough of it.
Interstellar travel is possible and practical. This, in my opinion, is even more unlikely than the easy evolution of life. We know life evolved at least once (here on Earth), but we have no idea if interstellar travel is possible. Sure, we could get on a spaceship today and head for a planet orbiting the nearest star, Proxima Centauri, but we better pack a lot of fun-sized bags of pretzels because it will take about 6,300 years to get there.
The notion that we will develop (or that some advanced alien civilization has already developed) the ability to easily traverse the galaxy is pure speculation. It is physically impossible to travel at the speed of light, though it may be possible to travel at a substantial fraction of the speed of light. Still, even if light speed was possible, the distances between stars is nearly unfathomable. Traveling at the speed of light, Proxima Centauri is still more than four years away; the other side of the galaxy is over 100,000 years away.
"Theoretically possible" does not mean "probable"
Sci-fi enthusiasts note that unknown technologies may develop, such as the ability to warp the fabric of spacetime or to travel through a wormhole. But again, these suggestions are purely speculative. Other than some fancy math that suggests such maneuvers could theoretically be possible, we have no idea if either can actually happen. Just because unicorns and mermaids are theoretically possible does not mean that they exist.
What about black holes? Perhaps we could dive into one and pop out somewhere else. For the sake of argument, let's say that we know that is absolutely true. The trouble is that the closest black hole to Earth that we know of is 1,500 light-years away.
Putting all this together, the sobering conclusion is that it does not matter if intelligent alien life exists elsewhere in the universe. We will never find them, and they will never find us. In other words, we are effectively alone in the universe.
Fox Nation documentary "The Secrets of Area 51" explores what the U.S. government might be hiding.
UFO sightings, signs of alien life and unsolved mysteries behind the confines of Area 51 all beg an answer to the question: Are we alone in the Universe?
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Fox Nation programs are viewable on-demand and from your mobile device app, but only for Fox Nation subscribers. Go to Fox Nation to start a free trial and watch the extensive library from your favorite Fox News personalities.
Ingenuity snaps a picture of its shadow as it flies over South Séítah.
NASA/JPL
NASA's Ingenuity helicopter has done the dozen. Not content to just prove it could fly on Mars, the chopper is now making itself a valuable contributor on the red planet, helping the rover Perseverance in its mission to find signs of ancient microbial life. Rising 32ft above the surface of Mars on Sunday evening, the chopper completed flight 12 in 169 seconds. Nice!
The chopper flew over a region called "South Seitah," an area that's home to boulders and rocky outcrops of interest to the Perseverance rover team. NASA's JPL called the region a "geological wonder."
"Flying over Seitah South carries substantial risk because of the varied terrain," Ingenuity team lead Teddy Tzanetos wrote in a status update prior to the flight on Sunday. The helicopter's navigation system was designed to work with relatively flat terrain, so making sense out of rougher landscapes can be a challenge. The rotorcraft has run into some technical difficulties, but survived them all so far.
"When we choose to accept the risks associated with such a flight, it is because of the correspondingly high rewards," Tzanetos said Sunday. "Knowing that we have the opportunity to help the Perseverance team with science planning by providing unique aerial footage is all the motivation needed."
The risks of flight 12 were easily managed by Ingenuity, which hasn't stopped delivering record flights since it first took to the air back on April 20.
Enlarge ImageThis image shows the path of the Perseverance rover in gray and the Ingenuity helicopter in green as it aims to get a look at South Seitah for its 12th flight.
NASA/JPL-Caltech
Ingenuity's mission has been all about risks and rewards. It was an unknown whether the helicopter would even work on Mars.
It not only works, but is also now showing how an aerial vehicle can act as a valuable scout for a ground-based rover. Flight 12, in particular, should prove extremely valuable for the Perseverance team. Scouting ahead and examining for potentially dangerous or interesting terrain makes for a much more efficient -- and safe -- rover journey. Just think of all the extra science that can be done when you're not wasting time trying to determine which way you should roll your rover!
Perseverance is expected to meet up with Ingenuity in the coming days and NASA's scientists will examine the images to determine which rocks they should be examining next. Further flights for Ingenuity have not yet been detailed by NASA but its next sojourn, number 13, will likely concern the superstitious.
But going by its first dozen flights, there doesn't seem too much to worry about.
There have been plenty of UFO cases and reports from the skies above our heads, but this seems to be far from the end of such unearthly phenomena. One are of supposed alien phenomena that doesn’t seem to get as much attention is that of strange things beneath the waters of out world. Known as USOs, meaning “Unidentified Submerged Objects,” or also “Unidentified Submersible Objects,” these are those fleetingly glimpsed “underwater UFOs” which are seen roaming about and entering and exiting oceans or lakes to create just as much awe and wonder as their airborne brethren. Here we will look at a selection or truly strange cases of unidentified submarine craft zipping about and inspiring wonder and debate.
Some earlier reports of USOs were mentioned in the book Unexplained!, by Jerome Clark, the earliest coming from all the way back in 1924, before the idea of UFOs was even really a thing. On July 1 of that year, pilot D.P. Lott and a photographer by the name of R.A. Smith were flying a small aircraft over the Hudson River, New York, when they saw below them two enormous mysterious objects in the water, each one estimated as being around 250 feet in length and travelling parallel to each other through the waves. The objects were described as being cylindrical in shape and with pointed ends, both leaving an “arrow-shaped wake” in their paths as they lumbered through. After some period of observation, the two massive objects submerged out of sight. It would later turn out that the Navy had no submarines scheduled to be in the area, and even if they did, these things were much larger than any known submarine of the era. The sighting remains unexplained.
In 1945 we have the case of the U.S. Army transport Delanof, which was off the coast of Alaska when an immense round object about 200 feet in diameter allegedly ominously emerged from the sea to loom over the water. It then purportedly turned to face the ship, then circled silently around them a few times as if examining them, before flying off out of sight. In 1947, Norwegian explorer Thor Heyerdahl was on his vessel in the South Pacific, capturing dolphins somewhere between South America and the Polynesian islands, and he and his crew saw “the shine of phosphorescent eyes drifting on the surface” several nights in a row. No one could figure it out, then one night, things would get stranger, of which he would say:
On one single occasion, we saw the sea boil and bubble while something like a big wheel came up and rotated in the air, while of our dolphins tried to escape by hurling themselves desperately through space.
The object then hovered a while before disappearing into the murky sea once again. In 1954 there is a report from the crew of the Dutch ship the Groote Beer, who observed a “flat, moon-shaped object” rise from beneath the grey waves near Long Island, New York. Captain Jan P. Boshoff would describe it as being gray, metallic, and having a ring of lights along its edge. It then flew off out of sight. Curiously, at around the same time, a strange sight was allegedly seen by the Honduran freighter Aliki P., which reported it as a “ball of fire moving in and out of the water without being extinguished, trailing white smoke and moving in erratic course. It is unknown if this could have been the same object witnessed by the Groote Beer.
The following year, in 1955, a couple by the name of the Bordes were out rowing at the Titicus Reservoir in Westchester County, New York, at around 1:30 a.m. when a rose-colored, luminous sphere rose from the water just a few feet from their boat and floated off towards shore, after which it rose sharply and then disappeared down into the water with a loud splash. It was eerie enough that the couple decided to call it a night and head back to shore. As they rowed along, eyes glued to the placid surface of the lake, they saw around 200 yards away two “parallel lights, wavy in shape but rigid, thirty feet in length” moving under the surface. Above these shapes was a “round light of lesser brilliance,” which was over the water but not hovering, rather seemingly attached to a larger body beneath, which could be seen as a “dim grey shape against the blackness.” When the couple reached the shore, they saw that the things was still out there, but when they returned some time later it was gone. They would insist it was not another boat out there with them.
From the 1960s we have a strange case that was mentioned in the book Invisible Residents, by Ivan Sanderson. The incident allegedly happened in 1963 off the coast of Puerto Rico, where the U.S. Navy was at the time conducting an anti-submarine warfare exercise. The command ship at the time was the anti-submarine warfare carrier USS Wasp, along with a fleet of five smaller vessels, mostly destroyers, and an unknown number of submarines below. It began when one of the sonar stations on one of the destroyers noticed that one of the submarines had broken formation and appeared to be pursuing a smaller, fast-moving unidentified object. This smaller object was reported as moving in excess of 150 knots, and would apparently lurk about the area for several days, zipping about underwater and tracked by both Naval ships and anti-submarine warfare patrol aircraft. The mysterious object was reported as doing maneuvers and travelling at speeds far beyond any submarine technology, as well as doing sudden, rapid dives to depths of up to 27,000 feet. Apparently visual confirmation was never made, so it is difficult to tell what this thing could have been.
In August of 1965 we have the case of the Soviet steamship Raduga, which was doing maneuver in the Red Sea when they had a rather bizarre encounter. It was reported that the crew observed a “fiery sphere” estimated as 60 meters in diameter spectacularly shoot out from underwater to hover over the waves for a time. It was noted that its exit from the water had caused a huge pillar of water to erupt forth with it. After a few minutes of hovering there motionlessly, the craft then smashed down into the water, leaving turbulence and roiling waves. Also in the 1960s was a report from a Marine at Guantanamo Bay, who would claim that personnel at the base would routinely see strange lights both in the sky and underwater, sometimes measuring up to 100 feet in length, but that they were always told not to discuss it. Years later, he would say of his experiences:
When I stood guard duty on the south side of the base, I witnessed on many, many nights UFOs landing and taking off out of the ocean. There were large blue lights moving around after their landing in the ocean and then slowly dimming down as they obviously descended deeper.
Yet another case from the files of the National UFO Recording Center (NUFORC) supposedly happened in 1964 at Laguna Beach, California. The witness claims to have gone to take a walk on the beach when he had a very weird experience. He explains what happened:
A long wooden stair case led down the cliffs to the beach and the waves appeared to be in the cliffs’ shadow from Highway 1 headlights. I saw a series of lights glowing from behind the waves about 5 feet apart and 8 inches in diameter. It/they gave the appearance of portholes on the side of a submersible. I have no explanation. When they interviewed a CA lighthouse keeper on the radio (his station was becoming automated – and you had to walk through a tunnel to reach it) and asked him if in all of his years of watching the surf he had seen anything strange – he reported seeing the same thing — with no idea what it could be.
From the 1970s there was an account given by an Admiral V.A. Domislovsky, chief of the Pacific Fleet’s Intelligence Department of the Soviet Navy. He would report that he had witnessed a gigantic cylindrical object around 800-900 meters long, which hovered over the water and emitted swarms of smaller flying objects “like bees from a beehive.” These smaller objects were then claimed to have shot down into the eater to disappear for a time, before flying back out and back into the larger “mothership.” This happened several times, after which the colossal ship loaded up all of the smaller craft and flew off at terrific speed.
In more recent decades there have been various other reports of USOs as well. From the files of NUFORC is one from February of 2007, reported by a witness who says that at the time she had been aboard a cruise ship “Damn Princess,” heading back to San Francisco from a cruise of the Mexican Riviera. As they passed Half Moon Bay, she claims to have had a very otherworldly experience, of which she says:
I was coughing up a storm at ~2 A.M., and my husband went to find a hot lemonade. I was awake anyway, so I pulled back the curtains and stood in the window to watch the ship’s churning water – mesmerizing! After about 5 minutes, three softly glowing objects came into view – three uniform, nearly spherical objects, evenly spaced in a line parallel to the ship’s hull and hovering just above the water surface. Based on the appearance of dolphins from the window, and of people seen standing on piers, I’d say that these spheres were somewhat larger – maybe 12-15’ high. Perfectly smooth, and with a pale bluish-white glow. They appeared to stay in one place while the ship moved past them. They were hovering, but didn’t disturb the water below them. Just as they went out of my sight, the left one (toward the bow) splashed down into the water and disappeared.
Of course, I hadn’t thought to tear myself away from the window to get the cell phone or camera (both in the safe, and of doubtful use through a window at night…). And, of course, three more glowing spheres, hovering in a straight line along the edge of the wake, came past the window 2 minutes later! 4-5 minutes after that, two more spheres were seen, but farther away from the ship. The first and second groups had been located just where the ship’s wake or foam line ends. The last group was about twice as far away. The “bow-ward” of these last two also dropped down into the water and disappeared. I was still standing at the window, in amazement, when my husband came back with lemon tea. I told him about the spheres, and we watched for a while, but no more sightings.
Another report from NUFORC happened as recently as 2017. In March of that year, a group of unnamed witnesses aboard an oil rig offshore supply ship (OSV) in the Gulf of Mexico, about 80 miles southeast of New Orleans, when they saw something very bizarre indeed. They claim that an immense, oval-shaped object estimated as being more than five times bigger than the 240-foot ship they were on rose up out of the ocean, yet oddly appeared to not be wet. The massive object was completely silent, and rose to hover around 30 feet over the waves before rapidly ascending out of sight at a 30-degree angle.
That very same year we have a report from the Mutual UFO Network (MUFON) which comes from Green Bay, a sub-basin of Lake Michigan, at the mouth of the Fox River near Little Suamico in Wisconsin. The unnamed witness claims that on November 18, 2017, he was at the lake when he observed a triangular-shaped UFO measuring around 100 to 150 feet in diameter emerge from the water. Susan Birttnen, of Wisconsin MUFON, would say of the report:
He reports they witnessed a triangular-shaped object fly out of the water of Green Bay, traveling at approximately 35 knots. It was so close that they could hear a muffled jet sound. As it came out of the water it turned on its side as it traveled west and gained elevation. The color was dark and it had blue flashing lights. The elevation was at 500 feet and the distance was less than 1,000 feet. The side of the triangle was between 100 to 150 feet. Based on the evidence and the data provided by the witness, I conclude that this case is in the unknown category.
What was this thing? Who knows? Lastly, we have our most recent report yet, logged in 2021 from the skies over Leeward, Oahu, in Hawaii. In January of that year, numerous witnesses began calling 911 reporting seeing a glowing blue oblong mass and a smaller white light darting about the sky, before the blue one went crashing into the water below. One witness only known as Moriah would tell Hawaii News Now of her own sighting of the spectacle playing out in the sky:
I look up and then I was like oh s***! I started calling my husband and them because they were all in the garage. I was like hey. Come look up there. See if you see what I see. They all said yea! I don’t know what it was. This one was going so fast. It went land in the water. Whatever it is. We called 911. For have like one cop or somebody for come out and come check em out. My husband went look up and he seen the white one coming. The white one was smaller. Was coming in the same direction as the blue one.
After the blue one had gone into the sea, the smaller white one then apparently shot off over the mountain to disappear. Numerous people in the area reported the same thing to police, with several people even taking video footage of it all. In the meantime, officials from the Federal Aviation Administration insisted that there had been no aircraft incident or accident in the area of the sightings, and no reports of a missing airplane. All of these reports leave us with some rather perplexing mysteries. What is there, if anything, roaming about under the waves of out seas and lakes? What do they want and why are they hiding beneath the waves? There is no way to know the answers, but reports of USOs keep coming in, and it is a curious subspecies of UFO report that perhaps deserves more attention than it has received.
ALL RELATED VIDEOS, selected and posted by peter2011
The question of whether or not there is or ever was life on Mars remains unanswered and we may not know for a while longer as NASA’s Perseverance Rover’s first attempt at collecting samples to return to Earth came up empty – literally! On August 6th, the rover drilled into the Martian ground but was unable to collect any rock or dirtfrom the Red Planet.
But there may be another way to find out if Mars ever had life. In a new paper by scientists Ryuki Hyodo and Tomohiro Usui from the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), they claimed that Mars’ moon Phobos may provide the answer regarding the possibility of ancient life on the Red Planet and that the upcoming 2024 launch of the Martian Moons eXploration (MMX) mission should help with getting that information as the spacecraft will collect samples from the moon’s regolith to return to Earth.
Phobos photographed by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter in 2008.
So, why Phobos? Since Mars had sustained numerous meteor impacts over billions of years that would have flung pieces of the planet into space, some of that debris may have landed on its moon. And in that debris, there may be evidence of organic molecules, chemical biosignatures, fossilized microorganisms, and even DNA.
This is actually quite possible as we have found fragments of Mars right here on Earth with the meteorite named Allan Hills 84001 (or ALH 84001). The meteorite, which was discovered in Antarctica back in 1984 by geologists, was believed to have formed 4 billion years ago on the Red Planet and crashed into Earth around 13,000 years ago.
The debris that possibly flew into Phobos from meteor impacts may provide scientists with all of the important factors in searching for past life on the Red Planet as Hyodo and Usui explained, “The random nature of the crater-forming impacts on Mars statistically delivers all possible Martian materials, from sedimentary to igneous rocks that cover all of its geological eras.”
Close-up of Phobos in 1998.
If there was life on Mars and if it was thrown into space by an impact, it is probably dead by now, so that’s why the MMX craft will be looking to collect Sterilized and Harshly Irradiated Genes, and Ancient Imprints (or SHIGAI which means “dead remains” in Japanese).
Based on how close the moon is to its planet, debris from Mars could have certainly made its way there. Discovered by astronomer Asaph Hall in 1877, Phobos is the larger of Mars’ two moons (the other is named Deimos), measuring 17 by 14 by 11 miles (27 by 22 by 18 kilometers). It is so close to the planet that it completes three orbits each Earth day and it is constantly moving closer to Mars at a rate of 6 feet (1.8 meters) every hundred years.
DE DRIE BEKENDSTE UFO-INCIDENTEN UIT DE GESCHIEDENIS
DE DRIE BEKENDSTE UFO-INCIDENTEN UIT DE GESCHIEDENIS
In de geschiedenis over Ufo’s doen vooral op het internet ontelbare theorieën, verhalen en getuigenissen de ronde. We beperken ons tot de samenvatting van het (internationaal) bekendste drietal en beroepen ons daarvoor op Wikipedia als wellicht meest betrouwbare bron.
1. Aurora
Het Aurora-incident is het oudste gedocumenteerde crash-mysterie rondom een ufo. Het incident vond plaats bij Aurora, Texas op 17 april 1897, iets meer dan 50 jaar vóór het bekendere Roswellincident (zie verder onder 2). Een “kogelvormig voorwerp” zou uit het niets na een botsing met de windmolen op het terrein van de plaatselijke rechter Proctor zijn neergestort en ontploft. Omwonenden konden volgens de overlevering de enige inzittende redden, maar deze overleed enkele uren later en werd begraven op de plaatselijke begraafplaats. Het incident kreeg destijds veel publiciteit in de pers, maar raakte snel in de vergetelheid. In het kader van de Amerikaanse televisieserie “UFO Hunters” onderzochten wetenschappers en ufologen het incident in Aurora. Ze deden daarbij diverse ontdekkingen, maar vonden geen onomstotelijk bewijs. Wel vonden ze het vermeende graf van de “piloot”, maar ze kregen geen toestemming om het te openen.
In 1979, zowat 80 jaar na het incident, beweerde Etta Pegues, toen 86, dat de schrijver van het krantenartikel over ‘Aurora’ dit gedaan had als grap om de stad Aurora, die op doodbloeden stond, op de kaart te zetten. Volgens Pegues zou rechter Proctor zelfs nooit een windmolen gehad hebben. In de aan het incident gewijde uitzending van “UFO Hunters” werden aan de hand van de beschrijvingen uit 1897 op het voormalige terrein van rechter Proctor echter wel de fundamenten en enkele resten van een windmolen gevonden. In de waterput, waarin restanten van het vermeende voertuig volgens de overlevering waren gestort, troffen ze delen van aluminium en een onbekende metaalsoort aan… Verdere opheldering werd nooit gevonden.
2. Roswell
Ufo of weerballon? In juli 1947 zou er op een boerderij nabij Roswell een opmerkelijke gebeurtenis hebben plaatsgevonden die aanvankelijk korte tijd voor wereldnieuws zorgde. Er zou een Ufo neergestort zijn met inzittenden aan boord. De resten werden in het nabijgelegen legerkamp geborgen. Een dag later kwam de persdienst van het “Roswell Army Air Field” (RAAF) met een communiqué waarin werd gesproken over (slechts) een neergestorte weerballon. Daarna werd het meer dan dertig jaar stil. Pas in 1978 kwam het Roswellincident weer in het nieuws toen de bekende Canadese ufo-onderzoeker Stanton Friedman in contact kwam met oud-majoor Jesse Marcel. Marcel was in 1947 betrokken geweest bij de berging van de resten van wat de luchtmacht een ‘weerballon’ had genoemd. Als majoor op rust verklaart Marcel in 1978 tegenover Friedman, dat het 30 jaar geleden geen weerballon was geweest, maar tóch een buitenaards ruimtevaartuig… Friedman vond in Roswell nog tientallen andere getuigen, onder wie zelfs een generaal, die allen de lezing van Marcel bevestigden. Friedman schreef een boek waarna nog meer getuigen zich meldden en er nog tientallen andere boeken verschenen.
Nieuwe verklaringen De discussie rond het Roswellincident, die tot op vandaag nog altijd aanhoudt, leidde destijds tot vragen in het Amerikaanse congres en lokte een nieuwe verklaring van de Amerikaanse luchtmacht uit. Twintig jaar na de verklaringen van majoor Marcel, in 1998, presenteerde de US Air Force een nieuwe uitleg in een persconferentie die zelfs door CNN rechtstreeks werd uitgezonden. Daarin kwam de luchtmacht met het “Project Mogul-verhaal”. De crash was toch niet die van een weerballon, maar “van een veel grotere spionageballon, waarmee de Amerikanen de Russische vorderingen op nucleair gebied trachtten te monitoren”. In 2006 presenteert de luchtmacht echter een derde verklaring voor het Roswellincident. Volgens de laatste lezing is er nu sprake van een crash van een cockpitdummy met etalagepoppen. De nieuwe verklaring en vooral het voortdurend wijzigen van de uitleg van de overheid heeft de aanhangers van een Ufo-theorie er nog meer van overtuigd, dat er in Roswell meer is gebeurd dan dat wat de luchtmacht hen telkens opnieuw voorhoudt. Interessant detail bij deze ganse geschiedenis is dat in de jaren veertig in Roswell de enige kernbommen van de wereld waren opgeslagen. Roswell was vanaf november 1945 bovendien de basis van de twee vliegtuigen die in augustus 1945 de atoombommen boven Hiroshima en Nagasaki hebben afgeworpen. Moesten deze uiterst geheime activiteiten mogelijk achter een Ufoverhaal schuil gaan?
Zoektocht naar uitleg In zijn in 2000 verschenen boek “The Roswell UFO Crash” onderzocht Karl Korff 16 jaar lang naar de waarheid achter deze geheimzinnige story. Hij geloofde dat, als dit alles werkelijk gebeurd zou zijn als beweerd, dit dan zeker de grootste door een regering geregisseerde doofpotaffaire aller tijden zou zijn. Maar hij reconstrueerde stuk voor stuk de werkelijke gang van zaken. Hij ondervroeg getuigen, consulteerde geheime documenten en stelde zich vooral zeer kritisch op. Zijn theorie is dat het hier wellicht toch over een neergestorte ballon ging, maar dan wel geen gewone. Het geciteerde ‘Project Mogul’ was in die tijd een ultrageheim project waarbij ketens van ballonnen werden opgelaten voorzien van instrumenten bestemd voor het vergaren van gevoelige informatie. De clusters van ballonnen zorgden ervoor dat ze op een redelijk constante hoogte bleven zweven in plaats van alsmaar verder te stijgen in de atmosfeer. Project-Mogul startte direct na afloop van de Tweede Wereldoorlog en was bedoeld om te achterhalen hoe ver de Russen stonden met het maken van atoombommen. Het project was vooral ‘top secret’, en had te maken met alle geheimzinnigheid rond en na de eerste atoombom die voorbereid werd. Mogul is dus een mogelijke verklaring voor het Roswell-incident.
Documentaires en films Het Roswellincident is onderwerp van tientallen documentaires en een speelfilm over het hele voorval. In de jaren negentig verscheen er ook een zogenaamd clandestien gemaakte film van de autopsie op het lichaam van een bij Roswell verongelukte Alien (zie foto linksonder hiernaast). De film werd wereldwijd uitgezonden, maar ook zeer bekritiseerd en wordt inmiddels algemeen als bewuste misleiding van het publiek door de filmmakers beschouwd. Ook latere films en televisieseries als The X-Files, Independence Day en Star Trek laten zich later inspireren door het Roswellincident.
3. Area 51
Area 51 in de Nevadawoestijn - jarenlang gehuld in een waas van geheimzinnigheid - is een ultrageheime militaire basis die niet toegankelijk is voor het publiek. Area 51 (fifty one)werd gebouwd in 1955 als een testgebied voor het pas ontwikkelde U-2 spionagevliegtuig. Vanuit dit vliegtuig werden strategische verkenningen gehouden op 21 kilometer hoogte waarbij stiekem foto’s werden gemaakt van de Sovjet-Unie om de capaciteit van hun bewapening vast te kunnen stellen. Maar het in 1960 boven Russisch grondgebied neerhalen van een U-2 (met piloot Gary Powers) deed de Amerikanen beseffen dat het niet meer verantwoord was om deze vluchten stiekem voort te zetten. Vanaf 1955 werd Area 51 voortdurend uitgebreid en gebruikt voor het ontwikkelen en testen van nieuwe geavanceerde militaire vliegtuigen, zoals de F-117 en B-2 stealth bommenwerpers (zie kaderstuk hierboven). Ook werden er onbemande vliegtuigen getest. De basis wordt tot op heden streng bewaakt en is voor buitenstaanders niet toegankelijk.
De basis werd ook gebruikt om geheime militaire projecten en hardware (zoals satellietonderdelen) te begraven. Hierdoor wilde men voorkomen dat deze projecten zouden uitlekken. Op de basis zijn tevens onderdelen voor de latere ruimtevaart getest: o.a. de maanlander, zuurstofsystemen voor astronauten en dergelijke meer.
Ufo-theorie Area 51 is in het verleden door Ufo-aanhangers vaak genoemd als locatie waar de Amerikaanse overheid buitenaardse intelligente wezens verborgen zou houden, maar dat is iets wat de Amerikaanse overheid altijd is blijven ontkennen. De belangrijkste interesse van de Ufologen voor deze basis is dat de brokstukken en lichamen van het Roswell-incident naar Area 51 gebracht zijn voor autopsie en om de techniek te onderzoeken.Enerzijds de fantasie van velen die beweerden ooit op de basis te hebben gewerkt en er neergestorte ruimteschepen of onderdelen ervan te hebben gezien, en anderzijds de geheimzinnigheid waarmee de overheid de basis afschermde om er geheime experimenten en spionagetuigen voor de buitenwereld verborgen te houden tijdens de Koude Oorlog (1960-1990) hebben er in de loop der tijden voor gezorgd dat over Area 51 ongecontroleerde speculaties en fantasieën de ronde deden. Tot uiteindelijk de CIA in 2013 geheime documenten vrijgaf waarin onder meer wordt beschreven dat Area 51 als basis werd gebruikt voor testvluchten en de ontwikkeling van het U-2 spionagevliegtuig. Het was wel voor het eerst dat in officiële papieren de naam Area 51 werd vernoemd.
Ufo’s of stealth’s ?
De F-117 Nighthawk (boven) en de B-2 Spirit (onder) zijn Amerikaanse lichte stealth bommenwerpers of sluipbommenwerpers, in volle Ufo-mania door fabrikanten Lockheed en Northrop/Boeing rond 1975 in het geheim ontwikkeld voor de Amerikaanse luchtmacht.
De hoekige zwarte toestellen zijn dankzij het speciale ontwerp en een speciale coating (radar-absorberende verf) zo goed als onzichtbaar voor radarsystemen en kunnen daardoor vrijwel ongestoord over vijandelijk grondgebied vliegen.
Hun unieke vorm en speciaal ontworpen silhouet zorgde bij de eerste testvluchten voor veel verwarring omdat personen (met veel fantasie) ze systematisch aanzagen voor Ufo’s…
Of all of the types of UFO encounters out there, pilot reports have always been held up high as particularly believable. These are seasoned professionals with a good bead on what might be strange up in the sky, so when they report something anomalous, people tend to listen. Such pilot reports go back decades, and I have recently written of cases from the 1950s of note, but this is just the tip of the iceberg. Let us jump into the 1970s and look at even more utterly bizarre cases of mysterious pilot encounters with UFOs.
Our first case here comes to us from the year 1972, from a witness who claims that at the time he was part of a police helicopter crew with the police department at Pasadena, California. On October 15 of that year, he was flying on a routine night patrol as a Helicopter Observer, along with pilot Pat Spafford, and as they approached the foothills to the northeast of the city, he claims they saw the lights of what they at first took to be a military helicopter hovering low over a residential area, apparently turning its landing light on and off intermittently in a very weird manner. They decided to investigate, but as they approached, the other “helicopter” then flew off and began gaining altitude. They approached, and it was then that they could see that this was no helicopter. The witness says of what happened next in a report to MUFON:
Then about 300 meters past it, we saw what first appeared to be a large object looking like bunch of big balloons tied together. The object was going at our exact airspeed, which was about 60 mph. The object was round and appeared to be rotating. I saw no lights on it. Pat began yelling over the intercom that he was seeing a UFO. I immediately shut off our running lights so I could activate our “night star” search light. The running lights were shut off because there would be too many amps going through the system with all the lights on and pop a breaker. The military helicopter then appeared to lose altitude quickly as if it was going into auto rotation.
Shutting off the running lights to power up the searchlight was S.O.P. (Standard Operating Procedure). Pat questioned what I was doing, and when I told him I was going to “light it up”, he said, “No,” and turned the running lights back on. We had a short argument about doing this or not, but he got the final word because he was the pilot. We watched the object for a few minutes and it flew abeam us going west. We then noticed that there was some fog coming in the L. A. basin, which was a signal for us to fly back to Bracket Field in Pomona, where we hangered the helicopter so as not to get caught in the fog. As we approached the west end of the city near the Rose Bowl, this object gained speed and in just a few seconds accelerated towards the L. A. skyline and disappeared out of sight. The speed it went was faster than supersonic. We were both amazed at how fast it accelerated.
As soon as they landed, they went about making calls to various agencies in order to try to make sense of what they had seen. Los Angeles International Airport claimed that they had seen nothing unusual on their radar in the area, and there were found to have been no test flights of any kind at the time. A report was filed of the incident, but it seems that nothing ever came of it, and by the time the witness retired from the force in 1979 he says that it had been completely forgotten. What did this helicopter crew see out there and why wasn’t it investigated further? Who knows?
In February of the following year, we have a strange case from Richard Hall’s book Volume II, The UFO Evidence, A Thirty-Year Report, which occurred in the area of McAlester, Oklahoma, in the United States. In the very early morning hours of February 14, 1973, at approximately 2:30 a.m., a DC-8 cargo flight was on its way from St. Louis to Dallas, and it was as they passed over Oklahoma that strange things began to happen. The co-pilot saw the lights of what he had first thought to be another aircraft off to the right and somewhere below them, seemingly on the same course as they were, and going at the same speed, with a single amber-colored light upon it. At this point they still thought it was just another airplane, but then the object suddenly rose vertically straight into the sky to make a sharp turn and take up a position above them nearby. The crew could now see that it was a disc-shaped object with a transparent dome on top, the whole of it made of some highly reflective metallic material. It was now rather obvious to them that this was no normal aircraft, and the captain turned on their weather radar to see it appear as a solid object. Whatever the unidentified object was, it did not seem to like being on radar, as it immediately shot straight up and disappeared from view, after which it was visible again dropping down to take up a new position near the airplane about 300 feet below them. As the baffled crew looked down at the mysterious object, they claimed that they had seen through the dome “two or three shadowy entities moving around.” After this, the object shot in front of them, did an impossibly sharp bank, and sped off out of sight. What was this thing?
Also in 1973 we have another encounter from a helicopter crew, this time from the area of Cleveland, Ohio, in the United States. On October 18 of that year, at approximately 11:10 p.m., Army Reserve helicopter pilot Capt. Lawrence Coyne, of the 316th Medical Detachment stationed at Cleveland Hopkins Airport, was flying in a Huey helicopter over the area of Mansfield on his way back to Cleveland from Columbus when he had a bizarre encounter with forces he could not comprehend. As he approached Mansfield, he claimed that he had spotted a red light in the sky, first spotted by his crew chief, Sgt. Robert Yanacsek. Coyne would say of what happened next:
The light was traveling in excess of 600 knots. It came from the horizon to our aircraft in about 10 seconds. We were on a collision course. At 1,700 feet I braced myself for the impact with the other craft. It was coming from our right side. I was scared. There had been so little time to respond. The thing was terrifically fast. We looked up and saw it stopped right over us. It had a big, gray metallic-looking hull about 60 feet long.” “It was shaped like an airfoil or a streamlined fat cigar. There was a red light on the front. The leading edge glowed red a short distance back from the nose. There was a center dome. A green light at the rear reflected on the hull. I had made no attempt to pull up. All controls were set for a 20-degree dive. Yet we had climbed from 1,700 to 3,500 feet with no power in a couple of seconds with no g-forces or other noticeable strains. Red navigational lights aren’t located in the front of an aircraft. That’s what was moving toward us. I don’t know what it was.
Image by Steve Baxter
The object then sped off to the west and disappeared. It is unknown just what was going on here, or why the helicopter had been sort of lifted up, but what has gone on to be called the “Coyne Incident” has long been touted as one of the more intriguing pilot reports of all time. An interesting case comes to us from 1976, when there was a harrowing encounter between a fighter pilot and a UFO in the country of Iran. On September 19 of 1976, the Iranian Air Force began getting a deluge of calls from frightened citizens reporting a strange light in the skies in the vicinity of Tehran. At first it was thought that this was just a misidentification of the planet Venus, but when the Assistant Deputy Commander of Operations saw the object for himself there was a sense of urgency and alert.
In response to this mysterious object, an F-4 fighter jet was scrambled from Shahrokhi Air Force Base at 1:30 a.m. in order to investigate and intercept if need be. As the jet sped closer to the object, which was reported as very large and bright, it allegedly experienced numerous technical difficulties, to the point that the pilot began heading back and full function of his plane was restored. This plane came into base, but in the meantime, another F-4 was deployed, and was able to make radar contact with the object, deducing that it was about the same size as a 707 jet, but it was so bright it was hard to get a visual size estimate. The UFO then suddenly shot away at great speed, rapidly accelerating from the F-4 even though it was going an estimated Mach 1 at the time. The plane followed it for some time, experiencing some technical difficulties but able to see it clearly enough to describe it as roughly rectangular in shape, with strobing lights that alternated from red, blue, green, and orange. Then things would get even stranger still.
It was reported by the F-4 pilot that this object then dropped a smaller object, which headed directly at them at a rapid pace. Thinking that this was some sort of aggressive action or weapon of some sort, the pilot targeted the incoming object with a missile, but the weapon system then cut out and went offline, and all radio communications with base were lost. Unable to engage the missile, the pilot took evasive action, taking a deep dive but still followed by the object. This smaller UFO tailed the F-4 for some time before then allegedly returning to the larger object, the jet’s systems going back online as it did so. After this, the smaller UFO merged with the larger one, and the whole of it sped off out of sight. What was going on here? Was this some sort of weapon or warning from the UFO? It is impossible to say.
In 1978, there is the case reported by veteran Navy pilot Floyd P. Hallstrom of Oxnard, California, who at the time was flying in a Cessna 170A bound to San Diego from Oxnard, California. At the time he was following another plane piloted by a friend, Jim Victor. The plan at the time was for Victor to deliver the plane to San Diego, after which they would both fly back, but things were not destined to go according to plan. As the two approached Santa Monica in perfectly clear conditions, Hallstrom noticed something very odd. He would say in his report to MUFON:
At this time, I was looking for Jim straight ahead, when I spotted the UFO just on the edge of the haze area above LAX [Los Angeles International Airport] slightly to the east side. I thought it was Jim so I watched it for about a minute because he had just given me his position report, but it seemed to get larger and coming toward me so I naturally realized that it wasn’t Jim. I started looking to see what it was, but I could see no wings on this aircraft although at this time I could see windows which appeared to be passenger windows in the aircraft. As it drew nearer though, I was able to determine that there were no wings or horizontal empennage assembly to the aircraft as a conventional aircraft.
All of a sudden, I was able to make out the complete form of a saucer shape or round object… I could see the dome, also very vividly clear, including all the windows. I observed it to be of a very bright metal… it was more of a nickel or highly polished chrome or stainless-steel type of metal than aluminum, because it had more of a mellow glow than if it was of the type finish on a high finish aluminum. About 16 to 20 evenly spaced windows were visible around the circumference of the dome, located just above the base. The dome appeared to be a perfect hemisphere about 20 feet in diameter resting on the base which was about 30 feet in diameter.
Image by Steve Baxter
Hallstrom observed the object for around a minute before it disappeared from view behind his plane. Hallstrom, who had at that time 37 years of military flight experience under his belt, was adamant about what he had seen, and would later admit that the encounter had deeply affected him and given him nightmares for years. Another case from 1978 comes to us from the country of New Zealand, where on December 30 of that year a Captain Bill Startup was piloting an Argosy freight plane over the Cook Strait, accompanied by an Australian TV crew which hoped to capture video footage of a UFO that had been seen in the area at the time. They would apparently not be disappointed.
During the flight, the crew saw a strange light in the sky out over the ocean, which they found had radar confirmation from ground control in Wellington. It soon turned out that what was being seen were actually five bright lights in a line that seemed to be pulsating in some sort of pattern, and which passed under the aircraft to travel over the town of Kaikoura. The plane tried to turn around to get a better look at the objects, and in the meanwhile, they received a warning from air traffic control that told them the target was pacing them and increasing in size. Everyone in the plane was witnessing these lights by this time, but the TV crew was unable to get a good shot for footage. It was only when the plane’s navigational lights were turned off that footage was able to be taken with a handheld camera of a large bright light outside. The airplane then deviated from course towards Christchurch, and managed to land safely. After this, the plane headed off on its return flight and saw two more mysterious objects, with one of them appearing as “a spinning sphere with lateral lines around it.” Once again, the objects appeared on radar, and the Royal New Zealand Air Force even put Skyhawk jet fighters on standby ready to scramble.
When the film of the strange objects was released, it created quite a stir, but was immediately picked apart by skeptics, who suggested everything from experimental aircraft, to shrimp boats, to the planet Venus. In the end, the sighting has never been explained. Indeed, none of these have ever been fully explained, and they come to us with these impeccable witnesses who have no reason to lie and who know what sorts of strange things go on in the sky. Could they be wrong, even in those cases in which they have radar confirmation? How are we to explain such cases away? This is only a sampling of such reports from the era, and it is rather unfortunate that many others were either buried or simply never reported due to the pilots wanting to protect their reputations and jobs. Yet rest assured there are many others where these came from, and it all paints a picture of something very strange going on in the skies above our heads.
Special thanks to Steve Baxter for his artwork on this, including the cover image.
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Was an Extraterrestrial Injured on The Tarmac of a Military Base?
Was an Extraterrestrial Injured on The Tarmac of a Military Base?
Was an Extraterrestrial Injured on The Tarmac of a Military Base?
Episode 8 – Richard reveals details in regard to the strange occurrences that took place around Fort Dix and McGuire Air Force Base in 1978. U.S. Military police officers had noticed a considerable amount of UFO activity over Fort Dix on the early morning of January 18th. Also, Major George Filer from McGuire Air Force Base had noticed a large amount of activity on the side of the runway. He quickly learnt that a strange being had been spotted and was shot and killed by military police officers.
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This UFO ligths Could Be Extraterrestrial Message?
This UFO ligths Could Be Extraterrestrial Message?
The next incident could be an ALIEN MESSAGE ?, all happened in Hartford, Connecticut USA, when witnesses saw a ship descend that appeared to be surrounded by a flotilla of lights.
However, everything became more incredible when the lights began to give a series of flashes and symmetrical patterns, as if it were a Message ... for whom ?!
Would it be for humans or for aliens themselves? ... what do you think of this sensational sighting reported to the Mutual UFO Network
El siguiente incidente podría ser un MENSAJE EXTRATERRESTRE?, todo paso en Hartford, Connecticut USA, cuando los testigos vieron descender una nave que parecía estar rodeada de una flotilla de luces.
Sin embargo, Todo se volvió mas increíble cuando las lucess empezaron a dar una serie de resplandores y patrones simétricos, como si se tratara de un Mensaje ....para quien o quienes?!
Seria para los humanos o para los extraterrestres mismos?....que opinan de este sensacional avistamiento reportado a la Mutual UFO Network
SOURCE SuspectSky Footage includes stunning helicopter camera captures of UFOs flying low over downtown areas, a missile destroying an unknown alien orb, an amazing formation of shimmering UFOs in California, and a close encounter on the high seas near Spain.
UFO Startles Dog In Trenton New Jersey ( August 17, 2021 )
Amazing sighting caught on security camera of a UFO startling a dog In Trenton New Jersey on August 17, 2021
This is Mufon Case : 117333 : Mutual UFO Network : MUFON SUBMISSIONS : Dog & ufo security cam footage Long Description of Sighting Report - Case 117333
My dog was barking very loudly this morning standing by the door. i thought maybe a burglar was trying to get into my house. i checked to see what i captured from my security camera & this is what i saw i couldn't beleive what i was seeing. recorded on Aug 17 2021 at 3:15am eastern time.
Location : Trenton, New Jersey Date Submitted : 2021-08-17 Date of Sighting : 2021-08-17 MUFON SUBMITTER FILE : 8172021.mp4 : video looped : no audio
Fast Moving UFO Sighted Over St. Augustine, Florida ( August 16, 2021 )
Fast Moving UFO was sighted over St. Augustine, Florida on August 16, 2021 : Here I present the original and in the wake with approach.
They are everywhere
More evident every day
credit : Micah Renee
UFOs Sighted Over Montreal, Canada ( August 8, 2021 )
Amazing this UFO sighting. Filmed west of Montreal, Canada.on August 8, 2021 : Here I present the original and in the wake with approach.
'Tucker Carlson Originals' explores the mysterious flying objects in the sky in 'UFO Files: Chasing the Truth'
For close to 80 years, our leaders have told us that UFOs aren't real. Rather, that they're weather balloons or strangely shaped clouds.
But earlier this year, U.S. intelligence officials released a lengthy report on UFO encounters with pilots and military officials, ultimately concluding they had no explanation for nearly every case except one.
Compiled by the office of the Director of National Intelligence, the report did not find any evidence to suggest the sightings were of an alien spacecraft or evidence of advanced technology possessed by a foreign power such as China or Russia. However, the report also did not rule out the possibility.
Included in the findings were video and images of the alleged encounters.
"Oh, UFOs, they’re spooky and kinda funny," Tucker writes. "Crazy people believe in them. Up until you get to the line, ‘The Pentagon admits it doesn’t know what in the world this is.’ That’s all you need to know. From a national security perspective, that’s a very big problem."
Tucker sits down with air and space experts and witnesses of the strange sightings for the Fox Nation special to learn more about what UFOs are and if they should worry us.
"I couldn't identify it. It was flying and it was an object. That's all I can really bring back," one witness tells Tucker.
After reviewing footage from a DHS patrol plane showing a five-foot-long object moving at more than 100 miles per hour off the coast of Puerto Rico, theoretical physicist Dr. Michio Kaku was left in shock.
"Look at this thing! It's traveling much faster than it should," Kaku said. "How many aircraft do we know can dive into the ocean? But these craft [sic] effortlessly go back and forth between the water and the air. Our missiles cannot do that. The stresses would be enough to rip the metal apart."
The material that Kaku and Tucker uncover is only a fraction of the files contained by the military.
Kaku admits that the footage he watched illustrates objects defying physics in a way no other known aircraft can duplicate.
"They break the sound barrier with no sonic boom," Kaku said. "They can hit the oceans and not break apart."
Tucker admits that one of the most vexing mysteries about UFOs is why the federal government has lied about their existence for so long—and reminds viewers there are pilots every day who might run into them.
To learn more about Tucker's out-of-this-world revelations, stream the episode of "Tucker Carlson Originals" Thursday, August 19.
Fox Nation programs are viewable on-demand and from your mobile device app, but only for Fox Nation subscribers. Go to Fox Nation to start a free trial and watch the extensive library from your favorite Fox News personalities.
Fox News' Thomas Barrabi contributed to this report.
Last week the German Aerospace Society held a workshop to discuss the search for extraterrestrial intelligent life and whether a recently released Pentagon report on Unidentified Aerial Phenomena—the new preferred name for UFOs—should change our outlook in this regard. Invited speakers were Massimo Teodorani, an astrophysicist and book author from Italy, Hakan Kayal, a remote sensing expert from the German AeroSpace Center, and myself.
The Pentagon report prompted a number of reactions in the United States, including a project initiated by Avi Loeb from Harvard University and others to investigate unexplained aerial phenomena. Scientists across the Atlantic also have been watching the latest developments. The European organization that keeps the closest eye on UAP sightings is probably GEIPAN, a unit of the French Space Agency that has analyzed a total of 2,923 cases, of which 99 remain unexplained to date. This correlates roughly with the percentage of unexplained observations in the United States.
I went first on the workshop agenda, giving a general overview of the search for extraterrestrial life and the evolutionary progression (on Earth) toward complex and intelligent life, including the Cosmic Zoo hypothesis. I then discussed the Fermi Paradox and its possible solutions, some of which could be consistent with the idea that UAP are extraterrestrial in origin—for example, Star Trek’s prime directive, whereby aliens do (generally) not interfere with humanity.
Next was Teodorani, who elaborated on methodologies for how to distinguish between natural phenomena and artificial objects. Doing so would require, ideally, that the spectral resolution of UAP images be increased by a factor of 1,000 to 10,000. He also pointed out that the number of reported sightings correlates roughly with population size, but with significant outliers. These exceptional locations may be preferred places for UAP to occur—something he thinks should be looked into. Teodorani saw no correlation of sightings with magnetic anomalies, but another workshop participant pointed out that a reported correlation of UAP sightings with tectonic fault lines may suggest that piezoelectricity could be responsible for some of the sightings.
In his talk, Kayal emphasized that in order to investigate UAP we first have to fully understand known phenomena and objects, including sprites, elves, blue jets, weather balloons, and possible technical artifacts. He updated us on his own efforts to develop sensor systems that could reduce false positive detections, which, based on his experience, turned out to be mostly birds or insects. Kayal was able to reduce the fraction of false positive detections by as much as 95 percent, but his goal is to get as close to 100 percent as possible.
The consensus of the workshop participants was that UAPs should be investigated with greater openness, and without a stigma. According to Kayal, the low but significant percentage of observations that remain unexplained (3.4 percent, according to GEIPAN) could be due to secret technology developments, previously unknown natural phenomena, or extraterrestrial intelligence, any of which would be exciting and important to know about. I’m confident that science will eventually be successful in providing an answer, especially as sensing technology improves.
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Largely unknown, however, is that the UFO taboo – and an array of outlandish alien conspiracy theories – are vestiges of Cold War paranoia.
Shortly after the development of nuclear weapons, waves of UFO sightings began sweeping the United States. At first, military and intelligence officials took such reports seriously.
According to a declassified Air Force document, the sheer volume and geographic distribution of sightings meant that the UFO phenomenon “cannot be disregarded.” A 1947 memo from a top Air Force general noted that UFOs are “real and not visionary or fictitious.”
With striking parallels to more recent encounters, Air Force analysts determined that many UFOs exhibited “extreme rates of climb, maneuverability … and action which must be considered evasive when sighted or contacted by friendly aircraft and radar.” Such characteristics, the Air Force concluded, suggest that “the objects are controlled either manually, automatically or remotely.” (A CIA director would go on to state that UFOs “are operating under intelligent control.”)
Adding to the mystery, a 1948 Air Force intelligence memo stated that UFOs “are not of domestic origin.” At the same time, the Air Force assessed the likelihood of the Soviet Union developing such advanced technology as “extremely remote.”
Unsurprisingly, the Air Force was not the only government entity with an interest in UFOs. An urgent 1952 memo from the CIA’s scientific branch to then-director Walter Bedell Smith sounded the alarm: “Reports of [UFO] incidents convince us that there is something going on that must have immediate attention.”
A 1952 FBI memo notes that analysts were “fairly certain that [UFOs] are not ships or missiles from another nation in this world.” Mirroring frequent reports of UFOs evading nearby aircraft, the FBI learned that “when the pilot in [an intercepting] jet approaches the object it invariably fades from view.”
In short, U.S. intelligence analysts concluded that intelligently controlled objects – often flying in restricted airspace and capable of eluding fighter jets – were not developed by the United States or any foreign power.
Indeed, the aforementioned FBI memo states that the Air Force – like Swedish air intelligence – entertained the extraordinary possibility that UFOs may “be ships from another planet.”
Another FBI memo notes that after years of Air Force study, “a small percentage of extremely creditable [sic] sightings have been unexplainable.” As a result, “some military officials are seriously considering the possibility of interplanetary ships.”
But such objective, open-minded analysis was not to last.
Amid intensifying Cold War hostilities, America’s spies and defense planners worried that mass UFO sightings could again overwhelm emergency reporting channels, giving the Soviet Union “a surprise advantage in any nuclear attack.” Officials also feared that the Soviets would use “UFOs as a psychological warfare tool” to sow “mass hysteria and panic.”
The agency began by recruiting academics to join a “Scientific Advisory Panel on Unidentified Flying Objects.” The group, which – importantly – was not shown the most compelling UFO data, recommended a “broad educational program” to “debunk” UFO reports and “train” observers “in proper recognition of unusually illuminated objects.”
According to the panel, the “training” program would “result in a marked reduction of [UFO] reports.” At the same time, the “debunking” effort would decrease “public interest in ‘flying saucers’” and reduce Americans’ “susceptibility to clever hostile propaganda.”
As investigative journalist Leslie Kean notes, the CIA-organized meetings “would forever change both the course of media coverage and the official attitude toward the UFO subject.”
The full extent of the “educational program” – which suggested “spread[ing] the gospel” through “television, motion pictures, and popular articles” – is unclear.
But the “debunking” effort had extraordinary consequences.
Objective analysis that once suggested astounding explanations for UFOs rapidly morphed into a public relations effort determined to debunk and discredit sightings, no matter how credible.
Perhaps worse, as astronomer and long-time consultant to the Air Force’s UFO project J. Allen Hynek bluntly stated: The CIA panel “made the subject of UFOs scientifically unrespectable.”
Vice Admiral Roscoe Hillenkoetter, the first director of the CIA, summarized the situation: “Through official secrecy and ridicule, many citizens are led to believe [UFOs] are nonsense.” “Behind the scenes,” however, “high-ranking Air Force officers are soberly concerned.”
To be sure, classified U.S. aircraft accounted for some UFO sightings. But once-secret aircraft were almost certainly not behind the most compelling historical UFO incidents. Indeed, dozens of credible witnesses and multiple sensor platforms observed objects engaging in movements that no American or Soviet plane was capable of.
Unsurprisingly, the Air Force’s bungling attempts to explain away UFO sightings led to accusations of a sweeping cover-up. This dynamic created fertile ground for an array of conspiracy theories.
But far-fetched claims of alien autopsies or a vast government plot to conceal extraterrestrial visitation are not supported by historical context and must be viewed with utmost skepticism.
Ultimately, instead of a nefarious cover-up, the government was guilty of a “grand foul-up” on UFOs. This conclusion is substantiated by the two scientists who spent decades studying UFOs while enjoying extraordinary access to government records.
James McDonald, the renowned atmospheric physicist, was particularly infuriated by the government’s shoddy work on UFOs, stating “I have never seen such superficiality and incompetence in an area of such potentially enormous scientific importance.”
Indeed, much of the Air Force’s effort to catalogue and analyze UFO reports was crippled by a woeful lack of interest and resources. Perhaps worse, it was managed by an ever-rotating cast of low-level officers determined not to “rock the boat.” The shift from investigating to discrediting UFO sightings only made matters worse.
But there is a silver lining. The government is no longer mounting a disingenuous UFO debunking campaign. It has no reason to.
Marik von Rennenkampff served as an analyst with the U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of International Security and Nonproliferation, as well as an Obama administration appointee at the U.S. Department of Defense. Follow him on Twitter @MvonRen.
A man noticed an unidentified floating object earlier this month in Clovis. Vince Mandara says he was going to a gas station on Fowler Avenue when he spotted something strange.
He got his phone out, started looking, and saw it. The witness observed the mysterious object kind of dancing around, which he found weird. So he filmed the UFO using his phone camera, and then suddenly it was just blurred out and gone completely.
He shared the clip on social media and provided details about his UFO sighting. He says this all took place around 2:30 in the afternoon.
Mandara says the sky was clear when the UFO caught his attention, moving so fast.
When Mandara went home, he started slowing down the speed of the footage. It was then he saw another dot that appeared out of nowhere underneath the other one. The second one shot to the right. When Mandara posted the video on Instagram, @TicTacUFO decided to take chunks of the footage and apply filters on it.
The creator of the Instagram page, Jaiya Figueras, slowed Mandara’s video down and put a few filters, showing an exciting image.
Figueras explained that all the object’s energy could be seen when putting the video into iMovie and changing the filters. He said that the object is white, and the energy surrounding it is anti-gravity.
Figueras is a high school teacher and coach who claims he’s spoken with six individuals who’ve seen similar bizarre objects in the sky.
Figueras thinks that they were teleporting because he couldn’t slow the film down.
What Happened In The Rendlesham Forest: Encounter With UFO And Aliens
What Happened In The Rendlesham Forest: Encounter With UFO And Aliens
Rendlesham is a large pine forest in Suffolk, England and the leading role of one of the most popular UFO incidents. Near the Forest are twin NATO air bases, RAF Bentwaters and RAF Woodbridge that were being leased to the United States Air Force at the time.
The Rendlesham Forest incident is the UK’s best documented UFO case, and these are the details.
In 1980, in the early hours of December 26, John Burroughs and Jim Penniston of the USAF, were investigating a suspected civilian aircraft crash. But, instead, they claimed to have found an unidentifiable craft on the Forest floor.
Image credit: history.com
The craft appeared to be a “strange glowing object” as they got closer. Penniston says that he was close enough to the object to see hieroglyphic symbols on it; he was even close enough to touch it.
“The fabric of the shell was more like a smooth, opaque, black glass”, describes Penniston. It was triangular in shape, metallic, and approximately 3 meters across and 2 meters in height. There was a reddish light on top of the craft and blue lights on the bottom. It appeared to be standing on legs or hovering just above the ground.
Penniston and Burroughs watched the craft rise after some time, and at very high speed it accelerated away from them. So further investigation continued in the days to follow. There were landing marks found in the ground where the two USAF members claimed to have seen the craft.
Three depressions from the landing gear, each identically 1.5 inches deep and 7 inches in diameter. Burn marks were found on the sides of nearby trees. And through beta/gama tests, moderate radiation levels were found in the specific area.
Two nights later, Deputy Base Commander Charles Halt set out to investigate the Forest. He reports seeing a sun-like light through the trees that was moving around and pulsing in the sky.
The light appeared to throw off glowing particles before breaking into five separate white objects which quickly disappeared. Immediately after, three star-like objects were noticed in the sky. There were two to the North, and one to the South. They all had red, green and blue lights and moved rapidly in sharp movements.
“It looks like an eye winking at you… And the flash is so bright to the star scope that it almost burns your eye.” Charles Halt reports.
That night, Soldier Larry warren and Sgt Adrien Bustinza were sent out on patrol with other military personnel. After 11 p.m., the men got into their trucks to head toward the field where the lights were previously spotted.
When they got closer to the field, Warren sees “disaster preparedness officers out here with Geiger counters, going in an almost half-clockwise motion around this thing on the ground.” He then claims to have seen a small red light coming from the coast.
“It moved in a downward arc, so fast. [It] stopped and hovered about 20 feet off the ground.” He described it as the size of an American basketball. All of a sudden, he says, it explodes and a craft immediately appears on the forest floor.
The men were ordered to leave the site. After leaving the site, they both recall Wing Commander Gordon Williams approach the craft. They then saw Williams speaking to an alien being who had “what looked like eyes, facial features, bright clothing and some other device.”
Around 4:30 a.m., Bustinza sees the craft fly away. “When it took off, it was, like, hovering. It went up and, like, took off at about a 45 degree angle, and if you would have blinked, you would have missed it.”
Newly released national archives say that the entity was 1.5 meters tall and wearing nylon coated pressure suits. The intelligence was recorded speaking in an electronically synthesized American English speaking accent. They were reported to have three fingers, claw like hands with opposable thumbs.
However, the report made by MoD and RAF suggest that there were no indications that the UK’s air defenses had been breached.
In 2014 Daniel Simpson directed and filmed “The Rendlesham UFO Incident” in the Rendlesham Forest. He found a series of mysterious hatches while filming the movie. Forestry Commissions towed one of the hatches off which opened up to a ladder going down. He was told that they were drainage systems for the airfield.
Perhaps, over time, more evidence will surface on the Rendlesham UFO case, and perhaps there will be more sightings. All we know is that the mysterious Rendlesham Forest either attracts intelligent life from beyond, or it attracts fascinating stories from the imaginations of clever minds. What do you think the truth is?
Faraway NASA probe detects the eerie hum of interstellar space
Faraway NASA probe detects the eerie hum of interstellar space
An undated artist's concept shows NASA's Voyager 1 spacecraft, the first human-made object to venture into interstellar space.
REUTERS/NASA/JPL-Caltech/Handout via Reuters
WASHINGTON, May 11 (Reuters) - The classic 1979 sci-fi horror film "Alien" was advertised with the memorable tagline, "In space no can hear you scream." It did not say anything about humming.
Instruments aboard NASA's Voyager 1 spacecraft, which nine years ago exited our solar system's outer reaches, have detected a faint monotonous hum caused by the constant vibrations of the small amounts of gas found in the near-emptiness of interstellar space, scientists said.
It essentially represents the background noise present in the vast expanse between star systems. These vibrations, called persistent plasma waves, were identified at radio frequencies in a narrow bandwidth during a three-year period as Voyager 1 traverses interstellar space.
"The persistent plasma waves that we've just discovered are far too weak to actually hear with the human ear. If we could hear it, it would sound like a single steady note, playing constantly but changing very slightly over time," said Stella Koch Ocker, a Cornell University doctoral student in astronomy and lead author of the study published this week in the journal Nature Astronomy.
The Voyager 1 spacecraft, launched in September 1977, is currently located about 14.1 billion miles (22.7 billion km) from Earth - roughly 152 times the distance between our planet and the sun - and is still obtaining and transmitting data.
Having decades ago visited the huge planets Jupiter and Saturn, Voyager 1 is now providing insight into interstellar space.
The immense regions between star systems in a galaxy are not a complete vacuum. The stew of matter and radiation present in low densities - mostly gas - is called the interstellar medium. About 15% of the visible matter in our Milky Way galaxy is composed of this interstellar gas, dust and energetic particles like cosmic rays.
Much of the interstellar medium is in what is called an ionized, or electrically charged, state called plasma.
"Interstellar plasma is extremely diffuse compared to what we're used to on Earth. In this plasma, there are about 0.1 atoms for every cubic centimeter, whereas the air we breathe on Earth has billions of atoms for every cubic centimeter," Ocker said.
Voyager 1 previously detected disturbances in the gas in interstellar space triggered by occasional flares from our sun. The new study instead reveals the steady vibrations unrelated to solar activity that could be a constant feature in interstellar space. This hum has a frequency of about 3 kilohertz (kHz).
"When the plasma oscillations are converted to an audio signal, it sounds like a tone that varies. It's a bit eerie," said Cornell University astronomy professor and study co-author James Cordes.
After 44 years of travel, Voyager 1 is the most distant human-made object in space.
"Voyager 1 will keep going but its power supply will run out most likely this decade after up to 50 years of service," Cordes said. "There are conceptual designs being made for future probes whose intended purpose is to reach further than the Voyager spacecraft. That is the message I find appealing: our reach is expanding into interstellar space."
Reporting by Will Dunham, Editing by Rosalba O'Brien
Robotic Navigation Tech – That Helped NASA’s Perseverance Rover Land on Mars – Will Explore the Deep Ocean
Robotic Navigation Tech – That Helped NASA’s Perseverance Rover Land on Mars – Will Explore the Deep Ocean
The Orpheus submersible robot is being developed by Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute and JPL to explore the deep ocean autonomously. Orpheus uses vision-based navigation that works in a similar way to how the Ingenuity Mars Helicopter navigates during flight.
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
Terrain-relative navigation helped Perseverance land – and Ingenuity fly – autonomously on Mars. Now it’s time to test a similar system while exploring another frontier.
On May 14, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) ship Okeanos Explorer departed from Port Canaveral in Florida on a two-week expedition led by NOAA Ocean Exploration, featuring the technology demonstration of an autonomous underwater vehicle. Called Orpheus, this new class of submersible robot will showcase a system that will help it find its way and identify interesting scientific features on the seafloor.
Terrain-relative navigation was instrumental in helping NASA’s Mars 2020 Perseverance Mars rover make its precision touch down on the Red Planet on February 18. The system allowed the descending robot to visually map the Martian landscape, identify hazards, and then choose a safe place to land without human assistance. In a similar way, the agency’s Ingenuity Mars Helicopter uses a vision-based navigation system to track surface features on the ground during flight in order to estimate its movements across the Martian surface.
Developed by engineers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, an evolution of the vision-based navigation that has been used on Mars will now undergo a trial run a little closer to home: off the U.S. East Coast in the Atlantic Ocean.
The submersible can explore the most extreme depths of the ocean, creating 3D maps of the seafloor. Shown in this photo during a previous expedition, Orpheus is much smaller than other submersibles, making it easier to transport and operate.
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
Large, high-power location-finding equipment like sonar would normally be required to navigate the dark and often murky waters near the seabed. By utilizing a low-power system of cameras and lights, along with advanced software, Orpheus is an order of magnitude lighter than most deep-sea submersibles. Smaller than a quad bike and weighing about 550 pounds (250 kilograms), Orpheus is designed to be nimble, easy to operate, and rugged while exploring depths inaccessible to most vehicles.
Designed by Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) in collaboration with JPL, Orpheus can work untethered almost anywhere in the ocean, including the most extreme depths. Ultimately, the project team hopes to see a swarm of these underwater robots work as a team to build 3D maps of the vast regions of unexplored ocean floor in the hadal zone – regions deeper than 20,000 feet (6,000 meters). But before the robot can explore these depths, it must first be put through its paces in shallower waters.
Diving Into the Future
“This tech demo will be used to gather data to demonstrate the viability of terrain-relative navigation in the ocean while also showing how multiple robots will operate together in extreme environments,” said Russell Smith, robotics mechanical engineer at JPL. “These tests will put us on track to start future dives into the hadal zone and intelligently seek out exciting regions of high biological activity.”
Orpheus’ version of vision-based navigation is called visual-inertial odometry, or xVIO, and it works by using a system of advanced cameras and pattern-matching software along with instruments that can precisely measure its orientation and motion. As Orpheus travels over the seafloor, xVIO identifies features – such as rocks, shells, and coral – below the vehicle. Like remembering landmarks during a road trip, xVIO will construct 3D maps using these features as waypoints to help it navigate. But this system is more than simply a means to prevent the submersible robot from getting lost.
The Orpheus technology demonstration will be carried out aboard the NOAA ship Okeanos Explorer. After departing from Florida’s Port Canaveral on May 14, the two-week expedition explores the waters off the U.S. East Coast.
Credit: Art Howard/NOAA Ocean Exploration
The high-resolution maps xVIO creates are stored to memory so that when Orpheus returns to the area, it will recognize the unique distribution of the features and use them as a starting point to expand its exploration. And when working with robot buddies, maps can be shared, cross-referenced, and developed to quickly identify areas of scientific interest.
“In the future, some of the most extreme ocean environments will be within our reach. From deep ocean trenches to hydrothermal vents, there are many new destinations we will explore,” said Andy Klesh, a systems engineer also at JPL. “By staying small, we’ve created a new, simplified tool for ocean scientists – one that directly benefits NASA as an analogue system for autonomous space exploration.”
But Klesh noted another virtue of the collaboration between NASA and organizations like WHOI and NOAA, with their extensive oceanographic expertise: The technologies being developed to explore Earth’s oceans with smart, small, and rugged autonomous underwater vehicles could ultimately be harnessed to explore the oceans on other worlds.
Earth analogues are often used as environmental stand-ins for other locations in the solar system. For example, Jupiter’s moon Europa possesses a subsurface ocean that could host conditions favorable to life.
“At hadal depths on Earth, the pressures are roughly equivalent to the bottom of Europa’s subsurface ocean, thought to be maybe 80 kilometers [50 miles] deep,” said Tim Shank, the biologist leading WHOI’s HADEX (Hadal Exploration) program. “It is a profound thing to think that this expedition could be the stepping stone to new discoveries about our own planet, including answering that most fundamental question: Is life unique to Earth, or are there other places beyond this pale blue dot where life could have arisen? But before we can explore Europa or any other ocean world, we have to better understand our own home first.”
UFOs regularly spotted in restricted U.S. airspace, report on the phenomena due next month
UFOs regularly spotted in restricted U.S. airspace, report on the phenomena due next month
Bill Whitaker reports on the regular sightings of unidentified aerial phenomena, or UAP, that have spurred a report due to Congress next month.
We have tackled many strange stories on 60 Minutes, but perhaps none like this. It's the story of the U.S. government's grudging acknowledgment of unidentified aerial phenomena— UAP—more commonly known as UFOs. After decades of public denial the Pentagon now admits there's something out there, and the U.S. Senate wants to know what it is. The intelligence committee has ordered the director of national intelligence and the secretary of defense to deliver a report on the mysterious sightings by next month.
Bill Whitaker: So what you are telling me is that UFOs, unidentified flying objects, are real?
Lue Elizondo: Bill, I think we're beyond that already. The government has already stated for the record that they're real. I'm not telling you that. The United States government is telling you that.
Luis Elizondo spent 20 years running military intelligence operations worldwide: in Afghanistan, the Middle East and Guantanamo. He hadn't given UFOs a second thought until 2008. That's when he was asked to join something at the Pentagon called the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, or "AATIP."
Lue Elizondo
Lue Elizondo: The mission of AATIP was quite simple. It was to collect and analyze information involving anomalous aerial vehicles, what I guess in the vernacular you call them UFOs. We call them UAPs.
Bill Whitaker: You know how this sounds? It sounds nutty, wacky.
Lue Elizondo: Look, Bill, I'm not, I'm not telling you that, that it doesn't sound wacky. What I'm telling you, it's real. The question is, what is it? What are its intentions? What are its capabilities?
Buried away in the Pentagon, AATIP was part of a $22 million program sponsored by then-Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid to investigate UFOs. When Elizondo took over in 2010 he focused on the national security implications of unidentified aerial phenomena documented by U.S. service members.
Lue Elizondo: Imagine a technology that can do 6-to-700 g-forces, that can fly at 13,000 miles an hour, that can evade radar and that can fly through air and water and possibly space. And oh, by the way, has no obvious signs of propulsion, no wings, no control surfaces and yet still can defy the natural effects of Earth's gravity. That's precisely what we're seeing.
Elizondo tells us AATIP was a loose-knit mix of scientists, electro-optical engineers, avionics and intelligence experts, often working part time. They combed through data and records, and analyzed videos like this.
A Navy aircrew struggles to lock onto a fast-moving object off the U.S. Atlantic Coast in 2015.
Recently released images may not convince ufo skeptics, but the pentagon admits it doesn't know what in the world this is or this or this.
Bill Whitaker: So what do you say to the skeptics? It's refracted light. Weather balloons. A rocket being launched. Venus.
Lue Elizondo: In some cases there are simple explanations for what people are witnessing. But there are some that, that are not. We're not just simply jumping to a conclusion that's saying, "Oh, that's a UAP out there." We're going through our due diligence. Is it some sort of new type of cruise missile technology that China has developed? Is it some sort of high-altitude balloon that's conducting reconnaissance? Ultimately when you have exhausted all those what ifs and you're still left with the fact that this is in our airspace and it's real, that's when it becomes compelling, and that's when it becomes problematic.
Former Navy pilot Lieutenant Ryan Graves calls whatever is out there a security risk. He told us his F/A-18F squadron began seeing UAPs hovering over restricted airspace southeast of Virginia Beach in 2014 when they updated their jet's radar, making it possible to zero in with infrared targeting cameras.
Ryan Graves
Bill Whitaker: So you're seeing it both with the radar and with the infrared. And that tells you that there is something out there?
Ryan Graves: Pretty hard to spoof that.
These photographs were taken in 2019 in the same area. The Pentagon confirms these are images of objects it can't identify. Lieutenant Graves told us pilots training off the Atlantic Coast see things like that all the time.
Ryan Graves: Every day. Every day for at least a couple years.
Bill Whitaker: Wait a minute, every day for a couple of years?
Ryan Graves: Uh-huh.
Ryan Graves: I don't see an exhaust plume.
Including this one – off the coast of Jacksonville, Florida in 2015, captured on a targeting camera by members of Graves' squadron.
Soundbites from pilots: Look at that thing, it's rotating! My gosh! They're all going against the wind, the wind's 120 knots to the west. Look at that thing dude!
Bill Whitaker: You can sorta hear the surprise in their voices.
Ryan Graves: You certainly can. They seem to have broke character a bit and were just kind of amazed at what they were seeing.
Bill Whitaker: What do you think when you see something like this?
Ryan Graves: This is a difficult one to explain. You have rotation, you have high altitudes. You have propulsion, right? I don't know. I don't know what it is, frankly.
He told us pilots speculate they are one of three things: secret U.S. technology, an adversary's spy vehicle, or something otherworldly.
Ryan Graves: I would say, you know, the highest probability is it's a threat observation program.
Bill Whitaker: Could it be Russian or Chinese technology?
Ryan Graves: I don't see why not.
Bill Whitaker: Are you alarmed?
Ryan Graves: I am worried, frankly. You know, if these were tactical jets from another country that were hangin' out up there, it would be a massive issue. But because it looks slightly different, we're not willing to actually look at the problem in the face. We're happy to just ignore the fact that these are out there, watching us every day.
The government has ignored it - at least publicly - since closing its project "Blue Book" investigation in 1969. But that began to change after an incident off Southern California in 2004, which was documented by radar, by camera, and four naval aviators. We spoke to two of them: David Fravor, a graduate of the Top Gun naval flight school and commander of the F/A-18F squadron on the USS Nimitz; and flying at his wing, Lieutenant Alex Dietrich, who has never spoken publicly about the encounter.
Alex Dietrich and Dave Fravor
Alex Dietrich: I never wanted to be on national TV, no offense.
Bill Whitaker: So why are you doing this?
Alex Dietrich: Because I was in a government aircraft, because I was on the clock. And so I feel a responsibility to s-- to share what I can. And it is unclassified.
It was November 2004 and the USS Nimitz carrier strike group was training about 100 miles southwest of San Diego. For a week, the advanced new radar on a nearby ship, the USS Princeton, had detected what operators called "multiple anomalous aerial vehicles" over the horizon, descending 80,000 feet in less than a second. On November 14, Fravor and Dietrich, each with a weapons systems officer in the backseat, were diverted to investigate. They found an area of roiling whitewater the size of a 737 in an otherwise calm, blue sea.
Dave Fravor: So as we're looking at this, her back-seater says, "Hey, Skipper, do you..." And about that got out, I said, "Dude, do you, do you see that thing down there?" And we saw this little white Tic Tac-looking object. And it's just kind of moving above the whitewater area.
As Deitrich circled above - Fravor went in for a closer look.
Bill Whitaker: So you're sort of spiraling down?
Dave Fravor:Yep. The Tic Tac's still pointing north-south, it goes, click, and just turns abruptly. And starts mirroring me. So as I'm coming down, it starts coming up.
Bill Whitaker: So it's mimicking your moves?
Dave Fravor: Yeah, it was aware we were there.
He said it was about the size of his F/A-18F, with no markings, no wings, no exhaust plumes.
Dave Fravor: I want to see how close I can get. So I go like this. And it's climbing still. And when it gets right in front of me, it just disappears.
Bill Whitaker: Disappears?
Dave Fravor: Disappears. Like, gone.
It had sped off.
Bill Whitaker: What are you thinking?
Alex Dietrich: So your mind tries to make sense of it. I'm gonna categorize this as maybe a helicopter or maybe a drone. And when it disappeared. I mean it was just…
Bill Whitaker: Did your back-seaters see this too?
Alex Dietrich: Yeah.
Dave Fravor: Oh yeah. There was four of us in the airplanes literally watching this thing for roughly about five minutes.
Seconds later, the Princeton reacquired the target. 60 miles away. Another crew managed to briefly lock onto it with a targeting camera before it zipped off again.
Alex Dietrich: You know, I think that over beers, we've sort of said, "Hey man, if I saw this solo, I don't know that I would have come back and said anything," because it sounds so crazy when I say it.
Bill Whitaker: You understand that reaction?
Dave Fravor: I do. I've had some people tell me, you know, "When you say that, you can sound crazy." I'll be hon-- I'm not a UFO guy.
Bill Whitaker: But from what I hear you guys saying, there's something?
Alex Dietrich: Yes.
Dave Fravor: Oh there's, there's definitely something that… I don't know who's building it, who's got the technology, who's got the brains. But there's, there's something out there that was better than our airplane.
The aircrew filed reports. Then like the mysterious flying object, the Nimitz encounter disappeared. Nothing was said or done officially for five years, until Lue Elizondo came across the story and investigated.
Lue Elizondo: We spend millions of dollars in training these pilots. And they are seeing something that they can't explain. Furthermore, that informations being backed up on electro optical data, like gun camera footage. And by radar data. Now, to me, that's compelling.
Chris Mellon
Inside the Pentagon his findings were met with skepticism. AATIP's funding was eliminated in 2012, but Elizondo says he and a handful of others kept the mission alive until finally, frustrated, he quit the Pentagon in 2017, but not before getting these three videos declassified and then things took a stranger turn.
Chris Mellon: I tried to help my colleague, Lue Elizondo, elevate the issue in the department and actually get it to the Secretary of Defense.
Christopher Mellon served as deputy assistant secretary of defense for intelligence for Presidents Clinton and George W. Bush and had access to top secret government programs.
Chris Mellon: So it's not us, that's one thing we know.
Bill Whitaker: We know that?
Chris Mellon: I can say that with a very high degree of confidence in part because of the positions I held in the department, and I know the process.
Mellon says he grew concerned nothing was being done about UAPs, so he decided to do something. In 2017, as a private citizen, he surreptitiously acquired the three Navy videos Elizondo had declassified and leaked them to the New York Times.
Chris Mellon: It's bizarre and unfortunate that someone like myself has to do something like that to get a national security issue like this on the agenda.
He joined forces with now civilian Lue Elizondo and they started to tell their story to anybody who would listen: to newspapers, the History Channel, to members of Congress.
Chris Mellon: We knew and understood that you had to go to the public, get the public interested to get Congress interested, to then circle back to the Defense Department and get them to start taking a look at it.
And now it is. This past August the Pentagon resurrected AATIP, it's now called the UAP task force; service members now are encouraged to report strange encounters; and the Senate wants answers.
Marco Rubio: Anything that enters an airspace that's not supposed to be there is a threat.
After receiving classified briefings on UAPs, Senator Marco Rubio called for a detailed analysis. This past December, while he was still head of the intelligence committee, he asked the director of national intelligence and the Pentagon to present Congress an unclassified report by next month.
Bill Whitaker: This is a bizarre issue. The Pentagon and other branches of the military have a long history of sort of dismissing this. What makes you think that this time's gonna be different?
Marco Rubio: We're gonna find out when we get that report. You know, there's a stigma on Capitol Hill. I mean, some of my colleagues are very interested in this topic and some kinda, you know, giggle when you bring it up. But I don't think we can allow the stigma to keep us from having an answer to a very fundamental question.
Bill Whitaker: What do you want us to do about this?
Marco Rubio: I want us to take it seriously and have a process to take it seriously. I want us to have a process to analyze the data every time it comes in. That there be a place where this is cataloged and constantly analyzed, until we get some answers. Maybe it has a very simple answer. Maybe it doesn't.
Produced by Graham Messick. Associate producer, Jack Weingart. Broadcast associate, Emilio Almonte. Edited by Craig Crawford.
NASA's NEXT Mars helicopter will be 'bigger and better' with a robotic arm to collect samples from Mawrth Vallis channel that was filled with lakes and wetlands 3.5 billion years ago
NASA's NEXT Mars helicopter will be 'bigger and better' with a robotic arm to collect samples from Mawrth Vallis channel that was filled with lakes and wetlands 3.5 billion years ago
NASA published a whitepaper detailing a design for what could be the next helicopter to fly on Mars
It is currently being called 'Mars Science Helicopter' and could be a hexacopter with six blades and a robotic arm to collect samples from Mars
NASA is looking at an ancient waterflow channel to deploy the helicopter or it could be used to map subsurface ice water in a massive crater
NASA's Ingenuity made history as the first powered vehicle to fly on another planet and with this great success, the space agency is already looking to design its predecessor that aims to be bigger and better.
The roboticists at NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory have been sketching out what they call the Mars Science Helicopter (MSH), a 66-pound hexacopter capable of collecting samples from the Red Planet.
Ingenuity, on the other hand, weighs just four pounds and features only two rotors.
Unlike Ingenuity, which is a scout for the Perseverance rover, MSH would carry and deploy scientific payloads and be given its own formation on Mars to explore for ancient signs of life.
NASA could deploy the hexacopter in Mawrth Vallis, a 3.5 billion-year-old waterflow channel once home to flowing rivers, lakes and wetlands.
On Earth, minerals found at sites similar to Mawrth Vallis preserve organic material – and that is what NASA hopes to find on Mars.
Scroll down for video
The Mars Science Helicopter (MSH) (left) is a 66-pound hexacopter capable of collecting samples from the Red Planet. Ingenuity (right), on the other hand, weighs just four pounds and features only two rotors
The helicopter would scout above the promising locations over a wide area, and then use an arm and microdrill to bring samples back to an accompanied lander.
J. (Bob) Balaram, Ingenuity Chief Engineer at JPL, told IEEE Spectrum: 'This is a brand-new way of looking at Mars.
'Aerial mobility gives you reach, range, and resolution. You can reach places that no wheeled vehicle can get to. You can travel kilometers every day. And depending on what height you fly at, you can get whatever resolution you want with your instruments. We were just telling the scientists, think big.'
Along with collecting rock samples, NASA sees MSH mapping out subsurface water ice over large areas.
NASA could deploy the hexacopter in Mawrth Vallis, which is a 3.5 billion-year-old waterflow channel once homes for flowing rivers, lakes and wetlands. On Earth, minerals found at sites like these preserve organic material – and that is what NASA hopes to find on Mars
The helicopter would scout above the for promising locations over a wide area, and then use an arm and microdrill to bring samples back to an accompanied lander
'One region with many icy scarps is Milankovič crater, ~75 km in diameter and located 212°E, 54.7°N at –4000 m elevation15,27,' Balaram and his team wrote in a whitepaper.
'Landscapes in and around the crater indicate periglacial and/or glacial activity, supporting widespread ground ice.
'Shallow ground ice is also a valuable resource for future human exploration13. We propose a mission employing a standalone hexacopter to perform proximate inspection of the icy scarps and the surrounding area, and to conduct vertical profiles to quantify volatile exchange with the atmosphere.'
Along with collecting rock samples, NASA sees MSH mapping out subsurface water ice over large areas
The concept MSH would be able to carry up to 11 pounds of payload, top speeds of 67mph and hover up to five minutes each flight. And just like Ingenuity, MSH would include solar panels to generate its power from the sun
Although MSH is still a sketch in a whitepaper, Balaram says the concept for the vehicle itself 'isn't just a cartoon—it's a serious engineering effort.'
The proposed MSH would be able to carry up to 11 pounds of payload, top speeds of 67mph and hover up to five minutes each flight.
Just as with Ingenuity, MSH would include solar panels to generate its power from the sun.
JPL has yet to reveal when and if it will begin developing MSH, but the agency is still monitoring Ingenuity on Mars.
The small rotocopter performed its 11th flight on August 5, which saw it fly 1,250 feet for 130 seconds as it prepares for a series of reconnaissance missions for the Perseverance rover, which is exploring the Jezero Crater in search of ancient signs of life.
Ingenuity flew for about two minutes before landing in a region scientists have dubbed South Séítah.
This is a patch of ground on the floor of Mars' Jezero Crater which has sandy ripples that NASA scientists fear could be very challenging for the rover.
In a tweet, JPL said: '#MarsHelicopter has safely flown to a new location! Ingenuity flew for 130.9 seconds and traveled about 380 meters before landing at a spot that will set up a series of future reconnaissance flights to help @NASAPersevere in its search for ancient microbial life.'
Perseverance is currently heading south from its landing spot on the Jezero Crater, while Ingenuity is scouting locations to help it plot its way on the ground.
NASA MARS HELICOPTER FLIES SUPER HIGH, SPOTS ROVER WAY DOWN ON GROUND
NASA MARS HELICOPTER FLIES SUPER HIGH, SPOTS ROVER WAY DOWN ON GROUND
"INGENUITY’S AERIAL IMAGES ARE AWESOME — BUT EVEN BETTER WHEN YOU GET TO PLAY ‘WHERE’S PERSEVERANCE?’ WITH THEM."
NASA/FUTURISM
Going Higher
NASA’s Mars helicopter Ingenuity embarked on its 11th flight on the Red Planet’s surface on August 4, flying to record heights.
The four-pound rotorcraft’s latest excursion demonstrates that it’s aced its recent transition from a mere technological demonstration to a fully fledged scientific endeavor — and, while it was at it, it snapped an absolutely gorgeous photo.
Where’s Percy
During the flight, Ingenuity flew to an altitude of 39 feet, allowing it to spot the space agency’s far bigger Perseverance rover from high up.
The images are helping the team at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab decide where to drive the rover next, but the engineers also had a bit of fun with the latest shots.
“Ingenuity’s aerial images are awesome — but even better when you get to play ‘Where’s Perseverance?’ with them,” said deputy mission manager for the Perseverance Robert Hogg in a NASA statement. “Once you find our rover and zoom in, you can make out some details, like the wheels, remote sensing mast, and the [Multi-Mission Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generator] on the aft end.”
And indeed Perseverance can be spotted as a tiny speck in the top center of a new image, taken by Ingenuity from 1,600 feet away.
The helicopter’s 11th flight allowed it to keep ahead of Perseverance and make sure it is headed in the right direction.
Ingenuity keeps breaking its own records — and we can’t wait for its legacy to go even further.
SEE IF YOU CAN SPY THIS MARS EASTER EGG SNAPPED BY NASA’S INGENUITY
SEE IF YOU CAN SPY THIS MARS EASTER EGG SNAPPED BY NASA’S INGENUITY
NASA's Ingenuity helicopter takes an aerial photo that let's viewers hunt for the Perseverance rover on the ground
NASA RELEASED ITS OWN VERSION OF WHERE’S WALDO?, courtesy of the space agency’s Ingenuity helicopter.
On August 11, Ingenuity climbed to an altitude of 39 feet above Mars and snapped a photo of the rippled and russet plains of the Jezero Crater. Somewhere in that expanse of dunes, dust, and rocks lies NASA’s Perseverance rover — if you can spot it.
It’s a fun visual challenge, but it’s more than just a cool view for NASA scientists, who, thanks to Ingenuity’s aerial reconnaissance, can now chart better courses for Perseverance as it pursues its mission of seeking signs of possible life on Mars.
WHERE’S PERSEVERANCE?
It can be tough to know where to start looking for Perseverance in the photo among the sandy plains, ring of rock outcroppings, and large dunes. Thankfully, NASA provided some clues for finding the rover in a media release.
Start by looking for Ingenuity’s shadow at the bottom of the photo, just right of center. If you follow the line from the shadow straight up to the top of the photo and look slightly further right in the rocky dune field, you’ll see a white speck. That’s no rock.
“That’s what a Mars rover looks like from about 1,600 feet (500 meters) away and 39 feet (12 meters) up,” the release notes.
NASA’s Perseverance rover as capture from the air by the Ingenuity helicopter over Mars on Aug. 11, 2021. NASA
INGENUITY HAS OVER-PERFORMED
Ingenuity’s portrait of the Perseverance rover came as part of the drone’s 11th flight, and the helicopter’s latest feat of over-performance has scientists thrilled.
Ingenuity’s original mission was a technology demonstration to prove a craft could fly in the Red Planet’s thin atmosphere and send data back to Earth. The four-pound helicopter accomplished that goal with aplomb on April 19, when the vehicle’s carbon fiber rotors carried it 10 feet above the Martian ground and held it there for 39 seconds — the first powered and controlled flight on another planet.
The aerial vehicle has now transitioned to an operations demonstration, using its camera to plot new courses for the rover and map Jezero Crater from above. The August 11 flight lasted for more than two minutes as Ingenuity flew at around 11 miles per hour to its eighth airfield. The helicopter will scout geologically interesting targets for the Perseverance rover.
NASA estimates the solar-powered Ingenuity can keep flying every few weeks for some time. Its landing gear is expected to handle up to 100 flights — assuming the extreme cold or unforeseen events do not damage the helicopter.
The long-term operation of Ingenuity could be a great boon for the Perseverance rover in its mission to seek signs of ancient life on Mars.
Just in case you still didn’t see it. NASA
PERSEVERANCE STILL HUNTING FOR MARTIAN LIFE
Ingenuity and Perseverance landed on Mars together on February 18, with the Jezero Crater selected as the mission target due to its possibly holding water around 3 billion years ago. The rover will extract Martian soil samples and cache them for retrieval by a later sample return mission to bring the Mars dirt home to Earth for analysis.
The rover’s primary mission is expected to last at least one Martian year — 687 Earth days — and it may need all the time and help it can get: Its first attempt at gathering a sample failed.
Maybe having Ingenuity as an eye in the sky will help.
The Moon was brought here million years ago by two Reptilian brothers, Wowane and Mpanku
The Moon was brought here million years ago by two Reptilian brothers, Wowane and Mpanku
It is in our human nature to question everything we know and to make assumptions or to question certain aspects of our lives that we took for granted so many times. One of these issues is related to the moon. We all know that the moon is the satellite on our planet Earth.
The moon was brought here a million years ago
What is not clear is whether it is a natural satellite or an artificial satellite. It may sound silly, but according to new research, many experts have concluded that something is wrong with the moon. According to experts, the moon rotates around the earth, and that’s fine, there is only one problem. The moon seems to constantly show the same face as it rotates, which completely breaks down already known physics laws.
And there is one more thing: The size of the moon in relation to the size of the earth would make it impossible for our planet to hold the moon in gravity around it. In addition, a new study realized that when Apollo 11 landed on the moon in 1969, the satellite surface did not vibrate, which is what it should have happened if the moon is natural.
Reptilian brothers, Wowane and Mpanku
With regard to all this news about the possible nature of the moon, many investigators firmly believe that the moon has been placed in the orbit of the earth by other alien races such as the so-called Reptilians to “spy” our civilization.
According to Zulu Shaman, the moon was brought here hundreds of generations ago by Wowane and Mpanku, two brothers who were leaders of the aforementioned Reptilians. These two were known as the Water Brothers and contained a fishy skin. It is impossible for us not to make a parallelism between these beings and the Mesopotamian and Sumerian views related to Anunnaki.
Zulu goes on to tell how these two brothers “stole” the moon from the large fire dragon and emptied it until it eventually turned into an empty shell. Then the moon “rolled” across the universe to the earth to bring disaster and destruction with it. Devastating events that ended the “golden age” of history.
Before these tragic events, the earth was a beautiful and idyllic place, nothing compared to what it turned out to be after the lunar arrival.
According to this theory, the moon changed the rotation and angle of the earth, and women began to menstruate – which was not the case before.
Zulu finally confirms that the moon was brought here to keep an eye on people and also serve as a vehicle for traveling across the universe.
The moon is considered the mother ship of Reptilians, which can be used as a refuge in the event of any major disaster.
With the renewed attention that UFOs have seen in recent years, a new series of questions—and challenges—have emerged.
According to the U.S. Navy’s UAP Task Force in its preliminary assessment sent to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) earlier this year, “UAP clearly pose a safety of flight issue and may pose a challenge to U.S. national security. Safety concerns primarily center on aviators contending with an increasingly cluttered air domain.”
The report also adds that “UAP would also represent a national security challenge if they are foreign adversary collection platforms or provide evidence a potential adversary has developed either a breakthrough or disruptive technology.”
Of course, opinions held by longtime advocates for the study of unusual aerial phenomena may differ with the notion that such objects could simply belong to a “foreign adversary,” as the flight capabilities of these objects since recorded since at least the Second World War describes nothing comparable to even the best U.S. technologies at the time.
However, along with the many questions people have about these mysteries of the skies, many are also now confused about what they should be called.
With the renewed interest the subject has seen in recent years, largely following revelations in 2017 about a Pentagon program that looked at aerospace threats, the United States military has preferentially labeled these objects unidentified aerial phenomena, or more simply, UAP. While some have mistakenly viewed this as a recent creation, UAP has been used as a descriptor for the phenomena now for decades.
“Use of the abbreviation UAP has increased in recent years due to the term’s appearance in government and media reports,” reads an entry for the term “UAP” at dictionary.com. “The term unidentified aerial phenomenon/phenomena have been used in US government reports since at least the mid-1960s,” the entry reads, noting that the term mostly appears in “reports of military pilots’ accounts of witnessing objects that appear to be traveling at speeds or performing maneuvers not thought to be possible by known aircraft or with current technology.”
Similar references to unusual airborne objects as unidentified aerial phenomena may have occurred even earlier, although the more commonly accepted name for these objects in popular usage over the last several decades has been unidentified flying objects or UFOs. This name was coined by Edward Ruppelt, the first director of the U.S. Air Force’s Project Blue Book, as a more ambiguous alternative to the term “flying saucer,” which had seen frequent usage in the American media prior to 1952.
“For a while after the Arnold sighting the term ‘flying saucer’ was used to describe all disk-shaped objects that were seen flashing through the sky at fantastic speeds,” Ruppelt wrote in 1956 in his book The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects.
“Before long, reports were made of objects other than disks, and these were also called flying saucers. Today the words are popularly applied to anything seen in the sky that cannot be identified as a common, everyday object.”
Edward Ruppelt (Public Domain)
“Thus,” Ruppelt explained, “a flying saucer can be a formation of lights, a single light, a sphere, or any other shape; and it can be any color. Performance-wise, flying saucers can hover, go fast or slow, go high or low, turn 90- degree corners, or disappear almost instantaneously.”
Herein, of course, we see the problem, since even in the early days of the U.S. Air Force’s involvement with collecting data on these objects, only a small number actually appeared to resemble discs or saucers.
“Obviously the term ‘flying saucer’ is misleading when applied to objects of every conceivable shape and performance,” Ruppelt said. “For this reason the military prefers the more general, if less colorful, name: unidentified flying objects. UFO (pronounced Yoo-foe) for short.”
On an interesting side note, those who have argued about whether the term UFO is an acronym or an abbreviation (yes, there actually are people who concern themselves with such things) will note that Ruppelt gave us his own pronunciation key, identifying “UFO” as indeed being an acronym, although his recommended “Youfoe” pronunciation never seems to have really caught on.
The expression UFO does have its problems, as well as its own degree of baggage, and many commentators from over the years have taken issue with this label for the objects. One primary issue with the term involves the inclusion of the word “flying,” which may be difficult for an object possessing no wings or visible propulsion system to achieve in the same sense that flight is recognized in conventional aircraft. This, in addition to the fact that reports logged for decades appear to convey that these objects can enter the water as easily as they can pass through the air. In other words, these objects may more appropriately be described as craft capable of “moving” through air or water, rather than performing anything comparable to flight as we know it.
Despite the questions over whether unidentified “flying” objects are really flying or not, UFO remains the more popular expression used to describe these objects even today, although the shift toward replacing it with UAP has been notable. Obviously, for the time being, it really seems to remain a matter of preference, and in likelihood, people are going to keep calling these things whichever name appeals to them the most.
Perhaps the most important thing to recognize is that, no matter what one chooses to call them, it has become increasingly difficult to ignore their presence. Whatever they may ultimately represent, UAP/UFOs do appear to represent a tangible phenomenon, as they have now for decades already… and there’s no sign that interest in these aerial mysteries is going anywhere any time soon.
ALL RELATED VIDEOS, selected and posted by peter2011
There have been many alien encounter and abduction reports over the years, and these vary widely across the spectrum from the merely odd to the downright outlandish. On occasion, there have been cases that seem to be particularly weird, playing out like some sort of twisted dream and having a decidedly surreal, ofttimes nightmarish quality to them. These are the cases that are even more bizarre than most, and one little known report comes to us from the country of Germany, where one man came face to face with forces beyond his understanding in an encounter that really pushes the boundaries of the weird.
One morning in August of 1981, an unnamed 55-year-old Polish immigrant living in Germany took a bicycle ride from his home in the city of Rheda-Wiedenbruck on a clear, sunny day. He was rather fond of these leisurely rides, during which he would just meander about and enjoy nature, and on this day, he decided to head to a small lake called Lintel, not far from where he lived. He often went to this lake to enjoy the peaceful serenity of the area, and although his bicycle chain broke and he was forced to walk, it wasn’t far and it was such a lovely day that he kept on going. As he sat looking out over the placid water, his attention was drawn to movement out across the lake on the opposite shore. He could see an old shed out there, and nearby it a figure who seemed to be moving around in a strange manner.
The witness apparently thought this was just a fisherman getting supplies from the shed, but as he peered across the water at this person, his attention was drawn to something else. According to the report, the witness saw a massive metallic object, about 10 meters high and 30 meters in diameter, that looked somewhat like an “upside down plate” hovering silently about 50 feet over the surface of the lake, with no apparent windows, seams, or propulsion device. It sort of hovered there for a time, never making a sound, and when the witness looked back to the fisherman he had been observing, he could now see that the man was in the company of several other figures dressed in some kind of suits that seemed to sparkle and glint in the sunlight. When he looked back at the flying object, he could see that it seemed to be moving towards that shed, eventually hovering low over a grassy clearing near it.
As he looked on at this bizarre sight, he still had no idea what he was looking at, and when he saw a woman walking her dog pass right past the object, the witness began to think that it was perhaps some sort of super advanced transport aircraft accepting passengers. He took it upon himself to approach the strange craft, and as he got closer, he could see there was some type of oval opening in its side, and he went even closer, meaning to ask how much admission was for a ride on this wondrous aircraft. It would appear that aliens were the furthest thing from his mind at this point, but this was about to change.
There was a platform leading from the opening down to the ground below, and as he approached the witness noticed one of the figures in the sparkling suits examining the bicycle he had left not far away. He could now see that the being was somewhat translucent, but this was still not enough to deter him from stepping aboard the craft. Once inside, he found himself in a room with what seemed to be surrounded with nearly transparent walls, and he was led to sit on an “invisible bench” by another of those strange figures. He could now smell a very unpleasant smell like burning rubber, and noticed that the fisherman he had seen earlier was sitting nearby in some sort of daze and was half-naked, being examined by one of the entities. The one near him then telepathically demanded that he hand over his satchel, which he did. The surroundings were now filled with that smell of burning rubber, now so potent that it made him feel dizzy, and he also became aware of some other rather unsettling sights around him. He says of what happened:
In my way toward the being I was somewhat light as if there was no floor below. I saw a cut off head of a cow without left eye and a half of its horn that was also cut off. There were some chains in it jaws. There were also childish shoes and glasses. They put me on some table. I felt lightness as if I was devoid of some internal organs. The interior part of the object was light with pinkish-violet glow.
He was brought into a “misty, blue-grayish room” with more of the beings, and he was undressed and forced to lie down on another table. He was then examined, dressed up again, and his bag was returned to him. He was also given some sort of belt, that seemed to transform into different shapes and had strange symbols on its side. The belt would also hover over the floor if dropped and return to his hand, and would always return to its original position no matter how much he tried to fold it up. As all of this was going on, the ship seemed to be moving, and he would say:
I could see many lights and I don’t know if in the ceiling or by a transparent floor I saw an enormous city with illuminated tower blocks – sometimes I was observing them from various positions. And maybe I was in some big machine or over it, somewhere far away when it was a night and everything around resembled very much an illuminated city.
The witness also says that a “small, transparent ball as big as a tennis ball” suddenly materialized in his hand, which “sparkled with many colors.” He could see when it shone that the bones in his hands were visible, like an x-ray, and this frightened him enough to make him want to throw the ball away, but he found he could not, as every time he threw it hovered back to him in much the same way that the belt did. The ball seemed to be weightless, and when he looked within it, he could see various strange things. The original report by UFO researcher Marcin Mizera would say of this:
The ball was emitting an image from inside – something like a three-dimension show. There were impossible things inside. From a chaos [a multitude of colorful stains divided by lines] there formed some images. There appeared: a tower [measuring pressure] from the town where he lived and then a town hall and a tower block standing in vicinity of his house. Then other similar elements were seen, for example: church towers, playing fields, parking lots etc. Mrs. X saw even himself holding the ball and looking into it. He wanted to turn it in his hands but it transformed into a big, glass circle [7-10 m.wide] that got smaller immediately and transformed into the original ball.
What in the world was going on here? It is all so bizarre that it is hard to say. All through this, one of the mysterious figures just looked on with an inscrutable expression, as if observing, and the witness would say of what happened next:
I smiled foolishly because it was weird, cool and funny. I haven’t seen something like it before. The humanoid was looking at me as a king at a clown. Anyway, I found myself unexpectedly on a scrapheap.
He was just suddenly there on the ground, around 5 km from the lake, with a severe headache and his watch inexplicably broken. His skin was red, as if suffering a sunburn, and he also noticed that both the orb and the belt he had been given on the craft were gone. A search of the area also showed that his bicycle was gone, and so he walked home. He felt a sudden exhaustion upon arriving, and fell into a deep sleep. From that day on, he claims that he suddenly had an incredible affinity and talent for painting, and went on to become a well-known artist in the area, although it is unclear if this had anything to do with his surreal encounter or not. The whole thing is incredibly bizarre, and it is really hard to make sense of. What happened to this man and what did he experience out there? It is hard to say for sure, but it is certainly one of the weirder alien encounter reports there is.
For the better part of the last century, pilots have reported sightings of unusual aerial objects or vehicles that they could not identify.
Students of the history of this subject will recognize that it has an integral relationship with aviation. During the summer of 1947, civilian pilot Kenneth Arnold had been inadvertently responsible for bringing widespread public attention to what thereafter, for a time, became known as “flying saucers,” following his observation of a group of objects whose movement reminded him of how a saucer might look skipping across the water.
Kenneth Arnold
Arnold wasn’t the first pilot to report seeing such uncanny objects in the skies. It would come to light years later that on April 5, 1943, aviation writer and pilot Gerry Casey had been supervising a student pilot in a BT-13A when he observed a peculiar, radiant orange object nearby. The aircraft was elliptical in shape with a rounded hump visible on the top and bottom, and the object appeared to wobble slightly as it flew alongside them and then suddenly accelerated and left their sight.
Casey, who had been carrying a camera with him during the flight, was concerned that what he had observed was one of Lockheed’s new experimental aircraft, and out of concern for national security, refrained from photographing the object.
Such sightings have continued into the present day, and regardless of what the source of these objects may be, one thing remains clear: whether directly or indirectly, unidentified flying objects (UFOs), or unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP) as the U.S. military now prefers to call them, represent a concern for aviators.
Some have expressed concerns in recent days about UFOs being categorized as “threats” by our military. How much evidence is there, after all, that these objects actually display any kind of threatening behavior?
“The military and intelligence establishments remain the guardians of our most profound secrets on UFOs,” wrote journalist Leslie Kean in a recent opinion piece. “Their current narrative frames UAP as a national security threat, which is understandable since the mysterious vehicles operate with impunity in restricted airspace.”
However, Kean asks whether the “threat” narrative is all that should be considered, asking “what about the deeper implications of this mystery? Can we find out what UFOs actually are?”
The challenge these objects represent for science is of equal, if not greater consideration than the assessment by our military about any threats they might represent. However, if we were to base their threat potential on recorded observations of the behavior over time—namely by pilots who have encountered these aerial objects—it appears that while UFOs may not be directly threatening, they do pose a safety concern for aviators.
“Aircrews and Air Traffic Controllers (ATC) have been reporting UAP and UFOs throughout the history of powered flight,” reads an Advisory for Pilots at the website of The National Aviation Reporting Center on Anomalous Phenomena (NARCAP). The advisory, written by the organization’s Director of Research Ted Roe, outlines many of the safety issues related to UFOs, and what can happen when pilots encounter them.
“Many of these observations and incidents involve safety factors,” Roe’s advisory states. “While the government, usually the military, has had a passing interest in UAP the data has moved away from the aviation community and safety planners, leaving no support for aircrews and ATC.”
There are many ways a UFO sighting could possibly result in dangers to pilots, airborne crews, and also passengers aboard commercial aircraft. Namely, these involve distractions UFOs may present to pilots or even incidents where the behavior of an unidentified aerial object may result in pilots taking evasive action that could lead to possible damage to aircraft, or even injury of those on board.
Roe’s advisory notes that “The Federal Aviation Administration, FAA, offers no leadership or guidance to civil or commercial aviation and suggests that aircrews and ATC that want to report UAP observations and incidents can do it to somewhere other than the FAA or the US government.”
The FAA’s aversion to being involved with pilot observations of UFOs has long been a sticking point among advocates of greater awareness of the safety concerns these objects represent to aviators. In recent days, the FAA did finally confirm that it documents pilot sightings of UFOs that can be corroborated on radar, and supplies information it collects to the Navy’s UAP Task Force. The admission marked a notable shift by the FAA, whose own policies have for years stated that UFO sightings should be reported to civilian groups like the Washington-based National UFO Reporting Center.
UFOs may not represent a direct “threat” in the same sense that the military’s current efforts toward studying the phenomena may entail. In fact, there is very little evidence that this is the case. However, this does not mean that UFOs aren’t a concern, especially for aircraft operated by both civilian and military pilots who must apparently share the skies with them. It is time that government agencies and aviation authorities take note of this reality, and begin taking it seriously.
UFO / UAP Humanoid Sighted Over Trenton, New Jersey ( August 15, 2021 )
UFO / UAP Humanoid Sighted Over Trenton, New Jersey on August 15, 2021 : This is MUFON CASE : 117308 Trenton, New Jersey : August 16, 2021 : Mutual UFO Network
MUFON SUBMISSIONS : Flying Man in White Robe Long Description of Sighting Report - Case 117308
It looks like a man wearing a white robe. After recording it I re watched the footage & heard loud static with a robotic voice talking. Recorded from a cell phone
Date Submitted : 2021-08-16 Date of Sighting : 2021-08-15 MUFON SUBMITTER FILE : flyingman.mp4
Strange Blue UFO Sighted Over Twentynine Palms, California ( July 17, 2021 )
Strange Blue UFO was sighted over Twentynine Palms, California on July 17, 2021
STATEMENT : UFO in 29Palms Ca on 7/17/2
They are here !
credit : tonyfrom29
UFO Sighted Over Bedfordshire, England ( August 15, 2021 )
Fiery UFO Sighted Over Bedfordshire, England on August 15, 2021
STATEMENT : Excuse the scared kids and my telling them to be quiet and also the not as good as I thought footage.
If the First Black Holes Collapsed Directly, Could we Detect Radio Signals From Those Moments?
If the First Black Holes Collapsed Directly, Could we Detect Radio Signals From Those Moments?
The universe is littered with supermassive black holes. There’s one a mere 30,000 light-years away in the center of the Milky Way. Most galaxies have one, and some of them are more massive than a billion stars. We know that many supermassive black holes formed early in the universe. For example, the quasar TON 618 is powered by a 66 billion solar mass black hole. Since its light travels nearly 11 billion years to reach us, TON 618 was already huge when the universe was just a few billion years old. So how did these black holes grow so massive so quickly?
One idea is that some of the very first stars were giants. With a mass of more than 10,000 Suns, such a star would be very short-lived, and would quickly collapse into a large black hole. These first black holes would act as seeds in the center of a galaxy, consuming nearby material to grow quickly in size. Some of them would even collide and merge to form an even larger black hole. While it’s a reasonable model, computer simulations find that this process takes too long. This process can’t produce the kind of black holes we see in the early universe such as TON 618.
A direct image of the supermassive black hole in M87. Credit: EHT Collaboration
Another idea is known as the direct collapse scenario. In this model, a small supermassive black hole forms all at once. Dense gas in the middle of a proto-galaxy cools enough to collapse under its own weight, forming a black hole. Since these black holes would have a head start on mass, they can quickly grow into the supermassive black holes we observe.
So far we haven’t been able to observe a direct collapse black hole (DCBH). A few years ago a couple of candidate DCBHs were discovered by their infrared signals. These might be confirmed when the James Webb Space Telescopes is (possibly) launched later this year. But recently a study argues that we might observe DCBHs by their radio signatures.
When black holes actively consume nearby matter, they can create powerful jets of hot plasma. These jets are radio loud and are one of the ways we identify supermassive black holes. Direct collapse black holes should have similar jets, but the jet material would be denser. And since DCBHs would form in the early universe, their radio signals would be more redshifted. This latest work argues that the radio signature of DCBHs would be similar in structure, but easily distinguishable from the radio jets we see today. The signature would also differ from jets created by seed black holes.
Unfortunately, these high-redshift radio sources can’t be seen by current radio telescopes. But they should be bright enough to be detected by the Square Kilometer Array (SKA) and the proposed next generation Very Large Array (ngVLA).
The First Images and Videos from the Double Venus Flyby
The First Images and Videos from the Double Venus Flyby
Two spacecraft made historic flybys of Venus last week, and both sent back sci-fi-type views of the mysterious, cloud-shrouded planet.
The Solar Orbiter and BepiColombo spacecraft both used Venus for gravity assists within 33 hours of each other, capturing unique imagery and data during their encounters.
Solar Orbiter, a joint mission between ESA and NASA to study the Sun, sailed past Venus on August 9 at a distance of 7995 km (4967 miles). Then BepiColombo, a collaborative venture between ESA and JAXA to Mercury, skimmed past at just 552 km (343 miles) from the planet’s surface on August 10.
The image above was taken when BepiColumbo was 1,573 km from Venus.
Here’s a video of Solar Orbiter’s view, from the SoloHI imager:
The camera observed the nightside of Venus in the days before closest approach. SoloHI will be used to take images of the solar wind – the stream of charged particles constantly released from the Sun – by capturing the light scattered by electrons in the wind. In the days leading up to the Venus flyby, the telescope caught views of the bright glare of the planet’s dayside. The footage shows Venus moving across the field of view from the left, while the Sun is off camera to the upper right. The planet’s nightside, the part hidden from the Sun, appears as a dark semicircle surrounded by a bright crescent of light, ESA scientists explained.
Animated gif of BepiColombo’s flyby, with a sequence of 89 images taken by the monitoring cameras . Credit: ESA
Both flybys helped the two spacecraft reach their next destinations. BepiColombo is scheduled to reach the innermost planet of the Solar System in October 2025. The spacecraft needs flybys of Earth, Venus and then several flybys of Mercury itself, together with the spacecraft’s solar electric propulsion system, to help steer into Mercury orbit against the immense gravitational pull of the Sun.
BepiColombo is actually made of two attached orbiters: the Mercury Planetary Orbiter and the Mercury Magnetospheric Orbiter. The Planetary Orbiter will map the planet in great detail, and the Magnetospheric Orbiter will study, obviously, its magnetosphere.
This video of BepiColombo’s Venus flyby includes sonification of data recorded by the Italian Spring Accelerometer (ISA) aboard the Mercury Planetary Orbiter spacecraft. The accelerometer data was converted to frequency to be made audible to the human ear. The resulting sound is quite interesting, with the sound reflecting variations in spacecraft accelerations due to the planet’s gravity acting on the spacecraft structure, as well as effects due to rapid temperature changes, and the change in reaction wheel velocity as they work hard to compensate for these effects. The audio has been matched to the timing that the images seen in this movie were captured, in the moments after closest approach.
A screenshot of the Solar Orbiter flyby video. Credit: ESA.
Solar Orbiter will make a final close Earth flyby on November 27 of this year, coming within 460 km (285 miles) before further Venus slingshots will tilt its inclination, helping the spacecraft get in the right position to get the first-ever views of the Sun’s poles, a crucial part of the mission to help us understand the Sun’s 11 year activity cycle. The beginning of the primary mission also begins in November. It will take the closest ever images of the Sun as it comes within 42 million km, and measure the composition of the solar wind.
This Alien Channeler Says He Speaks to Extraterrestrials
This Alien Channeler Says He Speaks to Extraterrestrials
Are the human race headed for apocalypse? Will Brexit be good for the UK? What do aliens think of VICE? And how soon until we get to get down with aliens in bed? In this rare opportunity, VICE asks an extraterrestrial race (through a man channeling them) all of earth’s burning questions.
Tune in to Venusian Radio! NASA's Parker Solar Probe captures eerie sounds from Venus during its closest EVER flyby of the planet - just 517 miles above the surface
Tune in to Venusian Radio! NASA's Parker Solar Probe captures eerie sounds from Venus during its closest EVER flyby of the planet - just 517 miles above the surface
NASA captured the eerie sounds during a close flyby of the Parker Solar Probe
This probe is being sent to travel within 4 million miles of the surface of the sun
It is making flybys of Venus to help it slow down so it doesn't miss our host star
During the latest flyby in July 2020 it travelled through the upper atmosphere
NASAhas captured haunting sounds coming from the upper atmosphere of Venus during a close flyby of the Parker Solar Probe launched to study the sun.
The natural radio signal is helping scientists study the atmosphere of 'Earth's less hospitable twin,' according to the NASA team responsible for the probe.
The space agency captured the sounds while the Parker probe was making its 'closest-ever flyby' of the planet, travelling at just 517 miles above the surface.
NASA's Goddard space centre is running the solar probe, which made its third flyby of Venus on July 11, 2020, when it detected the radio signal and its eerie soundtrack.
The natural radio signal is helping scientists study the atmosphere of 'Earth's less hospitable twin,' according to the NASA team responsible for the probe
CARBON DIOXIDE AND SULPHURIC ACID DROPLETS FEATURE IN THE ATMOSPHERE OF VENUS
Venus's atmosphere consists mainly of carbon dioxide, with clouds of sulphuric acid droplets.
The thick atmosphere traps the sun's heat, resulting in surface temperatures higher than 470°C (880°F).
The atmosphere has many layers with different temperatures.
At the level where the clouds are, about 30 miles (50 km) up from the surface, it's about the same temperature as on the surface of the Earth.
As Venus moves forward in its solar orbit while slowly rotating backwards on its axis, the top level of clouds zips around the planet every four Earth days.
They are driven by hurricane-force winds travelling at about 224 miles (360 km) per hour.
Atmospheric lightning bursts light up these quick-moving clouds.
Speeds within the clouds decrease with cloud height, and at the surface are estimated to be just a few miles (km) per hour.
On the ground, it would look like a very hazy, overcast day on Earth and the atmosphere is so heavy it would feel like you were one mile (1.6km) deep underwater.
The radio signal was detected during the Venus flyby while the probe was on its way back to study the sun, coming closer to the planet than on any of its previous flybys.
The Parker Solar Probe was launched by NASA in 2018 to study our star and come within 4.3 million miles of the centre of the sun by 2025.
The probe detected a natural radio signal that revealed the spacecraft had flown through the planet's upper atmosphere, coming just 517 miles of the surface.
This was the first direct measurement of the Venusian atmosphere in nearly 30 years - and it looks quite different from Venus past, according to a new study of the data.
The new study found that Venus' upper atmosphere undergoes puzzling changes over a solar cycle - that is the Sun's 11-year activity cycle.
This marks the latest clue to untangling how and why Venus and Earth are so different, despite being born of similar process.
Earth and Venus are twin worlds, they are both rocky, and of a similar size and structure, according to NASA, but their paths diverged from birth.
Venus lacks a magnetic field, and its surface broils at temperatures hot enough to melt lead, it is so intense spacecraft sent to study it only last a couple of hours.
Studying Venus, inhospitable as it is, helps scientists understand how these twins have evolved, and what makes Earth-like planets habitable or not.
The Parker Solar Probe is flying close to Venus in a bid to leverage its gravity to slow down its sideway motion, allowing it to reach the sun and not overshoot the star.
The signal was detected on the third flyby, with each trip around the second planet helping the probe hit its target of coming 4.3 million miles of the solar centre.
Eventually, when it gets closer to the suns atmosphere the probe will be travelling at 430,000 miles per hour - making it the fastest human spaceship ever created.
'I was just so excited to have new data from Venus,' said Glyn Collison of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, the lead scientist on the study.
A Venus expert, Collinson has pored over all the Venus data available from this and previous missions like the NASA Pioneer Venus Orbiter or the ESA Venus Express.
One of Parker Solar Probe's instruments is FIELDS, named for the electric and magnetic fields it measures in the Sun's atmosphere.
During its seven minute flyby of Venus, the FIELDS instrument detected a natural, low-frequency radio signal coming from the upper atmosphere.
The NASA probe, run by Johns Hopkins University made its third flyby of Venus on July 11, 2020, when it detected the radio signal and its eerie soundtrack
The space agency captured the sounds while the Parker probe was making its 'closest-ever flyby' of the planet, travelling at just 517 miles above the surface
AVERAGE DAY ON VENUS CAN VARY BY 20 MINUTES AND LASTS ABOUT 243 EARTH DAYS
An average day on Earth's sister planet Venus lasts a staggering 243 Earth days and new research reveals it can vary by up to 20 minutes from one day to the next.
Planetary scientists from the University of California Los Angeles have been repeatedly bouncing a radar signal off the surface of Venus for the past 15 years.
While it was already known that a Venusian day was 243 Earth days, longer than a year on the planet, which is 225 Earth days, the team now find that can vary.
The day length varies by up to 20 minutes, the team discovered, saying it is likely caused by the thick atmosphere, 93 times more massive than Earth's, exchanging momentum with the solid ground and speeding it up or slowing it down.
A similar phenomenon happens on Earth but the significantly thinner atmosphere means it only adjusts the day length by a millisecond.
Venus is an enigma. It's the planet next door and yet reveals little about itself due to an opaque blanket of clouds smothering a harsh landscape pelted by acid rain.
The team also discovered that the core of Venus has a 2,174 miles radius, similar to Earth's 2,165 mile radius, but they can't say if it is solid or liquid.
Study authors say that understanding the size of the core, speed of rotation and exact tilt of the axis will help with planning future landing missions on Venus.
The shape and strength of the signal seemed familiar, but Collinson said he couldn't place it at first, then had a moment of recognition saying 'I know what this is!'
Collinson recognised the signal from his previous work with NASA's Galileo orbiter, which explored Jupiter and its moons before the mission ended in 2003.
A similar frown appeared when Galileo passed through the ionospheres of Jupiter's moons, and it is due to a layer of electrically charged gas in the ionosphere.
This sea of charged gases, or plasma, naturally emits radio waves that can be detected by instruments like FIELDS, explained NASA.
When Collinson and his team identified that signal, they realised Parker Solar Probe had skimmed Venus' upper atmosphere, something they called 'a pleasant surprise.'
The radio emission provided enough data to calculate the density of the ionosphere and compare it to measurements taken in 1992 by Pioneer.
When the Pioneer Venus Orbiter visited our sister world the sun was near its solar maximum - the stormy peak of its 11-year solar cycle.
Observations from Earth over the years that followed revealed changes were taking place on Venus as the Sun settled into its calm phase, solar minimum.
This ground based data revealed the bulk of the atmosphere remained the same, but the ionosphere was much thinner when the sun was at its least active, but this was impossible to prove without direct measurements from a spacecraft.
The observations from Parker Solar Probe's recent flyby, which occurred six months after the latest solar minimum, verify the puzzle in Venus' ionosphere.
'Indeed, Venus' ionosphere is much thinner compared to previous measurements taken during solar maximum,' according to a NASA spokesperson.
'When multiple missions are confirming the same result, one after the other, that gives you a lot of confidence that the thinning is real,' said Robin Ramstad, a study co-author and researchers at the University of Colorado, Boulder.
Understanding why Venus' ionosphere thins near solar minimum is one part of unraveling how Venus responds to the Sun.
This was the first direct measurement of the Venusian atmosphere in nearly 30 years - and it looks quite different from Venus past, according to a new study of the data
This is an image of the surface of Venus, captured by the Soviet-era probe Venera 13 in 1982
This is an impact crater on the surface of Venus, captured by the NASA Magellan mission in 1996
VENUS: EARTH'S SISTER WORLD
Venus and Earth are remarkably similar in size but their histories differ.
The second planet from the Sun sits in the inner edge of the habitable zone, in fact scientists believe it may have been habitable 700 million years ago.
A single day on the inhospitable world is 243 Earth days, compared to the 24 hours on Earth.
It is a terrestrial planet similar in size, mass proximity to the sun and bulk composition as the Earth.
However, it has the densest atmosphere of the terrestrial planets, made up of 96% carbon dioxide and a pressure at the surface 92 times greater than Earth.
It has the hottest surface of any planet in the solar system with a mean temperature of 867 degrees Fahrenheit.
Its clouds are made of sulfuric acid, with acid rain falling to the hot surface.
It may have had oceans in the past, but the water would have been vaporised as temperatures rose due to a runaway greenhouse effect.
Understanding this will help researchers determine how Venus, which was once so similar to Earth it may have been habitable and have flowing water, became the scorching world full of toxic air it is today.
For example, Venus' ionosphere is prone to leaking, meaning the escape of energised gases into space. Gathering data on this and other changes in the ionosphere is key to understanding how Venus' atmosphere has evolved over time.
To confirm the Earth-based readings took a mission to Venus, and decades later, a state-of-the-art mission to the Sun.
'The goal of flying by Venus is to slow down the spacecraft so that Parker Solar Probe can dive closer to the Sun,' said Nour E. Raouafi, Parker Solar Probe project scientist at the Applied Physics Laboratory.
'But we would not miss the opportunity to gather science data and provide unique insights into a mysterious planet such as Venus.'
Collinson likened the research to hitchhiking. Venus scientists were eager to piggyback off Parker Solar Probe's flyby for new data and views of Earth's twin planet. 'To see Venus now, it's all about these little glimpses,' he said.
The findings have been published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.
HOW WILL THE PARKER SOLAR PROBE GET SO CLOSE TO THE SUN?
The Parker Solar Probe mission will require 55 times more energy than would be needed to reach Mars, according to NASA.
It launched atop a United Launch Alliance Delta IV Heavy, one of the most powerful rockets in the world, with a third stage attached.
But, its trajectory and speed are critical in getting to the correct orbit.
As Earth, and everything on it, are traveling at about 67,000 miles per hour in a direction that’s sideways to the sun, craft must be launched backward to cancel out the sideways motion, NASA explains.
The Parker probe is heading past the sun, so it will need to remove about 53,000 miles per hour, according to the space agency.
The Parker Solar Probe will swing around Venus a total of seven times, with each pass slowing it down some and pushing it closer and closer to the sun. These orbits are shown in the animation above
This will require a boost from the powerful Delta IV rocket, and several gravity assists from Venus to slow it down.
The probe will rely on a series of gravity assists from Venus to slow down its sideways motion, allowing it to get just 3.8 million miles away from the sun’s surface.
‘In this case, rather than speeding up the spacecraft, as in a typical gravity assist, Venus slows down its sideways motion so the spacecraft can get close to the sun,’ NASA explains.
‘When it finally does get close, Parker Solar Probe will have lost much of its sideways speed, but gained a great deal of overall speed thanks to the sun’s gravity.
‘Parker Solar Probe will hurtle past the sun at 430,000 miles per hour.’
At its closest approach, it will get just 3.8 million miles from the surface of the sun, making it the only spacecraft to ever venture so close.
Bepicolombo's second venus flyby in images. Credit: ESA
On 9th August 2021, the ESA/NASA Solar Orbiter and BepiColombo spacecraft made a historic Venus flyby at a distance of 7995 km and 552 km from the planet’s surface. The spacecraft passes by the planet within 33 hours. In addition, they captured some unique images, videos, and data during the flyby.
The reaction wheels installed on both spacecraft maintain spacecraft attitude, keeping it pointing on course. When spacecraft flew past Venus, the reaction wheels felt the immense gravitational pull of the planet in the angular momentum.
The spacecraft also measured the accelerations, which were then recorded by the Italian Spring Accelerometer (ISA) onboard the BepiColombo MPO. The acceleration data was then translated into frequency so that humans can hear it. The resulting sound involves the effects of the planet’s gravity acting on the spacecraft structure, the response of the spacecraft to the rapid temperature changes, and the reaction wheels working hard to compensate for these effects.
What’s more, for the first time, the accelerometer recorded the tidal effects acting on the spacecraft on another planet. Scientists are now analyzing this data.
While traveling from nightside to dayside of planet, both spacecraft felt a rapid increase of heat. The JAXA Mercury Magnetospheric Orbiter (MMO), situated inside the sun-shield, recorded an increase of 110 degrees Celsius on one of its eight solar panels, from -100ºC to +10ºC. Within the spacecraft itself, only a rise of 2-3 degrees was observed, demonstrating the effectiveness of the insulation.
On the European Mercury Transfer Module, a temperature increase of 50 degrees was observed on the spacecraft radiator, while the Mercury Planetary Orbiter (MPO) recorded a change of about 20 degrees.
The magnetometer teams from both spacecraft report they saw the effects of the flyby in their data. The data offered a rare glimpse into the solar wind interaction with a planetary atmosphere. The audio captures low-frequency wind-like noises caused by the solar wind and its interaction with Venus.
In the days leading up to the Venus flyby, Solar Orbiter’s SoloHI imager caught the dramatic glare of the planet’s dayside. In the footage, we see Venus moving across the field of view from the left, while the Sun is off-camera to the upper right. The planet’s nightside, hidden from the Sun, appears as a dark semicircle surrounded by a bright crescent of light.
On the other hand, BepiColombo’s three monitoring cameras captured a series of black-and-white snapshots. You can see the complete set of images from the flyby in the Planetary Science Archive.
With the close encounter, MPO’s Mercury Radiometer and Thermal infrared Imaging Spectrometer (MERIS) could capture spectra of the Venus atmosphere while the planet filled its field of view.
Black holes are great at sucking up matter. So great, in fact, that not even light can escape their grasp (hence the name).
But given their talent for consumption, why don't black holes just keep expanding and expanding and simply swallow the Universe? In 2018, one of the world's top physicists came up with a dazzling explanation.
Conveniently, the idea could also unite the two biggest theories in all of physics.
The researcher behind this explanation is none other than Stanford University physicist Leonard Susskind, also known as one of the fathers of string theory.
He gave his two cents on the paradox in a series of papers, which basically suggest that black holes expand by increasing in complexity inwardly – a feature we just don't see connected while watching from afar.
In other words, they expand in, not out.
Weirder still, this hypothesis might have a parallel in the expansion of our own Universe, which also seems to be growing in a counterintuitive way.
"I think it's a very, very interesting question whether the cosmological growth of space is connected to the growth of some kind of complexity," Susskind was quoted in The Atlantic.
"And whether the cosmic clock, the evolution of the Universe, is connected with the evolution of complexity. There, I don't know the answer."
Susskind might be speculating on the Universe's evolution, but his thoughts on why black holes grow in more than they do out is worth unpacking. Of course, by its very nature, this type of research is theoretical, and not easily verified or disproved through the process of peer review.
But there are some pretty cool idea in here worth unpacking. To do that, we need to go back to basics for a moment. So... hang tight.
Put simply, black holes are dense masses that distort space to the extent that even light (read: information) lacks the escape velocity required to make an exit.
The first solid theoretical underpinnings for such an object emerged naturally out of the mathematics behind Einstein's general relativity back in 1915. Since then, physical objects matching those predictions have been spotted, often hanging around the centers of galaxies.
A common analogy is to imagine the dimensions of space plus time as a smooth rubber sheet. Much as a heavy object dimples the rubber sheet, mass distorts the geometry of spacetime.
The properties of our Universe's rubber sheet means it can form a deep gravity funnel that stretches 'down' without stretching much further 'out'.
Most objects expand 'out' as you add material, not 'in'. So how do we even begin to picture this? Rubber sheets are useful analogies, but only up to a certain point.
To understand how matter behaves against this super stretchy backdrop, we need to look elsewhere. Luckily, physics has a second rule book on how the Universe works called quantum mechanics, which describes how particles and their forces interact.
The two rule books of general relativity and quantum mechanics don't always agree, though. Small things interpreted through the lens of general relativity don't make much sense. And big things like black holes produce gibberish when the rules of quantum mechanics are applied.
This means we're missing something important – something that would allow us to interpret general relativity's space-bending feature in terms of finite masses and force-mediating particles.
One contender is something called anti-de Sitter/conformal field theory correspondence, shortened to Ads/CFT. This is a 'string theory meets four-dimensional space' kind of idea, aiming to bring the best of both quantum mechanics and general relativity together.
Based on its framework, the quantum complexity of a black hole – the number of steps required to return it to a pre-black hole state – is reflected in its volume.
The same thinking is what lies behind another brain-breaking idea called the holographic principle. The exact details aren't for the faint-hearted, but remain freely available on arXiv if you want to get your mathematics fix for the day.
It might sound a bit like downloading movies onto your desktop only to find it's now 'bigger' on the inside. As ludicrous as it sounds, in the extreme environment of a black hole more computational power might indeed mean more internal volume. At least this is what Susskind's Ads/CFT modelling suggests.
String theory itself is one of those nice ideas begging for an empirical win, so we're still a long way from marrying quantum mechanics and general relativity.
Susskind's suggestion that quantum complexity is ultimately responsible for the volume of a black hole has physicists thinking through the repercussions. After all, black holes aren't like ordinary space, so we can't expect ordinary rules to apply.
But if anybody is worth listening to on the subject, it's probably this guy.
The lectures were originally made available on the preprint server arXiv, and in 2020 were published as a book.
A version of this article was first published in December 2018.
Vibrant pictures taken by NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter reveal Nili Fossae, Mars’ northwest region, as one of the most colorful spots on the Red Planet. Check it out for yourself.
The mesmerizing image was captured by the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera installed on the Mars Orbiter.
Many Martian regions appear smoothed by dust and regolith, but in this stunning pic we see the Nili Fossae bedrock very well exposed, except for spots where there are sand dunes.
This and other breathtaking pictures from Mars Orbiter show diverse compositions on the layered bedrock formed by the region’s complicated and interesting geology history.
These compositions produce different colors in HiRISE’s infrared-red-blue color images, like the beautiful shades of blue and beige in the one you see here.
The variety of colors is produced by the presence of minerals – such as carbonate, aluminum smectite, hydrated silica, and iron oxides – in Mars’ crust
A NASA spokesperson said the Orbiter’s next step will be to inspect the region further in search of signs of life that might once have existed there.
“Nili Fossae Trough is a huge crack in the surface of Mars,” the NASA spokesperson explained.
“The region has one of the largest, most diverse exposures of clay minerals [that] contain water in their mineral structure and may preserve organic materials. Scientists are excited about studying such deposits to understand past environments that could have supported life.”
Mars in Unusual Shades of Blue, Green and Yellow Is Like Nothing You’ve Seen Before
Mars in Unusual Shades of Blue, Green and Yellow Is Like Nothing You’ve Seen Before
For ages, when people are thinking about Mars, the first and probably only color that comes to mind is red. That’s, of course, somewhat inaccurate, but it happens nonetheless.
1. NILLI FOSSAE REGION ON MARS
Photos Credits : SpaceX
2. ARTIST RENDERING OF BASECAMP ON MARS
Photos Credits : SpaceX
3. RAPTOR ENGINES
Photos Credits : SpaceX
4. STARSHIP RENDERING
Photos Credits : SpaceX
5. STARSHIP RENDERING
Photos Credits : SpaceX
6. STARSHIP RENDERING
Photos Credits : SpaceX
7. FLEET OF RAPTORS ENGINES
Photos creditts Elon Musk via Twitter
For ages, when people are thinking about Mars, the first and and probably only color that comes to mind is red, some whar inaccurate, but it happens nonetheless
The target of humanity’s mid-future exploration plans, Mars gets its reddish color thanks to the layers upon layers of dust covering its surface. The dust is not actually red, but more of a rusty orange, because of the iron that makes up most of the substance, blown all over the surface eons ago and transformed this way by the oxygen that was once abundant around the planet.
From time to time, we get to see specs of white, given by the ice that can be found here and there. But one almost never gets to see other colors on the surface, except, perhaps, at the landing site for the Chinese Tianwen-1 mission, from where we were treated with some shades of blue not long ago.
But there’s a little place on Mars, on the rim of the Isidis impact basin, where one can be treated to shades of blue, green, and even yellow. All you need for that to happen is the High-Resolution Imaging Science Experiment camera (HiRISE) fitted on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) high up in Martian orbit.
The image you’re looking at was taken by HiRISE back in 2016 and republished this month by the people running the MRO. It shows the Nili Fossae region, and it definitely looks more like some abstract painting than an image from the planet we all know.
The scientists running the round-the-clock observation of the planet explain these colors by saying the reddish dust we talked about above is not as present here, and what we’re looking at is the exposed bedrock. The rocks that make it up have different compositions, which when viewed through the HiRISE infrared produce different colors.
So, not exactly something one could see with the naked eye, but stunning nonetheless.
A new UN report on climate change is "a warning for the entire global community," McArthur said.
Astronauts have a better view of Earth than anybody, but lately it's a discouraging one.
"We've been very saddened to see fires over huge sections of the Earth, not just the United States," NASA astronaut Megan McArthur told Insider on a recent call from the space station.
Wildfires are raging across the US, Canada, Greece, Turkey, Italy, Algeria, and Siberia. McArthur's crewmate, French astronaut Thomas Pesquet, has posted photos of those blazes from above on Twitter.
Wildfires are one of the most visible hallmarks of the climate crisis. This summer, they've come alongside historic heat waves and the western US's worst drought in the 20-year history of the US Drought Monitor.
A new report from the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) warns that "fire weather" will probably increase by 2050 in North America, Central America, parts of South America, the Mediterranean, southern Africa, north Asia, Australia, and New Zealand. That means more days where conditions are warm, dry, and windy enough to trigger and sustain wildfires.
The amount of fuel available to burn in those places — dry vegetation — is also likely to increase as rising temperatures cause the air to absorb more moisture and bring about more droughts.
The IPCC report, released Monday, is the first part of the group's sixth assessment, which recruits hundreds of experts to analyze years of scientific research on climate change. Those experts determined that global temperatures will almost certainly rise at least 1.5 degrees Celsius above the preindustrial average by 2040.
That may sound small, but it brings about huge changes across the planet, including further melting of glaciers and polar ice caps. This contributes to sea-level rise, and water expands as it heats up, so it is virtually certain that oceans will continue rising through the end of this century. In the best case scenario, the IPCC authors said, oceans will rise by nearly a foot over the next 80 years.
"Over many years, scientists around the world have been sounding this alarm bell," McArthur said. "This is a warning for the entire global community. It's going to take the entire global community to face this and to work through these challenges."
Astronauts can see the climate crisis unfolding across the planet
A photo of Hurricane Laura taken from the International Space Station on August 25, 2020. Chris Cassidy/NASA
Astronauts can see other signs of the changing climate, too: "Big tropical storms — those are always coming, and potentially the flooding that comes after them," McArthur said. "We can see all of those effects from up here."
Future astronauts will probably observe even more of that. The IPCC report found that combinations of extreme events like heavy rainfall and hurricane-caused storm surge, paired with rising seas, will continue to make flooding more likely in coming decades.
"The other thing that we can see, of course, is the very thin lens of atmosphere," McArthur said. "That is what protects our Earth and everything on it. And we see how fragile that is, and we know how important it is."
The atmosphere glows above the southeastern African coast, as seen from the International Space Station. NASA
The burning of fossil fuels like coal and oil is drastically changing that thin atmosphere by filling it with heat-trapping gas.
In 2019, the concentration of carbon in the atmosphere was higher than at any time in at least 2 million years, according to the IPCC report. Concentrations of methane and nitrous oxide — more potent greenhouse gases than carbon dioxide — were higher than at any time in at least 800,000 years.
On August 4, 2021, an astronaut on the International Space Station shot a photo of the Dixie fire’s thick smoke plume. NASA/JSC
As those gases fill the atmosphere, they prevent more and more heat from the sun from bouncing back into space. That's what's causing global temperatures to rise and bringing about the extreme weather that astronauts are watching in horror.
"That is the place that we need to be able to live. So it's important that we take ownership of whatever we can do to help maintain it," NASA astronaut Mark Vande Hei told Insider.
NOW WATCH:
6 major US cities could be underwater within 80 years — here are the disturbing ‘after’ images
One of the most mysterious UFO cases in Scottish history began on August 4, 1990, when two hikers were out in the remote Scottish Highlands, close to Calvine, north of Pitlochry, when they saw something very bizarre in the sky above. There hovering in the air above was an enormous diamond-shaped object estimated as being around 100 feet in diameter, and which oddly seemed to have some RAF Harrier jets circling about it, making passes, and following it as it moved slowly over the highlands and passed over the A9 expressway, where it was seen by some motorists. The men were able to take a series of six very clear color photos of the mysterious craft, one of which allegedly shows a fighter jet companion during the 10 minutes they spent observing the bizarre sight. After this, the UFO allegedly then shot straight up at breathtaking speed. After this, the photos they took would become one of the stranger odysseys of government cover-ups, shadowy conspiracies, and missing evidence that could very well shake the world of Ufology to its core.
The area of the sighting
The excited witnesses turned over the photographs to the Scottish Daily Record who then, perhaps foolishly in retrospect, contacted the Ministry of Defense (MoD) for some comment on the images. From here, it gets a bit shadowy, as officials from the MoD then allegedly arrived at the newspaper’s office and confiscated the photographs and the negatives without explanation, merely stating that the material was “sensitive.” The newspaper never would get them back and the photographs of what was being called the “Calvine Incident” were never published. Indeed, the newspaper never saw them again. However, the strangeness was only just starting.
At the time, one of the men involved with the MoD’s investigation into UFOs, sort of like America’s Project Blue Book, was a man by the name of Nick Pope, who has claimed that the photographs had attracted the attention of the military all the way up to the highest levels. Pope claims that these negatives that they had confiscated were analyzed in great depth, that the MoD also commissioned a series of line drawings of the images, and according to him these pictures were the clearest, most impressive UFO photographs anyone had ever seen. One of the photos in particular was considered to be of outstanding quality, and conclusively showed something beyond explanation. He would explain of all of this:
The MoD has all sorts of equipment and expertise that we used to analyze and enhance imagery to tell whether there were any signs of fakery. This picture was assessed by our digital experts, who concluded it was a real photograph showing a solid-structured craft which was estimated as being around 25m in diameter. There were no wings and no visible signs of any propulsion system. It was exotic and unknown in a way far beyond even the most modern stealth aircraft being trialed at that time. Even now, years after these events, I can’t discuss the details of this process, as so much of the information is top secret. The Defence Intelligence staff sent these images to JARIC that’s the Joint Air Reconnaissance and Intelligence Centre. Now this is the UK’s military centre of expertise when it comes to imagery analysis. These Intelligence personnel come to the conclusion that these photographs are real – it’s a solid craft and no one has the faintest idea what it is.
I remember going to a briefing with the defense intelligence staff where the photograph was discussed. Most of the details of our conversation are classified and must remain secret. While I took early retirement from the MoD in 2006, the Official Secrets Act binds me for life. But I can reveal the sensational conclusion to our top secret briefing. Summing up, the intelligence officer ran through the possibilities. Gesturing to the left with his finger, he said the object in the photograph wasn’t Russian. Jerking his hand to the right, he said it wasn’t American. He looked at us intently and said that only left one other possibility. He pointed straight up. My boss and I couldn’t help looking up too. Then we looked at each other and then we looked back at the intelligence officer. His face was inscrutable. Nothing further was said and my boss and I walked back to our office in silence.
Nick Pope
The official conclusion, according to Pope, was that what was shown in the pictures was an alien spacecraft, which would have been groundbreaking, as the MoD had traditionally shied away from this line of reasoning, almost always finding a rational explanation or at the very most filing a report away as unknown. However, this time was different, the Calvine photographs shaking up the MoD and causing much excitement. Pope also would explain that the MoD took its investigation into UFOs more seriously than they let on, and that they rarely let the public know what was going really going on. He would say of this and the confusion the Calvine Incident had caused:
The MoD’s standard line on UFOs was that the phenomenon was of ‘no defence significance’ – a meaningless Whitehall soundbite that meant whatever we wanted it to mean. At best it was misleading and at worst, it was a downright lie. We consistently played down the true level of our interest in UFOs, telling parliament, the media and the public that the subject was of little interest, while all the time, behind closed doors, we struggled to make sense of cases like the Calvine incident. Despite an extensive investigation, we never found a definitive explanation for what was seen at Calvine.
Nevertheless, according to Pope there were still skeptics within the MoD, who believed that what was shown in the photos was not aliens, but rather some sort of top-secret experimental aircraft designed by the Americans, and he even claims that this started a bit of an incident between the two countries. Pope would explain:
One time, they nearly caused a diplomatic incident that threatened to unravel the UK’s Special Relationship with the United States. By the mid-Nineties a bitter struggle had erupted within the MoD in relation to UFOs. A sceptic versus believer dogfight was raging. In relation to the Calvine photos, the only remotely possible skeptical theory was that the object was a secret prototype aircraft or drone. We knew what we did and didn’t have when it came to such things, so realistically, that only left the Americans. At the same time as this row was raging, speculation arose that the Americans had developed a secret prototype aircraft codenamed Aurora – a hypersonic replacement for the iconic SR-71 Blackbird. We asked the US authorities if they’d been testing such an aircraft over the UK, but received firm denials. With the Calvine photos in mind, some MoD officials didn’t believe the US assurances, so asked again.
The Secretary of the Air Force, Donald Rice, was ‘incensed’ by the questioning and the implication that he’d lied to the US Congress when he told them Aurora didn’t exist. Our Air Attaché at the British Embassy in Washington wrote to senior RAF officers, pleading with them to defuse the row. As a result of this diplomatic bust-up, my Head of Division removed the Calvine incident photo from our office wall. He, like my immediate boss, was a sceptic, and clung to the belief that the object had to be American, because the concept of extraterrestrial visitation was too terrible a truth for him to face.
A supposed degraded photocopy of one of the images
Pope claims that shortly after this, the negatives of Calvine photographs were all locked away and classified, with even his own copy of one of the photos taken away from him and all known existing copies of the photographs shredded and destroyed. In 1996, a Freedom of Information Act request was filed by a journalist, only to receive the following response:
A number of negatives associated with the sighting were examined by staff responsible for air defense matters. Since it was judged they contained nothing of defense significance the negatives were not retained and we have no record of any photographs having been taken from them.
This seems to suggest that they are gone forever, but according to Pope, there is no way that the negatives were destroyed, and they will almost certainly still be in the files. The only evidence he has for the existence of these alleged photographs that caused such waves in the MoD are mock ups of what was seen in them that Pope had made from memory, as well as a photocopy of of one of the images, but the real photographs have remained locked away. Even after retirement, Pope would champion efforts to get the MoD to declassify its UFO files and release the Calvine images, but just as these files were about to be released in 2021, the government suddenly blocked this, and ended up resealing the files for a further 50 years, not to be opened until 2072. For now, all there are lines drawings, a photocopy, and Pope’s recreations from memory. The Calvine photographs remain hidden from us, and not a single one of the real images has ever seen the light of day. Pope has said:
Plenty of other copies survived and when I came out of retirement in 2008 to help publicize the declassification and release of the MoD’s UFO files, I was looking forward to the Calvine photos seeing the light of day. Sadly, it wasn’t to be. All that remained were some poor-quality black and white photocopies of a line drawing of one photo. Intelligence analysts use line drawings in their work, but to the media and the public, they look cartoonish. It was almost as if the MoD wanted to ridicule the subject. A few years ago, I teamed up with a graphic artist in Los Angeles and we reconstructed the photo for a TV show, using the line drawing and my memory as a guide. The result was spot-on, but it’s still not the real thing.
We are left here with an intriguing story, indeed, photographs which by Pope’s estimates would virtually prove that UFOs are real. Yet, as with many such promised pieces of evidence they have disappeared, and it is hard to tell just how amazing these purported photographs might be or even whether they ever existed at all. We have only Pope’s assurances that they do, but no way to see them and analyze them for ourselves. There is also sadly the fact that we now live in an era in which photographic evidence doesn’t go very far, making it unlikely that these images would be accepted as real even if we had access to them. What is going on here? Were these really such incredible images and if so, what happened to them? Were they buried by the MoD and covered-up? Are they locked up somewhere hidden away, and what exactly do they show? It seems that we only have to wait until 20172 to find out how exciting any of this really is or whether these photos even exist, so in the meantime, it is left to debate and speculation.
ALL RELATED VIDEOS, selected and posted by peter2011
Strange lights Sighted Over Zhengzhou, China Before Flooding ( July 30, 2021 )
These amazing strange lights appeared in China's Zhengzhou sky in the Henan province.shortly before the flooding began on July 30, 2021.
They are everywhere
Multiple UFOs Sighted Over The Moon ( July 18, 2021 )
New UFO footage of Multiple UFOs or one large UFO Fleet sighted on July 18, 2021 by telescope. Video showing multiple UFOs passing continuously throughout the clip
They are here
credit : U.S.F
UFO / UAP Sighted Over Morón Air Base, Spain ( August 14, 2021 )
UFO / UAP sighted over Morón Air Base located in Morón de la Frontera, Spain southeast of Seville in the Arahal municipality territory
STATEMENT : This object was seen on the Morón Air Base what could it be.
They are here !
credit : Juan Cabrera
UFO Battle Over Hartford, Connecticut : MUFON CASE : 117278 : ( August 14, 2021 )
Mutual UFO Network : MUFON SUBMISSIONS : UFO FLEET IN BATTLE WITH EACH OTHER Long Description of Sighting Report - Case 117277
These objects are not fireworks it looks like they were shooting at one another like they were in a big battle.
Here I present the original and an approximate analysis.. Closer and more evident every day
Date Submitted : 2021-08-14 Date of Event : 2021-08-13 MUFON SUBMITTER FILE : ufobattle.mp4
UFO Sighted Over Anaheim, California ( August 2, 2021 )
STATEMENT : UFO sighting Anaheim California August 02, 2021. Possible UfO Sighting. if I zoom in it's even more awkward. To be honest I do not remember the exact location. I know I was in Anaheim. I want to say off of Euclid but again I do not recall exactly where in Anaheim I was. I was totally blown away by the object I seen floating. I forgot to show people in my life that day till the next day.
VIDEO 2 : zooming in on unidentified object in Anaheim California August 02, 2021
Things You will See for the First Time in Your Life
Things You will See for the First Time in Your Life
It’s not so bizarre to see a three-legged dog nowadays, after all, puppies are resilient little creatures. We’ll somewhere further along we’ll show you a picture of a dog with not three but two legs. I know it’s out of this world, but oh well. That’s what the episode is about. We have a whole bunch of other things too coming up which will blow your mind away.
TRERLATED VIDEOS, selected and posted by peter2011
12 Rarest Places on Earth That Are Extremely Clean
12 Rarest Places on Earth That Are Extremely Clean
Do you get to a place where you feel that you live in an area that has trash left, right and center? You need a breath of fresh air, you need to get out of the city life filled with all types of hustling, bustling and garbage. Add this next list of places into your list of travel destinations. These places are surreal with clean air, magnificent scenery and clear blue skies.
Two pilots over Canadian airspace reported seeing a 'bright green flying object' that flew into a cloud and 'disappeared' over the eastern part of the country last month.
The incident occurred on July 30, when a Canadian military plane - flying between CFB Trenton, a military base in Ontario and Cologne, Germany - and KLM Royal Dutch Airlines flight KLM618 - traveling from Boston to Amsterdam - saw the mysterious object.
Two pilots over Canadian airspace reported a 'bright green flying object' that flew into a cloud and 'disappeared'
A Canadian military plane and KLM Royal Dutch Airlines flight KLM618 saw the mysterious object on July 30. The military plane was flying between CFB Trenton, a base in Ontario and the passenger jet was traveling from Boston to Amsterdam
According to the Canadian government, there was 'no impact to operations' on either plane
However, logistics expert and consultant Steffan Watkins looked at the flight data information and tweeted that the Canadian military plane, a CC-177 Globemaster III, 'made a change in course and had climbed 1,000 ft when they reported seeing the UFO.'
'So, I would like to know if the [Royal Canadian Air Force] pilot changed course to avoid it, changed course to see what it was, or if the swerve-like course correction was completely routine and just a coincidence,' Watkins added.
Logistics expert and consultant Steffan Watkins looked at the flight data information
Watkins saw that the military plane made a change in course and climbed 1,000 ft upon seeing the UFO
'So, I would like to know if the [Royal Canadian Air Force] pilot changed course to avoid it, changed course to see what it was, or if the swerve-like course correction was completely routine and just a coincidence,' Watkins added
Watkins added that the object could have been a meteor, given it took place at the early part of the Perseid meteor shower, which started July 14 and peaked earlier this week.
The government report is perhaps unsurprisingly, tagged 'weather balloon, meteor, rocket, CIRVIS/UFO.'
A spokesperson for the Royal Canadian Air Force confirmed the sighting to DailyMail.com.
'The crew saw something in the air, and reported it to NAV Canada as per standard procedure, before carrying on with their mission without further incident,' the spokesperson said in an email. 'While it is not known what they saw, there was nothing to indicate that it posed any kind of security concern or posed a safety risk to the aircraft.'
A spokesman for NAV Canada, the company that operates Canada's air traffic control, pointed DailyMail.com to the Civil Aviation Daily Occurrence Reporting System (CADORS) website.
'This Canadian incident case is fascinating, not least for the light it sheds on how sightings are categorized not as UFOs, but as aviation occurrences,' Nick Pope, a former employee and UFO investigator for Britain's Ministry of Defense, told DailyMail.com via email.
'Part of this stems from historical reluctance on the part of pilots - civil and military - to report UFOs,' Pope added.
'Instead, these objects are described in terms of unidentified aircraft or drones, as potential air safety issues. What this means is that one has to trawl through all sorts of aviation occurrence reports and then read between the lines to find details of possible UFO encounters.'
Vice News was first to report on the incident with unidentified aerial phenomena.
Though Canada's Department of National Defense does not track UFO sightings, a department spokesperson told Vice, the US's neighbor to the north is acutely aware of these incidents.
In April, Canada revealed dozens of UFO reports made by commercial airline pilots, kept in the CADORS database.
Two months later, DailyMail.com reported that the Canadian military has 'dozens' of UFO reports that date back 70 years, with some reports describing 'bright' objects moving at speeds twice the rate of an F-86.
In 2015, former Canadian defense minister Paul Hellyer made the wild and controversial claim that governments are hiding aliens, many of whom 'walk among us.'
The incident over Canadian airspace comes after the US government released its report on the subject earlier this year that did little to settle the matter of what these objects are, one way or another.
The long-awaited report from the Pentagon on the subject of 'unidentified aerial phenomenon' (UAPs) offered no explanation for 140 of the 144 observations dating back to 2004.
The declassified June 25 report, which came from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, added that it lacks sufficient data to determine the nature of mysterious flying objects.
'In 18 incidents, described in 21 reports, observers reported unusual UAP movement patterns or flight characteristics,' the report reads.
'Some UAP appeared to remain stationary in winds aloft, move against the wind, maneuver abruptly, or move at considerable speed, without discernable means of propulsion. In a small number of cases, military aircraft systems processed radio frequency (RF) energy associated with UAP sightings.
'The UAPTF holds a small amount of data that appear to show UAP demonstrating acceleration or a degree of signature management. Additional rigorous analysis are necessary by multiple teams or groups of technical experts to determine the nature and validity of these data.
'We are conducting further analysis to determine if breakthrough technologies were demonstrated.'
The term UFO has been more recently replaced by unidentified aerial phenomenon, especially in light of the U.S. Pentagon declassifying three videos in April 2020.
Only one of 144 reports of UFOs - or Unidentified Aerial Phenomena as the government calls them - can be explained while the others can barely be classified
A government report says there are 144 reported UFOs - or UAPs - between 2004 and 2021.
These reports include a spherical flying object buzzing over Navy warships and disappearing into the Pacific ocean, a tic-tac shaped flying object mimicking Super Hornet pilots' maneuvers and pyramid-shaped flying objects.
The only one that can be explained with 'high confidence' is a deflated balloon.
Because the reported UAPs showed unusual flight characteristics and displayed a range of appearances and behaviors, the report groups the UAPs into five categories.
1. Airborne clutter - These objects include birds, balloons, recreational unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) or airborne debris like plastic bags that muddle a scene and affect an operator’s ability to identify true targets, such as enemy aircraft.
2. Natural atmospheric phenomena - Natural atmospheric phenomena includes ice crystals, moisture and thermal fluctuations that may register on some infrared and radar systems.
3. USG or U.S. industry developmental programs - Some UAP observations could be attributable to developments and classified programs by U.S. entities. The report states, 'We were unable to confirm, however, that these systems accounted for any of the UAP reports we collected.'
4. Foreign adversary systems- Some UAP may be technologies deployed by China, Russia, another nation, or a non-governmental entity but the report says the US is unaware that any nation has technology that's been reported.
5. A catchall 'other' bin- Most of the UAP described in the dataset probably remain unidentified due to limited data or challenges to collection processing or analysis and may require additional scientific knowledge and advances to categorize them. 'The UAPTF intends to focus additional analysis on the small number of cases where a UAP appeared to display unusual flight characteristics or signature management,' according to the report.
KLM Pilots Report Of Possible UFO Sighting Over Canada
KLM Pilots Report Of Possible UFO Sighting Over Canada
by Pranjal Pande
A KLM flight from Boston to Amsterdam on 30th July saw something interesting during its flight near Newfoundland, Canada. Pilots reportedly saw a “bright green object” from the cockpit, which had no impact on operations. Notably, another aircraft in the area, Canadian military C-17, also spotted the same object. Let’s investigate more.
The KLM A330-300 may have made an interesting discovery on a routine flight from Boston. Photo: Getty Images
One for the X-Files?
According to Live and Let’s Fly, the pilots of a KLM A330-300 made an interesting sighting on a routine transatlantic service on 30th July from Boston to Amsterdam. The flight deck reportedly saw a “bright green flying object,” noted as a UFO (unidentified flying object). The UFO quickly entered a cloud and disappeared soon after. There was no impact on KLM flight 618’s course or altitude.
The sighting occurred over the Gulf of St. Lawrence, before Newfoundland at around 01:55 AM local time and was reported to the Gander Area Control Center. However, interestingly, KL618 was not the only one to see this UFO on the same day.
The UFO was seen by two different sets of pilots over the Gulf of St. Lawrence in Canada. Map: RadarBox.com
A Canadian government C-17 Globemaster, flying from Trenton, Ontario, to Cologne, Germany, encountered the same bright green object at roughly the same time and location. However, the C-17 was forced to make flying changes when it spotted the UFO in its path, increasing altitude by 1,000 feet and changed its course to avoid contact.
Possibilities
While the presence of UFO and alien life may tickle one’s fancy, there are several other possible explanations. One likely explanation could be that the bright green object was a part of the Perseid meteor shower, which occurred on the same day. Meteors can have similar characteristics and positions as that one described.
However, the presence of two flights seeing the objects is rarer (but not unseen) and does raise further questions, and an investigation is likely underway. In a statement to Daily Mail, the spokesperson for the Royal Canadian Air Force said,
“The crew saw something in the air, and reported it to NAV Canada as per standard procedure, before carrying on with their mission without further incident…While it is not known what they saw, there was nothing to indicate that it posed any kind of security concern or posed a safety risk to the aircraft.”
Further investigations will be needed to ascertain what exactly the pilots saw.
Photo: Getty Images
Not new
It’s important to note that pilots spotting UFOs is not a new occurrence. In February, an American Airlines flight reportedly spotted a UFO over New Mexico but did not give any further information, with the investigation going to the FBI. Those on the ground have also seen UFOs in the past, which later turned out to be suborbital satellites.
UFOs have been in the news in recent months after the US declassified reports on its intriguing objects. For now, it remains unclear what the bright green flying object over Canada was, with many possibilities, including even UFOs.
What do you think about UFO sightings by pilots? Let us know in the comments.
Tic tac UFO following closely to an airliner heading North | Medina, OH 17-Jul-2021
Tic tac UFO following closely to an airliner heading North | Medina, OH 17-Jul-2021
This tic-tac UFO was flying near plane over Medina in Ohio on 17th July 2021.
Witness report:
I was with my niece and nephew outside enjoying the sunset on Saturday July 17th at 08:40pm. I heard an airline passenger jet coming over as we do everyday heading to Cleveland Hopkins Airport. What I saw next was not something I have ever seen before. I observed and was able to capture on video, what appeared to be a white glowing tic tac object following the jet closely. It was behind the jet and appeared to be following it. The jet turned and headed northwest and the object continued north.
Lt. Cmdr. Alex Dietrich, shown in the aircraft she flew between 2001 and 2007, was one of the Navy fighter pilots who reported seeing a UFO in 2004. (Family photo)
She picked up the kids after finishing her last call at work — there was some whining in the back seat — and raced to her home near Annapolis for family dinnertime. In between, she answered questions about the UFO.
“My life right now is very surreal,” said Lt. Cmdr. Alex Dietrich, who is a 41-year-old mother of three, a retired fighter pilot and one of the few people who gets regularly hauled into the Pentagon or before Congress for further questioning about the day in 2004 she saw a UFO — the Pentagon prefers to call them unidentified aerial phenomena — from the seat of her Super Hornet in the skies near San Diego.
Dietrich is pragmatic, forthright and has a swaggery, pilot’s sense of humor about this thing she’s been living with for nearly 17 years.
Thanks to a bizarro little line in last year’s coronavirus relief bill, the director of national intelligence and the secretary of defense are ordered to generate a report on everything the government knows about UAPs — including Dietrich’s sighting. It’s coming next month, and it’s going to be D.C.’s hottest summer read.
“Citizens have questions. It’s not classified. If I can share or help give a reasonable response, I will,” says the retired fighter pilot. (Michael Greene)
And now that UFOs join the pandemic and insurrection on the congressional agenda (when it comes to the weird year contest, 2021 is telling 2020 to “hold my beer”), Dietrich’s callers have moved from mostly the fringe, stalkery UFO fanatics who just want to be near her, to mainstream media freaks like me. She patiently plays along.
“I do feel a duty and obligation,” Dietrich said, when I asked her why she took my call and why she agreed to talk to “60 Minutes,” her national media debut. “I was in a taxpayer-funded aircraft, doing my job as a military officer,” she said. “Citizens have questions. It’s not classified. If I can share or help give a reasonable response, I will. I don’t want to be someone who’s saying ‘no comment.’ ”
Dietrich in an undated photo in her aircraft. (Family photo)
So, on to the events of Nov. 14, 2004.
She was a newly winged pilot on a regular training flight with the USS Nimitz Carrier Strike Group that day when something moving fast and erratically came into view.
Dietrich’s boss, Cmdr. Dave Fravor, told her to hang back and be his wingman while he flew closer in to check it out. The object began mirroring his movements and then just disappeared.
“Some days your boss asks you to swab the deck. Some days he asks you to keep high cover while he spars with a UFO,” Dietrich wrote in a tweet.
A video, just one of the recordings from that day, captures a white object shaped like a Tic Tac and the howls and exclamations of the pilots who were tracking its otherworldly motion. The video was released by To The Stars Academy of Arts & Science in 2017 but has gained a lot of traction after the Pentagon verified it as authentic. It will be included in that UAP report.
“I’ve never had a Twitter,” Dietrich said, but she created an account this month as a way to step out and connect with the thousands of people obsessed with the event — and her. (Her first tweet was a charming “Radio Check,” a pilot’s version of “Is this thing on?”)
“People have found me throughout the years,” she said. “I just was an eyewitness to something in the course of my normal duties . . . that somehow makes me a portal.”
They’ve tracked her down and called her. “I’ll give you 10 minutes on the phone, then I have to go feed my kids,” she’ll tell them and then patiently recounts the events of that day in 2004.
As soon as they returned to their aircraft carrier they reported everything they saw and how it happened.
“We all collectively lost our minds,” she said. “There was no denying it, everybody had heard us on the radio.”
Over beers, during the many reunions she’s had with her commander that day, they look at each other and shake their heads. “We agree that if we had been solo, we wouldn’t have said anything,” she said.
Naval aviator humor can be brutal. And in the days after the sighting, their colleagues were merciless. They looped alien-invader movies “Men in Black” and “Independence Day” to show on the ship’s channels. They left tinfoil hats all over the place. The daily newsletters had little green men cartoons.
They had to laugh it off, she said. Because it was so weird and because even back at the ship, they saw it, too, on their radar.
Dietrich said she’s decided to be open about it now because she knows other pilots have seen similar UAPs and have kept quiet about them, afraid of the stigma. Because let’s be honest — UFOs are still firmly in the realm of conspiracy and kooky.
She’s been low-key about it all these years, answering questions on the Hill and at the Pentagon, listening patiently as debunkers found her private number and screamed at her over the phone.
She’s been teaching at George Washington University and the U.S. Naval Academy, not staring into the heavens, wondering who is out there or putting herself in the public eye — “not when I’m active duty, not when I’m teaching. I don’t want to be the faculty UFO freak.”
Plus she’s been a little busy dealing with the mess we have right here on Earth, flying more than 200 combat missions and 57 mounted combat patrols and ground assault convoy missions over two deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The Navy sent her to language school, and she became the strategic architect for the civil-military stability operations team in Afghanistan’s Ghazni province.
She’s been working to promote three causes: her beloved magnet high school, Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy; the foundation to help diversify aviation founded by a former classmate, Legacy Flight Academy; and Wings for Val, the foundation to promote women in aviation dedicated to Valerie Delaney, a Navy pilot from Ellicott City, Md., who died in 2013 during a training mission in Washington state.
And Dietrich is also too busy with her three kids, now 2, 4 and 6, to focus much on UFOs.
One of them was the hit of that day’s pre-K show-and-tell. He brought in the “UFO Box” she keeps, the one with the red-and-white helmet she was wearing that day in 2004.
Another was commanding her from the back seat as we spoke: “Window open!” There was a chorus of squeals and shrieks from the back seat, the soundtrack of every working mom’s life.
“No, I didn’t have time to think about it too much,” she sighed. “But I will pay someone to abduct me right now.”
Paola Harris: “Communications with aliens have already been established”
Paola Harris: “Communications with aliens have already been established”
Paola Harris is a respected journalist in the field of extraterrestrial investigation. He has studied this phenomenon since 1979 and has written several books, published and translated into various languages.
This year we are privileged to have your participation in the Ufology World Congress in Barcelona, which will be held on October 8, 9 and 10, 2021.
Paola Harris has established personal relationships with many of the leading researchers in the field of ufology, such as Dr. Allen Hynek, and has conducted interviews with military witnesses of particular relevance, trying to shed light on the government’s concealment of the truth.
Among his books, “Joining the Points; making sense of UFOs ”, in relation to the Roswell case. “Exopolitics: How to Talk to a Fireball? – Exopolitical challenges and protocols for future contact. ” In whose book he deals with the ORBS phenomenon and the Spheres of Light.
In his third book “Exopolitics: Everything from above”, he talks about possible conclusions of the UFO enigma. He is a regular columnist for the UFO magazine “Area 51” and has written for “Nexus”, “Australia” and “Explora”, among other publications.
Straddling Rome and Boulder (Colorado), she has a degree in Teaching, Historical Teaching and Photo Journalism, and teaches virtual exopolitics classes at the Dr. Michael Salla Exopolitical Institute.
He has given conferences throughout Europe on the importance of the total declassification of the different UFO files that all countries have, and through his non-profit association called “Starworks Italia” he brings American speakers to Italy to promote the declassification and the exopolitical dialogue worldwide.
What is exopolitics?
Expressed in a concise and plain way, exopolitics deals with the relationships between human beings and extraterrestrial beings.
All this came from having published an article in the Washington Post, in which he claimed that President Eisenhower had had an interview with two extraterrestrials at a military base near Roswell.
The bottom line is that the two aliens, described as having white hair, light eyes and a colorless mouth, would have offered Eisenhower insight into their advanced technology if the United States were to nuclear disarm, an offer that Eisenhower declined.
But the vision of the exopolitics of Paola Harris goes much further, going deeper and trying to lay a foundation for future communications.
Paola Harris is convinced that communications have already been established with extraterrestrial civilizations, and that they have walked on Earth throughout human history.
In addition, of course, he believes that a more obvious contact is going to take place and therefore, it is necessary to lay a foundation on which to establish communications that guarantee fluency, but also security.
She considers exopolitics as the study of the extraterrestrial presence on Earth and the sociological and political implications that this presence may have on humanity.
She is totally convinced that ufology and contact with extraterrestrial beings will gradually be accepted and normalized, so we must be prepared.
In an interview, she assured that there are underwater extraterrestrial bases throughout the world, and that there are even graphic documents and a multitude of testimonies that she herself had been able to collect.
Paola Harris has conducted thousands of interviews, both with anonymous people and with renowned specialists in the UFO phenomenon and the military, as in the case of her book “Conversations with Colonel Corso.”
Phillip James Corso was a lieutenant colonel in the US Army between 1942 and 1963. He is known for his book “The Day After Roswell,” where he tells his version of the 1947 Roswell UFO incident.
According to Corso, as a result of this “incident” and the technology found by the US Army, it was possible to develop fiber optics, lasers, integrated circuits and Kevlar (the first synthesized polyamide).
They took advantage of all this in order to defend themselves from a potential enemy, however, they actively and passively denied their existence.
Harris’s book recounts private conversations with Colonel Corsican, recounting his personal anecdotes, messages he wanted to convey, formal interviews, and public appearances.
All this documented with more than 80 photographs and historical documents.
Undoubtedly, an essential work for all those who wish to inquire about the UFO phenomenon and to what extent the United States Army is involved.
In trying to explain the spectacular star trails of the star cluster Palomar 5, astronomers stumbled on a very large trove of black holes.
Full Transcript
Christopher Intagliata: This is Scientific American’s 60-Second Science, I’m Christopher Intagliata.
The universe is littered with black holes. But where exactly they’re all hiding? Well, that’s a little harder to say.
Priya Natarajan: Our current inventory of black holes is still highly incomplete.
Intagliata: Yale astronomer Priya Natarajan says black holes present unique challenges to those keeping count.
Natarajan: These are dark objects that have such peculiar properties, you can never directly quite image them like we image galaxies. Therefore, we have to infer their presence indirectly.
Intagliata: Natarajan and her colleagues recently predicted there might be a large population of previously undetected supermassive black holes just wandering around galaxies. But supermassive black holes are, as the name implies, massively large—which makes them easier to detect than their relatively tiny cousins: so-called stellar-mass black holes, which are closer in mass to our sun.
Natarajan: If you have a stellar-mass black hole, it doesn't have the same “oomph.” So it’s trickier to detect them.
Intagliata: Now researchers in Europe claim to have stumbled upon an unexpected trove of these stellar-mass black holes—in a puffy star cluster called Palomar 5.
Mark Gieles: In the paper, we call it kind of a Rosetta stone.
Intagliata: Mark Gieles is an astrophysicist with the University of Barcelona and the Catalan Institution for Research and Advanced Studies.
He says Palomar 5 is best known for its spectacular star trails, studded with stars ejected from the cluster over the last 11.5 billion years. But those trails turned out to be a critical clue, tipping Gieles and his team off to a large mob of black holes.
You see, the astronomers set out to determine how the trails formed. To do that, they ran more than three dozen computer simulations in which they’d let different configurations of black holes bully around hundreds of thousands of stars for about 11 billion years.
Gieles: Each of these models would run for several weeks up to several months. They were run on special hardware, like on graphics cards, GPUs—the ones you use for gaming, essentially.
Intagliata: The hope was one of those models would spit out something that resembles Palomar 5 today. And eventually, one did.
Gieles: We saw stars were being removed very efficiently because the black holes were basically pushing the stars away from the center.
Intagliata: The model explained the star trails. But it also suggested Palomar 5 likely harbors more than 100 black holes—that’s three times as many as the astronomers expected to find there. The details appear in the journal Nature Astronomy. [Mark Gieles et al., A supra-massive population of stellar-mass black holes in the globular cluster Palomar 5]
Natarajan of Yale says this work gives black hole hunters another tool for their investigations.
Natarajan: This is another indirect signature of the presence of these lurking black holes.
Intagliata: And it’s also suggestive of just how much we could be missing in other star clusters like Pal 5.
Natarajan: If those globular clusters like Pal 5 are further littered with black holes, the inventory just explodes, basically.
Intagliata: In other words, our current census of black holes appears to have some significant holes in it.
Thanks for listening. For Scientific American’s 60-Second Science, I’m Christopher Intagliata.
It’s not the plot of another doomsday movie. Yet there is a pending, albeit unlikely, threat to life as we know it: an asteroid approaching Earth.
Bennu, a rugged, rock-spewing asteroid with a diameter of about one-third of a mile, is headed in our direction, on track to come very close to Earth in September of 2135.
But not to panic, scientists with NASA said Wednesday. Though Bennu will come within half the distance of the moon, the odds of the asteroid colliding with Earth in the next century and causing Armageddon-type of destruction are still very low.
“Even though there is no possibility whatsoever of an impact during that encounter, Bennu is going to be fairly close to the Earth,” said Davide Farnocchia, a scientist with the Center for Near Earth Object Studies, a NASA center that calculates asteroid and comet orbits and their odds of impact at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California.
Although researchers believe Bennu will not impact Earth, they now face the challenge of deciphering how our planet’s gravity will alter the asteroid’s path around the sun, NASA scientists said in a conference call with reporters Wednesday.
Scientists noted there is small possibility that the asteroid could pass through what’s known as a “gravitational keyhole” that could put it in en route to Earth at a later date in the 22nd century. A gravitational keyhole is a tiny region in space where a planet’s gravity can tweak the trajectory of a passing asteroid and put it on a path to collide with it in the future.
Farnocchia said that although recentfindings show the odds of impact have slightly increased — from 1 in 2,700 to 1 in 1,750 over the next century — it “does not represent significant change,” or a reason to worry.
Farnocchia explained that scientists now have a much better idea of Bennu’s path thanks to data collected by NASA’s Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, Security-Regolith Explorer (OSIRIS-REx) spacecraft, which orbited and studied the asteroid for over two years.
“Overall the situation has improved,” Farnocchia, the lead author of a study published Wednesday, told reporters in a conference call. “I am not any more concerned about Bennu than I was before; the impact probability remains very small.”
In the study, NASA researchers used precision-tracking data from the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft to better understand Bennu’s movements through 2300, improving scientists’ ability to determine the probability of impacting Earth and predict the orbits of other asteroids.
Using NASA’s Deep Space Network of giant radio antennas that support interplanetary spacecraft missions and computer models, scientists were able to determine Bennu’s overall probability of striking is about 1 in 1,750 (or 0.057 percent.)
Looking at it from a glass-half-full perspective, it means there is a 99.94 percent probability that Bennu will not hit our planet.
Scientists also calculated the day with the highest risk of collision: Sept. 24, 2182, with a probability of 1 in 2,700 (or about 0.037 percent) — which is still lower than the overall probability of impact through 2300.
The potentially hazardous asteroid was discovered in 1999 by the Lincoln Near-Earth Asteroid Research Team, a program that works on detection and tracking, and has been closely observed with 580 ground-based “astrometric observations,” mainly made by optical and radar telescopes through 2018, according to the study published in Icarus Journal.
Since its discovery, Bennu has had three close encounters with Earth, in 1999, 2005 and 2011, during which two radar stations collected data of the asteroid’s measurements.
There have been countless pieces of photographic evidence of alleged UFOs put forward over the decades. At times they seem to be pretty much a dime a dozen, some of them held up as possibly real, others obvious hoaxes. Over the years there have been some photos that, regardless of their credibility, have managed to become much discussed and iconic, even after they have been proven to be faked. One series of such controversial photos emerged in 1993, and would cause quite the stir that reverberates through the field of Ufology to this day.
One morning in March of 1993, 69-year-old Eric Thomason got up and headed out to Maslin Beach, in Southern Australia, along with his son’s camera equipment, a Kodak S50 with a Fuji 100 ASA-film. His destination was an old abandoned mine called the Maslin Old Quarry, in order to take some photographs, as well as take some photos of the sunrise at a cliff called Ochre Point. Despite having no formal photography training and being a complete novice, he was planning to submit his photos to a photo contest in the magazine Southern Times-Messenger, but he was immediately disappointed to arrive at the beach to thick cloud cover that obscured the sunrise. He decided to come back and try again the next day, but it was similarly cloudy, useless for taking photos, but as he stared out over the cloudy grey sea in frustration, he saw something very odd.
Maslin Beach, Australia
As he looked out over the water from his vantage point high on the cliff, he claims that a strange object rose up from beneath the waves, and he could see it so clearly that the water dripping off of it was clearly visible. He would estimate it as being about 40 meters in diameter, He watched in awe as the mysterious object floated over the water and began hovering in his direction, and he would say of the appearance of this bizarre sight to the Swedish UFO magazine UFO-Aktuellt :
I saw a movement on the surface on the water, and something looking like the tower on an atomic submarine emerged. I could feel water dripping from the craft. When the object rose from the water, I was able to see how three legs were pointing out from the hull. I was also able to see how it was spinning, and how the three legs were pulled in.
He took his first photograph of the object, which was at this point apparently about 400 meters away, and things would only get stranger from there. As it grew closer, he says that he was afraid that the object would do something to him, perhaps even abduct him, as it was getting a little too close for comfort, so he started making his way down the slope. It was then that he saw a second smaller object, which took up a position under the larger object, after which it rose up into it. Throughout this all, Thomason was taking photos, and he explains how the scene played out:
I had heard of people being abducted by UFOs, so I climbed down a slope nearby. From there I could see how the light-grey object came flying somewhat south of me, and came to a halt over the mine. At that very moment I spotted yet another object, north of the first one. That’s when I snapped my second picture, but since the light from the sunrise was straight into my view-finder I moved a little to the left. I could see three lights on the exterior of the larger object and how it shone around the opening. Shortly after I’d taken the fourth and last photograph the larger object rose straight up and disappeared over me. When that happened, I could feel water dripping from the craft down on me.
One of the photographs
After this he hurried home, not telling anyone about what he had seen. He quickly had his film developed, wondering if the objects had even managed to show up in his pictures at all, but the photos proved to be remarkably clear. He even managed to notice a third object in the pictures that he had not noticed in his initial excitement during the encounter. He would say of this:
When the film had been developed, I noticed yet another object on the first photograph, which I hadn’t seen during the incident itself. A black dot in the distance, halfway between the object and the edge of the photograph, which might have been an airplane several kilometers away, or the smaller object on its way to intercept with the larger one.
Despite the amazing photos he had taken of what he claims to be UFOs, he did not come forward with his story for two months, not even telling his own wife, thinking that no one would believe him and wanting to avoid ridicule. It was only after watching a UFO program on TV that he decided to come forward to tell his strange story, first going to UFO-Aktuellt, after which his story made the rounds in other news services. The pictures he had taken were widely circulated and they had people mystified at the time, as they were some of the clearest photographs of alleged UFOs ever taken up to that point. To the general populace it was all pretty damn spectacular, and he even claimed to have sent the negatives to be analyzed by Kodak, drumming up even more interest. However, of course the skeptics were not far behind in all of this.
Another of the Maslin Beach photographs
One of the main criticisms of the Maslin Beach photographs is that they are almost too clear, and appear to be very staged, indeed they seem to be pretty well-shot for a man who claims to have had no photography experience, snapping pictures at moving objects while cowering in fear of his life. Making the startling clarity even more suspicious is that the camera he claims to have been using was a Kodak S50, which was a cheap camera with limited features, featuring pretty much a shutter button and that’s about it. No focus control or zoom in feature, nothing, and they have a large depth of field. In the first photo, which was allegedly taken from a distance of 400 meters away, the object is perfectly clear, while the background is fuzzy, but this doesn’t make sense because on that particular type of camera the object and horizon should both be equally in focus. Another criticism was that several people brought up the fact that the objects look suspiciously like a part of the ventilation system for private boats, nearly identical, in fact, although no one has been able to find a part like this that is an exact match. There were even those who pointed out that a string is vaguely visible in the first of the series of photos. In short, they just look really fake. The consensus was that he had built fake UFOs from both parts and staged the fake pictures, possibly even using some sort of remote-controlled craft but through it all Thomason has stood by his story and insisted his photos are genuine.
Looking at these photos now, they seem to be certainly faked, despite those who still continue to defend them. However, they are important in that they show just how far some hoaxes can go. At the time these were released, they made huge waves, and a lot of people bought it. Such fakes serve to dilute the worth of photographic evidence, especially in more modern times in which it seems to be getting easier and easier to fake such things. It has all caused us to be more vigilant and to keep our wits about us. Hopefully, this will make us better able to ferret out the hoaxes from what is possibly real, but it is still unfortunate that these hoaxes continue to happen, and because of them it doesn’t seem like photos alone will ever be accepted as hard evidence for UFOs.
Long Description of Sighting Report - Case 117268 :
There's a triangle ufo on the road & a disc on the field Get this out to the public quick!! before it gets removed again". Apparently I can see why it was removed . You see my understanding I was given Telepathically by the Ashtar Command is the Space People are testing our reaction to direct contact. The Miltary did not want people to see this. The media will not show this . I was guided to this early this morning . They tell me more direct contacts will happen. Wake up from the disinformation agents on Social Media . I monitor all my posts . Disclosure Is Above You Now
Date Submitted : 2021-08-13 Date of Sighting : 2021-08-01 Case: : Removed
UFOs Sighted Over Uruguay ( August 12, 2021 )
Amazing capture in Uruguay showing UFOS or Unidentified flying objects.This is a 2 Part UFO Institute Special. Here i present the originals
Video 1 was captured in Uruguay on August 12, 2021.
VIDEO 2 : STATEMENT : Happened in my country Uruguay this early morming. Made the paper from there it's not like here : August 12, 2021
A military plane may have had to swerve to avoid the mysterious object, surveillance data shows.
Two aircraft pilots reported seeing a bright green UFO over Canada in July 2021.
(Image credit: Getty)
Late on July 30, pilots of two separate aircrafts — one military and one commercial — reported seeing a mysterious green UFO vanish into the clouds over the Gulf of Saint Lawrence on the Atlantic coast of Canada, Vice News reported.
According to a report posted Aug. 11 to the Canadian government's aviation incident database, both flights witnessed a "bright green flying object" that "flew into a cloud, then disappeared." The object did not impact the operations of either flight, the report noted.
One of the aircrafts that reported the sighting was a Canadian military plane, flying from a base in Ontario to Cologne, Germany. The passenger flight was a KLM Royal Dutch Airlines plane flying from Boston to Amsterdam. Steffan Watkins, an aviation and shipping researcher, looked at transponder data from the two flights and saw that the military plane climbed 1,000 feet (300 meters) in altitude at the time of the sighting — possibly to avoid the object or get a closer look at it, Watkins tweeted.
There's a chance the UFO could have been a meteor streaking through the sky.
"Yes I know [the UFO sighting] would have been at the early stage of the Perseid meteor shower," Watkins added, "but don't be a buzzkill." (The Canadian aviation report tagged the incident with the catch-all label, "weather balloon, meteor, rocket, UFO," not ruling out a space rock as the possible culprit.)
Unlike the U.S. defense department, Canada's Department of National Defense does not track UFO sightings, a department spokesperson told Vice. Still, there is no shortage of civilian enthusiasts north of the border; in December 2019, a private collector donated more than 30,000 UFO-related documents to the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg — including scores of documents on the Falcon Lake incident, Canada's most infamous UFO case, Live Science previously reported.
Meanwhile, in June 2021, the Pentagon publicly released a long-awaited report onmore than 140 documented UFO sightings by U.S. Navy pilots. The report concluded that "most of the UAP [unidentified aerial phenomena] reported probably do represent physical objects," though there is no evidence that alien visitors are behind any of the incidents.
Of course, that's just the unclassified, nine-page version of the report. Some of the report's "juiciest details" hide in a classified annex, which the public will never see, The Guardian reported.
Originally published on Live Science.
Watkins asks:
“So, I would like to know if the pilot changed course to avoid it, changed course to see what it was, or if the swerve-like course correction was completely routine and just a coincidence.”
Meanwhile, the KLM flight made no change in course.
“The crew saw something in the air, and reported it to NAV Canada as per standard procedure, before carrying on with their mission without further incident. While it is not known what they saw, there was nothing to indicate that it posed any kind of security concern or posed a safety risk to the aircraft.”
The object may have been a meteor. The sighting occurred during the Perseid meteor shower, which peaked this week but had already begun on July 30th.
CONCLUSION
As much as I love science fiction, I strongly doubt that aliens walk among us. Still, when two pilots, including a KLM pilot, observe a mysterious green object, I do want more details. While it was probably just a meteor, it was certainly something…
Retired meteorologist Jack Bushong was working for the National Weather Service (NWS) when on the night of March 8, 1994 he saw something very unusual lighting up his radar: numerous UFOs “coming together and coming apart” to form a larger UFO.
Bushong wasn’t the only one who saw something in the sky that night. According to NBC affiliate WOOD, the Ottawa County emergency dispatcher was getting a lot of calls, over 100 people reported seeing the strange lights in the sky over Holland, Michigan, including a few police officers.
Audio of the conversation between Bushong and the dispatcher can be heard below.
Worried after finding out that his phone call with the emergency dispatcher was recorded, he figured he was going to be known as a “kook” when, with his job, he is “supposed to be a scientist and skeptical.”
Bushong was seeing images on his radar that corresponded to what people were calling in from the ground. He had to control his radar by hand to zero in on the sky south of his station in Muskegon.
“Oh my God, what is that?” the recorded dispatch call captured him saying in a startled voice once he had zeroed in.
He said he went through his mental checklist about all the weather phenomena and technical glitches he knew about and what he was seeing didn’t fit any of them.
He saw what appeared to be solid objects “coming together and coming apart.”
“Moving about 20 miles in each jump,” he recalled. “They were hovering, then jumping. Hovering and jumping.”
After watching them for a while, they appeared to be forming a wide triangle that moved out over Lake Michigan. He said they looked solid.
Jack Bushong says there were some people at the NWS criticized him and dismissed what he claims to have seen, but WOOD reports that even then-U.S. Rep. Gerald R. Ford of Grand Rapids once wrote a letter calling for congressional investigations after a number of UFO sightings in Michigan in the 1960s.
“NWS didn’t want to become the UFO reporting center for the United States, so that’s really why they really had to duck and cover for this one,” he told CBS affiliate WWMT in 2020.
He said as he was watching the object, it stopped and started hovering. “And then it shot up, about 5,000 feet, then 10,000 feet I was getting it, just straight up,” Bushong said. “At this point, the police officer was saying that he was seeing the same thing with that same object.”
“It was almost as if, it was like it was saying to me, ‘Hey, I know you can see me,'” Bushong said. “Until that one got up to about 30, 40 thousand feet, and finally I saw it.”
Bushong also stated that when he called the FAA control tower at the Muskegon County Airport, an air traffic controller there admitted to seeing three aircraft in formation off in the distance that didn’t have any transponder code.
Fast forward almost 30 years and the United States government finally released a UFO report which confirms what many have long suspected: for decades, there have objects flying in our skies that not even the government can explain.
“I guess I’ve been waiting for this vindication which I didn’t think I was going to get all my life,” said Jack Bushong.
“But now with the, basically, military coming out and saying the same thing I saw 30 years ago, I can finally say to people, ‘I told you so.'”
Bushong says he is considering writing a scientific paper about his experience back in 1994.
Strange metallic object hovering in front of a trail cam
Strange metallic object hovering in front of a trail cam
Cam Owner living Roanoke, Virginia: "I have a trail cam situated at night to observe any animals that may wander into my backyard".
"On 3:03 am, July 30, the trail cam audio/video recorded an object hovering in front of the lens that looks exactly like a typical metallic UFO".
"There was absolutely nothing to the front of the camera, there is a wood line about 50 yards in front of the camera and cannot be picked up by the camera".
Furthermore: Disk object zooms away over Manhattan, New York, Cigar object hovering in the sky over Los Angeles, California and a huge glowing ring emerges from a cloud.
The phenomenon 'Terminal Lucidity' the end-of-life transition
The phenomenon 'Terminal Lucidity' the end-of-life transition
Just before someone dies, there is a phenomenon known as terminal lucidity, in that moments just before death, patients will have a moment of full mental clarity.
It is often at this time they may talking about deceased loved ones in the room that have come to take them or reach up and smile to an invisible person as they take their last breaths.
Author of the “Fire in the Sky” UFO related book Travis Walton who the Hollywood movie of the same name was based on does an extended 2019 interview recorded in the area where part of his experience took place outside of Snowflake Arizona. In this video Walton covers his childhood, experience working in the woods and other jobs he’s done, details on the other workers and friends of his that were involved in his situation, what he recalls from the abduction experience himself in great detail, what he dealt with upon being returned to earth, the Police investigation into what was thought to be his murder, the detailed psychological and medical testing done on himself and his co-workers, theories on why he was abducted, thoughts on his critics, thoughts on the Hollywood movie that was done about him and what was incorrectly portrayed in the movie, thoughts on other people who say they’ve had similar experiences, details on his personal life, why he thinks the aliens might be visiting earth for and a lot more!
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- Gemiddelde waardering: 0/5 - (0 Stemmen) Categorie:ALIEN LIFE, UFO- CRASHES, ABDUCTIONS, MEN IN BLACK, ed ( FR. , NL; E )
13-08-2021
'Tic Tac UFO' spotted in Clovis
'Tic Tac UFO' spotted in Clovis
by Shelby Bracho
Screenshot of the original video with the comic filter.
(Courtesy: Vince Madara & Jaiya Figueras)
FRESNO, Calif. (FOX26) — A man spotted an unidentified floating object in Clovis earlier this week. He says he was heading to a gas station on Fowler Avenue when he noticed something peculiar.
“I got my phone out and I start looking and I see it and it’s just kind of dancing around which is just really weird," said Vince Mandara, "So I'm filming it and then all of the sudden it’s just gone, I mean, it just kind of blurs out.”
Mandara was able to film the UFO on his phone camera and subsequently share it on social media. He says this all happened on Wednesday around 2:30 in the afternoon.
“There wasn’t a cloud in the sky, there wasn’t anything, so it just looked so odd," said Mandara, "The thing that caught my eye was that it was moving so fast.”
The original video slowed down, followed by the video with the comic filter, then the zoomed in video with the ink filter.
(Courtesy: Vince Madara & Jaiya Figueras){p}{/p}
"When you put it into iMovie if you just change the filters," said Figueras, "You could actually see all the energy surrounding that, surrounding the object.”
Figueras put the comic filter on the video and then later added the ink filter.
"That’s the ink filter right there," said Figueras, "Now the object is actually the white, it’s the white in the middle, all the other stuff surrounding it, that's the energy that's surrounding it because they have anti-gravity.”
Figueras is a high school coach and teacher who says he's spoken with six people who've seen eerily similar objects in the sky.
"What I found is that these things are actually, they're teleporting," said Figueras.
Figueras says a recent video posted to the Instagram page shows filtered video of a UFO that's been slowed down more than 500 times its original speed. He says, no matter how slow, he can't catch the object in motion.
“I figured out they were teleporting because no matter what I did, I couldn't slow it down, I couldn’t slow the film down," said Figueras.
"For me, it was just interesting to see the different, I mean, there’s like an energy ball, I know that sounds crazy but it’s there and it’s just kind of circling around this dot," said Mandara, "And nobody else saw it, you know, nobody else pulled over, nobody was standing there pointing it wasn’t this big, you know, grandstand thing, it just, there it is and there it's not, so strange, in Clovis of all places."
An image of Vince Mandara explaining what he saw on his way to the gas station. He took out his phone and starting recording.
We reached out to the 144th Fighter Wing here in Fresno about any possible sightings or interruptions on Wednesday. It says their airmen were doing training exercises that day and had no reports of any air space violations.
NASA Spacecraft Provides Insight into Asteroid Bennu’s Future Orbit
NASA Spacecraft Provides Insight into Asteroid Bennu’s Future Orbit
This mosaic of Bennu was created using observations made by NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft that was in close proximity to the asteroid for over two years.
Credit: NASA/Goddard/University of Arizona
Along with collecting a sample from the Bennu’s surface, the spacecraft provided precision data to better predict the near-Earth object’s orbit around the Sun.
In a study released Wednesday, NASA researchers used precision-tracking data from the agency’s Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, Security-Regolith Explorer (OSIRIS-REx) spacecraft to better understand movements of the potentially hazardous asteroid Bennu through the year 2300, significantly reducing uncertainties related to its future orbit, and improving scientists’ ability to determine the total impact probability and predict orbits of other asteroids.
The study, titled “Ephemeris and hazard assessment for near-Earth asteroid (101955) Bennu based on OSIRIS-REx data,” was published in the journal Icarus.
“NASA’s Planetary Defense mission is to find and monitor asteroids and comets that can come near Earth and may pose a hazard to our planet,” said Kelly Fast, program manager for the Near-Earth Object Observations Program at NASA Headquarters in Washington. “We carry out this endeavor through continuing astronomical surveys that collect data to discover previously unknown objects and refine our orbital models for them. The OSIRIS-REx mission has provided an extraordinary opportunity to refine and test these models, helping us better predict where Bennu will be when it makes its close approach to Earth more than a century from now.”
In 2135, asteroid Bennu will make a close approach with Earth. Although the near-Earth object will not pose a danger to our planet at that time, scientists must understand Bennu’s exact trajectory during that encounter in order to predict how Earth’s gravity will alter the asteroid’s path around the Sun – and affect the hazard of Earth impact.
This video explains how OSIRIS-REx data was used to precisely determine asteroid Bennu’s orbit around the Sun, helping scientists understand how Earth’s gravity will affect the asteroid’s trajectory when it makes a close approach in 2135.
Credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center
Using NASA’s Deep Space Network and state-of-the-art computer models, scientists were able to significantly shrink uncertainties in Bennu’s orbit, determining its total impact probability through the year 2300 is about 1 in 1,750 (or 0.057%). The researchers were also able to identify Sept. 24, 2182, as the most significant single date in terms of a potential impact, with an impact probability of 1 in 2,700 (or about 0.037%).
Although the chances of it hitting Earth are very low, Bennu remains one of the two most hazardous known asteroids in our solar system, along with another asteroid called 1950 DA.
Before leaving Bennu May 10, 2021, OSIRIS-REx spent more than two years in close proximity to the asteroid, gathering information about its size (it is about one-third of a mile, or 500 meters, wide), shape, mass, and composition, while monitoring its spin and orbital trajectory. The spacecraft also scooped up a sample of rock and dust from the asteroid’s surface, which it will deliver to Earth on Sept. 24, 2023, for further scientific investigation.
“The OSIRIS-REx data give us so much more precise information, we can test the limits of our models and calculate the future trajectory of Bennu to a very high degree of certainty through 2135,” said study lead Davide Farnocchia, of the Center for Near-Earth Object Studies (CNEOS), which is managed by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. “We’ve never modeled an asteroid’s trajectory to this precision before.”
Gravitational keyholes
The precision measurements on Bennu help to better determine how the asteroid’s orbit will evolve over time and whether it will pass through a “gravitational keyhole” during its 2135 close approach. These keyholes are areas in space that would set Bennu on a path toward a future impact with Earth if the asteroid were to pass through them at certain times, due to the effect of Earth’s gravitational pull.
To calculate exactly where the asteroid will be during its 2135 close approach – and whether it might pass through a gravitational keyhole – Farnocchia and his team evaluated various types of small forces that may affect the asteroid as it orbits the Sun. Even the smallest force can significantly deflect its orbital path over time, causing it to pass through or completely miss a keyhole.
Among those forces, the Sun’s heat plays a crucial role. As an asteroid travels around the Sun, sunlight heats up its dayside. Because the asteroid spins, the heated surface will rotate away and cool down when it enters the nightside. As it cools, the surface releases infrared energy, which generates a small amount of thrust on the asteroid – a phenomenon called the Yarkovsky effect. Over short timeframes, this thrust is minuscule, but over long periods, the effect on the asteroid’s position builds up and can play a significant role in changing an asteroid’s path.
“The Yarkovsky effect will act on all asteroids of all sizes, and while it has been measured for a small fraction of the asteroid population from afar, OSIRIS-REx gave us the first opportunity to measure it in detail as Bennu traveled around the Sun,” said Steve Chesley, senior research scientist at JPL and study co-investigator. “The effect on Bennu is equivalent to the weight of three grapes constantly acting on the asteroid – tiny, yes, but significant when determining Bennu’s future impact chances over the decades and centuries to come.”
Click on this interactive visualization of asteroid Bennu and take it for a spin. The “HD” button in the lower right offers for more detailed textures. The full interactive experience is at Eyes on the Solar System.
The team considered many other perturbing forces as well, including the gravity of the Sun, the planets, their moons, and more than 300 other asteroids, the drag caused by interplanetary dust, the pressure of the solar wind, and Bennu’s particle-ejection events. The researchers even evaluated the force OSIRIS-REx exerted when performing its Touch-And-Go (TAG) sample collection event Oct. 20, 2020, to see if it might have slightly altered Bennu’s orbit, ultimately confirming previous estimates that the TAG event had a negligible effect.
“The force exerted on Bennu’s surface during the TAG event were tiny even in comparison to the effects of other small forces considered,” said Rich Burns, OSIRIS-REx project manager at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. “TAG did not alter Bennu’s likelihood of impacting Earth.”
Tiny risk, huge gain
Although a 0.057% impact probability through the year 2300 and an impact probability of 0.037% on Sept. 24, 2182, are low, this study highlights the crucial role that OSIRIS-REx operations played in precisely characterizing Bennu’s orbit.
“The orbital data from this mission helped us better appreciate Bennu’s impact chances over the next couple of centuries and our overall understanding of potentially hazardous asteroids – an incredible result,” said Dante Lauretta, OSIRIS-REx principal investigator and professor at the University of Arizona. “The spacecraft is now returning home, carrying a precious sample from this fascinating ancient object that will help us better understand not only the history of the solar system but also the role of sunlight in altering Bennu’s orbit since we will measure the asteroid’s thermal properties at unprecedented scales in laboratories on Earth.”
More about OSIRIS-REx
Goddard provides overall mission management, systems engineering and the safety and mission assurance for OSIRIS-REx. Lauretta is the principal investigator, and the University of Arizona also leads the science team and the mission's science observation planning and data processing. Lockheed Martin Space Systems in Denver built the spacecraft and is providing flight operations. Goddard and KinetX Aerospace in Tempe, Arizona, are responsible for navigating the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft. OSIRIS-REx is the third mission in NASA's New Frontiers Program. NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, manages the agency's New Frontiers Program for the agency’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington.
For more information about the OSIRIS-REx mission, visit:
More about NASA’s CNEOS and Planetary Defense Coordination Office
CNEOS computes high-precision orbits for near-Earth objects (NEOs) in support of NASA’s Planetary Defense Coordination Office, to help precisely characterize every NEO’s orbit to improve long-term hazard assessments.
More information about CNEOS, asteroids, and near-Earth objects can be found at:
Baan van één van de gevaarlijkste ruimtestenen in ons zonnestelsel nu nauwkeuriger in beeld gebracht
Baan van één van de gevaarlijkste ruimtestenen in ons zonnestelsel nu nauwkeuriger in beeld gebracht
Met dank aan ruimtesonde OSIRIS-REx weten we nu dat de kans dat ruimtesteen Bennu tussen nu en het jaar 2300 op aarde inslaat, slechts 0,057 procent is.
Dat heeft NASA zojuist bekend gemaakt. De Amerikaanse ruimtevaartorganisatie leunt voor de nieuwe kansberekening sterk op data van de Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, Security-Regolith Explorer (kortweg OSIRIS-REx): een sonde die bijna twee jaar om ruimtesteen Bennu cirkelde.
Modellen verfijnen Ruimtevaartorganisaties zoals NASA jagen al geruime tijd op planetoïden en kometen die relatief dicht bij de aarde in de buurt komen en op termijn een gevaar kunnen vormen voor onze planeet. “We doen dat door voortdurend onderzoeken uit te voeren, waarbij data verzameld worden die leiden tot de ontdekking van onbekende objecten en helpen om onze modellen die de baan van objecten beschrijven, te verfijnen,” zo legt onderzoeker Kelly Fast uit. “De OSIRIS-REx-missie bood ons de uitzonderlijke mogelijkheid om deze modellen verder te verfijnen en testen en nog nauwkeuriger te voorspellen waar Bennu wanneer deze over iets meer dan een eeuw bij de aarde in de buurt komt, precies zal zijn.”
Gevaarlijk Dat onderzoekers dankzij OSIRIS-REx een nauwkeuriger beeld van de baan van bennu hebben gekregen, is heel belangrijk. Want hoewel Bennu er op de prachtige foto’s die OSIRIS-REx van de planetoïde maakte, vrij onschuldig uitziet, staat de ruimtesteen toch te boek als één van de gevaarlijkste ruimtestenen in het zonnestelsel. In het jaar 2135 zal de ruimtesteen langs de aarde scheren. Hoewel Bennu op dat moment geen gevaar vormt voor de aarde, is het heel belangrijk dat onderzoekers precies weten waar Bennu zich tijdens die ontmoeting bevindt. Alleen zo kunnen ze namelijk voorspellen hoe de zwaartekracht van de aarde de baan van de planetoïde verandert en of de ruimtesteen in een later stadium daardoor wél gevaarlijk dichtbij gaat komen.
Nieuwe berekeningen, nieuwe kansen De nieuwe data suggereren dat we opgelucht adem kunnen halen. Na een nauwkeurigere bepaling van de baan van Bennu blijkt de kans dat de ruimtesteen tussen nu en 2300 inslaat ongeveer 1 op 1750, oftewel 0,057 procent te zijn. Ook kunnen onderzoekers nu een datum noemen waarop de inslagkans het grootst is. Dat is 24 september 2182. De kans dat Bennu op die dag op aarde inslaat, is echter nog steeds heel klein, namelijk 1 op 2700, oftewel 0,037 procent. “De OSIRIS-REx-data geven ons zoveel preciezere informatie, dat we nu de grenzen van onze modellen kunnen testen en de toekomstige koers van Bennu met vrij veel zekerheid kunnen berekenen,” aldus onderzoeker Davide Farnocchia. “We hebben de koers van een planetoïde nog nooit zo precies kunnen modelleren.”
Kleine krachten met een groot effect Het vaststellen van de exacte locatie van Bennu gedurende de scheervlucht langs de aarde is met name heel belangrijk met het oog op zogenoemde ‘gravitational keyholes‘. Dit zijn gebieden in de ruimte die Bennu op koers met de aarde kunnen brengen als de planetoïde er door toedoen van het effect dat de zwaartekracht van de aarde op de ruimtesteen heeft, op specifieke momenten doorheen beweegt. Om vast te stellen waar Bennu zich tijdens de scheervlucht bevindt en of deze door zo’n gravitational keyhole gaat bewegen, gingen de onderzoekers na welke krachten van invloed zijn op Bennu, terwijl deze zijn baantjes om de zon trekt. Zelfs kleine krachten kunnen de baan van Bennu over langere tijd sterk beïnvloeden en er zomaar voor zorgen dat deze zo’n gravitational keyhole mist of er juist wél doorheen beweegt. Een voorbeeld van zo’n kracht die van invloed is op de baan van Bennu is de warmte van de zon. Terwijl de planetoïde rond de zon trekt, wordt de dagzijde ervan – de zijde die door de zon beschenen wordt – opgewarmd. Omdat de planetoïde roteert, draait het verwarmde oppervlak weg van de zon, om aan de nachtzijde weer af te koelen. Terwijl het oppervlak afkoelt, geeft het infrarode energie af die een heel kleine stuwende kracht op de planetoïde uitoefent. Dat wordt ook wel het Yarkovsky-effect genoemd. Dit is op zichzelf een heel klein effect, maar op lange termijn kunnen de gevolgen ervan heel groot zijn en kan het Yarkovsky-effect de baan van een planetoïde zelfs behoorlijk veranderen. “Het Yarkovsky-effect speelt op bij alle planetoïden, ongeacht hun omvang en hoewel het effect – op afstand – voor een kleine fractie van de planetoïdenpopulatie al is gemeten, gaf OSIRIS-REX ons voor het eerst de mogelijkheid om het effect – terwijl Bennu om de zon reisde – in detail te meten,” stelt Steve Chesley. En ook op Bennu is het Yarkovsky-effect klein. “Maar wel van belang als we de inslagkans in de komende decennia en eeuwen willen berekenen.”
Bemonstering Andere krachten die de onderzoekers nader onder de loep namen, waren onder meer de zwaartekracht van de zon, de planeten, hun manen en meer dan 300 andere planetoïden. Maar ook de druk van de zonnewind. En er werd zelfs gekeken of het bemonsteren van Bennu – waarbij OSIRIS-REx zelf even kracht uitoefende op de planetoïde – van invloed was geweest op de baan van de ruimtesteen. Maar de bemonstering bleek – zoals verwacht – een verwaarloosbaar effect te hebben gehad op de koers van de ruimtesteen en de kans dat de ruimtesteen op aarde zou inslaan niet beïnvloed te hebben.
Minder keyholes Rekening houdend met alle krachten die van invloed zijn op de baan van Bennu hebben onderzoekers het aantal gravitational keyholes waar Bennu doorheen zou kunnen reizen, behoorlijk terug kunnen dringen. En daarmee ook een aantal toekomstige inslagscenario’s van tafel kunnen vegen.
De onderzoekers zijn in hun nopjes met de data van OSIRIS-REx en de bevindingen die daaruit voortvloeien. “De data van deze missie hielpen ons om de inslagkans in de komende eeuwen beter te voorspellen en heeft onze algemene kennis over mogelijk gevaarlijke planetoïden vergroot – een ongelofelijk mooi resultaat,” vindt onderzoeker Dante Lauretta.
Over de missie OSIRIS REx arriveerde in 2018 bij planetoïde Bennu. Na bijna twee jaar om de ruimtesteen gedraaid te hebben, daalde OSIRIS REx in 2020 af naar het oppervlak om daar wat materiaal te verzamelen. Dat materiaal is nu onderweg naar de aarde; OSIRIS REx verliet Bennu in mei. De sonde levert de capsule die rijkelijk gevuld is met materiaal afkomstig van Bennu naar verwachting in september 2023 op aarde af. Astronomen kunnen zich dan over het materiaal buigen en zo hopelijk meer te weten komen over Bennu én de totstandkoming van het complete zonnestelsel, waaronder onze van het leven wemelende planeet. Bennu is namelijk zo’n 4,5 miljard jaar oud, maar vrijwel ongerept en in zekere zin dan ook een tijdcapsule op zichzelf, die ons een uniek inkijkje kan geven in het jonge zonnestelsel en de materialen die daar voorhanden waren. “Koolstofhoudende planetoïden zoals Bennu bevatten een breed scala aan organische moleculen, zoals aminozuren en herbergen de oer-mineralen waaruit de planeten zijn opgebouwd,” zo legde projectwetenschapper Jason Dworkin eerder aan Scientias.nl uit. “We hopen dan ook de moleculaire voorlopers die leidden tot het ontstaan van leven en de bouwblokken van het zonnestelsel te gaan vinden.”
Oorspronkelijk zou de missie van OSIRIS-REx met het afleveren van het materiaal op aarde ten einde komen. Maar mogelijk zit er toch nog meer in het verschiet; NASA speelt met de gedachte om de sonde nog naar een ander hemellichaam te sturen.
ESA'S EXOMARS ROVER: LAUNCH DATE, BOREHOLES, AND THE HUNT FOR LIFE
ESA'S EXOMARS ROVER: LAUNCH DATE, BOREHOLES, AND THE HUNT FOR LIFE
The rover will dig deeper into Mars than any previous mission in search of ancient life.
IF YOU WANT TO FIND LIFE ON MARS, CARRY A BIG DRILL. That’s the idea the European Space Agency and partner Russian Roscosmos have brought to the upcoming ExoMars mission and its planned Rosalind Franklin Mars rover.
“The deepest anyone has dug on Mars is six centimeters,” ExoMars project scientist Jorge Vago tells Inverse.
That’s a big deal, he says, since there are several factors — cosmic radiation, unmitigated ultraviolet light, and powerfully oxidizing perchlorates — that have likely destroyed any organic biosignatures in the top meter or so of Martian soil over the past billions of years.
“The recipe we have with ExoMars is we’re going to drill below all that crap,” to a depth of two meters, Vago says. “Our hypothesis is that if you go to the right place and drill deep enough, you may be able to get access to well preserved organic material from 4 billion years ago, when conditions on the surface of Mars were more like what we had on infant Earth.”
The rover, set for launch in 2022, will bring to a head a decades-in-development program that has suffered a series of setbacks. If all goes well, the Rosalin Franklin rover may be scientists' best shot at getting a definitive answer about whether there was ever life on Mars and what its fate can tell us about our own planet.
WHAT IS THE ROSALIND FRANKLIN ROVER?
The Rosalind Franklin rover is an astrobiology lab on six wheels. It’s the mobile component of the joint ESA-Roscosmos ExoMars mission that also includes the Kazachok lander vehicle. Kazachok will land and release the rover on Mars’s Oxia Planum, an area believed to have once contained liquid water and may have been hospitable to early life.
“If we are lucky, it might have been the coastal area of a very large northern hemisphere ocean,” Vagos says. The Oxia Planum will also be the oldest site targeted by spacecraft so far, he adds, and is believed to be between 4 and 4.1 billion years old.
The rover will drill deep into the soil, bring samples into its internal array of instruments, and conduct experiments looking for biosignatures of potential life on Mars.
The rover itself is named in honor of the British scientist Rosalind Franklin, whose X-ray images of DNA were instrumental in the discovery of the double-helical structure of the DNA molecule by Frances Crick and James Watson. “She would have shared the Nobel Prize with them if she had not died of cancer,” Vargo says.
The Kazachok lander and Rosalind Franklin rover represent a second phase for the overall ExoMars mission, which began in 2016 with the launch of the Trace Gas Orbiter and ill-fated Schiaparelli EDM lander.
The Trace Gas orbiter is expected to continue studying the Martian atmosphere with a special focus on methane through at least 2023, but the Schiaparelli lander crashed during its descent to the Martian surface due to a computer malfunction. A problem with the lander’s inertial measurement unit, or IMU, which tracks the lander’s position on its descent, led the lander’s computer to believe it had landed while still a few kilometers in the air, according to Vago.
The Schiaparelli lander’s demise provided valuable data for ESA; however, the spacecraft’s final telemetry data led to improvements in the upcoming Kazochok and Rosalind Franklin rover mission.
“The 2022 mission implements a new, much more robust entry, descent, and landing (EDL) sequence, with redundant IMUs whose values are constantly being compared relative to what they should be by the capsule's computer,” Vago says. “In case one of them would go coo-coo, it would be taken offline.”
WHAT IS THE ROSALIND FRANKLIN ROVER LAUNCH DATE?
The 12-day launch window for ExoMars opens on September 20, 2022, and closes on October 1. If all goes well, the Kazachok lander and Rosalind Franklin rover will launch on a Proton rocket from the Baikonur launch complex in Kazakhstan sometime in that window. “Regardless of when we launch, the landing is always on the 10th of June, 2023,” Vago adds.
The mission was most recently scheduled to launch in 2020, but “we were hit with a double whammy,” he says. “On the one hand, we were late with the software and some of the avionics boxes, so we couldn’t test them the way we wanted to. And then we were hit by Covid-19.”
WHAT IS THE MISSION OF THE ROSALIND FRANKLIN ROVER?
“The main goal is to search for signs of life,” Vagos says, though there are many constituent steps the Rosalind Franklin rover will take in service of that goal. It will begin, he says, by studying geochemistry and potential biological signatures in the area around the landing site. “After you land, you look around and try to understand where you are and what it is that you see,” Vagos says. “It’s part and parcel of the exploration to try and understand the geology.”
The rover will then explore and drill in other locations, aiming to access any potentially preserved signs of life further beneath the Martian surface than any mission has reached before. It will be a deliberative process guided by the rover's many instruments to help with drill site selection.
“It is true we can go down to two meters, but it takes us almost five days to drill that deep,” Vago says. “It is a big commitment from the point of view of mission time to decide, ‘OK, I am going to drill here.’”
HOW BIG IS THE ROSALIND FRANKLIN ROVER, AND WHAT CAN IT DO?
The Rosalind Franklin rover is a middleweight, coming in at around 310 kilograms (683 pounds). Lighter than NASA’s 1,000 kilogram (2,204 pound) Curiosity rover, but heftier than the Russian Mars rovers at 186 kilograms (410 pounds).
The ground test model of the Rosalind Frankling ExoMars rover navigating rocky terrain in a laboratory test. ESA
Designed with difficult terrain in mind, the Rosalind Franklin rover has flexible wheels, which can also lock and serve as “feet” swung from articulated “knees” for traversing deep sand or steep dunes. “We can command a different type of gate in which we use the wheels as insect feet,” Vagos says.
Locomotion aside, the rover carries an arsenal of instruments designed to aid in its primary mission of searching for Martian life. A set of stereoscopic cameras on the rover mast aid in navigation, while a high-resolution 300-millimeter (~1 foot) camera is paired with an infrared spectrometer to help scientists decide where to explore. “Everything looks kind of butterscotch or orange-y,” Vagos says. “Having the infrared spectrometer gives you better information about the mineralogy.”
Once a potential drilling site is selected and the rover moves there, it can use the Russian-built Adron-RM neutron spectrometer to gauge how much water is in the soil beneath the rover. Too much moisture could interfere with measurements, Vagos says, “instead of crushing the samples to make powdered material, you would be sort of kneading dough to make bread.”
The rover also includes a French-made ground-penetrating radar to ensure the rover doesn’t attempt to drill through a slab of basalt a meter below the surface. The drill itself contains a microscope and an infrared spectrometer, according to Vagos.
Once a sample is acquired, it will be brought into the rover, where many tools can be applied to study the soil, including ovens and lasers designed to separate potential organic material from any perchlorates contained within the sample.
HOW WILL THE ROSALIND FRANKLIN ROVER LOOK FOR LIFE?
The rover will use the ESA’s ExoMars Biosignature score, which applies weight to several different signs of life. These include morphological signs of life similar to stromatolites on earth, layers of sediment that are structured by bacteria colonies.
“After what, 25, 30 years of missions landing on Mars, nobody has seen any of these that would feel comfortable with saying, for sure we have detected a morphological biosignature,” Vago says. “But in principle, that is something you can and would want to look for.”
The most important biosignatures the rover will look for are chemical biosignatures, such as the presence of organic molecules of a certain “handedness,” Vagos says.
Organic molecules are either left or right-handed — that is, they have the same structure, but they are reflections of each other. If you make an organic chemical in a lab or a geological process, you get equal amounts of both.
“But if it is life that makes an organic molecule, it makes one type,” Vagos says, so finding only “left-handed” organics on Mars would be a strong sign of life.
But even that wouldn’t be strong enough to prove life existed on Mars. Vagos says evidence of organic molecules of a certain handedness would add 30 points to the Biosignatures Score, the most of any independent sign, but not enough on its own.
“What we claim is that if you get up to 100 points, then for sure you have demonstrated life was active,” he says. “The reason we say that is to be able to add 100 points, you have to have at least four or five independent biosignatures verified, and the chance that would happen just using geology is very, very low.”
HOW MANY ROVERS WILL BE ON MARS?
If the Rosalind Franklin rover successfully lands on Mars in 2022, it will become the eighth successful rover to land and operate on Mars, and will likely be the fourth rover active on Mars at that time.
NASA’s Curiosity rover, which landed in 2012, is still operational as of August 2021, while NASA’s Perseverance rover, which landed in February 2021, should still be cruising the red planet in 2022.
A “Nazi coin of the year 2039” found in Mexico goes viral on the Internet
A “Nazi coin of the year 2039” found in Mexico goes viral on the Internet
Many ooparts have been found in ancient ruins, however is it possible to find one that comes from a future other than ours? That is the case with a Nazi coin minted in 2039.
The coin has 2039 as the date of minting.
Diego Avilés is responsible for having found a strange coin in one of his works . At first glance it looks like a Nazi coin, with its swastika and slogan “alle in einer nation”, which in Spanish translates as ” all in one nation .” Only this one is a bit peculiar.
Its minting date clearly says 2039 . Taking into account this date, and the motto that can be read on the reverse of the Nazi coin, is it possible that he traveled from a future where Nazi Germany won the war and dominated the world?
Nazi currency of the future?
In the municipality of La Concordia, in Chiapas, Mexico, there is, in fact, a town known as “New Germany,” but to date, no one pays with Nazi coins.
So how is it possible that a coin with a swastika and clear Nazi attributes is found in Mexico? A fraud? An alternative future?
Many people have claimed that the currency has been tampered with ; it would be the most logical thing to do. Modify the 1 and 9 at the beginning by a 2 and 0, so that, instead of 1939, it says 2039.
However, changing two numbers is something very different and much less complicated than adding a complete phrase to it .
The people of New Germany were born thanks to the German immigrants who arrived in Chiapas in the 1920s. However, at no time did any of them trade in Nazi coins in Mexico.
To date the origin is not known, so it will be analyzed by the University of Mexico.
Not even the commercialization of oil between both nations introduced the Nazi currency of the time in the North American nation. Their presence just doesn’t make sense.
An oopart today?
Quite simply, the coin found by Avilés does not fit into anything historical. Not even in the legal tender frameworks during the war , even though it has similarities.
Is this an oopart in our era? Let us remember that this is what objects are called ” outside their time line ” or that do not belong to the epoch attributed to them.
There are many of these discoveries, most belonging to ancient times, such as the Antikythera mechanism , a kind of ancient analog computer found in 1900.
However, an oopart from a future beyond the present had never been found . Reason that has generated a multitude of theories.
At the moment, the University of Mexico is analyzing the Nazi currency to determine its origin.
Is it possible that this coin came from an alternate future where the Nazis ruled the world? Or is it a simple fraud? However, the mystery is still present and until there are official versions, we will not be able to know where it comes from.
NASA SCIENTISTS SUGGEST NUCLEAR-POWERED LIFE UNDER MARS SURFACE
NASA / FUTURISM
NASA SCIENTISTS SUGGEST NUCLEAR-POWERED LIFE UNDER MARS SURFACE
"THE ENVIRONMENT WITH THE BEST CHANCE OF HABITABILITY ON MARS IS THE SUBSURFACE."
Digging Deep
Mars might be harboring an ecosystem of microbial life underneath its surface that survives on radioactivity-fueled chemical activity, an international team of scientists led by NASA says.
Even though the surface of Mars is hellish and inhospitable, the environment just beneath the surface may mirror the conditions that support underground microbes on Earth, according to new research published in the journal Astrobiology. It’s intriguing research and, despite being deeply speculative, could provide NASA and other space agencies with fresh ideas for what to look for in the ongoing hunt for past or present life on the Red Planet.
“The environment with the best chance of habitability on Mars is the subsurface,” lead study author and NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory planetary scientist Jesse Tarnas told Scientific American.
As Above, So Below
The scientists drew parallels to a similar phenomenon on Earth, in which underground radioactive compounds break down water molecules to produce life-sustaining compounds like hydrogen gas and sulfates.
This process has sustained subterranean microbes on Earth for millions of years if not longer, according to SciAm, and the researchers say that that the same thing could be happening on Mars based on their analysis of Martian meteorites and new data from NASA rovers. Even if there aren’t any radioactivity-fueled alien microbes on the Red Planet today, the scientists suspect that there could have been at some point in time.
Just Add Water
The one missing component, the scientists say, would be Martian groundwater. If there is water in the cracks and pores of the Martian subsurface, then the radiolysis process could theoretically support alien microbes today. But that’s a big “if,” Rutgers University planetary scientist Lujendra Ojha, who didn’t work on the study, told SciAm.
That’s not to say that Ojha disagrees with the researchers’ conclusion, but rather that there’s no guarantee we’ll find groundwater in the Martian subsurface.
“Where there is groundwater, there could be life,” Ojha told SciAm.
Less than two weeks after the blockbuster revelation that a Canadian company responsible for providing air traffic control monitoring to commercial pilots has been hiding UFO reports and just a few months after an independent investigation found numerous Canadian UFO sightings by pilots not known to the general public comes yet another unusual sighting near Canada’s Atlantic coast and this one has reports from both commercial AND military pilots. Are aliens spending more time in the Great White North now that border restrictions have lessened and close encounters with American military pilots may be getting too close for comfort?
2021-08-11 The Gander area control centre (ACC) reported that, at 0155Z, a Government Of Canada, Department of National Defence flight (CFC4003) from Trenton, ON (CYTR) to Cologne/Bonn, Germany (EDDK) and a KLM Royal Dutch Airlines Airbus A330-300 (KLM618) from Boston/Logan, MA (KBOS) to Amsterdam/Schiphol, Netherlands (EHAM) reported seeing a bright green flying object. It flew into a cloud, then disappeared. No impact to operations.
The incident referred to in this report was posted on August 11th by CADORS (the Civil Aviation Daily Occurrence Report System), the organization providing to the public digital access to its database of airline incidents and UFO reports from airlines, but actually occurred on July 30th, giving the military, airlines and government plenty of time to investigate it before posting. Why the delay? The CANDOR report gives probable causes as “Weather balloon, meteor, rocket, CIRVIS/UFO” – CIRVIS is the Canadian-United States Communications Instructions Reporting Vital Intelligence Sightings required to be filed by U.S. ands Canadian military pilots after “all unidentifiable, suspicious, or hostile air or seaborne traffic” incidents. VICE.com, which has been doing an outstanding job revealing the UFO goings-on in Canada recently, requested additional information from an unnamed Canadian military spokesperson and got this response:
“In this particular incident, there is nothing to indicate that what the crew saw posed any kind of safety risk to the aircraft. We believe that they saw something—they would not have filed a report otherwise.”
This sounds like the verbiage in the Pentagon’s recent UFO report – they saw something and they don’t know what it was but it was no safety risk. Isn’t that contradictory? A spokesperson from Nav Canada, the private company that operates Canada’s air traffic control system, told VICE it had nothing to add. However, Steffan Watkins (@steffanwatkins), an “open source research consultant focused on debunking #misinfo|#disinfo about planes, ships, & #OpenSkies,” had some interesting observations which he posted on Twitter:
“RCAF CC-177 177705 #CFC4003 (49.059, -60.787) @ 28k ft, had just made a change in course and had climbed 1000ft when they reported seeing the UFO.”
“PH-AKD #KL618 #KLM618 (48.023, -59.422) 39,000ft made no change in course.”
He wondered if the RCAF pilot changed course to avoid something or to get a better look, or was this just a normal swerve-like course correction. What’s normal about a swerve? Does the police officer EVER take that as your alibi and not write a ticket? (Asking for a friend.) And before you point out that the Perseids meteor shower could be the cause of the green object seen, this was still early in 2021 cycle (it doesn’t peak until Aug 11-13). Would a military pilot ‘swerve’ to see a meteor – especially when he or she was on their way to help out in Afghanistan?
“We believe that they saw something.” That’s the best we can say at this point, but the circumstantial evidence warrants more investigation. Will that ever happen? Kudos to VICE for their coverage of these mysterious Canadian encounters between Military and commercial flights and UFOs.
Of all of the types of evidence that have been put forward over the years for UFOs, certainly the most sought after is physical proof, something we can see and touch. It is a type of evidence that has remained frustratingly elusive over the decades, and considering the thousands of UFO sightings on record and the numerous reports of actual UFO crashes, one might think it was only a matter of time before such evidence came to light, but this has not proven to be the case. Any such alleged evidence is always whisked away by the military or covered up, leaving us with only stories. Yet, on occasion, we get a story of a piece of UFO or something of the sort, and one of these is the tale of a man who claimed to have retrieved a mysterious artifact dropped from an alien craft over the desert.
One evening in 1985, a man named Bob White was driving with a friend on their way from Denver to Las Vegas. At the time, White was asleep and his friend at the wheel, watching the hypnotic lane lines flicker by as they meandered through the remote wasteland between Grand Junction, Colorado and the Utah border. Here was a place in which there was not another soul for miles around, a moonscape of rocky desert that expanded out past the illumination of the headlights in a vast expanse of nothingness, and it would have been a rather dull drive until a weird series of events began to play out that made the evening a bit more exciting.
Bob White
At around 2:30 a.m., White was jolted awake by his friend. Wiping the sleepiness from his eyes and watching the nighttime desert streak by outside, he at first couldn’t figure out why his friend had woken him. It wasn’t his turn to be at the wheel and nothing at first seemed out of place, the car smoothly rolling along, but his friend was in a state of agitation. When White asked what was going on, his companion frantically pointed off towards the horizon, and it was then that he could see a strange light off in the distance, which did not look like an airplane. The light steadily grew in size and brightness until it was blinding, turning the desert night into day, and White would say of what happened:
The light was about the size of a full harvest moon. As we got closer, it grew larger. When we were a few hundred yards from it, I turned off the ignition and we coasted up close to it. It was huge, the size of a very big barn. I got out of the car for a better look. For some unknown reason, Jan turned on the headlights, and this light went up in the sky as fast as my eyes could follow it. What I saw, was not of this Earth. Then I saw another small light, bright orange with a tinge of yellow, white, and blue falling from it.
After this, the larger object rose into the air rapidly, joined with an even larger object, a sort of “mother ship,” and the whole of it shot off into the night, leaving the two frightened men there alone in the dark desert once again to try and process what they had just seen. Overcome with curiosity, White started hiking off through the scrub through the wilderness towards where he estimated the smaller object had fallen, making his way up an incline to find a groove in the ground, which he estimates as having been around 18 inches deep and 9 inches wide. Within this groove was a glowing object, about 7-1/2 inches long and shaped like a teardrop, still too hot to get anywhere near and apparently made of some kind of metal. White waited until it had cooled down enough to touch, and then brought it back to the car, stashing it into the trunk.
White, who claims to have never believed in UFOs before this incident, was baffled as to what the object could possibly be, but did not know who to turn to for help or what to do with it. He kept it locked in a safe deposit box to keep it safe, and in the meantime travelled about trying to raise interest in his discovery, travelling to conferences and trying to get the object tested. He even opened his Museum of the Unexplained, which would hold the object high as its main attraction. In 1996, a small sample of the object was finally tested by the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology, which didn’t come to any firm conclusions, but did have this to say:
The metallurgical analysis was pretty mundane. We didn’t find any evidence that it was extraterrestrial. Now you can make the argument that we didn’t spend $1 million and look at every conceivable option. We didn’t cover every base.
A second laboratory came to a similar conclusion, deflating hoped that this was an alien device or piece of spaceship. Undeterred and convinced of the object’s otherworldly nature, White decided to keep trying, sending in samples to the Los Alamos National Laboratory, New Mexico Tech, and at the Geosciences Research Division of the Scripps Institute in La Jolla, California, for more thorough analyses. One of White’s partners, a Dr. Robert Gibbons, a former scientist with NASA, would say of the results of these further tests:
We recently came across scientific data that linked Bob’s object with the planet Mars. Isotope abundance ratio tests were performed on Bob’s object in May, 1999 in La Jolla, CA and the numbers are virtually the same as obtained from Martian meteorite samples. The ratio of isotopes of Strontium for the QUE 94201 meteorite found in Antarctica in 1994 was 0.701. The ratio of isotopes of Strontium for Bob’s object was 0.712. The ratio of isotopes of Strontium for the Shergotty meteorite found India in 1865 was 0.723. Bob’s object is right in the middle of two proven Martian meteorites!
Bob White and his mysterious artifact
So, what does this all mean? Well, the most rational explanation is that this is exactly what the object is: a meteorite. This could also explain the strange sighting the two men had had to some degree, although it doesn’t explain the presence of the massive UFO they had seen or the “mothership” it attached to before speeding off into the night. Other ideas are that they saw debris from a satellite falling, or some naturally occurring celestial phenomenon, and that the weird object he found was completely unrelated. Then there is the possibility that this is all just a hoax. All of these possibilities White strongly denied. He never tried to get rich off of his findings, and whatever he did find out there in the desert, he certainly seemed to have at least truly believe it was real, once saying of his crusade to get the object recognized:
This is the most difficult thing I’ve ever done in my life. I’m 73 years old. I don’t have much longer. What I’d like to see before I’m gone is the national media get their heads out of the sand. I’d like to see the national media and everybody else realize that what I have is real. I don’t know what I have to do to prove this is the truth. You can’t make this stuff up.
He would continue to adamantly stick to his story and defend his strange discovery all the way up to his death in 2009, but the object would stay locked away in his museum, where it remains to this day. What exactly did he find out there in the desert on that fateful night? Is this a piece of meteorite, space debris, just a weird-looking rock, a hoax, or something else? As of yet, there is no proof that the object is anything more mysterious than a rock or meteorite, but it is still a pretty odd story all the same, and managed to get a lot of attention in its time as a piece of possible physical evidence from a UFO.
RELATED INFORMATION, selected and posted by peter2011
What others have to say about the Bob White object
'We recently came across scientific data that linked Bob's object with the planet Mars. Isotopic abundance ratio tests were performed on Bob's object in May 1999, in La Jolla, CA and the numbers are virtually the same as obtained from Martian meteorite samples. The ratio of isotopes of strontium for the QUE94201 meteorite found in Antarctica in 1994 was 0.701. The ratio of the isotopes of strontium for Bob's object is 0.712. The ratio of the isotopes of strontium for the Shergotty meteorite found in India in 1860 is 0.723. Bob's object is right in the middle of two proven Martian meteorites.
Dr Gibbons called for more tests on Bob's object. 2004
The Seattle Times newspaper dated 22 June 2004 carried an article by Steve Rock about White and the object. It provides an account by White himself. It was in 1985 about 2-3am one morning and he was travelling in a passenger. The driver woke him from sleep and pointed out a light in the sky. White went back to sleep. A while later the driver again woke White and there was a huge object only 100 yards away in front of the vehicle. These lights ascended into the sky where they joined a pair of neon tube like objects which all travelled East and were lost to view.
An orange object was seen falling from them, which White found red hot on the ground. After it cooled it was placed in the vehicle.
It was 7.5 inches long, teardrop shape and had a metallic exterior , and weighed less than 2 pounds.
It made its way to the Nevada based National Institute for Discovery Science. In 1996 a sample was sent to the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology. Col Kelleher of NIDS reportedly stated 'The metallurgical analysis was pretty mundane.' A Californian scientist who tested it is stated to have said 'It didn't have any extra-terrestrial signature.' The full analysis report may be read here. One website I located had the following table:
In reply to a comment from an individual, named Lee, who said they saw stalagmites of this type form in a steel workshop, Larry Cekander, co-founder of 'The Museum of the Unexplained' with Bob White, stated:
'...trying to compare iron or steel machine shop grinding to the artifact recovered in 1985 is like comparing apples and oranges and trying to make grape juice. The metal object pictured in the interview is aluminum not steel or other ferrous metal. No matter how hard you try you will never get aluminum to melt on a grinding wheel. You will never get any sparks from it. As soon as you start to grind on it, it will turn to powder or dust.
The Vickers hardness scale of the artifact is 61 to 63, the pictures you are using to compare the Bob White object are not close at all to the shape or consistency of the object. One other small point. The artifact has been to 15 labs and universities in the past 21 years including Los Alamos; Ne Mexico State Mine and Minerals; delta state and much more.
If the artifact had been in a machine shop on a grinder of some sort there would be residue in the artifact from the wheels used to form it. There are 33 elements identified and not one of them are binding agents from a grinding wheel or disc.
If you have any other questions please ask me. The labs and universities we have used DO KNOW the difference between a formation of metals under a grinding wheel and the artifact.
We know it was formed outside of our atmosphere, no question about it. Now maybe the machine used on it in outer space had a machine shop but then again we know it was in a molten state when ejected into a vacuum under extreme pressure with extremely cold conditions. There are identifiers showing an extra-terrestrial origin to the object also. It was never near a machine shop lee..'
Chronology
1985. Sighting; and artifact found.
1996 A sample was sent to the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology. Col Kelleher of NIDS reportedly stated 'The metallurgical analysis was pretty mundane.' The full analysis report may be read here. The final paragraph of the analysis report reads:
'There are no anomalies in the results of this analysis. The detected phases are accounted for, and the micro structure lends itself to standard metallurgical interpretation. The physical properties that were measured (density, hardness and electrical resistivity) all fall within the expected range.'
1999 Isotopic abundance ratio tests were performed on Bob's object in May 1999, in La Jolla, CA (Geosciences Research Division of the Scripps Institute.) I have not been able to locate a full copy of their analysis. However, it was reported, by Dr Robert Gibbons, that 'The ratio of the isotopes of strontium for Bob's object is 0.712.'
Since 1999Larry Cekander states that 'The artifact has been to 15 labs and universities in the past 21 years including Los Alamos; Ne Mexico State Mine and Minerals; delta state and much more.' However, I have been unable to locate detailed analyses from other than the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology. If any reader knows of these detailed analyses, I would like to hear of them.
UFO Sighted Over Miami, Florida ( August 12, 2021 )
STATEMENT : UFO. Just filmed what looks like a UFO. Colour lights in MIiami Sky, Florida, 9:26 PM EST.
Closer every day
credit : Alex Sanchez
UFO Sighted Over Lake Lac Saint-Martin, Manitoba, Canada ( August 11, 2021 )
STATEMENT : Was coming home from fairford Manitoba Canada when I got to little Saskatchewan First Nation I noticed a ball of light on the lake in the middle of know where maybe a UFO just crashed there I made a few videos of the light it was very dark on that road maybe a UFO just crashed near stellas beach lake st Martin Manitoba
MUFON CASE : 117250 Trenton, New Jersey ( August 12, 2021 )
Mutual UFO Network : MUFON SUBMISSIONS : 3 Massive orange ufo orbs Long Description of Sighting Report - Case 117250
It was too hot to sleep I went outside & saw 3 massive orbs just hovering in the sky I could not resist to record what was taking place. Recorded using a tripod from my balcony I wanted to show all different angels of these orbs.
Date Submitted : 2021-08-12 Date of Event : 2021-08-12 MUFON SUBMITTER FILE : 3orbs.mp4 : no audio
Some of the more remarkable UFO encounters on record have involved pilots of various types, both civilian and military. These reports tend to resonate because they come from well-trained professionals with impeccable observation skills, so when they say they have seen something truly strange, people tend to listen. Such reports are actually quite numerous, stretching back through the decades, and here we will look at a selection of particularly notable pilot UFO encounters from the 1950s.
Starting off, 1952 seems to have been a rather busy year for strange pilot UFO encounters. First, we have the case of Commander Edward P. Stafford, of the US Navy, who says that in August of that year he was in charge of a detachment of three Naval patrol planes flying out of an air base at Thule, in northwest Greenland, which was integral to the chain of arctic radar stations called the DEW (distant early warning) line. At the time they were doing what is called “ice reconnaissance,” which entailed flying around the Kennedy Channel looking for large icebergs or pack ice so that this data could be relayed to the supply ships that arrived during the summer. They also had the secondary mission of helping Arctic scientists doing cosmic ray research, by helping them to retrieve the data packages from their high-altitude research balloons when the balloons came back down to earth. They would relay the location of the fallen packages, after which helicopters would go in to retrieve them. Stafford describes these as easy missions, but on this day things would get strange. Stafford would say:
These were easy flights, always in good weather and always at an altitude safely above the tall, cloud-shrouded bergs and coastal rocks we often had to dodge on ice patrol. Each of us had two or three of those “milk runs” while deployed to Thule, and we rather enjoyed the change of tactics and routine, as well as the virtuous feeling that we were helping to advance the cause of science. This is why I was surprised to find one of the other plane commanders as tense and pale on return from a balloon chase as though it had been a hairy combat mission or a close encounter with a berg or a mountaintop. Lt. John Callahan was a salty, steady professional pilot, so I knew when I saw him walking in from his plane that something serious had happened on that flight. “What the hell’s the matter John?” I asked him. “You look as if you’d just survived a midair!” “Ed, you’re not going to believe it. I’m not even sure I do… and I SAW it. And so did O’Flaherty and Merchant. At least most of it. And I don’t think they believe it either.”
The obviously heavily distressed and scared Callahan was then brought into the ready room and began to explain just what “it” had been. He claimed that he had been on a balloon run, flying at 10,000 feet in the clear with the balloon in sight high above and the radio compass needle locked on to the balloon’s transmitter, with he and his co-pilot Bill O’Flaherty occasionally taking turns checking the balloon through their binoculars. It was as they were doing this that they had noticed something very unusual, indeed. On one of these binocular checks, Callahan noticed three bright silver discs attached to the instrument pod of the balloon, and he pointed them out to O’Flaherty, who also saw them. They hadn’t been there minutes before, so both men were baffled as to what these objects could possibly be. Stafford would describe of what had happened to them next, saying:
Callahan took the glasses back and looked again. They were still there exactly as the copilot had described, three shining, saucer-shaped metallic objects clustered on the hanging trail of the balloon just above the black dot of the science package. On the intercom Callahan called the plane captain to the cock- pit and handed him the binoculars. “Take a look Merchant. What do you think?” The captain’s reaction was the same as the copilot’s. “What the hell are they? Where did they come from?” Callahan took the glasses back and studied the strange objects for several minutes while O’Flaherty maneuvered the Privateer to keep the target in sight. Suddenly Callahan sucked in his breath and held it. What he was seeing could not be happening. The three objects had detached themselves from the tail of the balloon and formed up into a compact vee. As Callahan watched incredulously, they executed what looked at that distance like a vertical bank to the left and accelerated to a blinding speed that took them out of sight, climbing in about three seconds. Callahan handed the glasses back to O’Flaherty. “They’re gone,” he said slowly, “CLIMBING from 90,000 feet. Never saw anything turn so tight or move so fast.” Back in the ready room after the instrument pod had landed and its position had been reported, this was the aspect of the phenomenon that most affected Callahan. “Jesus, Ed,” he told me, “from the angle of the sky those things passed through in the three seconds they were in sight, at that distance, they must have been going tens of thousands of miles an hour. They must have pulled a hundred Gs in that turn. And what the hell climbs out, ACCELERATING from 90,000 feet?”
The witness then apparently wrote a full report of the incident, but after that it was apparently just sort of buried and forgotten by the higher ups. There was never any explanation given, and the report was never brought up again. The only record of this happening is Stafford’s testimony, which originally appeared in Naval History Magazine, and that’s it. It is a strange case to be sure, but it wasn’t the only incident to happen in 1952. Just the month before, in July of 1952, there was another high-profile case involving a passenger airliner in the United States. On the evening of July 14, 1952, a Pan American World Airways DC-4 with a crew of three and 10 passengers, was on a routine flight from New York to Miami and things were going smoothly until just after sunset, when things would get very strange, indeed. At the time, the plane was on autopilot over Chesapeake Bay approaching Norfolk, Virginia, at an altitude of 8,000 feet, when all three crew members, consisting of Captain F. V. Koepke, First Officer William B. Nash and Second Officer William H. Fortenberry, saw a bright “red-orange brilliance” low near the ground in the distance. None of them could figure out what it could be, it had just suddenly appeared from nowhere, and as they studied the phenomenon it got even weirder still, when they could discern that it was in fact a series of bright objects. First Officer Nash would say of what they saw:
Almost immediately we perceived that it consisted of six bright objects streaking toward us at tremendous speed, and obviously well below us. They had the fiery aspect of hot coals, but of much greater glow, perhaps twenty times more brilliant than any of the scattered ground lights over which they passed or the city lights to the right. Their shape was clearly outlined and evidently circular; the edges were well defined, not phosphorescent or fuzzy in the least and the red-orange color was uniform over the upper surface of each craft. Within the few seconds that it took the six objects to come half the distance from where we had first seen them, we could observe that they were holding a narrow echelon formation, a stepped-up line tilted slightly to our right with the leader at the lowest point, and each following craft slightly higher. At about the halfway point, the leader appeared to attempt a sudden slowing. We received this impression because the second and third wavered slightly and seemed almost to overrun the leader, so that for a brief moment during the remainder of their approach the positions of these three varied. It looked very much as if an element of “human” or “intelligence” error had been introduced, in so far as the following two did not react soon enough when the leader began to slow down and so almost overran him.
The mysterious objects then shot forward at great speed, like “a stream of tracer bullets” approaching to pass under the plane, and the crew all excitedly took up positions that allowed them to look outside to watch them as they did. Nash would say of what they saw beneath them:
All together, they flipped on edge, the sides to the left going up and the glowing surface facing right. Though the bottom surfaces did not become clearly visible, we had the impression that they were unlighted. The exposed edges, also unlighted, appeared to be about 15 feet thick, and the top surface, at least, seemed flat. In shape and proportion, they were much like coins. While all were in the edgewise position, the last five slid over and past the leader so that the echelon was now tail-foremost, so to speak, the top or last craft now being nearest to our position.
The objects then all sped off in formation to the west while making erratic maneuvers like “a ball ricocheting off a wall.” Two more objects they hadn’t noticed then sped under them to join the others, and went out over the darkened bay at low altitude, before lifting off to disappear into the sky. Nash would say of their ascent:
As they climbed, they oscillated up and down behind one another in a irregular fashion, as though they were extremely sensitive to control. In doing this, they went vertically past one another, bobbing up and down, just as the front three went horizontally past one another, as the initial six approached us. This appeared to be an intelligence error, ‘lousing up the formation’—they disappeared by blinking out in a mixed-up fashion, in no particular order. We stared after them, dumbfounded and probably open-mouthed. We looked around at the sky, half expecting something else to appear, though nothing did. There were flying saucers, and we had seen them. What we had witnessed was so stunning and incredible that we could readily believe that if either of us had seen it alone, he would have hesitated to report it. But here we were, face to face. We couldn’t both be mistaken about such a striking spectacle.
It would later turn out that none of the passengers had witnessed the strange spectacle, but when they radioed in their report, they would find that eight unidentified objects in the of vicinity Langley Field has also been seen by another pilot in the area, as well as several witnesses on the ground. In fact, there had apparently been seven additional reports from persons who had witnessed similar incidents within 30 minutes of the encounter in the same area. Air Force investigators would later try to explain it away as five jets that had been purportedly operating in the area at the time, but the crew were experienced pilots who knew they had not seen jets. At the time, Project Blue Book would look at the case and concur that it was likely not jets that had been seen, eventually filing it away as “unknown.” Interestingly, the case would be dusted off in 1962 by the Director of the Harvard College Observatory, astrophysicist Donald H. Menzel, who would conclude that it had all been due to simply a reflection in the cockpit windows, from either an internal or external light source, which had then been misidentified as UFOs. Menzel would doubt the credibility of the pilots, claiming that they gotten overexcited, had exaggerated what they had seen, and made a simple mistake of perception, falling for an optical illusion. This would be challenged by Nash, who lashed out at Menzel in a letter, saying:
Dr. Menzel, regardless of your figures the western horizon was not quite bright, and regarding your “reflection theory,” in the first place the objects were between us and the West. In the second place, they would have had to be damned persistent, consistent and impossible reflections to have manifested in three cockpit windows in exactly the same way. We first observed them through the front window. As they approached and I moved across the cockpit, I kept my eyes on the objects and saw them through the curved window of the windshield, and we both finished our observations looking through the right side window. That is why there is no evidence that the pilots considered that what they saw was a reflection; and you state that we were too excited by what we saw to make the most elementary scientific tests. Again, Doctor, pilots do not excite easily or they would not be airline pilots—please—a little respect for us?
Menzel would concede that perhaps it had not been reflections, instead changing his explanation to some sort of optical illusion caused by a temperature inversion, or even a spotlight that had been refracted off of a cloud layer, both of which he would hold up as “a highly probable explanation that is consistent with all observations and does not depend on the presence of an extraterrestrial spacecraft.” However, Nash would adamantly deny that this could have accounted for what they had seen, and indeed neither a spotlight nor a temperature inversion seems to have been able to explain every aspect of what was seen by multiple qualified witnesses. To this day the case remains unsolved.
Another report from 1952 comes to us from the Gulf of Mexico, where on December 6, 1952 a crew aboard a USAF B-29 bomber would have a hairy encounter of their own. The bomber was moving out across the gulf towards Texas when they picked up something bizarre on their radar scopes, which appeared to be several unidentified objects moving at incredible speed. The objects rapidly approached the bomber, after which they became visible as they streaked past, much to the astonishment of the crew. These mysterious objects then did a series of acrobatic aerial maneuvers around the bomber for several minutes, before merging with another massive object that appeared, after which this giant UFO sped off at speeds estimated to be in excess of 9,000 miles per hour. One of the crew that day, a 1st Lt Norman Karas, would explain of the incident:
On 6 December 1952, while flying over the Gulf of Mexico towards Galveston, Texas, the flight engineer finished transferring fuel and I then turned on my radar set. I noticed an unidentified target approaching our aircraft at terrific rate of speed. I timed it as best as I could with my stopwatch over a known distance and the instructor flight engineer computed the speed at 5,240 mph. I alerted the entire crew to look for the object visually and some flashes of light were noticed. The closest the objects came were approximately 20 miles. I saw about 20 objects in all, sometimes as much as two and three on the scope at one time. I re-calibrated the set and there was no change. The object was small and possibly round. I also noticed a large return come up to within 40 miles of our tail from behind, and then disappeared. To the best of my knowledge, I believe that this object was real and moved at an extremely high speed and was not a set malfunction or optical illusion. Contact was broken off at 05:35 after a group of the blips merged into a ½ inch curved arc about 30 miles from our aircraft at 320 degrees and proceeded across the scope and off it at a computed speed of over 9,000 mph.
B-29 bomber
What was going on here? Who knows? The following year, we have a 1953 case that allegedly happened near Ellsworth AFB, just east of Rapid City, South Dakota. On August 11 of that year, the Air Defense Command radar station at Ellsworth AFB got a strange call from the local Ground Observer Corps filter center just after dark. It turns out that a spotter about 10 miles from the base had reported a very bright light moving low on the horizon, and ground control also picked it up, reporting the object as being at an altitude of 16,000 feet and stating that it “was well defined, solid, and bright.” A F-84 pilot who had been on maneuvers in the area was diverted to investigate. The pilot made visual confirmation of the object and began to approach, but when he was about 3 miles away it began to pull away and ascend even as the fighter tried to keep up, getting brighter as it did. Captain Edward J. Ruppelt former Director of Project Blue Book, would say of what happened next:
There was always a limit as to how near the jet could get, however. The controller told me that it was just as if the UFO had some kind of an automatic warning radar linked to its power supply. When something got too close to it, it would automatically pick up speed and pull away. The separation distance always remained about 3 miles. The chase continued on north out of sight of the lights of Rapid City and the base – into some very black night. When the UFO and the F-84 got about 120 miles to the north, the pilot checked his fuel; he had to come back. And when I talked to him, be said he was damn glad that he was running out of fuel because being out over some mighty desolate country alone with a UFO can cause some worry.
Both the UFO and the F-84 had gone off the scope, but in a few minutes the jet was back on, heading for home. Then 10 or 15 miles behind it was the UFO target also coming back. While the UFO and the F-84 were returning to the base – the F-84 was planning to land – the controller received a call from the jet interceptor squadron on the base. The alert pilots at the squadron had heard the conversations on their radio and didn’t believe it. “Who’s nuts up there?” was the comment that passed over the wire from the pilots to the radar people. There was an F-84 on the line ready to scramble, the man on the phone said, and one of the pilots, a World War II and Korean veteran, wanted to go up and see a flying saucer. The controller said, “OK, go.”
After the second plane was in the sky the mysterious light proved to be very evasive and elusive, foiling all attempts to get near it, climbing, diving, and generally maneuvering in a way that was well beyond the capabilities of the fighter.Ruppelt would explain of this cat and mouse chase:
In a minute or two the F-84 was airborne and the controller was working him toward the light. The pilot saw it right away and closed in. Again, the light began to climb out, this time more toward the northeast. The pilot also began to climb, and before long the light, which at first had been about 30 degrees above his horizontal line of sight, was now below him. He nosed the ’84 down to pick up speed, but it was the same old story – as soon as he’d get within 3 miles of the UFO, it would put on a burst of speed and stay out ahead.
Even though the pilot could see the light and hear the ground controller telling him that he was above it, and alternately gaining on it or dropping back, he still couldn’t believe it – there must be a simple explanation He turned off all of his lights – it wasn’t a reflection from any of the airplane’s lights because there it was. A reflection from a ground light, maybe. He rolled the airplane – the position of the light didn’t change. A star – he picked out three bright stars near the light and watched carefully. The UFO moved in relation to the three stars. Well, he thought to himself, if it’s a real object out there, my radar should pick it up too; so he flipped on his radar-ranging gunsight. In a few seconds the red light on his sight blinked on – something real and solid was in front of him. Then he was scared. When I talked to him, he readily admitted that he’d been scared. He’d met MD 109’s, FW 190’s and ME 262’s over Germany and he’d met MIG-15’s over Korea but the large, bright, bluish-white light had him scared – he asked the controller if he could break off the intercept. This time the light didn’t come back.
Ruppelt claims that every aspect of the case was subsequently looked into, but no rational explanation was every found, leaving it to be filed as “unknown.” A similar aerial chase occurred in August of 1956, this time in the region of Bentwaters AFB, in the UK. On the evening of August 13, several radar operators at two military bases in the east of England, one of these being Bentwaters, picked up multiple anomalous objects that moved very rapidly and performed inexplicable maneuvers. These objects were showing some very strange behavior, and seemed to converge on one very large object described as “several times larger than a B-36 aircraft,” which then continued to fly out over the countryside at a speed of around over 12,000 mph. Other objects were picked up as well, all of them moving at speeds of between 4,000 and 6,000 mph. These objects were also visually confirmed by a C-47 twin-engine military transport plane over Bentwaters, which reported that “a bright light streaked under my aircraft travelling east to west at terrific speed.” It was all enough to scramble a deHavilland Venom jet interceptor, which streaked off to investigate, and a later report filed by a Captain Edward L. Holt would say of what happened next:
Pilot advised he had a bright white light in sight and would investigate. At 13 miles [20 km.] west he reported loss of target and white light. Lakenheath radar vectored him to a target 10 miles [16 km.] east of Lakenheath and pilot advised that target was on his radar and was ‘locking on.’ Pilot then reported he had lost target on his radar. Lakenheath GCA reports that as the Venom passed the target on radar, the target began a tail chase of the friendly fighter. Radar requested pilot acknowledge this chase. Pilot acknowledged and stated he would try to circle and get behind the target. Pilot advised he was unable to ‘shake’ the target off his tail and requested assistance. One additional Venom was scrambled from RAF station. Original pilot stated: ‘Clearest target I have ever seen on radar.
The jets would lose the object and it has gone on to become a very puzzling case. It would be thoroughly investigated by The Condon Report, which was a Air Force-funded study at the University of Colorado under Dr. Edward U. Condon, the case remains unexplainable, and would conclude:
The probability that anomalous propagation of radar signals may have been involved in this case seems to be small. One or two details are suggestive of AP, particularly the reported disappearance of the first track as the UFO appeared to overfly the Bentwaters GCA radar. Against this must be weighed the Lakenheath controller’s statement that there was “little or no traffic or targets on scope,” which is not at all suggestive of AP conditions, and the behavior of the target near Lakenheath – apparently continuous and easily tracked. The “tailing” of the RAF fighter, taken alone, seems to indicate a possible ghost image, but this does not jibe with the report that the UFO stopped following the fighter, as the latter was returning to its base, and went off in a different direction. The radar operators were apparently careful to calculate the speed of the UFO from distances and elapsed times, and the speeds were reported as consistent from run to run, between stationary episodes. This behavior would be somewhat consistent with reflections from moving atmospheric layers – but not in so many different directions.
Visual mirage at Bentwaters seems to be out of the question because of the combined ground and airborne observations; the C47 pilot apparently saw the UFO below him. The visual objects do not seem to have been meteors; statements by the observers that meteors were numerous imply that they were able to differentiate the UFO from the meteors. In summary, this is the most puzzling and unusual case in the radar-visual files. The apparently rational, intelligent behavior of the UFO suggests a mechanical device of unknown origin as the most probable explanation of this sighting. However, in view of the inevitable fallibility of witnesses, more conventional explanations of this report cannot be entirely ruled out.
What was going on here? It is hard to say. In our last case here, we have one more case from 1956, concerning a Navy R7V-2 transport, a 4-engine Constellation, that was flying west across the Atlantic Ocean at the time on its way from Newfoundland to the Naval Air Station at Patuxent, Maryland. The aircraft was under the leadership of the very experienced Commander George Benton, who had made more than 200 flights across the Atlantic, and flying under incredibly clear, ideal conditions at the time. Along for the ride were nine Naval personnel returning home from foreign duty, and along with Benton’s regular and relief crews there were nearly 30 airmen-pilots, navigators and flight engineers aboard, many of whom were asleep when things began to get strange.
It started when Commander Benton noticed “a cluster of lights, like a village” on the sea ahead, which should have been completely dark. He verified this with his co-pilot, Lieutenant Peter W. Mooney, who also also saw the lights and said they looked “like a small town.” There was not supposed to be land there, so at first they thought that they had somehow gone off course, but a check of their navigation instruments showed that this wasn’t the case. They then thought that perhaps they were seeing a fleet of ships, but they didn’t look like ships, and a radio enquiry showed that there were no known such shipping operations scheduled in the area. As the aircraft approached, several colored rings appeared to spread out from the lights, and it appeared to get larger. They could now see that it was one massive object, 350 and 400 feet in diameter, apparently metallic, and it was hovering over the water below.
As they all tried to make sense of what they were seeing, the object began to rise towards their plane. It was much larger than the aircraft, and moving at such a clip towards them that they took evasive action to avoid a collision. As they braced for impact, the enormous disk tilted and veered off, only to circle back around and pace them. It was then that they could get a clear look at it, and in a report on the incident made by Major Donald E. Keyhoe, of the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena (NICAP) he says of this:
Its sheer bulk was amazing; its diameter was three to four times the Constellation’s wing span. At least thirty feet thick at the center, it was like a gigantic dish inverted on top of another. Seen at this distance, the glow along the rim was blurred and uneven. Whether it was an electrical effect, a series of jet exhausts or lights from opening in the rim, Benton could not tell. But the glow was bright enough to show the disc’s curving surface, giving a hint of dully reflecting metal. Though Benton saw no signs of life, he had a feeling they were being observed. Fighting an impulse to dive away, he held to a straight course. Gradually, the strange machine pulled ahead. Tilting its massive shape upward, it quickly accelerated and was lost against the stars.
The men would subsequently be interrogated and debriefed, with the Air Force apparently keenly interested in what they had seen but refusing to answer any questions by the crew as to what was going on. It was then sort of just brushed under the carpet. Then, a week later, there would be a new and rather strange development, of which Keyhoe would say:
Five days later, Commander Benton had a phone call from a scientist in a high government agency. “I’m informed you had a close-up UFO sighting. I’d like to see you.” Benton checked, found the man was cleared by the Navy. Next day, the scientist appeared, showed his credential, listened intently to Benton’s report. Then he unlocked a dispatch case and took out some photographs. “Was it like any of these?” At the third picture, Benton stopped him. “That’s it!” He looked sharply at the scientist. “Somebody must know the answers, if you’ve got photographs of the things.” The other man took the pictures. “I’m sorry, Commander.” He closed his dispatch case and left. At the time when I learned of this case, I had served for two years as Director of the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena.
These are just but a few of the pilot reports from the era, and they paint a rather amazing picture. These are reports that come from very trained witnesses, with the phenomena viewed by multiple people and often with radar corroboration and reports from the ground. What are we to make of such reports? Just what is going on here and can it so readily be written off? Why were so many of these reports buried by their superiors in order to fade away into the background? This is also just one era, a few reports in one decade, but such accounts expand well beyond this, right up into the present day. It is all a very sobering look at a phenomenon we barely understand, and which seems to be relegated by those in control to the shadows. Whatever truth there is to any of this, and what it all means, looks likely to remain hidden from us for some time to come.
Scientists in the Chinese province of Heilongjiang have located a crater from what they believe was the largest asteroid impactto have hit our planet in the last 100,000 years. The speed as well as the way it impacted the planet would have been catastrophic to anyone living near the impact zone – it could very well have been the most powerful asteroid impact witnessed by modern humans.
Described as being “impossibly deep”, the crater was found in Yilan County close to Harbin and was believed to have been made by an asteroid that hit Earth approximately 49,000 years ago. The crater is 1.85 kilometers wide (1.1 miles) and 579 meters deep (1,900 feet deep). Professor Chen Ming from the Guangzhou Institute of Geochemistry, part of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, stated, “Yilan is the most deeply formed crater we have ever seen.”
According to their calculations, experts believe that the asteroid would have been about 100 meters in width (328 feet). While it was much smaller than the 10-to-15-kilometer-wide asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs, this impact would have caused a lot of destruction as it was traveling at a much faster speed and it came down vertically.
The blast from the impact would have been between 500 and 2,000 times stronger than the atomic bomb that hit Hiroshima, Japan, in 1945. Everything within a 10 kilometer radius (6.2 miles) of the impact zone would have been devastated. Furthermore, the shock waves and heat caused by the impact would have been strong enough to melt granite and turn it into glass.
Drill samples taken of rocks and tear-shaped shards of glass from the crater revealed that there was an asteroid impact many years ago, and the charcoal found there provided the researchers with a date of the event.
Those living in the area would have been strongly affected by the blast as well as numerous animals (such as elephants) since the crater is next to a fertile plain caused by the Songhua River that humans and animals would have enjoyed. (An aerial view of the crater site can be seen here.)
The Yilan crater in Heilongjiang province.
Photo:Heilongjiang
A picture of Professor Chen Ming at the Yilan crater drilling site.
I recently wrote a few articles on how, during the Cold War, the Russians tried to manipulate U.S. intelligence agencies by using the UFO phenomenon. But, what about the U.K.? Has it been manipulated in strange, similar ways by the Russians? The answer is: Yes. There’s no doubt about it. Welcome to the Serpo mystery. If you don’t know about Serpo, well, it goes like this: in May 1987 a woman named Alice Bradley Sheldon – an employee of the CIAwho wrote sci-fi under the alias of James Tiptree – took her life. Her husband’s life, too. Sheldon is believed to have created a faked UFO document – to freak out the Russians – in the 1960s called the Serpo document. It tells a story that mirrors certain portions of the 1977 movie, Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Specifically, the final stages of the movie in which Richard Dreyfuss’ character of Roy Neary is taken away by aliens. To understand how and why the Brits – alongside their American counterparts – secretly decided to make use of the UFO phenomenon in the late 1960s, and for reasons relative to counterintelligence, disinformation programs, and Russian destabilization, we have to begin with a sensational saga that surfaced in November 2005. That was when a source using the term “Anonymous” came out of the shadows and told an incredible story. Some said it was too incredible to be true. It just might have been exactly that.
Spielberg’s ‘Close Encounters of the Third Kind’ (1977).
It’s a story surrounding what became known within Ufology as “The Serpo Documents.” As for “Anonymous, he or she was said to have been a government insider with a wealth of information on some of the biggest UFO-themed secrets of all time. Here’s what “Anonymous” shared with the UFO research community on the Serpo controversy: “I am a retired employee of the U.S. Government. I won’t go into any great details about my past, but I was involved in a special program. As for Roswell, it occurred, but not like the story books tell. There were two crash sites: one southwest of Corona, New Mexico and the second site at Pelona Peak, south of Datil, New Mexico. The crash involved two extraterrestrial aircraft. The Corona site was found a day later by an archaeological team. This team reported the crash site to the Lincoln County Sheriff’s department. A deputy arrived the next day and summoned a state police officer. One live entity was found hiding behind a rock. The entity was given water but declined food. The entity was later transferred to Los Alamos. The information eventually went to Roswell Army Air Field. The site was examined and all evidence was removed. The bodies were taken to Los Alamos National Laboratory because they had a freezing system that allowed the bodies to remain frozen for research. The craft was taken to Roswell and then onto Wright Field, Ohio.”
The source continued: “The second site was not discovered until August 1949 by two ranchers. They reported their findings several days later to the sheriff of Catron County, New Mexico. Because of the remote location, it took the sheriff several days to make his way to the crash site. Once at the site, the sheriff took photographs and then drove back to Datil. Sandia Army Base, Albuquerque, New Mexico was then notified. A recovery team from Sandia took custody of all evidence, including six bodies. The bodies were taken to Sandia Base, but later transferred to Los Alamos. The live entity established communications with us and provided us with a location of his home planet. The entity remained alive until 1952, when he died. But before his death, he provided us with a full explanation of the items found inside the two crafts. One item was a communication device. The entity was allowed to make contact with his planet.” From thereon, the story expanded significantly: supposedly a number of American astronauts were sent to the planet of the aliens, no less.”
The highly talkative English informant, who worked at the U.K. Ministry of Defense, said the following of the statement from “Anonymous”: “Interesting reading. However, these are NOT real events that are being described here, although the document they come from IS REAL. I saw this information in 1969 or ’70 in Whitehall [London]. Originally it was a CIA document authored by a lady named Alice Bradley Sheldon. Its main purpose, if you will pardon the phrase, was to ‘scare the crap out of the Soviets’ in response to them scaring the crap out of us. In the ’60s, during the warmer part of the Cold War, the KGB successfully led the U.S. Government to believe that a number of nuclear devices had been concealed in disused mines and caves close to four (4) large American cities. These bombs could be detonated by sleeper agents at any time Moscow wished. It was not completely disproved that this was fake until 1980.”
There’s this, too, from the source: “The ‘Project SERPO’ report was part of the CIA’s riposte to this and an attempt to trump the Soviets. Its aim was to make them believe that we had acquired lethal extraterrestrial energy devices and that we had a cozy friendship with these all-powerful EBENs [EBEN is allegedly a classified term used by American Intelligence to describe aliens. It is said to derive from the term ‘Extraterrestrial Biological Entity’] who would be very unhappy if Moscow attempted to harm the United States in any way. To a degree I believe this effort was effective to begin with. However, it came unstuck when the CIA tried to overreach the information by ADDING PHOTOGRAPHS and also trying to spook allies such as ourselves who were better equipped to analyze the information and bugged to the hilt by the KGB. Why this information is being released again now I do not know. Possibly in the past the DIA could have BEEN FOOLED BY THE CIA into believing that ‘Project SERPO’was a real event and the ANONYMOUS source may genuinely want to release this information. Alternatively the DIA may have got it direct from the KGB most likely with a few choice modifications added by them.”
To me, all of this sounds entirely plausible. After all, what’s more likely, that decades ago aliens from their world came to our planet (and vice-versa) or that the whole thing was nothing but a made-up yarn to mess with the minds of Russian Intelligence? People in Ufology who thrive on the Serpo story may not like to hear my views on all of this, but the fact is that, in this story, the simplest scenario is probably the correct one. And, maybe one day, we’ll know more about how and why the U.K. Ministry of Defense were caught up in all of this.
Observatories Assemble: NASA’s Juno Spacecraft Joins Japan’s Hisaki Satellite and W. M. Keck Observatory to Solve “Energy Crisis” on Jupiter
Observatories Assemble: NASA’s Juno Spacecraft Joins Japan’s Hisaki Satellite and W. M. Keck Observatory to Solve “Energy Crisis” on Jupiter
Sitting more than five times the distance from the Sun as Earth, Jupiter is not expected to be particularly warm. Based on the amount of sunlight received, the average temperature in the planet’s upper atmosphere should be about minus 100 degrees Fahrenheit or a chilly minus 73 Celsius. Instead, the measured value soars to around 800 degrees Fahrenheit or 426 Celsius. The source of this extra heat has remained elusive for 50 years, causing scientists to refer to the discrepancy as an “energy crisis” for the planet.
Recently an international team assembled observations from a trio of observatories -- NASA’s Juno spacecraft, the Hisaki satellite from the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) and Keck Observatory on Maunakea in Hawaiʻi. -- to discover the likely source of Jupiter’s thermal boost.
“We found that Jupiter’s intense aurora, the most powerful in the solar system, is responsible for heating the entire planet’s upper atmosphere to surprisingly high temperatures,” said James O’Donoghue of the JAXA Institute of Space and Astronautical Science, Sagamihara, Japan. O’Donoghue began the research while at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland and is lead author of a paper about this research appearing in Nature August 4.
Jupiter is first shown in visible light for context before an artistic impression of the Jovian upper atmosphere's infrared glow is overlain. The brightness of this upper atmosphere layer corresponds to temperatures, from hot to cold, in this order: white, yellow, bright red and lastly, dark red. The aurorae are the hottest regions and the animation shows how heat may be carried by winds away from the aurora and cause planet-wide heating. At the end, real data is added with a temperature scale, indicating the observed global temperatures measured in the study. Credits: J. O'Donoghue (JAXA)/Hubble/NASA/ESA/A. Simon/J. Schmidt
Auroras occur when electrically charged particles are caught in a planet’s magnetic field. These spiral along invisible lines of force in the magnetic field towards the planet’s magnetic poles, striking atoms and molecules in the atmosphere to release light and energy. On Earth, this leads to the colorful light show that forms the aurora Borealis and Australis, also known as the northern and southern lights. At Jupiter, material erupting from its volcanic moon, Io, leads to the most powerful aurora in the Solar System and enormous heating in upper atmosphere over the polar regions of the planet.
Jupiter is shown in visible light for context underneath an artistic impression of the Jovian upper atmosphere's infrared glow. The brightness of this upper atmosphere layer corresponds to temperatures, from hot to cold, in this order: white, yellow, bright red and lastly, dark red. The aurorae are the hottest regions and the image shows how heat may be carried by winds away from the aurora and cause planet-wide heating. Credits: J. O'Donoghue (JAXA)/Hubble/NASA/ESA/A. Simon/J. Schmidt
The idea that the aurora could be the source of Jupiter’s mysterious energy had been proposed previously but observations have been unable to confirm or deny this until now.
Global models of Jupiter’s upper atmosphere suggested that winds heated by the aurora and headed to the equator would be overwhelmed and redirected by westward winds driven by the planet’s rapid rotation. This would prevent the auroral energy from escaping the polar regions and heating the whole atmosphere. However, this new observational result suggests that such trapping is not occurring, and that the westward winds may be relatively weaker than expected compared with equatorward winds.
High-resolution temperature maps from Keck II, combined with magnetic field data from Hisaki and Juno, allowed the team to catch the aurora in the act of sending what appears to be a pulse of heat toward Jupiter’s equator.
The team observed Jupiter with the Keck II telescope for five hours on two separate nights in April 2016 and January 2017. Using the Near-Infrared Spectrometer (NIRSPEC) on Keck II, heat from electrically charged hydrogen molecules (H3+ ions) in Jupiter’s atmosphere was traced from the planet’s poles down to the equator.
Previous maps of the upper atmospheric temperature were formed using images consisting of only several pixels. That’s not enough resolution to see how the temperature might be changing across the planet, providing few clues as to the origin of the extra heat. To improve the situation, the team utilized the power of Keck II to take many more temperature measurements across the face of the planet and only included measurements with uncertainty in the recorded value of less than five percent. This took years of careful work and yielded temperature maps with over ten thousand individual data points, the highest resolution to date.
Instead of high temperatures only in the polar regions near the aurora, which would be expected if the heat was trapped there, these detailed maps showed that the heat in the upper atmosphere was more widely distributed, with a gradual decrease in temperature closer to the equator.
“We also revealed a strange localized region of heating well away from the aurora - a long bar of heating unlike anything we've seen before,” said Tom Stallard, a co-author of the paper at the University of Leicester, Leicester, United Kingdom. “Though we can't be sure what this feature is, I am convinced it’s a rolling wave of heat flowing equatorward from the aurora.”
Additionally, observations from JAXA’s Hisaki satellite showed that conditions at the time of the Keck II temperature observations could generate a strong aurora on Jupiter. From orbit around Earth, Hisaki has observed the aurora-generating magnetic field around Jupiter since the mission’s launch in 2013. This long-term monitoring has revealed that Jupiter’s magnetic field is strongly influenced by the solar wind; a stream of high-energy particles that emanates from the Sun. The solar wind carries its own magnetic field and when this meets Jupiter’s planetary field, the latter is compressed. At the time of the Keck II observations, Hisaki showed that pressure from the solar wind was particularly high at Jupiter and the field compression is likely to have created an enhanced aurora.Finally, observations from Juno in orbit around Jupiter provided the precise location of the aurora on the planet. “Juno’s magnetic field data provided us with a ‘ground truth’ as to where the aurora was: this information isn't readily available from heat maps, as heat leaks away in many directions,” said O’Donoghue. “Picture this like a beach: if the hot atmosphere is water, the magnetic field mapped by Juno is shoreline, and the aurora is ocean, we found that water left the ocean and flooded the land, and Juno revealed where that shoreline was to help us understand the degree of flooding.”
Jupiter is shown in visible light for context with an artistic impression of the Jovian upper atmosphere's infrared glow overlain, along with magnetic field lines (blue lines). The aurorae are the hottest regions and the image shows how heat may be carried by winds away from the aurora and cause planet-wide heating. Credits: J. O'Donoghue (JAXA)/Hubble/NASA/ESA/A. Simon/J. Schmidt
"It was pure luck that we captured this potential heat-shedding event,” adds O’Donoghue. “If we’d observed Jupiter on a different night, when the solar wind pressure had not recently been high, we would have missed it!”
More about the observatories and partners:
The research was funded by NASA through the Solar System Observations Program and the Solar System Workings Program as well as JAXA’s International Top Young Fellowship program. Juno is part of NASA's New Frontiers Program, which is managed at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, for the agency's Science Mission Directorate in Washington. NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of Caltech in Pasadena, California, manages the Juno mission for the principal investigator, Scott Bolton, of the Southwest Research Institute, San Antonio, Texas. NASA Goddard built and runs Juno’s magnetometer instrument. The W. M. Keck Observatory is operated as a scientific partnership among the California Institute of Technology, the University of California and NASA. The Observatory was made possible by the financial support of the W. M. Keck Foundation. The authors wish to recognize and acknowledge the significant cultural role and reverence that the summit of Maunakea has always had within the indigenous Hawaiian community; the authors are fortunate to have the opportunity to conduct observations from this mountain.
After baffling scientists for 50 long years, the mystery of what’s causing Jupiter’s heat may finally be solved. The mysterious “energy crisis” on our Solar System’s largest planet is believed to be caused by auroras.
Since Jupiter is so far from our sun, experts were baffled as to why it is so hot. In fact, it is 5.2 astronomical units away from the sun, meaning that it is 5.2 times the distance that Earth is from the sun. Based on its location, the temperature in the Gas Giant’s upper atmosphere should be around -100 degrees Fahrenheit (-73 degrees Celsius); however, it is a whopping 800 degrees Fahrenheit (427 degrees Celsius). To put this into better perspective, the average surface temperature on Venus is 847 degrees Fahrenheit (453 degrees Celsius) – slightly hotter than Jupiter.
Image taken in 2016 by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope.
As for what is causing Jupiter to remain so hot, astronomers believe that the powerful magnetic field causes strong auroras which ultimately heats up the planet. When a magnetic field is strong, it sends electrically charged particles towards the poles that cause them to hit molecules and atoms in the atmosphere that create beautiful lights. And Jupiter has a very strong magnetic field (much more powerful than Earth’s). The volcanic eruptions on Jupiter’s moon Io sends a lot of particles into the planet’s atmosphere. Furthermore, the size of the Gas Giant and its powerful winds are contributing factors in how the heat moves throughout the planet.
The astronomers came to this conclusion by analyzing data collected by NASA’s Juno spacecraft, JAXA’s (Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency) Hisaki satellite, and the Keck II telescope. They watched how an aurora sent a pulse of heat towards the planet’s equator as James O’Donoghue, who is a planetary space scientist at JAXA’s Institute of Space and Astronautical Science, noted in a statement provided by the Keck Observatory, “It was pure luck that we captured this potential heat-shedding event,” adding, “If we’d observed Jupiter on a different night, when the solar wind pressure had not recently been high, we would have missed it.”
By using a near-infrared spectrograph, Keck performed two observations (April of 2016 and January of 2017) that showed how electrically charged hydrogen molecules traveled from the poles to the equator. Keck II then measured the temperatures. (An artist’s impression of Jupiter’s upper atmosphere infrared glow can be seen here.)
They even found something else that surprised them, “We also revealed a strange, localized region of heating well away from the aurora — a long bar of heating unlike anything we’ve seen before,” explained Tom Stallard from the University of Leicester, “Though we can’t be sure what this feature is, I am convinced it’s a rolling wave of heat flowing equatorward from the aurora.”
The study was published in Naturewhere it can be read in full.
Jupiter is first shown in visible light for context before an artistic impression of the Jovian upper atmosphere's infrared glow is overlain. The brightness of this upper atmosphere layer corresponds to temperatures, from hot to cold, in this order: white, yellow, bright red and lastly, dark red. The aurorae are the hottest regions and the animation shows how heat may be carried by winds away from the aurora and cause planet-wide heating. At the end, real data is added with a temperature scale, indicating the observed global temperatures measured in the study.
Credits: J. O'Donoghue (JAXA)/Hubble/NASA/ESA/A. Simon/J. Schmidt
Jupiter is shown in visible light for context underneath an artistic impression of the Jovian upper atmosphere's infrared glow. The brightness of this upper atmosphere layer corresponds to temperatures, from hot to cold, in this order: white, yellow, bright red and lastly, dark red. The aurorae are the hottest regions and the image shows how heat may be carried by winds away from the aurora and cause planet-wide heating. Credits: J. O'Donoghue (JAXA)/Hubble/NASA/ESA/A. Simon/J. Schmidt
A cow believed to have been mutilated by extraterrestrials
A pair of UFO enthusiasts are looking to make contact with a woman who told her story on national radio earlier this year about a mysterious sighting that appeared over Cavan Town more than three decades ago.
Carl Nally and Dermot Butler have co-authored a number of hugely popular books on phenomena such as ‘Unidentified Flying Objects’. They include Conspiracy of Silence, States of Denial, Circle of Deceit - with two more compendium type novels in the offing.
The caller, who spoke on Joe Duffy’s ‘Liveline’ on RTE Radio One said she had seen a “large object” over Cavan Town in August 1987 and the pair are interested in speaking with any other witnesses to the alleged sighting.
“It was Dermot who heard it and we found we hadn’t got information about that on our files, so we’re very interested in finding anything more about the sighting. We can then compare it with other sightings of the same type of craft, or others seen in the area,” explains Mr Nally.
According to data compiled by online resource ‘Psychic World’ earlier this year, Ireland tops the list for the most UFO sightings in Europe with 105, followed by France and Spain. It’s stated that each visit over the Emerald Isle lasts on average 13 minutes, with the majority of the sightings described as being inexplicable bright lights.
The US-based National UFO Reporting Center, meanwhile, records in detail personal accounts, dates and locations, the most recent occurring in Doolin, Co Clare, on May 30 last; and the closest to Cavan being in Mullingar on April 5 where the night before circles were observed in the sky over the Westmeath town for around eight minutes.
Neighbouring Co Meath has several more dating back over a number of years. Among the most interesting was a sighting in the early hours of August 6, 2019, when a person reported seeking a “blue” light “scanning skies with 3D lazers”, which lasted for around 10 mins.
In 2012 a person posted reporting an orange-coloured light cluster in formation, which when shared on social media, was similarly sighted in Navan, Kells and Oldcastle.
Elsewhere that same year in a separate resource there are records of three separate sightings of a UFO over Shantemon Mountain near Castletara.
Before that, on September 30, 1996, a slow-moving object was observed for around half an hour, moving east to west over Carrickmacross before retracing its path again in a way that dispelled suggestions it could be a plane.
Then again in Kells, on August 15, 1977, strange lights and shapes were spotted high above for several hours. At one point, an observer reported seeing a large triangular craft, with a multi-coloured light trail, fly past at high speed.
The region of course has a rich heritage in exploring, and indeed welcoming, paranormal activity, where the late Desmond Leslie of Castle Leslie, Glaslough, was celebrated in such circles for his studies as a ‘ufologist’.
UFO landing strip
A former British pilot amongst other titles earned, he was one of the first proponents of flying saucers and UFOs, co-writing with George Adamaski the bestselling ‘Flying Saucers have Landed’, a book later translated into more than 50 languages. He is also famously said to have approached Monaghan County Council about the prospect of building a UFO landing strip within the grounds of the historic Leslie estate.
“[Mr Leslie] was a wonderful man, a great mind on the subject, and we wrote to him and had arranged to meet prior to his death. Certainly he was a strong believer, and was said to have experienced strange lights and extraterrestrial behaviour in the area,” says Mr Nally, who first became interested in UFOlogy at the age of 16 years when he witnessed circular objects travel at altitude and, without stopping, veer at right angles before heading west.
“There were about 20 of them, and I was fascinated by this because any manoeuvre like that would kill a terrestrial pilot. There is no way they could stop and move at those angles and that speed,” he surmised.
Public interest in UFOs has again been piqued following the recent publication of the Pentagon’s preliminary assessment after reviewing 144 unidentified observations made by military aviators between 2004 and 2021.
Of the reports examined, the task force could only determine an explanation for one - a deflated balloon. The rest remain unexplained.
While Mr Nally says there appears to be “no rhyme or reason” as to where UFO sightings might occur, he actively encourages people who do encounter such experiences to consider as much detail as possible before passing it on to people like him who have spent a life time investigating such matters.
“Navan, Cavan, Kells, we’ve had people report seeing something hovering over fields before shooting off at speed, or lights leaping from one field to another and then the UFO will fly off.
“What’s important for us is to be able to put two sightings together, and match that with as many witness accounts as possible.”
Incidents of animal mutilations is another subject Carl and Dermot are very keen to explore further.
“Bodies across the world deny it but we know it’s happening, animals being found with organs cauterised. Examinations carried out in the UK show in some incidents sexual organs cored out with lazer equipment, and most of the animals are drained completely of blood. No one can explain that. To say it’s scavengers, grey crows, is complete rubbish. The truth will come out sometime.”
Major Milestone for NASA’s Revolutionary Roman Space Telescope
Major Milestone for NASA’s Revolutionary Roman Space Telescope
NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope.
Credit: NASA
The Space Telescope Science Institute Will Host Roman’s Science Operations Center and Data Archive
NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope has just successfully completed the critical design review of the mission’s ground systems, which are spread over multiple institutions including the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Maryland; NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland; and Caltech/IPAC in Pasadena, California. STScI will host the Science Operations Center while Goddard will provide the Mission Operations Center and Caltech/IPAC will house the Science Support Center. The passing of the critical design review means the plan for science operations has met all of the design, schedule, and budget requirements. The mission will now proceed to the next phase: building and testing the newly designed systems that will enable planning and scheduling of Roman observations and managing the resulting data, which will amount to over 20 petabytes (20,000,000 GB) within the first five years of operations.
Illustration of the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, named after NASA’s first Chief of Astronomy.
Credit: NASA
When it launches in the mid-2020s, NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope will revolutionize astronomy by building on the science discoveries and technological leaps of the Hubble, Spitzer, and Webb space telescopes. The mission’s wide field of view and superb resolution will enable scientists to conduct sweeping cosmic surveys, yielding a wealth of information about celestial realms from our solar system to the edge of the observable universe.
On July 23rd, the Roman Space Telescope successfully completed the critical design review of the mission’s ground systems, which are spread over multiple institutions including the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) in Baltimore, Maryland; NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland; and Caltech/IPAC in Pasadena, California. STScI will host the Science Operations Center (SOC) while Goddard will provide the Mission Operations Center and Caltech/IPAC will house the Science Support Center. The passing of the critical design review means the plan for science operations provides all the necessary data processing and archiving capabilities. The mission will now proceed to the next phase: building and testing the newly designed systems that will enable planning and scheduling of Roman observations and managing the resulting data, anticipated to be over 20 petabytes (20,000,000 GB) within the first five years of operations.
“At STScI, we are really excited about the opportunities for discovery that Roman will bring. All areas of astrophysics will benefit,” said STScI deputy director Nancy Levenson. “We are developing novel tools and new ways of working so the global research community can make best use of the advanced capabilities of this survey-oriented, ‘big data’ space mission.”
“A lot of work is required to reach this stage in any space mission, and our team faced the added challenge of the COVID-19 pandemic. The successful completion of the critical design review is a testament to all of their efforts,” said Cristina Oliveira, SOC deputy head at STScI.
In its role as Science Operations Center, STScI will plan, schedule, and carry out observations, process and archive mission datasets, and engage and inform the astronomical community and the public. STScI will collaborate closely with NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, which manages the mission and will host the Mission Operations Center (MOC). The MOC is responsible for overall spacecraft operations and overseeing the data transmitted between the spacecraft and the ground. The collaboration also includes Caltech/IPAC, home of the Roman Science Support Center (SSC), which works with the other ground system elements to achieve the scientific and operational goals of Roman.
The Science Support Center at Caltech/IPAC is tasked with issuing calls for Roman proposals to the general science community and managing the proposal process. It will also lead the Coronagraph Instrument observation planning and data products, and provide a data analysis environment for the instrument and community team. In addition, it is responsible for community outreach for both exoplanet science and science enabled by spectroscopic observations. The SSC is also developing and operating science data pipelines to process data from the Wide Field Instrument spectroscopic modes and for exoplanet microlensing science.
Goddard is developing the Wide Field Instrument to perform the major science surveys, and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory is developing the Coronagraph Instrument to perform exoplanet direct imaging observations.
Expanding Our View
Roman will be able to capture an area over 100 times larger than Hubble in a single snapshot. This will give it the unique ability to do wide-field surveys at space-based resolution, which will be the observatory’s primary operating mode.
“Unlike Hubble and Webb, Roman is a survey mission first and foremost,” explained acting SOC mission scientist John MacKenty of STScI. “Our role is to help gather input from the astronomical community, make those surveys ready for the community to do science, and give the community the tools they need to do their research.”
Roman’s surveys will generate mountains of data, creating new challenges for scientists seeking to analyze those data. As a result, STScI is spearheading the use of cloud-based computing for Roman data processing.
“Instead of sending the data to the astronomer, we’re bringing the astronomer to the data,” said SOC mission systems engineer Chris Hanley of STScI.
All of the data collected by the Roman Space Telescope will be accessible via the Barbara A. Mikulski Archive for Space Telescopes (MAST) at STScI. Those data will be publicly available within days of the observations – a first for a NASA astrophysics flagship mission. Since scientists everywhere will have rapid access to the data, they will be able to quickly discover and follow up on short-lived phenomena, such as supernova explosions.
The Science of the Roman Space Telescope
Roman will enable new science in all areas of astrophysics. It can search for dwarf planets, comets, and asteroids in our solar system. It will image stars throughout our own galaxy to measure its structure and investigate its formation history. It will also survey the birthplaces of stars, giant nurseries of gas and dust which Roman’s large field of view will be able to fully image at high resolution for the first time.
By staring deeply at wide swaths of apparently blank sections of sky, Roman will image an unprecedented number of galaxies with high resolution. Roman will map the distribution of dark matter within large clusters of galaxies and discover thousands of galaxies at very high redshifts, which will provide the tools to study how galaxies change over cosmic time.
Roman’s surveys will deliver new insights into the history and structure of the universe, including the mysterious “dark energy” that is making space itself expand faster and faster. This powerful new observatory will also build on the broad foundation of work begun with Hubble and other observatories like Kepler/K2 and the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) on planets outside our solar system. It will discover thousands of exoplanets using its wide-field camera. Its Coronagraph Instrument will conduct a technology demonstration and, depending on its performance, may provide studies of the atmospheres of giant gaseous planets orbiting other stars.
The Space Telescope Science Institute is expanding the frontiers of space astronomy by hosting the science operations center of the Hubble Space Telescope, the science and mission operations centers for the James Webb Space Telescope, and the science operations center for the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope. STScI also houses the Mikulski Archive for Space Telescopes (MAST) which is a NASA-funded project to support and provide to the astronomical community a variety of astronomical data archives, and is the data repository for the Hubble, Webb, Roman, Kepler, K2, TESS missions, and more. STScI is operated for NASA by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy in Washington, D.C.
The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is managed at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, with participation by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Caltech/IPAC in Southern California, the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, and a science team comprising scientists from various research institutions. The primary industrial partners are Ball Aerospace and Technologies Corporation in Boulder, Colorado; L3Harris Technologies in Melbourne, Florida; and Teledyne Scientific & Imaging in Thousand Oaks, California.
Are You Ready for Benevolent Artificial Intelligence
Are You Ready for Benevolent Artificial Intelligence
Picture yourself driving on a narrow road in the near future when suddenly another car emerges from a bend ahead. It is a self-driving car with no passengers inside. Will you push forth and assert your right of way, or give way to let it pass? At present, most of us behave kindly in such situations involving other humans. Will we show that same kindness towards autonomous vehicles?
Using methods from behavioural game theory, an international team of researchers at LMU Munich and the University of London have conducted large-scale online studies to see whether people would behave as cooperatively with artificial intelligence (AI) systems as they do with fellow humans.
Cooperation holds a society together. It often requires us to compromise with others and to accept the risk that they let us down. Traffic is a good example. We lose a bit of time when we let other people pass in front of us and are outraged when others fail to reciprocate our kindness. Will we do the same with machines?
The study which is published in the journal iScience found that, upon first encounter, people have the same level of trust toward AI as for human: most expect to meet someone who is ready to cooperate.The difference comes afterwards. People are much less ready to reciprocate with AI, and instead exploit its benevolence to their own benefit. Going back to the traffic example, a human driver would give way to another human but not to a self-driving car.The study identifies this unwillingness to compromise with machines as a new challenge to the future of human-AI interactions.
Credit: Pixabay
“We put people in the shoes of someone who interacts with an artificial agent for the first time, as it could happen on the road,” explains Jurgis Karpus, Ph.D., a behavioural game theorist and a philosopher at LMU Munich and the first author of the study. “We modelled different types of social encounters and found a consistent pattern. People expected artificial agents to be as cooperative as fellow humans. However, they did not return their benevolence as much and exploited the AI more than humans.”
With perspectives from game theory, cognitive science, and philosophy, the researchers found that ‘algorithm exploitation’ is a robust phenomenon. They replicated their findings across nine experiments with nearly 2,000 human participants. Each experiment examines different kinds of social interactions and allows the human to decide whether to compromise and cooperate or act selfishly. Expectations of the other players were also measured. In a well-known game, the Prisoner’s Dilemma, people must trust that the other characters will not let them down. They embraced risk with humans and AI alike, but betrayed the trust of the AI much more often, to gain more money.
“Cooperation is sustained by a mutual bet: I trust you will be kind to me, and you trust I will be kind to you. The biggest worry in our field is that people will not trust machines. But we show that they do!” notes Dr. Bahador Bahrami, a social neuroscientist at the LMU, and one of the senior researchers in the study. “They are fine with letting the machine down, though, and that is the big difference. People even do not report much guilt when they do,” he adds.
Biased and unethical AI has made many headline — from the 2020 exams fiasco in the United Kingdom to justice systems — but this new research brings up a novel caution. The industry and legislators strive to ensure that artificial intelligence is benevolent. But benevolence may backfire. If people think that AI is programmed to be benevolent towards them, they will be less tempted to cooperate. Some of the accidents involving self-driving cars may already show real-life examples: drivers recognize an autonomous vehicle on the road, and expect it to give way. The self-driving vehicle meanwhile expects for normal compromises between drivers to hold.“
Algorithm exploitation has further consequences down the line. “If humans are reluctant to let a polite self-driving car join from a side road, should the self-driving car be less polite and more aggressive in order to be useful?” asks Jurgis Karpus.
“Benevolent and trustworthy AI is a buzzword that everyone is excited about. But fixing the AI is not the whole story. If we realize that the robot in front of us will be cooperative no matter what, we will use it to our selfish interest,” says Professor Ophelia Deroy, a philosopher and senior author on the study, who also works with Norway’s Peace Research Institute Oslo on the ethical implications of integrating autonomous robot soldiers along with human soldiers.
“Compromises are the oil that make society work. For each of us, it looks only like a small act of self-interest. For society as a whole, it could have much bigger repercussions. If no one lets autonomous cars join the traffic, they will create their own traffic jams on the side, and not make transport easier”.
Contacts and sources:
Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München
Publication:
Algorithm exploitation: humans are keen to exploit benevolent AI. Jurgis Karpus, Adrian Krüger, Julia Tovar Verba, Bahador Bahrami, Ophelia Deroy. iScience, 2021; 102679 DOI: 10.1016/j.isci.2021.102679
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12 Mysterious Events That Left Scientists Scratching Their Heads
12 Mysterious Events That Left Scientists Scratching Their Heads
People are accustomed to routine events. However, something strange occurring anywhere in the world evokes interest across the globe. You might be familiar with certain mysteries. So, let us introduce you to a few mysterious events that are bound to pique your interest. From the true story of a young boy going into coma and waking up to speak a language completely foreign to him to actual rivers on fire, we got it all. Some would be terrified to know that a star in the galaxy disappeared suddenly for which astronomers could not find any reason. These jaw dropping events will make you feel like a very small and helpless part of a divine plan.
Here are the twelve most mind boggling, mysterious events that astonished everyone who found out about them.
August 10 612 BC: Nineveh, the Largest City in the World, Fell
August 10 612 BC: Nineveh, the Largest City in the World, Fell
On this day, 2,632 years ago, the ancient metropolis of Ninevehfell. “ ABC 3 ” is a historiographical text from ancient Babylonia which records August 10th 612 BC as the date of this dramatic occurrence. At that time, Nineveh was the largest city in the world and the capital of Assyria. This all came to an abrupt end when Nabopolassar, the Chaldean king of Babylonia and a central figure in the fall of the Neo-Assyrian Empire, siezed Nineveh. This marked what historians know as one of the most shocking events in ancient history: The “First” Fall of Nineveh. The “second” Fall of Nineveh occurred in 2015 with more destruction by ISIS.
The Discovery of Nineveh: A Unparalleled Archaeological Find
Ancient Mesopotamia was a cradle of civilization in the northern part of western Asia’s Fertile Crescent, corresponding to modern Iraq, Kuwait, eastern Syria, southeastern Turkey and areas along the Turkish–Syrian and Iran–Iraq borders. In 1839, Paul-Émile Botta of France excavated a series of mounds in the Iraqi desert that led to the incredible discovery of Nineveh, the vast ancient Assyrian city of Upper Mesopotamia located on the outskirts of modern-day Mosul in northern Iraq.
This discovery in mid-19th-century Europe was truly amazing, because it meant that at least one of the ancient cities and cultures mentioned in the Bible actually existed. This gave the Holy Bible a breath of newfound esteem at a time when scientists were demanding the empirical testing of supernatural claims, replacing time worn myths with logic and reason. The discovery of ancient Nineveh changed everything.
Ancient Nineveh: A Royal City Envied Far And Wide
The Assyrian Empire started to become unstable after the death of King Aššurbanipal in 631 BC when the Babylonians ended their independence. Around 627 AD the Babylonian general Nabopolassar defeated the Assyrians in a battle near Babylon and became king, marking the beginning of the Babylonian Empire which lasted until Nineveh was captured by the Persian Cyrus the Great in October 539 AD.
Assyrian military campaign in southern Mesopotamia, 640-620 BC, from an alabaster bas-relief located in the South-West Palace at Nineveh.
Although he had liberated Babylonia, Nabopolassar also wanted destroy its capital cities including the religious center at Aššur, the first Assyrian city, and the administrative center at Nineveh. To prevent this, which would have caused a major shift of power in the Near East, the Egyptians offered military support to Assyria. The Fall of Nineveh Chronicle says that on 25 July 616 AD Nabopolassar defeated an Assyrian force on the banks of the Euphrates to the south of Harran. However, soon after he retreated when an Egyptian army closed on his forces. By at the end of the following year, the Medes, a tribal federation living in modern Iran, seized the moment, amidst all the unrest, and had took control of Nineveh.
This image, taken in April 2017 during a UNESCO mission to Nineveh, which was heavily destroyed and excavated by ISIS in the "second" Fall of Nineveh in 2015.
Nabopolassar tactfully signed a treaty with the Medes king Umakištar (Cyaxares). The Babylonian crown prince Nabû-kudurru-usur (Nebuchadnezzar) is said to have married Amytis, who many historians hold to have been the daughter of Cyaxares' son Astyages. The joint Medes-Babylonian army invaded Nineveh in May 612 AD the city finally fell in July. According to an article on Livius after the suicide of King Sin-šar-iškun, “the looting of Nineveh continued until 10 August, when the Medes finally went home,” and that the fall of Nineveh “shocked the ancient world.” From distant Greece, the poet Phocylides of Miletus reported of the destruction of this ancient city.
ISIS soldiers in the Museum of Mosul destroying ancient Nineveh artifacts with sledgehammers in 2015.
2015: The “Second” Fall of Nineveh By ISIS Destruction
While Nineveh fell for the first time over 2500 years ago, destruction of the ancient city continued in 2015 when a priceless Assyrian winged bull was demolished at the Nineveh site. An article in The Guardian discussing the destruction of cultural heritage in Iraq by the Islamic State militant group (ISIS) described the destruction as a “war crime.” At the same time, the terrorist organization attempted to attract a sympathetic audience to gain new recruits in their homeland, while provoking reactions in the West.
A 2015 Aljazeera video shows the destruction of several 7th century artifacts from Nineveh on February 26 2015, when ISIS publicly destroyed the Mosul Museum. Many other artifacts were stolen and put up for sale in foreign markets. However in 2019, the BBC announced that since Iraqi troops recaptured Mosul in 2017, part of the Mosul Museum has been restored and reopened to exhibit contemporary art, while the rest of the museum remains closed “to protect what is left,” said the museum director. If the first Fall of Nineveh was incredible, the second fall of Nineveh was both tragic and disturbing.
Top image: Assyrian soldiers carry beheaded heads of their prisoners as depicted on a wall in the South-West Palace at Nineveh, during the “First” Fall of Neneveh.
A CANADIAN MILITARY TRANSPORT PLANE REPORTED SEEING A UFO OVER THE GULF OF SAINT LAWRENCE ON JULY 30.
FILE PHOTO BY LARS HAGBERG/THE CANADIAN PRESS
On the night of July 30, a Canadian military and a KLM Royal Dutch Airlines flight reported a UFO over the Gulf of Saint Lawrence.
According to an aviation incident report posted on the night of Aug. 11, both flights “reported seeing a bright green flying object” that “flew into a cloud, then disappeared” in a stretch of open water between Quebec and Newfoundland.
The KLM passenger flight (KLM618) was travelling from Boston to Amsterdam while the Canadian military transport aircraft (CFC4003) was flying between CFB Trenton, a base in Ontario, and Cologne, Germany.
Whatever they are, these kinds of enigmatic objects and lights have caught the attention of the U.S. government, which has openly investigated UFOs for years and recently released a report on 143 U.S. military sightings, including objects that appeared to “maneuver abruptly, or move at considerable speed, without discernible means of propulsion.”
Canada, by contrast, appears far less interested. In a recent statement to VICE World News, a spokesperson from the Department of National Defence said, “We do not track reports or collect information about sightings” of UFOs.
Data posted to Twitter by aviation and shipping researcher Steffan Watkins suggests the Canadian flight even changed course and altitude at the time of the sighting, which might actually have occurred on July 31.
KLM airlines did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the July 30 UFO report in CADORS.
In a statement to VICE World News, a Canadian military spokesperson said Canada’s air force has “no intent or need to investigate this further.”
“In this particular incident, there is nothing to indicate that what the crew saw posed any kind of safety risk to the aircraft,” they added. “We believe that they saw something—they would not have filed a report otherwise.”
A spokesperson from Nav Canada, the private company that operates Canada’s air traffic control system and whose employees would have received the initial reports, told VICE World News that “there is no additional Nav Canada information available for these events.”
In all statements relating to its aviation reporting system, Transport Canada cautions the “reports contain preliminary, unconfirmed data, which can be subject to change.”
Two planes reportedly spotted a “bright green flying object” that “flew into a cloud” before vanishing.
On 30 July, two flights – one of them military, the other civilian – apparently encountered a flying object that could’ve been a UFO over the Gulf of Saint Lawrence, Vice News reports citing the Civil Aviation Daily Occurrence Reporting System (CADORS), the Canadian government’s flight incident archive.
At the time of the sighting, the passenger jet – KLM Royal Dutch Airlines Airbus A330-300 (KLM618) – was travelling from Boston to Amsterdam, while the other – Canadian military transport aircraft (CFC4003) – was bound for Cologne, Germany from Canadian Forces Base Trenton in Ontario.
The aircraft "reported seeing a bright green flying object" which "flew into a cloud, then disappeared."
The "Occurrence Event Information" section in CADORS' report labels said encounter as "Weather balloon, meteor, rocket, CIRVIS/UFO."
A disclaimer on the CADORS website, however, warns that "for the most part, CADORS reports contain preliminary, unconfirmed data which can be subject to change."
Nieuwe berekening van NASA: asteroïde Bennu in 2182 het gevaarlijkst
De aardappelvorminge ruimterots Bennu vormt op 24 september 2182 een mogelijke bedreiging voor de aarde. Het kan zijn dat de asteroïde dan op onze planeet botst. De waarschijnlijkheid is ongeveer 1 op 2700 (0,037 procent). In het algemeen geldt voor de periode tot 2300 een mogelijkheid van 1 op 1750 (0,057 procent).
Hoewel de kans dat Bennu de aarde raakt erg klein is, blijft het een van de twee gevaarlijkste bekende asteroïden in ons zonnestelsel, samen met een andere, genaamd 1950 DA, aldus de Amerikaanse ruimtevaartorganisatie NASA. NASA-onderzoekers gebruikten bij hun berekeningen gegevens van de ruimtesonde OSIRIS-REx.
De kans op een botsing doet zich pas ná 2135 voor, wanneer de planetoïde zeer dicht langs de aarde raast. De zwaartekracht van de aarde past Bennu’s baan dan zodanig aan dat een botsing bij een volgende passage mogelijk wordt.
De kans dat de ruimterots tussen 2135 en 2300 inslaat bleek na de nieuwe analyse zo’n 1 op 1.750. In september 2182 is dus de kans op botsing het grootst.
Aardappelvormige rots
De Amerikaanse ruimtesonde OSIRIS-REx heeft de afgelopen jaren onderzoek gedaan bij Bennu. Dat is een aardappelvormige rots van ongeveer een halve kilometer doorsnee. Hij draait in een baan rond de zon, momenteel op 306 miljoen kilometer afstand van de aarde. De asteroïde kan wetenschappers iets vertellen over het ontstaan van ons zonnestelsel en over het ontstaan van leven op aarde.
De metingen van OSIRIS-REx helpen de bewegingen van de mogelijk gevaarlijke asteroïde de komende eeuwen beter te begrijpen, aldus NASA. Het vermindert de onzekerheden over de toekomstige baan aanzienlijk. Ook verbetert het het vermogen van wetenschappers om de waarschijnlijkheid van een inslag te bepalen en banen van andere asteroïden te voorspellen.
NASA deelt "belangrijke ontdekking" bij asteroïde Bennu
Een van de doelen van NASA is het vinden en in de gaten houden van asteroïden en kometen die in de buurt van de aarde kunnen komen en gevaarlijk kunnen zijn voor onze planeet. “De OSIRIS-REx-missie bood een buitengewone kans om deze modellen te verfijnen en te testen, waardoor we beter kunnen voorspellen waar Bennu zal zijn wanneer hij over ruim een eeuw dicht bij de aarde komt”, aldus de de organisatie.
De missie van de OSIRIS-REx kost 1 miljard euro. In 2016 werd de sonde gelanceerd en in 2018 kwam hij in een baan rond Bennu. Vanuit alle hoeken werd de rots gemeten en gefotografeerd. Die gegevens werden naar de aarde gestuurd om te bestuderen.
Een ander onderdeel van het onderzoek volgt nog. In oktober vorig jaar daalde de OSIRIS-REx af naar het oppervlak van Bennu om daar ongeveer 60 gram steentjes en stof op te zuigen. Die zijn verzameld in een bakje aan boord van de sonde. Een paar maanden geleden begon de OSIRIS-REx aan de miljoenen kilometers lange terugreis naar de aarde. Het is de bedoeling dat hij in september 2023 op aarde landt, waarna wetenschappers het opgehaalde gruis onder de microscoop kunnen leggen.
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The UFO Phenomenon | Full Documentary
The UFO Phenomenon | Full Documentary
It is now beyond doubt that strange, anomalous objects filling our skies and caught on camera are the real deal. Even the Pentagon admits it’s true. These seemingly intelligently controlled craft are operating above the clouds, in our oceans and in our orbit – travelling at hypersonic speeds far beyond any known human technology and completing manoeuvres unknown to science. The subject of conspiracy and derision for years, UFOs are now the hottest topic in Washington and the world. Five-time Walkley Award-winning investigative journalist Ross Coulthart – who has been investigating the phenomena for the past two years – led the 7NEWS Spotlight team across the US, amassing never-before-seen compelling evidence and speaking to the key players behind an event that will change the course of history.
MUFON CASE : 117235 Philadelphia, Pennsylvania ( August 11, 2021 )
Mutual UFO Network : MUFON SUBMISSIONS : strange object closeup Long Description of Sighting Report - Case 117235
Witnessed by 4 audio removed b/c of yelling & cussing words It is not a balloon or drone
Date Submitted : 2021-08-11 Date of Event : 2021-08-11 MUFON SUBMITTER FILE : blackobject.mp4
VIDEO 2 : MUFON CASE : 117231 Palos Heights, Illinois Glowing UFO Spotted in Illinois Long Description of Sighting Report - Case 117231
I was outside and I was sitting there on a chair in the middle of our yard, I look up to my right and see a normal plane flying at regular distance from the ground heading to midway airport like they usually do. I then look out far east and in the atmosphere I see this cylindrical glowing object, it did NOT look like a normal plan and was flying on a steady path at a normal not fast or slow speed, but was FAR OUT in the atmosphere. This video was cropped so I don't disclose personal information about where I live. However, this video is completely untampered with and I have the time and date stamp mark on the original video I recorded to prove it. This was recorded from an I-phone 11 Pro, the footage I am going to show you is a slowed down recording I made frame by frame from the original video I took.
Date Submitted : 2021-08-11 Date of Event : 2021-08-08 MUFON SUBMITTER FILE : evidence.mp4
VIDEO 3 : MUFON CASE : 117236 Philadelphia, Pennsylvania creature security cam footage Long Description of Sighting Report - Case 117236
A ufo was sighted around the neighbourhood last night.
Date Submitted : 2021-08-11 Date of Event : 2021-08-11 MUFON SUBMITTER FILE : Aug112021.mp4
MUFON CASE : 117221 Brooklyn, New York ( August 10, 2021 )
Mutual UFO Network : MUFON SUBMISSIONS : Giant blue ufo ejecting ufos : Long Description of Sighting Report - Case 117221 : Recorded from cellphone which turned off for no reason
Date Submitted : 2021-08-10 Date of Event : 2021-08-09
Flashing UFO Sighted Over Colombia ( August 9, 2021 )
Intense extream flashing UFO was sighted over the skies of Colombia on August 9, 2021 : UFO has intense extream flashing light
what is this mysterious bright flashing light above Colombia.
They are everywhere
credit : U.S.F
Transparent UFO Sighted Over Mt. Fuji Shizuoka Japan ( August 10, 2021 )
Transparent Cloaked UFO was sighted over Mt. Fuji Shizuoka Airport, Japan : 富士山静岡空港 on August 10, 2021 : What is this mysterious transparent spherical UFO / UAP/ ORB doing over Mt. Fuji Shizuoka Airport : Here i present the original
Closer every day and more evident
credit : アルマ・ウリベ
What Is Above Us?(UFO SIGHTINGS)
Several unexplained sightings. Come and join in on the discussions? All Lunar and Planetarium videos made by Terry's Theories. Source of first video MUFON case # 117112 Source of second video MUFON case # 117024
A UFO expert and filmmaker from Nova Scotia says the latest American report could be a subtle way to show how the U.S. is experimenting with new technologies.
(Mike Blake/Reuters)
At the end of June, the U.S. government issued a long-awaited report on UFOs. The unclassified nine-page report, released to Congress and the public, includes 144 observations — mostly from U.S. navy personnel — of what the government officially refers to as "unidentified aerial phenomenon," or UAP, dating back to 2004.
Since the acronym UFO, standing for Unidentified Flying Objects, is generally associated with the possibility of extraterrestrials, the government uses UAP.
The government's report on what these objects are is inconclusive. U.S. intelligence services suggest these objects might be technology belonging to Russia or China, for example.
Paul Kimball has other ideas about what's going on with this report.
Kimball is a Nova Scotia filmmaker, television producer and historian. His first film from 2002 was a documentary called Stan T. Friedman Is Real. It was about his uncle, the New Brunswick UFO researcher Stanton Friedman.
Friedman was one of the world's foremost investigators and lecturers on the UFO phenomenon, and broke the story of the Roswell, New Mexico, crash back in the 1970s.
"I was always interested in talking to him at family reunions," said Kimball. "He was the cool uncle who was talking about space aliens."
Kimball spent a decade researching UFO phenomena before stepping back from the subject, but he still keeps tabs on what's going on.
"These kinds of things have happened every now and then for about the last 70, 75 years. And they call them 'flaps,' when interest in UFOs break out into the broader public consciousness," Kimball said.
The current flap started with a series of videos that were taken by the United States military and shared with the public a few years ago.
In this 2015 video declassified by the U.S. Department of Defence, U.S. navy pilots track an unidentified flying object off the coast of Jacksonville, Fla. 0:35
"The U.S. navy has come out and said, 'Yes, these are real videos. Our guys took them and we're not exactly sure what they represent,'" said Kimball. "And that's kind of it. You know, I hate to be the skunk at the garden party, but at the moment that's as far as it goes. Then there's the UFO media machine, as I like to call it, that latches on to that and drums up interest in the subject and says, 'Well, OK, space aliens.' And it's a very long leap to get from these videos to space aliens.
"We have some anomalies. We can't necessarily explain them. No evidence to say that they're space aliens, but no evidence to say that they're not, you know, so leaving the door open."
As far as what else the U.S. government might be up to with the release of this current report, Kimball tells a story his close friend, Karl T. Pflock, told him.
The late Pflock was deputy assistant secretary of defence in the Ronald Reagan administration, a strategic planner, a CIA officer, UFO researcher, and author of Roswell: Inconvenient Facts and the Will to Believe.
"Karl actually believed that space aliens had visited Earth," said Kimball. "So we weren't talking about somebody who said there were never any space aliens. But, he said, 'Look, most of these cases can be explained by testing advanced weapon systems. The government is working on technology that is 10 or 15 years in advance of what they'll admit to.'
"You're sort of seeing in many of these cases, like the Belgian triangle flap that occurred in the 1980s, that was probably delta-wing aircraft being tested by the United States military. Well, you would mistake that potentially for a UFO."
Kimball suggests governments have been experimenting with hypersonics, the kind of technology that, theoretically, could be what these navy pilots may be seeing but not actually know anything about. If it represents tech being developed by the United States, these videos are a way to let America's enemies know what's coming soon without being overt about it. But if it's the tech of another superpower, that would be a problem.
"That would be very concerning from a national security point of view, which is, I think, why members of Congress are really interested in it," said Kimball.
Retired Canadian astronaut Col. Chris Hadfield has been following the conversation about UFOs, but says the idea that they're alien technology 'doesn't even pass the basic common sense test.' 1:03
For the record, Canada's Department of National Defence doesn't have a dog in this fight. Spokesperson Jessica Lamirande sent a statement to CBC News on the subject of the American report.
"The Canadian Armed Forces (CAF) and the Royal Canadian Air Force (RCAF) do not typically investigate sightings of unknown or unexplained phenomena outside the context of investigating credible threats, potential threats, or potential distress in the case of search and rescue," the statement said.
"Although we collaborate closely with the U.S. for aerospace control, we are not aware of any Canadian nexus or participation in the U.S. Department of Defence's UFO studies at this time, nor does the CAF have a unit dedicated to investigating UFOs."
Kimball remains an agnostic about extraterrestrial visitors to Earth, but he also thinks the subject is worth serious consideration.
"I'm very open to the idea of the paranormal or the supernatural or things beyond our understanding, however you want to frame it," he said.
"The odds are there are extraterrestrials in our galaxy. So could they be coming here? Yeah. Have I seen anything yet that absolutely convinces me that they have been coming here? No. But I've seen enough to make me think this isn't a subject that you should laugh at."
High speed UFO-Fastwalker passes close to a drone in straight path
High speed UFO-Fastwalker passes close to a drone in straight path
On August 8, 2021 a drone owner in the city of Vera Cruz, Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil captured a high speed object at the moment the object passes close to the drone in straight path.
The drone owner wonders whether the object was a small airplane, another drone, a bird or eventually something else.
After analyzing the object with other similar objects moving through the sky at very high speed, it looks like it is a so-called UFO "fastwalker".
“Fastwalker” is a term used by NORAD and branches of armed forces to describe unidentified aerial phenomena moving and/or changing directions at high speed far beyond what current aerospace technology is capable of.
UFO Sighted Over Middleburgh, New York ( August 8, 2021 )
Impressive UFO was sighted over the skies of Middleburgh, Schoharie County, New York on August 8, 2021
STATEMENT : UFOs in our airspace.
They are everywhere
credit : A Esemplare
New Crop Circle, Kitt's Lane, Nr West Meon, Hampshire.( August 8, 2021 )
This Stunning crop circle was discovered on August 8, 2021 North West of Meon in Hampshire, England . Crop circle show a unique six pointed star design aligning with what seekers call the 'Lion's Gate 8/8.'
credit : Stonehenge Dronescapes
RELATED VIDEO
What's Happening? Glitch in the Matrix ? ( August 8, 2021 )
What's happening? Glitch in the matrix ? August 8, 2021 : What if we are living in a simulation, and the world as we know it. This is the simulation theory -- the idea that our entire universe could be running inside of some sort of extra-dimensional computer ..
STATEMENT : What's happening?!?! Glitch in the matrix.....?
Is this a glitch in the matrix an account for a missing period of time or a lapse in the space-time continium.
credit : .W Wijk
UFO Sighted Over Spain ( August 8, 2021 )
UFO Mothership or Portal Entrance ? This was sighted over Spain on August 8, 2021
STATEMENT : Strange cloud appears in Spain, what is it?
ORIGINAL : Aparece una nube extraña en España, ¿qué es esto? Closer every day
credit : H Motti
RELATED VIDEOS
Huge UFO Sighted Over Mexico City ( August 8, 2021 )
A Huge UFO was sighted over a Mexican Federal Highway in Mexico City
STATEMENT : They send me this video in private message of a UFO sighting in Mexico City ORIGINAL : Me mandan, este video por privado, de un avistamiento O.V.N.I en Ciudad de Mexico
credit : U.S.F
UFO Filmed Deploying Two Objects & Fast-walker UFO Filmed By Drone Over Brazil. August 8, 2021
Guys, thanks for all the kind words and support. It meant alot to me....
Clip one was filmed on the 8th of August 2021 from the Mooca District of São Paulo, Brazil. In the clip we can see this brightly lit object fly over the sky of Mooca, the quick thinking witness pulled over his car and managed to filmed the UFO moments before it deployed two smaller objects. The Main craft seem to be Plasma in origin, as it doesn't seem solid. Thanks to Diego Santos for allowing me the use of his footage and to view the original: https://youtu.be/K5A1b2ar-nk
Second clip was also filmed on the 8th of August 2021 from Vera Cruz in Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil. The Fast-walker was filmed by the camera on-board this drone. The object passes close to drone in straight path but what could this object be??? Thanks to Fabricio Bullerjahn for allowing me the use of his footage and to view the original: https://youtu.be/_v20x74tBOs
Anunnaki Revealed: Who Were These Beings of Ancient Astronaut Theory? – Part I
Anunnaki Revealed: Who Were These Beings of Ancient Astronaut Theory? – Part I
The modern era has witnessed an incredible surge in the popularity of all forms of media concerning the mythology of the ancient Mesopotamians.Fueling this ever-growing trend are the writings of a number of researchers who propose connections between several Sumerian myth cycles and the theory that the human race was engineered or created by a group of extraterrestrial beings. Known as Ancient Astronaut Theory , this field is largely reliant upon the translations of cuneiform tablets supposedly made by Zecharia Sitchin, whose series of Earth Chronicles books form the foundation upon which the modern church of the alien gods has been built.
Central to Sitchin’s narrative is a group of mythic beings known as the Anunnaki, whom he claimed crossed their own DNA with that of Homo erectus in order to create mankind—for the purpose of using humans as slaves to mine gold and other minerals. Today these Anunnaki are often portrayed as the equivalent of the Old Testament creator God.
But what does the cuneiform corpus actually say about the Anunnaki and other mythic beings? How does the version of these beings and their activities presented in Ancient Astronaut media compare with how they were truly represented in the ancient world?
To begin with, Anunnaki translates to “princely blood” or “seed of Anu”, not “those who came down” or “those who came from heaven to earth”, as many modern sources have claimed. The Anunnaki are “the Sumerian deities of the old primordial time;” a pantheon of gods who were the children of the sky god Anu and his sister, Ki. Significantly, some scholars have come to realize that the Anunnaki should more appropriately be considered demi-gods or semi-divine beings. Apparently, Anu’s sister Ki was not originally considered a deity and was only ascribed the status of a goddess much later in the history of the myth cycle.
Akkadian cylinder seal dating to circa 2300 BC depicting the deities Inanna, Utu, and Enki, three members of the Anunnaki.
“Some authorities question whether Ki was regarded as a deity since there is no evidence of a cult and the name appears only in a limited number of Sumerian creation texts. Samuel Noah Kramer identifies Ki with the Sumerian mother goddess Ninhursag and claims that they were originally the same figure. She later developed into the Babylonian and Akkadian goddess Antu, consort of the god Anu (from Sumerian An).”
Essentially, this would mean that the Anunnaki were born of a union between a sky god and a mortal female, who was later deified in mythic traditions.
Four copper-alloy statuettes dating to c. 2130 BC, depicting four ancient Mesopotamian gods, wearing characteristic horned crowns.
Furthermore, “Ki” is the Sumerian sign for “earth”, and Anu’s consort is sometimes considered the personification of the earth itself. This is similar to Biblical tradition, where mortals were created out of the dust of the earth (Genesis 2:7). The concept of a group of half-divine beings born of mortal women is very similar to the Biblical and extra-Biblical tradition of the Nephilim.
One of the most heavily referenced ancient texts which describes the Nephilim is the Extra-Biblical Book of 1 Enoch attributed to the patriarch Enoch, son of Jared and father of Methuselah. 1 Enoch is considered an apocryphal text today, and is rejected by most mainstream theological establishments, but this was not always the case. Many of the early Church Fathers, such as Athenagoras, Clement of Alexandria, Irenaeus, and Tertullian accepted the book as scripture, and fragments of 10 copies of 1 Enoch in Aramaic have been found among the Dead Sea Scrolls. 1 Enoch is also quoted in the Biblical Book of Jude , and it has been estimated that there are as many as several hundred more references throughout the New Testament itself.
Joshua 1:1 as recorded in the Aleppo Codex, 10th century AD
The most famous portions of 1 Enoch feature an elaboration on certain events before the deluge recorded in the Bible (specifically Genesis chapter 6, verses 1-4). According to 1 Enoch, a group of 200 fallen angels known as the Watchers, led by an individual named Semyaza (or Semjaza) descended upon Mount Hermon, where they swore an oath to father lineages with human women. Each of these “took unto themselves wives, and each chose for himself one, and they began to go in unto them and to defile themselves with them”, a union which resulted in the birth of “great giants”.
These giants eventually “consumed all the acquisitions of men”, and, “when men could no longer sustain them, the giants turned against them and devoured mankind.” (1 Enoch, Ch. 6-7) These activities provoke the action of God, who curses the giants to war against one another “that they may destroy each other in battle”, and sends the archangels to bind the Watcher leadership “in the valleys of the earth”. (1 Enoch 10) As is well known today, the Hebrew texts refer to the powerful beings born to the Watchers as The Nephilim.
Location of the Sanctuary of the Anunnaki
Scholars have found profound similarities between the mythologies of the Anunnaki and the Nephilim. In 1971, Edward Lipinski published a scholarly analysis of several ancient texts, including the Old Babylonian version of the Epic of Gilgamesh, all which feature important details revealing the true location of the sanctuary of the Anunnaki in ancient Eastern thought and cosmology. Lipinski found that: “In fact, the Old Babylonian version of the [Gilgamesh Epic] identifies Hermon and Lebanon with the dwelling of the Anunnaki”.
He emphasizes lines 12-21 of the Old Babylonian Gilgamesh, which tell of the destruction of Humbaba, the guardian of the abode of the gods at the hands of Gilgamesh’s companion Enkidu, after which the text states that the two “penetrated into the forest, opened the secret dwelling of the Anunnaki.” While later mythologies suggest alternate locations for the home of the Anunnaki, Lipinski explains that the oldest Mesopotamian and Near Eastern Canaanite texts point to the Cedar forest of Mount Hermon:
“…traces of the older tradition can be found in the mention of the mountain which was the abode of the gods, and whose accesses were hidden by the Cedar Forest whose guardian was Humbaba. This mountain was, we believe, the Anti-lebanon-Hermon…The southern range of the Anti-Lebanon is therefore likely to be the mountain in whose recesses the Anunnaki dwelled according to the Old Babylonian version of the Gilgames epos. In the Old Babylonian period the Anunnaki were still the gods in general….Mount Hermon should thus be identified with the dwelling of the gods.”
Lipinski also points out the fact that Mount Hermon was considered the guardian of international treaties in the ancient world, and connects this tradition with the oath sworn by the Watchers in 1 Enoch. Incorporating apocryphal texts such as The Testament of the Twelve Patriarchs and 1 Enoch into his study, Lipinski concludes:
“Mount Hermon is the cosmic mountain which joins the earth with the lowest heaven. The same conception lies behind the episode of the sons of God in the Book of Enoch. The celestial beings gather on the summit of Mount Hermon because this is the mountain of the gods, the Canaanite Olympus.”
Mount Hermon is located at the southern end of the Anti-Lebanon mountain range, straddling the borders of Syria and Lebanon. Hermon’s highest peak reaches 9,232 feet (2814 meters). The area abounds with ancient altars going back millennia, and was still the host of shrines and rituals as recently as the time of Constantine the Great. Of further significance is the fact that Gilgamesh was renowned in the ancient world for obtaining knowledge from the pre-flood (or “antediluvian”) world, as stated by the Ugarit Epic of Gilgamesh (lines 5-9):
“He explored everywhere the seats of power, he knew the totality of wisdom about all things. He who travelled the distant road to Utter-napisti, who crossed the ocean, the wide sea, as far as the sunrise: he brought back tidings from the antediluvian age.”
These passages bring us full circle with Lipinski’s interpretation of the Old Babylonian version of the Gilgamesh epic, where the ancient king journeyed to Mount Hermon—abode of the Anunnaki…
Jason Jarrell and Sarah Farmer are investigative historians and avocational archaeologists. They study many subjects including depth psychology, Biblical mysteries, political science, and comparative mythology. They’re also authors of Ages of the Giants: A Cultural History of the Tall Ones in Prehistoric America (2017). Learn more at their website: ParadigmCollision.com
Top Image: Ordered universe and cuneiform (Public Domain) and Akkadian cylinder featuring Anunnaki. ( Public Domain );Deriv.
Central to Ancient Astronaut Theory and author Zecharia Sitchin’s narrative, is a group of mythic beings known as the Anunnaki, whom he claimed crossed their own DNA with that of Homo erectus in order to create mankind—for the purpose of using humans as slaves to mine gold and other minerals. Today these Anunnaki are often portrayed as the equivalent of the Old Testament creator God.
But what does the cuneiform corpus actually say about the Anunnaki and other mythic beings? How does the version of these beings and their activities presented in Ancient Astronaut media compare with how they were truly represented in the ancient world?
Babylonian representation of the national god Marduk, who was envisioned as a prominent member of the Anunnaki
Mount Hermon is located at the southern end of the Anti-Lebanon mountain range, straddling the borders of Syria and Lebanon. Hermon’s highest peak reaches 9,232 feet (2814 meters). Gilgamesh was renowned in the ancient world for obtaining knowledge from the pre-flood (or “antediluvian”) world, as stated by the Ugarit Epic of Gilgamesh (lines 5-9):
“He explored everywhere the seats of power, he knew the totality of wisdom about all things. He who traveled the distant road to Utter-napisti, who crossed the ocean, the wide sea, as far as the sunrise: he brought back tidings from the antediluvian age.”
These passages bring us full circle with Lipinski’s interpretation of the Old Babylonian version of the Gilgamesh epic, where the ancient king journeyed to Mount Hermon—abode of the Anunnaki.
The concept of ancient knowledge from the pre-flood world is actually inherent in many Eastern traditions. For example, there is a similar story in the apocryphal Book of Jubilees about Kainam, a son of the Biblical Arphaxad:
“And the son grew, and his father taught him writing, and he went to seek for himself a place where he might seize for himself a city. And he found a writing which former generations had carved on the rock, and he read what was thereon, and he transcribed it and sinned owing to it; for it contained the teaching of the Watchers in accordance with which they used to observe the omens of the sun and moon and stars in all the signs of heaven. And he wrote it down and said nothing regarding it; for he was afraid to speak to Noah about it lest he should be angry with him on account of it.” (Jubilees 8:1-5)
Interestingly, there are several ancient sources, which suggest that Gilgamesh himself was a half-god or semi-divine being of gigantic stature. According to the Sumerian Kings List, Gilgamesh was the 5th king of Uruk, who reigned sometime between 2800 and 2600 BC. While there are traditions considering the father of Gilgamesh to be king Lugalbanda, the Sumerian Kings List states that his true father was a “lillu-spirit, a high priest of Kulaba”, and he is described in the epic as “two-thirds god”.
Gilgamesh is believed to have attained victory over the kings of Kish, centralizing Uruk’s power, and tradition has him expanding the city of Uruk, including its temple precinct and walls. In several fragments of a twelfth-century-BC copy of the Gilgamesh Epic discovered at ancient Ugarit, Gilgamesh is described as “Surpassing all (other) kings (!), renowned for bodily stature” (line 16) and again as “Gilgames, renowned for bodily stature, hero born in Uruk, butting wild bull!” (lines 18-19). Lines 34-36 of the Ugarit Gilgamesh offer specific details on Gilgamesh’s size: “Eleven cubits was his height, four cubits the width of his chest. A triple cubit was his foot and a reed-length his legs”. According to these measurements, Gilgamesh would have stood between 16 and 18 feet tall (4.8 to 5.4 meters tall). In connection to Gilgamesh being a giant, the fragmentary Book of Giants from the Dead Sea Scrolls names several Nephilim giants as Ohya, Mahway, Hahya, and Gilgamesh.
Gilgamesh, the king-hero from the city of Uruk, battling the 'bull of heavens'
Returning to the subject of Mount Hermon, Gilgamesh is not the only ancient giant directly associated with this prominent locale. Several Old Testament books ( The Book of Numbers , Deuteronomy, and The Book of Joshua ) record the battle of Moses and the Israelites against Og, an Amorite king of Bashan. In Deuteronomy 3:11 (KJV), Og is described as “of the remnant of giants”, and his bed (or sarcophagus) is measured as nine cubits long and four cubits wide, meaning that Og himself may have been 12 or 13 feet in height (approx. four meters tall).
In Joshua 4:5 (KJV), it is revealed that Og “reigned in mount Hermon, and in Seclah, and in all Bashan”, a region which would include the slopes of Mount Hermon and the Golan Heights.
Entities of the Underworld
Still another factor connecting the Anunnaki with the story of the Watchers and their offspring is their status as underworld beings. In Mesopotamian cycles, the Anunnaki are frequently depicted as “fates” or judges of the dead who occupy the subterranean realm or function as “spirits of the earth”. In tablets discovered at Nippur from around 2000 BC, the Anunnaki are “the seven judges”, underworld entities that accompany Ereshkigal, queen of the subterranean realm. When Ishtar descends and is brought before the assembly, they fasten their “eyes of death” upon her, causing her to perish.
An early nineteenth-century drawing of a statuette of Hecate, with whom Ereshkigal was syncretized.
The mountain abode of the Canaanite god, El is also frequently associated with secret or hidden natural springs and underground rivers. Lipinski associates these connotations with the sources of the Jordan River, one of which is the spring of Banias, originating at the foot of Mount Hermon. He furthermore elaborates that the mountain was considered in ancient times to cover “one of the outlets of the Deep or Ocean from which came the waters of the Flood…an eruption of the subterranean ocean on which the earth was believed to rest.”
In 1 Enoch, God commands the archangel Michael to “Go, bind Semjaza and his associates who have united themselves with women…bind them fast for seventy generations in valleys of the earth…”(1 Enoch 10:11-12), while Raphael is commanded, “Bind Azazel hand and foot, and cast him into the darkness: make an opening in the desert, which is in Dudael, and cast him therein.”(1 Enoch 10:4)
Ancient Hittite relief carving from Yazılıkaya, a sanctuary at Hattusa, depicting twelve gods of the underworld, whom the Hittites identified as the Mesopotamian Anunnaki.
There are also references to the fate of the Watchers in New Testament books, including Second Peter , which states, “…God spared not the angels that sinned, but cast them down to hell, and delivered them into chains of darkness…” (2nd Peter, 2:4, KJV). The word translated as “hell” in this verse is actually the Greek Tartarus, referencing the deepest underworld of Greek mythology—the prison of the Titans.
Not only were the Titans giants, but like the Anunnaki, they were the offspring of an earth goddess (Gaia) and a sky deity (Uranus). Some scholars consider it likely that the Greek mythos was largely based on the older Eastern Mythologies. The same concept is repeated again in the Book of Jude, verse 6, which mentions, “the angels which kept not their first estate, but left their own habitation, he hath reserved in everlasting chains under darkness”.
One of the giant Titans, Atlas, who was punished to bear the heavens on his shoulders for all time.
It is widely known that the archetypal myth cycles of the Mesopotamian and Near Eastern traditions share a common origin, and that the subjects of these cycles also appear in the Biblical, extra-Biblical, and even Quranic texts. The purpose of this article is to identify the specific mythic concept behind the Anunnaki in the ancient world.
Contrary to much of the popular literature and other media of today, the evidence recorded by the academic research of scholars and a comparative study of the actual cuneiform and other ancient texts indicates that the true identity of the Anunnaki is to be found in the Eastern tradition of a group of half-gods, spawned by cross-breeding between divine beings and mortal females at Mount Hermon in the Anti-Lebanon mountain range. These beings are often associated with knowledge from the world before a great deluge and were later assigned roles in the underworld. This would suggest that rather than making the Anunnaki the equivalent of the “Elohim” who created man in the Book of Genesis; they should more properly be compared to the Nephilim and the fallen angels described in Genesis Chapter 6, 1 Enoch, and other extra-biblical texts.
Jason Jarrell and Sarah Farmer are investigative historians and avocational archaeologists. They study many subjects including depth psychology, Biblical mysteries, political science, and comparative mythology. They’re also authors of Ages of the Giants: A Cultural History of the Tall Ones in Prehistoric America (2017). Learn more at their website: ParadigmCollision.com
Top Image: Ordered universe and cuneiform (Public Domain) and statue of Gilgamesh. ( CC BY 2.0 );Deriv.
ANCIENT ALIENS: THE MILLENNIA-LONG HISTORY OF OBSESSING ABOUT EXTRATERRESTRIALS
ANCIENT ALIENS: THE MILLENNIA-LONG HISTORY OF OBSESSING ABOUT EXTRATERRESTRIALS
The idea that other worlds might be home to alien beings has been part of our thought for as long as we have been looking skyward.
TO FEEL SMALL, all we have to do is look up.
The Sun, the Moon, the stars, the planets, and the Milky Wayare evidence enough that Earth is not all thatis.
And for as long as humans have had words, we have been sharing stories about the presumed builders and occupiers of those vaulted heavens: the gods, spirits, angels, and demons who were, in a sense, the first extraterrestrials.
According to a Cherokee story, for example, the Milky Way is a great web spun across the sky by Grandmother Spider, who used it to reach the other side of the world and bring back the sun.
In one grisly Aztec myth, the war god Huitzilopochtli sprang from his mother Coatlicue’s womb fully grown and fully armored. He beheaded his sister, Coyolxauhqui, who had been plotting to kill Coatlicue, and cast her head into the sky, creating the Moon.
Materialist interpretations of the cosmos eventually began to take the place of mythological ones. But the idea that there might be other beings in the sky has stayed with us, and it found its first proto-scientific roots in Greece in the sixth century BCE.
Anaximander, a philosopher who lived in Miletus in modern-day Turkey, contributed one key idea. He was the first to propose that Earth is a body floating in an infinite void, held up by nothing. For someone who lived 2,200 years before Isaac Newton, this was a stunning insight. The philosopher Karl Popper called it “one of the boldest, most revolutionary, and most portentous ideas in the whole history of human thought.”
Anaximander also thought Earth was a cylinder with the continents arrayed on one flat end, so he wasn’t right about everything. But he did invent the idea of space, a place with no absolute up or down.
And just as important, Anaximander’s system was the first to leave open the possibility that there are other worlds like ours. (Though, to be clear, he may not have believed that these worlds existed elsewhere in space. He may have thought they preceded or would succeed Earth in time or perhaps coexisted in some parallel universe.)
Anaximander’s successors were more definite about the idea that came to be known as “the plurality of worlds” and more willing to explore its implications.
In the fifth century BCE, the Thracian philosopher Leucippus and his pupil Democritus invented atomism: the belief that the visible universe consists of tiny, indivisible, indestructible atoms, churning in the void without purpose or cause.
In this picture, worlds aren’t divinely created; they simply form when enough atoms collide and stick together. Democritus thought that there was an infinite supply of atoms, so he reasoned that there must be an infinite number of worlds. His pupil Metrodorus of Chios put it this way: “It seems absurd, that in a large field only one stalk should grow, and that in an infinite space only one world exists.”
And then there’s Epicurus. He lived about a century after Democritus and is most notorious for his philosophy that pleasure — best obtained through modest, self-sufficient living — is the greatest good.
But Epicurus read Democritus and thoroughly absorbed his empiricist, atomist worldview, including the idea that there must be many worlds. “There is an unlimited number of cosmoi [worlds], and some are similar to this one and some are dissimilar,” Epicurus wrote in a letter to the historian Herodotus.
Epicurus’s ideas are important not just because they were prescient but because they became a long-lasting irritant for future philosophers and theologians. Unfortunately, most of his writings are lost. What we know about his thought comes mainly from De rerum natura, or On the Nature of Things, a book-length poem by his Roman disciple Lucretius.
You can think of this book, written around 50 BCE, as the first volume of popular science. Here’s what Lucretius said about the Epicurean view of other worlds:
If store of seeds there is
So great that not whole life-times of the living
Can count the tale …
And if their force and nature abide the same,
Able to throw the seeds of things together
Into their places, even as here are thrown
The seeds together in this world of ours,
’Tmust be confessed in other realms there are
Still other worlds, still other breeds of men,
And other generations of the wild.
The passage is a milestone in discussions of extraterrestrials. It goes beyond the basic idea that infinity must contain many worlds to offer what is probably the first straightforward assertion in Western literature that aliens must exist. The first and sadly the last for a very long time.
The truth is that the mechanistic, nonsupernatural picture of the world offered by Anaximander, Democritus, and Epicurus was radical for its day. It failed to gain a large following in ancient Greece.
In Athens in 450 BCE, the philosopher Anaxagoras posited that the sun is a fiery rock and that the Moon is an Earthlike body that glows in the sun’s reflected light. He was promptly arrested on charges of impiety and sentenced to death. After his friend and former pupil Pericles came to his defense, he was released but banished.
Both Plato (428–348 BCE) and Aristotle (384–322 BCE) lambasted Democritus’s idea of a plurality of worlds on theological grounds. Plato, a monotheist, argued that there is only one creator and that therefore there can be only one world, “if the created copy is to accord with the original.”
Aristotle similarly thought that a plurality of worlds would require a plurality of Prime Movers to keep them in motion — a plainly heretical idea. The idea of infinite worlds also conflicted with his view of physics, in which the five basic elements — earth, air, fire, water, and divine aether — tend to move up or down toward their “natural places” at the center or the edges of the universe.
Because things made of earth always sink to the center, Aristotle believed, Earth must be the only world, and there can be no solid bodies in the heavens.
Though Aristotle was a pagan, his anthropocentric picture of the universe was a gift to early Christian theologians. The Book of Genesis, which says God purposefully created the heavens and the earth, left no room for other worlds or other sentient beings (unless you count angels and demons).
The New Testament then introduced the idea that God was incarnated as Christ to rescue the faithful from sin and damnation — a flattering story implying that humans are uniquely worthy of Christ’s sacrifice. As the scientist and Christian apologist William Whewell would later put it, the Incarnation made Earth into “the Stage of the Great Drama of God’s Mercy and Man’s Salvation.”
By contrast, Democritus, Epicurus, and Lucretius offered a picture of a purely mechanical universe where everything arises from the purposeless collisions of atoms and where humans might be just one of an infinite number of intelligent races. “Small wonder the early Christians tossed the Epicurean package, extraterrestrials and all, into the abyss of doctrinal errors,” writes the Catholic ethicist Benjamin Wiker.
As Christianity swept across the decaying Roman Empire in the third and fourth centuries CE, the Church Fathers ridiculed and suppressed the Epicureans and their ideas and allowed their writings to burn or crumble. Atomism, the pursuit of pleasure, the plurality-of-worlds idea — all of it slipped into darkness, where, as Wiker observes, “it stayed for nearly a thousand years.”
KEPLER, COPERNICUS, GIORDANO BRUNO, AND MANY WORLDS
Somehow, though, Lucretius’s poem On the Nature of Things managed to cross the abyss into the 15th century.
The Swerve, a delightful book about “how the world became modern” by the Harvard literary scholar Stephen Greenblatt, tells the story of the Florentine book collector Poggio Bracciolini, who recovered a copy of the poem in the library of a monastery in southern Germany in 1417.
Within 60 years, hundreds of manuscripts and print editions were in circulation, reigniting interest in Epicureanism. Greenblatt argues that the poem’s atheistic and materialist ideas helped usher in Renaissance humanism — an inquisitive philosophy that, despite its name, began to question humanity’s privileged station in the cosmos.
Whether the credit is due to Bracciolini or not, the Renaissance saw steadily growing interest in the idea of the plurality of worlds and its corollary, the possibility that other worlds might be populated by other beings. Mikołaj Kopernik, better known as Nicolaus Copernicus, provided one key stepping stone.
The Polish mathematician and astronomer were born in 1473 — coincidentally, the same year the first print edition of On the Nature of Things appeared. (Note the date here: Copernicus lived at the same time as Christopher Columbus, who was 22 years his senior; Leonardo da Vinci, who was 21 years older; Niccolò Machiavelli, four years older; and Martin Luther, 10 years younger.)
Copernicus is central to the story of extraterrestrials not because he believed in them — the question didn’t seem to interest him — but because he was the first person to propose, based on observation and calculation, that Earth was not the center of the visible universe.
Around 1510, Copernicus began writing the commentaries and manuscripts that would become De revolutionibus orbium coelestium (On the Revolution of the Celestial Spheres). Finally published in 1543, the year Copernicus died, the book upended the old Aristotelian system.
It argued that Earth rotates around its pole, that the Moon orbits Earth, and that Mercury, Venus, the Earth-Moon system, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn all travel around the Sun at their own rates.
Finally, it asserted that the firmament — the outermost celestial sphere, containing the stars — must be incomprehensibly far away, at least compared to the distances between the sun and the planets.
Copernicus’s heliocentric model accounted for important oddities that the old Aristotelian system couldn’t adequately explain, such as the occasional “retrograde” or backward motion of the other planets against the background stars.
But, of course, heliocentrism wasn’t immediately accepted, not least because it amounted to a huge demotion for Earth. It left us with only a single heavenly attendant, the Moon, and it forced Copernicus’s readers to reckon with the idea that we live on a planet that is just like any other.
This premise — that there’s nothing particularly special about Earth and that we aren’t in a privileged, central position to observe the universe — would come to be known as the Copernican principle, and it’s at the core of the modern-day case for doing research related to the search for extraterrestrial life (SETI).
Copernicus knew his theory would provoke religious objections, which may be why he declined to publish it during his lifetime. His follower Giordano Bruno was not so cautious. Bruno was a Sicilian subject who entered the Dominican order in Naples and then became a religious vagabond. He read Lucretius and Copernicus, took their ideas deeply to heart, and made some startling leaps of his own.
In three sets of dialogues published between 1584 and 1591 — La cena de le ceneri (The Ash Wednesday Supper), De l’infinito universo et modi (On the Infinite Universe and Worlds), and De immenso (Of vastness) — Bruno argued that at least some of the stars are suns with their own planets and that some of these planets must have their own residents.
On this and many other subjects, Bruno’s daring views conflicted with long-standing doctrines of the Catholic Church: For starters, that the universe was created for humanity alone and that there can be no people on other worlds without another Christ to redeem them.
Bruno was arrested in Venice in 1592 on charges of blasphemy and heresy and sent to Rome, where his trial lasted seven years. On February 17, 1600, he was hanged naked upside down and burned at the stake.
Bruno’s persecution was widely followed by people living outside Rome, but it couldn’t prevent the emergence of a new understanding of the heavens. In 1609, Johannes Kepler, the German mathematician and astronomer, published Astronomia nova (New Astronomy), which extended Copernicanism in crucial ways.
Understandably, Kepler was elated to receive a copy of Galileo Galilei’s Siderius nuncius (Starry Messenger) soon after it was published the following year. The book announced Galileo’s discovery of mountains on the Moon and four satellites orbiting Jupiter: we call them Io, Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto.
These Jovian moons formed what was, in essence, a miniature solar system obeying the same rules as the planets. This discovery provided spectacular evidence for Copernicanism and in Kepler’s mind confirmed his own theories about planetary motion.
Jupiter and its large moons.NASA/Hulton Archive/Getty Images
But here’s the interesting part for our purposes: Even though Kepler (a Protestant) knew of Bruno’s travails and the Catholic Church’s attitude toward the plurality-of-worlds idea, he sent Galileo (a Catholic) a congratulatory letter that included speculation about extraterrestrials. Any planet important enough to have moons, Kepler supposed, must also have people.
“These four little moons exist for Jupiter, not for us,” he wrote. “Each planet in turn, together with its occupants, is served by its own satellites. From this line of reasoning, we deduce with the highest degree of probability that Jupiter is inhabited.”
Galileo cannily declined to endorse that idea. “The view of those who would put inhabitants on Jupiter, Venus, Saturn, and the Moon, meaning by ‘inhabitants’ animals like ours, and men in particular” was “false and damnable,” he wrote in his pamphlet Istoria e dimostrazioni intorno alle macchie Solari (Letters on Sunspots) in 1613.
But while Galileo may have sidestepped Bruno’s error in this case, he eventually ran afoul of the church for different reasons. His volume Dialogo sopra i due massimi sistemi del mondo (Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems), a rousing defense of Copernicus, angered Pope Urban VIII and his inquisitors. In 1633, the church sentenced Galileo to a house arrest that lasted until his death in 1642.
OF THE PLURALITY OF WORLDS
From Democritus to Galileo, thinkers treated the idea that other worlds might be home to alien beings — the word alien comes from the Latin term alius, “other” — with great seriousness. After all, believing in aliens could get you banished or burned at the stake.
But in 1686 a Frenchman named Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle became the first writer to exploit the subject’s humorous possibilities. His book Entretiens sur la pluralité des mondes (Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds) was another early example of science popularization.
Fontenelle made a rigorous case for Copernicanism, but to keep things entertaining he also used whimsical proto-science-fiction notions about the cultures of the other planets. The people of Venus, Fontenelle mused, are “sunburnt, full of verve and fire, always amorous, loving verses, loving music, inventing celebrations, dances, and tournaments every day.”
The inhabitants of Saturn, by contrast, are “quite phlegmatic. … These are people who don’t know what it is to laugh, who always take a day to answer the slightest question asked them.”
These ideas didn’t contradict the doctrine of Christ’s unique incarnation on Earth, Fontenelle reassured his readers because people on other planets would not be descended from Adam and wouldn’t need saving. Unfortunately, that didn’t stop the church from putting Conversations on its Index of Forbidden Books.
Christian Huygens, the Dutch astronomer who explained the rings of Saturn and discovered its moon Titan, took a more serious tack in Cosmotheoros, published posthumously in 1698 and translated into English as Celestial Worlds Discover’d; or, Conjectures Concerning the Inhabitants, Plants, and Productions of the Worlds in the Planets.
He noted that Venus and Jupiter have atmospheres, one requirement for life. He expanded on Bruno’s assertion that other stars must have their own planetary systems and reasoned that where there are planets, there must be people.
By Huygens’s time, the plurality-of-worlds concept was beginning to seem ordinary. Eighteenth-century thinkers such as Edmond Halley, Gottfried Leibniz, Alexander Pope, Immanuel Kant, William Herschel, Pierre Laplace, and Thomas Paine accepted it as part of a scientific-realist worldview.
This view was, however, still incompatible with strict Christianity. That’s what motivated a leading 19th-century scientist and one-time believer in other inhabited worlds, William Whewell, to abandon pluralism and publish one of the strongest catalogs of scientific arguments against the idea.
A brilliant polymath, Whewell was a professor of mineralogy at the University of Cambridge, then a professor of moral philosophy, and finally the head of Trinity College, where Sir Isaac Newton had studied and taught.
In the 1830s, Whewell published essays that left room for the idea of extraterrestrials. But he later grew increasingly disturbed by the question of whether God had provided “a like scheme of salvation” for every other world.
If both pluralism and the Incarnation could not be true, Whewell decided he would stick with the Incarnation. So he assembled a scientific and philosophical broadside against the idea of other worlds, which he published in 1853 under the title Of the Plurality of Worlds: An Essay.
Whewell pointed out that humans, according to the geological record then being unearthed, had been present on this planet for only an “atom of time.” If Earth had been, in effect, uninhabited through most of its history, then it wouldn’t be surprising if other distant planets were also empty.
In any case, he pointed out, no planets around other stars had yet been observed, and many nebulae, star clusters, and multiple-star systems would be unsuitable places for them. Here in the local neighborhood, Whewell noted, the Moon has no atmosphere or water; Jupiter features crushing gravity and may lack a solid surface; Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune are probably too far from the sun and therefore too cold to support life; and Mercury and Venus are probably too close to the sun and therefore too hot.
He wasn’t sure about Mars, but he theorized that only Earth is in what he called “the Temperate Zone of the Solar System.”
In short, though Whewell’s ultimate goal was to defend Christian theology, he was the first to marshal empirical evidence to point out the real weaknesses in the plurality-of-worlds idea.
This challenge was, in a sense, long overdue. Copernicus was correct to revoke Earth’s privileges as the pivot point of the universe, but that insight by itself says nothing about what else might exist in the universe.
We know today that Democritus and Epicurus were on the right track when they theorized about atoms and other worlds, but they didn’t have any hard data, and neither did Bruno, Kepler, Huygens, or Fontenelle. Whewell concluded: “The belief that other planets, as well as our own, are the seats of habitation of living things, has been entertained, in general, not in consequence of physical reasons, but in spite of physical reasons.”
Coming from the master of Trinity, this attack caused a ruckus in the scientific world. Defenders of pluralism were forced to go back to their laboratories and telescopes (which is evidence, if you’re in an optimistic mood, that materialists and religious believers aren’t engaged in a winner-take-all war, but rather in a healthy competition of ideas). Even today, the essential aim of astrobiologists and exoplanet hunters is to provide what Whewell called the missing “physical reasons.”
Percial Lowell’s Mars canals.ullstein bild Dtl./ullstein bild/Getty Images
PERCIVAL LOWELL AND THE CANALS OF MARS
One of the researchers who poured new energy into the pursuit of extraterrestrials in the late 19th century was Percival Lowell. An amateur astronomer, Lowell used his wealth and his connections as a member of an old Boston Brahmin family to establish his own observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona, in 1894.
The year before that, the distinguished Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli had published La vita sul pianeta Marte (Life on Mars), laying out his observations of “seas,” “continents,” and waterways on Mars. After reading Schiaparelli’s book and another on Mars by the French astronomer Camille Flammarion, Lowell became convinced that the alleged waterways were artificial canals, and he built the observatory in order to observe, document, and publicize them.
One piece of lore, endlessly repeated in books, magazine articles, and web posts about Mars, says that Lowell’s imagination was fired by one of history’s most comic mistranslations. Schiaparelli, so the story goes, described the lines he saw on the surface of Mars using the word canali, “channels.”
English translators, however, rendered it as “canals.” A channel isn’t necessarily artificial; a canal is. The misleading word choice was what supposedly sent Lowell on his wild quest.
This is one of those stories journalists call “too good to fact-check.” In reality, Schiaparelli had begun talking about canali as early as 1878, the year after a close Mars–Earth approach. He was well aware that his work had inspired others to speculate that the canali were artificial, and perhaps used for irrigation. He did nothing to tamp down this speculation.
“Their singular appearance and the fact that they are designed with absolute geometrical precision as if they were drawn with a ruler or a compass, has led some to see in these features the work of intelligent beings, inhabitants of the planet,” Schiaparelli wrote in La vita sul pianeti Marte. “I will be careful not to combat this assumption, which includes nothing impossible.”
Regardless of who inspired his canal obsession, Lowell set out to confirm Schiaparelli’s discovery, making nearly nightly observations of Mars starting in mid-1894. He duly discovered 184 canals, putting Schiaparelli’s 79 to shame.
Lowell published these findings in a popular volume, Mars (1895), followed by “Mars and Its Canals” (1906) and Mars as the Abode of Life (1908). Like Schiaparelli before him, Lowell was struck by the “uniformity,” the “precision,” and the “supernaturally regular” appearance of the alleged canals. He wrote in the first volume, “Too great regularity is in itself the most suspicious of circumstances that some finite intelligence has been at work.”
Such a great collection of works would need builders, of course, and Lowell would go on to deduce — based on Mars’s lower gravity — that Martians must be far larger and stronger than humans. And older and wiser, too.
“A mind of no mean order would seem to have presided over the system we see — a mind certainly of considerably more comprehensiveness than that which presides over the various departments of our own public works,” he wrote. “Certainly what we see hints at the existence of beings who are in advance of, not behind us, in the journey of life.”
The public greeted Lowell’s work rapturously, scientists more coolly. Alfred Russell Wallace, the co-discoverer with Charles Darwin of evolution by natural selection, was still alive when Lowell’s books appeared. He eviscerated the idea of intelligent, canal-building Martians.
Wallace pointed out, correctly, that there is little liquid water on Mars to transport in canals. And he anticipated later critiques of SETI by highlighting the fantastic odds against the appearance of even one technological species in a given star system, let alone two on neighboring planets.
Given the series of evolutionary accidents that opened the way for the emergence of primates, each accident dependent on the previous one, “the total chances against the evolution of man, or an equivalent moral and intellectual being … will be represented by a hundred million of millions to one,” Wallace wrote.
Wallace was right that there are no men on Mars. But there was an intelligence at work in the story: Lowell’s. We know from decades of telescopic, orbital, and robotic exploration of the red planet that there are no canals or even features such as sand dunes or dust storms that could create the illusion of canals. What Lowell saw had to have been what astronomer Simon Newcomb would call, in 1907, unconscious “visual inferences” — projections of Lowell’s desire to see what he already believed was there.
I’m reminded of the snide acronym sometimes used by tech-support workers to describe questions from naive computer users: PIBKAC, Problem Is between Keyboard and Chair. In Lowell’s case, the problem was between the telescope eyepiece and the drawing pad.
But even before Wallace published his critique in 1904, it was too late to defuse Lowell’s idea. Martians had escaped into popular culture. H. G. Wells took Lowell’s concept of an ancient, advanced race of Mars dwellers and added a layer of imperial malice in The War of the Worlds, which was published in serial form in 1897 and as a print novel in 1898.
Edgar Rice Burroughs used Mars, a.k.a. “Barsoom,” as the setting for a series of pulpy stories and novels published between 1912 and 1948. Orson Welles adapted H. G. Wells’s story as a live radio drama broadcast on Halloween Eve in 1938, and its simulated news format scared at least a few listeners into believing invaders from Mars had really arrived.
The hostile-Martian cliché spread so quickly that by 1948 it would be satirized in the form of every nerd’s favorite Looney Tunes villain, Marvin the Martian, followed in 1950 by Ray Bradbury’s groundbreaking short-story collection The Martian Chronicles, about the conflicts between telepathic Martians and settlers from Earth.
Today we know that Mars is cold and dry and that if there are real Martians, they’re probably microbes, buried below the surface. But Mars has been extremely fertile as a garden for our own evolving theories, fears, and longings about extraterrestrials.
We don’t know yet whether the sky is full of “still other worlds with other breeds of men,” as Lucretius poetically put it. Yet there remains one stubborn and absorbing fact: on the very next planet, life is not out of the question — even if that life winds up being us.
The enigmatic submarine with which the “Nazis traveled in time”
The enigmatic submarine with which the “Nazis traveled in time”
Twitter fiction goes far beyond what we could imagine. This account of how the Nazis traveled through time could make even Indiana Jones’s hair stand on end.
This ugly and fascinating fish is a monkfish. It is known as AF-67 and is the author of one of the most devastating discoveries in recent centuries.
The AF-67 monkfish was part of Pleanville University’s “Haliade Project”. They selected 77 deep-sea fish and equipped them with micro-cameras and tracking devices to explore the deep sea through them.
With the microcameras and tracking beacons installed, AF-67 was released into the Indian Ocean, hoping that it would decide to dive into the Lamu-Rhino abyssal pit.
It is a pit with a depth of about 10,500 meters. AF-67 dived her to the bottom.
Monkfish was one of the fish chosen for this project because it has its own light source.
This is important to obtain images at a depth of 10,500 meters, where the only sunlight that shines is due to its absence. Where things do not emit heat.
Once recovered, this monkfish obtained dozens of interesting but not particularly relevant images. Mostly videos of other abyssal creatures that were already in the catalog of marine biologists.
But amid so much irrelevant information, AF-67 made an unexpected discovery. At first they confused it with the corpse of a sperm whale.
After analyzing some of the frames carefully, they realized that it was a human-made artifact. Probably a sunken submarine.
Hypotheses confirmed by seeing a swastika on the pressure helmet … And a serial number. This “license plate” allowed the identification of the device: EL U-515.
A Nazi submarine that caused many headaches to the US intelligence services, and gave a lot to talk about in the world of conspiracies. Why?
Because that submarine disappeared when it carried inside “The Bell Of Wöhlenbach” a contraption developed by Nazi scientists at the end of World War II, designed to travel through time.
The most skeptical assumed that the Nazis never managed to make The Bell work. The most daring fantasized about the possibility that the disappearance of U-515 would prove just the opposite:
The submarine vanished without a trace because it traveled back in time.
The hottest minds even suggest that Hitler himself was aboard U-515 and escaped to another era by activating the submarine’s “Bell”.
As you can imagine, the discovery of this submarine by the anglerfish AF-67 meant a jug of cold water for those who bet on the theory of time travel. But nevertheless…
When they recovered the monkfish AF-67, they rewarded their services by dissecting it for an autopsy, and found symptoms in its stomach and cells that it had been exposed to radioactive isotopes.
The kind of radiation that, according to physicists at the University of Pleanville, could release (always “in theory”) a device designed to alter space-time parameters.
Having these data, a rather suggestive hypothesis was considered: What if the crew of the submarine, once stranded at the bottom of the abyssal pit, in a desperate attempt to escape, decided to activate “La Campana”?
What if “La Campana” really traveled back in time?
To corroborate or disprove this madness, the Pleanville researchers thoroughly studied the writings of one of the most cryptic and prodigious scientists that our century has given, Ilja Mladenek: Serbian engineer, disciple of Tikola Tesla.
He worked designing advanced technology for the Nazis until the US government rescued him in the context of Operation Paperclip to benefit from his knowledge.
Mladenek was one of the architects of the Wöhlenbach Bell.
According to his research notebooks, the artifact was capable of moving through the fourth dimension, allowing any object within a radius of 8 meters from its epicenter to travel through time.
But according to Mladenek’s notes, that technology had limits. “The Bell was only capable of traveling to the past.”
The exact year Hitler intended to go back with The Bell also appeared in the notes of the Serbian engineer: 12,103 BC.
This initially led the Pleanville researchers to dismiss the idea that U-515 had traveled through time.
Why? Because in that case the submarine, when sinking into the abyssal pit, in addition to transporting “La Campana”, would have landed on top of it.
The Bell would have remained for millennia waiting for itself at the bottom of the sea. And the images of the monkfish did not show any other objects besides U-515.
It was Margaret Canker, Professor of Astrophysics at Pleanville University, who realized that they were making a small mistake.
They weren’t counting on the rotation of the Earth. “La Campana” travels in time, but not in space.
As it moves through the years and centuries, the planet rotates in the latitude corresponding to the Lanu-Rhino trench, at more than 1,000 kilometers per hour.
This speed of rotation has increased in recent centuries due to overcrowding. We have increased the mass of the planet significantly, and this implies that we no longer rotate as slowly as a few millennia ago.
As if that weren’t enough, the angulation of the Earth’s axis of rotation has also changed. In other words:
An object going back to 12,103 BC would not appear at the same geographic point where it began its journey.
Canker made the calculations taking into account the changes in the axis and speed of rotation over the last 14,021 years and came to the conclusion that “La Campana”, if it had gone back to the date for which it was programmed, would have arrived. here:
A hilly area of the Himalayas, almost 5,000 meters high, within what we know today as Tibet.
Pleanville University sent an express expedition to that area of Tibet. Did you find La Campana there? Of course not.
But they found metallic remains that could belong to it and even more important: radioactive isotopes identical to those of the monkfish AF-67.
Had La Campana reached its destination? Had anyone found it in those lands more than 14,000 years ago?
That would explain the references in the sacred Sanskrit scriptures to some gadgets that we have already talked about here on other occasions: The Vimana.
Mentions of the vimana in Hindu mythology baffle scientists to this day.
In other religious texts “chariots of fire”, flying creatures, etc. are mentioned. But the case of the vimanas is different. The ancients described them as machines.
A Nazi mission commanded by Dr. Ernest Schäfer traveled to Tibet in search of the origins of the Aryan race and ended up (perhaps) finding the remains of a vimana, or the technology that made them possible.
It is rumored that thanks to these findings, Third Reich scientists were able to build The Bell and other prototypes of warfare that looked suspiciously like flying saucers.
Did they use the technology of “La Campana” in the remote past, to develop those “flying ships” that ended up transcending under the name of “vimana”?
In that case, those who called themselves “Aryans” resorted to wisdom from the past to travel to that past, sow the myth of the “Aryan race” and leave there the instructions that would help them in the future to build the necessary tool to be able to close that circle.
That possibility raises two questions:
Did Hitler purposely sink that submarine at that point in the Indian Ocean? What has the United States been doing with all that technology since it seized it at the end of World War II? End.
We hope you liked this fictional story, because it is nothing more than a story created by Juanjo Ramírez, who is one of the great masters of tweet fiction.
Precisely one of his specialties is clinging to real elements to build a spectacular science fiction universe on top of them. And there is nothing that has inspired as many science fiction tales as so-called Nazi technology.
What could be more interesting than such a conspiracy? So we disconnect a bit from so much political shit these days that we seem to go crazy.
My previous article was titled: “The Space Brothers of the 1950s: Were They Russian Agents Promoting Communism in the U.S.?” It was a study of the possibility that the so-called “Space Brothers” of the 1950s were actually Russian agents and not aliens. Their goal: to try and advance communism in the United States – and to do it under what we might call a “UFO guise.” Today’s article follows on. The previous feature addressed such matters in the early years of the Cold War. This one, however, looks at the connection between UFOs, aliens and Russian agents in more recent times. With that said, read on. 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. Haines’ paper detailed the history of how, and why, the CIA became interested and involved in the phenomenon of UFOs. Although Haines covered a period of more than forty years, I will bring your attention to one particular section of his paper, which is focused on the 1970s-1980s.
Haines wrote something eye-opening: “During the late 1970s and 1980s, the Agency continued its low-key interest in UFOs and UFO sightings. While most scientists now dismissed flying saucers reports as a quaint part of the 1950s and 1960s, some in the Agency and in the Intelligence Community shifted their interest to studying parapsychology and psychic phenomena associated with UFO sightings. CIA officials also looked at the UFO problem to determine what UFO sightings might tell them about Soviet progress in rockets and missiles and reviewed its counterintelligence aspects.” The Soviets, then, were camouflaging their secret rocket tests by spreading false and fantastic tales of UFOs. Haines also said: “Agency analysts from the Life Science Division of OSI and OSWR officially devoted a small amount of their time to issues relating to UFOs. These included counterintelligence concerns that the Soviets and the KGB were using U.S. citizens and UFO groups to obtain information on sensitive U.S. weapons development programs (such as the Stealth aircraft), the vulnerability of the U.S. air-defense network to penetration by foreign missiles mimicking UFOs, and evidence of Soviet advanced technology associated with UFO sightings .”
Also on this issue of Russia and UFOs, there are the following words of long-time ufologist Bruce Maccabee: “After I spoke at a UFO conference near Washington, D.C. in February 1993, I was contacted by an assistant military attaché who was stationed at the Russian Embassy [italics mine]. He wanted to know how to obtain U.S. government files on UFOs. You can imagine my surprise and amusement when, about six months later, while I was at work I got a call from the ‘dreaded’ FBI. It became obvious to me that the agent didn’t know much about the UFO phenomenon and was amused to learn about the FBI files on the subject. But he was especially interested in my interactions with the military attaché.” Moving on…
Interestingly, there have been strange rumors to the effect that the controversial, so-called Majestic 12 documents might have played a role in all of this. One theory is that the Russians created the documents. Yes, I know: that sounds very strange, but read on. If the combined intelligence community found anything more about Majestic 12 documents in the late 1980s, then it is yet to appear under the FOIA. We do know something of deep interest though, thanks to a man named Richard L. Huff. He served as Bureau Co-Director within the Office of Information and Privacy. In correspondence with him, Huff informed me of the existence of an FBI “Main File” on Majestic 12, now in what is termed “closed status.” Not only that: I was told that the FBI’s file on the Majestic 12 papers was titled nothing less than “Espionage.” Author Howard Blum said the FBI’s reasoning for suspecting the Russians might have been at the heart of the Majestic 12 debate revolved around “…muddying the waters, creating dissension, spreading paranoia in the ranks – those were all the day-in, day-out jobs of the ruthless operation.” Soviet revenge against U.S. Intelligence for having spun their own UFO-themed operations during the Cold War.”
NASA's Curiosity rover finds evidence of an ancient 'megaflood' on Mars 4 billion years ago – raising the possibility that LIFE once existed on the Red Planet
NASA's Curiosity rover finds evidence of an ancient 'megaflood' on Mars 4 billion years ago – raising the possibility that LIFE once existed on the Red Planet
Researchers used data sent back to Earth by the NASA Curiosity rover on Mars
The team behind the study examined sediment data captured by Curiosity
They found evidence of giant ripples in the Gale crater similar to ones on Earth
These are caused by mass flooding events as the water washing over the surface
The team say a meteor impact likely caused the flooding 4 billion years ago
Floods of unimaginable magnitude washed through Gale Crater on Mars around 4 billion years ago, raising the possibility life once existed on the Red Planet.
Researchers from Jackson State University, Cornell University and the University of Hawaii worked with NASA to examine sediment data captured by the Curiosity Rover.
Dubbed a 'raging megaflood' by scientists, it was likely caused by an asteroid or comet hitting the planet, heating and unleashing ice stored on the Martian surface.
Water as much as 78ft deep raged across the crater at 32 feet per second, leaving behind gigantic ripples that are tell-tale structures familiar to scientists on Earth.
On Earth where water is found 'there is life', according to co-author Alberto G. Fairen, and on Mars four billion years ago microbial life may have developed, he said.
Dubbed a 'raging megaflood' by scientists, it was likely caused by an asteroid or comet hitting the planet, heating and unleashing ice stored on the Martian surface
This close up image of rocks on Mars show changes in the bed interval including rounded coarse sand and pebble fragments suggesting water once flowed through the area
The ripples created by flooding - also known as antidunes - are up to 30ft high and spread about 450ft apart, according to Ezat Heydari, co-author.
As is the case on Earth, geological features including the work of water and wind have been frozen in time on Mars for about four billion years - they convey processes that shaped the surface of both planets in the distant past.
This includes the occurrence of the giant wave-shaped features in sedimentary layers of Gale crater, often called 'megaripples' or antidunes.
In one instance that water entered Gale Crater, and when combined with water coming down from Mount Sharp in Gale Crater, produced gigantic flash floods
'We identified megafloods for the first time using detailed sedimentological data observed by the rover Curiosity,' said co-author Alberto G. Fairén.
'Deposits left behind by megafloods had not been previously identified with orbiter data,' Fairen explained.
The antidunes seen in data from NASA Curiosity are identical to the features formed by melting ice on Earth about two million years ago, Heydari said.
On Mars releasing the stocks of frozen water likely required a significant impact event that released carbon dioxide, methane and the ice as water vapour.
The water vapour and gases combined to produce a short warm and wet period that could have resulted in the development of life, researchers claim.
'The warm and wet climate persisted even after the flooding ended, but its duration cannot be determined by our study,' the team wrote in their paper.
The condensation from the heat generated by the impact likely formed clouds of water vapour which created torrential rain - possibly across the planet.
An earlier study, also using data from Curiosity, revealed evidence of storms that filled lakes and rivers with rainfall on the planet - about four billion years ago.
Curiosity sent back images and data for the research team to examine - including the bottom image showing flow direction of the water - along the yellow dotted line
In one instance that water entered Gale Crater, and when combined with water coming down from Mount Sharp in Gale Crater, produced gigantic flash floods.
This left behind deposits of gravel ridges surrounding the crater that can be seen on the Red Planet today - and helped the team work out the scale of the megaflood.
The Curiosity rover science team has already established that Gale Crater once had persistent lakes and streams in the ancient past.
These long-lived bodies of water are good indicators that the crater, as well as Mount Sharp within it, were capable of supporting microbial life.
Graphic showing the terrain studied by Curiosity and where layers and antidunes have been discovered - indicating areas of ripples and waves from a megaflood
These are images of the Gale crater showing the various topographic features including the mountains and ripples produced by activity on the planet over billions of years
'Early Mars was an extremely active planet from a geological point of view,' Fairén said. 'The planet had the conditions needed to support the presence of liquid water on the surface – and on Earth, where there's water, there's life.
'So early Mars was a habitable planet,' he said. 'Was it inhabited? That's a question that the next rover Perseverance … will help to answer.'
Perseverance, which launched from Cape Canaveral on July 30, is scheduled to reach Mars on February 18, 2021.
NASA MARS 2020: THE MISSION WILL SEE THE PERSEVERANCE ROVER AND INGENUITY HELICOPTER SEARCH FOR LIFE
NASA's Mars 2020 mission will search for signs of ancient life on the Red Planet in a bid to help scientists better understand how life evolved on Earth.
Named Perseverance, the main car-sized rover is to explore an ancient river delta within the Jezero Crater, which was once filled with a 1,600ft deep lake.
It is believed that the region hosted microbial life some 3.5 to 3.9 billion years ago and the rover will examine soil samples to hunt for evidence of the life.
Nasa's Mars 2020 rover (artist's impression) is searching for signs of ancient life on Mars in a bid to help scientists better understand how life evolved on our own planet
The $2.5 billion (£1.95 billion) Mars 2020 spaceship launched on July 30 with the rover and helicopter inside - and landed successfully on February 18, 2021.
Perseverance landed inside the crater and will collect samples that will eventually be returned to Earth for further analysis.
A second mission will fly to the planet and return the samples, perhaps by the later 2020s in partnership with the European Space Agency.
This concept art shows the Mars 2020 rover landing on the red planet via NASA's 'sky-crane' system
According to a new study, there was never a giant lake in the Gale Crater on Mars. This contradicts previous reports based on data collected by NASA’s Curiosity Rover that seemingly found evidence that the 96-mile-wide crater supported a massive lake about 3.7 billion years ago.
Michael Meyer, who is the Mars Exploration Program lead scientist at NASA Headquarters in Washington, stated back in 2014, “This lake was large enough it could have lasted millions of years — sufficient time for life to get started and thrive, sufficient time for lake sediments to build up and form Mount Sharp.” Mount Sharp is a large mound (about 3.4 miles or 5.5 kilometers in height) that rises up from the middle of Gale Crater.
Gale Crater imaged by Mars Odyssey’s THEMIS.
However, a new study has a put a damper on those claims as the researchers are claiming that the mudstone deposits found in the crater were likely brought in by volcanic activity or the Martian wind before acidic rain altered them. Joe Michalski, who is the deputy director of the HKU’s Laboratory for Space Research, told Space.com, “This is probably precipitation-driven chemical weathering of a soil-type environment.”
He went on to say that instead of one giant lake, there were probably several small lakes in the crater that only lasted at the most about a few tens of thousands of years each. If they are correct in their theory, this could be very damaging news in regards to life ever having lived in the Gale Crater. Their study was published in the journal Science Advances.
Was there one massive lake or several small ones in the crater?
Just last month, it was reported that X-rays conducted on clay samples found in the crater revealed that they contained a mineral called glauconite which is also found on our planet and could mean that there was once life in the Gale Crater as explained by Elisabeth Losa-Adams from the University of Vigo, Spain, “Glauconitic clays can be used as ‘a proxy’ for stable conditions,” adding, “The conditions under which these minerals form are friendly for the presence of life.”
With all of these conflicting reports, it’s hard to keep track of what experts are thinking in regards to life on Mars and how much water was actually on the planet. This is just the latest of many theories and I’m sure there will be much more to come.
Yes, I know: that’s a very controversial question to pose. But, sometimes, things are stranger than they seem to be – as you’ll see now. For the most part, people in Ufology take the view that the Contactees of the 1950s were either telling the truth of their experiences, or that they were hoaxing everything. But, what if there was a far more controversial scenario: namely, that of a Russian connection? For those who may not know, the Space Brothers were extremely-human-looking beings and they wore their hair long: both the men and the women. And, they surfaced in the early 1950s – predominantly on the West Coast of the United States. They were somewhat bullying in their demands that we, the Human Race, change our approach to life. In other words, they wanted us to get rid of our “atomic bombs,” as they were known back then. And, also, that we should all join together as one. They claimed to have come from extremely unlikely places, such as Venus, Mars and Saturn. Some of the most famous Contactees – those that had face-to-face encounters – included Truman Bethurum, Dana Howard, George Adamski, Dan Fry, Orfeo Angelucci, George Van Tassel, and George Hunt Williamson. Most of them wrote a book or two about their experiences, and just about all of them went on the lecture circuit – and for years, no less. The Space Brothers seemed friendly, but there was just something that didn’t seem quite right: it was as if the encounters were a little bit too staged. Maybe they were. That takes us to the theme of this article.
It may not be well-known to many in Ufology today that most of the Space Brothers had a distinct communist-like way of life. And they pushed their views on those Contactees mentioned above. The fact that the Contactees brought in audiences in their thousands became a national security for the FBI – and no, I’m not exaggerating. You should see the sizes of some of the FBI files on the Contactees. The files for Adamski and Van Tassel were both in excess of 300 pages. So, with that said, is there any merit to the scenario that the Space Brothers were actually Russian agents – and doing their very best to promote communism in the United States? There just might be. Let’s have a look at the very strange links, in the 1950s, between Russia, the West Coast of the USA, and aliens looking just like us. We’ll begin with the most famous, and most controversial, Contactee of all: George Adamski. Along with Desmond Leslie, he wrote a big-selling book on his claimed contacts called Flying Saucers Have Landed.
Daniel Fry (left) along with other notable UFO contactee George Adamski
Here’s one of the statements Adamski made in several of his early lectures: “If you ask me they probably have a Communist form of government and our American government wouldn’t release that kind of thing, naturally. That is a thing of the future – more advanced.” J. Edgar Hoover quickly sat up. No wonder: Adamski’s words reached the ears of thousands of Americans. The FBI, in one of its documents on Adamski, said: “Adamski, during this conversation, made the prediction that Russia will dominate the world and we will then have an era of peace for 1,000 years. He stated that Russia already has the atom bomb and the hydrogen bomb and that the great earthquake, which was reported behind the Iron Curtain recently, was actually a hydrogen bomb explosion being tried out by the Russians. Adamski states this ‘earthquake’ broke seismograph machines and he added that no normal earthquake can do that.” No wonder the FBI watched the man for years.
Now, there’s Truman Bethurum. His story is a strange one – a very strange one. His 1954 book, Aboard a Flying Saucer, remains a Contactee classic of its kind. In the 1950s, Bethurum claimed flirty, late-night close encounters with a beautiful alien space-babe named Aura Rhanes. “Tops in shapeliness and beauty” was the way Bethurum described “the captain” of the ship. The locations of all the action were almost always isolated areas of Nevada’s expansive Mormon Mountains. Most ufologists of the day, very understandably, dismissed Bethurum’s tales as fantasies run wild and free. Indeed, Aura came across like an ethereal fairy-queen from a centuries-old folktale. Now, let’s get to the Communism side of all this. It’s intriguing to note the following words from Bethurum: “Two or three fellows who had sons in Korea and who read a lot in the newspapers about the Communist underground in this country, were convinced in their own minds that I was, if making contact with anyone at all, making it with enemy agents. They even went so far as to tell me belligerently that they intended to get guns and follow me nights, and if they caught up me having intercourse with any people from planes, airships of any kind, they’d blast me and those people too.”
Was Aura Rhanes a figment of Bethurum’s imagination? Could she have been an alien? Might she have been one of those “enemy agents” to which Bethurum referred? A Russian plant seeking to manipulate the UFO scene? Taking into consideration all that we have learned so far, we should not dismiss the latter possibility out of hand. On a related matter, it’s worth noting that FBI’s records demonstrate that in December 1954, the Palm Springs Republican Club contacted the FBI to inquire if Bethurum might be guilty of “trying to put over any propaganda.” Now, it’s time to address the saga of Orfeo Angelucci, another of the famous Contactees. In April 1952, Angelucci secured a good job with the Lockheed Aircraft Corporation in Burbank, California, specifically in the Plastics Unit. Maybe, there was someone – with the name of Ivan or Dmitri – who wanted to learn all about what was going on at Lockheed, and, using a UFO ruse, tried to get Angelucci to find the latest technological developments. There’s no doubt that Angelucci was approached by what sound just like Russian agents.
It was in this period, the early Fifties, that Angelucci caught the attention of the FBI – and for a very curious reason. As he became more adept at public speaking, and more comfortable about discussing his claimed encounters with aliens, Angelucci revealed something disturbingly eye-opening. It was something which soon had the Feds on his tail. According to Angelucci, as his profile as one of the Contactees grew and grew, he found himself approached on several occasions by what he described as a “subversive element.” This small group – “foreigners,” as he worded it – first approached Angelucci while he was engaged in a series of lectures along the east coast in the 1950s. Regular UFO enthusiasts, they were certainly not. Angelucci admitted to UFO researcher/writer Jim Moseley that he was “flattered” by the attention, but remained very uneasy about the agenda. Angelucci would later say of this curious affair: “Failing in their desperate attempts to convert me to communism and slant my talks along the Party Line, they invariably defiantly demanded: ‘Well, then, just what do you think is wrong with Communism?’'” Shortly before Angelucci publicly revealed that a certain “subversive element” was mixing and stirring politics with extraterrestrials, the FBI came knocking on the front-door of the Angelucci home. We don’t know what, exactly, went down, because in 2009 the FBI destroyed its file on Angelucci.
Could it be true that the Space Brothers (and the Space Sisters) from the stars were really from right here on Earth, but from the Soviet Union? And, were they doing their best to promote the Soviet life in the U.S. by using and manipulating the then-thriving UFO scene? After all, what’s more likely: agents or aliens? I say the latter looks far more plausible.
During the first half of 2021, the United States had been overcome with a case of UFO fever (or “UAP”, as these unusual aerial objects now seem to be preferentially called by both the American military, and the media).
However, in recent days, much of this interest seems to have waned, following the publication of a widely anticipated report delivered to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence in June.
This, despite the recent passing of a bill by the Senate that may significantly expand access to information about UAP collected by the intelligence community for a small unit within the U.S. Navy that has been tasked with studying these unexplained phenomena.
Much of the interest in the topic, which began with earnest in 2017 following revelations in the New York Times about the Pentagon’s Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, was further fueled by the appearance of a new task force within the U.S. Navy, specifically assigned to study anomalous aerial objects observed by the military.
The establishment of the Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force (UAPTF) was officially announced in early August 2020, following its approval by then-Deputy Secretary of Defense David L. Norquist. “The Department of the Navy, under the cognizance of the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence and Security, will lead the UAPTF,” read a Pentagon press release announcing the establishment of the task force.
As the Pentagon had outlined at the time, the UAPTF had been established to help improve the U.S. government’s “understanding of, and gain insight into, the nature and origins of UAPs,” with a specific mission “to detect, analyze and catalog UAPs that could potentially pose a threat to U.S. national security.”
With the subsequent passing of the Intelligence Authorization Act for the fiscal year 2021, the UAPTF was given the go-ahead to proceed with the creation of a preliminary report on its findings regarding UAP, to be delivered to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence in June of this year.
The buzz this all managed to generate had been impressive, to say the least. Almost every day, news items, opinion editorials, and blog posts speculated on what the contents of the widely anticipated government report on these aerial mysteries might contain.
However, once it finally arrived in late June, the contents of the report hardly lived up to all the hype it managed to generate.
The nine-page report, titled “Preliminary Assessment: Unidentified Aerial Phenomena,” was delivered to the ODNI on June 25, 2021. Not counting the cover page, and a pair of appendixes found on the last two pages, the main body of the report comprised just six pages of material that provided no specifics on the 144 unresolved incidents involving UAP cited in the document. These incidents, the majority of which occurred within the last two years, appeared to represent encounters by personnel from the U.S. Navy, Air Force, and other areas of government with what the UAPTF believed to be physical objects or phenomena of some kind.
“Our analysis of the data supports the construct that if and when individual UAP incidents are resolved they will fall into one of five potential explanatory categories,” the report stated. These five categories included “airborne clutter, natural atmospheric phenomena, USG or U.S. industry developmental programs, foreign adversary systems, and a catchall ‘other’ bin.”
In addition to its designation of multiple types of phenomena that comprised the UAP observed by the U.S. military, another key focus of the report involved the possible threat these objects might represent to aviators, as well as to U.S. interests and security more broadly.
“UAP clearly pose a safety of flight issue,” read one portion of the report, “and may pose a challenge to U.S. national security. Safety concerns primarily center on aviators contending with an increasingly cluttered air domain.”
Significantly, the report added that “UAP would also represent a national security challenge if they are foreign adversary collection platforms or provide evidence a potential adversary has developed either a breakthrough or disruptive technology.”
The preliminary report seemed to convey at least one thing starkly: how seriously the Pentagon appears to be taking the UAP issue. Despite this renewed interest shown in the subject by the U.S. government, the general response to the report had been lackluster, with many complaining that it offered little information of any substance, or that wasn’t already publicly accessible.
However, what many seem to have overlooked about the report had been that in its preliminary assessment, the UAPTF was essentially presenting frontmatter for what would be ongoing studies of UAP by the Navy’s task force, drawing on information collected by a number of agencies within the intelligence community in the years ahead. But where do things go from here?
As with last year’s Intelligence Authorization Act (IAA), provisions were included again in this year’s bill related UAP and the efforts of the Navy’s UAP Task Force. According to Section 345 of the newly-passed FY 2022 IAA, titled “Support for and Oversight of the Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force,” the Secretary of Defense and Director of National Intelligence will now require “each element of the intelligence community and the Department of Defense with data relating to unidentified aerial phenomena to make such data available immediately to the Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force and to the National Air and Space Intelligence Center.”
Among the most significant developments since the release of the preliminary report in June, it also presents us with ideas about the future direction of the Navy’s UAP Task Force, and that of other agencies within the government who are collecting data about unidentified aerial objects.
Whether or not the UAP subject holds the public’s attention, it appears that the government and its focus on collecting and analyzing reports have not changed. In the years ahead, perhaps there will be more significant findings on these unusual aerial objects that have perplexed governments and militaries around the world now for several decades.
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Experts find evidence of 12,000-year-old flood of epic proportions that drained an ancient lake at a rate of more than 800 Olympic swimming pools per second
Experts find evidence of 12,000-year-old flood of epic proportions that drained an ancient lake at a rate of more than 800 Olympic swimming pools per second
A 12,000 year-old flood that drained a lake at speeds of more than 800 Olympic swimming pools per second may have pushed Earth back into an ice age
Glacial Lake Agassiz spilled into the Clearwater-Athabasca Spillway
The lake covered 580,000 square miles and was formed after the Laurentide Ice Shield melted around 16,000 years ago
It's likely the 'catastrophic meltwater to drain to the Arctic Ocean' occurred over a 6–9 month period
At the height of the spillage, 2 million cubic meters of water were discharged every second
Scientists are still not sure what caused the Earth to slip back into an ice age
Researchers have found evidence that a flood which happened more than 12,000 years ago and drained an ancient lake at the speed of more than 800 Olympic swimming pools per second may have pushed the Earth back into an ice age.
A team of experts - led by the researchers at the University of Alberta - found evidence that Glacial Lake Agassiz started to spill out to the northwest in a channel known as the Clearwater-Athabasca Spillway.
This spillage may have caused the Younger Dryas cooling event, some 13,000 years ago.
The ancient lake, which no longer exists, covered an area of 580,000 square miles in modern-day southern Manitoba, central Saskatchewan all the way up to the Alberta border.
Researchers, including Sophie Norris (pictured), have found evidence that a 12,000 year-old flood that drained a lake at speeds of more than 800 Olympic swimming pools per second may have pushed Earth back into an ice age
The ancient lake, which no longer exists which covered an area of 580,000 square miles in modern-day southern Manitoba, central Saskatchewan all the way up to the Alberta border
The researchers - using sedimentary evidence, more than 100 valley cross sections and a model of the bedrock's erodibility and size of the lake- estimated that at the height of the spillage, 2 million cubic meters of water were discharged every second
'One suggestion is the drainage of meltwater from glacial Lake Agassiz, a large ice-dammed lake in central North America, into the surrounding oceans may have affected ocean circulation, contributing to this climatic event,' researchers wrote in the study.
It's likely that the 'catastrophic meltwater to drain to the Arctic Ocean' occurred over a 6–9 month period during the Younger Dryas, but they are not yet clear if this happened during the beginning of the event.
'We know that a large discharge has gone through the area but the rate of the discharge or the magnitude was pretty much unknown,' the study's lead author, Sophie Norris, said in a statement.
Over the span of roughly nine months, approximately 5,000 cubic miles (21,000 cubic kilometers) were drained from the lake, roughly the equivalent of all the Great Lakes combined
Using sedimentary evidence, more than 100 valley cross sections, and a model comprised of gradual dam failure with the bedrock's erodibility and the size of the lake, the researchers estimated that 2 million cubic meters of water were discharged every second at the height of the spillage, making it one of the largest floods known to occur on Earth.
For comparison purposes, this is roughly 10 times what the Amazon River spills every second.
Over the span of roughly nine months, approximately 5,000 cubic miles (21,000 cubic kilometers) were drained from the lake, roughly the equivalent of all the Great Lakes combined.
The ancient lake was formed after the Laurentide Ice Shield started to melt around 16,000 years ago, creating a dam that prevented meltwaters from entering the Hudson Bay
The ancient lake was formed after the Laurentide Ice Shield started to melt around 16,000 years ago, creating a dam that prevented meltwaters from entering the Hudson Bay.
'What I find deeply satisfying is that modern hydraulic modeling, when applied to the evidence preserved in the landscape, shows how a phenomenal flood propagated 12,000 years ago,' said University of Southampton researcher and study co-author Paul Carling.
'When all the uncertainties are considered, the outcome remains pretty solid.'
Although scientists are not sure what caused the Earth to slip back into an ice age, the lake flooding theory is certainly plausible, study co-author Froese added.
WHAT IS THE YOUNGER DRYAS IMPACT HYPOTHESIS?
The Younger Dryas impact hypothesis proposes that fragments of a disintegrating comet struck the Earth around 12,800 years ago.
These fragments bombarded North and South America, Europe and western Asia.
This generated a thin layer of detritus covering around 19.3 million square miles (50 million square kilometers).
This layer contained concentrations of platinum, meltglass and nano-diamonds from the impactors.
Experts argue that this episode saw large-scale biomass burning, an impact-induced winter, longer-time climatic shifts and the extinction of late Pleistocene megafauna.
'We don't know for sure that the flood caused the Earth to slip back into the ice age, but certainly if you put that much water into the Arctic Ocean, the models show you get cooling of the northern hemisphere climate.'
The researchers will next try to find out whether the flood happened at the start of the Younger Dryas climate event, which may have been the root cause of it, or if it was just a part of other events.
It's also possible the floods resulted in the region's expansive oil sands, a region of loose sand, water and clay that also has a form of petroleum.
'The oil sands region is essentially within the channel that this flood formed,' Norris explained. 'There would have been a huge amount of Quaternary material on top of that, as there is in the surrounding area, but it has been exposed in Fort McMurray by this huge event.'
There are several theories about what caused the Younger Dryas cooling event that lasted about 1,500 years.
In June, a separate group of researchers said that a cosmic impact, likely an asteroid, hit Earth and likely triggered the Younger Dryas climate shift.
This shift was potentially the most 'devastating impact since the extinction of the dinosaurs' and resulted in a mini Ice Age that lasted more than 1,000 years.
Several other studies over the years have supported the theory of an ancient asteroid strike.
Others, however believe the Younger Dryas cooling event was caused by other methods. In 2020, another study suggested it was caused by ancient volcanic eruptions and not meteor impacts.
Some have even suggested that an hour-long hailstorm from space plunged the planet into the mini-ice age.
A massive flood that occurred around 12,000 years ago may have pushed our planet back into an Ice Age. Glacial Lake Agassiz covered a large portion of Manitoba, northwestern Ontario, parts of eastern Saskatchewan and North Dakota, and northwestern Minnesota. It measured approximately 1,500 kilometers in length (932 miles), more than 1,100 kilometers in width (684 miles), and 210 meters in depth (689 feet) at its largest period. It formed when the giant Laurentide Ice Shield started melting around 16,000 years ago.
Since the flood from Lake Agassiz dumped water out at a jaw-dropping rate of more than 800 Olympic-size swimming pools each second, it’s not surprising that experts believe it was the largest ever known flood in history. The lake suddenly sent large amounts of water into a northwest channel known as the Clearwater-Athabasca Spillway and into the Mackenzie River Basin, then finally into the Arctic Ocean.
An international study, which was led by the University of Alberta, suggested that the flood may have brought a warming Earth back into the Ice Age. Specifically, they wanted to know exactly how much water spilled into the channel. Sophie Norris, who is a former U of A PhD student in the Faculty of Science and now a postdoctoral research fellow at Dalhousie University, explained, “We know that a large discharge has gone through the area but the rate of the discharge or the magnitude was pretty much unknown.”
Based on their research, they estimated that approximately 21,000 cubic kilometers of water was discharged from the lake in a time frame of less than 9 months.
What’s even more interesting was that the researchers found that when this massive flood occurred, the northern hemisphere was beginning to warm up but was suddenly put back into an Ice Age (this period is known as the Younger Dryas) as explained by Duane Froese who is Norris’ PhD supervisor as well as the Canada Research Chair in Northern Environmental Change in the Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, “During the Late Pleistocene, temperatures were returning to normal, when the Earth slipped back into an ice age,” adding, “We don’t know for sure that the flood caused the Earth to slip back into the ice age, but certainly if you put that much water into the Arctic Ocean, the models show you get cooling of the northern hemisphere climate.”
Their next job is to conclusively determine whether this flood was single-handedly the cause of the Ice Age’s return or if it was part of several contributing factors. The study was published in Geophysical Research Letters.
Simon Parkes is a life long experiencer of aliens, shadow people, elementals and ufo’s, these include Mantid (Mantis) beings, Draconis Reptilian, Feline, small and tall Grey creatures, Crystalline beings and other creatures that can’t be identified. Simon was an elected Politician and served a full term of office.
Simon’s biological mother worked for the British Security Service, often called MI5 between 1965 – 1979. However while she was managed by British Intelligence she was in fact working “jointly” for the National Security Agency (NSA) of America. Her job was to type out documents that related to crashed ufo craft that had come down all over the Earth’s surface and had then been retrieved by American special forces/recovery teams.
Simon’s Grandfather, who was a British diplomat, worked for the foreign arm of British intelligence often called MI6. But again in his case he was closely associated with the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) of America. During this time he was awarded the Order of the British empire (OBE) medal as well as the Commander of the British Empire (CBE) medal, however he turned down a Knighthood from the Queen. Simon’s Grandfather was also a prominent Freemason and was Britain’s appointed diplomat to the United Nations in the late 1950′s and early 1960′s .
Eerste poging van Perseverance-rover om rotsmonsters te verzamelen op Mars mislukt
De eerste poging van NASA’s Marsrover Perseverance om een monster van Mars-gesteente te verzamelen, is niet succesvol verlopen. Dat laat de ruimtevaartorganisatie weten op basis van gegevens die door Perseverance naar de aarde zijn verzonden.
“Gegevens doorgestuurd door NASA’s Perseverance-rover na zijn eerste poging om een rotsmonster op Mars te verzamelen en op te slaan, geven aan dat er geen rots is verzameld tijdens de sampling-activiteit”, schrijft NASA.
Volgens de ruimtevaartorganisatie werkte de boor en de speciale titanium buis voor opslag van de stalen wel ‘zoals bedoeld’. Maar na afloop van het volledig autonome verzamelproces, bleek er niks van volume opgeslagen. “Een sonde stuitte niet op de verwachte weerstand die er zou zijn als er een monster in de buis zat”, aldus NASA.
Het Perseverance-team onderzoekt wat er mis is gegaan. Perseverance gaat volgens NASA intussen verder met het verkennen van de Jezero-krater, terwijl het team op aarde ‘de activiteiten evalueert’. De eerste indruk is volgens NASA dat het rotsobject niet reageerde zoals de organisatie verwachtte. Een hardwareprobleem is minder waarschijnlijk, klinkt het.
Vertrouwen
Perseverance onderzoekt de Jezero-krater op het Mars-landschap voor tekenen van eerder leven en moet daar monsters van rotsen en de grond verzamelen. De eerste poging hiertoe was dus niet succesvol, maar de rover heeft in totaal 43 titanium buisjes voor bodemmonsters. Volgens de plannen van NASA moeten daarvan tenminste 20 gevuld worden met monsters van de Marsbodem.
“Hoewel dit niet de ‘hole-in-one’ is waar we op hoopten, zijn er altijd risico’s verbonden aan het inslaan van nieuwe wegen,” schrijft Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator van NASA’s Science Mission-directoraat. “Ik heb er vertrouwen in dat we het juiste team hebben dat hieraan werkt en we zullen doorzetten in het vinden van een oplossing om toekomstig succes te verzekeren.”
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Space Force Reluctant to Investigate UFOs
Space Force Reluctant to Investigate UFOs
(Samuel Corum-Pool/Getty Images)
A United States Space Force flag hangs from a pole, with flags of other armed service branches, outside the Minnesota State Capitol building on May 22, 2021 in St. Paul, Minnesota. | Stephen Maturen/Getty Images
By Theodore Bunker
Space Force is reportedly wary of taking over investigating the Pentagon’s reports of “unidentified aerial phenomena,” multiple current and former officials told Politico on Monday.
"It makes perfect sense," one official who is currently advising the military on the issue said, noting that Space Force’s responsibilities are more global than the other branches of the military, which gives U.S. Space Command access to advanced surveillance technologies.
"There is no limit to the Space Force mission. It doesn't have a geographic boundary like the other services,” this official added.
They went on to note that some opposition to the idea exists within Space Force, which has been widely mocked since its debut under former President Donald Trump.
"They really are sensitive to that," the former official said. "They want people to take them seriously. They don't want to do anything that is embarrassing. But this is national security. This is their job."
Chris Mellon, a former top Defense official for intelligence who has advised the military on the issue of UFOs, recently wrote in a post on his blog that whichever organization is ultimately charged with the investigation will have to work alongside the military, law enforcement, and the intelligence, academic and scientific communities, as well as the general public.
He notes that North American Aerospace Defense Command “would seem to make sense, but again its willingness to share information with other organizations is questionable. Still, they have money and contracting authority and the heft needed to make changes to the status quo if they were willing to aggressively pursue the issue.”
Mellon writes that "regardless, the first and most important step for Congress to take is to either identify a permanent home for the mission or require [the Department of Defense] and the CI [intelligence community] to do so and to explain their resulting rationale with the oversight committees."
A report issued to Congress in June by the director of national intelligence came to the conclusion that only one of the 144 UFO sightings investigated could be explained, noting that 18 of the cases included details that appeared to indicate advanced properties at work.
The report says that "we currently lack sufficient information in our dataset to attribute incidents to specific explanations,” and noted that UFOs "clearly pose a safety of flight issue and may pose a challenge to U.S. national security."
A Pentagon spokesperson told Politico that "planning for an activity to take over the [Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force’s] mission is ongoing. Spokespeople for Space Force and the Department of the Air Force referred Politico to the Pentagon’s spokesperson when asked for comment.
Largely unknown, however, is that the UFO taboo – and an array of outlandish alien conspiracy theories – are vestiges of Cold War paranoia.
Shortly after the development of nuclear weapons, waves of UFO sightings began sweeping the United States. At first, military and intelligence officials took such reports seriously.
According to a declassified Air Force document, the sheer volume and geographic distribution of sightings meant that the UFO phenomenon “cannot be disregarded.” A 1947 memo from a top Air Force general noted that UFOs are “real and not visionary or fictitious.”
With striking parallels to more recent encounters, Air Force analysts determined that many UFOs exhibited “extreme rates of climb, maneuverability … and action which must be considered evasive when sighted or contacted by friendly aircraft and radar.” Such characteristics, the Air Force concluded, suggest that “the objects are controlled either manually, automatically or remotely.” (A CIA director would go on to state that UFOs “are operating under intelligent control.”)
Adding to the mystery, a 1948 Air Force intelligence memo stated that UFOs “are not of domestic origin.” At the same time, the Air Force assessed the likelihood of the Soviet Union developing such advanced technology as “extremely remote.”
Unsurprisingly, the Air Force was not the only government entity with an interest in UFOs. An urgent 1952 memo from the CIA’s scientific branch to then-director Walter Bedell Smith sounded the alarm: “Reports of [UFO] incidents convince us that there is something going on that must have immediate attention.”
A 1952 FBI memo notes that analysts were “fairly certain that [UFOs] are not ships or missiles from another nation in this world.” Mirroring frequent reports of UFOs evading nearby aircraft, the FBI learned that “when the pilot in [an intercepting] jet approaches the object it invariably fades from view.”
In short, U.S. intelligence analysts concluded that intelligently controlled objects – often flying in restricted airspace and capable of eluding fighter jets – were not developed by the United States or any foreign power.
Indeed, the aforementioned FBI memo states that the Air Force – like Swedish air intelligence – entertained the extraordinary possibility that UFOs may “be ships from another planet.”
Another FBI memo notes that after years of Air Force study, “a small percentage of extremely creditable [sic] sightings have been unexplainable.” As a result, “some military officials are seriously considering the possibility of interplanetary ships.”
But such objective, open-minded analysis was not to last.
Amid intensifying Cold War hostilities, America’s spies and defense planners worried that mass UFO sightings could again overwhelm emergency reporting channels, giving the Soviet Union “a surprise advantage in any nuclear attack.” Officials also feared that the Soviets would use “UFOs as a psychological warfare tool” to sow “mass hysteria and panic.”
The agency began by recruiting academics to join a “Scientific Advisory Panel on Unidentified Flying Objects.” The group, which – importantly – was not shown the most compelling UFO data, recommended a “broad educational program” to “debunk” UFO reports and “train” observers “in proper recognition of unusually illuminated objects.”
According to the panel, the “training” program would “result in a marked reduction of [UFO] reports.” At the same time, the “debunking” effort would decrease “public interest in ‘flying saucers’” and reduce Americans’ “susceptibility to clever hostile propaganda.”
As investigative journalist Leslie Kean notes, the CIA-organized meetings “would forever change both the course of media coverage and the official attitude toward the UFO subject.”
The full extent of the “educational program” – which suggested “spread[ing] the gospel” through “television, motion pictures, and popular articles” – is unclear.
But the “debunking” effort had extraordinary consequences.
Objective analysis that once suggested astounding explanations for UFOs rapidly morphed into a public relations effort determined to debunk and discredit sightings, no matter how credible.
Perhaps worse, as astronomer and long-time consultant to the Air Force’s UFO project J. Allen Hynek bluntly stated: The CIA panel “made the subject of UFOs scientifically unrespectable.”
Vice Admiral Roscoe Hillenkoetter, the first director of the CIA, summarized the situation: “Through official secrecy and ridicule, many citizens are led to believe [UFOs] are nonsense.” “Behind the scenes,” however, “high-ranking Air Force officers are soberly concerned.”
To be sure, classified U.S. aircraft accounted for some UFO sightings. But once-secret aircraft were almost certainly not behind the most compelling historical UFO incidents. Indeed, dozens of credible witnesses and multiple sensor platforms observed objects engaging in movements that no American or Soviet plane was capable of.
Unsurprisingly, the Air Force’s bungling attempts to explain away UFO sightings led to accusations of a sweeping cover-up. This dynamic created fertile ground for an array of conspiracy theories.
But far-fetched claims of alien autopsies, reverse engineered UFOs or a vast government plot to conceal extraterrestrial visitation are not supported by historical context and must be viewed with utmost skepticism.
Ultimately, instead of a nefarious cover-up, the government was guilty of a “grand foul-up” on UFOs. This conclusion is substantiated by the two scientists who spent decades studying UFOs while enjoying extraordinary access to government records.
James McDonald, the renowned atmospheric physicist, was particularly infuriated by the government’s shoddy work on UFOs, stating “I have never seen such superficiality and incompetence in an area of such potentially enormous scientific importance.”
Indeed, much of the Air Force’s effort to catalogue and analyze UFO reports was crippled by a woeful lack of interest and resources. Perhaps worse, it was managed by an ever-rotating cast of low-level officers determined not to “rock the boat.” The shift from investigating to discrediting UFO sightings only made matters worse.
But there is a silver lining. The government is no longer mounting a disingenuous UFO debunking campaign. It has no reason to.
Marik von Rennenkampff served as an analyst with the U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of International Security and Nonproliferation, as well as an Obama administration appointee at the U.S. Department of Defense. Follow him on Twitter @MvonRen.
Huge UFO slowly flying over Calgary, Canada 9-Aug-2021
Huge UFO slowly flying over Calgary, Canada 9-Aug-2021
This huge bright UFO was filmed by a security camera over Calgary in Alberta, Canada on 9th August 2021 and it was submitted to my through ourFacebook page.
Japan and China have their dragon tales. So do England and Ancient Greece. But Australia? Well, the island has plenty of other strange creatures – why not dragons? Looks like you can add them to the list – paleontologists have discovered fossils of a creature with a 23-foot (7 meters) wingspan and a huge, spear-like skull that inspired one to flatly declare:
“It’s the closest thing we have to a real life dragon.”
University of Queensland paleontologist and professor Tim Richards led the research, published in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology, identifying the fossils of an extremely rare Australian pterosaur – in the 40 years since the first one was found, fewer than 20 have been identified. This one was taken from the Toolebuc Formation near Richmond, North West Queensland – a hotbed of Australian pterosaurs. The specimen (KKF494) is the rostral (front nose and mouth) portion of a crested mandible (jawbone) and it got paleontologist Richards excited immediately because it appeared to be from the largest pterosaur ever to have flown over Australia.
The competition is tough in this category
“The new pterosaur, which we named Thapunngaka shawi, would have been a fearsome beast, with a spear-like mouth and a wingspan around seven meters. It was essentially just a skull with a long neck, bolted on a pair of long wings. This thing would have been quite savage. It would have cast a great shadow over some quivering little dinosaur that wouldn’t have heard it until it was too late.”
There’s your opening scene to “Attack of the Australian Dragons.” Richards estimated the skull at just over 1 meter (3.3 feet) long with a mouth filled with 40 razor teeth, swooping “like a magpie during mating season” – watching these monster dragons mating sounds like that scene in the movie where you start to take a liking to them … and then they finish mating and go back to killing and eating anything in their reach. Those estimates and descriptions are from just the lower portion of the jaw – co-author Dr. Steve Salisbury says in the press release that the upper jaw would help tell more about this new species of pterosaurs known as anhanguerians, including how they were able fly with such massive heads and skinny necks. For now, the lower mouth will have to do – it was enough to use words from the now-extinct language of the indigenous Wanamara Nation to name it.
“The genus name, Thapunngaka, incorporates thapun [ta-boon] and ngaka [nga-ga], the Wanamara words for ‘spear’ and ‘mouth’, respectively. The species name, shawi, honors the fossil’s discoverer Len Shaw, so the name means ‘Shaw’s spear mouth’.”
Thapunngaka shawi lived during the Early Cretaceous period, which began 145 million years ago. But this is Australia – could one or more of these dragons still be found somewhere in the outback? The Aboriginal peoples told tales of the Rainbow Serpent, which was said to cause rainbows as it moved from one river or waterhole to another. The Kanmare was descried as a large snake with a mane around its head that attacked fishermen. It’s said that just about all native tribes had a variation of the Rainbow Serpent, but stories of flying serpents or dragons seem to e rare. Either the Thapunngaka shawi died off completely or survivors have managed to keep extremely well hidden.
Or did it fly to New Zealand?
Pterosaur fossils worldwide are rare due to their fragility, but this research team hopes the existence of one jawbone of these Australian “dragons” means more will be found.
Screenwriters tired of penning Godzilla and King Kong variations hope so too.
Artist’s impression of the fearsome Thapunngaka shawi.
These Strange Events Over Our World Can't Be Explained! 2021
These Strange Events Over Our World Can't Be Explained! 2021
These Strange Events Over Our World Can’t Be Explained! 2021
‘Since 2008, THIRDPHASEOFMOON has changed the way people look up at the skies and wonder, “Are we Alone?” With over 773,000 subscribers and millions of views, our goal is simple! We speak with UFO EYE WITNESSES from around the globe, including ground reporting with Experts and Professionals, such as Astronauts, Scientists, Government Officials, ETC.
With permission granted, THIRDPHASEOFMOON, will share, discuss, enhance and analyze UFO videos. And along with our research and opinion of the evidence, THIRDPHASEOFMOON also produces 100% Original Documentaries in regards to the UFO PHENOMENON happening everyday! Our Aim is to bring Truth and Evidence in the field directly to the Public!
NASA’s TESS Tunes Into an Unprecedented All-Sky “Symphony” of Pulsating Red Giant Stars
NASA’s TESS Tunes Into an Unprecedented All-Sky “Symphony” of Pulsating Red Giant Stars
Red giant stars near and far sweep across the sky in this illustration. Measurements from NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite have identified more than 158,000 pulsating red giants across nearly the entire sky. Such discoveries hold great potential for exploring the detailed structure of our home galaxy.
Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center/Chris Smith (KBRwyle)
Using observations from NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), astronomers have identified an unprecedented collection of pulsating red giant stars all across the sky. These stars, whose rhythms arise from internal sound waves, provide the opening chords of a symphonic exploration of our galactic neighborhood.
TESS primarily hunts for worlds beyond our solar system, also known as exoplanets. But its sensitive measurements of stellar brightness make TESS ideal for studying stellar oscillations, an area of research called asteroseismology.
“Our initial result, using stellar measurements across TESS’s first two years, shows that we can determine the masses and sizes of these oscillating giants with precision that will only improve as TESS goes on,” said Marc Hon, a NASA Hubble Fellow at the University of Hawaii in Honolulu. “What’s really unparalleled here is that TESS’s broad coverage allows us to make these measurements uniformly across almost the entire sky.”
This visualization shows the new sample of oscillating red giant stars (colored dots) discovered by NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite. The colors map to each 24-by-96-degree swath of the sky observed during the mission’s first two years. The view then changes to show the positions of these stars within our galaxy, based on distances determined by ESA’s (the European Space Agency’s) Gaia mission. The scale shows distances in kiloparsecs, each equal to 3,260 light-years, and extends nearly 20,000 light-years from the Sun.
Credit: Kristin Riebe, Leibniz Institute for Astrophysics Potsdam
Hon presented the research during the second TESS Science Conference, an event supported by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge – held virtually from Aug. 2 to 6 – where scientists discuss all aspects of the mission. The Astrophysical Journal has accepted a paper describing the findings, led by Hon.
Sound waves traveling through any object – a guitar string, an organ pipe, or the interiors of Earth and the Sun – can reflect and interact, reinforcing some waves and canceling out others. This can result in orderly motion called standing waves, which create the tones in musical instruments.
Just below the surfaces of stars like the Sun, hot gas rises, cools, and then sinks, where it heats up again, much like a pan of boiling water on a hot stove. This motion produces waves of changing pressure – sound waves – that interact, ultimately driving stable oscillations with periods of a few minutes that produce subtle brightness changes. For the Sun, these variations amount to a few parts per million. Giant stars with masses similar to the Sun’s pulsate much more slowly, and the corresponding brightness changes can be hundreds of times greater.
Listen to the rhythms of three red giants in the constellation Draco, as determined by brightness measurements from NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite. To produce audible tones, astronomers multiplied the oscillation frequencies of the stars by 3 million times. It’s clear that larger stars produce longer, deeper pulsations than smaller ones.
Credit: NASA/MIT/TESS and Ethan Kruse (USRA), M. Hon et al., 2021
Oscillations in the Sun were first observed in the 1960s. Solar-like oscillations were detected in thousands of stars by the French-led Convection, Rotation and planetary Transits (CoRoT) space telescope, which operated from 2006 to 2013. NASA’s Kepler and K2 missions, which surveyed the sky from 2009 to 2018, found tens of thousands of oscillating giants. Now TESS extends this number by another 10 times.
“With a sample this large, giants that might occur only 1% of the time become pretty common,” said co-author Jamie Tayar, a Hubble Fellow at the University of Hawaii. “Now we can start thinking about finding even rarer examples.”
The physical differences between a cello and a violin produce their distinctive voices. Similarly, the stellar oscillations astronomers observe depend on each star’s interior structure, mass, and size. This means asteroseismology can help determine fundamental properties for large numbers of stars with accuracies not achievable in any other way.
When stars similar in mass to the Sun evolve into red giants, the penultimate phase of their stellar lives, their outer layers expand by 10 or more times. These vast gaseous envelopes pulsate with longer periods and larger amplitudes, which means their oscillations can be observed in fainter and more numerous stars.
The bright red giant Edasich in the constellation Draco is about 12 times larger and 1.8 times the mass of our Sun. Edasich oscillates three times a day, brightening and fading slightly as it does. For comparison, the Sun pulsates about every five minutes. Left: The star’s changing brightness as measured by NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite. Right: An illustration of the star and its varying brightness.
Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center/Chris Smith (KBRwyle)
TESS monitors large swaths of the sky for about a month at a time using its four cameras. During its two-year primary mission, TESS covered about 75% of the sky, each camera capturing a full image measuring 24-by-24 degrees every 30 minutes. In mid-2020, the cameras began collecting these images at an even faster pace, every 10 minutes.
The images were used to develop light curves – graphs of changing brightness – for nearly 24 million stars over 27 days, the length of time TESS stares at each swath of the sky. To sift through this immense accumulation of measurements, Hon and his colleagues taught a computer to recognize pulsating giants. The team used machine learning, a form of artificial intelligence that trains computers to make decisions based on general patterns without explicitly programming them.
To train the system, the team used Kepler light curves for more than 150,000 stars, of which some 20,000 were oscillating red giants. When the neural network finished processing all of the TESS data, it had identified a chorus of 158,505 pulsating giants.
NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) imaged about 75% of the sky during its two-year-long primary mission. This plot dissolves between the TESS sky map and a “mass map” constructed by combining TESS measurements of 158,000 oscillating red giant stars with their distances, established by ESA’s (the European Space Agency’s) Gaia mission. The prominent band in both images is the Milky Way, which marks the central plane of our galaxy. In the mass map, green, yellow, orange, and red show where giant stars average more than 1.4 times the Sun’s mass. Such stars evolve faster than the Sun, becoming giants at younger ages. The close correspondence of higher-mass giants with the plane of the Milky Way, which contains our galaxy’s spiral arms, demonstrates that it contains many young stars.
Credit: NASA/MIT/TESS and Ethan Kruse (USRA), M. Hon et al., 2021
Next, the team found distances for each giant using data from ESA’s (the European Space Agency’s) Gaia mission, and plotted the masses of these stars across the sky. Stars more massive than the Sun evolve faster, becoming giants at younger ages. A fundamental prediction in galactic astronomy is that younger, higher-mass stars should lie closer to the plane of the galaxy, which is marked by the high density of stars that create the glowing band of the Milky Way in the night sky.
“Our map demonstrates for the first time empirically that this is indeed the case across nearly the whole sky,” said co-author Daniel Huber, an assistant professor for astronomy at the University of Hawaii. “With the help of Gaia, TESS has now given us tickets to a red giant concert in the sky.”
TESS is a NASA Astrophysics Explorer mission led and operated by MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and managed by NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. Additional partners include Northrop Grumman, based in Falls Church, Virginia; NASA’s Ames Research Center in California’s Silicon Valley; the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian in Cambridge, Massachusetts; MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory; and the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore. More than a dozen universities, research institutes, and observatories worldwide are participants in the mission.
UFO falls to Earth and causes a strong explosion in Turkey (Video)
UFO falls to Earth and causes a strong explosion in Turkey (Video)
A video shows the moment when the skies over Smyrna, Turkey, lit up bright green when a mysterious object crashed into Earth.
Images of the bizarre incident that have been posted on social media show the object passing through the city of Izmir, before disappearing in a bright flash.
The seemingly inexplicable event has shocked residents, leading to speculation that the burning object is a satellite or an unidentified flying object (UFO).
The incident occurred around 2 a.m. on Saturday, July 31. One of the videos shows the object hitting the ground causing a loud explosion and changing the color of the sky to green for a few seconds.
Another video shows the object’s flare a bright greenish white before falling towards Earth.
Needless to say, the videos have gone viral intriguing netizens around the world. While many suggested it was a satellite or space junk, others chose to believe that they could be aliens.
However, Dr. Hasan Ali Dal, a Turkish astrophysics professor, denied these theories and explained a simple reason for the incredible scenes.
In a Twitter post, he said that the event known as a “fireball” occurs when a meteor begins to burn in the atmosphere.
“It usually burns in the upper atmosphere,” wrote Dr. Ali Dal. “It should be considered as a more specific version of the phenomenon known as a shooting star among people and that is often experienced during periods of meteor showers.”
According to the professor of astrophysics, the meteor could be part of the Perseid Rainfall , which occurs every year during July and August.
But it goes without saying that this explanation has not convinced everyone, since there are those who claim that it is a crashed alien spacecraft. There were even those who claimed to have seen the military in the area.
ALL RELATED VIDEOS, selected and posted by peter2011
TUCKED AWAY in a seemingly forgotten corner of the Istanbul Archaeology Museum, Daniel Mansfield found what may solve one of ancient math’s biggest questions.
First exhumed in 1894 from what is now Baghdad, the circular tablet — broken at the center with small perpendicular indentations across it — was feared lost to antiquity. But in 2018, a photo of the tablet showed up in Mansfield’s inbox.
Mansfield, a senior lecturer of mathematics at the University of New South Wales Sydney, had suspected the tablet was real. He came across records of its excavation and began the hunt. Word got around about what he was looking for, and then the email came. He knew what he had to do: travel to Turkey and examine it at the museum.
Hidden within this tablet is not only the oldest known display of applied geometry but a new ancient understanding of triangles. It could rewrite what we know about the history of mathematics, Mansfield argues.
These findings were published Wednesday in the journal Foundations of Science.
It’s generally thought that trigonometry — a subset of geometry and what’s displayed on the tablet in a crude sense — was developed by ancient Greeks like the philosopher Pythagoras. However, analysis of the tablet suggests it was created 1,000 years before Pythagoras was born.
Babylonian mathematics, which already holds a place of renown in the pantheon of ancient math, might’ve been more sophisticated than historians have given it credit for.
“The way we understand trigonometry harks back to ancient Greek astronomers,” Mansfield tells Inverse. “I like to think of the Babylonian understanding of right triangles as an unexpected prequel, which really is an independent story because the Babylonians weren’t using it to measure the stars, they were using it to measure the ground.”
Dr. Mansfield observes the tablet. University of New South Wales Sydney
WHAT YOU SHOULD KNOW FIRST
Mansfield is no stranger to a pair of white gloves and following his mathematical curiosity.
Years before discovering this latest tablet, dubbed Si.427, Mansfield was hot on the trail of another ancient Babylonian “document:” Plimpton 322. While the location of this artifact was known (it’s located at Columbia University) its true purpose was not.
Like Si.427, which dates back to roughly 1900 to 1600 BCE, Plimpton 322 is covered in geometric markings — riddles academics have tried to decipher for years. While the reigning theory was that these markings were a kind of teacher’s cheat code for Babylonian homework problems, Mansfield and colleagues were not convinced.
The Plimpton 322 clay tablet: it’s about the size of a postcard. Wikimedia Commons
In a 2017 paper, Mansfield and colleagues propose Plimpton 322 might be a kind of proto-trigonometry table of values — suggesting it predates the development of trigonometry as we know it today.
“A modern analogy would be to say that it contains a mix of elementary school problems alongside the unsolved conjectures of mathematics,” writes Mansfield in the new paper.
WHAT’S NEW
Now, Mansfield argues the discovery of Si.427 could confirm his Plimpton 322 hunch.
In essence, Si.427 is argued to be a case study of how this proto-trig could be used in practice.
Si.427 is what’s known as a cadastral document. These are used to document the boundaries of land ownership. There are other examples on record, but Mansfield argues this tablet is the oldest known example from the Old Babylonian period — a range that stretches from 1900 BCE to 1600 BCE. On the tablet are legal and geometry details about a field that was split after some of it was sold.
This research suggests Plimpton 322 was used similarly: It might have been a surveyor’s cheat sheet, instead of a teacher’s. It’s possible Plimpton 322 was the theoretical solution to the practical problems a surveyor using Si.427 might have encountered.
“It’s a discovery that has come to us far outside our mathematical culture,” Mansfield says. “It seems new and fresh to us, even though it’s almost 4,000 years old.”
Using the principles of right triangles and perpendicular lines, ancient surveyors could evenly divide land to avoid disputing neighbors.University of New South Wales Sydney
WHY IT MATTERS
While these tablets are the kind of thing you might easily walk past on display in a museum, Mansfield said this discovery could actually have a huge implication for how we understand these ancient mathematics.
Namely, it means mathematicians were working with so-called Pythagorean triples (trios of numbers that satisfy the infamous a^2+b^2 = c^2 equation) long before Pythagoras himself was even born.
It also helps answer a slightly less academic question: How do you evenly divide up disputed land?
How far would you go to answer a question? For Mansfield, the answer is halfway around the world.University of New South Wales Sydney
“This is from a period where land is starting to become private — people started thinking about land in terms of ‘my land and your land,’ wanting to establish a proper boundary to have positive neighborly relationships,” Mansfield explains in a statement.
“And this is what this tablet immediately says. It's a field being split, and new boundaries are made.”
HOW DOES IT WORK?
As for how triangles sketched in clay translate to farmer’s fields, it all comes down to perpendicular lines.
Essentially, surveyors would choose two Pythagorean triples (which were inherently right triangles) and extend the boundary line of the resultant rectangle by eye to create true perpendicular lines that spread across the entire field.
“This proves that our Babylonian surveyor had a solid theoretical understanding of the geometry of rectangles and right triangles and used it to solve practical problems,” Mansfield says in the video.
Extending the boundary of these triangles allowed surveyors to create incredibly straight lines without manually measuring or laying them out beforehand.University of New South Wales Sydney
There are also instances of resizing these triangles to better fit the physical shape of the field at hand, which surveyors would’ve liked done by referencing a table of trig values like Plimpton 322, the study suggests. This table would’ve been a comprehensive list of Pythagorean triples and the steps to resizing them.
WHAT’S NEXT
This discovery may have laid to rest one ancient math mystery, there’s still plenty more where that came from, Mansfield says.
“Ancient mathematics is not as sophisticated as modern mathematics,” he says. “But sometimes you want to simple answers instead of sophisticated ones.”
He’s not “just talking about how mathematics students want their exams to be.” The advantage of a simple approach is its quickness — and Mansfield wants to examine whether or not this approach has any real-world applications.
“This approach might be of benefit in computer graphics or any application where speed is more important than precision,” he says.
Abstract:
Plimpton 322 is one of the most sophisticated and interesting mathematical objects from antiquity. It is often regarded as teacher’s list of school problems, however new analysis suggests that it relates to a particular geometric problem in contemporary surveying.
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TWENTY-FIVE YEARS AGO, at least for a moment, even the President of the United States thought it might have been aliens. At least, fossilized signs of aliens.
On August 7, 1996, President Bill Clinton addressed the nation concerning the findings of a group of NASA and Stanford scientists. Just the month before, a president spoke of aliens in the newly released Independence Day. Extraterrestrials were on the country’s mind.
The scientists found what they believed to be signs of microbial life in a meteorite found determined to be of Martian origin.
The Alan Hills meteorite, also known as ALH 84001, would go on to become one of the most studied rocks in history, leading the majority of planetary researchers and astrobiologists to ultimately decide it did not contain evidence of life on Mars.
But the real legacy of ALH 84001 lies in the debate that it caused, and the changes that debate engendered. It reinvigorated the field of astrobiology, rekindled NASA’s interest in Mars, and changed how some scientists think about life itself.
And depending on who you ask, it’s a debate that isn’t even over yet.
THE DEBATE OVER THE ALAN HILLS METEORITE
“The question is still open, in my opinion,” Stanford University professor Richard Zare tells Inverse. Zare was one of the original investigators of ALH 84001 and a co-author of a related paper published in the journal Science on August 16, 1996.
“It is quite possible that what we found does not indicate a relic of ancient fossil life,” he says. “It’s also possible that it will still prove they are there.”
Photograph of the Martian meteorite, ALH84001.NASA
Zare’s lab was using lasers and mass spectrometry to study meteorites in the 1990s when he was approached by a group of scientists from NASA’s Johnson Space Center who had “a very interesting rock” they hoped he would analyze.
“They said this was a very important thing they were working on and they couldn’t tell me much about it,” Zare says. The secrecy, he would later learn, was because “they were not permitted at the time to do this kind of study by NASA at Johnson Space Center.”
It was after Zare reported his findings to the group — that the meteorite contained polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, organic molecules considered some of the starter materials for life — that they let him in on ALH 84001’s Martian origin.
DISCOVERING THE ORIGIN OF THE ALH 84001
Already more than 4 billion-years-old, ALH 84001 was likely ejected from Mars during a meteor impact around 3.6 billion years ago. ALH 84001 then fell through space for epochs until finally crashing to Earth in Antarctica some 13,000-years-ago.
“KNOWING THINGS FOR SURE IN SCIENCE IS A DANGEROUS THING.”
A group of prolific meteorite hunters discovered the rock in 1984 and in 1996 Zare and the NASA scientists published their findings in Science. There were the polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons discovered by Zare, but there were also carbonate globules similar to those left by Earthly bacteria. There wasn’t Martian life exactly, but the scientists argued they had found strong evidence of “biogenic activity” on Mars.
“There were people in this group who knew for sure what they had,” Zare says. “I never knew for sure, but I suspected they might be right. Knowing things for sure in science is a dangerous thing.”
Electron microscopy of the meteorite fragment, ALH 84001. Wikimedia Commons
The debate over the findings began unusually, with the details leaked to the press by a Washington D.C. prostitute who had in turn been whispered the information by President Clinton’s adviser Dick Morris. This culminated with Clinton giving a speech before the paper was published in Science.
“It was a crazy story,” Zare says. “There was a lot of publicity around this and it certainly caused me grief.”
Some of his faculty friends, Zare remembers, would say, “I remember when Dick Zare did science.”
THE SCIENTIFIC CONSENSUS ON ALH 84001
But Zare did do good science, according to Andrew Steele, an astrobiologist who worked on ALH 84001 on the Johnson Space Center team when he was a postdoc.
“Outside of the astronomy field with the detection of exoplanets, this is probably one of the most important papers published,” with regards to astrobiology, Steele tells Inverse. Zare and the other authors of the paper should be lauded, he says, “whether they are right or wrong.”
Steele, now a staff scientist with the Carnegie Institute, has also studied ALH 84001 as well as meteorites like it. He does lean toward the claims of fossil life in ALH 84001 being wrong, though he won’t say it definitively.
“My work has shown there is a non-biological explanation. My observations show mechanisms of organic synthesis, abiotic mechanisms of synthesis, in ALH 84001,” he says. Regardless, this still “doesn’t mean to say that they were wrong.”
Even if they were, that makes ALH 84001 even more interesting, Steele says.
“ALAN HILLS IS ONE OF THE OLDEST ROCKS WE HAVE FROM ANY PLANETARY SURFACE.”
Science is still being done on ALH 84001. Researchers in Japan recently discovered nitrogen-bearing organic material in the meteorite, adding further evidence that Mars was once a wet, potentially habitable planet.
If ALH 84001 does not provide evidence of past life on Mars, it might still tell us quite a bit about life on Earth.
“Alan Hills is one of the oldest rocks we have from any planetary surface,” Steele says, “and so if those globules are not life, or were not made by life or do not track life, then what are they?”
Even if Mars never hosted life, it may well have hosted the conditions where life could have arisen — conditions similar to those of the early Earth, evidence of which we’ll never know because of our planet’s geologic activity.
“The hard drive has been overwritten” by plate tectonics Steele says. “Alan Hills represents one of the earliest times in our solar system on a potentially habitable world, where the actions that possibly led to life are preserved.”
THE LEGACIES OF ALH 84001
It’s the questions about the origins of life, how to define life, and whether scientists should look for it beyond Earth at all which are the greatest legacies spurred by ALH 84001.
“The significance of the story, in my opinion, is that it actually changed the direction of NASA,” Zare says. “Prior to that, NASA was very excited and busy about spacewalks.”
The biology experiments on Viking 1 in 1976 failed to show evidence for life, and so human space flight was where it was at. ALH 84001, Zare says, got NASA thinking about Mars again, and about the question of whether or not Earth life was alone in the universe.
Today, the NASA rover Perseverance is tasked with finding evidence of ancient life on Mars.NASA
“This changed, really, the mission of NASA,” Zare says. “It was a good legacy.``
It also changed how scientists thought about the problem of knowing how to determine if they had discovered extraterrestrial life, whenever that might occur.
ALH 84001 contained terrestrial life that had contaminated the meteorite since it first landed, but this was often missed by scientists examining the space rock, according to Steele: “We’re having trouble finding Earth life in a Martian rock on Earth — how are we going to find life on Mars?”
The debate over ALH 84001 galvanized the scientific community and led to a total reconsideration of how to go about the study of life, wherever it might be found.
Part of ALH 84001’s legacy is on Mars right now, in the form of NASA’s Perseverance rover, which Steele notes is exploring Martian terrain of similar age and features to ALH 84001. The rover is drilling soil samples on the Red Planet, and NASA plans to retrieve them. Analysis of these samples will show how right, or wrong, we’ve been about the meteorite.
“The ultimate test of the AH 84001 hypothesis is bringing samples back from Mars,” Steele says.
NASA SAMPLE MYSTERIOUSLY GOES MISSING AS PERSEVERANCE ROVER SEARCHES FOR ALIEN LIFE
This image taken by one the hazard cameras aboard NASA’s Perseverance rover on Aug. 6, 2021, shows the hole drilled in what the rover’s science team calls a “paver rock” in preparation for the mission’s first attempt to collect a sample from Mars
(NASA/JPL-Caltech)
NASA SAMPLE MYSTERIOUSLY GOES MISSING AS PERSEVERANCE ROVER SEARCHES FOR ALIEN LIFE
A Mars sample from the Perseverance rover, which was to be used to search for alien life, has mysteriously disappeared.
Last week, the rover began one of its most important and complex tasks: drilling into Martian soil to collect a sample from underground that could be used to search for potential ancient alien life that might have once lived there. Were.
It conducted the first part of the mission successfully, leaving behind a drill hole. It should then have picked up some rock into a sample tube and stored it away.
But NASA found that the sample tube was empty, something that had never happened during the space agency’s on-Earth test.
“The sampling process is autonomous from start to finish,” Jessica Samuels, surface mission manager for Perseverance at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, said in a statement.
“One of the steps to be followed after placing the probe in the collection tube is to measure the volume of the sample. The probe did not encounter the expected resistance that would occur if there was a sample inside the tube.”
It is now working to understand where that sample might have gone, and what went wrong. When it does so, engineers will be able to work out how and when to try again to gather up some more of the Martian surface.
“The initial thinking is that the empty tube is more likely a result of the rock target not reacting the way we expected during coring, and less likely a hardware issue with the Sampling and Caching System,” said Jennifer Trosper, project manager for Perseverance at JPL.
“Over the next few days, the team will be spending more time analyzing the data we have, and also acquiring some additional diagnostic data to support understanding the root cause for the empty tube.”
Nasa has struggled with work on the Martian soil and rock in the past, often encountering surprising characteristics. Recently, for instance, the InSight lander was unable to drill into the Martian surface as planned.
Any samples collected by Perseverance will be stored safely on the rover but not analysed there. Instead, future Nasa and European Space Agency missions hope to send spacecraft to Mars that will pick up the samples and bring them back down to Earth to be examined.
Watch NASA's Mars helicopter Ingenuity make its most high-flying journey yet.
In a brand-new video, you can watch Ingenuity make its highest and most complex flight to date, which took the autonomous craft over an area known as Raised Ridges.
During this trip, its 10th flight, Ingenuity covered a distance of 310 feet (95 meters) and soared to a record altitude of 40 feet (12 meters). Combined with the distances traveled throughout all of its 10 flights, Ingenuity has now flown for more than one mile.
This flight, completed on July 24, was the most complex of all Ingenuity flights, according to a NASA statement, and saw the helicopter perform multiple maneuvers while passing through 10 distinct waypoints.
NASA's Ingenuity helicopter during its tenth and so far the most complex flight on July 24. (Image credit: NASA JPL)
As part of this flight, Ingenuity was sent to explore Raised Ridges, a rocky area in Jezero Crater south of the landing site of the agency's Perseverance rover, which carried Ingenuity to the Red Planet, landing on Feb. 18. The visuals obtained during the flight might help guide the rover in a future exploration of the Raised Ridges, which scientists find "intriguing," according to the NASA statement.
Ingenuity, originally designed to perform only four flights, first lifted off in April. Since then, it has been gradually increasing the duration and complexity of its trips. This latest flight took 165.4 seconds, which is nearly as long as the craft's longest flight so far, its ninth flight on July 5, which lasted 166.5 seconds.
Ingenuity is now parked on its seventh Martian airfield as mission scientists continue to examine telemetry and images from the flight.
The Perseverance mission, designed to search for traces of life on the Red Planet and prepare samples of soil for a future return to Earth, lifted off Cape Canaveral exactly one year ago on July 30, 2020.
Follow Tereza Pultarova on Twitter @TerezaPultarova. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook.
It won’t be worse than Matt Damon’s fictional solo experience on Mars because there will be a group, and hopefully it will be better than the combined Russian/ESA attempt to simulate living on Mars. It’s not much of a recruiting pitch but that’s the reality of NASA’s new search for volunteers to spend a year in isolation as part of its new Crew Health and Performance Exploration Analog (CHAPEA) project. Will they emerge in a year believing that Mars will fear their botany powers?
“Each mission will consist of four crew members living in Mars Dune Alpha, an isolated 1,700 square foot habitat. During the mission, the crew will conduct simulated spacewalks and provide data on a variety of factors, which may include physical and behavioral health and performance.
The 3D printed habitat will include private crew quarters, a kitchen, and dedicated areas for medical, recreation, fitness, work, and crop growth activities, as well as a technical work area and two bathrooms.”
No pyramids?
That doesn’t sound so bad, does it? Each of the three year-long missions will have a crew of four — NASA is looking for healthy, motivated U.S. citizens or permanent residents who are non-smokers, age 30 to 55 years old, and proficient in English. Ideal candidates would have a master’s degree in a STEM field such as engineering, mathematics, or biological, physical or computer science or a minimum of one thousand hours piloting an aircraft. Medical doctors, test pilots and applicants with less advanced degrees but more applicable experience will be considered. Here’s what they’ll be (hopefully) experience:
“To obtain the most accurate data during the analog, the habitat will be as Mars-realistic as feasible, which may include environmental stressors such as resource limitations, isolation, equipment failure, and significant workloads. The major crew activities during the analog may consist of simulated spacewalks including virtual reality, communications, crop growth, meal preparation and consumption, exercise, hygiene activities, maintenance work, personal time, science work, and sleep.”
No transportation testing?
If you were hoping for the full Matt-Damon-as-Astronaut Mark Watney experience, NASA will make sure that none of this happens:
“If the oxygenator breaks down, I’ll suffocate. If the water reclaimer breaks down, I’ll die of thirst. If the Hab beaches, I’ll just kind of implode. If none of those things happen. I’ll eventually run out of food and starve to death.” — Matt Damon as Mark Watner in “The Martian.”
And of course, someone will stop them if anyone attempts to dip a potato in crushed up Vicodin. Hopefully, nothing like Damon’s experiences will happen and these simulations will be better than the Mars 500 mission in 2013 when six people paid $100,000 each (there’s a difference right there) and ended up being in prolonged funks, having considerable trouble sleeping, depression issues, avoiding exercise or just moving about, and hiding from their observers. Was that just a bad experiment or could that be what will really happen on Mars?
We’re waiting for you.
“Every human being has a basic instinct: to help each other out. If a hiker gets lost in the mountains, people will coordinate a search. If a train crashes, people will line up to give blood. If an earthquake levels a city, people all over the world will send emergency supplies. This is so fundamentally human that it’s found in every culture without exception. Yes, there are assholes who just don’t care, but they’re massively outnumbered by the people who do.”
— Matt Damon as Mark Watner in “The Martian.”
Let’s hope NASA’s Crew Health and Performance Exploration Analog (CHAPEA) missions meet Mark Watner’s idealistic expectations.
UFO Eject Multiple UFOs Over Porterville, California ( August 6, 2021 )
UFO ejects multiple fiery objects over Porterville, California on August 6, 2021
STATEMENT : I have other footage, 10 cars had pulled over to take video of it!! it look like it was trying to weld itself and it was dripping molten lava
Here i present the video and following in approach
More evident every day
credit : J Gulso
UFO Sighted Over Sycamore, Illinois ( August 1, 2021 )
UFO was sighted over Sycamore, in DeKalb County, Illinois on August 1, 2021
STATEMENT : UFO Flying over Sycamore
They are here
credit : Ellie Rains
UFOs Sighted Over Phoenix, Arizona ( July 7, 2021 )
Impressive UFO Sighting over Phoenix, Arizona on July 7, 2021 showing UFOs appearing doing manoeuvres
WASHINGTON — A few days afterthe government released its report on UFOs, Avi Loeb got a call from the Harvard astronomy department that set off an unusual series of events.
An administrative assistant informed Loeb, a professor of science at Harvard, that he was getting some new research money. And shortly after, a billionaire paid Loeb a visit on the front porch of his home to ask him about aliens.
“I've been in academia for about 40 years and been a department chair," Loeb said. "Never have I ever seen a situation where a faculty member gets funding without looking for it and even meeting the donor."
The hunt for UFOs, or what are now officially called "unidentified aerial phenomena," is hot these days — but too hot for the halls of academia. Loeb is trying to change that.
He is in a unique position of having both the credibility and the interest in applying real scientific methods to what has long been the domain of pseudoscience and hucksters.
His new Galileo Project — named after the 17th century Italian astronomer known for his use of telescopes and for the controversy he generated over his findings — plans to install a network of small telescopes around the globe to watch the skies in the hopes of capturing even a single high-resolution image of something “weird,” as Loeb puts it.
With the help of a number of other well-regarded astronomers who have signed on to volunteer their expertise, the project plans to use artificial intelligence to help filter out planes, drones, birds and anything else not weird.
"It's a win-win proposition because even if we find that these aerial phenomena are rare atmospheric effects that are not expected, we learn something new,” he said. “If there is something out there, we need to find out.”
There’s never enough money to go around in science, especially in a field like astronomy where experiments can cost billions because they require sending probes to space or building telescopes on remote mountaintops in the Chilean desert.
But Loeb is quick to note that the relatively modest $1.755 million he’s starting with comes from private sources, so he’s not taking grant money that would otherwise go to, say, researching dark matter — a topic that he quips is just as bizarre as aliens and far less relevant to daily human life.
It’s exactly the kind of research many have called for after the release of the Pentagon's intelligence report in June, which found that the government could explain only one of the 144 encounters with unidentified flying objects reported by military pilots.
Avi Loeb, the chair of Harvard University's astronomy department, in Cambridge, Mass., on March 27, 2019.Lane Turner / Boston Globe via Getty Images file
Advocates like Loeb and others argue that military and intelligence agencies have shown no interest in seriously investigating these phenomena and would not tell the public what they found even if they did.
Loeb’s interest in the subject has irritated the mainstream astronomy community, despite broad public interest. A third of Americans think UFOs might be alien craft, according to Gallup.
He first got excited about the topic in 2017 when astronomers discovered ’Oumuamua, the first known interstellar object seen in our solar system, which looked and behaved in unusual ways.
Other astronomers and physicists called the work “a shocking example of sensationalist, ill-motivated science,” an “insult (to) honest scientific inquiry” and questioned whether he really even believed his own theory or was just doing it for attention.
Privately, some wondered if he had lost his mind, was having a midlife crisis or was just letting his ego and all the publicity get the best of him.
But Loeb feels vindicated now that the Pentagon, NASA administrator, senators, former CIA directors and former President Barack Obama acknowledge they have seen things that can’t be easily explained away.
“You have the cranks saying 'nonsense.' Then you have the scientists saying, 'See, you have all these people saying nonsense, therefore we should not engage,'” he said. “I don't think staying ignorant is a good idea.”
Loeb can’t easily be dismissed either — a rare scientist who has reached a position where he can afford to take risks and alienate peers, but still has his research taken seriously.
He’s one of the country’s best-known astronomers, was the longest-serving chairman of the astronomy department at Harvard and has held prestigious appointments from the White House and top academic societies.
Notably, Harvard is allowing Loeb to use its imprimatur for the Galileo Project, though he said it took some convincing that what he plans to do is really just basic observational astronomy, looking through telescopes to understand the universe.
“I was struck by the number of top-level astronomers and instrumentalists who said this was always something they thought about, but never thought they would get funding,” he said. “I even got emails from directors of centers saying, 'I agree with you, but am afraid to speak about it.'”
His funders include William Linton, the founder of a biotech company who is also at the forefront of researching the potential uses of psilocybin (the drug found in “magic mushrooms”) to treat psychiatric issues, and billionaire Frank Laukien, the founder of a company that makes complex scientific instruments.
“Why does science have to be boring?” Loeb said. “Here we are talking about a discovery that would change the history of humanity, so how dare we push it aside.”
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On August 8, 2021 the LASCO C2 satellite captured a massive unknown explosion on the sun and it doesn't look like a solar filament or solar flare.
Now, on November 1, 2020 NASA's satellite EIT 304 captured an alien spacecraft firing a huge beam at the sun (see video) and even though the reason is not known, it is said that intelligent races might survive by collecting, storing and harnessing the power of the sun.
As such we might wonder whether such a craft has fired something at the sun causing the massive explosion.
Alfred Webre: “Mars is inhabited by human-like beings”
Alfred Webre: “Mars is inhabited by human-like beings”
Alfred Webre was the first visionary to define Exopolitics in the world, focusing on the existence of societies with interstellar relationships. And humanity could have already created diplomacies outside of Earth, since there could be humans and extraterrestrial hybrids inhabiting Mars.
There is an interplanetary society: Alfred Webre.
Currently, Alfred Webre, being a general counsel for the New York Environmental Protection Agency and advisor to the Ford Foundation , former professor of economics at Yale and the University of Texas, in addition to being a delegate to the Texas Democratic convention in 1996, is considered like one of the main authorities of the Exopolitics.
Currently, he is the International Director of the Institute for Cooperation in Space, or ICIS, for its acronym in English. From that rostrum, it promotes disarmament in space and the transformation of the permanent war economy to a peaceful and cooperative society . Based on the exploration of space and studying life in the Universe .
Alfred Webre: Exopolitics for the development of society
In his book “Exopolitics: Politics, Government and Law in the Universe”, Webre shows us a different vision of the Cosmos . It reveals to us that the Earth is an isolated world, in the midst of an intergalactic and multidimensional society that evolves more and more.
In addition, he affirms that the entire history of humanity that we have always been told is wrong .
In the interview in the magazine “Athanor”, where they made him an 11-page report called: “Exopolitics, the ins and outs of space warfare and a positive future”, he mentioned the Martian contacts that the near future holds for us.
Each of his statements is backed by statements from ex-military personnel, astronauts, historians, and researchers.
Simply put, Alfred Webre leaves little room for doubt about the next contact and the few years we have left for impressive revelations.
Excerpt from the interview on the revelation of Mars
It is possible that the extraterrestrial contact is close.
Alfred Webre begins the interview with the following words:
I am 67 years old. I was born on a naval base in Florida during World War II. I live in Vancouver. Doctor of Law, judge of the Kuala Lumpur Court on War Crimes. Married, I have a son and two stepdaughters.
We live in a universe of intelligent origin . There is evidence that ethical civilizations more advanced than ours are involved in the process of our development.
Give me proof
Statements from employees of the United States government who have testified to participate in secret programs of relations with certain extraterrestrial civilizations.
Does that mean that there has already been contact with aliens?
Yes, since the 1950s the United States government, according to these witnesses, has been secretly working with them. Andrew Basiago , the son of a CIA officer, was enrolled at age seven in a secret program for gifted children who were trained to be ambassadors to extraterrestrial races .
Any contact?
He had an encounter with three astronauts from the planet Mars . In January 2009, Virginia Olds , a CIA employee, confirmed that the CIA knows that there is a humanoid civilization living under the surface of Mars.
We believe that in the year 9500 a. C. fragments of the supernova Vela entered the solar system and destroyed the ecology of Mars. The Martians, some 1,500 years more advanced than us ethically and technologically, took refuge underground.
… In December 2008 we published a report that includes photographs taken by the NASA robot Rover Spirit in which certain species of humanoids, animals and structures on the surface of Mars are identified.
Alien Contacts and How the Universe Works
How the universe works, according to Webre.
Buzz Aldrin who traveled on Apollo XI said that when they reached the Moon in 1969 there were two large alien spacecraft around the great crater, his version was verified by senior NASA officials.
Why not divulge life on Mars?
For political reasons. We are going to file a lawsuit under the freedom of information laws for NASA to recognize intelligent life on Mars.
¿ And why not present in society themselves, the Martians?
Ours is a low-order planet that we assume is under a quarantine imposed by the government of the universe .
And the first contact will be with the Martians?
Yes, because there are many mutual advantages, they can give us technologies and knowledge and we have a beautiful green planet to which they can migrate .
How does the universe work?
There are many dimensions and universes parallel to ours. Some alien civilizations come from another dimension, another parallel universe , that is why UFOs can appear and disappear.
How are these more evolved civilizations?
It seems that we live in an organized universe and the most ethical civilizations have managed to dominate the time dimension and it is they who probably develop our reality.
… Well, they do it fatal
According to some theories, we are rapidly evolving away from the permanent war economy and towards a sustainable economy. Human consciousness develops to enter the universal age and openly relate to those other civilizations.
Help for humanity?
Could they help the development of humanity?
There is a primary directive: do not interfere with the evolution of a civilization on another planet. But in a very short time, man will learn to use quantum teleportation and to draw energy from space.
We are in an era of transition in which we must decide whether we are going to destruction or evolution.
Is your job to study the great government of the universe?
Exopolitics is a social science, studying the relationships between our human civilization and other intelligent civilizations in the universe. One of our first steps towards universal diplomacy will be through the Martian civilization.
I understand
I personally work with Dr. Norman Miranda , chief of staff of the president of the UN General Assembly, so that the UN represents the Earth before the civilization of Mars.
According to Alfred Webre, our planet is more like a prison and has been designed that way by intergalactic society. However, we could be about to establish relationships with other civilizations …
The new trailer for executive producer J.J. Abrams' documentary series, UFO, arrives online. The series is directed by Mark Monroe, who previously served as the writer for Netflix's 2017 documentary, Icarus. UFO looks to delve into the truth behind extraterrestrial phenomena while peeling back layers of government interference. Starting August 8th at 9 pm, UFO will be released every Sunday throughout the month on Showtime.
In the trailer shared by Showtime on their YouTube page, real footage of UFO sightings from around the world is accompanied by narration from interviewees who have had experiences. Beyond exploring UFOs, the trailer highlights the emotional side felt by those who share their stories, as they feel no one ever believes them. Accentuated by an intense score, the trailer shows the declassified footage released by the United States government only a few years ago, and it promises an exciting dive into the unknown.
Abrams is no stranger to tackling ideas that most would label science fiction. Abrams' resume includes several projects, such as Star Wars, Super 8, and even Star Strek, that prove he loves to dabble in ideas beyond Earth, so bringing that fascination for otherworldy phenomena to the small screen seems like a natural fit. UFO also looks to come with the slick production value Abrams' Bad Robot is more than capable of providing. With a documentary series, Abrams looks to bring real evidence and eyewitness accounts into the spotlight with an eye toward the truth. Audiences will get to experience UFO when it premieres next month.
A possibly habitable super-Earth may be residing in a nearby planetary system. In fact, the system already has a world that is about half the size of Venus as well as another planet that could contain an ocean.
Located just 35 light-years away from Earth is a bright red dwarf star called L 98-59 (also known as TOI-175). So far, researchers have confirmed four planets in the system and there is possibly a fifth. When astronomers found the first three exoplanets in the system two years ago, they were compared to “…looking at Venus, Earth and Mars in the solar system”.
(Not any of the exoplanets mentioned in this article.)
In the latest research, a team wanted to find out the mass of the three planets by using the Echelle Spectrograph for Rocky Exoplanets and Stable Spectroscopic Observations (ESPRESSO) instrument on the ESO’s Very Large Telescope in Chile. More specifically, they looked at how much the star wobbled when the planets tugged at its gravitational force and they were able to calculate their masses. They were successful in studying the three known planets and even found another world (possibly two of them).
The planet closest to the star is the lightest – it has just half the mass of Venus. This planet and the one second-closest to the star are believed to have small iron cores and could even have a small amount of water in their atmospheres. The next-furthest planet seems to have a similar iron core but it appears to have much more water and gas – possibly one-third of the world’s mass could be water.
(Not any of the exoplanets mentioned in this article.)
The experts found a fourth planet and possibly even a fifth, but further analysis needs to be conducted in order to gather more information on them. If the fifth planet is confirmed, this would be hugely significant as it would be located in an area where it would receive approximately the same amount of heat and light from its star as Earth gets from our sun. Furthermore, the surface temperature might even be perfect enough to hold and protect water in addition to possibly supporting life. (An image of where the exoplanets are spaced in their system compared to Venus, Earth, and Mars, as well as a video about the research can be seen here.)
A graphic compares the L 98-59 system (above) with our own solar system (below). The systems are not shown to scale, instead, the diagram is arranged so that the habitable zones of the L 98-59 and the sun align.
(Image credit: ESO/L. Calçada/M. Kornmesser (Acknowledgment: O. Demangeon))
The research will continue regarding this fascinating system and hopefully more information will be gathered on the potential fifth and maybe even habitable world.
Evidence of a 2,800-year-old biblical earthquake is found in Jerusalem after archaeologists uncover ‘layer of destruction’ of collapsed walls and broken pottery
Evidence of a 2,800-year-old biblical earthquake is found in Jerusalem after archaeologists uncover ‘layer of destruction’ of collapsed walls and broken pottery
The Old Testament discuses an earthquake that hit Jerusalem some 2,800 years ago and now, archaeologists have found the first evidence of the event
Researchers found a layer of destruction while conducting excavations
It consisted of collapsed walls and broken pottery dating to the 8th century BC
Books of Amos and Zechariah in the Old Testament describe an earthquake that rocked the city Jerusalem about 2,800 years ago and archaeologists have now found the first evidence of biblical event.
The Israel Antiquities Authority's (IAA) excavations in the City of David National Park uncovered a layer of destruction during excavations, which consists of collapsed walls, broken pottery and bits and pieces of other goods.
Researchers say that since there was no signs of fire or an ancient conquest the destruction had to have been caused by an earthquake that hit Israel during the 8th century BC.
Some evidence of the event has been found in surrounding areas, but this is the first time archaeologists can prove it hit the major city.
Scroll down for video
The Israel Antiquities Authority's (IAA) excavations in the City of David National Park uncovered a layer of destruction during excavations, which consisted of collapsed walls, broken pottery and bits and pieces of other goods
In the book of Amos, the passage reads: 'The words of Amos, a sheep breeder from Tekoa, who prophesied concerning Israel in the reigns of Kings Uzziah of Judah and Jeroboam son of Joash of Israel, two years before the earthquake.
'And the Valley in the Hills shall be stopped up, for the Valley of the Hills shall reach only to Azal; it shall be stopped up as it was stopped up as a result of the earthquake in the days of King Uzziah of Judah,' reads another passage in Zechariah, recalling the event some 200 years later, to suggest how strong of a collective memory it left.'
Among the artifacts, archaeologists found were fragments of pottery, some nearly intact that they could be put back together, and small tables, The Jerusalem Post reports.
Since the artifacts were discovered deep into excavation site, experts say residents had to have built on top of the ruins following the earthquake, which preserved traces the event occurred.
Researchers say that since there was no signs of fire or an ancient conquest the destruction had to have been caused by an earthquake that hit Israel during the 8th century BC. Pcutred are collapsed walls that ruins of the event
Among the artifacts, archaeologists found were fragments of pottery, some nearly intact that they could be put back together, and small tables
IAA excavation directors Dr. Joe Uziel and Ortal Chalaf said in a statement: 'When we excavated the structure and uncovered an 8th century BCE layer of destruction, we were very surprised, because we know that Jerusalem continued to exist in succession until the Babylonian destruction, which occurred about 200 years later.
'We asked ourselves what could have caused that dramatic layer of destruction we uncovered.
'Examining the excavation findings, we tried to check if there is a reference to it in the biblical text.
'Interestingly, the earthquake that appears in the Bible, in the books of Amos and Zechariah, occurred at the time when the building we excavated in the City of David collapsed.'
Another biblical find was discovered in Israel last month - a pottery fragment unearthed in Israel bears the name of the biblical judge 'Jerubbaal,' which was inked on the artifact 3,100 years ago
Another biblical find was discovered in Israel last month - a pottery fragment unearthed in Israel bears the name of the biblical judge 'Jerubbaal,' which was inked on the artifact 3,100 years ago.
Mentioned in the Hebrew bible, Jerubbaal was a military leader, judge and prophet whose story is recounted in chapters 6 to 8 of the Book of Judges.
The ceramic artifact was discovered in an archeological excavation at Horbat al-Ra'i, near Kiryat Gat in Israel, which experts say it was part of a small jug that carried precious liquids.
'The name written on the jug, Yarubaal, may allude to biblical Jerubbaal, also known as the judge Gideon ben (son of) Yoash, but we cannot be sure if he owned the inscribed vessel,' the Israel Antiquities Authority shared in a statement.
Based on damaged artifacts found in Jerusalem, experts are convinced that they have proof of a 2,800-year-old devastating earthquake that was mentioned in the Bible. According to the books of Amos and Zechariah, there was a great earthquake that shook Israel “in the days of Uzziah king of Judah”.
A collection of shattered vessels that included cooking utensils, bowls, storage containers, and lamps, were unearthed in a layer of destruction by archaeologists from the Israel Antiquities Authority. It is believed that these items would have been damaged when the walls of an old building collapsed due to an earthquake because there wasn’t any evidence of a fire or any other natural phenomena. These vessels have been dated back to the 8th century BC. (Pictures can be seen here.)
The excavation area of an 8th century BCE layer of destruction in the City of David likely resulting from an earthquake from the same period that rocked the Holy Land and was mentioned in the Bible.
(Ortal Kalaf/ Israel Antiquities Authority)
Remains of tools discovered in Jerusalem's City of David within a layer of destruction from the 8th century BCE, which coincided with a massive earthquake mentioned in the Bible. The tools were likely shattered during the quake.
(Eliyahu Yanai/ City of David)
Vessels discovered in Jerusalem's City of David within a layer of destruction from the 8th century BCE, which coincided with a massive earthquake mentioned in the Bible. They are photographed after their restoration by Joseph Bocangolz.
(Dafna Gazit/ Israel Antiquities Authority)
Dr. Joe Uziel, right, and Ortal Kalaf from the Israel Antiquities Authority.
(Yaniv Berman/ Israel Antiquities Authority)
The researchers also described where the items were found, “This was most notable on the earliest floor of the southernmost room.” “In this room, a row of smashed vessels was uncovered along its northern wall, above which fallen stones had been found. It appears that these stones were the upper part of the walls of the room, which had collapsed, destroying the vessels which had been set along the wall.”
Dr. Joe Uziel and Ortal Chalaf, who are the directors of the excavation, explained in further detail how they came to the conclusion that an earthquake caused the damage, “We asked ourselves what could have caused that dramatic layer of destruction we uncovered,” adding, “Examining the excavation findings, we tried to check if there is a reference to it in the biblical text. Interestingly, the earthquake that appears in the Bible in the books of Amos and Zechariah, occurred at the time when the building we excavated in the City of David collapsed. The combination of the finds in the field together with the biblical description, led us to the conclusion that the earthquake that struck the Land of Israel during the reign of Uzziah king of Judah, also hit the capital of the kingdom – Jerusalem.”
Furthermore, they have found evidence of the earthquake in other parts of Israel as the researchers explained, “The earthquake that occurred in the middle of the 8th century BCE was probably one of the strongest and most damaging earthquakes in ancient times, and evidence of its occurrence has been discovered in the past in excavations conducted at a variety of sites throughout Israel, such as Hazor, Gezer, Tel Agol, and Tell es-Safi/Gath.”
Their findings will be presented next month at the “City of David Research” conference.
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- Gemiddelde waardering: 0/5 - (0 Stemmen) Categorie:ALIEN LIFE, UFO- CRASHES, ABDUCTIONS, MEN IN BLACK, ed ( FR. , NL; E )
LATEST UFO SIGHTINGS AND VIDEOS - 08 - 08 - 2021
LATEST UFO SIGHTINGS AND VIDEOS - 08 - 08 - 2021
UFO Sighted Over Istanbul, Turkey ( August 6, 2021 )
UFO was sighted over İstanbul, Turkey on August 6, 2021
STATEMENT : Yesterday, I went out in Turkey and this is serious, UFO disappeared
They are here
credit : Pablo Ortiz
note : background song : Kanunlar Gibi
UFO Sighted Over Arequipa, Peru ( August 7, 2021 )
UFO was Sighted over a mountain in Arequipa, Peru on August 7, 2021 : video was taken by Eric Estrada VIDEO 2 : STATEMENT : This happened in my city and it's not the 1st time it's happened, they always come out of the volcanoes. ORIGINAL : Esto pasó en mi ciudad y no es la 1era vez que sucede, siempre salen de los volcanes.
credit : Carlos Drums
Strange Phenomenon Sighted Over Sweden ( August 3, 2021 )
Strange Skies Video Compilation and it is only August 7
VIDEO 1 : Sweeden : A rare celestial optical illusion called Parelio, an optical phenomenon that occurs with the refraction of light in ice particles from clouds, took place in the sky of Sweden. by MegaCurioso : Aug 3, 2021 VIDEO 2 : New Brunswick, Canada : credit :Sharon Thibeault-Lizotte : August 3, 2021
VIDEO 3 : Cali, Colombia : August 2, 2021 : credit : Brain Chauxx
VIDEO 4 : Bielsko-Biala Poland : August 4, 2021 : credit : Henryk Bozek
VIDEO 5 : California : August 2, 2021 : Name withheld
Dark Disk UFO Zooms Away Over Manhattan, New York ( August 7, 2021 )
Disk object zooms away closeup : This is Mutual UFO Network Case 117196 file1 Long Description of Sighting Report - Case 117196 The audio was removed because I was freaking out & cussed while recording this thing. I couldn't beleive what I was looking at it really freaked me out!!!
Date Submitted : 2021-08-07 Date of Event : 2021-08-07 MUFON SUBMITTER FILE : 08072021.mp4
UFOs Sighted Over Huamantla, Tlaxcala, Mexico ( August 6, 2021 )
STATEMENT : Yesterday in a plot south of Huamantla Tlaxcala Mx I caught my attention to the sparks of light that they made, which can be I observed for a while, unfortunately I was in hours of work and I was not able to record or see them until I lost. ORIGINAL : El día de ayer en una parcela al sur de Huamantla Tlaxcala Mx me llamo la atención los destellos de luz que hacían, que puedan ser los observé por algún rato, desafortunadamente estaba en horas de trabajo y no me fue posible grabar ni verlos hasta perderse.
Closer and more evident every day
credit : Aurelio Servin
RELATED VIDEO
Strange Extraterrestrial Entity Attacks Man ( August 2, 2021 )
Paranormal or Extraterrestrial Entity : Security Camera capturing a Entity or Energy being attacking a man in the municipality of Quindio, Armenia, Colombia on August 2, 2021 at approx : 11:25PM
Paranormal or Extraterrestrial maybe the entitie is from other dimension. This unexplained light could be Alien or interdimensional or spirit orb : Introducing the original video and getting closer every day
They are everywhere now
note : no audio : video looped at approx 24 second mark
credit : A.v.e.l.f
UFO Battle Sighted Over Argentina ( August 5, 2021 )
UFO Battle Sighted Over Argentina on August 5, 2021
STATEMENT : Wonder what happened in the heavens of Argentina? Explain this to me!!! ORIGINAL : ¿Qué pasó en los cielos de Argentina? ¡¡¡Explícamelo!!!
Have the Argentine Air Force been ordered to shoot down an Unidentified Flying Object : Argentina's Air Force has many reports of Unidentified Flying Objects.
They are everywhere
credit : Max Santos
note : video loops at approx 16 second mark
UFO Sighted Over Yopal, Colombia ( August 5, 2021 )
STATEMENT : This was seen in Colombia, Yopal - Casanare yesterday at 11:24 pm did anyone else see it? After that, the army helicopters were late... they tell me that more people reported it!!
ORIGINAL : Esto se vio en Colombia, Yopal - Casanare ayer a las 11:24 pm alguien mas lo vio? Despues de eso estuvieron hasta tarde los helicópteros del ejército...me indican que ya mas personas lo reportaron!!
UFOs Are Already A Fact, But What About Alien Implants?
UFOs Are Already A Fact, But What About Alien Implants?
The case of Alien abductions and alien implants has been a fascinating subject for years, if proven to be true, it could be considered as one of the best pieces of evidence that points towards the existence of otherworldly beings.
After years of researcher on the UFO phenomena by different individuals worldwide, there is a tremendous amount of “official” information that has been made available for people around the globe.
The National Archives of the United Kingdom, for example, published in 2013 a wide range of information ranging from testimonies of sightings, photographs and even drawings to prove human contact with extraterrestrial beings.
Whether aliens exist or not is something that has “never” been officially answered yet the question has not changed for years, even though in the last decade, tremendous evidence has been made averrable which directly points towards the existence of not only extraterrestrial beings, but beings from other “dimensions”.
Since ancient times, there have been clues that have suggested an interaction between extraterrestrials and humans.
In modern days, factors such as the strange markings on the body and implants extracted from people claiming to have been abducted have fueled the idea that these otherworldly beings actually exist and have interacted with humans.
Dr. Roger Leir, a specialist in podiatry (Podiatry or podiatric medicine is a branch of medicine devoted to the study of diagnosis, medical and surgical treatment of disorders of the foot, ankle, and lower extremity) and arguably the most famous person in regard to the removal of extraterrestrials implants said to have performed around 17 surgeries in which suspicious objects, “implants” were extracted.
According to Dr. Leir, an amazing feature is that all of these alleged implants are the size of a pencil tip but extremely magnetic in nature, and some had too high frequency for their size.
Other items that were examined had meteorite fragments in common; metals such as gallium, germanium, platinum, ruthenium, rhodium and iridium. Research also found a diversion of nickel in quantities that lab analysis could not explain, nickel content of isotope ratio unknown to our planet.
According Ph.D. Alex Mosier specialist in Physical Chemistry, who examined the pieces together with Leir, fibers were found that are very similar in nature to carbon nanotubes which suggests that the fragments were designed or manufactured and it was impossible to find artifacts like these in nature.
They have to be processed, requiring complex engineering and are not easy to manufacture. These objects have also been scientifically researched by some of the world’s most prestigious laboratories such as Los Alamos National Lab, New Mexico Tech and the University of California in San Diego.
Dr. Leir, who also worked as a medical consultant in the Mutual UFO Network, said that the people from which they extracted these strange objects had no visible scars or interruption in the integrity of the skin.
There were no signs of inflammation but X-ray tests clearly showed embedding, which seemed nearly impossible.
So far, medicine has had a phobia about tests which are linked to ufology. Very few scientists and doctors have dared to enter into debate regarding the matter, especially due to their professional prestige.
So what are these objects that have been proven to exist? If these objects point towards an otherwordly origin, what other evidence do we need?
Established in 1958, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) is an independent agency of the United States Federal Government that succeeded the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA). It is responsible for the civilian space program, as well as aeronautics and aerospace research. It's vision is "To discover and expand knowledge for the benefit of humanity."
">NASA’s InSight lander, presented in three studies in this issue, provide clues to the composition of Mars
Mars is the second smallest planet in our solar system and the fourth planet from the sun. Iron oxide is prevalent in Mars' surface resulting in its reddish color and its nickname "The Red Planet." Mars' name comes from the Roman god of war.
">Mars. Researchers across these studies report preliminary findings from the Insight mission and begin to map — for the first time — the interior of a planet apart from Earth.
“These three studies provide important constraints on the present-day structure of Mars and are also key for improving our understanding of how the planet formed billions of years ago and evolved through time,” write Sanne Cottaar and Paula Koelemeijer in a related Perspective.
Studying a planet’s interior layers — its crust, mantle and core — can reveal key insights into its formation and evolution, as well as uncovering any geomagnetic and tectonic activity it hosts. Such deep interior regions can be probed by measuring the waves that travel through the planet’s body following seismic events like a quake. Such methods have been instrumental in surveying the internal characteristics of Earth.
The two largest quakes detected by NASA’s InSight appear to have originated in a region of Mars called Cerberus Fossae. Scientists previously spotted signs of tectonic activity here, including landslides. This image was taken by the HiRISE camera on NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona
In early 2019, NASA’s Martian lander InSight (Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport) began to detect and record marsquakes from its position on the surface of Mars, including several subcrustal quakes that resemble tectonic events on Earth. Brigitte Knapmeyer-Endrun and colleagues used marsquakes and ambient seismic noise to image the structure of the Martian crust below the InSight landing site, finding evidence for a multi-layered crust with either two or three interfaces. Extrapolating this data to the entire planet, Knapmeyer-Endrun et al. show how the average thickness of Mars’ crust lies between 24 and 72 kilometers (km).
Amir Khan et al. used direct and surface reflected seismic waves from eight low-frequency marsquakes to probe deeper and reveal the structure of Mars’ mantle to a depth of nearly 800 km. Their findings suggest that a thick lithosphere lies close to 500 km below the surface and, like the Earth, likely has a low-velocity layer beneath it. According to Khan et al., Mars’ crustal layer is likely highly enriched in heat-producing radioactive elements, which heats this region at the expense of the planet’s interior.
Illustration of NASA’s Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport (InSight)
Credits: NASA
Deeper still, Simon Stähler and colleagues used the faint seismic signals reflected off the Martian core-mantle boundary to investigate the Martian core. They found that Mars’ relatively large liquid metal core has a radius of nearly 1,830 kilometers and begins roughly halfway between the surface and the center of the planet, suggesting that the planet’s mantle consists of only one rocky layer, rather than two, like in Earth. According to Stähler et al., the findings indicate that the iron-nickel core is less dense than previously thought and enriched in lighter elements.
“Direct seismic observations on Mars represent a major leap forward in planetary seismology,” write Cottaar and Koelemeijer. “Over the coming years, as more marsquakes are measured, scientists will refine these models of the red planet and reveal more of Mars’ enigmatic mysteries.”
“Upper mantle structure of Mars from InSight seismic data” by Amir Khan, Savas Ceylan, Martin van Driel, Domenico Giardini, Philippe Lognonné, Henri Samuel, Nicholas C. Schmerr, Simon C. Stähler, Andrea C. Duran, Quancheng Huang, Doyeon Kim, Adrien Broquet, Constantinos Charalambous, John F. Clinton, Paul M. Davis, Mélanie Drilleau, Foivos Karakostas, Vedran Lekic, Scott M. McLennan, Ross R. Maguire, Chloé Michaut, Mark P. Panning, William T. Pike, Baptiste Pinot, Matthieu Plasman, John-Robert Scholz, Rudolf Widmer-Schnidrig, Tilman Spohn, Suzanne E. Smrekar and William B. Banerdt, 23 July 2021, Science. DOI: 10.1126/science.abf2966
“Seismic detection of the martian core” by Simon C. Stähler, Amir Khan, W. Bruce Banerdt, Philippe Lognonné, Domenico Giardini, Savas Ceylan, Mélanie Drilleau, A. Cecilia Duran, Raphaël F. Garcia, Quancheng Huang, Doyeon Kim, Vedran Lekic, Henri Samuel, Martin Schimmel, Nicholas Schmerr, David Sollberger, Éléonore Stutzmann, Zongbo Xu, Daniele Antonangeli, Constantinos Charalambous, Paul M. Davis, Jessica C. E. Irving, Taichi Kawamura, Martin Knapmeyer, Ross Maguire, Angela G. Marusiak, Mark P. Panning, Clément Perrin, Ana-Catalina Plesa, Attilio Rivoldini, Cédric Schmelzbach, Géraldine Zenhäusern, Éric Beucler, John Clinton, Nikolaj Dahmen, Martin van Driel, Tamara Gudkova, Anna Horleston, W. Thomas Pike, Matthieu Plasman and Suzanne E. Smrekar, 23 July 2021, Science. DOI: 10.1126/science.abi7730
“Thickness and structure of the martian crust from InSight seismic data” by Brigitte Knapmeyer-Endrun, Mark P. Panning, Felix Bissig, Rakshit Joshi, Amir Khan, Doyeon Kim, Vedran Lekic, Benoit Tauzin, Saikiran Tharimena, Matthieu Plasman, Nicolas Compaire, Raphael F. Garcia, Ludovic Margerin, Martin Schimmel, Éléonore Stutzmann, Nicholas Schmerr, Ebru Bozdag, Ana-Catalina Plesa, Mark A. Wieczorek, Adrien Broquet, Daniele Antonangeli, Scott M. McLennan, Henri Samuel, Chloé Michaut, Lu Pan, Suzanne E. Smrekar, Catherine L. Johnson, Nienke Brinkman, Anna Mittelholz, Attilio Rivoldini, Paul M. Davis, Philippe Lognonné, Baptiste Pinot, John-Robert Scholz, Simon Stähler, Martin Knapmeyer, Martin van Driel, Domenico Giardini and W. Bruce Banerdt, 23 July 2021, Science. DOI: 10.1126/science.abf8966
The arrogant mentality that saw Galileo derided still exists today, claims Harvard professor who wants to prove aliens exist
The arrogant mentality that saw Galileo derided still exists today, claims Harvard professor who wants to prove aliens exist
Chris Sweeney
Chris Sweeney is an author and columnist who has written for newspapers such as The Times, Daily Express, The Sun and Daily Record, along with several international-selling magazines. Follow him on Twitter@Writes_Sweeney
A new initiative aims to finally find out if we really are alone by investigating UFO sightings. Some think it’s a waste of time but what if the mainstream dismissal of aliens has blocked astronomers from pursuing their theories?
Galileo Galilei was locked up after the Roman Inquisition found him guilty of heresy. That was 1633, but Professor Avi Loeb of Harvard University is going through his own tribulations. The eminent scholar is viewed by some as controversial, which sparked an outpouring against his new initiative to finally answer the question, ‘are we alone?’ It is called the Galileo Project, and aims to provide data and evidence about what is flying above us. No more fighter jet cockpit cameras, vague eyewitness testimony, or reports from a hacker who infiltrated the CIA’s network.
The idea is simple: obtain good quality images and study them, but many of Loeb’s peers have already shot him down in flames. He admitted: “The reason I am doing what I’m doing is not because I enjoy the pain of the wounds inflicted on me on Twitter, that’s not a very pleasant experience.
“The only reason I’m willing to go through it is because I think it’s an extremely important question for the future of humanity. That’s probably the most important scientific question you can ask. It’s not about me, we should be open, rather than assume we know the answer in advance, that’s what Galileo taught us.”
Even though the Galileo Project was only launched last week, it has already attracted the attention of amateur astronomers, as thousands have landed emails in Loeb’s inbox. The venture was partly in response to the US government’s June 2020 Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP) report, which offered more questions than answers.
“You expect the scientific community to be blue sky, open minded, but the government seems to be more open minded in declaring that and the scientific community ridicules it out of a habit. There is this tendency of staying conservative and not dealing with it, which I think is inappropriate,” Loeb said.
Oddly, Loeb didn’t plan to start the Galileo Project, the interest stemmed from his book, ‘Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth’, about the unexplained object glimpsed from a Hawaiian observatory in 2017. Arriving at his office recently, he was informed a new research fund had been created in his name. Loeb said: “Soon after I had a multi-billionaire on the porch of my home with questions about my book.”
The next morning, the fund had $1.75 million from two mystery donors. Loeb added, “That never happens in academia, you have to understand that. A lot of people seek funding and work very hard to get funding and most often don’t get funded, but here I didn’t engage in any fundraising.” The cash allowed him to follow his instinct and recruit a team of 50 scientists.
It will also enable him to buy telescopes, cameras and computer systems.
The Galileo Project is going after two types of targets, and the first is UAPs. Loeb explained: “Astronomers usually look at distant objects so if a bird flies above the telescope, it’s ignored. We will pay attention to that bird and make sure it’s a bird, and not something else. We’ll be looking at the sky but not focusing on the usual suspects that astronomers are looking at far away, we’re looking at nearby objects. It’s a fishing expedition, you throw the hook and you don’t know what kind of fish you will find, and then you get as much data as possible.”
The other is interstellar objects from outside our solar system. Loeb continued: “I’m not after recruiting thousands of people with their cell phones looking at the sky, we want a large telescope more than 10cm in size or up to a metre, that’s 1,000 times the aperture of a cell phone. We want to read off the label if it’s Made in Country X versus Made on Planet Y.”
The US government report confirmed to Loeb the gaping lacuna in the status quo. The wrong people are investigating matters, he believes. “That report was an admission of failure of these intelligence agencies as that is their job, they are paid to figure out what flies in the sky,” he said. “I realised that this subject should not be limited to the talking points of politicians or military personnel, it should be in the realm of science because you would never ask a plumber to bake you a cake.”
That’s not to say that The White House doesn’t have some fascinating information, but it doesn’t share it with academics because of the well-worn reason of national security.
Loeb said: “The data the government has was gathered by classified sensors, they are sensors monitoring the sky and the US government prefers its adversaries not to know what sensors it is using. It cannot release the data for that reason, not because all of the data is classified.
“Frankly, I’m not interested in that data, I want to collect my own data. I behave like that kid that is told by adults this is the truth, often they don’t pay attention, the kids want to find it by himself or herself by checking it out. Science is an extension of our childhood curiosity and about reproducible evidence.”
The Galileo Project should swing into action in 12 months. What members of the public may be surprised to discover is that Loeb is not actually expecting to see aliens, he is looking for their equipment. That for him will be enough to prove there is a more advanced species than us in the universe.
Loeb said: “We live in the 21st century, not in the Dark Ages, and we know that if we have the instruments that can collect the evidence we need, we should just go ahead and do it, rather than argue forever philosophically whether it makes sense or not, or ridicule it. The right approach is this is an intriguing question because it could indicate there is a smarter kid on the block, we should consider that possibility.”
There is a valid reason why Loeb anticipates only seeing machinery. “Biological creatures were not selected by Darwinian evolution to survive in space, it takes light which travels at the fastest speed, four years to reach us from the nearest star,” he said.
“If you imagine chemical rockets that we use to cross the galaxy, it would take them 100 million years. No biological creature can survive that long even if you have multiple generations because of the impact of cosmic rays, but there is no need to send them, you can send artificial intelligent systems.”
And expanding on his theory, it truly does become hard to visualise. Loeb said: “If there was a civilisation, more advanced than we are, that sent self-replicating AI systems, that are connected to 3D printers that can make more of the same as they get to other places, you could easily full up the Milky Way galaxy with such probes within a billion years, and most of the stars in the universe formed billions of years before the Sun. If you just imagine another star that predated us, that’s enough to fill up the galaxy with probes.”
Once the cameras and computers are calibrated, Loeb will place them in different parts of the world. Mountaintops are a likely spot but if he can reach $10 million in funding, then he will have over 100 sets of equipment to deploy in a variety of locations. He said: “Then we will have a high likelihood of resolving this question of what UAPs are all about. If it turns out to be some atmospheric phenomena that we’ve never anticipated, so be it. We will just report back and clear up the fog.”
Underlining how tough it may be is the fact that NASA has already snubbed Loeb. But with his status as a professor at the world’s most prestigious university, he is hoping to inspire others to push the boundaries. He said: “Around the same time (of the US government report) the head of NASA Bill Nelson said scientists should look into that, I was very happy to hear that so I approached people under him and said ‘here I am, to serve and make your boss happy’. Nobody got back to me.
“This subject appeals to the public, it’s an opportunity if it were to be brought to the mainstream of science to attract more funding to science, and to attract talent into science, young people that will become scientists because it’s exciting.”
The example of Galileo is inescapable. Loeb is staking a lot on his theory and generations to come could look back at him as we now do at the famed Italian astronomer. Who else is leading an educated surge to countenance that we may not be the shot callers that we think we are?
Loeb said: “I don’t think we’re special or unique and the reason I say that is whenever we’ve pretended we’re really special, it ended up being wrong. We thought we were the centre of the universe, that’s wrong and that’s what Galileo showed by looking through his telescope.
“The philosophers at the time said, ‘we know the Sun moves around the Earth and you’re claiming the Earth moves around the Sun, therefore, we will not look through our telescope because we know the truth’.
“They put him in house arrest, today he would have been cancelled on social media. Reality doesn’t care what we say, we can pretend there are no neighbours and there is no smarter kid on the block by not looking through our windows and closing the curtains, that won’t get rid of that smarter kid.
“The point is not to repeat again the mistakes made during the days of Galileo.”
In a report submitted to the United Nations in January 1979, the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research (DSIR) classified the objects as "UFOs until identified", but said the "prospect of extra terrestrial intervention being proved is regarded as extremely remote".
The document is one of a large group of declassified documents regarding "Unidentified Flying Objects" at Archives New Zealand, which came from New Zealand's post at the UN between 1977 and 1982.
In the briefing, DSIR debunks one film of the famous event, but has trouble in doing the same with TV1's footage.
What we learned from the United States UFO Report
The United States released a report on UFOs earlier this year.
"Both Crockett's and TV1's films are highly distorted," the briefing reads.
"Crockett's film now considered unmeritous because of visual discrepancies produced by filming through an argosy window. DSIR have actually duplicated Crockett's results by shining a torch light onto the plane's window.
"TV1's film proving more interesting as it was a straight shot free of any distortion produced by filming through glass and plastic.
"However, aberrations are apparent in the film which is making it difficult to analyse. DSIR are now converting the film to computer readout and are hopeful that distortions can be erased."
DSIR said atmospheric conditions could explain false radar readings at the time of the sightings, where both Christchurch and Wellington air traffic control registered signals.
They said the readings weren't consistent with the sightings of pilots, or ground sightings.
"DSIR are not willing to make definite statements yet but their conjecture is that the objects filmed will turn out to be no more than general illumination (possibly produced by Jupiter or Venus) on the horizon.
"The objects remain classified as UFOs until identified. Prospect of extra terrestrial intervention being proved is regarded as extremely remote."
UNCREDITED/AP
UFO sightings have received significant media coverage in recent months. This 2015 image from video provided by the US Department of Defense shows an unexplained object as it soars high along the clouds, travelling against the wind.
Other documents show the lobbying New Zealand received from the nation of Grenada, which wanted the United Nations to "initiate, conduct and co-ordinate research into the nature and origin of unidentified flying objects and related phenomena".
New Zealand was chairing the Western European and Other States Group in November, 1978, when Grenada wanted to table their suggestion, and was not too pleased at the suggestion.
"We are disenchanted with Grenada resolution and would hope that the item can be disposed of without vote," one document reads.
"If put to the vote our inclination would be to vote against."
UNSPLASH
A report to the United Nations in 1979 said the "prospect of extra terrestrial intervention being proved is regarded as extremely remote".
Another document said: "A number of countries who were members of the Outer Space Committee (particularly Austria) were unhappy at the proposal. They felt it would damage the Committee's credibility and divert resources from more imporant work."
New Zealand's Ministry of Foreign Affairs said it shared the opinion of the committee.
"The matter is not appropriate for discussion in a United Nations context.
"We would hope, therefore, that the matter would be disposed of without vote.
"If put to the vote a negative vote would be appropriate though the delegation has discretion to abstain in appropriate company."
Grenada eventually pulled its pursuit of an UFO investigations unit in the UN, at the urging of the United Kingdom.
UFOs, UAPs—Whatever We Call Them, Why Do We Assume Mysterious Flying Objects Are Extraterrestrial?
UFOs, UAPs—Whatever We Call Them, Why Do We Assume Mysterious Flying Objects Are Extraterrestrial?
For better or worse, sightings of unidentifiable things in the sky have become inextricably linked to spacecraft from outer space.
Still unidentified: Navy pilots tracked and photographed what appeared to them to be a fast-moving object off the Florida coast in 2015. (U.S. Department of Defense)
Earlier this summer, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) released a much publicized nine-page report titled, with deliberate blandness, “Preliminary Assessment: Unidentified Aerial Phenomena.” Although the report was requested by Congress, in many ways it was the culmination of three-and-a-half years of public attention to military reports regarding unidentified flying objects. ODNI did not use the acronym “UFO,” which dates back to the 1950s (government officials now prefer “UAP,” for unidentified aerial phenomena), and never even mentioned the possibility of an extraterrestrial origin for the sighted objects. But that didn’t keep news outlets from concluding that the report “stops short of ruling out aliens.”
Military and intelligence officials have consistently framed these mysterious incidents in terms of national security. The Preliminary Assessment stated that ODNI’s charge from Congress was to provide policymakers with an overview of “the challenges associated with characterizing the potential threat posed by UAP.” The office was directed to focus on “identification of potential aerospace or other threats posed by the unidentified aerial phenomena to national security, and an assessment of whether this unidentified aerial phenomena activity may be attributed to one or more foreign adversaries.” Even those who promote the study of UFOs agreed that possible military threats—not extraterrestrials—were the focus of the new report.
So why do the press and social media keep bringing up aliens? Because, for better or worse, sightings of unidentifiable things in the sky have become inextricably linked to visitors from outer space. Aliens are now our default explanation for such events, and the reason is no accident: For nearly 75 years, people have worked hard to make it the default.
When reports of flying saucers first began to surface during the summer of 1947, extraterrestrials were hardly brought up. Yes, there were some who took seriously the prospect that Martians or other beings from outer space were behind all the commotion. Kenneth Arnold—the man credited with first reporting a UFO sighting—is said to have encountered a distraught woman in an Oregon café, who ran out sobbing and shouting, “There’s the man who saw the men from Mars,” adding that she “would have to do something for the children.”
Most people, though, didn’t take this possibility seriously. Opinion writers tended to think it most likely that the U.S. or Soviet Union were testing experimental rockets or aircraft. The general public also seemed dubious that flying saucers might be the work of extraterrestrials. In August 1947, George Gallup published the results of a poll in which he asked those surveyed—all Americans—what they thought the flying objects reported in the newspapers might be. Twenty-nine percent thought witnesses had been mistaken, 15 percent thought they were secret American weapons, and one-third said they didn’t know. If there were people who believed they were ships from outer space, their responses were included among the nine percent who answered “other.”
A Dutch survey in October 1952 revealed similar sentiments in the Netherlands, with no apparent support for the idea of alien visitors. And 43 percent confessed that they had no idea what the flying saucers were.
The fact that almost half the general public in the late 1940s and early 1950s were undecided about the nature of UFOs meant that, in principle at least, they were open to different explanations. This provided an opportunity in 1950 for pulp and entertainment writers Donald Keyhoe (The Flying Saucers are Real), Frank Scully (Behind the Flying Saucers), and Gerald Heard (The Riddle of the Flying Saucers) to find receptive readers for their claims that unidentified flying objects were visitors from outer space. Over the course of the 1950s, first local, then nationwide flying saucer clubs and groups sprouted up across the United States. These offered subscribers both a way to keep up with UFO news through newsletters and bulletins, and a forum for speculating about the intentions of the extraterrestrials free from fear of public ridicule.
By 1956, the terms “unidentified flying object” and “UFO” were being used in place of “flying saucer” by some military officials and amateur civilian researchers. Within a decade and a half, the acronym UFO had effectively replaced its predecessor. If the new terminology was meant to bring precision to reports of sightings, however, it achieved nothing of the kind. Just as any account of an odd thing in the sky had been quickly branded by media outlets to be a potential flying saucer, so too “UFO” served as a convenient rubric under which the media categorized just about any perplexing observation. All the while, “UFO” continued to carry with it the same association with aliens that “flying saucer” once had. The current term, “unidentified aerial phenomena” is a prisoner of this same past.
What then, should we make of this most recent report? Does it add anything new to the long history of UFOlogy? How does it compare with previous official statements?
Unfortunately, the document is thin on details, so there is much we don’t know. What we have been told, however, is that the Department of Defense has formed an Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force (UAPTF) to study the issue. For the purposes of the report, this task force examined 144 incidents involving U.S. government personnel and assets, all of which occurred between November 2004 and March 2021. Most of the cases are considered explainable, though they haven’t all been completely explained due to the fact that “the reporting lacked sufficient specificity.”
The most worrying UAP episodes for national security-minded readers involved 18 outlier instances in which it was reported that the object displayed “unusual flight characteristics.” In these cases, investigators could not rule out the possibility that it was the result of sensor errors, cyberattack, or misperception. In the end, intelligence authorities recommend increased funding to the task force to develop a more robust data collection and analysis system.
This is by no means the first government fact-finding effort in this arena. After 1947, the U.S. Air Force established a series of UFO investigation task forces, the most prominent being Project Blue Book during the years 1952-1969. In 1953, the Central Intelligence Agency convened a small panel of consultants to look into the matter. Finally, the Air Force sponsored a scientific study of the UFO phenomenon by the University of Colorado between 1966 and 1968.
Civilian UFO researchers and enthusiasts have soundly criticized these undertakings for what they see as evidence of bias and secrecy. Nevertheless, in all these cases, officials publicly concluded that most reports of UFOs were explicable and presented no reason for concern, and that the residue of inexplicable cases did not pose a national security threat.
In short, the ODNI Preliminary Assessment is all too familiar. Modern investigation of UAPs has been hampered by inconsistent standards of reporting and limited resources, and as in the past, officials on the whole appear unruffled by such reports. And once again, government agencies leave room for ambiguity in admitting that there are a number of anomalous incidents.
ODNI’s preliminary report does break some new ground, however. It clearly states that most unidentified aerial phenomena reported are physical objects. It also admits that a culture of dismissiveness and ridicule within the military and intelligence communities has inhibited witnesses from coming forward, which may partly explain the shortcomings in reporting. In fact, the Preliminary Assessment appears to open the way for more scientists and technical experts to join the discussion, although how they should do that remains unclear.
We can expect that intelligence analysts will continue to monitor the situation. Activists will take to social media to demand full disclosure by government agencies. And both skeptics and believers in alien visitation will come away feeling that their side has won the day. Far from the end of the UFO controversy, this is just the beginning of a new chapter.
UK's top military brass refuse to rule out existence of extraterrestrial UFOs
UK's top military brass refuse to rule out existence of extraterrestrial UFOs
A senior defence source told the Daily Star Sunday that the government was having to very carefully word its statements on the existence of aliens and the presence of UFOs in our skies
By Sean Rayment
Aliens may well be shooting through the skies above us
(Image: Getty Images/iStockphoto)
Military bosses have refused to rule out the existence of extraterrestrials.
The Ministry of Defence admitted it had been receiving reports of UFO sightings for more than 50 years.
But the Government said that because none of them posed a threat to UK security it had “no opinion on the existence of extraterrestrials”.
One senior defence source said last night he believed the Government was worried about commenting on alien life.
He said: “The MoD can’t deny the existence of UFOs because there are reports coming in every week, so it tries to fudge the issue by saying that no UFOs have posed a military threat.
Unidentified Flying Objects have been spotted in the skies above the UK with worrying frequency
“It’s interesting that it doesn’t mention anything about UFOs which don’t represent a threat.”
Details of the Government position was revealed in a Freedom of Information request.
An MoD spokesman said: “While I note your interest in Unidentified Aerial Phenomena, you may wish to be aware that the MoD has no opinion on the existence of extraterrestrials.
The MoD did not rule out the existence of UFOs(Image: Getty Images)
“This is because, in over 50 years, no UFO sighting reported to the department has indicated the existence of any military threat to the UK.”
Author Nick Pope, who used to run the British Government’s UFO Project, said: “The MoD’s response is disappointing, but predictable.”
Back in June, the Star reported how more than 200 close encounters have been reported in Yorkshire over the past two decades.
The latest came at the end of May, when a jet passenger filmed a long cigar-shaped object flying close to their aircraft as it cruised over the county.
Dark Disk Over Manhattan, New York, Aug 7, 2021, UFO Sighting News.
Dark Disk Over Manhattan, New York, Aug 7, 2021, UFO Sighting News.
Date of sighting: Aug 7, 2021
Location of sighting: Manhattan, New York, USA
Source: MUFON
This dark craft was caught over Manhattan yesterday. I'm not too surprised that only one report came in about it, since many people hide inside to stay safe from covid worldwide. At first I thought it might be a smoke ring made by a volcano amusement ride, but its unlikely there is anything like that open let alone working during covid. Then I thought it could be a dark cloud that got hit by a wind stream...which might explain it shooting away at the end of the 57 second video. But I have a feeling it's much more. I believe its a alien craft, disk shaped and has a black smoke tinting (coloring) on its clock around it. I do think this is an alien craft observing the public below. Aliens are watching us.
Scott C. Waring - Taiwan
Eyewitness states:
The audio was removed because I was freaking out & cussed while recording this thing. I couldn't believe what I was looking at it really freaked me out!
Major General John A. Samford On UFO And “Flying Saucers”, Pentagon, Washington, DC, 07/31/1952
Major General John A. Samford On UFO And “Flying Saucers”, Pentagon, Washington, DC, 07/31/1952
The first featured film was shot four months after the genesis of Project Blue Book, and two days after a press conference held by the Air Force to address a rash of UFO sightings over Washington, D.C. In this interview, Major General John A. Samford explains the Air Force’s mandate to identify and analyze potential threats that come by air, while also assuring the citizenry that there was no known threat. Also present in this film to offer a differing opinion is Major Donald Keyhoe. Keyhoe was a vocal believer in the existence of extraterrestrial visitors. His book, The Flying Saucers are Real, is referenced in this interview.
The Real Story of the ‘Bearded God’ Named Quetzalcoatl
The Real Story of the ‘Bearded God’ Named Quetzalcoatl
Many myths have cropped up in the centuries since Columbus landed upon the shores of Hispaniola. While some of these myths have come to be seen for what they are, many more persist in the zeitgeist as fact. One such myth is that the Aztecs believed that Hernan Cortes, the leader of a band of conquistadors, was in fact a reincarnated deity by the name of Quetzalcoatl.
As the story goes, the Aztec believed in a white, bearded god named Quetzalcoatl, who, long ago, had disappeared into the east. Before he left, however, he promised to return. When Cortes and his crew of Spaniards came ashore in Mexico in 1519, many thought they were gods.
And when their march inland took them to the Aztec emperor’s doorstep, he recognized who Cortes truly was. A pious man, Montezuma proclaimed Cortes was in fact Quetzalcoatl himself, come to fulfill the prophecy. He then graciously handed over the keys to his empire to the bearded, white god.
This tale has become so pervasive in the modern ethos that I even learned it in my 9th grade world history class. Told by our teacher that this story was historical fact, I went on believing the myth for years. It wasn’t until graduate school, when I became more interested in the history of the Atlantic World and the colonial societies it produced, that I learned that the story of a white bearded god named Quetzalcoatl was a myth.
In this article, I’d like to explore this myth, examining why it’s untrue, how it came about, and why both European and Indigenous people of post-Conquest Mexico came to believe in it. But first, let’s quickly delve into the history of the real Quetzalcoatl and his theological origins in Mesoamerica.
The Real Quetzalcoatl, the Plumed Serpent
The Plumed Serpent made his first appearance in the archaeological record over 2,000 years ago. In the heartland of the Olmec civilization, at a site known as La Venta in the present-day state of Tabasco, Mexico, archaeologists discovered a carving of a snake sporting a beak and feathered crest, with birds (or quetzal in Nahuatl, the language of the Aztecs ) on either side. Under the Olmecs, La Venta flourished from 900 BC to somewhere between 300 and 200 BC. Credited as the mother of civilization in Mesoamerica, the Olmec spread their culture throughout the region, including their belief in the Plumed Serpent deity.
A photo of La Venta Stela 19, the earliest known representation of the Feathered Serpent in Mesoamerica.
The next great civilization that left signs of worshiping Quetzalcoatl was Teotihuacan. While scholars do not know who built and inhabited this magnificent ancient city, its people etched their reverence for Quetzalcoatl into stone. The site contains three large pyramids: the Pyramid of the Sun, the Citadel, and the Temple of Feathered Serpent.
Built around 150 AD, the Temple of the Feathered Serpent, also known as the Temple of Quetzalcoatl, was the third largest pyramid in the city. Made up of seven tiers, the facade of the pyramid swarms with carvings of snakes. The symbolism of Quetzalcoatl here is intriguing.
Archaeologists have argued that the ornate headdresses found on the serpents represent time. This suggests the people of Teotihuacan gave Quetzalcoatl a role in the creation of the calendar, a role he would continue to play in later civilizations. Though Teotihuacan lay abandoned by 750 AD, it represents an important point in the evolution of Quetzalcoatl in Mesoamerican thought.
By the time the Aztecs emerged on the scene in fourteenth-century Mesoamerica, Quetzalcoatl had become an important god for many peoples of the region. And during the centuries of the Aztecs’ rise to power, the god came to play a variety of roles in Aztec belief .
For one, they credited him with the creation of the universe, humanity, the calendar, and their most important crop, corn. The Aztecs also drew upon long standing traditions that associated Quetzalcoatl with science, arts, and learning, as well as the planet Venus. And, as if this were not enough, he was also closely associated with rain.
Despite the various roles and deeds ascribed to Quetzalcoatl in Aztec theology, he was not the most important god worshipped in Tenochtitlan, the capital of the Aztec empire. Indeed, nowhere in the traditions of the Aztec, or the Olmec, Toltec, Maya, or numerous other cultures for that matter, did the Plumed Serpent god disappear, promising one day to return.
So how did this myth come about? As with most historical phenomena, many events fed into the Cortes-as-Quetzalcoatl legend, like tributaries into a river. Perhaps one of the first to occur, chronologically, was a simple matter of mistranslation.
When the Spanish arrived on the Mexican coast in 1519, they were a complete unknown in the Mesoamerican world. Thus, as the Spanish made their way inland, the towns they passed, and sometimes destroyed, had no idea what to call them.
In sixteenth-century Mesoamerica, part of a person’s identity was their city of origin or the social role they filled. Eventually, Nahuatl speakers denoted the Spaniards as Caxtilteca, or people of Castile; but that was years in the future. For now, no one knew from whence the Spanish had come, and so could not label them in traditional fashion.
It seems, however, that many people in the region were impressed with Spanish guns and horses. After all, nothing like this existed in Mexico at the time. When the Spanish recorded the interactions they had with the various peoples of central Mexico, they noted that these people called them ‘teotl.’ In Nahuatl, teotl can mean god, and this was the translation the Spaniards latched onto.
But, teotl had other meanings as well. As historian Matthew Restall explains, “it could be combined with other words… to qualify them not as specifically godly or godlike, but as fine, fancy, large, powerful, and so on.”
Impressed by the horses and goods the Spanish brought with them, the people who met Cortes on his march inland surmised the Europeans were important people. And, lacking any other way to distinguish them in speech, used the word ‘teotl’ to denote this, which later Spanish chroniclers misinterpreted as ‘god.’
Not So Reverent Actions
If the Aztecs had truly believed that Cortes was a god, Cortes himself would certainly have made note of it. But in all the letters he wrote to King Charles V in which he attempted to establish political and moral legitimacy for the war he started, he never mentions it. Even when describing his first encounter with Montezuma, the Aztec emperor, Cortes portrays Montezuma as recognizing the Spaniard’s humanity. In a letter to Charles V, Cortes recounted how Montezuma told him, “See that I am of flesh and blood like you and all other men, and I am mortal and substantial.”
Whether or not Montezuma ever actually spoke those words, we can never know. But, if the Aztec emperor had proclaimed Cortes’s divinity, why did the conquistador leave it out of his letter? Surely, such a thing would have gone far in his attempts to justify the conquests he sought in the New World.
Additionally, in the midst of the battle for that conquest, the Aztec did not sit passively by and watch the Spanish take their capital of Tenochtitlan. While they found Spanish horses and guns rather fascinating, the Spaniards themselves had quickly worn out their welcome.
In traditional Aztec warfare, soldiers captured enemies for sacrifice, which was thought to be an honorable death. In their war against the conquistadors, however, Aztec warriors delivered a devastating blow to the back of their opponent’s head whenever they could. In pre-conquest Tenochtitlan, such a death had been reserved for the city’s criminals.
Through the re-examination of the word ‘teotl’ and closer look at the actions we know the Aztecs took in regards to the Spanish presence , we can say with certainty they did not view Cortes as a god. To get a better understanding of how this myth came to permeate both European and Mesoamerican histories of the conquest, we need to examine the works of prominent thinkers in post-conquest Mexico.
Planting the Seeds of a Myth
One of the most prominent of these thinkers is the Franciscan friar Toribio de Benavente, known to history as Motolinía. While in the decades following the Aztec-Spanish War, many Spanish chroniclers made mention of the variant forms of teotl used to identify the conquistadors, most left it at that. They simply observed its use, telling their readers it translated as ‘god’ or ‘gods’ and moved on. But Motolinía took it a step further.
He saw this mistranslation as evidence of God’s approval. Writing about the conquest and post-conquest era while living in the Valley of Mexico as a missionary, Motolinía noted that the Nahua people “called the Castilians teteuh, which is to say gods, and the Castilians, corrupting the word, said teules.” For Motolinía, the use of this word denoted that the Mesoamericans had been awaiting the Spanish arrival. As Restall notes, this “anticipation… proved the Conquest was part of God’s plan for the Americas.”
Some 30 years after Motolinía scribbled those words, the Cortes-as-Quetzalcoatl myth reached its penultimate form in the work of Bernardino de Sahagún. Known as the Florentine Codex , this gargantuan work comprised 12 books that took around 45 years to compile.
Spaniards disposing of the bodies of Moctezuma and Itzquauhtzin in the Florentine Codex.
An intelligent man with an aptitude for languages, Sahagún travelled to Mexico as part of the Franciscan order’s attempts to convert the Indigenous populations to Christianity. During his time there, Sahagún learned to speak Nahuatl.
With his newly earned Nahuatl skills, Sahagún recruited the children of Nahua elites to work with him on creating the Codex. With Sahagún essentially filling the role of project manager, his Nahua assistants wrote most of the Florentine Codex .
This gave the Codex a decidedly Indigenous point-of-view on the conquest of Mexico. Yet, in this text composed by young Aztec scholars in the decades following the conquest, we see the following depiction of Montezuma preparing for Cortes’s arrival:
“When Moteucçoma heard the news, he immediately sent people for the reception of Quetzalcoatl, because they thought it was him who was coming, because they were expecting him daily.”
Even though the form of the Cortes-as-Quetzalcoatl myth so many of us were taught as children didn’t come about until the 1560s, some forty years following the fall of the Aztec empire, both European and Nahua populations had reason to buy into it.
By the time the Florentine Codex was published, the days of the conquistadors were long gone and Spain’s New World empire established. For some Europeans, the notion of Indigenous inferiority sufficed as an explanation for the success of the Spanish conquistadors. Other Spaniards who immigrated to the colony built on the ruins of the Aztec empire, known as New Spain, undoubtedly observed the unjust treatment the Indigenous populations faced at the hands of the Spanish empire.
Luckily, the Cortes-as-Quetzalcoatl myth helped to assuage, at least in part, whatever guilt colonists may have felt. As historian Camilla Townsend put it, the myth showed that “the Europeans had not only been welcomed, they had been worshipped.”
The Nahua had the opposite question to answer: How did we fall from power? The Nahua who helped Sahagún create the Florentine Codex knew the Indigenous populations of the New World were not inferior to the Europeans. After all, their ancestors had built the most sophisticated city in the world, Tenochtitlan, and the Aztec empire had never before known defeat. And on top of that, they had personal memories of fathers and grandfathers who had fought against Cortes and his conquistadors.
To account for the fall of the Aztec from power, the Nahua writers of the Florentine Codex ascribed a generally positive attribute, piety, to their ancestors, rather than the negative attribute used by some Europeans, inferiority. By explaining the Aztec loss through this positive lens, the Nahua of post-conquest Mexico could remain confident in their ancestor’s strength and intelligence, while also accounting for their defeat in the Aztec-Spanish War. Could Montezuma and his empire be blamed for losing if they had been stunned, even just temporarily, by overwhelming reverence to their gods?
The Cortes-as-Quetzalcoatl myth had been building steam for a few decades before work on the Florentine Codex began. By the 1560s, it had reached its final form, the one that survives to this day. In order to truly understand what happened in the years of the Spanish invasion and conquest of Mexico, indeed to understand the history of European colonization in general, we must expose this myth, and others like it, as falsehood.
Myths like this deny agency to the colonized, cause European victory to seem inevitable when it was not, and keep us from knowing the true, much more interesting story.
Top Image:Quetzalcoatl, detail. Source: Manzanedo/ Deviant Art
Meet our sun's 'solar twin': NASA discovers a nearby star that may be just 600million-years-old and looks like a young version of the sun… and it could shed light on how life formed on Earth
Meet our sun's 'solar twin': NASA discovers a nearby star that may be just 600million-years-old and looks like a young version of the sun… and it could shed light on how life formed on Earth
NASA astronomers used multiple observations to study a nearby young star
Kappa 1 Ceti has a similar mass, radius, temperature and brightness to the sun
The star is much younger than the sun at just 600 to 750 million years-old
This means astronomers can use it as an analogue for a young solar system
In a NASA study they looked at the likely power of stellar winds from the star
A nearby star that looks like a young version of the sun has been discovered by NASA astronomers, and it could shed light on how life on Earth first formed.
The star, Kappa 1 Ceti has a similar mass and surface temperature to our sun, is about 30 light years away, the team from NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland said, adding it is just 600 to 750 million-years-old.
The sun is considered middle-aged, at 4.6 billion-years-old, so finding a similar star in its younger years can help understand conditions in the early solar system.
'The work allows scientists to better understand how [the sun] may have shaped the atmosphere of our planet and the development of life on Earth,' said NASA.
Part of the work involved studying coronal mass ejections and stellar winds flowing from the young star to see how the sun's expulsions may have impacted the Earth.
Illustration of what the sun may have been like four billion years ago, around the time life developed on Earth
An artist concept of a coronal mass ejection hitting young Earth's weak magnetosphere
HOW DO STARS FORM?
Stars form from dense molecular clouds - of dust and gas - in regions of interstellar space known as stellar nurseries.
A single molecular cloud, which primarily contains hydrogen atoms, can be thousands of times the mass of the sun.
They undergo turbulent motion with the gas and dust moving over time, disturbing the atoms and molecules causing some regions to have more matter than other parts.
If enough gas and dust come together in one area then it begins to collapse under the weight of its own gravity.
As it begins to collapse it slowly gets hotter and expands outwards, taking in more of the surrounding gas and dust.
At this point, when the region is about 900 billion miles across, it becomes a pre-stellar core and the starting process of becoming a star.
Then, over the next 50,000 years this will contract 92 billion miles across to become the inner core of a star.
The excess material is ejected out towards the poles of the star and a disc of gas and dust is formed around the star, forming a proto-star.
This is matter is then either incorporated into the star or expelled out into a wider disc that will lead to the formation of planets, moons, comets and asteroids.
It is impossible to go back billions of years to the early solar system and see what the sun was like when life first formed on planet Earth.
However, there are more than 100 billion stars within the Milky Way, with one in ten of which are of a similar size and luminosity to our own star.
Many of these stars are in the early stages of development.
'Imagine I want to reproduce a baby picture of an adult when they were one or two years old, and all of their pictures were erased or lost,' said study author Vladimir Airapetian from NASA.
'I would look at a photo of them now, and their close relatives' photos from around that age, and from there, reconstruct their baby photos,' he said.
'That's the sort of process we are following here – looking at characteristics of a young star similar to ours, to better understand what our own star was like in its youth, and what allowed it to foster life on one of its nearby planets.'
Kappa 1 Ceti is one such solar analogue star, within our stellar neighbourhood.
The star is located about 30 light-years away, which NASA says in space teerms is like living on the next street over.
Study second author, Meng Jin, a heliophysicist with the SETI Institute and the Lockheed Martin Solar and Astrophysics Laboratory in California said it is a 'twin' of the sun when it was young.
The team adapted existing models of the solar system to try and predict some of the more difficult to measure characteristics of Kappa 1 Ceti.
This includes the strength of stellar winds and coronal ejections coming from the star as they flow out towards any potential planets - yet to be formed or discovered - within the system.
They used data from a range of space telescopes include Hubble, TESS, NICER and the ESA XMM-Newton satellites.
Like human toddlers, young stars are known for their high bursts of energy and activity - released in the form of a stellar wind.
Stellar winds, like stars themselves, are mostly made up of a superhot gas known as plasma, created when particles in a gas have split into positively charged ions and negatively charged electrons.
The most energetic plasma, with the help of a star's magnetic field, can shoot off away from the outermost and hottest part of a star's atmosphere, the corona, in an eruption, or stream more steadily toward nearby planets as stellar wind.
'Stellar wind is continuously flowing out from a star toward its nearby planets, influencing those planets' environments,' Jin said.
Global structure of the stellar magnetic corona of 1 Ceti in 2012 (left) and 2013 (right panel), with the superimposed plasma pressure along the field lines specified by the colour bars.
KAPPA 1 CETI: A TWIN OF THE YOUNG SUN
Name: Kappa 1 Ceti Constellation: Cetus
Known planets: None
Spectral type: G5
RA: 03h 19m 21.6960s
DEC: +03° 22′ 12.712″
Distance: 29.81 light years
Mass: 1.037 solar masses
Radius: 0.95 solar radius
Luminosity: 0.85 times the sun
Temperature: 9,814 F
Age: 600-750 million years
Kappa 1 Ceti is a yellow dwarf star 30 light years away from the Earth in the constellation of Cetus.
It has a rapid rotation, once every nine Earth days and so far no exoplanets have been discovered.
It is regarded as a good candidate to host terrestrial planets similar to Earth.
It is about the mass of the sun, with a radius 95 per cent that of our own star, but is only 85 per cent as bright.
It is relatively young, at a few hundred million years old making it a good candidate to explore the sun's past. Younger stars tend to generate hotter, more vigorous stellar winds and more powerful plasma eruptions than older stars do.
Such outbursts can affect the atmosphere and chemistry of planets nearby, and possibly even catalyse the development of organic material – the building blocks for life – on those planets.
Stellar wind can have a significant impact on planets at any stage of life.
But the strong, highly dense stellar winds of young stars can compress the protective magnetic shields of surrounding planets, making them even more susceptible to the effects of the charged particles.
The sun is a perfect example of this process and how it changes over the lifetime of the star - from youth to middle-age.
Compared to now, in its toddlerhood, our sun likely rotated three times faster, had a stronger magnetic field, and shot out more intense high-energy radiation.
These days, for lucky spectators, the impact of these particles is sometimes visible near the planet's poles as aurora, or the Northern and Southern Lights.
Airapetian said that four billion years ago these lights would have been visible from many more different places around the globe than they are today.
That high level of activity in our sun's early years may have pushed back Earth's protective magnetosphere, and provided the planet with the right atmospheric chemistry for hte formation of the first biological molecules.
This wouldn't have happened for Venus, which was close enough to have its atmosphere torched, or Mars too far away for the radiation to reach at strength.
Similar processes could be unfolding in stellar systems across our galaxy and universe including in Kappa 1 Ceti.
'It's my dream to find a rocky exoplanet in the stage that our planet was in more than four billion years ago, being shaped by its young, active star and nearly ready to host life,' Airapetian said.
'Understanding what our sun was like just as life was beginning on Earth will help us to refine our search for stars with exoplanets that may eventually host life.'
The team used multiple instruments including Hubble and TESS to study the star to see how it compares to the young sun
THE SUN: YELLOW DWARF STAR IN THE SOLAR SYSTEM
Name: Sun Known planets: Eight Spectral type: G2 Distance: 2.7×10^17 km Mass: 1.9885×10^30 kg Radius: 696,342 km Luminosity: 3.828×10^26 W Temperature: 9,929 F Age: 4.6 billion years
The Sun is the star at the heart of the Solar System, it is a nearly perfect sphere of hot plasma, radiating energy supporting life on Earth.
It has a diameter of 1.39 million km, and is 330 times the mass of the Earth.
Three quarters of the star is made of hydrogen, followed by helium, oxygen, carbon, neon and iron.
It is a G-type main sequence star and is sometimes called a yellow dwarf.
The Sun formed from the gravitational collapse of matter in a large molecular cloud that gathered in the centre.
The rest flattened into an orbiting disc that formed planets, moons, asteroids and comets.
Multiple agencies have sent instruments into space capable of measuring the stellar winds from the sun - but it is not yet possible to directly observe the stellar wind of other stars in our galaxy, like Kappa 1 Ceti, because they are too far away.
When scientists wish to study an event or phenomenon that they cannot directly observe, scientific modelling can help fill in the gaps.
While scientists have previously modelled the stellar wind from this star, Airapetian said they used more simplified assumptions than the new NASA study.
The basis for the new model of Kappa 1 Ceti is the Alfvén Wave Solar Model, which is within the Space Weather Modelling Framework, that works by inputting known information about a star, including its magnetic field and ultraviolet emission line data, to predict stellar wind activity.
When the model has been tested on our Sun, it has been validated and checked against observed data to verify that its predictions are accurate.
'It's capable of modelling our star's winds and corona with high fidelity,' Jin said.
'And it's a model we can use on other stars, too, to predict their stellar wind and thereby investigate habitability. That's what we did here.'
Previous studies have drawn on data gathered by the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) and Hubble Space Telescope (HST) to identify Kappa 1 Ceti as a young solar proxy, and to gather the necessary inputs for the model, such as magnetic field and ultraviolet emission line data.
'Every model needs input to get output,' Airapetian said, adding that to get useful output the input needs to be from a solid data source, or multiple sources.
'We have all that data from Kappa 1 Ceti, but we really synthesised it in this predictive model to move past previous purely observational studies of the star.'
The team is now working on a project looking more closely at the particles that may have emerged from early solar flares, as well as prebiotic chemistry on Earth.
The researchers hope to use their model to map the environments of other Sun-like stars at various life stages.
Specifically, they have eyes on the infant star EK Dra – 111 light-years away and only 100 million years old – which is likely rotating three times faster and shooting off more flares and plasma than Kappa 1 Ceti.
Documenting how these similar stars of various ages differ from one another will help characterise the typical trajectory of a star's life.
Their work, Airapetian said, is all about 'looking at our own Sun, its past and its possible future, through the lens of other stars.'
Clouds of electrons blooming in deep space have been revealed in a whole new level of detail, showing cosmic phenomena unlike anything astronomers have seen before.
Resembling eerie dancing ghosts in space, these colossal specters could reveal new information about the behavior of supermassive black holes – and the complex environment between galaxies.
They are, astronomers discovered, being produced by winds from two active supermassive black holes at a distance of about a billion light-years. They have been named PKS 2130-538, and much about them remains mysterious.
While the 'ghosts' and the two radio galaxies thought responsible for their formation have been seen before, no previous observations have captured them in such glory.
The ghosts, and the galaxies making them.
(Norris et al., arXiv, 2021)
"When we first saw the 'dancing ghosts' we had no idea what they were," explained astrophysicist Ray Norris of Western Sydney University and CSIRO in Australia.
"After weeks of work, we figured out we were seeing two 'host' galaxies, about a billion light-years away. In their centers are two supermassive black holes, squirting out jets of electrons that are then bent into grotesque shapes by an intergalactic wind.
"New discoveries however always raise new questions and this one is no different. We still don't know where the wind is coming from? Why is it so tangled? And what is causing the streams of radio emission? It will probably take many more observations and modelling before we understand any of these things."
The peculiar objects were just one in a trove made by the Australian Square Kilometer Array Pathfinder (ASKAP) radio telescope array, as part of its Pilot Survey of the EMU (Evolutionary Map of the Universe) survey.
One of the most sensitive radio telescopes ever built, and the world's fastest survey radio telescope, ASKAP is designed to see deep into the radio Universe and reveal secrets we had no idea were out there.
Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No – it's an ORC!
(Norris et al., arXiv, 2021)
That's exactly what it's doing. Last year, the survey revealed the presence of what have been called Odd Radio Circles, or ORCs, which seem to be giant circles of radio emission a million light-years across, surrounding distant galaxies. We still don't know what they are.
To date, the EMU pilot survey has amassed a catalogue of around 220,000 sources of various sorts, many of which had never even been suspected.
"We are even finding surprises in places we thought we understood," Norris said.
"Next door to the well-studied galaxy IC5063, we found a giant radio galaxy, one of the largest known, whose existence had never even been suspected. Its supermassive black hole is generating jets of electrons nearly 5 million light-years long. ASKAP is the only telescope in the world that can see the total extent of this faint emission."
Giant, previously invisible galaxy plumes.
(Norris et al., arXiv, 2021)
Most known radio sources are from active supermassive black holes in the centers of galaxies. This is because as these black holes devour matter, material is funneled around the outside of the event horizon along magnetic field lines and blasted away from the poles in the form of radio-loud jets.
These sources are the brightest in the radio sky, and therefore that's what radio telescopes tend to pick up. ASKAP is starting to show us the extent of the radio Universe – those fainter sources that we don't usually see, such as synchrotron emission from radio relics in galaxy clusters, and more mysterious objects, like ORCs and dancing ghosts.
And this is just the pilot survey. The EMU survey is expected to continue for years, peering deep into the night to uncover the mysteries in the dark.
"We are getting used to surprises as we scan the skies as part of the EMU Project, and probe deeper into the Universe than any previous telescope," Norris said. "When you boldly go where no telescope has gone before, you are likely to make new discoveries."
Commander assures that the US has the technology to teleport people
Commander assures that the US has the technology to teleport people
Teleportation, or teleportation, is the process of moving objects or particles from one place to another instantly.
Depending on the narrative in question, it may or may not be done using a machine or device. Literally it means “to move at a distance” , understood as a movement that occurs without the need to establish direct physical contact with the object for it to move.
For example, if we teleported the exact copy of a human being, we should destroy the original so that it is considered teleported and not cloned .. Or is it not entirely so?
Late last year, Lt. Gen. Steven L. Kwast, commander of the Education and Training Air Command at San Antonio-Randolph Base in Texas, revealed surprising classified information during a conference in Washington DC.
Kwast, who retired in 2019, believes advanced technology will determine who will lead the world in space. But at one point in the conference, he made a shocking revelation:
“The United States already has the ability to teleport humans anywhere on Earth using radically advanced technology.”
“The technology is in the engineering benches today,” said Lt. Gen. Kwast. “But most Americans and most members of Congress haven’t had time to really look at what’s going on here.”
“But I have had the benefit of 33 years of study and friendship with these scientists. This technology can be built today with non-development technology to take any human being from anywhere on planet Earth to any other place in less than an hour ”
According to the official, in addition to people, already existing advanced technologies can provide Wi-Fi and power from space, eliminating the need for mobile phone antennas and chargers, with the technology also applicable at a particular level.
“The power of space will change world power, and it doesn’t have to be a big country to do it,” the former officer emphasized.
“It can be a small island country, let’s say New Zealand, because technology, if optimized, can change world power, and there is nothing you can do if you don’t have that power.”
“You have it and your values govern, or you don’t have it, and you must send it. We have seen it played over and over again in history, and now it is developing. “
Unfortunately Kwast did not specify what kind of technology the US supposedly has to teleport humans, but given the subject of his speech, dedicated especially to the US Space Force, the new branch of the US military.
Kwast, who retired from the Air Force in August, is known to have spoken and written on subjects deemed qualified despite having direct orders not to, and is an active advocate of military dominance in space.
Even The Drive magazine suggested that the retired officer could be chosen to lead the Space Force.
At the conference, Kwast warned that while the United States remained “dominant” in the space at this time, it had to act now to maintain this dominance, because America’s adversaries, particularly China, could “win this race” and then be a real danger in space.
The officer claimed that China is already building a space armada, including “battleships and destroyers” capable of maneuvering and destroying its adversaries, while the United States was not currently developing such ships.
Again a conspiracy theory comes true, and it has been shown that teleportation is not just fiction, it is a reality.
It also shows us how much governments hide, either for security or for following a dark agenda about the technology that exists today, which is much more advanced than we can imagine.
One weird feature of the world of UFOs and aliens is that of the phenomenon of cattle mutilations. This is when cattle or other livestock are found dead and in very strange circumstances. The carcasses are usually cut up, drained of blood, missing soft-tissue organs or other extremities, dismembered, or otherwise mutilated in a variety of ways, always showing a surgical precision to the cuts not consistent with the attack of a predator such as a coyote or mountain lion. There are typically other oddities as well, such as a lack of flies or strange substances seeping from the wounds, which are sometimes even cauterized. Dead, butchered cattle will be reported miles away from where they disappeared or in inaccessible places. There is never any sign of tracks of any perpetrator around the body, no scuff marks or sign of a struggle, and sometimes there aren’t even tracks from the dead animal, as if it has just materialized there or been carefully placed from the air. Usually there is no blood at all, and a distinct lack of decomposition or damage from scavengers. Even insects are usually said to shun these mystery corpses. This is all usually found after the fact, with no explanation, but one case of cattle mutilation going back all the way to the 19th features a witness who saw this happening, and which has remained a controversial case to this day.
One of the only known reports of someone actually witnessing a cow being abducted by aliens, and which would become a spooky case of cattle mutilation, supposedly happened all the way back in 1897, in the rural area of LeRoy, Kansas, in the United States. One evening in April of that year, a local cattle rancher by the name of Alexander Hamilton and his son were apparently woken up at around 10:30 PM by the sound of a “noise among the cattle.” It was at first thought that this was just their dog up to some prankish behavior with the cows outside, but when Hamilton went to the window to look outside, he was astonished by what he saw. He claimed that he witnessed a very strange-looking and enormous “airship” hovering above the cow lot around 600 feet away, with “strange beings” visible within it, and he would say of what happened:
Calling my tenant, Gid Heslip, and my son Wall, we seized some axes and ran to the corral. Meanwhile the ship had been gently descending until it was not more than thirty feet above the ground and we came within fifty yards of it. It consisted of a great cigar-shaped portion, possibly three hundred feet long, with a carriage underneath. The carriage was made of glass or some other transparent substance alternating with a narrow strip of some material. It was brightly lighted within and everything was plainly visible-it was occupied by six of the strangest beings I ever saw. They were jabbering together but we could not understand a word they said. Every part of the vessel which was not transparent was of a dark reddish color. We stood mute with wonder and fright. Then some noise attracted their attention and they turned a light directly upon us. Immediately on catching sight of us they turned on some unknown power, and a great turbine wheel, about thirty feet in diameter, which was revolving slowly below the craft, began to buzz and the vessel rose lightly as a bird.
As the three of them looked on in absolute astonishment, the flying craft seemed to have taken an interest in the cattle below it. In particular, it seemed to float over to and hover above a heifer that it seemed especially drawn to. Then, a very bizarre sequence of events would play out. Hamilton would say:
When about three hundred feet above us it seemed to pause and to hover directly above a two-year-old heifer which was bawling and jumping, apparently fast in the fence. Going to her, we found some material fastened in a slip knot around her neck and going up to the vessel from the heifer tangled in the wire fence. We tried to get it off but could not, so we cut the wire loose to see the ship, heifer and all, rise slowly, disappearing in the northwest.
The following day, Hamilton went out to look for the cow, but could find no trace of it, not even any tracks. There were signs that the animal had been at that spot, but after that it seems to have just evaporated into thin air. The baffled rancher went around to other ranchers in the area, but no one had seen the missing animal. However, he would soon find someone who had made a rather gruesome find a few miles away, of which Hamilton would say:
Coming back in the evening I found that Link Thomas, about three or four miles west of LeRoy, had found the hide, legs and head in his field that day. He, thinking that someone had butchered a stolen beast, had brought the hide to town for identification, but was greatly mystified in not being able to find any tracks in the soft ground. After identifying the hide by my brand, I went home. But every time I would drop to sleep, I would see the cursed thing, with its big lights and hideous people. I don’t know whether they are devils or angels or what; but we all saw them, and my whole family saw the ship, and I don’t want any more to do with them.
Rather eerily, it was reported that the remains had no footprints around them, no sign of predator activity, in fact no signs of any struggle, as if they had just been carefully placed there from above. The whole sensational account would be published in the Yates Center Farmers Advocate and once it was out in the wild become big local news. At the time, the region was in the throes of a series of mysterious sightings of strange airships, often described as highly advanced flying machines covered with electric lights and well ahead of anything available at the time, often seen manned by very strange looking humanoid occupants. Such mysterious airships had been sighted in such far-flung places as the Midwest, California, Texas, and Utah, so they were already making the rounds in the news at the time, but Hamilton’s report was especially amazing. When the odd news hit, there immediately came in a deluge of witnesses saying they had seen the same ship in the area where the cow abduction had occurred, and Hamilton even had over a dozen high-profile, well-respected citizens sign an affidavit vouching for his tale and his honesty, including several Sheriffs, pharmacists, attorneys, a banker, a doctor, the State Oil Inspector, the Justice of the Peace, the Postmaster, and the Register of Deeds. Considering that at the time Hamilton was a very respected, upstanding citizen, a stock dealer and successful businessman, most people believed his story and it generated a lot of excitement. One statement made of his impeccable character reads:
Hamilton’s popularity in the community is unmistakable not only on account of his fidelity to duty in public office, but also because of his honorable business career, his fidelity to manly principles and his reliability in private life. During the long years of his residence in Kansas he has left the impress of his individuality for good upon the communities with which he has been connected and he feels just pride in the splendid advancement made by his adopted state. We have never heard his word questioned and that we do verily believe his statement to be true and correct.
Despite how much it had been talked about, the Hamilton cow abduction story would eventually sort of fade away into obscurity until it was dug up again in the 1960s. Jacques Vallee would mention it in his book Anatomy of a Phenomenon (1965), and after that it would feature in a best-selling book by ufologist Frank Edwards in his book Flying Saucers—Serious Business in 1966, which really brought it into the limelight, after which it would be mentioned in various other books and magazine articles over the years. For a long time it was considered to be a very intriguing early UFO account and perhaps the only time a cattle mutilation had been actually witnessed by someone, but a 1977 article in Fate Magazine would take some of the wind out of its sails. Author Jerome Clark would uncover the fact that Hamiton had allegedly at the time been a member of a local “Liar’s Club,” in which prominent citizens would make up wild yarns to see which ones would make it into the news and fool people the most. Clark cited as evidence a 1943 article from a Kansas newspaper called The Buffalo Enterprise, which held the testimony on a Mrs. Donna Steeby of Wichita Kansas, who related how her 93-year-old mother, Ethel L Shaw, had know Hamilton, and that he had told her that it was all a big, wild yarn that had gotten out of hand. Shaw would apparently tell Clark of it all:
How well I remember that beautiful afternoon, almost as though it were yesterday. I, as a young girl about fourteen years old, was visiting in the Hamilton home with Mrs. Hamilton and their daughter Nell when Mr. Hamilton came home from town, put up his team and came into the sitting room where we were visiting. He pulled up a chair and almost immediately began relating this story by saying, ‘Ma, I fixed up quite a story and told the boys in town and it will come out in the Advocate this weekend.’
Not only that, but she also claimed that all of the ones who had signed the affidavit had been members of the very same Liar’s Club, and that he had hoaxed the other airship sightings in the area by using fake airships that he had crafted out of cleaning bags, candles and balsa wood. Clark also mentions the discovery of a Robert Schadewald, an American correspondent of the British publication Fortean Times, who in 1976 uncovered an article in the Buffalo Enterprise of January of 1943 an account by a man named Ed F. Hudson, who claimed that he had been the editor of the Yates Center Farmer’s Advocate and that Hamilton had admitted to faking the sighting and even claimed to have seen the workshop where he had been making his fake UFOs. Hudson would say of this:
I had just bought and installed a little gasoline engine, the first I believe to come to Yates Center, using it to run my machinery replacing the hand-power on the old County Campbell press and kicking the job presses. I invited many of my friends into the back shop to see the engine work. Hamilton was one of them. He exclaimed, ‘Now they can fly,’ hence the airship story that we made up. After we had published it, the story was copied in many of the largest newspapers in the country, England, France, and Germany, some illustrating it with pen-drawn imaginings by their staff artists. There were also hundreds of inquiries from every part of the globe. Soon afterwards there came the various experiments in flight, but I have always maintained that Alex Hamilton was the real inventor of human flight.
This all seems to be pretty damning, and the story has gone on to be seen as a big historical hoax largely thanks to Clark’s article, but there are those willing to defend Hamilton’s story and have raised some points in their defense over the years. For one, Hamilton never really publicly admitted to it all being bogus, and was long dead by that time and was in no position to defend himself. There also is the fact that this is a second-hand tale from an elderly lady, so who is to say that she really knows what she is talking about or is telling the truth herself? As for Hudson, how do we know we can believe him either? There is actually no hard evidence that Hamilton was a part of a Liar’s Club, or that the others who had vouched for him were, just these admissions uncovered long after the fact. Although the main consensus now is that Hamilton was indeed lying, what if he wasn’t? One argument from a defender of his was written by The Last Sisyphus on Medium, who says:
The vast majority of “experts” hold that it was a hoax. A couple thoughts on the issue. One reason “experts” disagree with Hamilton’s testimony is that he belonged to “The Liars Club.” There is no doubt that this was probably the case, but to suggest that Hamilton’s UFO testimony is an elaborate hoax because he was involved in a liar’s club raises questions. The first: Since he was a member of “The Liars Club,” we could, in theory, dismiss every word Hamilton ever said based on his involvement with the group. But that is not fair. Hamilton probably told the truth on a number of occasions despite being a part of a liars club. Why is it not possible that he told the truth about the UFO? (He is, after all, backed by [literally] countless UFO reports.) The second: Hamilton did not give the “hoax” up (if it was, indeed, a hoax). We have no evidence that he admitted his story was a hoax. Also: There were others who witnessed this phenomenon. Hamilton even signed an affidavit (which is not something to joke about — no matter how elaborate the prank) and was practicing law in Leroy, Kansas. The hyper-skeptics have no basis to dismiss this testimony. Nothing. The most radical position for them to hold — while maintaining consistency in their own logic and scientific worldview (ie we are not at the pinnacle of scientific discovery)— is to remain indifferent to Hamilton’s testimony. The wisest response for a skeptic is thus: “We simply do not have enough information to dismiss Mr. Hamilton’s testimony, therefore we must keep silent on the matter.”
While the Alexander Hamilton case has long been written off as a hoax, some people believe Clark’s debunking of it all, some people don’t. We are left to wonder, is this all just a ruse conjured up by the “Liar’s Club” or something more? It is all most certainly a hoax, but some people still seem to defend it, and it has taken on a life of its own and has made its mark. Whatever the case may be, it is still one of the earliest cattle mutilation reports on record, and the only one that seems to have been allegedly witnessed by someone, back in the day when UFOs weren’t really a thing, so true or not it is an intriguing case nonetheless.
Over the years, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has very generously released into the public domain numerous pages of UFO-related files from its vaults. Those papers – made available through the terms of the Freedom of Information Act – involve files on more than a few of the Contactees of the 1950s, such as George Van Tassel, Truman Bethurum, George Adamski, Wayne Aho and George Hunt Williamson. Other files of the mysteriously UFO-tied kind, and that the FBI has declassified, include ones on cattle mutilations, extra-sensory perception, crashed UFOs, the controversial Majestic 12 documents, and much more. Although the FBI has declassified literally thousands of its pages on the Contactee movement of the 1950s and later, they have released just one document pertaining to the alien abduction issue. In all probability, of course, that’s because the FBI only ever received just one report from a U.S. citizen claiming to have been carried away by ETs! Nevertheless, that one document is well worth taking a look at. It dates from 1967 and tells – albeit briefly – what sounds very much like a classic alien abduction experience. Notably, the FBI shared the data, and the document, with an agency whose name has been deliberately blacked out in the relevant papers. The likelihood, however, is that that solitary sheet of paper reached the U.S. Air Force’s UFO program, Project Blue Book. The specific date is January 18, 1967 and is captioned as follows: “Unidentified Flying Object Allegedly Sighting [sic], January 17, 1967.”
It reads as follows:
What was I supposed to do?
“At 4:10 a.m., January 18, 1967, [deleted] advised that he desired to report that he had observed a large oblong-shaped object which alighted in the street in front of him when he was on his way home from his television repair shop, the [deleted], Chesapeake, Virginia. He believes that he was taken into this craft which he recalls as being made of a glass-like substance and being transparent. It was manned by several individuals who appeared to be undersized creatures similar to members of the human race, probably not more than 4 feet tall. They were allegedly wearing regular trouser pants and T-shirts. [deleted] believes that he was transported by this craft for an undetermined distance and returned to his point of take-off approximately one hour later. [Deleted] spoke in a coherent manner although he appeared to be under certain emotional strain. He claimed he had not been drinking any intoxicants but he was unable to account for the time between 8:00 p.m. and 4:00 a.m. he stated he was telephoning from his workshop but had no recollection of being elsewhere between 8:00 p.m. and 4:00 a.m.”
And that’s where the document comes to its end. As you’ll see, the story that the FBI received was an intriguing one. In fact, it’s not very often that someone jumps in their car and chooses to head-off to the offices of the FBI after allegedly having being kidnapped by black-eyed aliens from another world. Or, even, from another galaxy. While the reference to the aliens allegedly wearing “regular” clothing is admittedly strange, there is no denying, at all, the fact that the experience closely mirrors so many of those accounts of latter day times. There was, for example, the fact that the aliens were “not more than 4 feet tall,” which is something that strongly suggests the man’s captors were of the Grey alien kind that are undeniably ingrained in our pop-culture of today. And, that the victim “was unable to account for the time between 8:00 p.m. and 4:00 a.m.” is prime evidence of the phenomenon of what is famously known as “missing time.” Okay, it’s not the greatest report of the alien abduction variety; but, in many respects it’s unique, due to it having been handled and scrutinized by the FBI, no less. Who knows what J. Edgar Hoover, the Director of the FBI, at the time, thought of it all? Maybe, it didn’t reach him. After all, I’m sure that the FBI had much more to do on that 1967 night than chase down alien abductees. Or, maybe I’m wrong!
A new theory has emerged regarding the “Great Dimming” period of Betelgeuse. Known as one of the biggest and most luminous stars in the night sky (it is located in the Orion constellation), it is also very mysterious.
Between October 2019 and March 2020, this red supergiant star’s brightness dimmed 2.5 times which was the biggest drop in 50 years. Known as the “Great Dimming”, the decrease in brightness caused a drop in surface temperature of about 300 degrees Fahrenheit (149 degrees Celsius).
While scientists scrambled to figure out what was causing such a dim in the star, several theories emerged, such as a giant dust cloud that moved between Earth and Betelgeuse that temporarily blocked us from seeing the light; it was about to go supernova; and “cool star spots” that covered about 70% of the star’s surface. Even though the star’s luminosity had dipped dramatically, the theory of it going supernova was dismissed when it started brightening up again.
Betelgeuse
And now, there is a new theory that suggests a large dark spot is covering parts of the star’s surface. While this is another interesting hypothesis, experts can’t confirm or deny the idea as a large dark spot has never been directly observed on the star.
The research team studied Betelgeuse’s temperature by analyzing the high-resolution near-infrared spectra of the star on four specific dates — January 31, March 19, April 4, and April 6, 2020. These four dates coincide with the dimming and post-dimming phases of the star.
Dr. Sofya Alexeeva explained their research in further detail, “Our method is based on the measurement of titanium oxide (TiO) and cyanide (CN) molecular lines in stellar spectra.” “The cooler a star is, the more these molecules can form and survive in its atmosphere and the molecular lines are stronger in the stellar spectrum.” “In a hotter atmosphere, these molecules dissociate easily and do not survive.”
Since the decrease in brightness caused a surface temperature drop of about 300 degrees Fahrenheit, the researchers realized that the results of an earlier study predicting that 70% of the star’s surface was covered in spots was similar to their findings. However, they believe that it is just one gigantic dark spot that is actually quite common on red supergiants.
Spots on our sun captured by amateur astronomer Alan Friedman in July of 2012.
While this is just the most recent of several theories regarding Betelgeuse’s “Great Dimming” period, the mysterious red supergiant star will continue to amaze and baffle us at the same time. (More pictures of Betelgeuse can be seen here.)
The study was published in the journal Nature Communications where it can be read in full.
NASA's Perseverance tries to collect Mars rocks, fails
NASA's Perseverance tries to collect Mars rocks, fails
The Perseverance rover is on a mission to hunt for signs of past life on Mars. But something went wrong in its first attempt to gather rock samples.
Perseverance will explore Jezero Crater for at least one Martian year (687 Earth days)
NASA's Perseverance rover could not collect rock samples from Mars in its first attempt to do so, the US space agency said.
The Mars rover is on a mission to collect rock samples from the Red Planet that can be studied by scientists on Earth. Samples are to be encased in tubes that would be brought back to Earth at a later date.
But the data received by scientists showed that no sample was collected after the drilling process.
The rover is currently stationed on the surface of a large crater. Scientists believe the crater to be the site of a deep lake that existed 3.5 billion years ago. Researchers say it can provide clues about extraterrestrial life.
What did the rover do?
NASA released images of a small mound with a hole in its center next to the rover — the first dug into the planet by a robot.
The drilling process had been successful, scientists say. The engineers are now trying to discover why the rover failed to place a finger-sized rock sample in one of its titanium sample tubes.
"While this is not the 'hole-in-one' we hoped for, there is always risk with breaking new ground," Thomas Zubuchen, the associate administrator for NASA's science mission directorate, said in a statement.
NASA project scientist Ken Farley said the next step would be using a camera mounted on a robotic arm to inspect inside the hole. He said they might see the broken rock core, or might discover the sample had turned to sand.
"It's a bit deflating because this whole complicated piece of machinery worked fine, the engineering worked just fine, but it seems Mars didn't cooperate," Farley said.
"We will persevere," Farley added.
The whole sampling process takes up to 11 days.
What are Perseverance's tasks?
The Perseverance rover is on Mars to help NASA study Martian geology and past life.
NASA extracts oxygen from CO2 on Mars
It is currently stationed on the surface of Jezero Crater. It landed on Mars in February, following its seven-month journey from Earth that saw it fly about 300 million miles (480 million kilometers) before reaching its destination.
NASA plans to bring around 30 samples back to Earth in the 2030s.
UFO crosses the air route of a Lockheed C-130 Hercules ( July 27, 2021 )
Dark colored UFO crosses the air route of a Lockheed C-130 Hercules. A American four-engine turboprop military transport aircraft on 27/7/21: Here i present the video and in approach the original.
Every day they are closer and more evident
note : no audio
ORIGINAL VIDEO TITLED : queda de ufo ovni avião
ORIGINAL VIDEO OWNER : Arquivos do Mundo Sobrenatural
UFOs Sighted Over Baltimore, Maryland ( August 5, 2021 )
Strange UFO activity over Baltimore : UFOs were sighted over the night skies of Baltimore, Maryland by Jay Orr on August 5, 2021 : Here I present the original
Every day they are closer and more evident
credit : Jay Orr
Circle Shaped UFO Sighted Over Chile ( August 5, 2021 )
UFO / UAP Sighted Over Ventura, California ( July 31, 2021 )
Strange UFO / UAP or Unidentified Aerial Phenomena was sighted over Ventura, California on July 31, 2021
STATEMENT : VENTURA , CALIFORNIA - 31/07/2021
They're everywhere already
note : no audio : video looped at 16 second mark
credit : H.P.M.B
RELATED VIDEO
UFO Sighted Over Boston, Massachusetts ( August 2, 2021 )
Strange moving UFO was sighted over Boston, Massachusetts on August 2, 2021
STATEMENT : I saw this Tuesday night Here I present the original and in the wake with approach.
More evident every day
credit : Michael Hunter
Nazi Die Glocke Bel Type UFO Sighted Over Switzerland ( July 2, 2021 )
Is this the new Swiss Army Flying Vehicle resembling the Nazi Die Glocke Bell : Sighted over Solothurn Military Base STATEMENT :
The region is a hilly region, as can be seen, and that there are cave systems and some military facilities here. No one is allowed near these military areas, there are definitely some extraordinary things going on here and the army is aware of it. And they hide many things from us. That's why we are not even allowed to go to that area and take images from a distance.
MUFON CASE : 117180 Isla Cristina, Huelva, Spain ( August 5, 2021 )
Mutual UFO Network : MUFON SUBMISSIONS : Objeto a gran velocidad : Object at high speed Long Description of Sighting Report - Case 117180
Me encontraba en la sala manejando la cámara de seguridad con conexión Wifi previamente instalado en el tejado de la casa. Encendí lámpara de infrarrojo desde el portátil en el software del dispositivo unos minutos después contemple un objeto que pasaba a gran velocidad así que inicie la grabación del vídeo. Pude seguir la trayectoria del mismo mediante el control del software.
Long Description of Sighting Report Translated- Case 117180
I was in the living room managing the security camera with a Wi-Fi connection previously installed on the roof of the house. I turned on the infrared lamp from the laptop in the device software a few minutes later I saw an object
Date Submitted : 2021-08-05 Date of Event :2021-07-02 MUFON SUBMITTER FILE : 117180_submitter_file1__Huelva001922001958.mp4 : no audio
Archaeologists have uncovered 2,640- to 2,550-year-old clay moulds for casting spade coins as well as fragments of finished spade coins at Guanzhuang in Xingyang, Henan province, China. The technical characteristics of the moulds demonstrate that the site — which was part of the Eastern Zhou period (770-220 BCE) bronze foundry — functioned as a mint for producing standardized coins.
Spatial distribution of the minting remains in the Guanzhuang foundry’s excavation area: red dots: deposit with clay moulds; green dots: deposits with fragments of finished spade coins.
Image credit: Z. Qu / H. Zhao.
“The origins of metal coinage and the monetization of ancient economies have long been a research focus in both archaeology and economic history,” said Dr. Hao Zhao from the School of History at Zhengzhou University and colleagues.
“The earliest coins are thought to have been minted in China, Lydia (in Western Asia Minor) and India.”
“Of these, the hollow-handle spade coin (kongshoubu) minted in China is a likely candidate for the first metal coinage.”
“The spade coin was an imitation of practical metal spades, but its thin blade and small size indicate that it had no utilitarian function.”
“The earlier spade coins had a fragile, hollow socket, reminiscent of a metal shovel. This socket was transformed into a thin, flat piece in later spade coins, and over time, characters were applied to the coins to mark their denominations.”
“Several versions of spade coins circulated across the Chinese Central Plains until their abolition by the First Emperor of Qin in 221 BCE.”
“Their origin and early history, and the social dynamics under which they were developed, however, remain controversial — a situation paralleled by the century-long debate over Lydian coins.”
Dr. Zhao and co-authors from Zhengzhou University and Peking University uncovered the ancient remains from different stages of the minting process at Guanzhuang in China’s Henan province.
The mint was part of a well-organized, integrated bronze foundry run under the auspices of the Zheng State.
“Guanzhuang is located in the Central Plains of China, some 12 km south of the Yellow River,” the archaeologists said.
“Continuous excavations since 2011 have revealed the general layout of a city, which consisted of two walled and moated enclosures.”
“The city was established in c. 800 BCE and abandoned after 450 BCE.”
“Excavations between 2015 and 2019 have revealed a large craft-production zone in the centre of the outer enclosure, immediately outside the southern gate of the inner city. This area included workshops involved in bronze, ceramic, jade and bone-artifact production.”
“The bronze foundry occupied the largest area. Its main features comprise more than 2,000 pits for dumping production waste, most between 1.5 and 3 m in diameter, with a depth of 1-2.5 m.”
“Alongside ceramic sherds, these pits contained abundant remains related to bronze-casting activities, including crucibles, ladles, bronze droplets, unfinished or broken bronze artifacts, clay moulds, charcoal, and furnace fragments.”
Spade coin SP-1 and its reconstruction; the outer mould (bottom left) is also used to reconstruct the spade coin.
Image credit: H. Zhao.
At the site, the researchers found two fragments of finished spade coins, dubbed SP-1 and SP-2.
“Coin SP-1 is so well preserved that its complete shape can be confidently reconstructed,” they said.
“This example is a typical pointed-shoulder spade coin, with a (restored) full length of 14.3 cm, a shoulder width of 6.35 cm and a maximum thickness of 0.9 mm. The weight of the extant coin is 27.1 g.”
“Reconstructing the volume of its missing feet at around 660 mm3 (4-5g), we estimate that the original weight of SP-1 was no less than 31 g, including the weight of the clay core inside the handle.”
As is typical of the earliest spade coins, there are no inscriptions indicating either the name of the locality where the coin was cast or its face value.
“Coin SP-2 was found in the context dated to the Eastern Han Dynasty (200 CE), and hence the coin must be considered a residual find, as spade coins had long been abolished by this time,” they said.
“Of this coin, only the handle and its clay core survive. They are of exactly the same shape and size as the corresponding portions of SP-1.”
The compositional analysis shows that the copper content of SP-1 and SP-2 is 62.5 and 76.46%, respectively.
“The existence of minting activity at Guanzhuang is further documented by numerous finds of clay cores and outer moulds for casting spade coins,” the scientists said.
“All the moulds are made of reddish fine silt, which was also the primary material for producing clay moulds to cast other types of bronze products at the Guanzhuang foundry.”
Combining the evidence from radiocarbon-dating, mould style and ceramic typology, they suggest that the Guanzhuang foundry was first established around 780 BCE.
During its initial phase of around 150 years, the foundry produced predominantly ritual vessels, weapons and chariot fittings — items used in ceremonies, warfare and other aspects of elite life.
Standardized minting started from the second phase of the Guanzhuang foundry, after c. 640 BCE and no later than 550 BCE, and it made use of the workshop’s existing bronze-production capacity.
“Currently, Guanzhuang is the earliest-known archaeological mint site dated by robust radiocarbon dates in the world, and coin SP-1 is the earliest spade coin — and, more generally, the earliest Chinese coin — recovered from a secure archaeological context,” the authors said.
“The minting techniques employed at Guanzhuang are characterized by batch production and a high degree of standardization and quality control, indicating that the production of spade coins was not a small-scale, sporadic experiment, but rather a well-planned and organised process in the heartland of the Central Plains of China.”
The team’s paper was published this week in the journal Antiquity.
@SarahEBond- Twitter Image
Hao Zhao et al. Radiocarbon-dating an early minting site: the emergence of standardised coinage in China. Antiquity, published online August 6, 2021; doi: 10.15184/aqy.2021.94
The Bridgewater Triangle, which is a 200-square-mile section of land in Eastern Massachusetts, is a reported hotbed of paranormal activity and unexplained occurrences. According to legend, the area, which is between Abington, Freetown, and Seekonk, attracts ghosts, UFOs, mythological creatures, and other unusual and unexplainable activities.
As reported by Boston.com, the epicenter of the Bridgewater Triangle is the Hockomock Swamp. In addition to being New England's largest swamp, Hockomock is known for its biological and geological diversity. The swamp is one of Massachusetts' most stunning landmarks. And, according to legend, it is also one of the most haunted.
The name Hockomock, which means "place where spirits dwell," was given to the swamp by the Wampanoag tribe. In later years, Colonial settlers referred to it as the "Devil's Swamp."
Roadtrippers reports the dense swampland is difficult to navigate, and it is easy to get lost in the nearly impenetrable brush. However, local folklore suggests the swamp is specifically dangerous because it is home to a creature called the "Thunderbird." According to legend, the Thunderbird is a massive prehistoric-like bird, which has a wingspan up to 12 feet.
Boston.com reports the swamp has also been a hotbed for Bigfoot sightings. According to local folklore, the creatures have been responsible for attacks on livestock, including pigs and sheep. After receiving a number of similar reports, authorities searched the Hockomock Swamp with the assistance of K-9 units. However, they did not find anything to suggest the swamp was inhabited by anything unusual.
REPORTEDLY HAUNTED SITES WITHIN THE BRIDGEWATER TRIANGLE
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Another supposedly haunted site within the Bridgewater Triangle is the abandoned Taunton State Hospital. As reported by Boston.com, the hospital has been closed for decades. However, people who have explored the deserted buildings reported "having their shoulders and legs touched and pulled" by unseen entities. According to local legend, the property was popular with satanic cults in the 1960s and 1970s, and the entities they disturbed are still present.
The Fall River-Freetown State Forest, which is also inside the Bridgewater Triangle, is another rumored site of satanic cult activity. However, unlike most of the other Bridgewater Triangle sites, a number of confirmed crimes have taken place in and around the forest. Boston.com reports the park is secluded but easily accessible. Therefore, it became a popular site for committing violent crime and even dumping bodies.
Although the location of The Fall River-Freetown State Forest likely contributed to the number of crimes committed there, paranormal investigators believe something far more sinister is to blame. According to legend, the site has an unusually strong negative energy, which draws people to the location and encourages them to commit violent crimes.
Other reportedly haunted sites within the Bridgewater Triangle include the Assonet Ledge, where people have reported seeing ghosts leaping from the cliffs, Copicut Road and Route 44, which reportedly have ghastly hitchhikers, and the Horbine School, where people have reported hearing unexplained voices.
People have also reported seeing UFOs and unexplained lights throughout the region.
THE BIZARRE TRUE STORY OF BIGFOOT, AMERICA'S MISSING APE
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BY NICHOLAS CONLEY
Every part of the world has its legends, whether they're elves, djinns, or green-suited little bearded men perched at the end of rainbows. In the United States and Canada, our local mythological figure is a bipedal, hairy primate that goes by the strange name "Bigfoot." When the big ol' ape isn't tromping around the woods with his size 30-something feet, he's getting his picture snapped by photographers, having his language secretly recorded, or starring in beef jerky commercials.
For as long as human beings have looked into the forest's shadows, they've speculated about whether Bigfoot is out there. Whether these creatures are real or not, people have been telling stories about Bigfoot encounters for centuries, across many cultures and regions, to the point where even the most fervent disbeliever has to at least raise an eyebrow. Either way, Bigfoot is one of North America's greatest icons. Here's the true story about how this big-soled gorilla-man became a big deal.
SASQ'ETS WAS AN IMPORTANT FIGURE IN NATIVE AMERICAN BELIEFS
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If Bigfoot is real, he didn't just traipse into the country sometime after the U.S. constitution was signed. One of the most fascinating parts of Bigfoot mythology is the fact that a tall, hairy, man-like figure plays a key role in the mythologies of numerous North American indigenous peoples, according to Native Languages. For example, the Sioux believed in a powerful, burly figure they called Chiye-Tanka, or "Big Elder Brother." The Cheynne tribe told tales of an aloof "Hairy Man" named "Maxemista," who may have played a key role in their creation story. Even the now-familiar term "sasquatch" is merely an Anglicization of the more Halkomelem name, "Sasq'ets."
Different tribes each had their own take on the Bigfoot figure, but for the most part, very few saw the creature as being monstrous, aggressive, or evil. Rather, as described by Indian Country Today, Bigfoot's place in many tribal mythologies was that of a gentle guardian, a protector, a "Keeper of the Earth." Over the centuries, as the Bigfoot legend has grown, the Oregon Historical Society states that Native Americans in Oregon have increasingly come to see Bigfoot as an important piece of their culture with great significance to their history.
BIGFOOT MEETS THE INVADERS
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As we know today, North America was fated to become the landing dock of countless European settlers. From the 1600s onward, these Europeans experienced their own alleged Bigfoot encounters, though the colonizers found the creatures a lot scarier than the native peoples usually did. One of the more popular historical writings among cryptozoology aficionados is a 1604 passage from French navigator Samuel de Champlain, who ominously described a "frightful monster, which the savages call Gougou." Though Champlain said Gougou was an enormous, feminine beast that devoured human beings and made horrible noises, his description was vague enough that, reading it today, Gougou could've been anything from Bigfoot to a swamp monster. Champlain decided that Gougou was an unholy devil of some sort, because ... well, that's what Europeans said about every weird phenomenon back then.
As the New World was increasingly colonized, reports of encounters with more distinctly Bigfoot-like creatures continued trickling in. In 1811, according to Rolling Stone, explorer David Thompson was hiking through the Rockies when he stumbled upon some seriously massive footprints, which he followed for nearly 100 yards before the trail went cold. One of the biggest stories appeared in the July 1884 edition of a British Columbia newspaper called the Daily Colonist, now archived online. The paper reported the capture of a young, gorilla-like primate called "Jacko." Was Jacko a young Bigfoot, a hoax, a stunt? You decide. Regardless, little Jacko was never reported on again.
THE 1924 BIGFOOT ATTACK IN APE CANYON
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According to Slate, it was a warm summer night in July 1924, and a group of five miners decided to call it a night in their little homemade cabin, perched up in what is now called "Ape Canyon," a narrow gorge found in the hike up Mount St. Helens in Washington. Allegedly, as the miners tried to get some sleep, a group of crazed, hairy "apemen" came screaming out of the hills and started launching heavy stones at their cabin. The creatures continued railing on the cabin all night, at one point even reaching inside through a gaping hole in the wall and attempting to steal an ax. The whole thing sounds like a real-life Evil Dead, but with Bigfoot instead of deadites.
Finally, the assault died down at daybreak, and the miners reemerged from the cabin. One miner, Fred Beck, reported that he saw an apeman standing in the distance, so he shot the creature, sending it tumbling down into the rocks. Years later, Beck went on to propose that the hostile animals he encountered were actually ghostly beings from another reality. On the other hand, many people have speculated that the "apemen" were just a gang of rowdy teenagers. Either way, it sounds like a scary night. As you've probably guessed, this incident is why this particular mountain gorge is now referred to as Ape Canyon.
THE FOOTPRINTS ARE FOUND, AND THE NAME "BIGFOOT" IS BORN
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According to Rolling Stone, American ape sightings continued coming in throughout the next few decades. In 1940, a Canadian family reported an 8-foot apeman had come out of the woods and broken into their shed, leaving 16-inch footprints in its wake. Then, on one October morning in Northern California in 1958, workers for the Granite Logging Company found a series of giant footprints — once again, 16 inches long — submerged in the damp bed of one of their newly built roads. Less than a week later, the workers spotted a creature in the woods that "ran upright like a man, swinging long hairy arms ... it looked ten feet tall." They found more footprints the next day. The local Humboldt Times picked up the story, publishing a photo of the megalithic footprint's cast, with journalist Andrew Genzoli lending the unknown creature a name that would soon become legendary: "Bigfoot."
The hubbub didn't stop there. At the construction site, footprints kept appearing. Equipment was flipped over. Workers reported feeling like something in the woods was watching them, and the paranoia grew so intense that 15 men quit. When Ray Wallace, a partner in the firm, was accused of perpetrating a hoax, he angrily retorted, "Who knows anyone foolish enough to ruin their own business?"
Anyhow, "Bigfoot" became big news. More tracks were discovered up in Washington, and spotting Bigfoot became a tradition as American as apple pie.
BUT HEY, WAIT, WERE THOSE BIG FEET A BIG HOAX?
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Ray Wallace made a good argument for why the footprints weren't a hoax (caused by him), but here's the thing. As any good prankster knows, if you get caught, you're left with two options: Give up or double down. Guess what Wallace chose?
In 2002, according to the New York Times, Wallace died at age 84. Once Wallace's children finished laying their father to rest, they finally came clean with the greatest joke that their "prank-loving pop" ever pulled on the world. Evidently, the famous "feet" were wood carvings, and Ray had slowly rolled along in a truck to create the massive gait between the tracks. Ray's son Michael told the Times, "It's weird because it was just a joke, and then it took on such a life of its own that even now, we can't stop it." You know, Ray would've pulled it off, too, if it wasn't for his meddling kids. Of course, he did pull it off for over half a century. Vote Ray Wallace for prankster king.
You'd think this postmortem revelation would've hit the sasquatch community like a baseball bat, but for the most part, believers were unfazed. That's because even though the Wallace tracks did launch a lot of the Bigfoot hubbub, major Bigfoot researchers had long suspected that the 1958 incident was a hoax. Besides, by 1967, those tracks were overshadowed by a far more dramatic piece of evidence...
THE BIGFOOT VIDEO YOU KNOW BY HEART
Maybe someday, a close-up Bigfoot selfie will be posted on Instagram. Until then, the Patterson-Gimlin footage remains the holy grail of Bigfoot evidence. Back in 1967, according to Australian Broadcasting Corporation, Roger Patterson approached his old rodeo buddy Bob Gimlin for the explicit purpose of finding Bigfoot after more giant tracks were found in Northern California. Patterson and Gimlin set out on horseback. Unlike almost every other Bigfoot expedition in history, the pair allegedly stumbled onto the legendary creature walking around the creek, just 30 meters away. Patterson, wielding the camera, jumped off his horse in an effort to get closer, accounting for the infamous shaky-cam effect.
So, was this Bigfoot, dubbed "Patty," the real deal? Over five decades later, Patterson's footage has become one of the most studied video clips in history, and it's never been summarily debunked. According to Oregon Public Broadcasting, anatomy professor Jeffery Meldrum strongly believes in the footage, theorizing that when compared to other primate special effects of the time — namely, Planet of the Apes — Patty's anatomical features are much too advanced to be a phony costume. Not everyone is convinced. In 2004, the Charlotte Observer reported that costume designer Philip Morris, then deceased, claimed to have sold a gorilla suit to Roger Patterson.
As for the men behind the video, Patterson died of cancer in 1972. Bob Gimlin maintains that the Bigfoot encounter truly happened, and says the decades of interrogation he received because of it "ruined his life."
BIGFOOT BECOMES A POP CULTURE CELEBRITY
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Was the Patterson-Gimlin footage real or fake? We don't know, but either way, it set the stage for Bigfoot mania. Since then, enthusiasm for the hairy one has never really died down. Through the 1970s, after the Patterson-Gimlin footage went '70s viral, the public was bombed with Bigfoot TV specials, magazine articles, tourist traps, and more. Speculation over the creature's possible existence went rampant, a phenomenon that journalist Michael McLeod describes as "the first widely popularized example of pseudoscience in American culture." Bigfoot mania brought about plenty of other Bigfoot sightings, photos, and footprints. Who doesn't have at least one family member or friend who claims to have spotted Bigfoot in the woods?
In the latter half of the 20th century, Bigfoot grew into one of North America's most potent cultural icons. The wild apeman starred alongside John Lithgow in the 1987 film Harry and the Hendersons, is the focus of the Animal Planet series Finding Bigfoot, has a publishing company named after it, and became the mascot of Jack Link's beef jerky. Quickly being co-opted into pop culture and marketing? Now that's American.
WHAT BIGFOOT LANGUAGE SOUNDS LIKE: THE SIERRA SOUNDS
Despite the work of such organizations such as North America Bigfoot Search (NABS) and the Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization (BFRO), definitive proof of Bigfoot hasn't yet manifested. All the hair samples have ended up being bears, the bodies aren't real, Bigfoot feces never turns up in Old Man Jenkins' cow pasture — none of that. If sasquatches are real, the creatures cover their tracks really, really well. However, if Ron Morehead and Al Berry are to believed, we might have an idea of what Bigfoot sounds like. According to Scientific American, Morehead and Berry say they captured the so-called "Sierra Sounds" by dangling a microphone over a tree in the Sierra Nevada Mountains. Though the "language" in the recordings is interesting and is broadcast in many Bigfoot TV specials, such human-sounding noises could also be a relatively easy hoax, so the Bigfoot community isn't exactly united in the call of the Bigfoot.
On the other hand, what if Bigfoot speaks without ever moving its mouth? There are some who believe Bigfoot possesses telepathic powers, but we won't delve into that. It's probably better to prove these creatures exist in the first place before we get all X-Men about it.
WHOA, THERE'S A BIGFOOT IN MY FREEZER!
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In 2008, according to CNN, two hikers named Rick Dyer and Matthew Whitton announced that they'd found the dead body of a nearly 8-foot "half-ape, half-human" in the Georgia wilderness. They brought the "carcass" home, stuffed it in a freezer, and shared photos online, hoping to make money from the marketing and promotion rights. The deception was short-lived. Testing soon proved that the "carcass" was just a rubber costume, and the duo publicly apologized.
However, Rick Dyer's Bigfoot fakery days were far from over. According to the Huffington Post, the Georgian man hit Bigfoot headlines again in 2012 when he claimed to have killed a Bigfoot in Texas, whom he then named "Hank." Dyer also claimed that tests run by a "university" (cough, cough) had proven that the corpse belonged to a previously unknown species. Dyer wanted to take the dead Bigfoot on a national tour and charge admission for anyone who wanted to see Hank. C'mon, what is this, the 1800s?
Not surprisingly, Dyer's efforts flopped again. In 2014, Dyer's second phony Bigfoot was outed to the public, and he re-apologized. Only time will tell if Dyer attempts the same stunt again in a few years.
THE DNA 'PROOF' AND THE CALL FOR TRIBAL RECOGNITION
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As the years go on, Bigfoot evidence gets weirder and weirder. In 2012, a veterinarian named Melba S. Ketchum brought Bigfoot back into the headlines, according to Live Science. Ketchum, citing prior experience in genetics research, claimed that after analyzing 100 DNA samples, she had uncovered genetic proof that sasquatch was real. Not only that, but Ketchum also determined that the cryptid's humanoid features were because an earlier species of primate had mated with Homo sapiens about 15,000 years ago, resulting in the Bigfoot we (sort of) know today. Ketchum argued fiercely on behalf of her work, even asking the U.S. government to recognize Bigfoot as "an indigenous people and immediately protect their human and constitutional rights," against potential hunters.
But then, the Houston Chronicle's Eric Berger took a closer look and found some holes. In addition to discovering Ketchum had self-published her work rather than sending it to a reputable scientific journal, Berger also had Ketchum's evidence tested by a distinguished geneticist in Texas, who wasn't impressed with the results. Berger admitted to feeling let down about the whole thing, saying, "I'm honestly really disappointed. A world with Bigfoot would be a little softer. A little more fun. But in my world science is the arbiter of reality." Nonetheless, Dr. Ketchum's efforts on the "Sasquatch Genome Project" continue to this day, and she still posts updates on Facebook.
BIGFOOT ISN'T THE ONLY APEMAN MYTH IN THE WORLD ... BUT MAYBE IT'S BECAUSE OF US?
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Legends of wild apemen are prevalent in cultures all over the globe, whether it's North America's Bigfoot, the Yeti that prowls the Himalayas, or Australia's Yowie. What is it that makes these half-man, half-apes so popular? Writing for The Atlantic, Edward Simon ponders if, perhaps, the widespread obsession with Bigfoot is due to a human fascination with the wilderness from which we came. A creature that is so similar to human beings, yet still so wild and free, piques our imagination — and makes us wonder, deep inside, if we're really so evolved from our prehistoric ancestors. Perhaps Bigfoot hearkens back to the ancient concept of an uncorrupted man — call him Adam, call him sasquatch, call him whatever — whose soul has not been torn asunder by the sins of humankind.
Of course, the truth might be simpler: A world with Bigfoot is way more exciting than a world where Bigfoot doesn't exist. Famous chimpanzee researcher Jane Goodall once made the surprising confession to NPR that she believed in Bigfoot, but said, "Well, I'm a romantic, so I always wanted that." In this one line, Goodall captures the central truth of why, when it comes to Bigfoot, hope springs eternal. So for now, maybe we should just enjoy the myth, keep our eyes on the woods, and have fun telling stories to each other.
WHEN THE FBI TAKES YOUR BIGFOOT SAMPLE AND NEVER RETURNS IT
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If you read that a federal intelligence agency had investigated some Bigfoot shenanigans, you would probably assume you were reading the synopsis for a new Men in Black movie. But no, this happened in real life.
The Washington Post reports that back in the cryptozoology-crazed days of the '70s, a Bigfoot researcher named Peter Byrne sent a small hair sample ("about 15 hairs attached to a tiny piece of skin") to the FBI, writing that he had been unable to identify what creature they belonged to. The FBI did, surprisingly enough, agree to test the samples ... but then ghosted Byrne. What a bummer, right? (And not suspicious at all.) While you might imagine that the hairs were passed around the office as a joke, in reality, the agency actually took Byrne's request quite seriously. In 2019, a Freedom of Information Act request made the FBI's Bigfoot homework go public, and the documentation revealed that the FBI's tests — unfortunately for Byrne, who by this point was 93 years old — proved the furry stuff had belonged to a regular ol' deer rather than a North American ape-man. Poor guy. Nothing like bad news that gets delivered 40 years late, eh?
The Real UFOs: These Are the Secret Planes the U.S. Air Forces Tests in Area 51
The Real UFOs: These Are the Secret Planes the U.S. Air Forces Tests in Area 51
The Air Force test facility at Groom Lake, Nevada—better known as Area 51—has harbored a wide variety of experimental aircraft the Pentagon would rather keep away from the prying eyes of the public.
Here's What You Need To Remember: Area 51 might also be an attractive place to host new hypersonic glide vehicles, which the Pentagon is currently pouring a ton of research money into. Hypersonic weapons would combine the extreme speed of ballistic missiles with the flatter, harder-to-detect trajectory of a cruise-missile style weapon.
While fanciful stories of alien spaceships continue to captivate the public, as recent internet memes attest, there’s little doubt that Groom Lake’s actual activities are of considerable interest—sufficiently so that in April 2019 Russia even dispatched one of its treaty-authorized Tu-154M Open Skies surveillance planes to spy on the base.
The facility has considerably expanded from the small, remote landing field adjacent to a salt flat first used to test the Lockheed U-2 spy plane in 1955. Now it lies within a twenty-three by twenty-five-mile perimeter of restricted airspace located within the larger 4,500-square mile Nevada Training and Test Range. Other nearby bases include Nellis Air Force Base and Tonopah Test Range—the latter which also has hosted numerous “black project” programs.
While a companion piece looks at Area 51’s original role in developing the CIA’s U-2 and A-12 spy planes, here we’ll look at the “black projects” known to have been flown there in the 1970s, to those speculated to be there in the present day.
While the F-117 has been officially retired from the Air Force service, photos and video footage reveal that at least one or two of the venerable stealth jets continue to fly over Area 51 as of 2019—possibly used to test sensors and air-to-air tactics against stealth aircraft.
Soviet Warbirds
Air Force and Navy pilots suffered unexpected difficulties in the early years of the air war over Vietnam when confronted by agile Soviet-built MiG-17 and MiG-21 jets.
Conveniently, Israel acquired a MiG-21 from a defecting Iraqi pilot in 1966. Then in 1968, two Syrian MiG-17F pilots got lost and mistakenly landed in Israel. All three jets were shipped over to Groom Lake, where Air Force pilots extensively tested the planes in a series of head-to-head dogfights with a wide variety of U.S. jets. They came to an uncomfortable conclusion: they were evenly matched in a head-to-head fight even with more sophisticated F-4 Phantom jets, and the better-trained pilot was likely to win—a conclusion which led to the formation of the Navy’s Top Gun program.
Evaluations continued in the 1970s under a special unit of “Red Hats” known as the 6513th Test Squadron, who received their own section of the base aptly nicknamed “Red Square” which accumulated a growing collection of Soviet warbirds.
However in 1984, General Richard Bond, a fifty-four-year-old decorated combat pilot and retiring head of the Air Force systems command, decided to take a MiG-23BN “Flogger” swing-wing fighter out for a spin without thoroughly familiarizing himself with the infamously temperamental aircraft. While racing at twice the speed of sound, he lost control of the MiG as its afterburners became stuck in the active position and was killed attempting to eject—in fact, he was the second U.S. Air Force pilot to die piloting a MiG-23 in two years.
While the 6513th was long ago inactivated, photos and footage of MiG-29s and Su-27s flying over Area 51 reveal that Red Hats continue to test the limits of Russian engineering to this day. After an Air Force test pilot died in a crash in 2017, Aviation Week’s Guy Norris reported he had been flying a foreign-built airplane.
Missing In Action: the Mythical ‘Aurora’ Spyplane
During the 1990s, several respected aviation writers wrote of their conviction that the Air Force had sequestered in Groom Lake a top-secret Blackbird successor dubbed the “Aurora” that could attain hypersonic speeds, i.e. exceeding five times the speed of sound. Supposedly, the triangle-shaped Aurora was powered by either a scramjet or a “pumpkin seed” shock-wave pulse engine which used the flat airframe to “squeeze” the aircraft forward.
However, no concrete evidence ever emerged to confirm such a plane’s existence, nor the exotic propulsion systems it would have required. Thus, the veracity of the admittedly cool legend seems dubious in hindsight.
Boeing Bird-of-Prey
No, not the Klingon starships from Star Trek—but a prototype stealth jet that vaguely resembled one with its upward-swept wings. Like its science-fiction counterpart, the Boeing Bird-of-Prey may also have possessed an active camouflage “cloaking device” designed to minimize its shadow and blend it visual signature with the surrounding sky—a technology first deployed on ships and aircraft during World War II.
The jet, fashioned out of a single piece of composite material, also tested radar-stealth features such as shielded engine intakes and a tailless fuselage which remarkably did not require a fly-by-wire system to remain aerodynamically stable.
The demonstrator made thirty-nine test flights between 1996-1999 before being unveiled to the public in 2002, and is now on display at the U.S. Air Force Museum in Dayton, Ohio.
Lockheed P175 Polecat Stealth Drone
The “Polecat” was a 4.5-ton flying wing high-altitude stealth drone made of two hundred composite parts glued together. Resembling a miniature B-2 stealth bomber with wings 27 meters wide, the P175 was conceived of as a high-altitude surveillance and attack platform with a thousand-pound payload. The stealth UAV began testing in 2006, but that December a failure in its remote-control system reportedly caused it to self-destruct by crashing into the ground.
The Northrop-Grumman RQ-180? The Lockheed SR-72?
Area 51’s perimeter remains heavily guarded by security sensors and camouflaged civilian security contractors with guns. Gray, unmarked 737 airliners and Blackhawk helicopters can be observed delivering cargoes to the airfield.
However, it’s possible to examine satellite images and snap photos of the base from twenty-six miles away on Tikaboo Peak. These reveal that in 2017, a huge new hangar was sighted in Area 51 measuring 200 by 250 feet in size—slightly more square footage than a football field—which surely houses something of interest.
Some interpreted this spate of activity in 2017 as being related to the development of the B-21 stealth bomber, a successor to the B-2 Spirit, which it also very much resembles. Officially, however, the Air Force has announced that B-21s will be tested at Tinkers AFB in Oklahoma and Edwards AFB in California.
The smart money may instead be that hangar harbors advanced stealth drones.
One likely-seeming candidate is the Northrop-Grumman RQ-180, which according to a 2013 report inAviation Week, is a very large long-range and long-endurance drone with a powerful ground-scanning Active Electronically Scanned Array radar. The project had reportedly entered low-rate production, and was likely funded by a $2 billion allotment of black project money.
Though the RQ-180’s specs may resemble those of the RQ-4 Global Hawk, an airliner-sized drone envisioned as a modern successor to the U-2, the RQ-180 is also a stealth platform that can penetrate hostile airspace and possibly could be employed on attack missions. Furthermore, it reportedly exhibits broadband stealth, unlike most stealth fighters which tend to become visible to less-precise low-bandwidth radars.
The Pentagon unusually responded to the article by confirming the RQ-180’s existence—and has had no more to say about it since then.
A long-range penetrating stealth drone could have significant strategic applications as a “silver bullet” to monitor and possibly even attack nuclear assets during crisis, which may explain the secrecy surrounding the RQ-180.
Area 51 might also be an attractive place to host new hypersonic glide vehicles, which the Pentagon is currently pouring a ton of research money into. Hypersonic weapons would combine the extreme speed of ballistic missiles with the flatter, harder-to-detect trajectory of a cruise-missile style weapon.
Indeed, Lockheed-Martin has publicly hinted that it may or may not have developed an experimental hypersonic unmanned aircraft nicknamed the SR-72 (a clear nod to the SR-71 spy plane) intended for both surveillance and bombing roles. If such a demonstrator exists, Groom Lake would seem like a logical place to secret it.
Sébastien Roblin holds a master’s degree in conflict resolution from Georgetown University and served as a university instructor for the Peace Corps in China. He has also worked in education, editing, and refugee resettlement in France and the United States. He currently writes on security and military history for War Is Boring.
This piece first appeared in 2019 and is being reprinted due to reader interest.
Image: Reuters.
ALL RELATED VIDEOS, selected and posted by peter2011
An image of an area called Telegonus Mensa on Jupiter's moon Io, taken by NASA's Galileo spacecraft on Oct. 16, 2001, reveals a huge cigar-shaped object that stands out in the surrounding landscape.
Aside from the possibility that the object could be an ordinary rock formation, it resembles a huge tower or obelisk.
Next to the huge obelisk, it looks like artificial structures have been built. Could it be that Jupiter's Moon LO was once inhabited by an intelligent race?
“I saw an alien get on the space shuttle,” says retired astronaut
“I saw an alien get on the space shuttle,” says retired astronaut
Astronaut Clark C. McClelland was fired from NASA, filed and sentenced with loss of all social privileges and pension for speaking openly about aliens and broadcasting censored videos of the missions in which he participated.
McClelland, a former astronaut and former member of the MUFON commission (in charge of collecting information about UFOs), revealed that he and NASA know that aliens exist and that during a space mission from their ship they were able to see a smart disk.
He told ‘The Canadian’ secret details of an astonishing incident that occurred during NASAA’s STS-80 mission aboard the shuttle Columbia.
What happened was confirmed by Dr. Franklin Story Musgrave (crew member of the STS-80 mission).
Then they saw that a disk-shaped object much larger than the shuttle suddenly appeared, while they were about 190 miles up (about 306 kilometers).
Musgrave admitted that he saw the object, but could not identify what it is. Unlike other objects he saw, this one seemed to come from “nowhere, it was very impressive,” he said.
Upon returning to Earth, Musgrave was questioned about the encounter and the scientist reviewed a video recording of the encounter between the Columbia and the UFO as they flew over Denver, Colorado.
He indicated that the object appeared to be controlled by an intelligence changing its flight vector. Most disconcerting was that it seemed to follow Columbia and its crew through space.
After the mission, the scientist became convinced not only of the existence of aliens, but that they are here. The astronaut decided to go on a personal discovery mission.
At a lecture on astronomy, Musgrave, at the end of his presentation, displayed images on a big screen, showing an artistic rendering of the evil gray aliens, and shook his audience by saying, “These guys are real, I guarantee it!” .
This testimony adds to another serious revelation made by retired United States military who ask the government not to continue hiding the truth and narrated how aliens interfered with nuclear bases.
Other members of NASA who have testified about aliens are Gordon Cooper , Donald Slayton, Gene Cernan, Frank Borman, Neil Armstrong, and Scott Carpenter, who insist that UFOs are real and that intelligent extraterrestrial beings exist.
Voyager’s views of Jupiter’s colorful cloud tops reminded many people of an impressionist painter’s canvas. Fine details in and around the Great Red Spot changed significantly in the four months between the Voyager 1 flyby and Voyager 2 (pictured).
NASA/JPL
Until the mid-1990s, when planets were at last being discovered orbiting distant stars, Jupiter was the largest world known. Eleven times Earth’s diameter and 318 times our planet’s mass, Jupiter possesses more than twice the combined matter of all the other planets, moons, asteroids, and comets in the solar system. Made mostly of hydrogen (89.8 percent by volume) and helium (10.2 percent), Jupiter is essentially a bottomless atmosphere that, beneath the clouds, transitions into an exotic fluid. Its largest moons, so big they rival Mercury in size, appear to hold substantial amounts of liquid water and beckon scientists as potential abodes for life beyond Earth.
For centuries, humanity could view this giant world only through ground-based telescopes. But in 1973 and 1974, respectively, the Pioneer 10 and 11 spacecraft raced past the planet, providing the first close-up images of its stormy atmosphere, probing its internal structure, and charting its intense radiation belts and magnetic field. The Pioneer probes blazed a trail for further exploration of the outer solar system. Even as scientists reveled in the data the probes returned, NASA already was working on a far more ambitious encore.
The huge, umbrella-shaped plume of the volcano Pele rises some 185 miles (300km) above Io’s surface. Ejecta from the massive eruption covers an area the size of Alaska.
NASA/JPL/USGS
The mission, originally called Mariner Jupiter-Saturn 1977, received a name change before launch to the one we know today: Voyager, the longest-running space mission in history. The twin Voyagers carried better cameras, more advanced instruments, and more computing power than the Pioneers. Both spacecraft launched in 1977 and are still returning data as they cruise away from our planetary system and journey into the unending night of interstellar space. Voyagers 1 and 2 are now so far away that their radio signals take more than 15 hours to reach us. The more distant probe, Voyager 1, has passed beyond the heliopause, a boundary separating the interstellar environment from charged particles and magnetic fields flowing from the Sun, known as the solar wind. Voyager 2 is cruising through the heliosheath, a zone where pressure from interstellar gas begins slowing the solar wind.
“It’s been a remarkable journey,” says Voyager project scientist Ed Stone at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. “We keep discovering things nobody knew we were going to discover.” He says both spacecraft may be able to return measurements from a single science instrument until 2030 if their power sources — called radioisotope thermoelectric generators — hold out as expected.
Encounter with Jove
On January 6, 1979, Voyager 1 was 36 million miles (58 million kilometers) from Jupiter and two months from its closest approach. Views of the planet’s cloudy, banded disk already exceeded the best images from Earth. Among other assignments, the probe began accumulating a time-lapse movie by taking images every 10 hours, one for each Jupiter rotation.
By early February, the resolution and image quality were comparable to the best pictures returned by the Pioneers. From that point on, Jupiter would be seen as never before.
When viewed from Earth through a small telescope, the planet’s atmosphere shows alternating bright white zones and darker brown belts. These are the visible manifestations of east-west jet streams that alternate direction from the equator to the poles and carry oval-shaped weather systems of all sizes.
Voyager 1 captured this view of Jupiter on January 9, 1979. Even though the spacecraft was 34 million miles (54 million km) away, its camera captured details impossible to see from Earth.
NASA/JPL
The Voyager imaging team tracked a pair of similarly sized brown ovals, watching them merge, tumble, and eject a dark streamer. Atmospheric models had not predicted such strange behavior. Eddies, waves, and turbulent clouds churned everywhere. At a February 28 press briefing, imaging team leader Bradford Smith described his team as “happily bewildered” by what they were seeing. “Jupiter is far more complex in its atmospheric motions than we had ever imagined,” he said.
The planet’s largest feature, a vast southern storm called the Great Red Spot, had been observed continuously from Earth for 150 years. But now, for the first time, scientists could study its rotation and watch it interact with neighboring features. Large enough to hold a pair of Earth-sized planets, the Great Red Spot rolls between two jet streams and completes a rotation in about six days. It spins counterclockwise, the opposite direction as hurricanes in Earth’s Southern Hemisphere, classifying it as a high-pressure system. Its cloud tops extend nearly 5 miles (8km) above neighboring layers. Although winds whip around its periphery at 425 mph (680 km/h), the interior is calm. Its size and position vary slightly, and long-term ground-based monitoring shows that the longest-lived storm known to science is shrinking steadily.
Amy Simon at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, leads a team studying Jupiter with the Hubble Space Telescope. The observations show the storm’s long axis is half what was reported in the 1880s and about 30 percent smaller than during the Voyager flybys. And since 2014, the Great Red Spot has turned an unusually intense shade of orange.
Io (in front of the Great Red Spot) and Europa appear against Jupiter’s cloud tops in this Voyager 1 image from February 13, 1979. Io’s odd coloration already stands out from a distance of 12 million miles (20 million km).
NASA/JPL
Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena have conducted laboratory experiments that suggest the storm’s color, which has ranged from pale orange to brick red, is a result of reddish coloring agents produced when ultraviolet (UV) sunlight breaks down ammonia and acetylene, gases common in Jupiter’s upper atmosphere. The high clouds within the Great Red Spot and similar storms receive more solar UV, and the storms’ rotation helps retain colored particles that result in stronger shades. Scientists suspect these changes in color and size are related to storm strength, but they remain poorly understood.
In 1998, two of three 60-year-old white oval storms in a cloud band south of the Great Red Spot merged, and in early 2000, the third oval joined them. The resulting weather system, named Oval BA, is about half the size of the Great Red Spot and persists today. In August 2005, amateur astronomers noticed it was acquiring a reddish color. The hue gradually deepened; by 2006, the storm was nicknamed “the Little Red Spot” and “Red Spot Jr.”
Yet despite the Voyager probes and later missions, vital questions about Jupiter’s atmosphere remain. Why are the jet streams and large storms stable for so long? What’s the energy source for the jets? And do the winds continue into the planet’s interior?
Diving into Jupiter
The top of Jupiter’s atmosphere consists of haze layers formed by complex hydrocarbons like ethane, ethylene, and acetylene. These chemicals assemble from the fragments of methane molecules broken apart by solar UV, a process similar to how smog forms in Earth’s atmosphere. About 25 miles (40km) deeper, the pressure approaches 60 percent of that at Earth’s surface (1 bar), but the temperature is only –193° F (–125° C). A deck of bright white clouds formed by ammonia ice crystals occupies this level.
The Voyagers revealed several brown ovals in Jupiter’s atmosphere. These appear to be openings in the high-level clouds that give a peek to darker regions below. Note the high white cloud protruding over this oval’s northern edge.
NASA/JPL
Plunge deeper, to twice Earth’s surface pressure, and the temperature rises to –76° F (–60° C). Here we encounter a tawny, yellow-orange cloud deck built from droplets or crystals of ammonium hydrosulfide. Usually we cannot see past these clouds, but spacecraft measurements and models indicate that the next cloud layer — at pressures of about 3 to 7 bars and temperatures from freezing to about 60° F (16° C) — contains water ice crystals at the colder levels and water droplets lower down, just like clouds on Earth. Any familiarity pretty much ends there, though.
Minute frequency changes in spacecraft radio signals allow scientists to map the structure of Jupiter’s gravitational field; this enables them to develop models of what lies beneath the clouds. Pressures and temperatures increase steadily, but the hydrogen atmosphere simply grows denser and hotter with depth until, hundreds of miles beneath the clouds, molecular hydrogen starts to resemble a hot liquid. At depths 10 times greater, only 20 percent of the way to Jupiter’s center, pressures approach a million bars, and temperatures soar to 10,000° F (5,700° C) — nearly as hot as the Sun’s surface. Here the interior transforms into a more exotic substance called liquid metallic hydrogen, an electrically conductive soup of protons and electrons that makes up most of Jupiter’s mass.
Some 28,000 miles (45,000km) farther down, about 80 percent of the way to the planet’s center, the composition may change to a mix of water, methane, and ammonia at enormous temperatures and pressures. Another 4,400 miles (7,000km) down, and we’re 10 percent from the center; the pressure rises to around 40 million bars and the temperature to some 40,000° F (22,000° C). At this point, Jupiter’s composition may gradually morph into a dense core, perhaps containing up to 20 Earth masses in a mix of rock and iron that may also include water, methane, and ammonia.
At these pressures, dense materials may become soluble in liquid hydrogen, some scientists suggest. This means Jupiter’s original core may have dissolved partially or completely away, its high-density materials dispersed throughout a larger portion of the planet. One of the main goals of NASA’s Juno mission, which has been orbiting the planet since July 2016, is to answer the many remaining questions about how the solar system’s largest world is put together. (See “Under the veil,” above.)
Magnetic tango
Like Earth, Jupiter generates a magnetic field, which at the cloud tops is about 15 times stronger than our planet’s. The field traps, stores, and controls the flow of charged particles inside it, forming a vast, comet-shaped bubble — called a magnetosphere — that shields the planet from direct exposure to the solar wind. Pressure from the solar wind pushes the Sun-facing side into a rounded bow shock that slows and deflects most of the incoming charged particles in much the same way that water flows around the bow of a moving ship. The opposite side tapers into an immense magnetotail whose farthest portions wave and flap like the tattered end of a windsock.
Sinuous rivers of lava flow down the flanks of Io’s volcano Ra Patera. The volcano’s vent measures about 19 miles (30km) across, while the lava flows extend up to 155 miles (250km) from there. The summit rises only about 0.6 mile (1km) above the surroundings.
NASA/JPL
Jupiter’s magnetosphere is the solar system’s largest planetary structure. “If you look up and identify Jupiter in the sky, its magnetosphere would be about the size of the Moon,” says Goddard’s John Connerney, deputy principal investigator for the Juno mission. Its bow shock typically lies about 40 Jupiter diameters sunward of the planet and its magnetotail stretches some 3,500 diameters behind it, nearly reaching Saturn’s orbit. We know this because as Voyager 2 approached Saturn in 1981, two years and 400 million miles (650 million km) after its Jupiter encounter, the spacecraft slipped in and out of Jupiter’s frayed magnetotail multiple times. (By comparison, Earth’s bow shock lies three to five Earth diameters toward the Sun, and its magnetotail may extend hundreds of diameters.)
Between February 28 and March 2, 1979, the magnetosphere seemed to be playing hard to get with the approaching Voyager 1. The solar wind was gusty, producing unusually strong and variable pressures that pushed the bow shock closer to the planet. When the wind eased, the bow shock re-expanded. Pioneers 10 and 11 made their crossings 50 diameters from Jupiter, but Voyager 1 crossed it five times, the last at scarcely half that range (28 diameters).
On March 5, the spacecraft made its closest approach, passing within 128,400 miles (206,700km) of Jupiter’s cloud tops, barely one-third the distance at which Voyager 2 would pass July 9. Scientists selected this path so they could measure a hypothesized electrical circuit connecting Jupiter and its moon Io, and it took Voyager 1 deep into the most hazardous radiation belts in the solar system. Based on measurements from the Pioneers, the Voyager design included shielding that hardened sensitive electronics to the bombardment of high-energy electrons, protons, and ions stored in Jupiter’s equivalent of Earth’s Van Allen Belts. But an unprotected human passenger riding aboard Voyager 1 during closest approach would have received a thousand times the lethal radiation dose.
Four new worlds
An extraordinary planet deserves extraordinary moons, and Jupiter’s four big satellites do not disappoint. Discovered by Galileo Galilei in 1610, they are Io, Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto (in order of distance from the planet). Ganymede, the largest and most massive moon in the solar system, is slightly bigger than Mercury, while Callisto is nearly the planet’s diameter. Both Io and Europa are roughly the size of Earth’s Moon.
The moons’ complexity and individuality, which scientists hardly suspected despite centuries of telescopic observations, proved a major surprise of the Voyager missions. Reporting their results in the journal Science three months after the Voyager 1 encounter, the imaging team noted that the large moons do not closely resemble either the planets in the inner solar system or one another. “The sense of novelty,” they wrote, “would probably not have been greater had we explored a different solar system.”
“They’re quite distinct,” says Stone, “and I think the one thing we have learned is that nature is remarkably diverse, and you don’t see replicas. Each body seems to have its own life history written on the surface and in its interior.”
There had long been hints that the big moons might be doing something interesting. Galileo’s 17th-century plots showed that Europa and Io always meet up on the side of Jupiter exactly opposite from where Europa and Ganymede do. In the 7.15 days it takes Ganymede to go around Jupiter once, Europa orbits twice and Io four times. This 1:2:4 resonance forces the moons’ orbits to maintain a slight eccentricity, which in turn causes their bodies to flex slightly due to tides raised by Jupiter’s gravity. Just as repeatedly bending a paper clip warms up the metal, this forced flexing warms the interiors of Jupiter’s big moons.
Giant Ganymede — larger than Mercury — sports two different types of terrain. The dark material is oldest, while the lighter bands cut by grooves and ridges are significantly younger. A relatively recent impact threw out the bright material at bottom.
NASA/JPL
Stanton Peale at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and his colleagues first described the mechanism in a paper submitted to Science in January 1979. They presciently concluded: “Voyager images of Io may reveal evidence for a planetary structure and history dramatically different from any previously observed.” The paper was published March 2, three days before Voyager 1’s closest approach. By then, images of the weirdly colored moon, reminiscent of a cheese pizza, already were making headlines. Scientists had expected Io to resemble our Moon, but it lacked anything that looked like an impact crater and was coated with richly colored deposits that wouldn’t look out of place around active fumaroles on Earth.
On March 8, as Voyager 1 raced out of the Jupiter system, its camera captured a routine navigation image of a crescent Io as part of a program to refine knowledge of the spacecraft’s trajectory. The next day, JPL engineer Linda Morabito enhanced this image to locate background stars and uncovered another crescent shape on Io’s sunlit limb. It looked like the edge of another satellite peeking out from behind Io, but scientists determined that an unknown satellite so large would have been detectable from Earth. “No one understood what they were seeing, reinforcing the degree of difficulty associated with interpreting this image,” she later wrote.
The Voyagers revealed dark streaks crisscrossing the surface of Europa, the smallest of Jupiter’s Galilean moons. In some cases, the streaks stretch more than 1,000 miles (1,600km). Scientists later deduced that the streaks are cracks in the moon’s icy crust filled with material from its interior.
NASA/JPL/USGS
By March 12, the imaging team had confirmed the presence of active volcanoes. What Morabito had noticed was a plume of ejecta associated with a heart-shaped volcano now known as Pele. Remarkably, the same picture also held a second plume, one erupting from a feature now called Loki and catching sunlight as it rose high over Io’s night side.
Scientists now know of at least 150 active volcanoes on Io. Some of them blast umbrella-shaped plumes containing sodium, potassium, sulfur, sulfur dioxide, and more to altitudes as high as 310 miles (500km). Some of the ejecta falls back to paint Io’s terrain in garish hues, and the rest forms a thin, distended atmosphere around the moon. Particle interactions ionize some of these atoms, and they then become swept up in Jupiter’s fast-moving magnetic field, which rotates with the planet’s 10-hour rotation. “About a ton per second of that material is picked up by the jovian magnetic field, and that mass of stuff inflates the Jupiter magnetosphere to about twice the size it should be,” Stone says.
The ionized gas spreads along Io’s orbit to form a doughnut-shaped cloud called the Io plasma torus. Some of the heavy ions in the torus migrate outward, and their pressure supersizes the magnetosphere. As Io moves through the torus, it continuously generates an electrical current that flows along a conduit, called the Io flux tube, linked to Jupiter’s upper atmosphere. Two billion kilowatts flow through the flux tube, comparable to the average global power consumption on Earth. The Voyager 1 team deliberately tried to pass through the tube, but the material around Io shifted its position from what was expected, and the spacecraft instead flew alongside it.
While imaging from Earth in 1993, Connerney and his colleagues discovered a spot of infrared emission in Jupiter’s polar atmosphere. The glow tracked with Io in its orbit and arose from energy coursing down the flux tube. But Io isn’t alone in this regard. In 2002, Hubble imaged Io’s spot in the UV and found two more glows from Europa and Ganymede, showing they generate their own flux tubes. “The system is highly coupled and connected, where the magnetic fields and the particles are all interacting with the moons,” Stone says. And the phenomenon isn’t unique to Jupiter. In 2011, scientists identified a UV spot associated with the active moon Enceladus in images from the Cassini mission orbiting Saturn.
Voyager 1 discovered Jupiter’s faint, dusty rings during its flyby, and they posed for this Voyager 2 portrait once the probe passed into the planet’s shadow. The curved rings appear orange-red; Jupiter’s multicolored limb comes from the long exposure through two filters.
NASA/JPL
The outer trio
Europa, the next moon out from Jupiter, couldn’t be more different from its siblings. Low-resolution images from Voyager 1 showed a bright surface of frozen water with no discernible craters, along with hints of dark linear features. Voyager 2 passed much closer to Europa on July 9, and its images revealed frozen plains crisscrossed by dark streaks, giving it the look of a cracked egg. Europa’s surface is the smoothest in the solar system. Features display so little topographical relief that imaging team member Larry Soderblom compared the moon to a billiard ball. Later that year, the scientists who explained the heating of Io suggested that tidal flexing of Europa could provide enough heat to sustain an ocean beneath its icy shell, which is widely thought to be 10 to 15 miles (16 to 24km) thick. The ocean itself may be at least 30 miles (48km) deep, or more than 10 times the average depth of Earth’s seas.
In fact, several lines of evidence now support the presence of briny global oceans within Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto, each containing more water than Earth’s seas. NASA’s Galileo spacecraft, which in 1995 became the first to orbit Jupiter, flew close to these moons and found that Jupiter’s rotating magnetic field induces currents in electrically conducting layers within them. These currents, in turn, generate secondary magnetic fields Galileo could detect. Europa’s induced response matches what researchers would expect for a salty subsurface ocean many miles thick. And different teams using Hubble in 2012 and 2016 discovered tantalizing evidence that Europa occasionally erupts plumes of water vapor reaching heights of 125 miles (200km), suggesting the icy shell may be quite thin in some locations.
The Juno spacecraft’s camera preferentially targets Jupiter’s poles. This view of the south pole reveals several oval cyclones up to 600 miles (1,000km) in diameter.
The first low-resolution glimpses of Ganymede revealed two starkly different terrain types. A dark material covers about 35 percent of the surface. Peppered with impact craters and their bright halos of icy ejecta, this is the moon’s geologically oldest surface. The rest of the moon features light materials crosscut by an intricate patchwork of grooves and ridges. Voyager 1 images showed that fault lines cut some of the light bands, which were then offset by surface movement. “There is transverse motion along these faults,” Soderblom said at a March 6 briefing. “Things get offset, apparently, for hundreds of kilometers.” This suggested that tidal heating had powered a brief period of intense tectonic activity in Ganymede’s icy crust early in its history.
The Galileo mission revealed in 1996 that Ganymede generates its own permanent magnetic field, the only moon in the solar system known to do so, and therefore makes its own miniature magnetosphere. This complicates the interpretation of its induced field, but recent models, as well as Hubble observations of Ganymede’s aurorae, suggest the interior contains shells of different phases of water ice separated by salty seas.
Callisto, the farthest of Jupiter’s big moons, hosts the solar system’s most heavily cratered and geologically ancient surface. Its terrain is nearly saturated with bright impact craters. The largest visible feature, named Valhalla, resembles a bull’s-eye about 2,200 miles (3,600km) across, the frozen remnant of a giant impact. Galileo spacecraft observations indicate the presence of a salty, subsurface global ocean despite little tidal heating at Callisto now. Perhaps ammonia and other contaminants lower the freezing point enough for a liquid layer to survive.
Opening act
The Jupiter flybys mark the first chapter in the Voyagers’ exploration of the outer solar system. They provided new views of an enormous, complex, and dynamic atmosphere that is still far from understood. They explored a vast magnetosphere loaded with particles from its moons, especially Io, and intimately connected to them. Close-ups of unique new worlds uncovered incredible properties, including the first example of active extraterrestrial volcanism and the first clues that frozen moons could sport internal seas. Further discoveries included a faint ring of dust extending 80,000 miles (129,000km) from the planet’s center, and two new moons, Metis and Adrastea, orbiting just beyond it. The probes also found a third satellite, Thebe, in a more distant orbit, though still well inside Io’s.
With Jupiter now in the rearview mirror, Voyager scientists could begin digging deeper into the data — and wondering what awaited them at their next destination, Saturn.
NASA's solar sail technology wants to power space exploration using sunlight
NASA's solar sail technology wants to power space exploration using sunlight
NASA has announced plans to test its updated solar sail technology in 2022. known as ACS3 (advanced composite solar sail system), the aim of the mission is to replace conventional rocket propellants by developing and testing solar sails using sunlight beams to move nanosatellites.
‘just as a sailboat is powered by wind in a sail, solar sails employ the pressure of sunlight for propulsion, eliminating the need for conventional rocket propellant,’NASA wrote in a june 23 statement.
the NASA solar sail propulsion systems have been designed for future small interplanetary spacecrafts destined for low-cost deep-space and science missions requiring long-duration and low-thrust propulsion.the benefit of nanosatellites with solar sails is a continuous thrust without using expending propellants, enabling orbits that are not possible with conventional propulsion systems.
‘the primary objective of the ACS3 mission is to demonstrate the successful deployment of the composite boom solar sail in low-earth orbit,’said NASA.‘after reaching space, the mission’s CubeSat spacecraft will deploy its solar power arrays and then begin unfurling its solar sail via four booms that span the diagonals of the square and unspool to reach 7 meters (about 23 feet) in length. after approximately 20 or 30 minutes when the solar sail is fully deployed, the square-shaped solar sail measures approximately 9 meters (about 30 feet) per side or about the size of a small apartment. a suite of onboard digital cameras will obtain images of the sail during and after deployment in order to assess its shape and alignment.’
interest in solar sailing as an alternative to chemical and electric propulsion systems continues to increase.using sunlight to propel small spacecraft in lieu of consumable propellants will be advantageous for many mission profiles and offers flexibility in spacecraft design to help NASA meet its missions’ objectives most efficiently.
project info:
name: advanced composite solar sail system (ACS3) initiator: NASA company:NanoAvionics
Filer’s Files 30 2021 - 747 Sighting Shows UFOs Are Real Says FAA Chie - PART I
Filer’s Files 30 2021 - 747 Sighting Shows UFOs Are Real Says FAA Chie - PART I
Major George A. Filer III ret. USAF
New Jersey State Director
MUFON Eastern Region Director
Special reports on 747 Sighting of UFO Shows UFOs Are Real Says FAA Chief, Communist Chinese Warfare is Devious, C-60, and Strange Craft.
‘Unidentified Aerial Phenomena sightings were reported over California, Delaware, Idaho, Illinois, Kansas, Louisiana, Maryland, Nebraska, New York, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Texas, Utah, and Washington.
Unidentified Aerial Phenomena sightings were reported over Canada, Columbia, Peru, South Africa, and England in the United Kingdom.
The Filer Research Institute feels the scientific study of UFOs is for the benefit of humankind and is an important endeavor. The US Air Force investigated UFOs publicly for more than twenty years under Project Blue Book; and I continue this advanced research. I believe the God of the universe has spread life throughout the cosmos and UFOs are visiting us in ever-increasing numbers.
Forward these files to your friends and neighbors.
Special Projects
747 Sighting of UFO Shows UFOs Are Real Says FAA Chief
FAA Division Chief John Callahan
A thirty-year career and for six years Mr. Callahan was the Division Chief of the Accidents and Investigations Branch of the FAA in Washington DC. In his testimony he talks about a 1986 Japanese Airlines 747 flight that was followed by a UFO for 31 minutes over the Alaskan skies. The UFO also trailed a United Airlines flight until the flight landed. There was visual confirmation as well as air-based and ground-based radar confirmation. This event was significant enough for the then FAA Administrator, Admiral Engen, to hold a briefing the next day where the FBI, CIA, President Reagan’s Scientific Study Team, as well as others attended.
747 and possible 2 UFOs
Videotape radar evidence, air traffic voice communications and paper reports were compiled and presented. At the conclusion of this meeting, the attending CIA members instructed everyone present that “the meeting never took place” and that “this incident was never recorded.” Not realizing that there was additional evidence, they confiscated just the evidence presented, but Mr. Callahan was able to secure videotape and audio evidence of the event.
Briefing on 747 Incident
Callahan states, “Now in the 747 they have radar in the nose that picks up the weather outside there. So, his radar is picking up a target. He sees this target with his eyes. And the target, the way he described it, was a huge ball with lights running around it. And I think he said it was like four times as big as a 747!”And the military man said something like, yeah, I see him 35 miles north of Anchorage.
JAL 747 and UFO at Upper Right
The UFO was bouncing around the 747. Locations of the Flight 1628 and subsequent incidents are shown. The first sighting occurred from point A to B, where Flight 1628 was escorted by two objects. A third object would have paced the cargo plane as it approached Eielson AFB, mirroring the evasive maneuvers initiated by its pilots. It would have disappeared near Mt Denali, as they approached Talkeetna for a landing in Anchorage. Two and a half months later, Flight AS-53 recorded an unidentified object near McGrath, and a military plane observed an object between Elmendorf and Eielson Air Force Bases.
Well, they ran through for the best part of 31 minutes.
Then the next day I got a call from someone with the Scientific Study Group [for President Reagan who was briefed ever day about UFOs], or the CIA, I not sure who it was, the first call. And they had some questions about the incident.And I had said, I don’t know what you are talking about, you probably want to call the Admiral [FAA Administrator Engen].
Well, a few minutes later the Admiral calls down and says, I have set up a briefing tomorrow morning at 9:00 am in the round room. Bring all the stuff you have. Bring everybody up there and give them whatever they want. We want to get out of it. Just let them do whatever they want. So, I brought all the people from the Tech Center. We had all kinds of boxes of data that we had them print out; it filled up the room. They brought in three people from the FBI, three people from the CIA, and three people from Reagan’s Scientific Study team I don’t know who the rest of the people were, but they were all excited.
One of the guys from the CIA, when we got done says, “This meeting never took place. We never had this meeting. And this was never recorded.”
At the time I said, “I don’t know why you are saying this. I mean, there was something there and if it’s not the stealth bomber, then you know, is a UFO. And if it’s a UFO, why wouldn’t you want the people to know? Oh, they got all excited over that.”
Radar picks up UFO
He said, “This is the first time they ever had 30 minutes of radar data on a UFO. And they are all itching to get their hands onto the data and to find out what it is and what really goes on. He says, “If they come out and told the American public that they ran into a UFO out there, it would cause panic across the country. So therefore, you can’t talk about it. And we are going to take all this data.”
The only ones that see a UFO in the TV programs are the rednecks out in the country that are going coon hunting or alligator hunting at night. You don’t find anybody with any kind of smarts or some professional individual saying hey, last night let me tell you what I saw. They don’t display that in the United States. So, if you talk about seeing a UFO, you are putting yourself in a funny kind of category. That’s probably one of the reasons why you don’t hear about it anymore. But as far as I’m concerned, I saw a UFO chase a Japanese 747 across the sky for over half an hour on radar.
747 and giant Mothership
I’ve been involved in a lot of cover-ups with the FAA. When we gave the presentation to the Reagan staff, I was behind the group that was there. And when they were speaking to the people in the room, they had all those people swear that this never happened. But they never had me swear it never happened. And it always bothered me that we have these things going on and when you see something or you hear something on the radio or TV, the news, that it’s put down as it’s not there. I have a hard time saying nothing.
It still bothers me that I’ve seen all this, I know all this, and I’m walking around with the answer, and nobody wants to ask the question to get the answer. And it kind of irritates me a little bit. And I don’t believe our government should be set up that way. I think when we have something like this, that you can probably find out more about what’s going on in the world [by not covering it up].’
For those people that say that if these UFOs existed, they would someday be on radar and that there’d be professionals who would see it, then I can tell them that back in 1986 there were enough professional people that saw it. It was brought down to headquarters, FAA headquarters,
Washington D.C. The Administrator saw the tape of it. The people that we were debriefing, the Scientific Study team they’ve all seen 30 minutes of a UFO on radar.
FAA’s Anchorage, Alaskan Building
Early January of 1987, I received a call from the Air Traffic Quality Control Branch in FAA’s Alaskan regional office, requesting guidance on what to tell the media personnel who were overflowing their office. The media was requesting information about the UFO that chased a Japanese 747 across the Alaskan sky for some 3 minutes at flight levels between 30,000 and 35,000 feet on November 7, 1986. Somehow, the word had got out.
What UFO; when did this take place; why wasn’t Washington Headquarters informed?” I asked. “Hey, he replied, “Who believes in UFO’s? I just need to know what to tell the media to get them out of here.” The answer to that question was easy: “tell them it’s under investigation. Then, collect all the data – the voice tapes and data disc for both the facility and the military. Send then overnight to the FAA Tech Center in Atlantic City, New Jersey.”
Japan Air Lines flight 628, a cargo jet with a pilot, co-pilot and one crew member, was just north of Anchorage, and it was about 8 pm when the pilot first reported the UFO. He described it as a huge ball with lights running around it. He said it was about four times bigger than a 747, and he saw it with his own eyes. So did the other two crew members. Over the course of three minutes, the UFO jumped miles in a few seconds, changing places to different spots around the 747, in one sweep of the radar scope.
JC: Now in the 747 they have radar in the nose that picks up the weather outside there. So, his radar is picking up a target. He sees this target with his eyes. And the target, the way he described it, was a huge ball with lights running around it. And I think he said it was like four times as big as a 747!
And the military man said something like, yeah, I see him 35 miles north of Anchorage.
The pilot reported the UFO was bouncing around the 747, The military radar operator would cut in and say, “He’s now at 2 o’clock, moving to 3:00” and he would confirm the position. The military controller has height-finding radar, and they have long-range radar and short-range radar. So, if they don’t catch it on one of their systems, they catch it on the other. And if you listen to the military operator, at one time he said, “I have it on the height radar and my range radar,” which indicated that they had a target on his system.
Drawing of the huge Mothership UFO Compared to the 747
They ran through for the best part of 31 minutes. If they [the UFOs] can travel that far, that distance with that type of machinery, who knows what they could do here for the health of the nation, the people, the cancers we could cure. They must know more than us to be able to travel at that speed.
I’ve got a videotape, voice tape, the reports that were filed that will confirm it all and I’m a high Government official in the FAA. I was a Division Chief. I was only three down from the Admiral.
Japan Air Lines flight 628, a cargo jet with a Captain Terauchi as pilot e, co-pilot and one crew member, was just north of Anchorage, and it was about 8 pm when the pilot first reported the UFO. He described it as a huge ball with lights running around it. He said it was about four times bigger than a747, and he saw it with his own eyes. So did the other two crew members. Over the course of three minutes, the UFO jumped miles in a few seconds, changing places to different spots around the 747, in one sweep of the radar scope. Here is Captain Terauchi’s drawing of the sighting.
This is a silhouette of the spaceship. We could see because of the lights around the center. This is the same size as two aircraft carriers.
Pilot’s drawing of UFO
After receiving the data from Alaska almost two months later, I briefed my boss Harvey Safer and the FAA Administrator Admiral Engen, and Safer and I went to the FAA Tech Center to observe the playback.
The FAA had developed a program capable of recreating the traffic on the controllers’ scope, or plan view display. I instructed the FAA specialist to synchronize the voice tapes with the radar data so we could hear everything the controller and pilot said. I videotaped the radar display. Later that day, I requested that the FAA automation specialists plot the radar targets along the route of flight and explain what each target was doing. I videotaped the resulting chart. The printout and radar play back displayed primary targets in the vicinity of the 747. These target returns were displayed about the same time and place as the pilot advised viewing the UFO.
Captain Terauchi as pilot
Both the radar and manual controller observed the primary target. The military controllers also viewed the primary target on their radar and identified it as a “double primary.” The pilot and crew viewed the target on their radar and were able to see the huge UFO at the same time as it approached their aircraft.
If this craft had been a Leer jet or military aircraft at the wrong altitude, that would have been clear. The FAA has procedures that cover tracking unidentified aircraft violating another’s airspace -but it has no procedures for UFOs. Back at FAA headquarters, I gave Administrator Engen a quick briefing and showed him the video. He set up a briefing with President Reagan’s scientific staff and told me my function was to give them a dog and pony show and hand this event off to them, “since the FAA does not deal with UFO’s.“I brought along a copy of the video and all the data print outs available at the time. One of the scientists asked several questions, such as, what is the range of the radar, what is the frequency of the radar, what is the band width, what is the formula for the height equipment, etc. I was impressed with the response from the FAA experts.
After receiving the data from Alaska almost two months later, I briefed my boss Harvey Safer and the FAA Administrator Admiral Engen, and Safer and I went to the FAA Tech Center to observe the playback.
The FAA had developed a program capable of recreating the traffic on the controllers’ scope, or plan view display. I instructed the FAA specialist to synchronize the voice tapes with the radar data so we could hear everything the controller and pilot said. I videotaped the radar display.
Later that day, I requested that the FAA automation specialists plot the radar targets and the radar play back displayed primary targets in the vicinity of the 747. These target returns were displayed about the same time and place as the pilot advised viewing the UFO. Both the radar and manual controller observed the primary target. The military controllers also viewed the primary target on their radar and identified it as a “double primary.” The pilot and crew viewed the target on their radar and were able to see the huge UFO at the same time as it approached their aircraft.
Here is part of the communication between Captain Terauchi of JAL and ground controllers:
6:19 PM local time: The pilot of JAL1628 requested traffic from the ZAN (FAA Air Route Traffic Control Center, Anchorage) Sector 15 controller.
6:26 PM: ZAN contacted the Military Regional Operations Control Center (ROCC) and asked if they were receiving any radar returns near the position of JAL1628. The ROCC advised that they were receiving a primary radar return in JAL1628’s 10 o’clock (left-front) position at 8 miles.
6:31 PM: JAL1628 advised that the ‘plane’ was ‘quite big,’ at which time the ZAN controller approved any course deviations needed to avoid the traffic.
Captain Terauchi as pilot
Captain Terauchi revealed this was his third sighting of UFOs. JAL downgraded him to a desk job.
If this craft had been a Leer jet or military aircraft at the wrong altitude, that would have been clear. The FAA has procedures that cover tracking unidentified aircraft violating another’s airspace -but it has no procedures for UFOs. Back at FAA headquarters, I gave Administrator Engen a quick briefing and showed him the video. He set up a briefing with President Reagan’s scientific staff and told me my function was to give them a dog and pony show and hand this event off to them, “since the FAA does not deal with UFO’s.” At the end, one of the three people from the CIA said, “This event never happened; we were never here; we’re confiscating all this data and you are all sworn to secrecy.” “What do you think it was?” I asked the CIA person. “A UFO and now they have over 30 minutes of radar to go over,” he responded. “Well let’s get a Twix out and advise the American public that we were visited by a UFO,” I suggested. “No way, if we were to tell the American public there are UFO’s they would panic,”he informed me.
Sometime after the briefing, the detailed FAA report which included extensive interviews with the pilot and crew, the chart prepared at the Tech Center; and facility voice tapes arrived at my office and were placed on a small table waiting for the CIA to request more data. The material stayed there until I retired two years later, and I’ve had it ever since.
On the night of November 17, 1986, the sighting of at least one of the UFOs was confirmed by FAA and U.S. military ground radar. Thanks to Steven Greer, Leslie Kean, and John Callahan
Communist Chinese Warfare is Devious
Arsonist enjoying the Wildfire
I fought Communism in Vietnam, Israel, and Yemen through much of my life and I know they are very clever and devious and underhanded. They are much smarter than most of our politicians. Generally successful sabotage against the U.S is not revealed and considered classified information so you have to watch the news for destruction, fires and lives lost. They may be natural disasters but often they involve sabotage and arson.
I believe Chinese Communist Party of China is using every trick and geoengineering method possible to destroy the U.S.
These include Geoengineering methods, weather Control, satellite direct energy weapons, and bio-warfare. China builds advanced weapons systems using American chip technology from Phytium Inc.
The HAARP and weather control threat has been called a conspiracy theory by the mainstream fake media and by most government officials, but we controlled much of the weather in 1968 and the Chinese have 39,000 weather control personnel in Shanghai alone near their HAARP facility. ttps://climateviewer.com/2018/08/02/weather-control-directed-energy-weapons-fires-rage-worldwide/ttps://climateviewer.com/2018/08/02/weather-control-directed-energy-weapons-fires-rage-worldwide/
During a Senate hearing on May 20, 2014, David Walker, Deputy Secretary of the Air Force for science, technology and engineering, dropped a bombshell in answer to a question asked by Lisa Murkowski in relation to the dismantling of our $300 million High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program (HAARP) in Alaska.
Walker said,” This is not an area that we have any need for in the future” and it would not be a good use of Air Force research funds to keep HAARP going. “We’re moving on to other ways of managing the ionosphere, which the HAARP was really designed to do,” he said. “To inject energy into the ionosphere to be able to actually control it. But that work has been completed.”
This is not the first time a public official has acknowledged that HAARP and weather control is not only possible, but has been and continues to be used as a “super weapon,” as evidenced by a statement in 1997 by former U.S. Defense Secretary William Cohen, where he said “Others [terrorists] are engaging even in an eco-type of terrorism whereby they can alter the climate, set off earthquakes, volcanoes remotely through the use of electromagnetic waves… There are plenty of ingenious minds out there that are at work finding ways in which they can wreak terror upon other nations…It’s real, and that’s the reason why we have to intensify our [counterterrorism] efforts.”
Many believe HAARP was created and has been used for weather control, with enough juice to trigger hurricanes, tornadoes and even earthquakes and comments such as this bring about the question of whether conspiracy theorists are more on target than anyone has admitted to date.
Why the Chinese did not allow domestic travel from Wuhan, China but allowed millions of Chinese people to travel from Wuhan to all other parts of the world carrying
COVID 19 killing millions of people, which allowed the coronavirus to spread worldwide killing half a million Americans. They had an effective vaccine a year earlier than the US and claim only 15,000 Chinese died due to their advanced medical ability. The Chinese have taken virtually every technology developed in the US and often improved on it including all types of aircraft and missiles.
Five HAARPs (H) Facilities Japan’s Fukushima Earthquake and Tsunami (EQ)
The Chinese Communists have developed at least five HAARP like facilities, three in the Gobi Desert, one near Shanghai, and a similar facility on the Hainan Island in the South China Sea. Some are also likely mounted a HAARP on a ships and are able to move to key locations and conduct geoengineering. Virtually everything we have like missiles, aircraft, weapons they have been copied in larger numbers. and built in China with improvements.
Weather Control is not new.
President Johnson used weather control in 1968 dropping silver oxide on the North Vietnamese roads to slow their movement of supplies.
The South China Morning Post in 2018, revealed that a me scientists believe it could have more alarming uses such as causing natural disasters like hurricanes.
China is massively expanding its weather-control project, and is aiming to be able to cover half the country in artificial rain and snow.
Chinese radar facility on the island of Hainan, China’s southernmost point. Described as a “high-powered incoherent scatter radar,” this installation will bounce radio waves off the Earth’s high-altitude layer of charged gas called the ionosphere. China has built the world’s most powerful particle accelerator, building the largest single dish radio telescope, or racing other nations to the nuclear fusion finish line—experts think the new facility is more interested in military matters than discovering the secrets of Earth’s upper atmosphere. Most powerful radar that can punch holes in the ionosphere. It is felt the equipment can affect the space weather.
China has been branded the world’s worst executioner as the state kills thousands of people every year using firing squads, lethal injections, and mobile death vans. The true numbers of those killed by the Communist Party are thought to be exceptionally high – but thy are state secrets.
The fires and high temperatures are affected by odd Jet Stream Pattern and bring smoke to the Eastern US.
HAARP Facilities Heat the Middle Atmosphere and affect the Jet Stream
There is evidence the jet stream is moving in ways that do he most damage to the Western US bringing three weeks of exceptionally high temperatures and strong winds that help feed the fires. One of, if not the, worst heat wave in the region’s modern records impacted the Pacific Northwest of the United States and western Canada during late June 2021. China has used the HAARP facilities to push and pull the jet stream that passes through China and is pushed north into Canada the US bringing record cold temperatures. Causing the jet stream to move south and pick-up record-breaking heat domes near the equator. The severe drought in the Wes is not an accident of nature.
HAARP putting Tremendous Energy and high pressure into Jet stream
HAARP has been blamed by conspiracy theorists for a range of events, including numerous natural disasters. That includes weather warfare, earthquakes, and hurricanes’ The idea behind Weather Control is simple, when you see and experience a strong thunderstorm, with a lot of lightning and thunder, what fact about this storm strikes you the most? Are you not impressed by the powerful display of energy that you witness? Energy is the primary ingredient behind nature’s storms.
Dr. Begich explain this concept, “This invention provides the ability to put unprecedented amounts of power in the Earth’s atmosphere at strategic locations and to maintain the power injection level, particularly if random pulsing is employed, in a manner far more precise and better controlled than heretofore accomplished by the prior art. The jet stream flows over China and they are likely to change its course and create high pressure in the atmosphere when it reaches the United States. There has r been three unprecedented heat domes this year causing record breaking temperatures well over a 110 degrees Forethought. It is unusual to have one heat dome per year displaying evidence that China is controlling our weather.
High pressure in the middle layers of the atmosphere acts as a dome or cap allowing heat to build up at the earth’s surface.
There is a high-pressure system, stronger than ever observed in the United Stats.
The Jet Stream brings the heat and the weather from China. HAARP machines apparently can increate the high pressure system over the U.S. Even if the Intelligence officials are aware of the sabotage it is unlikely it will be revealed. Expect a long period of unnatural extreme heat.
Everything in China is directed by the Communist Party for example Chinese pharmaceutical companies are often run by generals to make fentanyl and meth for profit. Three million people mostly Moslems are in Chinese Communist’s concentration camps with smoking crematoriums. The Chinese have built the largest Military in the world copying our best equipment and making improvements.
The Chinese Communist’s even seem to even control the US evening television news that is very favorable to China. I have I watched every night for years and on Monday they reported China hacked the Microsoft Exchange but never mention the major hacking during the election. China has recently sunk Philippine fishing boats and murdered 20,000 Indian troops according to India News reports on the border but not on US news.
Some 8,000 wildfires occurred in California, many started by lightning, but many people see beams of light coming from the sky that may belong to Chinese, Russia, or Iranian Directed energy satellites.
Sabotage of US
As an Intelligence Officer I look for evidence of sabotage. Many people report seeing beams of light coming from satellites.
U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia speculated that the real culprit behind the November 2018 wildfires in California may have been laser beam from space. The West Coast is burning, and insurers are fleeing. Since February the Western half of the U.S. has been facing a record-breaking wildfire season. In California, wildfires have now burned over 4 million acres — double the destruction that the 2018 wildfires caused. So far, 8,400 buildings have been destroyed in California wild land fires
The U.S. Department of Interior states as many as 90 percent of wild land fires in the United States are caused by people lighting the fires The remaining 10 percent are started by lightning or lava.
Beams of light coming from space started the Dolan fire in California. Cars have been burned melting glass and metal that does not normally happen with wildfires. Towns have been burned to the ground while the forest around them is untouched by fire.
According to Verisk’s 2019 Wildfire Risk Analysis 4.5 million U.S. homes were identified at high or extreme risk of wildfire, with more than 2 million in California alone.
2020: By December 18, 2020, there were about 57,000 wildfires compared with 50,477 in 2019, according to the National Interagency Fire Center. More than 10.3 million acres were burned in 2020, compared with 4.7 million acres in 2019. Five of the top 20 largest California wildfires fires occurred in 2020, according to CalFire’s list. Wildfires in California have burned a record 4.2 million acres, damaging or destroying 10,500 structures and killing 31 people.
Wildfires are occurring all over the US and in many other democracies like Australia.
The West Coast is burning, and insurers are fleeing, and a few people are committing arson and sabotage are caught. Since February the Western half of the U.S. has been facing a record-breaking wildfire season. In California, wildfires have now burned over 4 million acres — double the destruction that the 2018 wildfires caused. In 2020, 8,400 buildings have been destroyed in California alone.
Through much of September, at least a thousand or more nd eight large wildfires each of 100,000 acres and were burning in Washington and Oregon, with 3 in Washington and 5 in Oregon. This was unprecedented for those two states, which combined only saw a total of 26 large fires from 1997 to 2019. Deaths: 46 (32 in California, 11 in Oregon, 1 in Washington, 2 in Colorado), numerous towns destroyed
Wildfires on July 22, 2021, two lines of fires from NW to SE
There is some evidence that the fires might be started by satellite. Many of the fires in the past are on a line from west to east and shortly after satellites pass over. People claim to see fire coming down from space. California had 8,194 wildfires in 2018 costing $10,380. millions for just one campfire. Thousands of wildfires per state is common indicating these are not all accidental wildfires.
YouTube video of direct energy weapons coming from sky setting fires.
We know China has Direct energy weapons, laser, infrared, mirror, and satellites that can magnify the sun passing over the US. Douglas MacKinnon of the Daily Sun writes, “China’s space supremacy could wipe out our satellites and send us back to the Stone Age. As you read this, the Communist People’s Republic of China continues its military program to identify and target every single satellite in Earth orbit needed by the United States for its survival.”
Insiders claim since 2017 – 2021there has been a large increase in the wildfires suggesting a deliberate plan to sabotage the US. Many homes are destroyed away from any wildfires indicting fire from the sky. That should be of concern to the political and military leadership of the United States and those of our allies particularly since we have proof of Chinese espionage and sabotage in many other areas.
For example, China spread the COVID-19 from Wuhan all over the world but restricted all travel in China. The developed their vaccine was ready at least a year before ours. China claims their advanced medical system kept Chinese deaths down to 15,000 compared to 600,000 US deaths and they claim COVID 19 virus was wiped out of China by June of last year. Communist media reminds the Chinese people they are at war with the US.
My experience has been as an Intelligence officer to listen carefully to what the politically motivated intelligence leaders say and believe the opposite. China is much stronger than they will admit and every logical and diabolical trick they can create is used to defeat the US. Their Chinese companies are run by generals to dream up ways to defeat democracies.
Strange Craft
The True Story of an Air Force Intelligence Officer’s Life with UFOs
U.S. Air Force Major George Filer belongs to the generation of pilots and airmen whofirst became aware of the strange aircraft showing up in the Earth’s atmosphere after World War II. These men – military professionals who flew planes, served as radar operators and air traffic controllers at airfields around the world – began to whisper amongst themselves about encounters with suspected extraterrestrial aircraft.
During secret debriefings at U.S. bases, pilots and air crew told their commanders of seeing UFOs off their plane’s wings. Award-winning investigative author John Guerra spent four years interviewing Filer, a decorated intelligence officer.
From objects in the skies over Cold War Europe to a UFOs over during the Cuban Missile Crisis to lights over the DMZ in Vietnam Filer leaves nothing out about his Air Force UFO encounters,
Filer’s most memorable case – the shooting of an alien at Fort Dix Army Base in 1978 – is fully recounted for the first time in this book. As a member of the Disclosure Project, military experts, astronauts, and scientists urge the U.S. government to release all it knows about UFOs to the public.
Filer describes his UFO encounters in this incredible book.
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Filer’s Files 30 2021 - 747 Sighting Shows UFOs Are Real Says FAA Chie - PART II
Filer’s Files 30 2021 - 747 Sighting Shows UFOs Are Real Says FAA Chie - PART II
Major George A. Filer III ret. USAF
New Jersey State Director
MUFON Eastern Region Director
Special reports on 747 Sighting of UFO Shows UFOs Are Real Says FAA Chief, Communist Chinese Warfare is Devious, C-60, and Strange Craft.
‘Unidentified Aerial Phenomena sightings were reported over California, Delaware, Idaho, Illinois, Kansas, Louisiana, Maryland, Nebraska, New York, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Texas, Utah, and Washington.
Unidentified Aerial Phenomena sightings were reported over Canada, Columbia, Peru, South Africa, and England in the United Kingdom.
The Filer Research Institute feels the scientific study of UFOs is for the benefit of humankind and is an important endeavor. The US Air Force investigated UFOs publicly for more than twenty years under Project Blue Book; and I continue this advanced research. I believe the God of the universe has spread life throughout the cosmos and UFOs are visiting us in ever-increasing numbers.
Forward these files to your friends and neighbors.
UFO Sightings in the United States
Sightings are from MUFON CMS
California Object
Fairfield – on March 30, 2021, it was white I don’t know why but I felt it knew we were watching it.
Delaware Disc
Milford – March 2, 2021, the game camera took a picture of a black round disk.
Note: There was no lights on the object and there is some grayness on the picture that could be a camera anomaly. Thanks to Will Pucket/www.ufosnw.com/newsite/
Idaho Light
Filer – on July 17, 2021, pulsating lights only half of shape could be seen by naked eye. Oval without lighting markers. Pulsing the whole time while suspended.
Illinois Lights
Rock Island – on July 3, 2021, I witnessed a triangle shaped UFO up close as I traveled west on I-80. I traveled toward ball of light, filming for 30 minutes. At 10pm this ball of light descended toward me fast with a fluorescent green glow. At an altitude of 100 feet and 200 yards away it slowed and crossed my path as I got this photo.
It was triangle shaped ship with 3 bright lights of every color swirling like plasma. I chased it and managed to get nearly beneath it again. I drove around Rock Island tracking this object, but it disappeared.
Kansas Object
Emporia — on June 29, 2021Tic Tac sighting.
Maryland Object
Annapolis –on April 19, 2021, this is hard to describe so I made this sketch. It was at 5:30 am the triangle flew over.
Nebraska Object
Omaha in early spring we were driving to Council Bluffs at 9 pm when I saw this disk and asked my dad to stop the car. He didn’t but we were able to see it for an hour when we got home.
Ohio Object
New Richmond – on July 18, 2021, my wife and I were coming down our driveway and she said she saw a light in the sky. We began to video tape the light. It moved southeast then hovered changing shape, glowing ball then a triangle.
Oklahoma Object
Tulsa –on July 20, 2021, we saw a dark grey hovering object with a rear ghoulish orange light. At first the light began to dim and then brighten twice before fading away.
South Dakota Object
Rapid City – on July 18, 2021, we were in the backyard when a wobbly black disk flew overhead.
Texas Light
Lubbock – on July 17, 2021, thought this could be drone but too bright and too far away. I do have video.
Utah Object
South Ogden ‘’ on July 15, 2021, nearly flat, donut looking object traveled across the sky, like a balloon, but it was way faster and there was no wind.
Washington Lights
Forks – on July 19, 2021, I was riding my horse that has often spooked by low aircraft, so I was watching the sky when I saw a UFO. It was a few miles away coming towards me silently but changed directions and the horse was o.k.
Worldwide UFO Sightings
Canada Object
Calgary – on September 6, 2019, I saw flames like a large comet descending that stopped and hovered into multiple glowing balls. They joined and separated.
Columbia Light
GPalermo Magdalena –– on April 6, 2021, next to the Puente Pumarejo bridge on the Magdalena River. I was taking pictures of a “sun halo.”
Note: The bright spot in the photo is not a real object. It is a lens flare as the result of taking a photo of the Sun. Thanks to Will Pucket/www.ufosnw.com/newsite/
Peru Light
Lima– November 16, 2016, half-cylindrical stationary light observed in southwest at 6 pm. I went to the roof to see it move towards me, despite the scare. I continued recording.
South Africa Object Drawing
Velddrif– on July 15, 2021, it was 100 meters from me at 4 am while taking my dog out. I live on the west coast, and I made a sketch of what as flew silently overhead.
UK/England Lights
London–on November 18, 2018, I finished work around 6pm, and observed a Laser show near Heathrow airport. My brother and I saw these astounding fast lights. I was told this is a laser light. But laser light comes with a trail from point A to B and there was no trail.
Telford, England – on July 18, 2021, after viewing my photos later I noticed the UFOs
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Filer’s Files 29 2021 - UFOs Disable U.S. Nuclear Missiles - PART I
Dana Point, California UFO flies with [Dana Point planes 4 July 2021
Filer’s Files 29 2021 - UFOs Disable U.S. Nuclear Missiles - PART I
.Major George A. Filer III ret. USAF
New Jersey State Director
MUFON Eastern Region Director
Www.nationalUFOcenter.com. Now receiving 3 to 4 million hits a month
Sending out 32,000 emails a week
In special reports, this week’s files cover:
Special Reports on UFOs Disable U.S. Nuclear Missiles,We Have Lost Many Men Trying to Intercept UFOs, Peru – Crashed UFO Was Hit,Map of UFO Sightings, Triangle UFOs Attack Soviet Union, Time Travelers, The Black Lives Matter Organization Defends Communist Cuba, and Strange Craft.
Unidentified Aerial Phenomena sightings were reported over Arkansas, California, Florida, Connecticut, Colorado, Florida, Kentucky, Illinois, Maine, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, Oregon, Tennessee, Texas, and Utah.
Unidentified Aerial Phenomena sightings were reported over Australia, Brazil, Canada, Mexico, Romania, and England in the United Kingdom.
The Filer Research Institute feels the scientific study of UFOs is for the benefit of humankind and is an important endeavor. The US Air Force investigated UFOs publicly for more than twenty years under Project Blue Book; and I continue this advanced research. I believe the God of the universe has spread life throughout the cosmos and UFOs are visiting us in ever-increasing numbers.
Forward these files to your friends and neighbors.
Special Projects
UFOs Disable U.S. Nuclear Missiles
At the MUFON Conference I had a nice talk with Captain Silas who was one of six former Air Force officers and a former enlisted man stepped forward in Washington last September to say that they’d seen or had been directly involved with UFO sightings at Malmstrom and F. E. Warren nuclear missile sites.
These sightings began at the dawn of the Cold War and continued through the 1970s. At this press conference, organized by UFO researcher Robert Hastings, these men told the media that they were encouraged not to speak of these sightings by their superiors, and in some cases, were required to sign secrecy oaths. Robert Silas who I talked with on Sunday, told me, ”
He was able to obtain formally classified data about the sighting and cold now tell what happened on March 16, 1967, he was 60 feet below ground working a 24-hour shift monitoring a launch-control center outfitted with 10 nuclear Minuteman missiles.
“I got a call from the topside guard, telling me they were watching some strange lights flying around in the sky, making odd maneuvers. They didn’t think they were airplanes because they were going amazingly fast, turning on a dime and not making a bit of noise.” Salas, co-author of “Faded Giant” (BookSurge Publishing), was a first lieutenant in 1967, serving as a missile-launch officer while stationed at Malmstrom Air Force Base in Montana with Minuteman missiles.
We Have Lost Many Men Trying to Intercept UFOs
General Benjamin Chidlaw told investigators, `We have stacks of reports about flying saucers. We take them seriously when you consider we have lost many men and planes trying to intercept them.” Commander Air Defense Command 1951 to 1955.
Timothy Good writes, “The destruction or disappearance of military aircraft during interceptions of UFOs continued apace.” As General Benjamin Chidlaw, former commanding general of Air (later Aerospace) Defense Command told Robert C. Gardener (ex USAF) in 1953: “We have stack of reports of flying saucers. We take them seriously, when you consider we have lost many men and planes trying to intercept them.”
Leonard Stringfield, the former Air Force intelligence officer was told by a reliable source in the 1950s that the “Air Force was losing about a plane a day to the UFOs.” Stringfield was reliably informed. According to US Defense Department figures, from 1952 until the end of October 1956, there were 18,662 major accidents of military aircraft, broken down.
If UFOs are fired at they respond with deadly return fire
Air Force – Navy Total Losses of aircraft
1952 2,274 2,086 4,354
1953 2,075 2,325 4,400
Year 1954 1,873 1,911 3,784
1955 1,664 1,566 3230
1956 1,530 1,358 2,888
Of this astonishing accident total, most involved fast new jets (such as those scrambled in UFO interceptions), of which 56.2 per cent were found to be caused by pilot error; 8.1 per cent by ground-crew or other personnel failure; 23.4 per cent by failure of parts and equipment in the aircraft; 2.8 per cent by various ‘unsafe conditions’, and –9.5 per cent (1,773) were due to ‘unknown factors. Thanks to Timothy Good’ book, “Need to Know” P.172
Peru – Crashed UFO Was Hit by Something
Marine Corps Lance Corporal John Weygandt
Weygandt, who was part of the Disclosure Project, was sent to Peru in March 1997, to provide perimeter security for a radar installation that he was told tracked drug traffic aircraft in Peru and Bolivia. He states, “About midnight, while I was on guard duty, Sergeant Allen and Sergeant Atkinson told me, an aircraft crashed, and they need us to go and secure the crash site.” Early that morning we drove six Hummers close to the crash site just when it started to get light. Well, we found the area easy because there was a huge gash in the land where something had crashed. Everything was burned and it was as if something had almost cut warm butter with a knife. It was like something on fire or had energy like a laser had cut it. It was strange. I was in the front with Sergeant Allen and Sergeant Atkinson, and we were ten or twenty meters ahead of everyone else. We were the first ones to see this thing. It had gone up the hill and then off in the side of the ravine and ridge. This was a 200-foot ridge of solid rock. A huge craft was buried at a 45-degree angle in the side of the cliff there at the ridge. It was straight up and down. ‘
The craft was dripping a greenish-purple syrup-like liquid. The liquid was everywhere and fluctuated like it was alive and changing to a different shade of greenish purple. The craft was humming like a bass guitar and had a slowly turning light. Most of the craft seemed buried into the cliff but vents, like a fish gill were on the back.
The liquid got on my clothes and ate holes in them and burned off some the hair on my arms. There were three holes in the ship that may have been hatches that were not flush with the main body of the craft. There was another hatch the same width and diameter of the top hatch and it was kind of crooked to the side and it was half-open. I didn’t see any lights or anything coming out of it, but I felt this… presence. It is strange. I think the creatures calmed me. It was weird and I think they were trying to communicate with me, like, I guess, telepathically. The Corporal estimated the craft was ten meters in width and about 20 meters in length and shaped like something between an egg and a teardrop. The skin of the craft had bumps and notches and appendages on it. It was organic and almost like art. It looked like something that could be made in a shop. It looked like it could have been handmade but out of what materials I do not know. It was nothing like titanium. It looked like metal but there was no reflection. The sun was shining on it, and I could see the different shades of the craft and it didn’t reflect anything. Suddenly the Sergeants were yelling at me to get the hell out of there.
After we climbed back up, the Department of Energy people were there. They knew about it, so I don’t know why we went there still to this day. But anyway, I was arrested and cuffed, both hands down. I had all my gear taken from me by men in black cammies who threatened me, subdued me, and put me on a cot. They had no nametags. At the crash site there were about thirty of these guys wearing hazard suits.
I had been told aircraft were flying in and out of the atmosphere as much as ten plus per week. When you have objects that reenter the atmosphere, then stop on a dime, then turn around, and go exactly the opposite direction – that is somewhat strange. Meteors don’t do that. The craft was not from Earth. I knew that when I looked at it. I wondered if those facilities were built for the intent to track UFO’s and their cover was to track drug aircraft. They had laser range finders and all kinds of high-tech stuff that I have never seen before.
Patriot is a long-range, all-altitude, all-weather air defense system
Patriot system detects, tracks, and engages UAVs, cruise missiles, and short-range or tactical ballistic missiles. and perhaps UFOs.
They [the laser range finders] looked like big telescopes and some sort of Command Center manned by a multi –national force. So, these craft were tracked from this radar and were logged. I’m confident that when I saw the aircraft, it had been hit by something. Something had taken it out.
Editor’s Note: Corporal Weygandt described a craft damaged by enemy action, either by our weapons or an opposing alien force during our meeting in the Disclosure Project. His testimony on Page 274 of “Disclosure: Witnesses Reveal the Greatest Secrets” as being used against alien intruders during the Clinton Administration. We can assume this war continues.
Map of UFO Sightings
UFO sighting hot spots are around major cities such as: Seattle, Los Angeles, San Diego, Phoenix, Minneapolis, St. Luis, Chicago, Detroit, Columbus, Charleston, Philadelphia, and New York.
Alien UFO Bases
UFO in Cave
Erich A. Aggen, Jr. reports a great deal of UFO research has led to the conclusion that various species of aliens have set up secret underground bases in the United States and other countries. It is logical to assume that such bases have also been established elsewhere in the solar system. If such bases exist, where would we find them? Existing information allows us to make a few educated guesses.
“EARTH BASES: UNDERGROUND – The dark, cavernous world beneath our feet is the source of many baffling mysteries. Clandestine UFO bases may be hidden deep within the earth in natural and or artificial caverns and even under the sea…
UFO entering field near a Finley, Ohio farm in slow motion by George Ritter
As a former member of the National Speleological Society (NSS), I am aware of the vast extent of cave systems within the United States. In my own native state of Missouri, for example, there are over 2,500 known caves and dozens of new ones being discovered every year. Many of these caves are intricately linked together by numerous passageways and interconnecting chambers.
“One particular species of blind white (albino) cave fish, the TYPHLICHTHYS, has been found in many widely separated cave systems over several states. It has been found in caves that make a great arc through Kentucky, Indiana, Illinois and UNDER the Mississippi River extending into Missouri, Arkansas, and Oklahoma! A vast section of the central and southern United States must lie above one immense cavern system!
“Many caves possess rooms hundreds of feet in length, width, and height. In most cases, these huge natural caverns can only be reached and explored with the utmost skill and perseverance. There are only a few thousand NSS members in the United States and only a few hundred of this number are active spelunkers that is people who explore caves. With so few spelunkers spread over such a large area, only an exceedingly small fraction of the tens of thousands of known caves in this country have been carefully mapped and explored. Thousands of other caves remain undiscovered and unexplored. The aliens can fly into the caves without causing damage to the ground or the sides of mountains. Any of the caves appear to be underwater in oceans, lakes, and rivers.
“Extensive evidence indicates that caves in the United States may be connected with caves in other parts of the world. In Mexico, the cave known as ‘Sotano de las Golondrinas’, (or) basement of the swallows, in the Municipio de Aquismo, S.L.P., reaches a depth of 1100 feet (334 meters). The cave is a giant ‘sinkhole’ or ‘hole’ in the ground with a nearly circular opening at the top, hundreds of feet in diameter.
“The entrance to Golondrinas is in one of the most primitive and uncivilized areas of Mexico and local inhabitants are afraid to approach the cave because they believe it is full of ‘evil spirits’ which lure people to their deaths. They tell stories of people mysteriously disappearing never to be heard from again while passing near the cave entrance. These stories may be based more on fact than fiction: they are similar in some respects to UFO abduction reports. Because of its huge size, remote location, and unique geological structure, Golondrinas would be an ideal UFO base. Naturally, camouflaged caves in other parts of the world may serve as excellent natural bases, way stations, and ‘depots’ for UFOs.
“An underground nuclear test called the ‘Schooner Experiment’ conducted in December 1968, substantiates the theory that caves in North and South America are intimately linked. In this test, a 35- kiloton nuclear bomb was exploded under the desert of Nevada. Five days after the test, the radiation level rose from 10 to 20 times in Canada, 1000 miles away from the Nevada test site! The only way the radioactive dust could have traveled that far is through an interconnected system of caves extending all the way from Nevada to Canada!”
Many abductees report going underground, undersea, or taken to spaceships orbiting Earth. UFOs are often reported entering the ground, the sea, or mountains. They seem to pass through the soil, rock, or water with no problems. Thanks to ‘TOP SECRET SEARCH Magazine,
UFO bases in the Caspian and Black Sea
The Aug. 1-2 sighting of UFOs over Baku’s oil company district, in the South Caspian Sea as reported by the opposition Musavat Daily News raised a few eyebrows? Did it mean that so-called flying saucers run on petrol as well at anti-matter? According to Fuad Gasimov, academician and head of the Seismological Department of the National Aerospace Agency the often-sighted space craft have bases deep in the Caspian, one off the north part of the Absheron Peninsula, the other in the north sector of the Caspian Sea.
Possible UFO bases shown in Red Oval
“I had been associated with the Institute of Earth Physics of the Academy of Sciences of the U.S.S.R. during the Soviet era Gasimov told the Baku Sun. “Since then, we have information on the existence UFO bases around Baku. But it was strongly kept as a military secret.” The modern Republic of Azerbaijan proclaimed its independence on 30 August 1991,
shortly before the dissolution of the USSR in the same year. Aliens and UFOs reportedly were responsible for the breakup of the Soviet Union shortly after a gigantic fleet of missile carrying submarines was detected off the coast of the United States.
Allegedly the aliens would not put up with two super nuclear powers that could destroy the Earth and their potential home. Gasimov says that he worked with a Soviet organization that tracked UFOs. The organization sent an expedition to Baku and the Absheron Peninsula, where they discovered UFOs bases around the Nardaran and Pirshagi districts and around the Siyazan water spring. The entrances to these bases, he says, are found deep underground. Kasimov is not Baku’s only ufologist. Other than the incidents at Nardaran, flying saucers zoom in as the No. 2 topic of conversation in the villages around Baku.
Caspian Sea Oil Drilling Platform Belonging to Iran
The Caspian region isn’t the only home for UFOs, he says. The Pacific and Atlantic oceans, around Bermuda are also home to alien bases. Another alien base is located off the coast of Crimea in the northern Black Sea not far from the port of Simferopol.
With thousands of Russian troops occupying this perennially embattled autonomous republic, an overwhelming majority of Crimeans voted on Sunday, March 16, 2014, to secede from Ukraine and join Russia, resolutely carrying out a public referendum that Western leaders declared illegal.
Simferopol, Crimea
The outcome, in a region that shares a language and centuries of history with Russia, was a foregone conclusion even before exit polls showed more than 93 percent of voters and Crimean Parliament favoring secession. There was bitterness over Ukraine because they did not let Crimea elect its own leader in the State Council of Crimea and the economy was poor. Crimea has been known for almost daily sightings of UFOs, even as the Russian Navy has moved into the port in force and bringing relative prosperity to the two million Crimean’s.
Vidadi Erbulozole, 85, a resident of Mardakan village, swears he saw a UFO with his own eyes. He says that while drinking tea on his balcony he observed a huge shining object going toward the sea.
It wasn’t the first time he has spotted an alien vessel, he says. In August last year, he and his neighbors were terrified by three shining objects in the sky. I saw it with my own eyes,” he says. “Again, they were like huge circles with terrifying lights around it. They seemed awfully close to you, but the interesting thing is they would disappear rapidly.”
UFO seen over Crimea
He told the Baku Sun that under the Soviets at the end of the 1980s, Azeri scientists produced theoretical studies, or functioning principles, for types of flying objects such as UFOs. Most requests came from the Ministry of Defense of the Soviet Union. He notes that this was the period of the United States’ Strategic Defense Initiative, also known as the Star Wars space defense plan.
Star Wars made a lot of U.S. defense contractor’s rich and eventually led to the anti-missile program; the U.S.S.R. took it seriously and wanted its own scientists to come up with a possible answer to SDI’s space shield. Azerbaijani scientists were called on to develop a Soviet UFO.
Triangle UFOs Attack Soviet Union
Several KGB Colonels claim the U.S.S.R. was on heavy attack by Triangle UFOs and was forced to surrender and formed Russia at a great lost to military capability and the loss of numerous of its nation Republics such as Ukraine. The attacks occurred shortly after numerous Soviet nuclear missile submarines appeared ready to attack the U.S. with 360 nuclear missiles. The alien primary mission is to stop nuclear war on Earth since large numbers of aliens now live here and more are coming.
The Soviet Union lost fifteen Republics when it downgraded to Russia only.
After the collapse of U.S.S.R. Salmanzadeh says, all research about the theoretical principles of flying objects prepared by Azeri scientists were sent to Moscow, sometime in the early.
1990s. Salmanzadeh claims to have observed a flying object that looked like a UFO in October 1999. He and some colleagues took photos of the craft, which they named Tusi-800.
Time Travelers
Grey Alien
Commander Graham Bethune told me, “The entities that crashed near Roswell, New Mexico in 1947 seemed to be coming home and might be from our Earth’s future”. It is apparent they are unhealthy in appearance like their livers or other organs are damaged, perhaps as the result of an environmental disaster. They may be suffering from radiation poisoning possibly from a nuclear war, environmental chemical poisons, or space radiation. The eye is the most sensitive target for space radiation and long duration stays may lead to detectable opacities and cataracts. The unusually large eyes may reflect repeated damage to the eyes and immune disorders.
They also seem to be collecting DNA, fertile eggs, and sperm possibly to improve their species and develop offspring that can live on Earth’s atmosphere. Our bacteria and virus strains appear to mutate or be developed for bio-warfare like the corona virus into stronger diseases and visitors may also be attempting to obtain some of our antibodies and vaccines that fight these strains.
The entities may have come here to prevent humans from destroying Earth in an attempt to keep the Earth environmentally clean or prevent nuclear war for future generations. Earth is the best planet for life for millions of miles in this part of the galaxy and is a tremendous source of life forms, food, water, minerals, and atmosphere.
Time Travel is possible, and I’ve talked to government personnel who have travelled to other planets in a few hours. Both planets must have the machines
It is apparent our government based on President Roosevelt or Truman’s orders kept the entities visits and crashes secret because they feared the intentions and abilities of the visitors. My experience has shown our leaders often make decisions like what the average person would make knowing the same information.
There have been rumors that human probably were taken by the Grays were found in the crashed craft.
Clones My already Exist are they identical Twins or Clones?
There is also an indication the Grays are robotic computerized clones and all look essentially the same. According to various reports the visitors have large brains and are able transmit their telepathic thoughts and read our minds. They obviously have advanced technology and reportedly can go through walls, transport people into their craft, and control people’s actions, etc.
The Greys
The most encountered alien species is known as the “Greys” due to the greyish color of their skin. There are several species of Greys which have interacted with mankind in one form or other during our history. The Greys share several common characteristic traits to include a telepathic genetic/technological collective consciousness and the inability to feel emotion. The appear to be conducting abductions to mate with humans and to breed offspring that after five or six times create an almost human looking starseeds with often advanced capabilities.
The Black Lives Matter Organization Defends Communist Cuba
Many U.S Flags Waved during Cuban Riots
Peter Hasson Democratic Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, Ilhan Omar of Minnesota and Cori Bush of Missouri have yet to weigh in on Black Lives Matter declaring its support for Cuba’s Communist regime, even though the congresswomen have been vocal Black Lives Matter (BLM) supporters in the past.
BLM sparked a backlash after posting a statement that blasted the U.S. embargo and praised Cuba’s Communist government and police tactics against Cuban’s protests.
BLM claims the people of Cuba are being punished by the U.S. government because the country has maintained its commitment to sovereignty and self-determination,” Then, BLM claimed Cubans have chosen their own government which is untrue sine the peopled have never voted.
Communist general and Dictator Fidel Castro took over the country in a violent siege in 1959, despite never having won an election.. Fidel, his successor, and brother Raúl, and current figurehead President Miguel Díaz-Canel have all not stood in any election, despite being the nation’s only leaders in those 62 years. Repeatedly Castro claimed he would get around to having elections, but this never happened according to Wikipedia.
Over a million Cubans have voted with their feet and fled Cuba with 1,344,00 going to the US with Spain getting (141,400), Italy (37,300), Canada (19,000), Germany (13,400), Mexico (12,900), and Puerto Rico with 13,600.
The BML statement said. “United States leaders have tried to crush this Revolution for decades with an embargo.” The statement also credited Cuba’s government for “protecting Black revolutionaries like Assata Shakur,” a convicted cop-killer who fled to Cuba after escaping from prison in 1979. BLM Marxist co-founder Patrisse Cullors has repeatedly praised Shakur in the past.
Ocasio-Cortez and Omar are vocal supporters of BLM, while Cori Bush was a BLM activist before joining Congress.
The six-time #1 New York Times bestselling author, and radio and TV host Mark R. Levin explains how the dangers he warned against in the bestseller Liberty and Tyranny have come to pass.
In American Marxism, Levin explains how the core elements of Marxist ideology are now pervasive in American society and culture—from our schools, the press, and corporations, to Hollywood, the Democratic Party, and the Biden presidency—and how it is often cloaked in deceptive labels like “progressivism,” “democratic socialism,” “social activism,” and more. With his characteristic trenchant analysis, Levin digs into the psychology and tactics of these movements, the widespread brainwashing of students, the anti-American purposes of Critical Race Theory and the Green New Deal, and the escalation of repression and censorship to silence opposing voices and enforce conformity. Levin exposes many of the institutions, intellectuals, scholars, and activists who are leading this revolution, and provides us with some answers and ideas on how to confront them.
As Levin writes: “The counter communist revolution to the American Revolution is in full force. And it can no longer be dismissed or ignored for it is devouring our society and culture, swirling around our everyday lives, and ubiquitous in our politics, schools, media, and entertainment.” And, like before, Levin seeks to rally the American people to defend their liberty.
Communist China’s media tells the Chinese people they are at war with the United States and that everything must be done to defeat them. The Bio-warfare of COVID 19 and updated variants is just one example. Another issue is, have you ever heard anything derogatory against China on the evening news?
BLM isn’t the only group allied with AOC to have praised the oppressive Communist Cuban regime that has killed thousands. The Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), which counts Ocasio-Cortez and Bush among its members, appeared to signal its support for the Cuban regime this week.
The DSA National and International Committee declared their solidarity with the “Communist Cuban Revolution”
In 1962 hundreds of Soviet nuclear missiles were set up in Cuba to destroy the U.S. but aerial reconnaissance of Cuba discovered the missiles, and they were removed by negotiation narrowly averting World War III.
The U.S. placed an embargo on exports to Cuba after Cuba nationalization American-owned Cuban oil refineries without compensation. People should be aware that many Marists and Communist s are at work in America. Ask any Cuban, Russian or Chinaman etc., what it’s like under Communism?
Strange Craft
The True Story of an Air Force Intelligence Officer’s Life with UFOs
U.S. Air Force Major George Filer belongs to the generation of pilotsand airmen who first became aware of the strange aircraft showing up in the Earth’s atmosphere after World War II. These men – military professionals who flew planes, served as radar operators and air traffic controllers at airfields around the world – began to whisper amongst themselves about encounters with suspected extraterrestrial aircraft.
During secret debriefings at U.S. bases, pilots and air crew told their commanders of seeing UFOs off their plane’s wings. Award-winning investigative author John Guerra spent four years interviewing Filer, a decorated intelligence officer.
From objects in the skies over Cold War Europe to a UFOs over during the Cuban Missile Crisis to lights over the DMZ in Vietnam Filer leaves nothing out about his Air Force UFO encounters,
Filer’s most memorable case – the shooting of an alien at Fort Dix Army Base in 1978 – is fully recounted for the first time in this book. As a member of the Disclosure Project, military experts, astronauts, and scientists urge the U.S. government to release all it knows about UFOs to the public.
Filer describes his UFO encounters in this incredible book.
Special Reports on UFOs Disable U.S. Nuclear Missiles,We Have Lost Many Men Trying to Intercept UFOs, Peru – Crashed UFO Was Hit,Map of UFO Sightings, Triangle UFOs Attack Soviet Union, Time Travelers, The Black Lives Matter Organization Defends Communist Cuba, and Strange Craft.
Unidentified Aerial Phenomena sightings were reported over Arkansas, California, Florida, Connecticut, Colorado, Florida, Kentucky, Illinois, Maine, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, Oregon, Tennessee, Texas, and Utah.
Unidentified Aerial Phenomena sightings were reported over Australia, Brazil, Canada, Mexico, Romania, and England in the United Kingdom.
The Filer Research Institute feels the scientific study of UFOs is for the benefit of humankind and is an important endeavor. The US Air Force investigated UFOs publicly for more than twenty years under Project Blue Book; and I continue this advanced research. I believe the God of the universe has spread life throughout the cosmos and UFOs are visiting us in ever-increasing numbers.
Forward these files to your friends and neighbors.
UFO Sightings in the United States
Sightings are from MUFON CMS
Arkansas Light
Searcy— on June 30, 2021, I placed my Android phone on a fixed surface to see cloud using a free app called DSLR HD Professional. I shot at 1900 frames a second. I saw objects follow military planes from Little Rock Air Force Base. They started as rings in the sun rays then after the second one flew by there was an extremely fast cone shaped one that moves unbelievable fast. I hooked up my phone to PC and viewed the video with SMPlayer. All free. I viewed them one frame at a time. I discovered they fly at high noon to avoid being seen. This is daily. They fly at high noon in the deep blue of the sun. That’s why we don’t see them. I have so much footage I need help screen shooting.
California Object
Dana Point – JA friend was filming a Fourth of July fly by and saw the black object fly past then, back thru them, and past again.
Colorado Light
Westminster– on July 12, 2021, my daughter and I were at the pool when three fighter jets were flying in formation. I was wishing I had my camera but took a few photos on their second pass when they were no longer in formation. They continued to fly for the next hour and took photos with my phone, I noticed a green orb, closely following and rapidly changing directions. This orb was not visible to the naked eye. Note: The green light is probably a lens reflection.
Connecticut Disc
Milford – July 20. 2018, disc came out from a cloud.
Florida Lights
Port St Luci – on July 11, 2021, five objects moving away from Earth in a clear sky.
Kentucky Object
Lexington– July 16, 2019, looked like it hovered and glided in one direction, spinning fast, with a top part that spun separately. If you move slowly back and forth you can see it spinning, wobbling, no sound, no propellers like a drone,
Illinois Light
Chicago– June 27, 2021, I saw a light in the sky like a star, but its movements indicated otherwise. Around 10 lights appeared shortly in a transgression of 3 days. They were east, west, north, and south of my home. Three would gather in a wide triangle formation. I zoomed in to see it travels through light trying to communicate an intelligent message of string theory drawings.
Note:The witness sent several photos and some videos. Only one of the photos is shown. The witness says that she continually had sightings from June 27 through July 2, 2021. The photo shown in this report could be the Moon which was visible and 91% illuminated at the time of the photo. Thanks to Will Pucket/www.ufosnw.com/newsite/
Maine Light
Norway – on May 22, 2021, the UFO was an off white that flew above tree line, making no sound. It flew in a straight path northwest to east. The UFO flew over my house without lights and yelled for my family.
Massachusetts Light
Braintree– on July 5, 2021, photo taken by a friend
New Jersey Lights
Union City– 1980, two friends and I were chatting, we all looked up to the sky and noted a V shaped object travel from left to right. The lights were not even, maybe 5 on one side and 4 on the other. it was moving extremely slowly, now there are three major airports in this area and jets are in the sky all the time, this object was moving very slowly, def not a jet, plane, helicopter.there was no sound. It was very high and it was at least the size of a couple of football fields. It vanished and we all looked at each other.
New York Object
Endicott– on July 2, 2021, photo from game camera
Oregon Object Drawing
Hillsboro– on July 11, 2021, I was walking my dog through the sports fields off Veteran’s Drive when I noticed a flashing object in the sky. I close to the Hillsboro airport so it’s quite common to see aircraft flying 50 feet above me. This object did not appear to be a plane as it was hovering above me for around 5 minutes until it slowly moved away. It was rotating diamond shape hovering at 1000 feet up with a smaller diamond shaped object hanging down. There were antennas sticking out the main body. The upper diamond portion was rotating causing flashes from the sun. It eventually headed south behind the trees.
Tennessee Light
Franklin –viewed two lights above the clouds with erratic movement. Then one seems to eject a cylindrical yellow object into clear sky that moved with enormous speed and disappeared.
Texas Object
Joshua – on July 8, 2021, my boyfriend and I were sitting outside, and he said, “What’s that it’s on fire?” I looked up and saw orange and red-looking ball flying west. I grabbed my phone and recorded it turning back north. I have never seen anything like it.
Utah Object
Saint George – on July 13, 2021, took a picture of what I thought was a bird. It moved as if it rose with a flap of its wings, and then would dip as if closing its wings, falling briefly, and then doing it again as it moved across the sky. It wasn’t until I zoomed in that it appeared not to be a bird.
Worldwide UFO Sightings
Australia Light
Townsville –December 4, 2010, this video was taken during the night using a security camera motion detection with infrared. This is a copy of the video. On the original there is a voice saying the word “HELLO”. I will look for the original and send it on Note: The orb could be an out of focus insect or even a spider sac. Thanks to Will Pucket/www.ufosnw.com/newsite/
Brazil Light
Rio De Janeiro— on July 2, 2021, he went to close the window when he saw the UFO up in the cloudless sky. It moved a little bit in all directions with some red flashes that shot out from the main light. He tried to photograph with his cell phone and with a manual camera for 30 minutes watching the UFO, when he decided to go to bed
Canada Object
Bowmansville– on July 9, 2021, was watching Branson’s landing from suborbital flight when I noticed an object that was off to the right in the sky. It was oval with black underneath with a glowing around its circular edge.
Ireland Light
Dublin — on May 22, 2021, arc shaped object seen at upper right.
Mexico Object
Palenque– on December 1, 2020, I’ am Mark Knudson a film maker who visited the Palenque ruins in Chiapas, Mexico earlier this year. I am submitting this report for Antonio Martinez, who I met personally in Palenque in January 2021. Antonio lives in Palenque on a ranch across the valley from the Palenque ruins, where he took the attached photo. He told me of many sightings like this with a smart phone. He says there will be more photos because he has seen these Omnis/UFOs in the area frequently by Pascal’s tomb at the Temple of the Inscriptions incredibly famous pyramid that tourists go to see. He lives in a hut yet is highly intelligent and used to work for NASA robotics in Texas a while ago. — Mark Knudson c
Romania Light
Cluj Napoca— on July 12, 2021, my friend and I went out at night to the Hoia Forest. We knew there were UFO sightings there and I saw something vibrating that was very bright for a moment and then it disappeared and appeared again and changed its position amazingly fast. I decided to video. This is a frame from the video that is not clear. It was moving extremely fast with 3 objects illuminating separately.
UK/England Lights
London – 1948, every Sunday morning I use to visit my grandmother. I would ride my bicycle along Southwest Road. Looking up I noticed a large round spherical object with several smaller spheres emerging. After a while they vanished behind a large cloud. Since then, I have often sighted many objects in the sky.
Bexleyheath – on July 3, 2021, caught on security camera one star like object flashing in the SW at 23:55. Two seconds later two other stars flashed simultaneously as if they were communicating with each other.
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LATEST UFO SIGHTINGS AND VIDEOS - 06 - 08 - 2021
LATEST UFO SIGHTINGS AND VIDEOS - 06 - 08 - 2021
UFO Sighted Over Rome, Italy ( August 4, 2021 )
Impressive clear daytime UFO Sighting from Comune di Roma Capitale, Rome, Italy on August 4, 2021
They are everywhere
credit : O.A
Humanoid Sighted Over Memphis, Tennessee ( August 1, 2021 )
And it happened again : Now in 01/08/2021, Memphis, Tennessee a being with the same characteristics was sighted resembling the entity with a strange humanoid form that was recorded in Russia on 20/04/2021 has once again been recorded in Memphis skies, Tennessee.
There is no doubt to me that it is the same guy
They're already among us...
credit : A.M.C.B
Large UFO Caught As It Passes Over The Moon!
What appears to be a five pointed object passes over the moon.
Evidence of serious, government concerns about the alien abduction phenomenon began in the 1950s. That was the year in which a young American soldier found himself caught up in a very strange saga that, to a degree, still disturbs him to this very day. It all went down on a chilly night in Utah’s expansive desert. Private Bernard Gerry Irwin was the man whose life took a turn of the decidedly unforeseen type. February 20, 1959 began as a regular day for Irwin, but, it most definitely didn’t end that way. At the time, Irwin was driving to Fort Bliss, Texas, from Idaho – the former being the facility at which Irwin was stationed, and the latter his home state. As night set in, something completely unforeseen and paradigm-shifting happened to Irwin. He was about to be confronted by the UFO phenomenon in spectacular and mysterious fashion.
The night was dark, silent and all but empty of vehicles. As desert highways so often are well after sunset. But, for Irwin this was a night he would never forget – which is somewhat ironic, as a result of the fact that certain portions of his memory were forever erased from his mind. As he drove along the winding, curving road, Irwin was suddenly distracted by a bright light in the night sky – but at a distinctly low level – which descended below a looming ridge. A meteorite? No. A flare, perhaps? Wrong again. Maybe an aircraft in trouble? That was Irwin’s first thought and, with that in mind, he brought his car to a stop at the side of the road, and turned on the blinkers. He quickly got out, and left a note for passing drivers. It read: Have gone to investigate what looks like a plane crash about one-quarter mile to my right. Notify state police immediately. Wearing his Army coat and armed with a flashlight, Irwin headed off into the unknown. Irwin headed for what he suspected – and feared – just might be the site of a plane crash, only to find himself in an even greater nightmare.
The next thing Irwin remembered was waking up in a hospital bed in Cedar City. Where and why, he didn’t know. A doctor and a nurse were standing around the bed, and were soon joined by a local county sheriff. Irwin was confused and scared, which is not surprising. The other three were far more interested in finding out what had gone on. Irwin kept muttering about “survivors,” asking the nurse and the doctor if there were any. Were they all killed? Who “they” might have been, it seems that no-one really knew. That included Irwin, whose mind was in complete turmoil. The doctor then broke the news: Irwin had been unconscious for a full day and night. It was only thanks to a passing warden with the Fish and Game Commission, who came across Irwin’s car, that Irwin was found. The police were soon on the scene, and Irwin was finally found, completely unresponsive, around a quarter of a mile from the road. It was in the early hours before Irwin was finally resting in an unfamiliar bed.
Irwin was kept under observation for several days, but remained unable to recall any of the events of that strange night. Military personnel soon appeared on the scene to fly Irwin back to Fort Bliss, where he was placed under additional observation by a medical team. After around a full week, Irwin was declared back to full health. But, try telling that to Irwin. Only a couple of days after he got the green-light to return to work, Irwin collapsed in a dead faint. He failed to remember the names and faces of the people who had taken care of him on his return to his base. Things got even weirder: in an almost hypnotic state he got a bus ticket to Utah and headed out to the scene of the incident which had caused so much puzzlement and concern. Not only that, in leaving his post, Irwin was officially AWOL – something which would come back to cause significant problems with his superior officers, which is hardly surprising. In somewhat of a daze, Irwin then walked back to Cedar City. While Irwin was certainly in big trouble with his commanding officers – he received a fine and a loss of rank – more intriguing was the response of the medical people who were required to continue to observe Irwin and try and figure out what had happened to him on that lonely, dark night.
Certainly, one of the most notable pieces of evidence that has surfaced via the Freedom of Information Act is a document prepared by a Captain Valentine, who was Irwin’s psychiatrist while he was undergoing treatment for his strange condition. On March 27, 1959, Irwin was injected with sodium amytal. It provoked a strange response from Irwin, which caught Captain Valentine’s deep attention. In his official report on this particular drug-induced session, the captain wrote: “[Irwin] stated there was a ‘special intelligence’ that he couldn’t explain to me, since it would be incomprehensible to me, which has directed him not to remember or not to tell me about any of the events in Utah. He says that if he tells what was behind the incidents in Utah there will be a ‘big investigation’ that he does not want to be bothered with and also because it will harm many people and he doesn’t want that to happen. He states ‘it’ all began at the age of three years,’ although he will not reveal how or what began, stating that it would provide a clue to me as to what is behind all this. Also, he informed me that he could leave this hospital any time if he wanted to by invoking a special force. Following this interview the patient stated he could remember nothing of what he said during it.”
Notably, David Booher – a UFO researcher who has carefully investigated the Irwin saga – says of Irwin’s statement made to Captain Valentine: “It’s intriguing that Gerry speaks of an intelligence which ‘directed him not to remember or not to tell me about any of the events in Utah.’ As we know, in the decades that followed this would become a very common theme in the alien abduction literature, i.e. having memories blocked and/or being warned against telling others about the experience.” The Freedom of Information Act has also shown that the military, despite dosing Irwin with drugs to try and uncover the true story of that night in the desert in 1959, drew nothing but blanks. But, the words of Captain Valentine strongly suggest he suspected that there was much more to the story than met the eye – and particularly so considering that Irwin had alluded to the fact that something happened to him “at the age of three.” It should be noted that alien abduction phenomena very often begins in early childhood. The case of Private First Class Bernard G. Irwin is a most important one.
NASA Study Highlights Importance of Surface Shadows in Moon Water Puzzle
NASA Study Highlights Importance of Surface Shadows in Moon Water Puzzle
The Moon is covered with craters and rocks, creating a surface “roughness” that casts shadows, as seen in this photograph from the 1972 Apollo 17 mission. These cold shadows may allow water ice to accumulate as frost even at daytime. The area of detail is highlighted in the following illustration. Credits: NASA
The shadows cast by the roughness of the Moon’s surface create small cold spots for water ice to accumulate even during the harsh lunar daytime.
Scientists are confident that water ice can be found at the Moon’s poles inside permanently shadowed craters – in other words, craters that never receive sunlight. But observations show water ice is also present across much of the lunar surface, even during daytime. This is a puzzle: Previous computer models suggested any water ice that forms during the lunar night should quickly burn off as the Sun climbs overhead.
“Over a decade ago, spacecraft detected the possible presence of water on the dayside surface of the Moon, and this was confirmed by NASA’s Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy [SOFIA] in 2020,” said Björn Davidsson, a scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. “These observations were, at first, counterintuitive: Water shouldn’t survive in that harsh environment. This challenges our understanding of the lunar surface and raises intriguing questions about how volatiles, like water ice, can survive on airless bodies.”
In a new study, Davidsson and co-author Sona Hosseini, a research and instrument scientist at JPL, suggest that shadows created by the “roughness” of the lunar surface provide refuge for water ice, enabling it to form as surface frost far from the Moon’s poles. They also explain how the Moon’s exosphere (the tenuous gases that act like a thin atmosphere) may have a significant role to play in this puzzle.
This illustration zooms in on the area of detail indicated in the previous photo, showing how shadows enable water ice to survive on the sunlit lunar surface. When shadows move as the Sun tracks overhead, the exposed frost lingers long enough to be detected by spacecraft. Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech
Water Traps and Frost Pockets
Many computer models simplify the lunar surface, rendering it flat and featureless. As a result, it’s often assumed that the surface far from the poles heats up uniformly during lunar daytime, which would make it impossible for water ice to remain on the sunlit surface for long.
So how is it that water is being detected on the Moon beyond permanently shadowed regions? One explanation for the detection is that water molecules may be trapped inside rock or the impact glass created by the incredible heat and pressure of meteorite strikes. Fused within these materials, as this hypothesis suggests, the water can remain on the surface even when heated by the Sun while creating the signal that was detected by SOFIA.
But one problem with this idea is that observations of the lunar surface show that the amount of water decreases before noon (when sunlight is at its peak) and increases in the afternoon. This indicates that the water may be moving from one location to another through the lunar day, which would be impossible if they are trapped inside lunar rock or impact glass.
Davidsson and Hosseini revised the computer model to factor in the surface roughness apparent in images from the Apollo missions from 1969 to 1972, which show a lunar surface strewn with boulders and pockmarked with craters, creating lots of shady areas even near noon. By factoring this surface roughness into their computer models, Davidsson and Hosseini explain how it’s possible for frost to form in the small shadows and why the distribution of water changes throughout the day.
Because there is no thick atmosphere to distribute heat around the surface, extremely cold, shaded areas, where temperatures may plummet to about minus 350 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 210 degrees Celsius), can neighbor hot areas exposed to the Sun, where temperatures may reach as high as 240 Fahrenheit (120 Celsius).
As the Sun tracks through the lunar day, the surface frost that may accumulate in these cold, shaded areas is slowly exposed to sunlight and cycled into the Moon’s exosphere. The water molecules then refreeze onto the surface, reaccumulating as frost in other cold, shaded locations.
“Frost is far more mobile than trapped water,” said Davidsson. “Therefore, this model provides a new mechanism that explains how water moves between the lunar surface and the thin lunar atmosphere.”
Davidsson and Hosseini revised the computer model to factor in the surface roughness apparent in images from the Apollo missions from 1969 to 1972, which show a lunar surface strewn with boulders and pockmarked with craters, creating lots of shady areas even near noon. By factoring this surface roughness into their computer models, Davidsson and Hosseini explain how it’s possible for frost to form in the small shadows and why the distribution of water changes throughout the day.
Because there is no thick atmosphere to distribute heat around the surface, extremely cold, shaded areas, where temperatures may plummet to about minus 350 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 210 degrees Celsius), can neighbor hot areas exposed to the Sun, where temperatures may reach as high as 240 Fahrenheit (120 Celsius).
As the Sun tracks through the lunar day, the surface frost that may accumulate in these cold, shaded areas is slowly exposed to sunlight and cycled into the Moon’s exosphere. The water molecules then refreeze onto the surface, reaccumulating as frost in other cold, shaded locations.
“Frost is far more mobile than trapped water,” said Davidsson. “Therefore, this model provides a new mechanism that explains how water moves between the lunar surface and the thin lunar atmosphere.”
One hypothesis is that water molecules are trapped within lunar material (left). But a new study posits that water molecules (right) remain as frost on the surface in cold shadows and move to other cold locations via the thin exosphere. Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech
A Closer Look
While this isn’t the first study to consider surface roughness when calculating lunar surface temperatures, previous work did not take into account how shadows would affect the capability of water molecules to remain on the surface during daytime as frost. This new study is important because it helps us to better understand how lunar water is released into, and removed from, the Moon’s exosphere.
“Understanding water as a resource is essential for NASA and commercial endeavors for future human lunar exploration,” Hosseini said. “If water is available in the form of frost in sunlit regions of the Moon, future explorers may use it as a resource for fuel and drinking water. But first, we need to figure out how the exosphere and surface interact and what role that plays in the cycle.”
To test this theory, Hosseini is leading a team to develop ultra-miniature sensors to measure the faint signals from water ice. The Heterodyne OH Lunar Miniaturized Spectrometer (HOLMS) is being developed to be used on small stationary landers or autonomous rovers – like JPL’s Autonomous Pop-Up Flat Folding Explorer Robot (A-PUFFER), for example – that may be sent to the Moon in the future to make direct measurements of hydroxyl (a molecule that contains one hydrogen atom and an oxygen atom).
Hydroxyl, which is a molecular cousin of water (a molecule with two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom), can serve as an indicator of how much water may be present in the exosphere. Both water and hydroxyl could be created by meteorite impacts and through solar wind particles hitting the lunar surface, so measuring the presence of these molecules in the Moon’s exosphere can reveal how much water is being created while also showing how it moves from place to place. But time is of the essence to make those measurements.
“The current lunar exploration by several nations and private companies indicates significant artificial changes to the lunar environment in the near future,” said Hosseini. “If this trend continues, we will lose the opportunity to understand the natural lunar environment, particularly the water that is cycling through the Moon’s pristine exosphere. Consequently, the advanced development of ultra-compact, high-sensitivity instruments is of critical importance and urgency.”
The researchers point out that this new study could help us better understand the role shadows play in the accumulation of water ice and gas molecules beyond the Moon, such as on Mars or even on the particles in Saturn rings.
In October of last year, NASA revealed that their Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA) had confirmed the presence of water on the moon’s sunlit surface. More specifically, the amount of water was about the same as what would fit in a 12-ounce bottle and it was discovered in a cubic meter of soil in the Clavius Crater.
While that was incredibly exciting news, scientists were still baffled as to how water could be present during the hot daytime temperatures on the lunar surface. The daytime temperature on the sunlit surface can reach temperatures as high as 260 degrees Fahrenheit (127 degrees Celsius). To put this into better perspective, water boils at an average temperature of 212 degrees Fahrenheit (100 degrees Celsius) depending on where you are located.
So, if the sunlit surface is hot enough to boil water, why is there still water ice in certain areas? According to a new study by NASA scientists, the “roughness” of the lunar surface in addition to its shadows could help to keep it from evaporating.
A previous study published in 2009 stated that the amount of water on the lunar surface changed throughout the day – there was less water before noon (the hottest part of the day) but when the temperatures cooled down in the afternoon, the amount increased. This suggested that some of the water was able to move around from being boiled to freezing over again. However, the thermophysical models used in that study were conducted on a mostly flat lunar surface. Another paper was published last year that described how water could have been held in small “cold traps” across the lunar surface.
In this most recent study, the researchers focused on desorption (a phenomenon where a substance is released through or from a surface) in addition to using a much more accurate model of the actual lunar surface. In fact, astrophysicist Björn Davidsson from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) and JPL researcher Sona Hosseini referenced photos taken from the Apollo missions in order to update their model to a lot rougher lunar surface with craters and boulders.
In this new model, they realized that the roughness on the moon created shadows that kept the surface cool enough for the water to move around and not evaporate as Davidsson explained, “Frost is far more mobile than trapped water,” adding, “Therefore, this model provides a new mechanism that explains how water moves between the lunar surface and the thin lunar atmosphere.”
The researchers detailed their findings the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society which read in part, “The model of the surface temperature of the Moon described in this paper has significant implications for understanding the presence and evolution of water on the lunar surface.” “It is of critical importance to take account of the surface roughness to get an accurate picture of the amount of water on the surface of the Moon.”
An illustration depicting the shadows on the rough lunar surface can be seen here.
If you’re into UFOs, you’ll know of the wave of activity that occurred in the skies of the United States in the latter part of the 1890s. Then, during the Second World War, there were the Foo Fighters. And, when the Second World War was over, we had the Ghost Rockets of Scandinavia. Flying Saucers followed within a year. In the early 1990s, the Black Triangles put in appearances, but never really went away. There’s another important time-frame to all of this, however. I’m talking about the very earliest years of the 1900s. You may not know, but there are some classic cases from that period, and particularly from 1909. Let’s begin. Nigel Wright is a long-time UFO researcher based in England, and – with Jonathan Downes, the director of the British-based Center for Fortean Zoology – the co-author of the book, The Rising of the Moon, which is a fine study of paranormal phenomena that I recommend to one and all. In their book, Nigel cites a report that he found within the May 21, 1909 edition of England’s Exmouth Journal newspaper, and, to which, are attached definitive M.I.B. overtones. Titled Invasion Scares – Queer Stories from Humberside, the article reads as follows: “A strange story was told the Yorkshire Post, Grimsby correspondent by workmen from Killingholm near Immingham new dock works on Tuesday night. They declared that they were seated at noon on the roadside at Killingholm, when a large motor car drove up and two men alighted who walked to the bank on which the workmen were seated and asked if any airships [italics mine]had been recently seen near. The workmen replied: ‘No,’ whereupon the motorists asked the distance between Killingholm and Spurn, and whether any mines were laid in the Humber between the two places. The workmen referred their interrogators to a coastguard, saying he would be able to answer them. It does not matter,’ replied the motorists, and, after enquiring the way to the nearest refreshment house, they jumped into their car and drove quickly away.” Now, onto another case from that early period:
Brett Holman, who has extensively studied this issue, says: “On the night of 23 March 1909, a police constable named Kettle saw a most unusual thing: a strange, cigar-shaped craft passing over the city of Peterborough, Cambridgeshire. His friends were skeptical, but his story was corroborated, to an extent, by Mr Banyard and Mrs Day, both of nearby March, who separately saw something similar two nights later. In fact, these incidents were only the prelude to a series of several dozen such sightings throughout April and especially May, mostly from East Anglia and South Wales.” In May of the same year, the LondonStandard newspaper told its readers that with “few exceptions” the witnesses described seeing “a torpedo-shaped object, possessing two powerful searchlights, which comes out early at night.”
Artist’s rendering of the airship purportedly seen during late 1896 and into the summer of 1897.
May 18, 1909 was the night on which one of the most amazing encounters occurred. A Mr. C. Lethbridge was walking to his Roland Street, Cardiff home, via the 271-meter-high Caerphilly Mountain. As he did so, Lethbridge was astonished by the sight of a cigar-shaped vehicle – in excess of forty-feet in length – which was sitting on the grass, at the edge of a mountain road. In his very own words… “When I turned the bend at the summit I was surprised to see a long tube-shaped affair on the grass on the roadside, with two men busily engaged with something nearby. They attracted my close attention because of their peculiar getup; they appeared to have big heavy fur coats and fur caps fitting tightly over their heads. I was rather frightened, but I continued to go on until I was within twenty yards of them, and then my idea as to their clothing was confirmed.
“The noise of my little spring cart seemed to attract them, and when they saw me they jumped up and jabbered furiously to each other in a strange lingo — Welsh or something else; it was certainly not English. They hurriedly collected something off the ground, and then I was really frightened. The long thing on the ground rose up slowly. I was standing still at the time, quite amazed, and when it was hanging a few feet off the ground the men jumped into a kind of little carriage suspended from it, and gradually the whole affair and the men rose in the air in a zigzag fashion. When they had cleared the telegraph wires that pass over the mountain, two lights like electric lamps shone out, and the thing went higher into the air, and sailed away towards Cardiff.” It seems that 1909 was a hotbed for UFO activity in the U.K.!
To save our readers from trawling through its pages, we at indy100 have put together eight key takeaways from the report.
Here they are:
1. There is not enough evidence to prove the existence of alien life... but there’s also not enough evidence to rule it out
When the report looked into those 144 reported sightings, investigators said they didn’t find any extra-terrestrial connections.
But, with the data available, there wasn’t also wasn’t sufficient evidence to come up with an explanation.
“Of the 144 reports we are dealing with here, we have no clear indications that there is any non-terrestrial explanation for them - but we will go wherever the data takes us,” a senior official said.
2. Authorities created five categories to explain different sightings
The report came up with five potential explanatory categories to decipher what a sighting could possibly be, the five explanations are:
Airborne clutter,
Natural atmospheric phenomena,
U.S. government or American industry developmental programs,
Foreign adversary systems
“Other”
3. Only one of the sightings had an explanation
One sightings was attributed to a large, deflating balloon which was categorised as “airborne clutter”.
But what about the other 143 reported sightings?
4. For most reported sightings, there wasn’t enough evidence to provide a conclusive explanation
After investigating the claims, the report concluded there was too little information to even generally characterise the rest of the sightings
5. Of the 144 sightings , witnesses in 18 of them saw ‘unusual’ patterns of movement or flight characteristics
More analysis is needed in order to see if those sightings were a result of “breakthrough” technology, the report added.
6. There were 11 UAP near-misses reported by pilots
A small number also reported “processed radio frequency energy associated with UAP sightings.”
The report also stated that around 80 reports involved detection by multiple sensors.
7. The report found no links to Russia or China
There was no “clear indication” of any links to foreign powers such as Russia and China, but most reported sightings didn’t have enough information to go by.
8. The Pentagon now plans to ‘formalise’ its investigation into UAPs
The Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force has recognised that reporting “lacked sufficient specificity, ultimately recognised that a unique, tailored reporting process was required to provide sufficient data for analysis of UAP events.”
So maybe one day we’ll know if extra-terrestrial list exists.
The sightings were categorised into five categories: airborne clutter, natural atmospheric phenomena, U.S. government or American industry developmental programs, foreign adversary systems and “other.”
Only one out of the 144 sightings could be explained as “airborne clutter” while the rest were categorized as “other” as there wasn’t enough conclusive evidence to provide an explanation.
A woman has taken to TikTok to share ‘evidence’ of a bizarre backyard discovery – which she believes to be a UFO.
Ally (@allymurray222) opened the viral video by saying, “If anybody from conspiracy TikTok is here um, I think you’d be interested in the UFO I just found in my backyard.”
(@allymurray222 / TikTok)
The clip, which has since racked up 2.3 million views, showed a large metal disc planted in the floor, with what appears to be a small entrance.
While many follower theories flooded the comments. One joked, “That’s what 5G looked like in the 80s.”
Another pointed out, “Lol, technically you’re right. Unidentified flying object.”
“Ummmmm, I don’t want to burst your bubble, but storm shelters in the south – some of them look just like this”, one TikTok user commented.
Ally has since followed up with a second part of the video, where she gives followers a closer look at her discovery. She explains how it’s “completely out here in the middle of nowhere” with “nothing for a mile in any direction.”
The strange object has Mario Cart mushroom-style graffiti on it
(@allymurray222 / TikTok)
The TikToker then continues to show viewers “what they’ve all been waiting for” – the inside of the ‘UFO’ – which –unfortunately, is nowhere near as exciting as anticipated. In an anti-climatic twist, the interior is full of rocks and water due to monsoon season.
The monsoon flooded the inside of the alleged UFO
(@allymurray222 / TikTok)
In a third and final clip, Ally said: “I know for a fact it’s not actually a UFO”, but would “sooner believe it was a UFO than a satellite.”
Really fast UFO filmed over Isla Cristina, Spain 2-Jul-2021
Really fast UFO filmed over Isla Cristina, Spain 2-Jul-2021
This really fast object was filmed in the sky above Isla Cristina, a city and municipality located in the province of Huelva, Spain on 2nd July 2021.
Witness report (Google translate):
I was in the living room managing the security camera with a Wi-Fi connection previously installed on the roof of the house. I turned on the infrared lamp from the laptop in the device software a few minutes later I saw an object passing by at high speed so I started recording the video. I was able to follow the trajectory of it by controlling the software.
TUCKED AWAY in a seemingly forgotten corner of the Istanbul Archaeology Museum, Daniel Mansfield found what may solve one of ancient math’s biggest questions.
First exhumed in 1894 from what is now Baghdad, the circular tablet — broken at the center with small perpendicular indentations across it — was feared lost to antiquity. But in 2018, a photo of the tablet showed up in Mansfield’s inbox.
Mansfield, a senior lecturer of mathematics at the University of New South Wales Sydney, had suspected the tablet was real. He came across records of its excavation and began the hunt. Word got around about what he was looking for, and then the email came. He knew what he had to do: travel to Turkey and examine it at the museum.
Hidden within this tablet is not only the oldest known display of applied geometry but a new ancient understanding of triangles. It could rewrite what we know about the history of mathematics, Mansfield argues.
These findings were published Wednesday in the journal Foundations of Science.
It’s generally thought that trigonometry — a subset of geometry and what’s displayed on the tablet in a crude sense — was developed by ancient Greeks like the philosopher Pythagoras. However, analysis of the tablet suggests it was created 1,000 years before Pythagoras was born.
Babylonian mathematics, which already holds a place of renown in the pantheon of ancient math, might’ve been more sophisticated than historians have given it credit for.
“The way we understand trigonometry harks back to ancient Greek astronomers,” Mansfield tells Inverse. “I like to think of the Babylonian understanding of right triangles as an unexpected prequel, which really is an independent story because the Babylonians weren’t using it to measure the stars, they were using it to measure the ground.”
Dr. Mansfield observes the tablet. University of New South Wales Sydney
WHAT YOU SHOULD KNOW FIRST
Mansfield is no stranger to a pair of white gloves and following his mathematical curiosity.
Years before discovering this latest tablet, dubbed Si.427, Mansfield was hot on the trail of another ancient Babylonian “document:” Plimpton 322. While the location of this artifact was known (it’s located at Columbia University) its true purpose was not.
Like Si.427, which dates back to roughly 1900 to 1600 BCE, Plimpton 322 is covered in geometric markings — riddles academics have tried to decipher for years. While the reigning theory was that these markings were a kind of teacher’s cheat code for Babylonian homework problems, Mansfield and colleagues were not convinced.
The Plimpton 322 clay tablet: it’s about the size of a postcard. Wikimedia Commons
In a 2017 paper, Mansfield and colleagues propose Plimpton 322 might be a kind of proto-trigonometry table of values — suggesting it predates the development of trigonometry as we know it today.
“A modern analogy would be to say that it contains a mix of elementary school problems alongside the unsolved conjectures of mathematics,” writes Mansfield in the new paper.
WHAT’S NEW
Now, Mansfield argues the discovery of Si.427 could confirm his Plimpton 322 hunch.
In essence, Si.427 is argued to be a case study of how this proto-trig could be used in practice.
Si.427 is what’s known as a cadastral document. These are used to document the boundaries of land ownership. There are other examples on record, but Mansfield argues this tablet is the oldest known example from the Old Babylonian period — a range that stretches from 1900 BCE to 1600 BCE. On the tablet are legal and geometry details about a field that was split after some of it was sold.
This research suggests Plimpton 322 was used similarly: It might have been a surveyor’s cheat sheet, instead of a teacher’s. It’s possible Plimpton 322 was the theoretical solution to the practical problems a surveyor using Si.427 might have encountered.
“It’s a discovery that has come to us far outside our mathematical culture,” Mansfield says. “It seems new and fresh to us, even though it’s almost 4,000 years old.”
Using the principles of right triangles and perpendicular lines, ancient surveyors could evenly divide land to avoid disputing neighbors.University of New South Wales Sydney
WHY IT MATTERS
While these tablets are the kind of thing you might easily walk past on display in a museum, Mansfield said this discovery could actually have a huge implication for how we understand these ancient mathematics.
Namely, it means mathematicians were working with so-called Pythagorean triples (trios of numbers that satisfy the infamous a^2+b^2 = c^2 equation) long before Pythagoras himself was even born.
It also helps answer a slightly less academic question: How do you evenly divide up disputed land?
How far would you go to answer a question? For Mansfield, the answer is halfway around the world.University of New South Wales Sydney
“This is from a period where land is starting to become private — people started thinking about land in terms of ‘my land and your land,’ wanting to establish a proper boundary to have positive neighborly relationships,” Mansfield explains in a statement.
“And this is what this tablet immediately says. It's a field being split, and new boundaries are made.”
HOW DOES IT WORK?
As for how triangles sketched in clay translate to farmer’s fields, it all comes down to perpendicular lines.
Essentially, surveyors would choose two Pythagorean triples (which were inherently right triangles) and extend the boundary line of the resultant rectangle by eye to create true perpendicular lines that spread across the entire field.
“This proves that our Babylonian surveyor had a solid theoretical understanding of the geometry of rectangles and right triangles and used it to solve practical problems,” Mansfield says in the video.
Extending the boundary of these triangles allowed surveyors to create incredibly straight lines without manually measuring or laying them out beforehand.University of New South Wales Sydney
There are also instances of resizing these triangles to better fit the physical shape of the field at hand, which surveyors would’ve liked done by referencing a table of trig values like Plimpton 322, the study suggests. This table would’ve been a comprehensive list of Pythagorean triples and the steps to resizing them.
WHAT’S NEXT
This discovery may have laid to rest one ancient math mystery, there’s still plenty more where that came from, Mansfield says.
“Ancient mathematics is not as sophisticated as modern mathematics,” he says. “But sometimes you want to simple answers instead of sophisticated ones.”
He’s not “just talking about how mathematics students want their exams to be.” The advantage of a simple approach is its quickness — and Mansfield wants to examine whether or not this approach has any real-world applications.
“This approach might be of benefit in computer graphics or any application where speed is more important than precision,” he says.
Abstract:
Plimpton 322 is one of the most sophisticated and interesting mathematical objects from antiquity. It is often regarded as teacher’s list of school problems, however new analysis suggests that it relates to a particular geometric problem in contemporary surveying.
Astronomers Find Small Rocky Planet – Just Half the Mass of Venus
Astronomers Find Small Rocky Planet – Just Half the Mass of Venus
ByEUROPEAN SOUTHERN OBSERVATORY
This artist’s impression shows L 98-59b, one of the planets in the L 98-59 system 35 light-years away. The system contains four confirmed rocky planets with a potential fifth, the furthest from the star, being unconfirmed. In 2021, astronomers used data from the Echelle SPectrograph for Rocky Exoplanets and Stable Spectroscopic Observations (ESPRESSO) instrument on ESO’s VLT to measure the mass of L 98-59b, finding it to be half that of Venus. This makes it the lightest planet measured to date using the radial velocity technique. Credit: ESO/M. Kornmesser
A team of astronomers has used the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (ESO’s VLT) in Chile to shed new light on planets around a nearby star, L 98-59, that resemble those in the inner Solar System. Amongst the findings are a planet with half the mass of Venus
Venus, the second planet from the sun, is named after the Roman goddess of love and beauty. After the moon, it is the second-brightest natural object in the night sky. Its rotation (243 Earth days) takes longer than its orbit of the Sun (224.7 Earth days). It is sometimes called Earth's "sister planet" because of their similar composition, size, mass, and proximity to the Sun. It has no natural satellites.
">Venus — the lightest exoplanet ever to be measured using the radial velocity technique — an ocean world, and a possible planet in the habitable zone.
“The planet in the habitable zone may have an atmosphere that could protect and support life,” says María Rosa Zapatero Osorio, an astronomer at the Centre for Astrobiology in Madrid, Spain, and one of the authors of the study published today (August 5, 2021) in Astronomy & Astrophysics.
The results are an important step in the quest to find life on Earth-sized planets outside the Solar System. The detection of biosignatures on an exoplanet depends on the ability to study its atmosphere, but current telescopes are not large enough to achieve the resolution needed to do this for small, rocky planets. The newly studied planetary system, called L 98-59 after its star, is an attractive target for future observations of exoplanet atmospheres. Its orbits a star only 35 light-years away and has now been found to host rocky planets, like Earth or Venus, which are close enough to the star to be warm.
This infographic shows a comparison between the L 98-59 exoplanet system (top) with part of the inner Solar System (Mercury, Venus, and Earth), highlighting the similarities between the two. L 98-59 contains four confirmed rocky planets (marked in color in the top panel), orbiting a red-dwarf star 35 light-years away. The planet closest to the star is around half the mass of Venus, making it the lightest exoplanet ever detected using the radial velocity technique. Up to 30% of the third planet’s mass could be water, making it an ocean world. The existence of the fourth planet has been confirmed, but scientists don’t yet know its mass and radius (its possible size is indicated by a dotted line). The team also found hints of a potential fifth planet, the furthest from the star, though the team knows little about it. If confirmed, it would sit in the system’s habitable zone where liquid water could exist on its surface. The distances from the stars and between the planets in the infographic are not up to scale. The diagram has been scaled to make the habitable zone in both the Solar System and in L 98-59 coincide. As indicated by the infographic, which includes a temperature scale (in Kelvin [K]), the Earth and the fifth (unconfirmed) planet in L 98-59 receive similar amounts of light and heat from their respective stars. Assuming their atmospheres are similar, this fifth planet would have a similar average surface temperature to Earth and would support liquid water at its surface. Credit: ESO/L. Calçada/M. Kornmesser (Acknowledgment: O. Demangeon)
With the contribution of ESO’s VLT, the team was able to infer that three of the planets may contain water in their interiors or atmospheres. The two planets closest to the star in the L 98-59 system are probably dry, but might have small amounts of water, while up to 30% of the third planet’s mass could be water, making it an ocean world.
Furthermore, the team found “hidden” exoplanets that had not previously been spotted in this planetary system. They discovered a fourth planet and suspect there is a fifth, in a zone at the right distance from the star for liquid water to exist on its surface. “We have hints of the presence of a terrestrial planet in the habitable zone of this system,” explains Olivier Demangeon, a researcher at the Instituto de Astrofísica e Ciências do Espaço, University of Porto in Portugal and lead author of the new study.
The study represents a technical breakthrough, as astronomers were able to determine, using the radial velocity method, that the innermost planet in the system has just half the mass of Venus. This makes it the lightest exoplanet ever measured using this technique, which calculates the wobble of the star caused by the tiny gravitational tug of its orbiting planets.
The team used the Echelle SPectrograph for Rocky Exoplanets and Stable Spectroscopic Observations (ESPRESSO) instrument on ESO’s VLT to study L 98-59. “Without the precision and stability provided by ESPRESSO this measurement would have not been possible,” says Zapatero Osorio. “This is a step forward in our ability to measure the masses of the smallest planets beyond the Solar System.”
The astronomers first spotted three of L 98-59’s planets in 2019, using NASA
Established in 1958, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) is an independent agency of the United States Federal Government that succeeded the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA). It is responsible for the civilian space program, as well as aeronautics and aerospace research. It's vision is "To discover and expand knowledge for the benefit of humanity."
">NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS). This satellite relies on a technique called the transit method — where the dip in the light coming from the star caused by a planet passing in front of it is used to infer the properties of the planet — to find the planets and measure their sizes. However, it was only with the addition of radial velocity measurements made with ESPRESSO and its predecessor, the High Accuracy Radial velocity Planet Searcher (HARPS) at the ESO La Silla 3.6-metre telescope, that Demangeon and his team were able to find extra planets and measure the masses and radii of the first three. “If we want to know what a planet is made of, the minimum that we need is its mass and its radius,” Demangeon explains.
The team hopes to continue to study the system with the forthcoming NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), while ESO’s Extremely Large Telescope (ELT), under construction in the Chilean Atacama Desert and set to start observations in 2027, will also be ideal for studying these planets. “The HIRES instrument on the ELT may have the power to study the atmospheres of some of the planets in the L 98-59 system, thus complementing the JWST from the ground,” says Zapatero Osorio.
“This system announces what is to come,” adds Demangeon. “We, as a society, have been chasing terrestrial planets since the birth of astronomy and now we are finally getting closer and closer to the detection of a terrestrial planet in the habitable zone of its star, of which we could study the atmosphere.”
More information
This research was presented in a paper entitled to appear in Astronomy & Astrophysics.
Reference: “A warm terrestrial planet with half the mass of Venus transiting a nearby star” 5 August 2021, Astronomy & Astrophysics. DOI: 10.1051/0004-6361/202140728
The team is composed of Olivier D. S. Demangeon (Instituto de Astrofísica e Ciências do Espaço, Universidade do Porto, Portugal [IA/UPorto], Centro de Astrofísica da Universidade do Porto, Portugal [CAUP] and Departamento de Física e Astronomia, Faculdade de Ciências, Universidade do Porto, Portugal [FCUP]), M. R. Zapatero Osorio (Centro de Astrobiología, Madrid, Spain [CSIC-INTA]), Y. Alibert (Physics Institute, University of Bern, Switzerland [Bern]), S. C. C. Barros (IA/UPorto, CAUP and FCUP), V. Adibekyan (IA/UPorto, CAUP and FCUP), H. M. Tabernero (IA/UPorto and CAUP), A. Antoniadis-Karnavas (IA/UPorto & FCUP), J. D. Camacho (IA/UPorto & FCUP), A. Suárez Mascareño (Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias, Tenerife, Spain [IAC] and Departamento de Astrofísica, Universidad de La Laguna, Tenerife, Spain [ULL]), M. Oshagh (IAC/ULL), G. Micela (INAF – Osservatorio Astronomico di Palermo, Palermo, Italy), S. G. Sousa (IA/UPortol & CAUP), C. Lovis (Observatoire de Genève, Université de Genève, Geneva, Switzerland [UNIGE]), F. A. Pepe (UNIGE), R. Rebolo (IAC/ULL & Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, Spain), S. Cristiani (INAF – Osservatorio Astronomico di Trieste, Italy [INAF Trieste]), N. C. Santos (IA/UPorto, CAUP and FCUP), R. Allart (Department of Physics and Institute for Research on Exoplanets, Université de Montréal, Canada and UNIGE), C. Allende Prieto (IAC/ULL), D. Bossini (IA/UPorto), F. Bouchy (UNIGE), A. Cabral (Instituto de Astrofísica e Ciências do Espaço, Faculdade de Ciências da Universidade de Lisboa, Portugal [IA/FCUL] and Departamento de Física da Faculdade de Ciências da Universidade de Lisboa, Portugal), M. Damasso (INAF – Osservatorio Astrofisico di Torino, Italy [INAF Torino]), P. Di Marcantonio (INAF Trieste), V. D’Odorico (INAF Trieste & Institute for Fundamental Physics of the Universe, Trieste, Italy [IFPU]), D. Ehrenreich (UNIGE), J. Faria (IA/UPorto, CAUP and FCUP), P. Figueira (European Southern Observatory, Santiago de Chile, Chile [ESO-Chile] and IA/UPorto), R. Génova Santos (IAC/ULL), J. Haldemann (Bern), J. I. González Hernández (IAC/ULL), B. Lavie (UNIGE), J. Lillo-Box (CSIC-INTA), G. Lo Curto (European Southern Observatory, Garching bei München, Germany [ESO]), C. J. A. P. Martins (IA/UPorto and CAUP), D. Mégevand (UNIGE), A. Mehner (ESO-Chile), P. Molaro (INAF Trieste and IFPU), N. J. Nunes (IA/FCUL), E. Pallé (IAC/ULL), L. Pasquini (ESO), E. Poretti (Fundación G. Galilei – INAF Telescopio Nazionale Galileo, La Palma, Spain and INAF – Osservatorio Astronomico di Brera, Italy), A. Sozzetti (INAF Torino), and S. Udry (UNIGE).
ESO is the foremost intergovernmental astronomy organization in Europe and the world’s most productive ground-based astronomical observatory by far. It has 16 Member States: Austria, Belgium, the Czech Republic, Denmark, France, Finland, Germany, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom, along with the host state of Chile and with Australia as a Strategic Partner. ESO carries out an ambitious program focused on the design, construction, and operation of powerful ground-based observing facilities enabling astronomers to make important scientific discoveries. ESO also plays a leading role in promoting and organizing cooperation in astronomical research. ESO operates three unique world-class observing sites in Chile: La Silla, Paranal, and Chajnantor. At Paranal, ESO operates the Very Large Telescope and its world-leading Very Large Telescope Interferometer as well as two survey telescopes, VISTA working in the infrared and the visible-light VLT Survey Telescope. Also at Paranal ESO will host and operate the Cherenkov Telescope Array South, the world’s largest and most sensitive gamma-ray observatory. ESO is also a major partner in two facilities on Chajnantor, APEX, and ALMA, the largest astronomical project in existence. And on Cerro Armazones, close to Paranal, ESO is building the 39-meter Extremely Large Telescope, the ELT, which will become “the world’s biggest eye on the sky.”
Fastwalker UFOs Are So Fast They Appear As Mere Streaks To Unaided Human Eye
Fastwalker UFOs Are So Fast They Appear As Mere Streaks To Unaided Human Eye
They are called Fastwalkers (or Fast Walkers) and travel at speeds well over 20,000 miles per hour making these UFOs mere “streaks” of light to the unaided human eye.
Their name comes from a 1984 NORAD incident which tracked an unidentified Fastwalker UFO moving at speeds over 22,000 MPH as it screamed towards the earth.
The May 1984 NORAD Fastwalker event
In May of 1984 at 1400 hours Zulu time, an alert was triggered at the North America Air Defense Command (NORAD) when ultra-sensitive orbiting USDSP military satellites (highly-classified satellites that serve as early ICBM launch detection systems) spotted a mysterious UFO heading towards earth at a mind-boggling 22,000 miles per hour.
As it passed in front of Earth and less than 20 miles from the USDSP satellite, officials determined it was not a ballistic missile nor a meteor. After classifying it as “unknown”, it was given the code name “Fast Walker”.
NORAD data revealed the unidentified object was a hot, fast, solid object that swept in quickly from space, approached Earth, then sped off into space.
The event was intended to be kept secret but an official (a retired military official) leaked details about the event to an investigator (special agent Joe Stefula) along with a diagram of the incident. According to Stefula:
“I haven’t been able to determine that the document’s absolutely authentic but I have been able to confirm that the DSP printout for that date shows an event at the same time with the same characteristics.
“What makes this particular Fast Walker so peculiar is that it came in from outer space on a curved trajectory, passing within three kilometers of the satellite platform, and then disappeared back into space. Whatever it was, it was tracked for nine minutes.”
The 1984 Fastwalker event obviously alarmed government officials – the sighting resulted in a 300-page internal report which basically “looked at every possibility and couldn’t explain [the unidentified object] by natural or man-made means.” A researcher explained whey the NORAD sighting was significant:
“Where it appeared in the (satellite’s) sensor field would indicate that the object came into the sensor field from outer-space, went in front of the sensor, and left, departing back into deep space. It would indicate that it was some type of craft that had the ability to maneuver. And there you have hard evidence.
“You have telemetry from that satellite, you have information, you have systems, you have data that you can go back and investigate and check and verify. In the past, usually UFO events are of just eye-witness testimony…
“There you have a very sensitive defense system that sent you information to the ground. I don’t even know if you can solve it… maybe it’s one of those enigmas that’s just gonna be with us forever. What type of craft would have that ability? Some people might say, ‘A UFO’.”
In 1993, after word of Fastwalkers had leaked to the public, the Department of Defense declassified unrelated satellite information which confirmed that satellites were routinely picking up unidentified hi-speed moving objects in space which were neither missiles nor meteorites/asteroids. According to the official who leaked the documents, an average of two to three Fastwalkers are detected each month.
The Observatory Journal documents a “candidate for an alien probe”
Additional stunning evidence was presented in April 1995, when The Observatory journal published an article by Duncan Steel (University of Adelaide, Australia), an expert on the danger of near-Earth objects, that described a recently sighted Fastwalker.
The article revealed that a December 1991 object passing near earth was designated a “candidate for an alien probe”. For all intents and purposes, the object looked and moved like an artificial satellite – only much faster.
Fastwalkers – alien surveillance probes
Below is a FOIA request submitted in 2013 which confirms NORAD’s search for “Fastwalkers” and “Slowwalkers” in internal document databases produced a representative hit. However, as noted in the response below, information on Fastwalkers is still classified and unavailable for public review.
For reference, Fastwalkers travel much faster than orbiting satellites but much slower than deep space asteroids. When discussed together, slower anomalous flying objects are termed “Slowwalkers”.
Many in the UFO community theorize the Earth may be under surveillance by advanced alien races whose motives are unclear. They believe Fastwalkers are alien surveillance vehicles or probes which conduct routine surveillance missions gathering data on our planet and its inhabitants.
They surmise that governments know of their existence, and their intent, but choose to keep details of their activities from the public.
USSR General Claimed Soviets Learnt To Attract UFOs & Made A Contact With Them In The 1980s
USSR General Claimed Soviets Learnt To Attract UFOs & Made A Contact With Them In The 1980s
During the cold war, it was impossible to leak information outside the Soviet Union. Due to top-tier secrecy, military officers and personnel never discussed UFOs during the Soviet era. Meanwhile, in the United States, UFO conferences were conducted due to the surge in UFO sightings. After the collapse of the USSR, people came forward to talk about UFOs in Russia, including the officers from Soviet Air Forces. Major General Vasily Alexeyev claimed that the Soviets had made contact with UFOs.
In 1997, Dr. Valery Uvarov interviewed the Head of the USSR’s Flight Safety Service Major General Vasily Alexeyev on the subject of UFOs. Dr. Uvarov is the head of the Department of UFO Research, Paleosciences, Palaeothechnology of the National Security Academy of Russia. Later, the text of the interview was exclusively released in the German edition of MAGAZINE 2000plus in May 2000.
Dr. Valery Uvarov
There is always a doubt over the existence of Major General Alekseyev, but he exists. His identity was confirmed in the book entitled “Russia’s Air Power At The Crossroads” written by Benjamin S. Lambeth. All the research mentioned in this book was funded by the United States Air Force, which makes it the most credible source to confirm this Soviet General’s existence.
During the 1980s, General Alekseyev had been working in the central staff that involved him with the units in the field. From there, he learned about many reports of unexplained phenomena. There were eye-witnesses to the phenomenon and that was reflected in specific documents and the reports of officials. This triggered the Soviet Defence Ministry and other departments to investigate. They sent the experts to the places where UFOs were spotted frequently.
He said that the UFOs appeared often on several military bases or any place where “there is a high concentration of advanced science and, to some degree, danger. Because every nuclear rocket, every new airforce installation represents a breakthrough both in science and in military terms.”
Moreover, he stated that individual officers and commanders who knew about the phenomenon had no official guidelines or instruction on the matter, so they investigated it in their own way.
“I know that in some places they even learned to create a situation which would deliberately provoke the appearance of a UFO. A UFO would appear where there was increased military activity connected, say, with the transportation of “special” loads. It was enough to artificially stimulate or schedule such a move for a UFO to appear,” General Alekseyev claimed.
Additionally, the Soviets learned to make contact with UFOs. According to him, the military personnel would move his hand in various directions which caused the sphere (UFO) to flatten in the same direction.
For example, if you raised your arms three times, the UFO would flatten out in a vertical direction three times as well. In the early 1980s, the Soviets ordered to carry out the experiments using technical devices (theodolites, radar stations, and others), as a result of which the unidentified objects were firmly recorded as instrumental data.
General Alekseyev shared one incredible incident when a team of Soviet scientists and other experts had an encounter with the UFO in the mid-air. They flew to Novosibirsk from Moscow to investigate an air crash. While returning, a UFO accompanied their plane in the air. As a research team, they observed the object, sketched it, and even collected data for scientific analysis.
He understood that the Defence Ministry, the Academy of Sciences and the intelligence services had been studying the UAP/UFOs, but those who were not directly into the investigation had no idea what was going on. He blamed the politics for not letting an open invention into the undefined objects. “I think that politics interfered with science here. Investigation of what was unidentified and not understood was carried out above all to clear matters up,” he said.
General Alekseyev even talked about encounters between UFOs and military personnel. He remembered one incident that happened to two warrant officers outside Moscow. One of them telepathically made a contact with the ship and even was invited inside it, but he refused as he was afraid to enter the spaceship. Alekseyev personally saw the drawings of the ship made by that officer. Soviet General believed that there are higher chances that UFOs are extraterrestrial or belong to other civilizations.
Ever wondered just how much strange, mysterious, paranormal and ufological activity has taken place at military and government facilities? Just about everyone knows about Area 51, so I won’t go down that path. And, just about everyone who has an interest in UFOs will know about the Rendlesham Forest “UFO landing.” It took place at the Royal Air Force Woodbridge military base in December 1980. But, let’s now take a look at some lesser-known cases of strange phenomena at other such, secure facilities. I’ll begin with the late 1940s and a U.S. government program titled “Project Twinkle.”Its top secret mandate was to investigate reports of strange, brightly lit, green fireballs, many of which were seen near the Kirtland Air Force Base, New Mexico. Many of the staff believed the fireballs were under intelligent control: personnel at Kirtland were unsure as to what the balls of light were. Theories included Russian devices, perhaps even sent to get photos of the base. There was also the possibility of secret, domestic devices of the U.S. military. And, there was the extraterrestrial angle, too. Confusingly, all of the theories had some degree of merit. While the Twinkle program was ultimately closed and fell into a degree of obscurity, the now-available files offer an intriguing insight into the phenomenon. Now, let’s look at werewolves at military bases. Yes, you did read that right!
Linda Godfrey’s first-class research into American werewolves has demonstrated connections to cemeteries, to areas that were perceived as sacred and magical by Native Americans, and – bizarrely – to old military bases, too. Her books Hunting the American Werewolf and Real Wolfmen make that abundantly clear. “Wes” is someone who encountered a werewolf at a weapons storage area at a British military base – Royal Air Force Alconbury, situated in the county of Cambridgeshire – in the 1970s. The beast, said Wes, had a flat snout, very big eyes, a height of around five feet, and a weight in the order of two hundred pounds. It slowly vanished into the surrounding woods. Moving on, in January 2010, I spoke at a New York State conference called Ghosts of Cooperstown, which was organized by the stars of the SyFy Channel’s Ghost Hunters series. It was on the Saturday night of the event that an American soldier, who had then recently returned from serving with the military in the Middle East, revealed to an audience in the hotel bar that he had heard tales of large, marauding werewolves roaming by night the mountains of Afghanistan and some of the more ancient parts of Iraq – and also seen on the perimeters of military facilities.
This next one comes from Hillary Gough, of the town of Hampshire, England. The date was early 1974, and the setting, the Marconi Space and Defense Systems, Ltd., at Frimley, England. At the time, Gough was employed as a draftswoman in the Central Services branch – having previously served an apprenticeship in a division of the British Royal Navy – something that ensured she had access to much of the establishment. “Something very serious has happened, hasn’t it?” she inquired.”Yes,” was the quiet response. “We’ve had a break-in. I can’t say anymore.” Over the course of several weeks, however, further pieces of the puzzle fell into place. It transpired that the break-in was far more than simply an unauthorized entry. What occurred was nothing short of the penetration of a highly sensitive facility by what some of the staff suspected was an extraterrestrial creature. I was cautiously advised that the incident had occurred late at night, and the one witness was a security guard who had been patrolling the building as part of his routine duty. While walking along a corridor, the guard was startled by a dazzling blue light that emanated from one particular room. But this was no ordinary room: it was a storage facility for top secret documentation generated by Marconi as part of its work on behalf of the British Government and the Ministry of Defense, much of which was related to classified, radar-based programs.
Realizing that no-one – at all – should have been in the area at that time of night, the guard burst into the room, only to be confronted by a shocking sight. There, literally sifting through pages and pages of top secret files was a gray-skinned humanoid – but decidedly non-human – creature which quickly de-materialized before the shocked guard’s eyes. Although severely traumatized by the event, he was able to provide a brief description of the being to his superiors and noted that the blue light emanated from a helmet which encompassed the head of the entity.
Another person who had something to say something very strange was a man named Ron Petersen, who I met a couple of years ago, after he read my book, Monster Files. He told me a third-hand story of how a U.S. Army man stationed at the Dugway Proving Ground – in 1983 – went into a certain room “by mistake” and saw before him the bodies of three, massive, hair-covered creatures: Bigfoot. They were all upright and in large, see-through containers. One of them was badly burned. The man stared – amazed and shocked – and then quickly exited the room, concerned that he had just violated security. True? I don’t know. All I can do is hope that someone else comes forward and adds weight to the story. Now, to our final story:
Official investigations within the U.K. of unusual aerial phenomena started during the First World War. One of the most notable UFO-style reports can be found within the archives of the British Admiralty and dates from, rather incredibly, 1915. Prepared by a Lieutenant Colonel W.P. Drury, the Garrison Intelligence Officer at the military facility Plymouth Garrison, Devon, England, a four-page document tells the story. It concerns a series of strange events that occurred on the wilds of Dartmoor (the setting for Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s classic novel, The Hound of the Baskervilles). Lt. Col. Drury advised personnel at the Admiralty that on 28 June 1915 he and a colleague, one Lt. C. Brownlow of Naval Intelligence, had interviewed a Miss Cecilia Peel Yates at Dolbeare Cottage, Ashburton, about an unusual experience: “She informed us that a few mornings previously, just before dawn, having been awakened by the barking of dogs, she saw from her bedroom window a bright light in the sky, bearing N., and apparently suspended a short distance above the earth. It was too large and bright for a planet, and, as she watched, it swung to the N.E., and disappeared. Haytor is due North of Ashburton and 4 miles distant as the crow files.”
Machu Picchu is 'several decades' OLDER than expected: Carbon dating of human remains found at the famous Inca site indicates it was in use in 1420 - over 20 years earlier than previously thought
Machu Picchu is 'several decades' OLDER than expected: Carbon dating of human remains found at the famous Inca site indicates it was in use in 1420 - over 20 years earlier than previously thought
Research finds Machu Picchu is several decades older than previously thought
Carbon dating of human remains at the Inca site indicates it was in use in 1420
Archeologists said that is more than 20 years earlier than they had expected
Experts thought it was built around 1440 as an estate for Emperor Pachacuti
The famous Inca site of Machu Picchu is several decades older than previously thought, archaeologists have discovered.
Carbon dating of human remains suggests that it was in use in 1420 – more than 20 years earlier than scientists expected.
Machu Picchu was built as an estate for Emperor Pachacuti, who according to historical records rose to power in 1438 before conquering the area where the site is located.
This led experts to believe it was built after 1440, and perhaps as late as 1450.
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Surprise discovery: The famous Inca site of Machu Picchu (pictured) is several decades older than previously thought, archaeologists have found
Carbon dating: Researchers dated 26 individuals recovered from three cemeteries in Machu Picchu during excavations in 1912. Archaeologists are pictured at the site in 1911
WHAT IS CARBON DATING AND HOW IS IT USED?
Carbon dating, also referred to as radiocarbon dating or carbon-14 dating, is a method that is used to determine the age of an object.
Carbon-14 is a carbon isotope that is commonly used by archaeologists and historians to date ancient bones and artefacts.
The rate of decay of carbon-14 is constant and easily measured, making it ideal for providing age estimates for anything over 300 years old.
It can only be used on objects containing organic material - that was once 'alive' and therefore contained carbon.
Carbon-14 occurs naturally in the atmosphere as part of carbon dioxide, and animals absorb it when they breathe. Animals stop taking it in when they die, and a finite amount of the chemical is stored in the body.
Radioactive substances all have a half-life, the length of time it takes for a material to lose half of its radioactivity.
Carbon-14 has a long half-life, 5,370 years to be exact. This long half-life can be used to find out how old objects are by measuring how much radioactivity is left in a specimen.
Due to the long half-life, archaeologists have been able to date items up to 50,000 years old.
Radiocarbon dating was first invented in the 1940s by an American physical chemist called Willard Libby. He won the 1960 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his discovery.
'Machu Picchu is among the most famous archaeological sites in the world,' said the study's lead author, Prof Richard Burger from Yale University.
'But until now estimates of its antiquity and the length of its occupation were based on contradictory historical accounts written by Spaniards in the period following the Spanish conquest.'
He added: 'This is the first study based on scientific evidence to provide an estimate for the founding of Machu Picchu and the length of its occupation.'
Prof Burger and a team of experts from several US universities carried out accelerator mass spectrometry (AMS) dating of human remains from Machu Picchu.
AMS dating is an advanced form of radiocarbon dating that can date skeletons with only small amounts of organic material left, expanding the pool of remains that can be examined.
In this case, the team dated 26 individuals found at three cemeteries in Machu Picchu and recovered during excavations in 1912.
The study found the site was in use from 1420 to 1530 – ending around the time of the Spanish invasion of the Inca Empire.
It also suggests that Pachacuti ascended to the throne and began his conquests decades before the accepted historical records indicate.
Pachacuti took control of a city-state but his reign put the Inca on the path to becoming the most powerful empire in pre-Columbian America.
Researchers said the discovery could have dramatic implications for our understanding of Inca history, and also challenges the reliability of using historical records of colonial forces.
'The results suggest that the discussion of the development of the Inca empire based primarily on colonial records requires revision,' said Prof Burger.
'Modern radiocarbon methods provide a better foundation for understanding Inca chronology than the contradictory historical records.'
Machu Picchu is located in modern-day Peru's Cusco region, on a 7,970ft-long (2,430m) mountain ridge.
It was built in the classical Inca style, with polished dry-stone walls.
The site was abandoned during the time of the Spanish conquest, but was not discovered by the invading forces.
Geological analysis has suggested that the citadel's location above a network of intersecting tectonic faults was deliberately chosen.
These would have provided an abundance of easy-to-work rock as well as a source of water and drainage.
Carbon dating, also referred to as radiocarbon dating or carbon-14 dating, is a method that is used to determine the age of an object.
Machu Picchu is pictured during the 1912 expedition when the remains tested were first found
Machu Picchu was built as an estate for Emperor Pachacuti, who according to historical records rose to power in 1438 before conquering the area where the site is located
The study found the site was in use from 1420 to 1530 – ending around the time of the Spanish invasion of the Inca Empire. They analysed the remains from three cemeteries (pictured right)
Carbon-14 is a carbon isotope that is commonly used by archaeologists and historians to date ancient bones and artefacts.
The dated shell middens – remnants of 'meals eaten long ago' – captured a record of Aboriginal occupation that goes back 29,000 years in the Katarapko Riverland Floodplains, South Australia.
They had to deal with unpredictable river flows and heavily-salted valley waters that may have limited their seafood options.
Radiocarbon dating was first invented in the 1940s by an American physical chemist called Willard Libby, who won the 1960 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his discovery.
The new study has been published in the journal Antiquity.
Who were the Inca? People indigenous to South America who ruled from modern Ecuador to central Chile by 1532
The Inca, also spelled Inka, were a people indigenous to South America who, at the time of the Spanish conquest in 1532, ruled an empire that spanned from the northern border of modern Ecuador to central Chile.
Establishing their capital at Cusco (a city in modern-day Peru) in the 12th century, the Inca began a campaign of expansion in the early 15th century which would see some 12 million people come under their rule.
Much of the information we have today comes from the written records of Spanish conquistadores as the Inca passed on their history through story telling and other oral traditions.
Machu Pichhu is the best-known site remaining from the Inca Empire, once the largest and richest in the Americas
Best known for the brutal practice of human sacrifice, the Inca Empire is also notable for its advanced agricultural techniques, unique art and architecture.
At its peak, the Inca Empire was the largest and richest in the Americas. Its downfall is thought to have come about through rebellion, disease and the Spanish invasion.
The most famous and perhaps best-preserved site that remains from Inca times is the citadel of Machu Picchu, located in Peru.
UFO Sighted By Moon From Joshua, Texas ( August 2, 2021 )
Impressive UFO sighting of a UFO flying past the moon from a telescope on August 2, 2021 in Joshua, Johnson County, Texas.
Here I present the original and following with approaching and speed reduction
credit : U.D.
UFOs Sighted Over Nagoya, Japan ( August 3, 2021 )
UFOs were sighted over Nagoya, Japan on August 3, 2021
STATEMENT : I recorded this in the city of Nagoya, Japan; can someone explain to those ′′ lights ′′ that by the way flew over the clouds
credit : Orlando Yamaguchi
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Strange Lights Over Jinan, Shandong, China
UFOs or Strange lights were sighted over Jinan, Shandong province China on June 6, 2021
STATEMENT : 中国.山东.济南 外星人降临地球! China. Shandong. Jinan Aliens come to Earth!
credit : 刘剑
Huge Fireball Sighted Over İzmir, Turkey ( August 1, 2021 )
A huge fireball lights up the night sky in Izmir, Turkey. During the night between 31 July and 1 August
Inhabitants reported a heavy explosion and tremors at some points in the city. A meteor explosion took place in Turkey that caused the sky to turn green. Several users shared videos of the same on their social media platforms.The phenomenon is that when the meteors enter the earth's atmosphere, they heat up.
A user wrote, 'A green meteor was seen over Izmir Turkey. This is not a meteor, just a tiny/demo missile/bomb shot from a satellite. Notice the fire as meteor enters the earth's atmosphere.'
Astrophysicist J. Allen Hynek displays a photo of a fake UFO at a 1966 press conference.
Image: AP
UFOs and the Boundaries of Science
This summer, a defense report and a new Harvard research project have renewed the public’s interest in UFOs. But neither are likely to change many minds.
On June 25 of this year, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence released a brief report entitled “Preliminary Assessment: Unidentified Aerial Phenomena.” It fulfilled a 2020 directive from the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, chaired at the time by Marco Rubio, which ordered the national intelligence director to publish an unclassified, public appraisal of the “potential aerospace or other threats posed by the unidentified aerial phenomena to national security, and an assessment of whether this unidentified aerial phenomena [UAP] activity may be attributed to one or more foreign adversaries.” The request came partly as a response to news reports that Navy personnel had, in recent years, filed a number of incident reports involving UFOs.
Since 1947, UFOs have been caught in cycles of periodic, animated interest from government officials, enthusiasts, and scientists. But results are always inconclusive.
In the lead-up to the report’s release, both believers and skeptics were abuzz with anticipation. Chatter on social media was lively, and the self-styled crusader for government disclosure about UFOs, former intelligence officer Luis Elizondo, announced he would run for Congress if the report seemed misleading.
In the end, the preliminary assessment proved a mixed bag. Enthusiasts could be buoyed by the government’s admissions that most reported UFOs were real objects, that only 1 in 144 could be definitively explained, and that fear of ridicule had thus far stymied witnesses and thereby inhibited effective inquiry. Debunkers, on the other hand, could point to the fact that most reports suffered from a lack of “sufficient specificity,” that the overwhelming majority of UAP demonstrated conventional flight characteristics, and that there remained a great many mundane explanations for the phenomena. All sides felt vindicated, all could claim victory.
And so, ambiguity reigns. To anyone familiar with the history of unidentified flying objects, this represents a familiar state of affairs. The first modern report of a UFO took place in Washington State in 1947, and since then the phenomenon has been caught in cycles of periodic, animated interest from government officials, civilian enthusiasts, and scientists. During such moments, it always seems that the riddle of UFOs is about to be solved. But the result is always inconclusive findings and a dispersal of interest, leaving few minds changed and everyone returned to their corners to await the bell for the next round. The seeming effervescence of our current moment notwithstanding, it’s doubtful we should expect anything different this time around.
It’s easy to forget that, not long ago, the media was not giving regular updates on UFOs.
This most recent fanfare surrounding UFOs—or UAP, as those seeking distance from UFOs’ outsize reputation now prefer—began in December 2017, when the New York Times, the Washington Post, and Politico all published exposés revealing the existence of a secret government program which, between 2007 and 2012, had investigated UFOs. Then followed viral videos of Navy pilots encountering unusual objects (reported upon in the same outlets); a cable television series on the incidents featuring Elizondo and former Blink 182 band member Tom DeLonge; announcement of the first human-detected interstellar object to enter our solar system (’Oumuamua); and a highly publicized, though admittedly frivolous, attempt to storm Area 51 in Nevada. And in July, astronomer Avi Loeb announced the creation of a new project at Harvard University, called Galileo, that will use high-tech astronomical equipment to seek evidence of extraterrestrial artifacts in space and possibly within Earth’s atmosphere. This follows closely on the publication of Loeb’s book Extraterrestrial, in which he argues that ’Oumuamua might be an artificial light sail made by an alien civilization.
It’s easy to forget that, not long ago, the media was not giving regular updates on UFOs. On the contrary, during the past two decades, public discussion of UFOs has been limited. But interest in UFOs has cycled through a couple of phases of ups and downs. The 1960s ushered in a revival of the supernatural in popular culture that flourished throughout the seventies, eighties, and into the nineties. If you’re old enough—say, over the age of forty—you may still have memories of Leonard Nimoy narrating the occult and mystery TV series In Search Of (1977–82); of listening to interviews with telepathic spoon benders and alien abductees on the daytime talk shows of Mike Douglas, Merv Griffin, and Phil Donahue; or of browsing through the extensive paranormal section at your local public library or Waldenbooks. New Age philosophy, extrasensory perception, exorcisms, reincarnation, telekinesis, astrology, channeling, psychic healing, cryonics, Satanic ritual abuse claims: UFOs were sucked up into this paranormal wave and boosted by the lively syncretism of it all. The rising paranormal tide lifted all boats.
All this publicity surrounding the supernatural also gave rise to a revival of debunking, with prominent figures taking it upon themselves to call out erroneous claims and expose frauds. In 1976 a group of dedicated skeptics founded the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (CSICOP), headed initially by philosopher Paul Kurtz and sociologist Marcello Truzzi. At the organization’s inaugural conference, Kurtz expressed worry about the growing number of “cults of unreason and other forms of nonsense.” Noting the popularity of related beliefs in Nazi Germany and under Stalinism, he lamented the fact that “Western democratic societies are being swept by other forms of irrationalism, often blatantly antiscientific and pseudoscientific in character.” Skeptics needed to be decisive. “If we are to meet the growth of irrationality,” he insisted, “we need to develop an appreciation for the scientific attitude as a part of culture.” During the seventies and eighties, a number of well-known personalities associated with SCICOP—including aviation journalist Philip J. Klass, illusionist James Randi, and astronomer Carl Sagan—agreed and assumed the roles of public myth-busters.
Mudslinging over convictions is familiar to historians of religion, a domain of human existence marked by deep divisions over interpretations of belief. But science has often found itself engaged in similar debates and conflicts.
Over the last fifty years, the mutual antagonism between paranormal believers and skeptics has largely framed discussion about unidentified flying objects. And it often gets personal. Those taking seriously the prospect that UFOs are extraterrestrial in origin have dismissed doubters as narrow-minded, biased, obstinate, and cruel. Those dubious about the idea of visitors from other worlds have brushed off devotees as naïve, ignorant, gullible, and downright dangerous.
This kind of mudslinging over convictions is certainly familiar to historians of religion, a domain of human existence marked by deep divisions over interpretations of belief. But science too has found itself engaged in similar debates and conflicts over the centuries. Venerated figures and institutions have regularly taken it upon themselves to engage in what has been dubbed “boundary work,” asserting and reasserting the borders between legitimate and illegitimate scientific research and ideas, between what may and what may not refer to itself as science.
When scientists engage in boundary work, they are doing something more than saying “this is true” or “that is false.” Instead, they are setting up the ground rules for what will be considered acceptable questions, methods, and answers when it comes to doing science. In essence, they are saying, “this is a question we may pursue in science” or “that is an impermissible way of conducting an experiment.” And there are any number of examples of this in the modern world.
Take psychology, for instance. Until the middle of the nineteenth century, it was a subject that largely fell under the domain of philosophy. Then, during the second half of the century, some scholars interested in psychology took their cue from the natural sciences and started conducting experiments with animals and human beings. In this way, psychology began to establish itself as an independent social scientific field. That status remained contested, however, and psychologists had to defend their claims of being a legitimate science for decades. Boundary work was essential to this mission. So, when prominent researchers such as William James, Frederic Myers, and Eleanor Sidgwick argued that psychical research—the study of the power of mediumship, telepathy, clairvoyance, and life after death—should be included as part of academic psychology, many practitioners bristled. Experimentalist Wilhelm Wundt, Science editor James Cattell, and Harvard psychologist Hugo Münsterberg were just some of the influential figures to repudiate the phenomena as “nothing but fraud and humbug” and to bemoan research about them for “doing much to injure psychology.” Their judgments eventually won the day and, as a result, parapsychology was shifted from science to pseudoscience.
Boundary work has also been evident in policing the how and what of the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI). When SETI takes the form of astronomers using telescopes to seek evidence of intelligent radio signals and mechanical objects in outer space, it is accepted as a mainstream (though, admittedly, underfunded) academic pursuit. The study of UFOs, on the other hand, is brushed off as pseudoscience. UFO investigation has, consequently, been largely privately funded and conducted by committed individuals in their free time.
This stark divide did not happen overnight, and its roots lie in the postwar decades, in a series of events that—with their news coverage, grainy images, celebrity crusaders, exasperated skeptics, unsatisfying military statements, and accusations of a government cover-up—foreshadow our present moment.
When astronomers use telescopes to seek evidence of extraterrestrials, it is accepted as a mainstream academic pursuit. The study of UFOs, on the other hand, is brushed off as pseudoscience. This stark divide did not happen overnight.
It all started in June 1947, when a private pilot, Kenneth Arnold, reported seeing a group of bat-like aircraft flying in formation at high speeds near Mt. Rainier. He described their motion to the media as moving like a saucer would if skipped across water, and an enterprising journalist had found his headline: he christened them “flying saucers.” That summer, flying saucers were reported across the United States, and the press began wondering what exactly was going on.
The thought that the objects might have been extraterrestrial visitors did not rank highly on the list of possibilities considered by most people at the time. A Gallup poll published just a few weeks after the Arnold sighting asked Americans what they thought the things were: while 90 percent admitted having heard of “flying saucers,” a majority either had no idea what they could be or thought that witnesses were mistaken. Gallup didn’t even mention if anyone surveyed brought up aliens. Ten years later, in August 1957, Trendex conducted a similar survey of the American public and found that now over 25 percent believed unidentified flying objects could be from outer space.
Three things had happened in the meantime that made this possible. First was media saturation. Newspapers and magazines across the world covered and outright promoted the flying saucer saga, especially after 1949. Then, what had begun as a distinctly U.S. phenomenon soon became a global one, as UFOs began to turn up in Southern Africa, Australia, Europe, and South America. By the mid-1950s, few in the world could say they had never heard of flying saucers.
Second was the rise of flying-saucers-from-outer-space promoters. In 1950, three influential books by pulp and entertainment writers—Donald Keyhoe’s The Flying Saucers Are Real, Frank Scully’s Behind the Flying Saucers, and Gerald Heard’s The Riddle of the Flying Saucers—hit bookshelves, each arguing that the overwhelming evidence showed that aliens were visiting, more likely than not in response to the detonation of atomic bombs. The authors provided the model for a new kind of public figure: the crusading whistleblower dedicated to breaking the silence over the alien origins of unidentified flying objects.
Third, some Americans were so curious about the phenomenon that they sought out like-minded others. Inspired by the development of science fiction fan clubs and newsletters in the 1930s and ’40s, enthusiasts beginning in the early ’50s organized local saucer clubs where members could meet to discuss the latest developments. By the end of the decade, some had grown into vibrant organizations, with national, even international followings and monthly newsletters which actively solicited contributions from members about their own sightings and theories.
So, by the end of the 1950s, flying saucers didn’t just make news; they had champions who helped make them news. Some enthusiasts, however, believed interest in UFOs needed to be channeled into something more than a hobby or pastime. The Air Force had been conducting its own investigations into the flying saucer phenomenon since 1947. Saucer groups, however, placed little confidence in the military and were especially frustrated by the secrecy surrounding its work. They believed it was time for civilians to seize the day and to begin investigating cases in a more thorough and open manner.
Keyhoe, Leonard Stringfield, Morris Jessup, and Coral and Jim Lorenzen were some of the leading pioneers in this effort. At first, most civilian investigators had to rely exclusively on newspaper and magazine articles for their source materials. By1965, however, the Lorenzens and Keyhoe were directing large organizations (the Aerial Phenomena Research Organization and the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena, respectively) with national reach, allowing them to send members into the field to conduct interviews and examine sites. By 1972 the Lorenzens had put together a manual for field investigators, guiding them through the kind of equipment and procedures to use when going about their work.
The first generation of ufologists was buoyantly optimistic. They saw themselves as trailblazers who, though now dismissed, would one day be vindicated when ufology was established as a legitimate research enterprise.
In this way, a new field of study was born—“ufology,” as it was dubbed. That first generation of ufologists was buoyantly optimistic. They saw themselves as trailblazers—it was not uncommon for comparisons to be made to Galileo—who, though now dismissed by the establishment, would one day find their endeavors vindicated when ufology was established as a legitimate research enterprise.
Major scientific associations and most academic scholars saw matters differently. They considered ufology yet another example of a pseudoscience. While some went about publicly debunking its methods and findings, most academics opted to simply pay ufology no heed.
By the mid-1960s, however, a few scientists working at major U.S. universities had reached a different conclusion. They believed that UFOs were genuine physical phenomena that warranted serious scientific study. Northwestern University astronomer J. Allen Hynek was one such figure. Hynek was the scientific consultant to the Air Force in its investigations into unidentified flying objects. At first skeptical about the claims of witnesses, he grew puzzled by the growing number of cases that seemed to defy conventional explanation.
In the early sixties, Hynek began holding UFO discussion meetings in his home with interested colleagues—at first from Northwestern, but then from other universities as well. The group included French computer scientist Jacques Vallée, who would go on to become a leading voice in ufology. Soon, Hynek was referring to the circle as The Invisible College—a reference to the secretive group of seventeenth-century natural philosophers who had touted experimental research and defied church dogma. The name stuck, and continues to be used to refer to academics who study and exchange ideas about UFOs but do so clandestinely for fear of hurting their careers.
Another ufologist who rose to prominence in the 1960s was James McDonald, an internationally respected atmospheric physicist at the University of Arizona. An expert in cloud physics and micrometeorology, he had begun privately looking into UFOs in the late fifties and joined a leading UFO organization. In 1966 he suddenly went public as an outspoken advocate for the position that UFOs were, as he put it, “the greatest scientific problem of our times.” Though a latecomer to the scene, McDonald was a constant public presence, making the case for the scientific study of UFOs in press conferences, public lectures, and TV and radio interviews. He railed against what he considered the Air Force’s incompetence in handling the matter, and he took it upon himself to interview hundreds of witnesses.
Though widely acknowledged to be accomplished and eloquent, many of his fellow scientists found McDonald to be dogmatic and abrasive. So when it was announced in October 1966 that the University of Colorado at Boulder had agreed to serve as the home for a scientific committee funded by the Air Force to study the UFO phenomenon, McDonald was not invited to serve as a member. Like Hynek and Vallée, McDonald instead was asked to consult now and again with the committee, but all three were left out of the group’s day-to-day activities and deliberations.
The project’s director was nuclear physicist Edward Condon, who had spent decades working in and with the government dating back to the wartime Manhattan Project, which developed the atomic bomb. His involvement with the military, however, hadn’t stopped him from criticizing it for being too secretive. After the war, he was also a leading voice insisting that civilian authorities be put in control of atomic energy, and he had to face down accusations before the House Un-American Activities Committee on several occasions. Here, then, was a no-nonsense academic, who was not easily intimidated and despised government secrecy. He seemed the ideal choice to head up this first-ever funded scientific study of UFOs by academic researchers.
The Condon Committee began its work in November 1966. Excitement and anticipation surrounded the start of the project. Ufologists, UFO enthusiasts, members of the Invisible College, the Air Force, and the general public all expressed high hopes that the world would finally have an answer to the riddle of the flying saucers. Their enthusiasm was soon quashed. While some ufologists were asked to make presentations before the committee, word inside the Colorado group was that Condon considered the possibility of alien visitors to be preposterous. Disgruntled insiders reported that researchers were being steered toward concluding that the UFO phenomenon had a psychological explanation.
Condon came to consider his involvement in the study of UFOs “the biggest waste of time that I ever had in my life.”
McDonald was careful to cultivate contacts within the Colorado project. His personal papers, now housed in the archives at the University of Arizona, show that he received surreptitious updates from Boulder on an almost daily basis. As he did, he became more and more frustrated by what he saw as Condon’s attempt to stop any serious consideration that UFOs might have extraterrestrial origins. In early 1968 he, along with several people serving on the Condon Committee, confronted Condon with evidence that he had no intention of conducting a legitimate scientific investigation into unidentified flying objects.
The move outraged Condon, who fired the committee members for dereliction of their duties. McDonald went to the media, finding a journalist at Look to write an exposé chronicling what was portrayed as Condon’s incompetent and imperious management of the project. And with that, all bridges had been burned. Ufologists dismissed the work of the committee even before it had released its report in January 1969. McDonald demanded a new scientific study be conducted. The Air Force formally shut down its UFO task force. And Condon came to consider his involvement in the study of UFOs “the biggest waste of time that I ever had in my life.”
The Condon Committee’s final report did not mince words. “Our general conclusion,” it stated, “is that nothing has come from the study of UFOs in the past 21 years that has added to scientific knowledge”—this despite the fact that around a third of the cases examined remained unexplained. No one was terribly surprised, least of all people in the UFO community. Rather than settling the matter of UFOs for good, it simply escalated the mutual mistrust between believers and skeptics, between amateur ufologists and academic scientists.
Was the Condon Committee a failure then? At first glance, it would appear so. Without question, it fell victim to the political machinations of bad actors such as McDonald. Nevertheless, one has to wonder if any study at the time could have resolved the matter. If the 2020–21 UAP task force found itself confronted with ambiguities and a lack of information, this was surely even more the case in the 1960s.
And it must be said that both back then and today, there are many people for whom the mystery is the matter. UFOs may well be far more interesting to ponder than to actually solve. And fittingly, the decades that followed saw the rise of the UFO as mystery, with increasingly bizarre stories of alien abductions capturing the attention of readers and TV audiences between 1975 and 1995. Yes, there had always been outlier abduction reports dating back to the ’50s and ’60s. But now the floodgates opened, and with them a new generation of UFO advocates.
Chief among them were artist Budd Hopkins, horror writer Whitley Strieber, historian David Jacobs, and psychiatrist John Mack: each came onto the scene in the 1980s and ’90s insisting on the veracity of those claiming to have been kidnapped, examined, and experimented upon by beings from another world. The ufology of investigating the nuts and bolts of unidentified flying objects gave way on the public stage to these new missionaries who simultaneously played the role of investigator, therapist, and advocate to their vulnerable charges.
There are many people for whom the mystery is the matter. UFOs may well be far more interesting to ponder than to actually solve.
In many ways, it was Mack’s involvement that signaled both the culmination and end of the headiest days of alien abduction. A distinguished Harvard psychiatrist, when Mack began working with and publishing accounts of abductees—or “experiencers,” as he called them—in the early 1990s, he lent the study of extraterrestrial captivity an air of legitimacy it had been lacking. A five-day conference at MIT in 1992 on the alien abduction phenomenon, followed by a book on the subject two years later, brought him the affection of many in the UFO community and the scorn of many of his colleagues. The Harvard Medical School initiated a review of his position; he retained tenure, but after, as review board chairman Arnold Relman later put it, he was “not taken seriously by his colleagues anymore.” Claims of alien abduction have continued since then, but one would have to search far and wide to find a clinician of Mack’s stature who would go on record saying they believed them.
And so here we are a quarter century later, and we are again hearing some rumblings from within the scientific community. Some scientists involved with SETI have publicly called for the interdisciplinary study of UFOs. And now Loeb (another Harvard professor) has announced the Galileo Project. With an initial private investment of nearly $2 million with which to work, the Galileo Project will certainly have access to equipment qualitatively better than what existed in the fifties and sixties. Will this make a difference? Many of Loeb’s colleagues are skeptical about the prospect. If history is any guide, it’s questionable a project like this will succeed in persuading diehard believers and skeptics to rethink their positions.
Bizarre green meteor falls to Earth with ‘massive explosion’ in Turkey
Bizarre green meteor falls to Earth with ‘massive explosion’ in Turkey
A video has captured the moment a b
right object in the sky explodes over the city of Izimir in Turkey before crashing towards earth on July 31, 2021.
The spectacular event has sparked speculation, many people are convinced that the object may have been a meteor, but others suggest that the object could have been space junk, rocket debris or even a crashing UFO.
Most people are content with spotting birds and butterflies in their garden.
But a British amateur photographer has set his sights a lot higher and has taken incredible images of the sun’s raging surface from his back yard.
The 72-year-old managed to capture violent solar flares and spots on the sun’s surface, which is 5,505°C and approximately 93million miles (150million km) away from Earth.
This incredible image of a violent solar flare was taken by a British amateur photographer from his back garden in High Wycombe, Buckinghamshire
Dave Tyler, from a village near High Wycombe in Buckinghamshire has spent the last 40 years scouring the skies using an array of powerful telescopes, which have set him back over £2,000.
His latest images are spectacular and show solar flares as the sun goes through its ‘solar maximum’ – a period when it is most active, which comes around every 11 years.
‘The sun is a star 10 times as close to us as the planet Saturn - a thought I always find sobering,’ Mr Tyler said.
The 72-year-old managed to capture violent solar flares (pictured) and spots on the sun¿s surface, which is 5,505°C and approximately 93million miles (150million km) away from Earth
Dave Tyler (pictured), from a village near High Wycombe in Buckinghamshire has spent the last 40 years scouring the skies using an array of powerful telescopes
‘Right now solar activity is at its maximum, but not its most spectacular.'
‘My favourite image is the solar flare with an associated outburst, just inside the solar limb [‘edge’ of the sun]. Its position gives a nice 3D effect.'
He added: ‘I also like the wide horizon shot showing general surface activity.’
The small black areas are sunspots, which are a little cooler than the surrounding surface of the star
The amateur astronomer and photographer has spent 40 years scouring the skies and used specialist equipment to capture the swirling surface of our star, including solar flares (the white flash) and dark sun spots (also pictured)
Mr Tyler captures the images by replacing the eyepiece on his telescope with a miniature charged-coupled device camera, a gadget often used for deep-sky, planetary, lunar and solar photography.
He can take thousands of frames before using computer software to piece them together like a jigsaw puzzle.
Mr Tyler said: ‘Sometimes the image is as much art as science and the image is often coloured to best serve the original wow factor from the live view.’
The amateur photographer's latest images are spectacular and show solar flares as the sun goes through its 'solar maximum' - a period when it is most active, which comes around every 11 years
Mr Tyler captures the sun's violent surface (pictured) by replacing the eyepiece on his telescope with a miniature charged-coupled device camera, which are often used for deep-sky, planetary, lunar and solar photography. This is one of his favourite images
Mr Tyler has been a keen astronomer for the last 40 years and built his first telescope when he was 29. He has been fascinated ever since. Here the sun's swirling gaseous surface is pictured
Solar flares are created when magnetic energy builds up and is suddenly released. They extend out to the layer of the sun called the corona – the outermost atmosphere of the sun.
The small black areas are sunspots, which are a little cooler than the surrounding surface of the star.
Mr Tyler has been a keen astronomer for the last 40 years and built his first telescope when he was 29. He has been fascinated ever since.
Mr Tyler captures the images by replacing the eyepiece on his telescope with a miniature charged-coupled device camera, a gadget often used for deep-sky, planetary, lunar and solar photography. His current telescope set-up is pictured
The father-of-one usually uses a five inch refracting telescope equipped with a hydrogen-alpha solar filter to take his images of the solar flares (pictured)
A flare (pictured) occurs when magnetic energy that has built up in the solar atmosphere is suddenly released. This image is the photographer's favourite as he thinks the solar flare, just inside the solar limb ['edge' of the sun] gives the image 'a nice 3D effect'
The father-of-one usually uses a five inch refracting telescope equipped with a hydrogen-alpha solar filter to take his images.
Despite being millions of miles away from the sun, he always urges caution when trying to capture it.
‘You have to be careful. Never look at the sun through anything other than equipment specialised for direct solar viewing or it will blind you,’ he warned.
Solar flares (pictured) extend out to the layer of the sun called the corona, which is the outermost atmosphere of the star and is made up of highly rarefied gas
WHAT IS A SOLAR FLARE AND WHY DOES IT OCCUR?
A flare is defined as a sudden, rapid and intense variation in brightness and occurs when magnetic energy that has built up in the solar atmosphere is suddenly released.
Radiation is emitted across virtually the entire electromagnetic spectrum, from long wavelength radio waves to x-rays and gamma rays.
The amount of energy released is the equivalent of millions of 100-megaton hydrogen bombs exploding at the same time, according to Nasa.
The first solar flare was recorded in 1859 by two scientists - Richard C. Carrington and Richard Hodgson, who were independently looking at sunspots at the same time and saw a large flare.
Solar flares extend out to the layer of the sun called the corona, which is the outermost atmosphere of the star and is made up of highly rarefied gas.
This gas normally has a temperature of a few million degrees Kelvin, but inside a flare, the temperature typically reaches can reach as high as 100 million degrees Kelvin.
The frequency of flares coincides with the sun's eleven year cycle and at its maximum – approximately every 11 years – solar flares are more common and larger.
NASA said: "Solar flares are powerful bursts of radiation. Harmful radiation from a flare cannot pass through Earth’s atmosphere to physically affect humans on the ground.
"However – when intense enough – they can disturb the atmosphere in the layer where GPS and communications signals travel.’
X-class flares are the most powerful solar flares: the one this week was ranked X1.5 – X-class denotes the most intense flares, while the number provides more information about its strength.
An X2 is twice as intense as an X1, an X3 is three times as intense, etc.
The most powerful on record was an X28 in November 2003.
NASA’s orbiting Solar Dynamics Observatory spotted the flare over the weekend.
The Solar Dynamics Observatory blog wrote: "At 1430 UTC on July 3, 2021, the first X-class flare (actually an X1.5 flare) of Solar Cycle 25 was seen on the Sun.
"There were also several B and C flares, and even one M flare in the day before the X1.5 flare.
"There was no active region associated with the X1.5 flare. A large region of magnetic field that was rotating off the disk is probably the home of the flares.
"Solar Cycle 25 is starting to get more interesting!"
The Solar Cycle 25 Prediction Panel, an international group of experts co-sponsored by NASA and NOAA, announced that solar minimum occurred in December 2019, marking the start of a new solar cycle.
Scientists use sunspots to track solar cycle progress.
The dark blotches on the Sun are associated with solar activity, often as the origins for giant explosions (such as solar flares or coronal mass ejections) which can spew light, energy, and solar material into space.
Lika Guhathakurta, solar scientist at the Heliophysics Division at NASA Headquarters in Washington said in December, ‘As we emerge from solar minimum and approach Cycle 25’s maximum, it is important to remember solar activity never stops; it changes form as the pendulum swings.’
Solar Cycle 25 is anticipated to be as strong as the last solar cycle, which was a below-average cycle, but not without risk.
Mysterious GodSelf Icon Found Worldwide: Lost Symbol of an Ancient Global Religion?
Mysterious GodSelf Icon Found Worldwide: Lost Symbol of an Ancient Global Religion?
Significant evidence now exists that ancient cultures worldwide were all connected by a powerful religious symbol which I call the “GodSelf Icon,” that is especially conspicuous among the pyramid cultures.
The pyramid cultures shared the “Triptych Temple” and “GodSelf Icon.”
In my 2011 book, Written in Stone , I revealed how these pyramid cultures all employed the same three-door “Triptych Temple” pattern. Another discovery that I announced concerns the GodSelf Icon, an image depicting a central figure, a hero or god, facing forward and holding in either hand parallel objects or animals.
THE GODSELF ICON
My new book, The Missing Link, shows more than 500 spectacular images as evidence of the central role the GodSelf Icon played in civilizations as diverse as Egypt, India, China, Persia, Mexico, Peru, Colombia, and ancient Europe:
GodSelf Icons found worldwide.
Just as the crucifix symbol unites millions of Christians under one universal religion, so the GodSelf Icon symbol did the same for our ancient ancestors.
GodSelf Icons found worldwide.
TRIPTYCH TEMPLES Parallel art and architecture in Antiquity—pyramid-building, corbel arches, and mummification—always interested me, so much so that I began traveling at a young age in an effort to examine these parallels as well as discover as many more parallels that I could find:
The ancients shared a common wisdom and possibly a common heritage.
Written in Stone tells the heroic story of how organized guilds of medieval stonemasons— who officially surfaced in 1717, calling themselves “Freemasons”— attempted to take back the religious narrative from priests by embedding the lost secrets of this universal religion into Gothic cathedrals. Gargoyles have nothing to do with Christianity. I realized that the standard blueprints of Gothic cathedrals, which called for a large central door flanked by two smaller doors, and two towers on either side of the central entrance hall, were a memory of pagan temples in Egypt, Mexico, Peru, China, India, etc.:
Central door flanked by two smaller doors seen in architecture around the world.
The center door is the “source”—the “soul” inside the body. The twin doors are the opposing bodily forces of duality that surround the soul on either side, and that the soul must confront and master in life.
The Universal Religion of the Triptych Temple formed the foundation of other Secret Societies besides Freemasonry, including the Knights of Pythias, Skull & Bones, and Shriners, all of whom use the Triptych entrance into their headquarters:
The Lost Universal Religion of the Triptych Temple
The main façade of Rockefeller Center in New York City depicts one of the most striking esoteric Triptychs of modern times. It shows a "god" image in the center doorway (the “GodSelf”) balanced between male / female opposites. Note that the god holds a compass—a key Masonic symbol :
Triptych façade, Rockefeller Center, NYC.
As with the Triptych, the GodSelf Icon represents the soul of the hero or sage who balances his opposing bodily forces, represented by the twin objects held symmetrically in each hand. The GodSelf Icon calls upon us to develop our inner strength and spiritual potential by means of balancing the twin opposing forces within us (through meditation) and by carefully cultivating our physical and mental powers.
The concept of an external “God,” as in the familiar monotheistic and polytheistic religions, is a distraction from what I believe is the true purpose of religion, which is to recognize the eternal nature of our own spiritual being and to nurture the “GodSelf” within ourselves.
The GodSelf Icon inspired the logos of companies like Starbucks.
A beautiful variation of the GodSelf Icon is visible at Rockefeller Center. The “twin opposites” are symbolized by the Comedy and Tragedy masks, held aloft on the right and left sides of the goddess:
Rockefeller Center in New York City, USA
THE GOLDEN AGE The origins of the GodSelf Icon can be traced to a Golden Age “Mother Culture” that may have existed in the prehistoric past. Some Victorian-era scholars associated the Golden Age with Plato’s Atlantis, and with ideas of the rise and fall of civilization over a period corresponding with the Zodiacal precession of the equinoxes which takes roughly 25,000 years. Plato called it the “Great Year”; the ancient Greeks, even before Plato, linked the Great Year with the seasons. Similar theories lay behind such phenomena as the Mayan and Aztec calendars, and the Hindu Yuga concept.
Recently, some alternative researchers have latched onto this Golden Age idea, claiming that a “technologically” advanced civilization flourished in the distant past. These researchers are making the mistake of projecting the spirit of our own times onto the distant past, rather than paying attention to what the ancients were trying to tell us. Plato describes the Golden Age as a “spiritually” advanced civilization, not “technically” advanced. The demise of this civilization occurred because the Atlanteans ceased identifying with their “divine” nature (i.e., their GodSelf nature):
“For many generations…they obeyed the laws and loved the divine to which they were akin…But when the divine element in them became weakened…and their human traits became predominant, they ceased to be able to carry their prosperity with moderation.” —Plato, Timaeus
SURPRISING FIND: MORE ANCIENT = MORE ADVANCED
We see evidence of the remnants of the Golden Age not only in the common language of symbolism left by our ancient ancestors, but also in the common architecture (like the Triptych Temple). Ancient civilization is characterized by remarkable skill in stonemasonry. One of the most amazing facts about ancient stone masonry is that many of the greatest works are among the oldest:
The most ancient stone structures are the most advanced.
In Italy, for example, Etruscan aqueducts and monuments are more tightly put together than later Roman-era constructions. The Great Pyramid at Cheops is thousands of years older than the inferior pyramids that surround it. The aqueduct in Segovia, Spain (said to be Roman) is far more advanced than later aqueducts. The development of many technologies in the ancient world often seems to reflect more degeneration and decay than progress. Perhaps this is really a result of a genuine pattern of a Great Year cycle of the decline and fall of civilizations, where the great period of spiritual achievement occurred over ten thousand years ago, and has been followed by a period of ever-accelerating spiritual decline. The purpose of my new book is to help uncover the real truth of the human past, in order to understand and eventually to reverse this decline.
MASONIC GODSELF ICONS Much evidence that would illuminate the meaning of the GodSelf Icon was destroyed by the conquistadors, Crusaders, Mongol Hordes, and slave traders. My presentation emphasizes the critical role of medieval stonemasons in preserving ancient symbols like the GodSelf Icon into the present. Gothic cathedrals are full of marvelous examples of the GodSelf Icon:
GodSelf Icons in cathedrals.
The clincher for me was the image of the Rebis, an androgynous alchemical drawing published in 1613. The sun is over its right shoulder; the moon over its left:
The Rebis is an ancestor of Masonic tracing boards that feature similar dualities; like the tracing boards, the message of the Rebis is to overcome dualities by means of mystic techniques involving the ancient practice of balancing opposites to find the center. Note the Masonic Square and Compass symbols in the left and right hands of the Rebis—simple tools used to build incredibly advanced stone monuments (pyramids, aqueducts, cathedrals) which to this day remain a testament not to the “technological” power of the ancients, but to their “spiritual” centeredness.
Most Freemasons have no idea what their symbols mean. My research has convinced me that the “lost secret of Freemasonry” is the same as the “lost secret of the Incas” and the same as the “lost secret of the Egyptians.” The GodSelf icon, which is identical in form and meaning in places as far apart as Egypt and Peru, is an important key for understanding the origins and destiny of mankind.
Top Image: Deriv; Step Pyramid of Djoser, Egypt. ( CC BY-SA 2.0 ), El Castillo (pyramid of Kukulcán) in Chichén Itzá, Mexico ( CC BY-SA 4.0 ), Candi Sukuh in eastern Central Java ( CC BY-SA 3.0 )
Images, unless otherwise noted, via author Richard Cassaro.
Antarctica lijkt misschien een bevroren, roerloos landschap. Maar er gebeurt veel meer onder het ijs dan je denkt.
Van bovenaf wekt Antarctica de illusie dat het niet veel meer is dan een wit, bevroren en ijzig gebied. Maar niets is minder waar. Met behulp van de nieuwste technieken zijn wetenschappers namelijk in staat om onder het ijs te kijken. En daar gebeurt veel meer dan je waarschijnlijk vermoedt.
Netwerk van meren De hydrologische systemen onder de Antarctische ijskap zijn al tientallen jaren een mysterie. Lang dacht men dat verborgen smeltwatermeren onder de dikke ijslaag van elkaar afgescheiden waren. Die aanname werd in 2007 aan het wankelen gebracht, toen wetenschappers met behulp van de baanbrekende ICESat-satelliet ontdekten dat er heus netwerk aan meren bestond die in de loop van de tijd actief gevuld en afgevoerd worden. “De ontdekking van deze onderling verbonden meren – en de daarbij behorende effecten op de glaciologie, microbiologie en oceanografie – was een grote ontdekking van de ICESat-missie,” aldus onderzoeker Matthew Siegfried.
Vervolg Nu, bijna vijftien jaar later, krijgt deze ontdekking een interessant vervolg. Hoewel NASA’s ICESat-missie ons een bijzonder inkijkje heeft gegeven in wat er zich onder de dikke Antarctische ijslaag afspeelt, krijgen we dankzij de nieuwere ICESat-2-missie een nóg scherper beeld. “ICESat-2 is als het opzetten van je bril na het gebruik van ICESat,” schetst Siegfried. “De gegevens zijn zo nauwkeurig dat we echt kunnen beginnen met het in kaart brengen van de grenzen van meren aan het oppervlak.”
Meer over de ICESat-2-missie De langverwachte ICESat-2-missie werd in september 2018 gelanceerd. De satelliet werd in een baan rond de aarde gebracht en had een duidelijk doel voor ogen: het verzamelen van zoveel mogelijk hoogtegegevens van onze aardbol. Hiervoor verrichtte de satelliet miljoenen metingen per dag. De missie borduurt voort op de ICESat-missie, die operationeel was tussen 2003 en 2009. Deze satelliet wist tijdens zijn werkzame leven zo’n twee miljard metingen te volbrengen; een score die ICESat-2 in zijn eerste week al overtrof.
Met behulp van dit geavanceerde laserinstrument zijn wetenschappers dus in staat om de verborgen subglaciale meren nog beter te bestuderen. En dat heeft nu geleid tot verbeterde kaarten van deze verborgen, diepe en mysterieuze meren, waardoor we deze systemen steeds beter beginnen te begrijpen.
Twee nieuwe meren Daarnaast leverde de studie ook nog een andere interessante ontdekking op. Want wetenschappers kwamen dankzij ICESat-2-satelliet nog twee, tot voor kort onbekende actieve subglaciale meren op het spoor. Deze twee nieuw ontdekte meren liggen redelijk in de buurt van eerder ontdekte meren, maar zijn onopgemerkt gebleven door de ICESat-missie. Op dit moment lijkt het erop dat deze twee meren langzaam leeglopen en water wordt afgevoerd. Hoe dergelijke verborgen smeltwatermeren ontstaan? Wetenschappers vermoeden dat deze subglaciale meren het resultaat zijn van een combinatie van factoren, waaronder fluctuaties in de druk die wordt uitgeoefend door het enorme gewicht van het ijs erboven, de wrijving tussen de ijslaag en rotsen eronder en de warmte die uit de aarde zelf komt.
Inzicht De nauwkeurige metingen met ICESat-2 zijn cruciaal voor ons begrip over het subglaciale merenstelsel op Antarctica. Bovendien laten ze ons zien hoe deze meren in de loop van de tijd groter en kleiner worden. “Als er meren zijn die worden gevuld of leeglopen, zullen we ze met ICESat-2 kunnen detecteren,” zegt Siegfried. En dat verschaft ons ook meer inzicht in de complexe processen die zich op Antarctica afspelen. Terwijl de Antarctische ijskap beweegt, ontstaan er namelijk scheuren en spleten. Wanneer meren onder het ijs worden gevuld of juist water afvoeren, vervormt ook het bevroren oppervlak erboven. ICESat-2 brengt al deze hoogteverschillen in kaart met een precisie van slechts enkele centimeters. En door alle complexe processen op Antarctica te volgen, zullen we ook een beter beeld krijgen van het uiteindelijke lot van de ijskap, die momenteel aan ernstige veranderingen onderhevig is. Zo zal het ons bijvoorbeeld meer inzicht verschaffen in hoe al het afgevoerde zoete water afkomstig uit subglaciale meren de snelheid van de ijskap erboven beïnvloedt en in hoeverre het de circulatie en ecosystemen van de oceaan waar het uiteindelijk in stroomt, verandert.
Kortom, door goed te bestuderen wat er momenteel ondergronds op Antarctica gaande is, zullen wetenschappers ook een beter beeld krijgen van de toekomst van de ijskap. “Zonder de satellietgegevens zouden we echt geen idee hebben gehad over welke processen er precies onder Antarctica afspelen,” zegt Helen Amanda Fricker. “We worstelen met voorspellingen over de toekomst van Antarctica. Maar met instrumenten zoals ICESat-2 kunnen we de processen die er plaatsvinden veel beter observeren.”
WIST JE DAT…
…onderzoekers nog niet zo lang geleden getuige waren van de verdwijning van een heus meer? Geschat wordt dat tussen de 600 en 750 miljoen kubieke meter water zo de oceaan in is gestroomd. Lees het hele verhaal hier.
In 2019, a National Geographic and OceanX underwater photographer appeared in a video and said this:
“I think, in the ocean, I have come across potentially beings from another heavenly body that are more highly advanced than humans.”
The photographer is Luis Lamar and the video appears to have been made by or for OceanX, an ocean exploration initiative whose website describes a “mission to explore the ocean and bring it back to the world.” Does that mission include bringing photos of underwater aliens back to the world?
“I’ve seen giant deep sea arachnids, venomous sea snakes far offshore with, like bright-yellow heads. Sharks in a frenzy, Orcas swarming all around me. Some sort of you know, hyper-advanced aquatic alien creatures inhabiting the shallow waters, which almost look like stingrays.”
I think I know that alien!
According to the Meeko TV YouTube channel, Lamar stated that he was waiting for an underwater film crew to assemble when he saw the sharks in a frenzy. When he approached them, he saw the “hyper-advanced aquatic alien creatures.” While they looked like stingrays, Meeko TV reports he said something about them didn’t feel right, something that wasn’t normal. The original report and video was said to have been made by The War Zone, which is well known for its in-depth reports on advanced military aircraft and strange encounters. In fact, in 2019 it was fact reporting on U.S. nuclear submarines having a number of encounters with unidentified submerged objects or USOs.
And that is where the plot thickens. The War Zone has no record of Luis Lamar. Links to the original video no longer work. Lamar is definitely a real person and National Geographic photographer — his photos appear in a 2019 story titled “If alien life exists in our solar system, it may look like this.” That’s “may.” However, the underwater alien encounter story is still alive, having popped up on various paranormal and UFO sites and on Reddit. This week on the UFO Reddit, a follow-up on this story was alluded to. u/MFLUDER posted a tweet by filmmaker Steven Greenstreet … who retweeted a post by Andrew Harbinson (@sSamscwantch), a “Para experiencer” who contacted Luis Lamar to asked for clarification on his encounter in light of the recent UFO/USO/UAP encounter disclosures by the Pentagon. Luis Lamar responded with this:
“this was a stupid joke video my friend made while we were bored on a shoot – for kids on Instagram or whatever. It’s complete bullshit. Stop wasting your time.”
What was that word again?
Sigh. This is why we can’t have nice things … like accurate and honest reports on UFOs and USOs. Some commenters tried to save it by saying that Lamar could have been pressured by the government to disavow the video and remove it, but it sounds more like his employers may have been behind it. Or Lamar just got tired of being contacted by serious researchers about his “joke” video. These days it’s hard to be a comedian or satirist or just a plain old person trying to have some fun, especially when trying to joke about politics or world affairs. It’s getting to be the same way with UFOs.
Let that be a warning to UFO or USO hoaxers – payback can be a bitch.
My previous article was on the matter of some of the lesser-known aspects of the Rendlesham Forest “UFO landing” of December 1980. With that said, today I’ve decided to do something similar with the Roswell case. Namely, share with you some of the aspects of Roswell that many might not be aware of. So, let’s begin: when personnel at the Roswell Army Air Field announced, in July 1947, that they had recovered a crashed flying disc, one thing was one hundred percent absent: any mention of bodies. And, needless to say, the body angle was also absent from the hasty follow-up explanation of a weather-balloon recovery. The body angle was also denied in the Air Force’s July 1994 report on Roswell (titled Report of Air Force Research Regarding the Roswell Incident), as the following extract shows: “It should also be noted here that there was little mentioned in this report about the recovery of the so-called ‘alien bodies.’ The wreckage was from a Project Mogul balloon. There were no ‘alien’ passengers therein.'” Three years later, however, things had changed. In a then-new document – The Roswell Report: Case Closed – it was stated by the Air Force that: “‘Aliens’ observed in the New Mexico desert were probably anthropomorphic test dummies that were carried aloft by U.S. Air Force high altitude balloons for scientific research…The reports of military units that always seemed to arrive shortly after the crash of a flying saucer to retrieve the saucer and ‘crew’ were actually accurate descriptions of Air Force personnel engaged in anthropomorphic dummy recovery operations.”
While the dummy theory is well-known in Ufology, there’s one far-lesser-known story that can be found in the U.S. Air Force’s large report. On one occasion northwest of Roswell, a local woman – who was wholly unfamiliar with the test activities – arrived at a dummy landing site prior to the arrival of the recovery personnel and had the scare of her life. The woman saw what appeared to be a person embedded head-first (no less!) in a snowbank and became hysterical. The woman screamed, “He’s dead! He’s dead!” Even though I don’t buy into the crash-test dummy picture, this tale is undeniably bizarre! Moving on, there’s the story of Frank Edwards and Roswell – and of another lesser-known story. Edwards was a radio broadcaster and someone who had a deep interest in the UFO subject. Indeed, he wrote two books on UFOs. They were Flying Saucers – Here and Now! and Flying Saucers – Serious Business. Edwards also wrote a handful of books on the world of the paranormal. So, you might ask: what does any of this have to do with Roswell? Well, I’ll tell you. It was early July 1947 when the Roswell event took place. And although the story, at the time, got widespread coverage from the world’s media, it was actually quickly forgotten. That is, until the mid-1970s, when Bill Moore and Stan Friedman resurrected the story and dug deep into it. However, there’s something else. It’s a little-known fact that Edwards gave the Roswell story brief coverage in Flying Saucers – Serious Business. Indeed, between 1947 and the 1970s, when Moore and Friedman were getting moving on the case, Edwards was the only person to have promoted the case.
In Serious Business, in 1966, Edwards wrote: “There are such difficult cases as the rancher near Roswell, New Mexico, who phoned the Sheriff that a blazing disc-shaped object had passed over his house at low altitude and had crashed and burned on a hillside within view of the house. The sheriff called the military; the military came on the double quick. Newsmen were not permitted in the area. A week later, however, the government released a photograph of a service man holding up a box kite with an aluminum disc about the size of a large pie plate dangling from the bottom of the kite. This, the official report explained, was a device borne aloft on the kite and used to test radar gear by bouncing the signals off the pie pan. And this, we were told, was the sort of thing that had so excited the rancher. We were NOT told, however, how the alleged kite caught fire – nor why the military cordoned off the area while they inspected the wreckage of a burned-out kite with a non-inflammable pie pan tied to it.” Admittedly, Edwards’ version of the story was way off-course. But, the man – for all of his flaws – was the first to give Roswell any significant coverage in the post-1947 period.
Moving on, there’s another not particularly well-known story concerning Roswell. It all revolves around the matter of the United States Capitol. It goes as follows: Jesse Marcel, Jr. was the son of Major Jesse Marcel who was present at the Roswell crash-site itself in July 1947. According to Marcel, Jr., in the early 1990s he received an invite to meet with a “mysterious government official” in none other than the Capitol Building. The meeting went ahead. The subject: the Roswell events of 1947. Marcel, Jr. said of that same official figure: “He told me that he had been charged with the responsibility of investigating the operation of a ‘black government’ within the government, where funds were being spent without appropriate oversight to maintain a false story about the Roswell incident and cover the true story up. He said that his job was to report to the Senate Appropriate Committee, and advise them as to where these dollars were going, and why.” The mystery of all those secretly siphoned dollars still exists.
Finally, there’s the mysterious issue of Roswell files that can’t be found. But, that should have been found. This was a specific issue that the General Accounting Office (today, it’s called the Government Accountability Office) addressed when it went looking for the truth of Roswell in the early 1990s. Its staff said: “In 1947, Army regulations required that air accident reports be maintained permanently. We identified four air accidents reported by the Army Air Forces in New Mexico during July 1947. All of the accidents involved military aircraft and occurred after July 8, 1947 – the date the RAAF public information office first reported the crash and recovery of a ‘flying disc’ near Roswell. The Navy reported no air accidents in New Mexico during July 1947. Air Force officials told us that according to record- keeping requirements in effect during July 1947, there was no requirement to prepare a report on the crash of a weather balloon. In our search for records concerning the Roswell crash, we learned that some government records covering RAAF activities had been destroyed and others had not. For example, RAAF administrative records (from Mar. 1945 through Dec. 1949) and RAAF outgoing messages (from Oct. 1946 through Dec. 1949) were destroyed. The document disposition form does not indicate what organization or person destroyed the records and when or under what authority the records were destroyed.”
And, that’s where, today, our story comes to its end. No doubt, there are far more Roswell secrets that, one day, will surface. Whether they will provide answers or even more mysteries is something that, right now, is hard to predict.
UFOs Sighted Over Jiutepec, Mexico ( August 3, 2021 )
UFOs were sighted over Jiutepec, Mexico on August 3, 2021
STATEMENT : Will it be planes coming out of the cloud? One after another??
ORIGINAL : Serán aviones saliendo de la nube? Uno tras otro??
They are here
credit : J Arellano
UFOs Sighted From Plane Over Middle East At 40, 000 ft ( August 2, 2021 )
STATEMENT : I saw these lights in the sky from our plane window, at 40,000 ft, on Monday morning, somewhere over the Middle East. I’ve not seen anything like it previously and wonder if anyone else has? What are they?
credit : Miles Ellerby
UFO Sighted Over Duque de Caxias. Brazil ( August 1, 2021 )
A personal friend of mine filmed this Sunday the 01/08/2021th Flamengo game time...Duque de Caxias RJ A strange and unusual situation.. stood still for about 5 minutes in the same spot without making a noise and in a blink of an eye it was gone
ORIGINAL : Um amigo meu pessoal filmou nesse domingo dia 01/08/2021 horário do jogo do flamengo ...duque de caxias ,RJ. Uma situação de fato estranha e inusitada ..ficou parada por volta de 5 minutos no mesmo lugar sem fazer barulho e num piscar de olhos sumiu
2 videos
credit : Digo Arruda
Flying Saucer Shaped UFO Sighted Over Italy ( July 30, 2021 )
This UFO flying saucer or flying disc was sighted over Italy on July 30, 2021. : This flying craft has a disc or saucer-shaped body, Classic Flying saucer Saucer commonly : anomalous flying object.
STATEMENT : Classic Flying saucer Saucer
credit : think tank
Future of flight? Black Fly electric flying vehicle. UFO?
August 1, 2021 Live : 09:20
STATEMENT : Future of flight? Black Fly electric flying vehicle. UFO? : The difficult thing will be for us to distinguish what comes from the outside and what is right here.
Strange object in sky caught on camera in Croatia. What is it?
Strange object in sky caught on camera in Croatia. What is it?
In Croatia, residents have been thrown into a fright after a bizarre story emerged regarding peoples being scared at a street location by what has been described as a “strange UFO”.
That and more strange events caught on tape. Real or fake?
A docu-series about UFOs has just landed on Netflix and it features some interesting extraterrestrial insight from none other than Tom DeLonge.
Yes that Tom Delonge—the Blink-182 member-turned-UFO researcher is featured in Top Secret UFO Projects: Declassified.
For the series, which previously aired on Sky History, the 45-year-old is featured as a UFO witness.
The musician is featured in the fourth episode, titled "Hacked and Leaked" alongside personalities like Vickie Landrum and Betty Cash, Scottish hacker Gary McKinnon, as well as former White House Chief of Staff John Podesta.
As well as being world-famous and having an instantly recognizable singing voice, DeLonge has also carved out a career as a UFO researcher.
Following the split with Blink-182, the "All the Small Things" performer founded the To the Stars Academy of Arts & Sciences in 2017 and also runs a website devoted to paranormal activity, extraterrestrial life called Stranger Times.
DeLonge opened up about his passion for all things extraterrestrial in a detailed interview with The New York Times in 2019.
The performer shared details about one incident that left his mind blown.
When asked if he's ever actually seen a UFO, DeLonge revealed he had indeed—but can't say for sure what it was.
"I saw some really anomalous stuff one night out in the desert, zipping across the stars, horizon to horizon, zig zagging. That really blew my mind because no satellites move that way," he told the newspaper. "But, I can't tell you what it was. I think like most people, the stuff that I've seen is a lot of stuff on the internet where I bet some of it really is true, but you really don't know which pieces."
On how he got into UFO researching, DeLonge said he has found science fiction fascinating since he was a kid.
"I started becoming very fascinated in the idea of what else is there besides working a 9-to-5 job and coming from a broken family," he shared. "For some reason I just thought science fiction was just fascinating.
Musician Tom DeLonge speaks onstage at A Conversation With Tom DeLonge at The GRAMMY Museum on October 13, 2015 in Los Angeles, California. He is featured in "Top Secret UFO Projects: Declassified."REBECCA SAPP/GETTY/WIREIMAGE
Former Sen. Harry Reid (D-NV) was behind funding for extensive research by government and military experts examining Unidentified Aerial Phenomena filmed over the years by the pilots. The full report published in June detailed 144 encounters that they still can't explain. All of the interviews with pilots, military specialists, scientists and officials ultimately lead to the conclusion that they have no idea what any of the sightings are.
Speaking to KPBS Midday Edition Tuesday, Reid said that he was disappointed in the report, though an admission that the government is just as clueless as Americans, is different.
"Harry Reid said he applauds the Pentagon for making it easier for military personnel to report sightings of unidentified aircraft and is urging Congress to press for more public disclosure of future sightings," said the report.
He implied in the interview that it's possible they wanted to bury the report since they released it on a Friday night.
"They obviously in reading the report, it was so cursory so thin," he said. "So marginalized. I am very disappointed. I would hope that people in Congress understand that that is not the way to satisfy the American people. The one thing we need to do is be transparent and this shows no transparency. We need to get to the bottom of this, continue working on. It seems to me, the more we study it, the more we don't know. And I think that's important that people understand that this is not some conspiratorial theory. This is real facts we need to get to the bottom line."
"I found very little of this new cut, but I have said, and I believe this, this can't be a one I don't we're through with it," he continued. "This has to be an ongoing program for the federal government is involved in studying these unidentified flying objects. They can no longer say they don't exist because they exist and we need to find out what they are. And the more we try to hide it, the more parent becomes at work trying to hide something from the American people. That's a long way to go."
During a "60 Minutes" special, a former Navy pilot expressed his concern that the Pentagon and military, in general, are so dismissive of pilots who report UFOs. His concern, he explained, is that there are foreign actors creating technologies unknown to the United States and that they continue to be ignored because the idea it is an unidentified flying object makes people look nuts. Reid said that the one good thing to come out of this is that the military is taking it more seriously now.
However, he explained, there are decades of reports and investigations about UFOs to uncover what they are. None of those were included in the report and Reid wants to know why sightings between 2004 and 2021 were the only things considered. Some of the videos have been examined and released to the public with little information. Reid believes that there should be ongoing study as we learn more and technology gets better.
"We've been talking about these UFO's for 70 years and we have not gotten any place other than to understand that the more we learn, the more we need to learn," he explained. "And so I am satisfied that the medical Pentagon is doing the right thing."
He said that he's "ready" to find out specifics about what these UFOs actually are.
Here's What You Need To Remember: The Groom Lake facility at this time acquired the designation “Area 51” as it expanded and developed specialized facilities for the striking supersonic jets: larger additional hangars, a longer 10,000 foot runway, safer backup landing areas, over 130 housing units for personnel, and enlarged fuel stores for the exotic high-temperature JP-7 fuel used in the A-12.
Area 51, the highly secretive U.S. Air Force test facility in the deserts of southern Nevada, is enjoying a resurgence of popular interest thanks to an internet meme—as if being featured in X-File episodes, arcade shoot’em up games and films weren’t enough.
Despite the countless dubious conspiracy theories attributed to the site also known as “Dreamland” or “Groom Lake,” there’s no doubt that for over six decades the base hosted all sorts of “black project” aircraft whose existence was not formally disclosed by the Pentagon.
Though the CIA only obliquely admitted to the site’s existence in 2013, we actually know a fair bit about how Area 51 came to be—and even how it first became a subject of juicy UFO stories.
A Private Testing Ground for Eisenhower’s Top-Secret Spy Plane
In the early 1950s, the United States was super keen on monitoring the Soviet Union’s rapidly developing nuclear ballistic missile program. As the first spy satellites remained a few years away from being launched, the only way to reliably spy on these sights was to fly above them and snap pictures with giant cameras. But by the early 1950s, the Soviet Union’s new air defense system and high-flying jet interceptors made spy flights excessively risky.
To overcome these defenses, Lockheed engineer Kelly Johnson proposed a glide-liker spy plane that would simply fly too high to be intercepted at over 70,000 feet. This still involved illegally violating Soviet airspace—but as long as the spy planes couldn’t be shot down, Moscow couldn’t prove the spy flights were happening at all.
In November 1954, Eisenhower approved development of this U-2 spy plane in a program known as “Project Aquatone” to be operated by the CIA. While the plane would be built at Lockheed’s famous Skunkworks facility, an aircraft designed for illegal spy overflights needed to be tested somewhere more discrete.
Johnson asked Lockheed test pilot Tony LeVier to find a suitably clandestine airfield. As described in the bookDark Eagles by Curtis Peebles, test pilot Tony LeVier departed from the Skunkworks facility in Palmdale, California flying a Beechcraft Bonanza light plane, ostensibly on a “hunting trip.” In reality, they proceeded to survey 50 decertified sites in Arizona, California and Nevada over two weeks—but none seemed sufficiently remote.
However, Air Force liaison Col. Osmond Ritland recalled an abandoned X-shaped landing strip that had served as a gunnery field during World War II.
CIA officer Richard Bissell, LeVier and Johnson flew down to inspect the strip, which lay next to a dry Nevada salt flat called Groom Lake. Bissell described the site as “…a perfect natural landing field… as smooth as a billiard table without anything being done to it.”
Johnson indicated “We’ll put it right there. That’s the hangar.”
A fake company called CLJ, created to obscure Lockheed’s involvement, recruited contractors to build up the facilities in the sweltering summer of 1955 at a cost of $800,000.
The desolate site, deceptively nicknamed “Paradise Ranch,” started out with a nearly mile-long runway, two hangars, a control tower, fuel and water storage tanks, an access road, and trailers for onsite personnel. LeVier personally road about the lakebed to clear it of debris and spent shell casings to make it safe for landing.
Finally, on July 24, 1955, the prototype U-2, dubbed Article 341, was disassembled and stowed into a hulking C-124 Globemaster transport plane, which transported it to the “Ranch”—landing with deflated tires so as not to break through the thin runway.
LeVier took the gawky aircraft around on taxi tests, hitting 80 miles per hour on the runway—only for the aircraft’s lengthy wings to lift his plane twenty feet into the air during his second run. The U-2 flew over a quarter-mile, before LeVier was able to get the lift-prone aircraft back down on the lakebed on his second attempt—though the hard landing caused one of the jet’s tires to burst and catch fire.
The U-2 went on to see several successful flight tests and in a matter of months was deployed on spy flights over the Soviet Union with CIA pilots.
Civilian airline pilots and air traffic controllers began spotting the silvery U-2s flying at supposedly impossible heights. Given that the Air Force couldn’t explain the sightings by telling the truth, it devised weather-related incidents to explain them away. These often unconvincing explanations only fed the fervor of conspiracy theorists.
The Blackbirds: A-12, D-21 and SR-71
When a Soviet S-75 surface-to-air missile blasted Gary Powers’s U-2 in 1960, and he subsequently confessed to performing espionage flights) it became clear that altitude alone would not provide an adequate defense. Kelly Johnson had already anticipated this vulnerability in 1958, when he began exploring a new spy plane concept: combining high altitude with sustained speeds exceeding three times the speed of sound, and radar-stealth—hopefully making the jet too high and fast to ever intercept.
This CIA-Lockheed “black project”—codenamed “Project Oxcart”—spawned the futuristic-looking A-12 single-seat spy plane, the progenitor of the famous (and unclassified) two-seat SR-71 Blackbird flown by the U.S. Air Force.
The Groom Lake facility at this time acquired the designation “Area 51” as it expanded and developed specialized facilities for the striking supersonic jets: larger additional hangars, a longer 10,000 foot runway, safer backup landing areas, over 130 housing units for personnel, and enlarged fuel stores for the exotic high-temperature JP-7 fuel used in the A-12.
The first A-12s arrived in 1962 along with elite military pilots temporarily discharged and placed in the employ of the CIA, a protocol known as “sheep-dipping.” Though the White House never dispatched A-12s on overflights of the Soviet Union, they did fly thirty-two missions over Vietnam and North Korea in Project Blackshield before being retired in favor of the Air Force’s SR-71s, which had side-looking cameras that didn’t require overflight of hostile airspace.
Lockheed also devised a D-21 spy drone that resembled a miniature, single-engined Blackbird, carried on top of a Blackbird-derived carrier aircraft called the M-21.
Tragically, one of the piggybacked D-21 drones collided with its M-21 carrier during a test launch. Though both of the M-21’s crew ejected, one drowned before he could be rescued, and Johnson canceled M-21 program.
However, the CIA did later try to make use of the D-21s by launching them from B-52 bombers to snap footage of Chinese nuclear test sites. However, a series of mishaps meant the Air Force was unable to recover footage from any of the five drone missions it dispatched.
Birthplace of the Stealth Jet
While the A-12 and Blackbird had limited stealth characteristics, by the 1970s, the Air Force was interested in taking another crack at a low-radar-observable jet, this time with combat application.
In 1977, the Skunk Works used new computer modeling technology to design and build two pale aircraft with diamond-like faceted surfaces coated with radar-absorbent iron ball paint. These “Have Blue” aircraft were disassembled and flown to Area 51 in a giant C-5 cargo jet November 16, then rebuilt and test flown.
Lo and behold, the Have Blues did exhibit drastically reduced radar cross-sections—but they were also highly aerodynamically unstable, and both crashed in 1979.
Lockheed evolved Have Blue into the F-117 Nighthawk attack jet, which used computer fly-by-wire systems to correct the aircraft’s inherent instability. A YF-117 prototype too made its first flight at Groom Lake on June 17, 1981. Production F-117s were then stationed at Area 51 before being redeployed to the nearby Tonopah Test Range.
Though the Pentagon admitted to the existence of a stealth jet in 1983, the secrecy surrounding the F-117 was so effective that the public never had any inkling of the Nighthawk’s true appearance, nor even its designation (widely believed to be the “F-19”) until was finally unveiled in 1988.
Meanwhile, Northrop, too, began refining its stealth technology with the Tacit Blue demonstrator, dubbed the “whale” or “alien school bus” for its decidedly unglamorous appearance. This made its first flight at Groom Lake in February 1982—the first of 135 in all before the demonstrator was retired in 1985.
Conceived as stealthy surveillance plane with a discrete Low Probability of Intercept Radar, Tacit Blue instead pioneered the use of computer-engineered curved-surfaces in stealth aircraft which heavily informed Northrop’s forthcoming B-2 stealth bomber.
Sébastien Roblin holds a master’s degree in conflict resolution from Georgetown University and served as a university instructor for the Peace Corps in China. He has also worked in education, editing, and refugee resettlement in France and the United States. He currently writes on security and military history for War Is Boring.
This article first appeared in 2019 and is being reprinted due to reader interest.
Weird 'UFO mirage' hovering over water in a national park in Alaska
Weird 'UFO mirage' hovering over water in a national park in Alaska
The footage was captured at the Glacier Bay National Park and Reserve. The park posted the video to its Facebook page and explained that the mirage is called a "Fata Morgana".
The strange dome-shaped object in the video is actually your brain being tricked into seeing a distorted version of an island.
A Fata Morgana is a mirage that appears just above the horizon and can significantly distort an object that's already there. Glacier Bay National Park and Reserve explained on Facebook: "Fata Morgana is a mirage seen within a narrow band on Earth’s horizon.
Islands in glacier bay turn to UFOs or the flying Dutchman with a little imagination and a pinch of cool science! When air of different densities meet, the air in Earth’s atmosphere acts as a refracting lens, creating the mirage effect we see.
In this clip from a 1994 episode of “The Oprah Show”, guest Peter Faust claims he was visited—and ultimately abducted—by aliens at the age of 8. As an adult, Peter says he’s had terrifying recollections of the abduction, which left him so unsettled he ultimately sought the help of a psychiatrist. Here, John Mack, MD, joins Peter on stage to give credence to his patient’s abduction story, and those of thousands of other people claiming similar experiences.
NASA beams back spectacular images of Jupiter and our solar system's biggest moon, Ganymede
NASA beams back spectacular images of Jupiter and our solar system's biggest moon, Ganymede
BY SOPHIE LEWIS
NASA's Juno probe has flown closer to Jupiter and its largest moon, Ganymede, than any other spacecraft in more than two decades — and the images it beamed back of the gas giant and its icy orb are breathtaking.
Juno approached Ganymede on June 7, before making its 34th flyby of Jupiter the following day, traveling from pole to pole in under three hours.
On Thursday, NASA released an animated series of images captured by the spacecraft's JunoCam imager, providing a "starship captain" point of view of each flyby. They mark the first close-up views of the largest moon in the solar system since the Galileo orbiter last flew past in 2000.
The time-lapse animation lasts three-and-a-half minutes, guiding space enthusiasts within 645 miles of Ganymede at 41,600 miles per hour. The images show the lighter and darker regions of the moon, believed to be the result of ice sublimating, transitioning from a solid to a gas state.
Also visible is the crater Tros, one of the largest and brightest crater scars on the moon.
The animation then travels to Jupiter, a 735,000-mile journey from Ganymede that takes Juno 14 hours and 50 minutes. Viewers are brought within 2,100 miles of Jupiter's famous clouds, as the planet's powerful gravity accelerates the probe to nearly 130,000 miles per hour.
Visible from that perspective are the cyclones at the gas giant's north pole, as well as five "string of pearls" — gigantic storms spinning in the southern hemisphere, appearing as white ovals.
"The animation shows just how beautiful deep space exploration can be," Scott Bolton, principal investigator for Juno, said in a statement. "The animation is a way for people to imagine exploring our solar system firsthand by seeing what it would be like to be orbiting Jupiter and flying past one of its icy moons. Today, as we approach the exciting prospect of humans being able to visit space in orbit around Earth, this propels our imagination decades into the future, when humans will be visiting the alien worlds in our solar system."
NASA's Juno spacecraft captured high-resolution views of Jupiter's moon Ganymede during a flyby in June 2021 at an altitude of about 645 miles. The flyby was the first close-up look at the big moon since NASA's Galileo orbiter flew past for the last time in 2000.NASA/JPL-CALTECH/SWRI/MSSS
NASA's animation team also simulated lightning that would be visible if you were actually viewing one of Jupiter's thunderstorms in person. The camera's point of view for the animation was generated by citizen scientist Gerald Eichstädt, using composite images of the planet and its moon.
"This is the closest any spacecraft has come to this mammoth moon in a generation," Bolton said. "We are going to take our time before we draw any scientific conclusions, but until then we can simply marvel at this celestial wonder, the only moon in our solar system bigger than the planet Mercury."
The next flyby of Jupiter, Juno's 35th such trip, is scheduled for July 21.
NASA’s Fermi Spots a Weird Pulse of High-Energy Radiation Racing Toward Earth
NASA’s Fermi Spots a Weird Pulse of High-Energy Radiation Racing Toward Earth
ByFRANCIS REDDY, NASA’S GODDARD SPACE FLIGHT CENTER
When the core of massive star collapses, it can form a black hole. Some of the surrounding matter escapes in the form of powerful jets that rush outward at almost the speed of light in opposite directions, as illustrated here. Normally jets from collapsing stars produce gamma rays for many seconds to minutes. Astronomers think the jets from GRB 200826A were shut down quickly, producing the shortest gamma-ray burst (magenta) from a collapsing star ever seen.
Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center/Chris Smith (KBRwyle)
On August 26, 2020, NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope detected a pulse of high-energy radiation that had been racing toward Earth for nearly half the present age of the universe. Lasting only about a second, it turned out to be one for the record books – the shortest gamma-ray burst (GRB) caused by the death of a massive star ever seen.
GRBs are the most powerful events in the universe, detectable across billions of light-years. Astronomers classify them as long or short based on whether the event lasts for more or less than two seconds. They observe long bursts in association with the demise of massive stars, while short bursts have been linked to a different scenario.
Astronomers combined data from NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope, other space missions, and ground-based observatories to reveal the origin of GRB 200826A, a brief but powerful burst of radiation. It’s the shortest burst known to be powered by a collapsing star – and almost didn’t happen at all.
Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center
“We already knew some GRBs from massive stars could register as short GRBs, but we thought this was due to instrumental limitations,” said Bin-bin Zhang at Nanjing University in China and the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. “This burst is special because it is definitely a short-duration GRB, but its other properties point to its origin from a collapsing star. Now we know dying stars can produce short bursts, too.”
Named GRB 200826A, after the date it occurred, the burst is the subject of two papers published in Nature Astronomy on Monday, July 26. The first, led by Zhang, explores the gamma-ray data. The second, led by Tomás Ahumada, a doctoral student at the University of Maryland, College Park and NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, describes the GRB’s fading multiwavelength afterglow and the emerging light of the supernova explosion that followed.
“We think this event was effectively a fizzle, one that was close to not happening at all,” Ahumada said. “Even so, the burst emitted 14 million times the energy released by the entire Milky Way galaxy over the same amount of time, making it one of the most energetic short-duration GRBs ever seen.”
When a star much more massive than the Sun runs out of fuel, its core suddenly collapses and forms a black hole. As matter swirls toward the black hole, some of it escapes in the form of two powerful jets that rush outward at almost the speed of light in opposite directions. Astronomers only detect a GRB when one of these jets happens to point almost directly toward Earth.
Each jet drills through the star, producing a pulse of gamma rays – the highest-energy form of light – that can last up to minutes. Following the burst, the disrupted star then rapidly expands as a supernova.
GRB 200826A was a sharp blast of high-energy emission lasting just 0.65 second. After traveling for eons through the expanding universe, the signal had stretched out to about one second long when it was detected by Fermi’s Gamma-ray Burst Monitor. The event also appeared in instruments aboard NASA’s Wind mission, which orbits a point between Earth and the Sun located about 930,000 miles (1.5 million kilometers) away, and Mars Odyssey, which has been orbiting the Red Planet since 2001. ESA’s (the European Space Agency’s) INTEGRAL satellite observed the blast as well.
All of these missions participate in a GRB-locating system called the InterPlanetary Network (IPN), for which the Fermi project provides all U.S. funding. Because the burst reaches each detector at slightly different times, any pair of them can be used to help narrow down where in the sky it occurred. About 17 hours after the GRB, the IPN narrowed its location to a relatively small patch of the sky in the constellation Andromeda.
Using the National Science Foundation-funded Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF) at Palomar Observatory, the team scanned the sky for changes in visible light that could be linked to the GRB’s fading afterglow.
Discovery image of the fading afterglow (center) of GRB 200826A.
Credit: ZTF and T. Ahumada et al., 2021
“Conducting this search is akin to trying to find a needle in a haystack, but the IPN helps shrink the haystack,” said Shreya Anand, a graduate student at Caltech and a co-author on the afterglow paper. “Out of more than 28,000 ZTF alerts the first night, only one met all of our search criteria and also appeared within the sky region defined by the IPN.”
Within a day of the burst, NASA’s Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory discovered fading X-ray emission from this same location. A couple of days later, variable radio emission was detected by the National Radio Astronomy Observatory’s Karl Jansky Very Large Array in New Mexico. The team then began observing the afterglow with a variety of ground-based facilities.
Observing the faint galaxy associated with the burst using the Gran Telescopio Canarias, a 10.4-meter telescope at the Roque de los Muchachos Observatory on La Palma in Spain’s Canary Islands, the team showed that its light takes 6.6 billion years to reach us. That’s 48% of the universe’s current age of 13.8 billion years.
But to prove this short burst came from a collapsing star, the researchers also needed to catch the emerging supernova.
“If the burst was caused by a collapsing star, then once the afterglow fades away it should brighten again because of the underlying supernova explosion,” said Leo Singer, a Goddard astrophysicist and Ahumada’s research advisor. “But at these distances, you need a very big and very sensitive telescope to pick out the pinpoint of light from the supernova from the background glare of its host galaxy.”
To conduct the search, Singer was granted time on the 8.1-meter Gemini North telescope in Hawaii and the use of a sensitive instrument called the Gemini Multi-Object Spectrograph. The astronomers imaged the host galaxy in red and infrared light starting 28 days after the burst, repeating the search 45 and 80 days after the event. They detected a near-infrared source – the supernova – in the first set of observations that could not be seen in later ones.
The researchers suspect that this burst was powered by jets that barely emerged from the star before they shut down, instead of the more typical case where long-lasting jets break out of the star and travel considerable distances from it. If the black hole had fired off weaker jets, or if the star was much larger when it began its collapse, there might not have been a GRB at all.
The discovery helps resolve a long-standing puzzle. While long GRBs must be coupled to supernovae, astronomers detect far greater numbers of supernovae than they do long GRBs. This discrepancy persists even after accounting for the fact that GRB jets must tip nearly into our line of sight for astronomers to detect them at all.
The researchers conclude that collapsing stars producing short GRBs must be marginal cases whose light-speed jets teeter on the brink of success or failure, a conclusion consistent with the notion that most massive stars die without producing jets and GRBs at all. More broadly, this result clearly demonstrates that a burst’s duration alone does not uniquely indicate its origin.
References:
“A peculiarly short-duration gamma-ray burst from massive star core collapse” by B.-B. Zhang, Z.-K. Liu, Z.-K. Peng, Y. Li, H.-J. Lü, J. Yang, Y.-S. Yang, Y.-H. Yang, Y.-Z. Meng, J.-H. Zou, H.-Y. Ye, X.-G. Wang, J.-R. Mao, X.-H. Zhao, J.-M. Bai, A. J. Castro-Tirado, Y.-D. Hu, Z.-G. Dai, E.-W. Liang and B. Zhang, 26 July 2021, Nature Astronomy. DOI: 10.1038/s41550-021-01395-z
“Discovery and confirmation of the shortest gamma-ray burst from a collapsar” by Tomás Ahumada, Leo P. Singer, Shreya Anand, Michael W. Coughlin, Mansi M. Kasliwal, Geoffrey Ryan, Igor Andreoni, S. Bradley Cenko, Christoffer Fremling, Harsh Kumar, Peter T. H. Pang, Eric Burns, Virginia Cunningham, Simone Dichiara, Tim Dietrich, Dmitry S. Svinkin, Mouza Almualla, Alberto J. Castro-Tirado, Kishalay De, Rachel Dunwoody, Pradip Gatkine, Erica Hammerstein, Shabnam Iyyani, Joseph Mangan, Dan Perley, Sonalika Purkayastha, Eric Bellm, Varun Bhalerao, Bryce Bolin, Mattia Bulla, Christopher Cannella, Poonam Chandra, Dmitry A. Duev, Dmitry Frederiks, Avishay Gal-Yam, Matthew Graham, Anna Y. Q. Ho, Kevin Hurley, Viraj Karambelkar, Erik C. Kool, S. R. Kulkarni, Ashish Mahabal, Frank Masci, Sheila McBreen, Shashi B. Pandey, Simeon Reusch, Anna Ridnaia, Philippe Rosnet, Benjamin Rusholme, Ana Sagués Carracedo, Roger Smith, Maayane Soumagnac, Robert Stein, Eleonora Troja, Anastasia Tsvetkova, Richard Walters and Azamat F. Valeev, 26 July 2021, Nature Astronomy. DOI: 10.1038/s41550-021-01428-7
The Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope is an astrophysics and particle physics partnership managed by NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. Fermi was developed in collaboration with the U.S. Department of Energy, with important contributions from academic institutions and partners in France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Sweden, and the United States.
The Mysterious Ancient Etruscan Monuments of Selva di Malano
The Mysterious Ancient Etruscan Monuments of Selva di Malano
Selva di Malano, which may be translated to mean ‘Forest of Malano,’ is an archaeological site located in Viterbo, in the central Italian region of Lazio. The site is known for its carved stone monuments, a number of which have been interpreted to be altars. It is believed that these altars date to the time of the Etruscans, though some of the site’s monuments are thought to be from the Roman period.
There is evidence that some of the Etruscan monuments were reused by the Romans for funerary purposes. It has been suggested that the monuments at Selva di Malano, as well as other Etruscan monuments in the area, played a part in the creation of the 16 th century Sacro Bosso (‘Sacred Grove’), located in nearby town of Bomarzo.
The Malano Jungle
Selva di Malano is a wooded area located between the municipalities of Soriano nel Cimino and Bomarzo. The forest is situated in the foothills of the Cimini Mountains, in the Vezza River Valley, and about 4 km (2.5 miles) to the west of the Tiber River . In terms of geology, the Selva di Malano “borders a long, exposed outcrop of quartzolatitic ignimbrite from the Cimini complex.” In other words, this is an area that has access to volcanic rock suitable for construction purposes. And there is evidence that the Romans carried out quarrying activities within the Selva di Malano.
The exploitation of this natural resource in the Selva di Malano, however, predates the Romans, as is evidenced by the monuments in the forest. Before the hegemony of Rome in Italy, the central part of the peninsula was dominated by the Etruscans. At the peak, during the 6 th century BC, the Etruscan civilization stretched as far north as the Po River valley and as far south as Campania. Additionally, by this time, the Etruscans had developed into three confederacies consisting of 36 cities. Central Italy, however, remained the heartland of the Etruscan civilization. This region, known as Etruria, corresponds roughly to modern day Tuscany, Lazio, and Umbria.
The Etruscans: The People and Culture That Influenced Rome
The origin of the Etruscans has been debated since antiquity. Some have argued that they were an indigenous people of Italy, while others claim that they came from outside Europe, perhaps from Lydia, or from the Greek island of Lemnos. Though this debate continues even today, it is clear that the Etruscan civilization had a huge impact on Europe and the Mediterranean world, as a result of their influence on the Romans.
The Etruscans made a big contribution to Roman culture, as Rome was once situated within Etruscan territory. Moreover, there is substantial evidence that during the early part of Rome’s history, the city was dominated by the Etruscans. In fact, it was only in 396 BC when the Etruscan city of Veii was sacked by the Romans.
One of the important sources for our understanding of the Etruscan civilization are ancient texts. It may be pointed out, however, that these works were written by Greek and Roman authors, rather than the Etruscans themselves. In addition to these texts, archaeological work has also helped to shed light on this ancient civilization. Nevertheless, archaeology its own limitations. Very few preserved Etruscan constructions have survived, as the Romans who succeeded them built over their settlements.
On the other hand, archaeologists have discovered numerous Etruscan necropolises in the areas where they once inhabited. Amongst the most famous of these are the necropolises of Cerveteri and Tarquinia, which have been designated as World Heritage Sites . The tombs and grave goods unearthed at these necropolises offer us a glimpse into the world of the Etruscans, especially their artistic achievements.
The Notable Etruscan Monuments of the Selva di Malano
Although Selva di Malano is an Etruscan site, it is not considered to be a necropolis since the original Etruscan monuments are not believed to have had a funerary purpose. Neither are the monuments that are remnants of a lost Etruscan settlement. Instead, the site is thought to have been a place where ritual ceremonies were carried out. Some have even speculated that sacrifices to the gods were performed by the Etruscans in the forest. Therefore, a number of monuments in the Selva di Malano have been interpreted as being ‘altars,’ or ‘sacrificial altars’.
Sasso del Predicatore or ‘Stone of the Preacher’ in the Selva di Malano.
Amongst the most notable monuments in the Selva di Malano are the two so-called Sasso del Predicatore (‘Stone of the Preacher’). The monuments were given this name due to their resemblance to pulpits. Both monuments are quite similar, consisting of an ovoid boulder with an altar on its flattened top. A flight of stairs is carved into the boulder, which allows access to its top. On the top of the first Sasso del Predicatore are the remains of what may have been a small altar. The top of the second Sasso del Predicatore , on the other hand, was modelled into a cube-like structure, which is still visible today.
The actual function of these two monuments is unclear, though it is quite unlikely that the Etruscans used them for preaching. It has been suggested that the monuments were used for haruspicy, a form of divination involving the inspection sacrificed animal entrails. Alternatively, it has been speculated that the two monuments were used for augury, specifically the interpretation of omens based on the flight of birds, or that they were used for astronomical observations .
Incidentally, there is another Etruscan monument not far from the Selva di Malano that resembles the Sasso di Predicatore . Tacchiolo, near Bomarzo, is the location of the so-called Piramide Etrusca di Bomarzo (‘Etruscan Pyramid of Bomarzo’). In spite of its name, the monument bears more resemblance to the Etruscan altars in the Selva di Malano. Like the Sasso del Perdicatore , steps were cut into the rock. The first flight of stairs leads to a pair of intermediate altars. Beyond the altars is another flight of stairs, which leads to the top of the rock, where there seems to have been another altar.
Piramide Etrusca di Bomarzo or the ‘Etruscan Pyramid of Bomarzo.’
Within the Selva di Malano, the second Sasso del Predicatore is not the only monument in the area with a cubic structure. Not far from the first Sasso del Predicatore is another cubic monument called the Ara Cubica (‘Cubic Altar’). Unlike the two monuments mentioned previously, the Ara Cubica is thought to have been created during the Roman period, and that it served as a sepulchral memorial stone. The problem with these three monuments, however, is the fact that there are no identifying or epigraphic marks on them. This means that their date of creation and their purpose are still nothing more than speculations. Nevertheless, one cannot help but marvel at the ability of the Etruscans and Romans to carve such perfectly shaped cubes out of rocks.
Etruscan Sasso del Predicatore rock cube in the Selva di Malano, Italy.
At the bottom of a steep tufo (or volcanic tuff) cliff in the Selva di Malano are three rock-cut tombs, which are also believed to have been created during the Roman period. The tombs are known as tombe a dado in Italian, which roughly translates to mean ‘dice tombs.’ They are believed to have been made during the Late Republican or Early Imperial period, based on the observation that they possess both Roman and Etruscan characteristics. One of the tombs is surmounted by a low relief pediment and entablature, which are supported by five fictive Doric columns in sunken relief. As these features were carved into the rock, it looks as though the monument is emerging from the rock.
Etruscan tombe a dado or “dice tombs” in the Salvo di Malano.
Another tomb has the inscription “Heros V.A. XXV”, above a niche, indicating that this was the tomb of a 25-year-old slave with the Hellenized name of Heros. Interestingly, a Benedictine abbey called San Nicolao was built on the top of the cliff much later. Today, however, the abbey lies in ruins.
Epigraphic marks and artistic features allow us to attain a better understanding of the monuments, as seen in the case of the tombe a dado . Another monument where inscriptions have been found is the so-called Coelius Altar, known also as the Coelius Tomb or the Coelius Monument. This monument is believed to have originally been made by the Etruscans. Later on, however, it was reused by the Romans. The inscription on this monument reads “D. Coelius D. L. Alexander / Quintia P. L. Hilara”, which means “Decimus Coelius Alexander, freedman of Decimus and Quintia Hilara freedwoman of Publius.” In addition to this inscription, a small modification was made to the original monument, in order to make it suitable for its new purpose. Two niches were carved on the top of the Coelius Altar. These were meant to hold the ashes of Coelius and Quintia.
Connections Between Selva di Malano and the Parco dei Mostri
The monuments in the Selva di Malano may be regarded as relics of a lost civilization. Nevertheless, it seems that they were not entirely forgotten by the inhabitants of that region. Similarities have been drawn between these ancient monuments and the Sacro Bosso , a Renaissance garden in nearby Bomarzo. This has led to the suggestion that the garden was partly inspired by the monuments of the Selva di Malano.
The Sacro Bosso is known also as the Parco dei Mostri , or ‘ Park of the Monsters ,’ due to its grotesque sculptures. The garden is located beneath Orsini Castle, and was commissioned in 1552 (based on an inscription in the park) by Pier Francesco Orsini, known also as Vicino Orsini. According to one interpretation, the garden was designed as an expression of grief, and was meant to shock those who visited it. In any case, in order to comprehend the Sacro Bosso , one has to first gain some understanding of its patron.
Pier Francesco Orsini was born in 1523. He was the second son of Duke Gian Corrado Orsini of Bomarzo and Clarice di Franciotto di Monterotondo. When he grew up, Orsini became a condottiere (a mercenary captain) like his father and served under the banner of the Farnese family. In the early 1540s, Orsini married Giulia, the daughter of a fellow condottiere, Galeazzo Farnese. During the 1550s, Orsini was active in the field. He retired from military service around 1560.
It was also around the time of Orsini’s retirement that his wife died. It has been argued, therefore, that the death of Giulia left Orsini inconsolable, and that he created the Sacro Bosso in her memory. An alternative interpretation argues that the garden was Orsini’s pet project. This takes into consideration Orsini’s infidelity and the pride he took in taking nobles and learned men (Orsini himself was an accomplished man of letters) around the garden.
As mentioned earlier, the Sacro Bosso was filled with grotesque sculptures, many of which make a clear reference to classical mythology . These include the Orcus Mouth, Proteus with the weapons of the Orsini family, and a triton in a niche. Other sculptures include a war elephant seizing a Roman legionary in its trunk, a turtle with a winged woman on its back, and a giant tearing its victim apart.
If the inhabitants of the region during the Renaissance had no memory or understanding of the Etruscans, then the monuments of the Selva di Malano would have made no sense to them. In this case, the monuments in the forest and the sculptures in Orsini’s garden would have been similar, in the sense that they are both enigmas that puzzle on-lookers. Moreover, both the ancient monuments and the grotesque sculptures are covered with moss and lichen. In Orsini’s garden it is unclear whether he intended his sculptures to have this look, though one may imagine that he was inspired by the monuments in the forest and to allow nature to add the ‘finishing touches’ to his art pieces.
This could be fodder for moon landing deniers – the Eagle may not have landed a second time. Wait … what? For those who don’t get the reference, on July 20, 1969, Commander Neil Armstrong radioed the following message from the lunar surface: “Houston, Tranquility base here. The Eagle has landed.” That meant the Apollo 11 Lunar Module nicknamed ‘Eagle’ descended successfully. On July 21, Armstrong and Aldrin left the surface of the moon with their cargo of 22 kilograms of lunar rock in the ascent stage of Eagle. After docking and unloading, the Eagle was undocked and it was assumed to have ended a retrograde orbit by plummeting back to the surface for a second, albeit un-eagle-like, landing. Unfortunately, it was not tracked and no one knows where it crashed. Or did it?
Space enthusiast and Eagle researcher James Meador is not affiliated with NASA, but perhaps he should be. He tells Discover magazine he became intrigued with what happened to the Eagle after hearing about NASA’s 2012 mission to map the Moon’s gravitational field using a pair of spacecraft called GRAIL (Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory). They showed that the Moon’s mass is not evenly distributed, which causes tiny variations in its gravitational field that make most lunar orbits unstable in the long term.
Rendering of the Apollo 11 command module Columbia, and the lunar module, Eagle.
In 2012, NASA sent a pair of spacecraft called GRAIL to map the Moon’s gravitational field and this mission eventually created a detailed map of this varying field. Meador decided to use the data to calculate where the Eagle’s impact crater debris might be. This was not an issue with the lunar ascent modules from Apollos 12, 14, 15, 16 and 17 because surface seismometers left by the astronauts recorded their impacts. GRAIL data is available to the public, as is an open-source program called the General Mission Analysis Tool developed by NASA and others to model a spacecraft’s trajectory in any gravitational field.
“The simulations show a periodic variation in eccentricity of the orbit, correlated to the selenographic longitude of the apsidal line. The rate of apsidal precession is correlated to eccentricity. These two factors appear to interact to stabilize the orbit over the long term.”
The model takes into account outside forces such as the gravitational pull of the Earth, the Sun and all the planets except Mercury and calculates how a spacecraft’s orbit changes over time. Meador used the supplied set of starting parameters for the Eagle — the time of jettison, the latitude, longitude and altitude, heading angle and others, and was able to manipulate them to see if they produced different results. Instead, they all came to the same conclusion. (Meador details the research in a pre-print paper.)
“Numerical analysis described here provides evidence that this object might have remained in lunar orbit to the present day.”
In other words, the Eagle HASN’T landed – it may still be in orbit. That means it could be located and observed. The Indian Space Research Organization lost contact with the Chandrayaan-1 lunar orbiter, less than half the size of Eagle, in 2009 and it was found again in 2016 by modeling where it should be and aiming radar at that spot. In 2019, NASA found Apollo 10’s lunar module named Snoopy which had been left behind by the crew during their test flight for Apollo 11. That one left lunar orbit and was found circling the Sun.
Buzz Aldrin getting ready to leave the Moon
So, finding the Eagle is entirely possible. Will it convince deniers that the Moon landing really happened? Probably not. Will Jeff Bezos offer to retrieve the Eagle and bring it back to Earth so Buzz Aldrin can see it? Only if NASA gives him an exclusive contract.
UFO Sighted Over Ecatepec, Mexico ( August 1, 2021 )
UFO Sighted Over Ecatepec, officially Ecatepec de Morelos, a municipality in the State of Mexico on August 1, 2021.
credit :
Eduargo Lugo
Mauricio Escaleij
Pedro Durán Ramírez
UAP ORB Sighted In The Scottish Highlands ( June 6, 2021 )
Amazing UAP ORB sighted in the Scottish Highlands ! The distinct singular UAP ORB phenomenon was captured at Dukes Pass, Aberfoyle in Scotland on the 6th of June 2021.
This most fascinating video footage should be seen in its entirety.
credit : PRET
Cigar-Shaped UFO Sighted From Plane Over Atlantic Ocean ( July 30, 2021 )
Cigar-Shaped UFO Sighted From Plane Over Atlantic Ocean on July 30, 2021 : I present here the cigar-shaped interstellar object : alien spaceship : original and approach.
More evident every day
credit : UFO Sightings Footage
Being That Is Just Legs (No Body) Captured On Camera & UFO Invisible To The Naked Eye (Redux)
First Clip:
This footage just appeared on the internet with no source or location but i liked it and this is why i wanted to show it to you guys. I feel that this footage is 100% real ( not CGI or any other trickery) but what do you guys think?
Second Clip:
This footage was filmed on May 23, 2021 from Taxco a town in the state of Guerrero, Mexico. This object which appears invisible to the naked eye and other recording devices but was only picked up by his night vision camera. The night vision that was used to film this was "Sionyx Aurora Pro" and this enabled him and us to see this object. There is a extinct volcano that is part of the Sierra Madre Occidental mountain range named Cerro Mohinora and this is where this object was filmed hovering over, with the witness recording from his vantage point we get a good view from where he filmed and we can see that there is nothing there.... The witness stated the following "I took this video on may 23, 2021 in Taxco Guerrero around midnight from a well-known hotel next to the magic town of Taxco, watching the song appreciate some lights on the left side of the town which are only perceptible through the night vision of a camera with Sionyx aurora pro."
NASA is Going Ahead With a Hopping Lander to Explore the Lunar Surface
NASA is Going Ahead With a Hopping Lander to Explore the Lunar Surface
Methods of movement for robotic explorers of other worlds have been as varied as the worlds themselves. Some missions have been simple landers, some rovers, and now there’s even been a helicopter flight on Mars. But there is an unexplored hybrid mode of movement that will soon be coming to a Moon near you – hopping. NASA just granted an additional $41.6 million to support development of a hopping lunar lander that will explore the inside of craters that are permanently in shadow.
The mission, known as Micro-Nova, was granted as part of NASA’s $370 million “Tipping Point” contract for technologies that are developing milestone-based new technologies. The $41.6 million was awarded to Intuitive Machines, a Texas-based company that specializes in developing autonomous systems for drones and other exploration technologies. To be clear – the “hopping” the Micro-Nova will do is actually a control flight using thrusters rather than the more biological form of hopping that insects do on Earth. The company won’t be working alone on the project – they recruited scientists from Arizona State University’s School of Earth and Space Exploration.
Intuitive Machines video discussing the Micro-Nova HopperCredit – Intuitive Machines YouTube Channel
Those specialists will help to define what Micro-Nova will carry as part of its 1 kg payload. Most likely it will involve cameras to peer into areas that no person has ever seen before. The reason Micro-Nova uses its unique mobility technique is to peer into “permanently shaded regions” (PSRs) of the moon. Rovers would be unable to descend into the craters, and helicopters wouldn’t work with the moon’s lack of atmosphere. So a hopper is the best bet to reach these difficult environments.
They are not just difficult because they are hard to reach – they are also hard to observe and extraordinarily cold. Even once Micro-Nova is in the crater, it will still only be able to take full color spectra images of its immediate surroundings, but it should be able to take black-and-white images of a wider swath of the whole crater. Any information it is able to gather is better than the complete lack available right now at least.
Conceptual illustration of permanently shadowed, shallow icy craters near the lunar south pole. Credit: UCLA/NASA
Cold is a completely separate problem, with temperatures in these permanently dark areas dipping to 40°-80° Kelvin (-388° to -316° F). Most electronics will not function at those temperatures, and even the materials themselves would fail if they were not especially designed to withstand them.
That is a lot to expect from a hopper that measures only 76.2 centimeters on a side. But with the moon’s miniscule gravity and the hopper’s impressive leaping ability, it should be able to achieve its mission when it is dropped off by a Nova-C lander near the lunar south pole in December 2022.
Rood pigment in Spaanse grot blijkt aangebracht door Neanderthalers, ruim 60.000 jaar geleden
Neanderthalers werden lange tijd gezien als onnozel, maar volgens een gisteren gepubliceerde studie brachten ze meer dan 60.000 jaar geleden rood okerpigment aan op stalagmieten in een Spaanse grot in Malaga.
In 2018 verscheen al een onderzoek in Science waarin het rode okerpigment, gevonden op stalagmieten in Cueva de Ardales, werd bestempeld als werk van Neanderthalers. Sindsdien houdt het de wereld van de archeologie die zich verdiept in de oude tijd flink bezig.
In het onderzoek van drie jaar geleden werd geschreven dat de ‘kunst’ minstens 64.800 jaar oud is, maar de bevinding werd controversieel gevonden. “Wetenschappers zeiden dat de pigmenten wellicht een natuurlijke oorzaak hadden”, vertelt Fransisco d’Errico, hoogleraar aan de universiteit van Bordeaux en co-auteur van een nieuw onderzoek dat verscheen in het academische tijdschrift Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).
Een nieuwe analyse toont aan dat de samenstelling van de pigmenten niet consistent genoeg was voor natuurlijke processen. De rode kleur zou aangebracht zijn door middel van spatten en blazen. Ook komt de textuur van het pigment niet overeen met monsters uit grotten, wat suggereert dat ze van een externe bron kwamen.
Het onderzoek laat zien dat de pigmenten op verschillende tijdstippen werden aangebracht, waar soms wel 10.000 jaar tussen zat. Volgens d’Errico ondersteunt dit de hypothese dat Neanderthalers gedurende duizenden jaren verschillende keren de grot met pigment hebben gemarkeerd. Het onderzoek stelt dat het pigment geen uiting van kunst is, maar eerder een manier waarop Neanderthalers de betekenis van een ruimte aangaven.
Toenemend bewijs
Deze nieuwe bevindingen dragen volgens het onderzoek bij aan het toenemende bewijs dat Neanderthalers, die zo'n 40.000 jaar geleden uitstierven, niet zulke ‘lompe verwanten’ van de homo sapiens waren als lange tijd werd gedacht. Het pigment in de grot speelde volgens de onderzoekers ‘een fundamentele rol in de symboliek voor Neanderthalers’, maar wat die symbolen precies betekenden blijft, ook na dit onderzoek, voorlopig een mysterie.
Photograph courtesy of Michigan Chapter of the Mutual UFO Network
What am I looking at?
Nobody really knows. Unofficially, it’s called Patty’s Triangle because a woman named Patty Blackburn caught it on camera on June 14, 2006, near Lansing. In 24 seconds of video, Patty captured an unexplainable triangular configuration of lights that jerked around the sky. Maybe it’s a military aircraft that nobody’s seen before, or maybe it’s extraterrestrial beings from galaxies far, far away accidentally giving Earthlings a glimpse of themselves while surveilling humankind. Those, it seems, are the two most likely options to longtime aficionados of unidentified flying objects or, as the U.S. government has rebranded them, “unidentified aerial phenomena.”
Why are you showing me this particular blur?
Mostly because, as obscured and fuzzy as it is, it’s the best available image of a UFO from a Michigan sighting. Hundreds of sightings are reported each year to the Michigan chapter of the Mutual UFO Network (MUFON), but the vast majority are resolved as something of clearly human origin. Patty’s Triangle is among the few that remain unexplained, says Michigan MUFON State Director Bill Konkolesky.
OK, but why should I care about something someone saw 15 years ago?
Because UFOs, once relegated to the province of crackpots, are having a big moment. The federal government, partly prompted by videos shot by U.S. Navy sailors of airborne objects moving in erratic manners that defy the understandings of modern physics, even released a report in June from the Defense Department’s Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force that can be summed up thus:That is, no evidence that E.T. is phoning home but no earthly ideas, either. Of 144 sightings involving military aviators, the task force was able to explain just one — it was a deflatingballoon. The other 143 remain a mystery. The feds have been taking the matter seriously for more than a decade now. Then-Sen. Harry Reid, a Nevada Democrat, secured $22 million for UFO research in 2007, and more recently Sen. Marco Rubio, a Florida Republican, told 60 Minutes this spring that he wants answers, too. Last year, former CIA Director John Brennan told a podcaster these incidents “could involve some type of activity that some might say constitutes a different form of life.” And former President Barack Obama sent speculation into hyperdrive by telling TV’s James Corden recently there are “objects in the skies that we don’t know exactly what they are.”
Whoa! Obama believes in little green men?
Not exactly. You don’t have to think a slow-moving alien invasion is underway to accept that there’s weird stuff in the air that defies explanation. But many avid ufologists — yep, that’s a legit word — reason that astronomers claim there are possibly millions of inhabitable planets and moons in the Milky Way or other galaxies. “If life happened somewhere else and they’re even just a couple hundred years more advanced than we are, they probably have the ability to visit us,” says Konkolesky, who notes MUFON officially has no position on the existence of extraterrestrial sentient life. Either way, Konkolesky says interest from credible leaders makes the topic “a lot easier to talk about now. Some neighbors and family members who used to treat it with a giggle now ask with sincere interest. It takes a very short time, when you’re a dedicated, sincere UFO investigator, to conclude something really unusual and unexplainable is happening.”
What’s this Konkolesky guy’s deal, anyway?
He’s a 50-year-old father of two who works in the Academic Support Center at Oakland Community College and found a kinship when he discovered MUFON.He’salso a Michigan native who says that as a high school senior in February 1989, he and some buddies saw a blue football-shaped, car-sized ball of light the height of two telephone poles arching over their Chevette. Then it morphed into a display of white lights that “ping-ponged all over the sky,” followed by a red ball of light the size of a full moon. “We all saw the same thing,” he says. “It took a few years for me to find a group that actually investigates such things.”
Are there lots of UFO sightings in Michigan?
Michigan’s MUFON chapter received 2,789 sightings from 2010 to 2020, of which 80 to 95 percent turned out to have easy, earthly explanations, Konkolesky says. In 2019, for instance, a third of the reports turned out to be sightings of SpaceX’s Starlink satellites, a stream of thousands of machines floating in a line in low-Earth orbit that aims to provide low-cost internet access the world over. There are four still-unexplained sightings that stand out — a 1953 sighting of disc-shaped objects darting across Lake Superior over the Soo Locks; a cluster of sightings in 1966 in which “many hundreds of witnesses” saw UFOs across southeastern Michigan, capped by a claim by a Dexter man of a landing in his backyard; a 1975 incident in which people at four Air Force bases where nuclear weapons were stored around the U.S., including Wurtsmith in Iosco County, saw a white disc descend for a bit before flitting off; and a 1994 sighting outside Grand Rapids that prompted a flood of calls to 911 and front-page coverage in the Detroit newspapers.
What do I do if I see something?
You can call the police, the military, or your shrink, as many people do. Or you can contact Konkolesky via mufon.com. Be aware, though, that Konkolesky offers this caveat: “If they’re saying something landed in their backyard, there’s not a lot we can do for them.”
2 new ways to find aliens, according to a Nobel Prize winner
2 new ways to find aliens, according to a Nobel Prize winner
Physicist Frank Wilczek proposes new methods of searching for extraterrestrial life.
Nobel Prize-winning physicist Frank Wilczek thinks we are not searching for aliens correctly.
Instead of sending out and listening for signals, he proposes two new methods of looking for extraterrestrials.
Spotting anomalies in planet temperature and atmosphere could yield clues of alien life, says the physicist.
For noted theoretical physicist Frank Wilczek, finding aliens is a matter of figuring out what exactly we are looking for. To detect other space civilizations, we need to search for the specific effects they might be having on their worlds, argues the Nobel laureate in a new proposal.
Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Wilczek says that it’s a real challenge to figure out which among the over 4,000 exoplanets that we found so far outside of our solar system might host extraterrestrial life. The classic way of listening for space signals is insufficient and inefficient, says the scientist. What might really help are new developments in exoplanetary astronomy that can allow us to get much more precise information about faraway space objects.
In particular, there are two ways we should focus our attention to turn the odds of finding alien life in our favor, argues the physicist.
1. Atmosphere chemistry
Like we found out with our own effect on the Earth’s atmosphere, making a hole in the ozone layer, the gases around a planet can be impacted by its inhabitants. “Atmospheres are especially significant in the search for alien life,” writes Wilczek “because they might be affected by biological processes, the way that photosynthesis on Earth produces nearly all of our planet’s atmospheric oxygen.”
But while astrobiology can provide invaluable clues, so can looking for the signs of alien technology, which can also be manifested in the atmosphere. An advanced alien civilization might be colonizing other planets, turning their atmospheres to resemble the home planets. This makes sense considering our own plans to terraform other planets like Mars to allow us to breathe there. Elon Musk even wants to nuke the red planet.
The Most Beautiful Equation: How Wilczek Got His Nobel
2. Planet temperatures
Wilczek also floats another idea – what if an alien civilization created a greenhouse effect to raise the temperature of a planet? For example, if extraterrestrials were currently researching Earth, they would likely notice the increased levels of carbon dioxide that are heating up our atmosphere. Similarly, we can looks for such signs around the exoplanets.
An advanced civilization might also be heating up planets to raise their temperatures to uncover resources and make them more habitable. Unfreezing water might be one great reason to turn up the thermostat.
Unusually high temperatures can also be caused by alien manufacturing and the use of artificial energy sources like nuclear fission or fusion, suggests the scientist. Structures like the hypothetical Dyson spheres, which could be used to harvest energy from stars, can be particularly noticeable.
Similarly, there might be instances when our faraway space counterparts would want to cool planets down. Examining temperature anomalies of space bodies might allow us to pinpoint such clues.
Focusing on the temperatures and atmospheres of other planets might be not only a winning strategy but something specifically encouraged by other civilizations who want us to find them. “An alien species that wants to communicate could draw the gaze of exoplanetary astronomers to anomalies in its solar system, effectively using its parent star to focus attention,” expounds the physicist.
Wilczek, who currently teaches at MIT, was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2004 for discovering asymptotic freedom.
You can check out Wilczek’s full article here.
Wilczek: Why ‘Change without Change’ Is One of the Fundamental Principles of the …
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New files suggest that the “Philadelphia Experiment” was real
New files suggest that the “Philadelphia Experiment” was real
In the middle of World War II, “an American battleship put a technology designed by Einstein himself to the test and managed to become invisible and teleport.” This is how the “Philadelphia Experiment” was born.
This is, at least, what some conspiracy theorists say. Here is the true story of the USS Elridge, the ship that “traveled back in time”:
What is popularly known as the Philadelphia Experiment, (or Philadelphia Experiment), alludes to a supposed dark program of the US Navy called Project Rainbow.
Legend has it that the military were testing an electromagnetic field generator with which they were trying to find practical applications to the unified field theory proposed by Albert Einstein.
In one sentence: they wanted to achieve invisibility.
Private technicians who would not know what they were installing would equip two powerful generators, dozens of meters of electrical cable around the hull and other complex electronic devices to the USS Elridge, a 93 meter long battleship.
On July 22, 1943, the first supposed experiment would take place.
“The generators activated an electromagnetic field that made the battleship disappear from view for a few minutes surrounded by a greenish mist.”
“Some sailors complained of severe nausea caused by the test.”
“The equipment was readjusted and the second test took place on October 28. This time, the entire ship completely disappeared and appeared at the navy base in Norfolk , 600 kilometers away and 15 minutes in the past. ”
“He was sighted there during that time. After that he disappeared again in the middle of a blue lightning to return to Philadelphia ”.
Official statements from the navy
As they say, the consequences of this second experiment were so devastating for the crew that the Navy decided to cancel the project.
“Most of the sailors developed schizophrenia and some completely lost their minds.”
“Many were seriously injured when they materialized, and others, less fortunate, fused horribly with the ship’s hull.”
“Some faded days after the experiment and never reappeared.”
This is, broadly speaking, the gruesome story perpetuated by theorists, ufologists, and some science fiction movies. The navy has always denied the existence of the Philadelphia experiment.
In a statement released in November 2000, the Navy Office of Naval Research (ONR) completely denied the existence of any invisibility or teleportation programs, as well as Einstein’s involvement.
But between 1943 and 1944, Einstein worked as a part-time consultant for the navy on theoretical research on explosives and blasting.
Of course, there is no evidence that Einstein has worked on anything related to invisibility or teleportation.
How did the Philadelphia Experiment come to light then?
The answer is through a series of letters sent by Carl Meredith Allen under the pseudonym Carlos Miguel Allende.
Allegedly, Allen was a merchant marine who saw the USS Elridge disappear from his own ship, the SS Andrew Furuseth.
Allen described the alleged teleportation experiment in a correspondence with the writer and ufologist Morris Jessup.
Although the marine never provided any credible proof of what he said, Jessup was fascinated by the story and included it in a book called The Case For The UFO. Continue with more information in the following video:
Godlike Power and Monster Malevolence: Mishipizheu of Lake Superior
Godlike Power and Monster Malevolence: Mishipizheu of Lake Superior
In Gordon Lightfoot’s 1976 song The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald , he figuratively blames the sinking of that ship on the “witch” of November. Folks more familiar with Ojibway mythology might, however, have pointed to Mishipizheu, one of the most important of the underground mythological creatures of the Northeastern and Midwestern North American tribes.
This pictograph of the Great Lynx known as Mishipizheu was created by Ojibway spiritual leaders at Agawa Rock in Lake Superior Provincial Park in Ontario, Canada.
The “Great-Lynx” Mishipizheu blurs the line between god and monster and thus sheds light on what it takes to be one or the other. The Ojibway, an indigenous people from southern Canada and the northern Midwestern United States, believed Mishipizheu was a giant lynx-like creature. An apt description would be that the Mishipizheu was a horned panther covered in copper scales with razor-sharp spikes down its back and a long flexible tail.
According to Ojibway mythology, Mishipizheu lived under the vast waterways of their territory in the Canadian Shield, in and near the Great Lakes. It exercised complete control over the waterways and had a mean-streak which had to be placated with copper or tobacco offerings lest it use its tail to create violent whirlpools or harsh waves to drown the people residing in the area.
On the one hand, we might consider him a god as he exercised supernatural power over a vast area of waterways and accepted tokens or sacrifices for his cooperation with human endeavors. On the other hand, he is primarily a malevolent presence, drowning those who forget their offerings to him, creating tumult capriciously with a whip of his tail, and standing in opposition, in many stories, to the heroic Thunderbird. He was godlike in his power, but monster-like in his malevolence.
The SS. Algoma went down on Lake Superior in 1885. It was the worst loss of life in the history of Lake Superior.
The Malevolent Intentions of Mishipizheu the Underwater Panther
It is no wonder that a malevolent spirit was felt to inhabit Lake Superior. Some people believe Mishipizheu has sunk at least 400 ships on the lake in recorded memory alone, in addition to the Edmund Fitzgerald. Some have even said that the island of Michipicoten, in Ontario (Canada) in the northeastern part of Lake Superior, is the primary abode of Mishipizheu, when he is not swirling through underground tunnels and caverns throughout the region.
The belief of indigenous tribes of the region is that Mishipizheu lives and travels through a vast system of tunnels and caverns underlying the vast waterways of Midwestern United States and Canada, often wreaking havoc on those who sail those waters. But, why?
Mishipizheu guards the vast amount of copper which, to this day, lies within the Great Lakes . Native inhabitants of the Great Lakes region, stretching back to about 7,500 BC, discovered copper that was 99% pure in Lake Superior, in veins or just lying around in nugget form. Initially they used the copper for spear points and tools, but as a larger social organization developed the copper was used for personal ornamentation denoting social standing.
There was only one problem. Lake Superior was not a gentle lake to those extracting the copper, in fact it was quite fierce. The fierceness was attributed to a creature which seemed obviously to be guarding the copper. Hence the existence of Mishipizheu. Indeed, if we dig a little deeper, the belief in this creature points to why monsters were created in the first place. In pre-scientific cultures, folks often attributed evil intentions or ill will to events possessing no evil intentions or ill will.
To this day, in some villages, when someone falls ill a shaman might declare that a personal enemy sent an evil spirit to possess the victim. A person does not just fall ill, someone or something must desire that. Thus it is with the sea and other bodies of water. Unpredictable tragedies occurred and we were quick to attribute the tragedies to an invisible malice or ill will. Anything other than natural causes.
We seem to be wired, for whatever reason, to be super-keen to perceive and attribute malice and malevolence to adverse things that happen to us. It was too difficult for us to believe that things affecting us negatively could just happen. Mishipizheu became the figuration of the malice of the sea, part godlike in his scope, mostly monstrous in his intentions. But, interestingly, we attributed a reason for his malice – his irrational desire to possess all the copper in Lake Superior.
Stormy sky over Lake Superior, the home of Mishipizheu.
The odds are that the origin of the Mishipizheu myth is derived from the destructive power of Lake Superior and other violent waterways of the Canadian Shield and the emotionally painful tragedies caused by the unpredictable harshness of these bodies of water. Mishipizheu became the malicious element causing the lake to harm innocent people. From this initial birth of the monster, various tribes added on stories, which is not uncommon in myth-making. In fact, we can look at Mishipizheu as a good example of the possible evolution of a myth.
Hunting and gathering peoples often have animistic beliefs. Every natural element has a spirit, even stones and streams. Perhaps it was recognized early on that Lake Superior’s was not a gentle spirit. Lake spirits often became personified in world mythology. If you can imagine one being or creature controlling the lake, it is easier to deal with this entity through sacrifice and bargaining.
Once you create a god, spirit or monster that you can appease or cajole, then stories concerning the exploits of this being can be constructed. You can even think of the Greek myths this way. Zeus was once a sky and thunder spirit. Then, through story-telling, he morphed into the leader of a pantheon and a character in a rich mythological tradition.
Some of the stories concerning Mishipizheu even purport that he engaged in acts of benevolence, thus adding to his stature as a god and not solely a monster. In one story Mishipizheu was responsible for the primordial flood. In another story, we learn that swamps and quicksand are due to his slithering on the ground when he chose to take shortcuts from river to river.
In one particular mythological tale, Mishipizheu is referred to as the ancestor of all snakes, due to the belief that he was hit by lightning and shattered into thousands of those creatures. Another story tells of Mishipizheu the trickster. A shaman seeks a powerful medicine from Mishipizheu who happily complies. Unfortunately, the medicine only works for the shaman as he remains healthy while he watches his family and loved ones deteriorate and die around him.
Final Verdict On Mishipizheu: Godly Extortion or Defender of Humanity
So is Mishipizheu more monster than god? What might tip the scales is that he does not engage in acts of benevolence. He is predisposed to cause harm continually and only will desist from this if he receives, basically, extortion money. But gods receive extortion money too, do they not? Did the ancient Greeks not placate Poseidon before sea travel? It seems that the gods like to be appreciated and remembered but are also quick to do good things for good people. They also might need to be coaxed a little into supplying help.
And it is not like the gods are a constant threat which has to be avoided. So the scales would seem to tip more toward monster in this case, yet one interested in mythology might ask whether a primarily malevolent “god” is possible. Or, dare we stretch and say that Mishipizheu was not at all malevolent but merely attempted, as well as he could, to steer humanity away from the world bought through copper, in an attempt to keep humanity living in a land of paradise.
Top image: The malevolent Mishipizheu monster-god of Lake Superior.
The Disc of Sabu: Ancient Egyptian Water Pump or Alien Hyperdrive?
The Disc of Sabu: Ancient Egyptian Water Pump or Alien Hyperdrive?
There is no doubt that the Ancient Egyptian civilization is filled with wonders and mysteries beyond our comprehension. An exceptionally old culture that reaches far back to the early dawn of man’s advancement, Egypt left behind it many man-made wonders. From the enormous pyramids, the giant statues, and the sprawling mortuary temples, their monuments are many and glorious.
While some of these are easy to understand, study, and explain, others remain an absolute mystery. One such enigma is the so-called “Disc of Sabu”, a curious stone object that almost defies all logic. Over the years, many odd theories arose have arisen in an attempt to uncover its true purpose.
The Tomb of Prince Sabu
Anyone visiting the sprawling museum of antiquities in Cairo will be awed by the wealth of Ancient Egyptian treasures contained inside it. From the famed treasures found in the Tomb of Tutankhamun, to the pharaonic statues and well-preserved mummies, this museum is the number one stop for all lovers of this ancient culture. But while you will be dazzled by these popular treasures, one curious item can be easily overlooked. The Disc of Sabu.
This odd item is circular in shape and measures roughly 610 millimeters (24 inches) in diameter and roughly 104 millimeters (4 inches) in height. It was discovered in 1936 by a renowned British Egyptologist, Mr. Walter Bryan Emery, and has been dated to the earliest periods of Ancient Egypt.
Emery devoted his career to excavations in the Nile River valley, and between 1935 and 1939 he conducted numerous surveys and digs in the burial grounds of Saqqara. The resting grounds of many high-status individuals from the early dynastic period, Saqqara is one of the oldest and largest necropolises from Ancient Egypt.
The Necropolis at Saqqara
(Jose Javier Martin Espartosa / CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 )
Of course, digging in Saqqara yielded many important and valuable items, but none so odd as the Disc of Sabu. Emery discovered it while excavating the tomb of Prince Sabu, a First Dynasty governor and the son of the famed Pharaoh Anedjib. The latter was the fifth ruler of the First Dynasty, and succeeded the powerful Pharaoh Den.
Sadly, little is known of Anedjib’s son, Prince Sabu. He did not succeed his father on the throne, but still received an honorable burial at Saqqara. History does not record a lot of details about the dynastic relations in the First Dynasty, so we may never know of Sabu’s fate, his exact role in the court, or the political events of that time. Emery writes that Sabu was likely a high official and an administrator of a province, both during the reigns of Pharaoh Den (likely his grandfather), and his father Anedjib.
The Mysteries Beneath the Sands of Saqqara
The Mastaba (tomb) of Prince Sabu was discovered on the very edge of the plateau in the northern part of Saqqara. It was situated roughly 1.7 kilometers (1.1 miles) north of the iconic Stepped Pyramid of Djoser . Designated as “Tomb 3111”, it was excavated by Emery on January 10th, 1936.
The tomb consisted of seven funerary chambers, each strewn with assorted grave goods. The largest room held the body of Prince Sabu, which was accompanied by many funerary items. Most of these were nothing out of the ordinary - animal bones, flint implements, pottery vessels, ivory items, stone bowls. But one item stood out like a sore thumb: Emery discovered a curious disc, broken into numerous pieces.
Once painstakingly re-assembled, the Disc of Sabu intrigued many leading Egyptologists. The disc-shaped object resembles a round-bottomed bowl and has three extremely thinly carved, curving lobes at roughly 120 degree intervals around the bowl’s periphery. These lobes are separated from the rim by three biconvex holes.
In the center of the disc is a thin tube, roughly 10 centimeters in diameter. The object is constructed of metasiltstone, elsewhere referred to as schist. This is a porous, fragile rock that would be extremely difficult to carve - especially in such delicate detail.
Schist is comprised of coarse grains and characterized by elongated minerals in marked layers. It has the propensity to flake when worked, and can be crushed very easily when tools are applied to it. So here we have our first mystery: how was the disc carved in such fine detail?
When asking this question, we need to consider the age of the disc. Prince Sabu’s tomb is dated to circa 3,000 BC, making the disc at least 5,000 years old! It is believed that the tools used back then were made of stone and copper, which would make fine craftsmanship quite challenging, if not impossible, especially on such a fragile material as schist stone. Somehow, the Disc of Sabu seems out of place in a tomb of a First Dynasty noble.
An Ancient Egyptian Puzzle
The next mystery is the purpose of this object. Over the years, many convincing theories surfaced. Almost immediately following its discovery, the disc was “dismissed” as being a “vase” or “incense burner” , or simply a trivial decorative or ceremonial item. But many believe that this is far, far from the truth. One glimpse and just the basic knowledge of mechanics and engineering offers a wholly different interpretation – this disc could be a part of a mechanism.
There are marked similarities between the disc and a modern pump impeller
One resourceful amateur historian may have solved the mystery. Armed with a 3D printer, this person created an accurate replica of the disc of Sabu in an attempt to prove his own theory: the disc was an ancient “impeller”, a part of a centrifugal pump. When placed in a housing and propelled at high speed via the small shaft at its center, the disc was extremely efficient at displacing water.
Furthermore, when propelled without a housing to direct the displaced water, the disc creates a powerful vortex. Observing these recorded experiments makes one thing clear: the curiously folded lobes and a slightly concave shape of the disc are there for a purpose. Thanks to the intricately carved details, the disc is able to displace water with ease, and is seemingly a crucial component of a water pump mechanism.
One fact supports this theory: Ancient Egypt depended on irrigation. Later in their history they perfected water management through basin irrigation, a process that allowed them to control the rise and fall of the river. Thus they managed to maximize their crops and boost their agricultural capabilities. So, why should it be odd to consider that they made attempts at creating an advanced design that would help them irrigate land quickly and efficiently?
An even older clay object dated to the Predynastic Naqada II period (3650 - 3300 BC) is oddly similar to the disc of Sabu. This object shows three “snakes” leaping up from the center of a disc that looks extremely similar to the Sabu disc, complete with the central shaft and the three biconvex holes. Could this clay object represent three water spouts being propelled from the disc? It seems very likely.
Proof of Ancient Astronauts?
But schist does not seem a strong enough material for a pumping mechanism. This suggests something else: were craftsmen from the First Dynasty of Egypt attempting to recreate an older object using the tools and materials available to them, an object they perhaps did not completely understand?
Many theories suggest that the disc of Sabu is just a schist stone replica of an original item made from metal. It is even suggested that the object was discovered amongst the remnants of an older, more advanced civilization, one that preceded the earliest history of Ancient Egypt.
The renowned Swiss author, Erich Von Däniken , is one of the leading proponents of the theory that extraterrestrials or superior, advanced civilizations influenced early humans. He suggests that the Disc of Sabu was an Egyptian stone copy of an internal component from an extraterrestrial ship’s hyperdrive, or more simply a stone model of a flying saucer . Others likened the disc to the advanced light-rimmed flywheels that were developed in the 1970’s by Lockheed missile engineers, and there are indeed plenty of similarities.
Does the Disc suggest alien contact with Ancient Egypt?
Some however have proposed a much simpler role for the disc. They state that the three lobes were used to hold strands of silk or rope: when the disc was spun, it would weave the three strands into one, creating twine and thicker ropes. This theory is often dismissed as simply too straightforward: the Egyptians would not go to such extreme lengths to create the disc just to weave fibers when other methods were available quite early on.
There are other theories, some more extreme than the others. One French author suggests that the Disc of Sabu is just one of many that were an integral part of an early “factory”. This complex theory explains how the Ancient Egyptians manufactured Sodium Carbonate within pyramids using advanced systems and technologies.
As can be seen, a lot of proposals simply swerve into the realms of the impossible, and seem more based on wish-fulfilment than sound archaeology. Ancient hyperdrives, factory complexes, steering wheels, and other unlikely suggestions are simply impossible to prove.
Certainly More than a Vase
On the other hand, mainstream science has a suspicious tendency to dismiss every suggestion that the disc is part of a mechanism. Mainstream archaeology considers the disc to be an incense burner, or – bluntly – a vase.
Going to such extreme lengths to polish and shape the super-delicate schist stone into such a complex form simply to create a “vase” seems, on the face of it, unlikely. Even the process used to create the disc is difficult to explain, given its age. But, if we accept the fact that this is something craftsmen of the First Dynasty were able to create with the tools at their disposal, the question still remains: for what purpose? It seems clear that the disc of Sabu was part of something complex.
Schist was a popular choice for funerary carvings through Ancient Egypt
Walter Bryan Emery made note of his discovery in his Great Tombs of the First Dynasty , mentioning it as simply “a container in the form of a schist bowl.” He later mentioned it again in his work Archaic Egypt , where he described it as a “cachivache” – a knick-knack or trinket, a gadget.
However, several sources point to the fact that he was well aware of the problem it posed in scientific circles, where it was described “as a small hole that threatens to become a much larger one”. It is perhaps, for this reason, that the Disc of Sabu is often overlooked in scholarly literature. In fact, little is known at all about Prince Sabu, his tomb, or his peculiar disc.
Ancient Doesn’t Mean Primitive
In the end, it remains entirely possible that the Disc of Sabu was a crucial part of a more advanced design, one likened to a water pump. Considering the fact that the experiments using a disc replica were highly successful in that role, it could certainly function as one.
Ancient Egypt was highly dependent on irrigation to survive in the desert
With an adequate housing, water outlet, and means of propulsion, the Disc of Sabu could have easily displaced large amounts of water, quickly and efficiently. And given the need for irrigation in Ancient Egypt , the pieces of the puzzle quickly seem to fall into place. Given how unusual the design of the disc is, and given how useful a pump of this kind would be, it seems beyond coincidence that the disc would not be used for that purpose.
Perhaps it is time that we looked at the early Egyptians from a different perspective. Even though Prince Sabu lived 5,000 years before present, it doesn’t mean he and his contemporaries weren’t able to observe the world around them and come up with logical and ingenious solutions to the problems of their time. Even so, plenty of aspects about this disc cannot be easily explained, which leaves a lot of questions unanswered.
Neanderthals Hunted with Leaf-Shaped Spears, Archaeologists Say
Neanderthals Hunted with Leaf-Shaped Spears, Archaeologists Say
Archaeologists say they have found a 65,000-year-old leaf point in a cave in the Swabian Jura, Germany.
The 65,000-year-old leaf point from Hohle Fels Cave, Germany.
Image credit: University of Tübingen.
“This discovery represents the first time a leaf point has been recovered from a modern excavation, allowing us to study the fresh find with state-of-the-art methods,” said Professor Nicholas Conard, a researcher at the University of Tübingen and the Senckenberg Centre for Human Evolution and Palaeoenvironment.
“The last time archaeologists in the region recovered such artifacts was in 1936.”
The leaf point was found at the archaeological site of Hohle Fels, a cave in the Swabian Jura of Germany.
The artifact is 7.6 cm (3 inches) long, 4.1 cm (1.6 inches) wide, 0.9 cm (0.35 inches) thick, and has a mass of 28 grams.
“Our results document how the tool was made, used and why it was discarded,” Professor Conard said.
“Thanks to a series of four ESR-dates the find is securely dated to over 65,000 years ago.”
“Until now finds of leaf points were interpreted as belonging to the period between 45,000 and 55,000 years ago — the last cultural phase of Neanderthals in Central Europe,” he added.
“The new results demonstrate that our assumptions about the dating of the cultural groups of the late Neanderthals were wrong and need revision.”
Using detailed microscopic analyses, the researchers found that the leaf point was mounted on a wooden shaft.
“Damage to the tip indicates that the artifact was used as a hafted spear point, and that the spear was likely thrust into prey rather than being thrown,” they said.
“Neanderthals used plant-based glue and bindings made from plant fibers, sinew, or leather, to secure the leaf point to the spear.”
“They clearly used the spear for hunting. While they re-sharpened the tool it broke, leading to its discard.”
“Neanderthals were expert stone knappers and knew exactly how to make and use complex technologies combining multiple parts and materials to produce and maintain deadly weapons,” said Dr. Veerle Rots, a researcher at the University of Liège.
“Homo heidelbergensis used sharpened wooden spears for hunting too, but their spears lacked mounted stone points like those used by Neanderthals.”
Nicholas J. Conard & Alexander Janas. Ausgrabungen im Hohle Fels: Fundschichten aus dem Mittelpaläolithikum und Neues zur Jagdtechnik der Neandertaler. Archäologische Ausgrabungen in Baden-Württemberg 2020: 60-65
Veerle Rots et al. 2021. A Leaf Point Documents Hunting with Spears in the Middle Paleolithic at Hohle Fels, Germany / Eine Blattspitze belegt die Jagd mit Speeren im Mittelpaläolithikum am Hohle Fels, Deutschland. Mitteilungen der Gesellschaft für Urgeschichte 30: 1-28
Look up at the stars tonight. Those twinkling diamonds are several thousand light-years away. Our planet is just a grain of sand on a virtually endless beach, a small dot in agigantic galaxy. Is it the only dot with life on it? That’s a question humankind has been asking ever since we started to understand the basics of astronomy thousands of years ago. Now, we’re closer than ever to finding the answer, as an unprecedented crush of ultrapowerful telescopes and interplanetary missions try to trace where else life might possibly exist. Today’s Daily Dose travels to the far reaches of the universe on that search, taking you through the latest breakthroughs and the people behind them. Curious? You should be.
COME OUT, COME OUT WHEREVER YOU ARE
Age-Old Search
Some 2,500 years ago, two Greek philosophers looked to the sky and wondered if humans were alone in the universe. Today, many scientists believe the question is a no-brainer. For decades, one of the fundamental laws of physics formed the basis of our understanding of life on Earth. The law of increasing entropy insists that energy tends to dissipate instead of coming together: pour ink in water and watch it diffuse. If that’s true for the universe, then the sublime marriage of millions of cells and molecules for the creation of life on Earth could be a low-probability fluke that needn’t repeat itself. But some researchers now believe that the existence of extraterrestrial life doesn’t necessarily violate that basic law: In fact, they argue, it could be what drives the creation of living beings.
Count the Stars
And then there’s simple math to consider. There are billions of galaxies in the universe, each one home to tens of billions of stars circled by at least a planet each. See where I’m going? From the first astronomer eager to catch audio signals using radio in the early 1900s to the rovers currently exploring Mars, our fascination with outer space has always in part had to do with the hunt for potential neighbors beyond our planet. Sophisticated new tools, including the soon-to-be-deployed largest telescope in history, are capable of exploring the atmosphere of planets trillions of miles away, potentially bringing us within reach of an answer.
Move Over, Mars
While Mars has long been the poster child for out-of-Earth exploration, (it is, after all, the most similar to Earth in many ways), scientists are expanding their horizons. In fact, researchers at Washington State University have already identified more than 20 planets outside our solar system that could sustain life even better than Earth (don’t pack your bags just yet though; they are all more than 100 light-years away). Meanwhile, even as it waits for a robotic rover to deliver Martian samples by the end of the decade, NASA wants to explore one of Jupiter’s moons, Europa. The agency is planning to send a mission to probe Europa’s frozen oceans and volcanoes as early as 2024. Another moon catching everyone’s attention is Titan, Saturn’s largest, where a mission will be launched to analyze liquid methane lakes in 2027.
Not So Fast
But some scientists are urging caution, saying the broadly accepted global guidelines on how to respond to a potential alien encounter are not enough. Physicist Mark Buchanan worries that these new civilizations could be more advanced and powerful than ours. “Most stars in our galaxy are much older than the sun. If civilizations arise fairly frequently on some planets, then there ought to be many civilizations in our galaxy millions of years more advanced than our own,” he wrote in The Washington Post in June. On the opposite side is a slightly more eerie argument: If these super smart aliens wanted to kill us all, they would have already done it.
Wait, Are They Already Here?
What if we’re the aliens on Earth? While a recently declassified report on alleged UFO sightings by U.S. navy pilots raised more questions than it provided answers, some prominent scientists have been positing a much more interesting theory: that life on Earth could have actually originated on Mars, making us, well, Martians. How? Life forms when planets cool down and liquid water eventually emerges. Evidence is increasingly pointing to the fact that Mars formed and cooled down before Earth, and that it had methane (an ingredient for the birth of life). Add that to the theory that various forms of life travel across the universe through asteroids and other debris, and you have a hypothesis more credible than distant sightings by pilots that could be explained in part by optical illusions.
Who Are the Aliens?
Scientists have recently discovered more than 2,000 stars from where Earth would be visible when it passed in front of the sun. That means that aliens with powerful telescopeson planets near those stars could actually be looking at us without visiting us on UFOs. The good news? Hector Socas-Navarro, an astrophysicist at the Institute of Astrophysics of the Canary Islands, says that if there’s life out there, we currently have a good chance of finding it. “The new large telescopes will allow us to scrutinize the chemical composition of many exoplanet atmospheres,” he tells OZY. “With those tools, we could find life elsewhere within the next 10 to 20 years.”
HOW ARE WE FINDING THEM?
Telescopes
From the moment Galileo Galilei, one of modern astronomy’s founding fathers, pointed his telescope upward in the 1600s, the instrument has been central to our understanding of the universe. It helped early scientists study the surface of our moon and discover Saturn’s rings and Jupiter’s moons. Since then, telescopes have evolved in ways the Italian astronomer probably never dreamed of. In 1931, American engineer Karl Jansky’s giant rotating antennas detected the first radio signal from the center of the Milky Way. And more than seven decades later, NASA’s Kepler Space Telescope identified thousands of planets that orbit around stars other than the sun between 2009 and 2018.
Best Bet
While China and the European Space Agency — apart from America — are investing in new rovers to explore Mars’ surface, modern versions of the telescope represent our best shot at discovering the truth about possible extraterrestrial life. China recently unveiled one of the largest single dish observatories in the world, so sensitive that it can detect anything from dead stars to hydrogen in distant galaxies. Meanwhile, NASA is preparing to send up the James Webb Space Telescope this year. This $10 billion observatory will work from space, its state-of-the-art technology allowing it to look through the gas and dust that usually obscure the view for other telescopes.
The Future
Telescopes are poised to become ever more sophisticated, with the ability to provide better images of smaller planets located farther away. The Giant Magellan Telescope in Chile and the European Extremely Large Telescope (brownie points for original naming) are both due to be up and running by 2025. They promise to deliver images so sharp scientists might be able to identify the fine imprint that molecules leave in the atmospheres of other planets, tracking clues to the possibility of life. Another Harvard University-led project will search for possible technologies aliens might have discarded as junk. Meanwhile, other researchers are developing ultrafast light-driven nanocrafts, similar to the ones aliens could have, to launch toward Alpha Centauri, the star system closest to ours (about 25 trillion miles away) that could potentially harvest life. Why is it so important to search for life elsewhere? Astrophysicist Socas-Navarro tells OZY the answer is simple: “All the life that we know descends from one line. Biology has only one sample to work with in trying to understand life itself and how it originates. It’s like trying to study medicine in a world with only one person.”
THE NEXT GALILEOS
Yuri Milner
Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson aren’t the only billionaires locked in a space race. Milner, an Israeli Russian businessman and one of the moneybags behind Facebook and Twitter, founded Breakthrough Initiatives in 2015 and has invested more than $200 million in the search for alien life on Jupiter, Saturn and in the clouds over Venus. The businessman, who was named after the Russian astronaut Yuri Gagarin, the first human to venture into space, has always been interested in what is out there. “I think it is only appropriate that we, as a civilization, devote at least some resources to try and ask the biggest existential questions; for example, are we alone in the universe?” he told CTech. But his biggest strength might be his proximity to Russian President Vladimir Putin, who heads a state with one of the world’s most sophisticated space programs at its disposal.
Latinas in Nasa
Latinos represent just 7% of NASA’s workforce, though they constitute 18% of the U.S. population. For Hispanic women, making it to NASA can be as hard as getting to Jupiter. Mexican Ali Guarneros Luna is shattering that glass ceiling, remaking the space agency’s reputation for a new generation. Growing up in Mexico, she read about space missions in an encyclopedia — and was instantly hooked. Then, at the age of 12, she immigrated to California with her mother after an earthquake devastated her native Mexico City in 1985. After high school, she gave up on her college dreams to support her four children. After she finally went back to school and earned two degrees, a professor convinced her to try out for NASA. She now works as part of the Agency’s small satellite technology program, which develops new tools for space missions, and is a top safety expert at the agency. Shooting for the stars has paid off for her.
You
But you don’t need to be a space engineer to satiate your curiosity about possible alien life. All you need is a telescope and a ton of time. NASA is recruiting amateur astronomers keen to observe planets from outside our solar system as they pass in front of the sun. The idea is that mass observation will help build a body of data pointing to the time and frequency at which these planets travel near the sun, allowing more experienced astronomers to know when to point the larger telescopes.
IN POP CULTURE
Fact or Fiction?
If they exist, what do aliens look like? Are they green and cute as in E.T., tall and skinny as in Signs, human-looking like Sally from 3rd Rock From the Sun or perhaps angry and gooey like in Aliens? For decades, popular culture has stepped in where science has been unable to answer questions. Some argue these stories reflect other social fears (think about the many reports of UFO sightings between 1952 and 1969 during the Cold War).
Mirror, Mirror
OK, that’s Hollywood. What do scientists say about the way aliens might actually look? That we should look at evolution, and keep an open mind. They argue that the way we humans look is pretty much a result of necessity (two eyes for wide vision, two ears for stereo audio, two legs to stand up and grab things from high up). Each species is different, based on their own evolutionary needs. So aliens can actually look completely different to us. Where we are going wrong is that we are only imagining beings similar to creatures on Earth.
Man on Mars
What if we could combine scientific research with the spectacle of films? A series of cool new documentaries does just that, exploring some of the questions NASA scientists are asking themselves and offering a front-row seat to their findings. Among them is Nat Geo’s Mars, a documentary-style fiction series that takes viewers on a trip over the next few decades as humans settle on Mars. Spoiler alert: It will take more than finding a new habitable planet to rid humanity of its problems.
Motion activated security camera (Uniden-AppCam) mounted on shed activated and sent alert to phone. On inspection it shows a clear UFO Fastwalker.
UFO shows up in only one single frame This single image of a UFO proves that crafts equipped with advanced technology flying through the sky that are not visible to the naked eye due to their enormous speed.
Navy Photographer captured flying saucer on Catalina Island, California 1966
Navy Photographer captured flying saucer on Catalina Island, California 1966
Navy Photographer Lee Hansen captured this footage on Catalina Island, California, April 15th 1966 at 9.45 am.
A Navy Photographer Lee Hansen captures this footage of this object with no apparent flight control surfaces or engine On this „clear, clear day“ he describes the object as „silver with a shadow underneath as though as metallic“ and „maybe 20 meters across“ – quote end.
X-RAY ECHOES BEHIND BLACK HOLES PROVIDE “EXTREME” PROOF EINSTEIN WAS RIGHT
X-RAY ECHOES BEHIND BLACK HOLES PROVIDE “EXTREME” PROOF EINSTEIN WAS RIGHT
The massive gravity of a black hole actually bent X-ray echoes from around its back.
WHEN SCIENTISTS FIRST TURNED the X-Ray space telescopes NuSTAR and XMM-Newton toward a supermassive black hole in the center of a distant galaxy with the memorable name of IZwicky1, they knew their mission:
How could it be that some of nature’s darkest forces are also some of its brightest? Black holes are called black holes for a reason. Yet, the hot gasses that fall into black holes become superheated and glow intensely.
This was a question the international team aimed to solve. Instead, they wound up confirming Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity in one of its most extreme tests to date.
Through a serendipitous observation of exceptionally bright X-ray flares around the supermassive black hole and careful analysis of the flare’s “echoes,” researchers were able to prove that what they were actually seeing were X-ray reflections from behind the black hole.
The black hole’s massive gravity was bending the X-ray light around the corner, so to speak.
“It’s really further confirmation that this light bending is still working as Einstein predicted it, even when the gravity gets really strong and really close to a black hole,” Dan Wilkins tells Inverse. Wilkins is the paper’s first author and a Stanford University research scientist.
“It’s confirming what we already knew,” he says, “but at a more extreme scale.”
These findings were published Wednesday in the journal Nature.
The theory of general relativity suggests that a massive object can warp space-time around it, creating what we experience as gravity. This facet of the theory has been proven many times, perhaps most famously during a solar eclipse in 1919, when astronomer Arthur Eddington confirmed that the sun’s gravity bent the light from stars — just as Einstein predicted.
“IT’S GRAVITATIONAL LENSING AT ITS MOST EXTREME.”
Astronomers have since used the gravity of distant galaxies to see around them toward even more distant objects, a phenomenon known as “gravitational lensing.”
But this new work takes gravitational lensing to a whole new level, according to Wilkins.
“It’s not just light being reflected a little bit. It’s coming from all the way behind the black hole, being bent all the way around into our line of sight,” he says. “It’s gravitational lensing at its most extreme.”
HOW THEY DID IT
As stellar gas and dust fall into a supermassive black hole, they flatten out and spin around it in a disk, like water going down a drain, Wilkins says. This creates a high-intensity glow in the visual and X-ray parts of the electromagnetic spectrum.
His team was measuring the X-rays when “all of a sudden, it started emitting what we refer to as X-ray flares,” he says. “Suddenly the X-rays got about 2.5 times brighter for a very short period of time.”
ESA graphic describing the phenomenon of X-ray echoes around a supermassive black hole. ESA
The extremely bright flares reflect, or echo, off of the spinning disk of hot gas around the black hole.
Echoes, and the flares that cause them, are known phenomena, but Wilkins says the team began noticing extra echoes they hadn’t anticipated.
“These were the echoes from the backside of the disk,” he says. “The echoes that come off the far side of the disk — the part that is hidden by the shadow of the black hole — actually get bent around the edge of the black hole.”
WHY IT MATTERS — In the big picture, the new findings add one more brick in the column of evidence supporting general relativity. There are also implications for better understanding galaxies, stars, and black holes themselves.
It’s thought that most galaxies contain a supermassive black hole at their center, including our own Milky Way. Better understanding how these supermassive black holes function could help scientists better understand their possible role in galaxy formation, according to Wilkins.
And in the process of verifying the gravitational bending of the X-rays around this particular supermassive black hole, the researchers also developed a new tool to help them study other black holes. Most such objects are too distant to photograph, but Wilkins says they can now use measurements of X-ray echoes as a sort of sonar “to reconstruct that picture, of that map, of the extreme environment outside a black hole.”
WHAT’S NEXT
The immediate next step for Wilkins and other researchers is to refine the new techniques to get better and better measurements of X-ray echoes, as well as a better picture of what the area around a black hole actually looks like.
An artist's simulation of the ATHENA X-ray telescope’s view of the merger of two supermassive black holes. ESA
New X-ray space telescopes, such as the European Space Agency’s Advanced Telescope for High-Energy Astrophysics (ATHENA) — planned for the early 2030s — could be a big help.
“It will be the biggest X-ray telescope we’ve ever launched and having a bigger telescope, we will have a much more detailed view,” Wilkins says. “We will get a clearer and clearer picture of this extreme environment just outside the black hole and find out what is happening to this gas in its final moments before it falls in.”
Abstract:The innermost regions of accretion disks around black holes are strongly irradiated by X-rays that are emitted from a highly variable, compact corona, in the immediate vicinity of the black hole. The X-rays that are seen reflected from the disk, and the time delays, as variations in the X-ray emission echo or ‘reverberate’ off the disk provide a view of the environment just outside the event horizon. I Zwicky 1 (I Zw 1) is a nearby narrow-line Seyfert 1 galaxy. Previous studies of the reverberation of X-rays from its accretion disk revealed that the corona is composed of two components: an extended, slowly varying component extending over the surface of the inner accretion disk, and a collimated core, with luminosity fluctuations propagating upwards from its base, which dominates the more rapid variability. Here we report observations of X-ray flares emitted from around the supermassive black hole in I Zw 1. X-ray reflection from the accretion disk is detected through a relativistically broadened iron K line and Compton hump in the X-ray emission spectrum. Analysis of the X-ray flares reveals short flashes of photons consistent with the re-emergence of emission from behind the black hole. The energy shifts of these photons identify their origins from different parts of the disk. These are photons that reverberate off the far side of the disk, and are bent around the black hole and magnified by the strong gravitational field. Observing photons bent around the black hole confirms a key prediction of general relativity.
Watch NASA's Mars helicopter Ingenuity make its most high-flying journey yet.
In a brand-new video, you can watch Ingenuity make its highest and most complex flight to date, which took the autonomous craft over an area known as Raised Ridges.
During this trip, its 10th flight, Ingenuity covered a distance of 310 feet (95 meters) and soared to a record altitude of 40 feet (12 meters). Combined with the distances traveled throughout all of its 10 flights, Ingenuity has now flown for more than one mile.
This flight, completed on July 24, was the most complex of all Ingenuity flights, according to a NASA statement, and saw the helicopter perform multiple maneuvers while passing through 10 distinct waypoints.
NASA's Ingenuity helicopter during its tenth and so far the most complex flight on July 24. (Image credit: NASA JPL)
As part of this flight, Ingenuity was sent to explore Raised Ridges, a rocky area in Jezero Crater south of the landing site of the agency's Perseverance rover, which carried Ingenuity to the Red Planet, landing on Feb. 18. The visuals obtained during the flight might help guide the rover in a future exploration of the Raised Ridges, which scientists find "intriguing," according to the NASA statement.
Ingenuity, originally designed to perform only four flights, first lifted off in April. Since then, it has been gradually increasing the duration and complexity of its trips. This latest flight took 165.4 seconds, which is nearly as long as the craft's longest flight so far, its ninth flight on July 5, which lasted 166.5 seconds.
Ingenuity is now parked on its seventh Martian airfield as mission scientists continue to examine telemetry and images from the flight.
The Perseverance mission, designed to search for traces of life on the Red Planet and prepare samples of soil for a future return to Earth, lifted off Cape Canaveral exactly one year ago on July 30, 2020.
Follow Tereza Pultarova on Twitter @TerezaPultarova. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook.
Enlarge/ Jeff Bezos holds aviation glasses that belonged to Amelia Earhart at a press conference about his flight on Blue Origin’s New Shepard on July 20, 2021, in Van Horn, Texas.
The US Government Accountability Office (GAO) today rejected Blue Origin's attempt to block the lunar-landing contract that NASA awarded to SpaceX. The GAO also rejected a similar protest filed by Dynetics.
"The cost of SpaceX's bid was about half that of Dynetics, and one-fourth the amount received by Blue Origin," as our coverage at the time said. While budget was apparently the biggest factor, NASA also "praised the [SpaceX] vehicle's innovative design and future-looking technology that might also one day be used on Mars" and cited Starship advantages including "a spacious cabin for astronauts, two airlocks, and ample payload capability to bring large numbers of experiments to the Moon and return samples to Earth."
“NASA did not violate procurement law”
NASA's choice didn't sit well with Blue Origin, which is owned by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. Blue Origin filed a protest to the GAO shortly after, claiming that NASA's process and reasoning for selecting SpaceX were flawed. The GAO announced its decision today, finding that NASA didn't violate any laws or regulations.
"NASA made award to SpaceX for a total evaluated price of $2,941,394,557," the GAO said. "After noting that SpaceX submitted the lowest-priced proposal with the highest rating, and that the offers submitted by Blue Origin and Dynetics were significantly higher in price, NASA also concluded that the agency lacked the necessary funding to make more than one award."
Blue Origin and Dynetics "argued that the agency was required to make multiple awards" because it had previously stated a preference for multiple awards, the GAO said in summarizing the companies' complaints. The protesting companies also "alleged that the agency was required to open discussions, amend, or cancel the announcement when NASA, after the receipt of proposals, determined that it had less funding than it needed to support multiple HLS [Human Landing System] awards," the GAO said. The protesters further claimed that "NASA unreasonably evaluated all three of the proposals" and "improperly waived a mandatory solicitation requirement for SpaceX."
The GAO was not convinced by any of the primary arguments, the agency's announcement said:
In denying the protests, GAO first concluded that NASA did not violate procurement law or regulation when it decided to make only one award. NASA's announcement provided that the number of awards the agency would make was subject to the amount of funding available for the program. In addition, the announcement reserved the right to make multiple awards, a single award, or no award at all. In reaching its award decision, NASA concluded that it only had sufficient funding for one contract award. GAO further concluded there was no requirement for NASA to engage in discussions, amend, or cancel the announcement as a result of the amount of funding available for the program. As a result, GAO denied the protest arguments that NASA acted improperly in making a single award to SpaceX.
GAO next concluded that the evaluation of all three proposals was reasonable, and consistent with applicable procurement law, regulation, and the announcement's terms.
The GAO said it agreed with Blue Origin and Dynetics about one "limited discrepancy in the evaluation" in which "NASA waived a requirement of the announcement for SpaceX" but said that the "protesters could not establish any reasonable possibility" that this created a competitive prejudice.
The GAO announcement was a bit vague, and the agency did not release the full decision because it "may contain proprietary" information. A public version will be issued after the companies are given a chance "to promptly identify information that cannot be publicly released."
Blue Origin still mad, but it’s NASA’s decision
The GAO also said that it "expresses no view as to the merits" of each company's proposal, adding that "judgments about which offeror will most successfully meet the government's needs are reserved for the procuring agencies, subject only to statutory and regulatory requirements."
Blue Origin told CNBC that "there were fundamental issues with NASA's decision, but the GAO wasn't able to address them due to their limited jurisdiction." The company also said it will "continue to advocate for two immediate providers" because NASA's "Human Landing System program needs to have competition now instead of later."
SpaceX CEO Elon Musk responded to the GAO decision on Twitter with a flexed-biceps emoji.
NASA issued a statement saying the GAO "decision enables NASA to award the contract that will ultimately result in the first crewed demonstration landing on the surface of the Moon under NASA's Artemis plan... An uncrewed flight of Artemis I is on track for this year and a crewed Artemis II mission is planned for 2023."
Antarctica may seem like a static environment: a still, white landscape frozen motionlessly into place.
But much more is going on under the ice than we realize – even if you have to travel all the way to space to tell for sure.
Over a decade ago, scientists made just such a discovery, when an analysis of data from NASA's ICESat satellite revealed that variations in ice elevation in West Antarctica reflected a vast mass of subglacial water movement underneath the ice sheet.
Prior to the discovery, it had been thought that hidden meltwater lakes – deeply concealed at the bottom of the ice sheet, where the ice meets the continental bedrock underneath – existed in isolation, cut off from one another.
But in 2007, researchers found that fluctuations in the height of Antarctica's surface ice signified the movement of water flowing between a hidden network of subglacial lakes, which alternately fill and drain before their water escapes to the Southern Ocean.
The new lakes discovered.
(Siegfried et al./NASA Goddard/YouTube)
Now, the ICESat mission's follow-up – ICESat-2, launched in 2018 – is giving scientists an even keener glimpse at this mysterious, deeply buried lake network, while revealing two lakes never before discovered.
"The discovery of these interconnected systems of lakes at the ice-bed interface that are moving water around, with all these impacts on glaciology, microbiology, and oceanography – that was a big discovery from the ICESat mission," says glaciologist Matthew Siegfried from the Colorado School of Mines.
"ICESat-2 is like putting on your glasses after using ICESat, the data are such high precision that we can really start to map out the lake boundaries on the surface."
In a new study, Siegfried and fellow researchers compiled altimetry data from ICESat-2 and the original ICESat mission, along with measurements taken from CryoSat-2, an ice-observing satellite operated by the European Space Agency (ESA).
By combining the datasets – encompassing the period from 2003 to 2020 – the researchers are able to monitor active subglacial lakes at timescales shorter than ICESat-2's repeat cycle (the 91-day gap before it can observe the same region again).
"Surface deformation due to active subglacial lakes filling and draining provides one of the few remotely accessible windows into the evolution of basal water systems; these systems are otherwise hidden beneath up to 4 km [2.5 miles] of ice and remain one of the major physical uncertainties on projections of future ice sheet dynamics," the researchers write in their paper.
"ICESat-2 laser altimetry can not only extend the record of subglacial lake activity but also provides better understanding of hydrological processes by capturing denser and more precise spatial detail."
In addition to giving us a more detailed look at the activity and outlines of known subglacial lakes in Antarctica – of which there are over 130 already documented – the analysis found two anomalies that appear to be hidden lakes, previously undetected.
These potentially active lakes – called Lower Conway Subglacial Lake (LSLC) and Lower Mercer Subglacial Lake (LSLM), lie near previously discovered lakes, and may have been missed by the original ICESat mission, falling within the narrow gaps between its observations.
In this region – underneath the Mercer and Whillans ice streams in West Antarctica – the lake system, which is dominated by two large active subglacial lakes (Conway Subglacial Lake and Mercer Subglacial Lake), appears to be in the midst of its third drainage event since ICESat observations began in 2003.
Just a few weeks ago, one of the same researchers involved here – glaciologist Helen Fricker from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography – co-authored a related study, detailing a dramatic lake drainage event in East Antarctica, where a surface lake on a floating ice shelf vanished in the space of days.
Far below the ice sheet in West Antarctica, the water draining from subglacial lakes is also thought to eventually flow into the ocean, although the concealed escape route is much harder to visualize.
"These are processes that are going on under Antarctica that we wouldn't have a clue about if we didn't have satellite data," Fricker says.
"We've been struggling with getting good predictions about the future of Antarctica, and instruments like ICESat-2 are helping us observe at the process scale."
UFO Sighted In Mammatus Clouds Over Mount Rushmore On Opening Day
Fast moving UFO was sighted in UFO looking Mammatus Clouds Over Mount Rushmore On Opening Day
UFO at approx 10 sec mark
Mammatus is a cellular pattern of pouches hanging underneath the base of a cloud, typically a cumulonimbus raincloud, although they may be attached to other classes of parent clouds. The name mammatus is derived from the Latin mamma.
Mammatus clouds are some of the most unusual and distinctive clouds formations with a series of bulges or pouches emerging from the base of a cloud. The shape of mammatus formations can vary widely; from the classic protruding shape, to a more elongated tube hanging from the cloud above.
Mount Rushmore reopend after wildfires caused the monument to close. 1/04/2021
UFO Sighted Over Vancouver, Canada ( July 28, 2021 )
Amazing UFO was sighted over Vancouver Canada on 28/07/2021. Here I present the original and following with approach and speed reduction.
More evident every day
credit : G.S.J.
UFO Sighted Over Bronx, New York ( August 1, 2021 )
Fast moving UFO was sighted over the Bronx, New York on August 1, 2021
STATEMENT : Bronx New York 8-01-2021 7am
They are everywhere
credit : Christian Acosta
Sphere UFO Sighted Over Mexican Highway ( August 1, 2021 )
Impressive geometrical defined sphere UFO was sighted beside a Mexican Federal Highway on August 1, 2021 : Sphere UFO has a geometrical shape in the three-dimensional space that is the surface
Is it possible there are people out there who may not really be people, after all? How about constructed creatures? I’m talking about things that might be created and grown. It might sound outlandish (in fact, it is outlandish!), but bear with me. One particular story from 1973 comes to mind: the October 1973 Hickson-Parker “alien abduction” affair. The case is made notable by the fact that the creatures the pair encountered were not taken away by the typical large-headed, dwarfish, black-eyed aliens (the Greys). They weren’t even of the benevolent-looking, so-called “Space Brothers” variety of the 1950s. Nope, this particular breed of E.T. was described later by the shocked and undeniably traumatized men as being humanoids, but with faces that appeared to be almost masked, and heads from which three carrot-style aerials protruded. On top of that, they had large crab-like or lobster-like claws. Then matters got even worse: when the things from another world were practically on top of terrified Parker and Hickson, both men were rendered into a state of paralysis. Whether due to some technology of the aliens, or provoked by overwhelming fear, remains unknown. Maybe it was a combination of both. Suddenly, the entities seized the pair, who were manhandled onto the UFO. Like most abductees, Hickson and Parker were quickly reduced to the equivalents of lab rats. When the trauma-filled encounter was over, the pair was dumped back on the edge of the river.
Hickson and Parker, shortly after the 1973 incident.
Now, let’s look at the 1952 saga of the Flatwoods Monster of West Virginia. Although the creature involved in the incident is referred to as a monster, there’s not doubt it was a constructed thing. Flatwoods, West Virginia, is situated in Braxton County and is a town of less than three hundred people. It dates back to the latter part of the 19th century and makes for a pleasant visit. The landscape is wooded and hilly, and provides a captivating picture. For such a tiny town, though, Flatwoods has become famous: it was the location of one of the most legendary of all UFO encounters of the 1950s. September 12, 1952 was the night on which something bizarre, out of this world, and beastly paid Flatwoods a menacing visit that they have still never forgotten, decades on. Or, those same townsfolk were the manipulated targets of a very strange experiment. The expert on the story is Frank C. Feschino, Jr. His extensive research into the case led him to write an excellent book on the subject: The Braxton County Monster. He says that on the night when the town was destined to forever become famous, a strange, bright object fell from the sky in a hilly area in town. Feschino expands: “A group of schoolboys saw the object maneuver across the sky and seemingly fall to Earth.” He asks: “Was it a meteor, plane or anything they could explain? The boys and two adults headed off to look for the object. Soon a twelve-foot tall being from the downed craft terrified these innocent people.”
Looming before the hysterical band of intrepid souls was an approximately ten-feet-tall, floating monster, which appeared to be humanoid in shape, and which had a large black cowling behind its head – that gave the entire head a kind of “Ace of Spades” appearance – and that was possibly even cloaked. Oddly, its lower half was ice-cream cone-shaped and had wires and cables running from it. This issue of the cone-shaped lower portion led flying saucer sleuths to later suggest the monster my actually have been encased within some kind of remotely piloted vehicle. As the creature then turned its attention to the group, and wildly fired laser-like beams from its eyes, the brave band was suddenly brave no more. They didn’t wait to see what might happen next. One and all fled, screaming – possibly for their lives. Mrs. May breathlessly shouted to the boys to follow her to her home, which they all did. On arrival, and possibly as a result of exposure to the noxious odor that hung around the hill, several of the boys became violently ill, feeling nauseous and even outright vomiting. Kathleen May quickly and shakily called the local police, who, rather intriguingly, were busy responding to reports of what was described as an “airplane crash” in the area. It turns out that no such crashed aircraft was ever found. The mystery is still a mystery.
How about the Black-Eyed Children? They appear to be far more robot-like than living beings. For example, there’s their pale skin that actually appears to be more like plastic or rubber. When they try and find ways to get into the homes of people, and asked to be invited in, it’s as if the words they’re saying mean nothing to them. In other words, it’s like a recording. And what about created creatures that look like other people? A perfect example revolves around the late writer, Brad Steiger. We might say that, back in the 1960s, Brad found himself “copied.” A sinister situation, to be sure. Brad said: “I suspect a human agency involved in a strange campaign that was conducted regarding Steiger imposters who spoke at various conferences around the United States. On occasions the imposters allegedly conducted themselves very well, thus making the whole enterprise of Counterfeit Steigers a seemingly futile project. On other occasions, the imposter’s assignment was quite obvious.”
Brad continued: “On an unfortunate number of occasions, I received letters complaining of my outrageous and insulting behavior while speaking at a conference. There were claims that I had openly berated my audience, calling them stupid for accepting the very premise of UFOs. A close friend happened to arrive on the scene after one pseudo-Steiger had departed and tried his best to assure the sponsors of the event that the rowdy, disrespectful speaker could not have been the real Brad. In his letter, my friend warned me that he had visited a number of lecture halls where the imposter had damned his audiences. “Someone seems out to damage your reputation,” he advised. “In a most bizarre twist, dozens of men and women have approached me at various lectures and seminars, congratulating me about the manner in which I bested Carl Sagan in debate. The event allegedly occurred after a lecture when I happened to bump into the great scientist in a restaurant. The eatery, according to the witnesses, was crowded with those who had attended the seminar, and they egged on a debate between myself and Sagan. I mopped up the floor with him, countering his every argument against the reality of UFOs. The truth is that I never met Sagan, therefore, neither had I ever debated him. But from coast to coast, there are those who claim to have witnessed my triumphal bout. Even more individuals claim to have been in the audience when I delivered a rousing message from the Space Brothers in Seattle. Regardless of how often I deny that I was not in Seattle at that time and have never channeled the Space Brothers, those who were at that event are puzzled why I would deny my eloquence.”
Creatures that aren’t born, but constructed and rolled off of conveyor-belts? Maybe.
Scientists have discovered two giant rocks in the asteroid belt between the orbits of Jupiter and Mars that shouldn't be there.
The asteroids, called 203 Pompeja and 269 Justitia, resemble trans-Neptunian objects – those that are found beyond the eighth planet in our Solar System.
Both have 'complex organic matter' on their surface and are redder than any other object in the asteroid belt.
The two asteroids - 203 Pompeja and 269 Justitia - could have formed in the vicinity of Neptune and been transplanted to the main belt region during a violent phase of 'planetary migration'
THE ASTEROID BELT
The asteroid belt is a region of space between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter where most of the asteroids in our Solar System are found orbiting the Sun.
Astronomers think that the asteroid belt is made up of material that was never able to form into a planet, or of the remains of a planet which broke apart a very long time ago.
The asteroids in the asteroid belt come in a variety of sizes.
Some are very small (less than a mile across), while others are quite large.
The largest asteroid is called Ceres. It is about one-quarter the size of our moon.
Source: Caltech
'This discovery therefore provides new evidence that planetesimals formed at the outer edge of the Solar System have moved to the asteroid belt within Jupiter's orbit,' says JAXA, the Japanese space agency, in a statement.
203 Pompeja is about 70 miles (110 km) in diameter, while 269 Justitia is 35 miles (55km), according to JAXA.
203 Pompeja is the only 'very red' asteroid known so far among the approximately 250 bodies with diameter larger than 70 miles found in the asteroid belt, the experts report.
Both were discovered in the 19th century, but their colour was detected through visible and near-infrared spectroscopic observations from the Infrared Telescope Facility (IRTF) in Hawaii and Seoul National University Astronomical Observatory (SAO) in Korea.
Generally, objects in the inner solar system tend to reflect more blue light because they don't have complex organic compounds like carbon and methane.
Objects in the outer solar system – past Neptune – are redder because they do have a lot of these compounds, which are red in the visible and near-infrared light wavelengths.
So the fact that both are redder than any other 'D-type' body (which were thought to be the reddest objects in the asteroid belt until now) suggests they originated from the outer solar system.
Figure showing the evolution of the Solar System shows how the two 'very red' asteroids ended up in the asteroid belt (often referred to as the 'main' belt). D-type bodies are generally 'reddish' and were thought to be the reddest objects in the asteroid belt until now
'In order to have these organics, you need to initially have a lot of ice at the surface,' study author Michaël Marsset from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) told the New York Times.
'So they must have formed in a very cold environment. Then the solar irradiation of the ice creates those complex organics.'
If the asteroids were too close to the Sun, temperatures would not allow those ices to exist, Marsset said.
What's more, the characteristics of 203 Pompeja and 269 Justitia are supportive of a theory known called the Nice model.
The theory – developed in the French city of the same name – goes that that when the giant planets first formed they were closer to the Sun than they are today.
Artist's impression of the asteroid belt - the region of space between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter where most of the asteroids in our Solar System are found orbiting the Sun
NASA explains: 'The planets interacted with each other and with the surrounding small bodies and eventually underwent an instability, in which Neptune, Uranus and Saturn moved outwards and Jupiter moved inwards.'
This theoretically would have brought the two ultra-red asteroids from beyond Neptune into the asteroid belt over several millions of years.
The Nice model also supports the idea that there was an additional Neptune-like planet that was ejected from the Solar System, commonly referred to as Planet Nine.
Scientists led by Sunao Hasegawa from JAXA, the Japanese space agency, reported about the discovery of two red objects in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. These interloper objects are assumed to be formed beyond Neptune and somehow sneaked into their current orbits.
The objects are asteroids, dubbed as 203 Pompeja and 269 Justitia. They are loaded with organic matter, possibly including the building blocks of life on Earth.
The asteroids orbit at about 2.7 and 2.6 times the Earth-sun distance, well within the asteroid belt. 203 Pompeja, at about 70 miles across, appears to be structurally intact, whereas 269 Justitia, only 35 miles or so, is likely a fragment of a previous collision. Because of their stable circular orbits, scientists think that the objects have settled into this space long ago.
Objects in our solar system, enriched with organic material, reflect blue light, whereas objects with organic materials outside the solar system glow red. The reason behind the red surface is many organics, perhaps the building blocks of life on Earth.
Objects with such organics have a lot of ice at the surface. Based on this fact, scientists assumed that things must have formed in a very cold environment. Then the solar irradiation of the ice creates those complex organics.
203 Pompeja and 269 Justitia are special because they appear more red than anything else seen in the asteroid belt. The finding, if correct, would offer evidence for planetary migration in the early solar system.
Most of these leftover objects in the present day are known as trans-Neptunian objects and orbit in the Kuiper belt beyond Neptune. Many are red in color. 203 Pompeja and 269 Justitia both appear to match them.
Josh Emery, a planetary scientist from Northern Arizona University who was not involved in the paper, said, “People have been talking about some fraction of asteroids coming from the Kuiper belt for quite a while now. The research “definitely takes a step” toward finding evidence to support that hypothesis.”
Karin Öberg from Harvard University, who was not involved in the new study, told New York Times, “It’s an exciting discovery with implications for the origins of life.”
Journal Reference:
Sunao Hasegawa et al. Discovery of Two TNO-like Bodies in the Asteroid Belt. DOI: 10.3847/2041-8213/ac0f05
Brandon Fugal is the owner of Skinwalker Ranch. As the Chairman of Colliers International in Utah, Brandon is one of the most prominent businessmen and real estate developers in the Intermountain West. From an early age, he has also been fascinated with the mysteries of our universe and the question of whether or not we are alone. In 2016, Brandon purchased Skinwalker Ranch from aerospace tycoon Robert Bigelow in order to investigate and study the strange and unexplainable phenomena that has been reported there for more than two centuries.
The team at Skinwalker Ranch (From L-R: Kaleb Bench, Travis Taylor, Erik Bard, Brandon Fugal, Bryant “Dragon” Arnold, Thomas Winterton, Tom Lewis, Kandus Linde, Jim Morse) Photo by HISTORY Copyright 2021
Alejandro Rojas: When was it you first heard about the ranch and what is it that you heard?
Brandon Fugal: The ranch was first brought to my attention when I was at Barnes and Noble, back in 2006, and saw Dr. Colm Kelleher and George Knapp’s book The Hunt for the Skinwalker on the shelf. I actually bought it and read it on the weekend. I found it to be very interesting. And that was about it.
I read the book, found it interesting, especially as it relates to being a Utah property and, you know, a very intriguing account of strange activity not far, just hours, from where I live. But upon finishing the book, I put it on the shelf and didn’t really think about it any further until 2015 when I was contacted by two of Robert Bigelow’s science advisors with the question as to whether I would be willing to entertain a potential joint venture or acquisition of the property for the purpose of advancing the research beyond what Mr. Bigelow had done for 20 years. I had developed a good relationship with these science advisors through another effort that I had been involved with a decade ago.
They had a high degree of respect for me, thankfully, and confidence that I would be a worthy successor to Mr. Bigelow’s interest in a program regarding the property. I quickly agreed. I was intrigued and quickly agreed to meet with Mr. Bigelow to discuss a potential joint venture or acquisition of the property. I flew down to Las Vegas to meet with he and others, including Dr. Kelleher, to discuss not only the history of the property and their investigation, but a new structure moving forward. Upon meeting them, I disclosed to them that I was approaching the topic as a healthy skeptic and that I had never seen a UFO, ghost, or anything of the sort. And that I believe that there was most likely a natural prosaic explanation for what had been reported in the book and on the property.
They were amused and shared with me the reality of what their investigation revealed. They also disclosed that the ranch had been part of a five-year Pentagon black budget program studying the UFO phenomenon and that, although the results of that investigation remain classified and confidential – how do I say this? The phenomenon is real. It was interesting, so we took the discussion forward. I had my attorneys work with his legal counsel and in April of 2016 I acquired the property.
I first saw the property one week before closing on the purchase, flying in on my private helicopter with Jim Morris, who you see on the History Channel series as the ranch manager. I have had a long relationship with Jim Morris in that he was my first big commercial real estate developer client when I was 18 years old, back in 1991, when he was developing class A office buildings in our market. As a confidant and someone with military experience, I felt it was important to bring him with me to inspect the property for the first time and establish this new phase of ownership and investigation.
He also was very skeptical and had never seen anything unusual in his life that would qualify as a UFO sighting or paranormal experience. He has had a special relationship with the Indian tribes spanning decades, raising millions of dollars for scholarships and providing financial aid,and his great respect for the Native American people has been a key part of our community engagement.
Rojas: So are you still as skeptical as you were about something unusual going on at the ranch?
Fugal: No. So people ask me all the time whether I am now a believer based on what we have seen and recorded during my ownership of the ranch. The honest, most direct answer I can provide is that I am not a believer. I am an experiencer. I know for a fact that it is real and have witnessed with my own eyes, with other credible witnesses at my side, what can only be described as daylight sightings of exotic craft over Skinwalker Ranch.
Rojas: Do you mind describing one of those incidents?
Fugal: Yeah. You bet. For the first six months of my ownership and stewardship of the property, I did not personally witness or see anything unusual. But, six months into our investigation, I had an experience while entertaining a visiting dignitary and his security detail that involved an undeniable sighting of what can only be described as a 40 to 50 foot long silver, grayish disc-like object that performed maneuvers that were stunning and defy conventional explanation.
This was in broad daylight with multiple witnesses present. During that same afternoon, we experienced everything from our smartphones being completely drained from about 80% charge to zero to other electromagnetic anomalies, even acute medical episodes that attended the incidents that occurred on that fateful day.
Skinwalker Ranch as featured on HISTORY’S new series “The Secret of Skinwalker Ranch” premiering March 31 at 10PM ET/PT
Photo by History Copyright 2021
Rojas: Lue Elizondo, who worked on that Pentagon program that you had referred to earlier had stated that a lot of the pushback in the Department of Defense (DoD), and one of the main reasons they kind of pared it down to a UFO project, as opposed to the other paranormal phenomenon that they were looking at, is that there were a lot of insiders who felt what they were dealing with was demonic. Do you believe that there’s anything angelic or demonic related to the phenomenon going on at the ranch?
Fugal: Good question. I am asked on a daily basis whether I believe that what we are observing is extraterrestrial, inter-dimensional, or spiritual in nature. And my honest answer is “all of the above.” I believe what we are observing and documenting involves all of the above. I think there is a spiritual aspect to what we are encountering at Skinwalker Ranch. There are definitely malevolent and benevolent forces at work and we’ve had negative experiences from time to time that have resulted in people being hospitalized.
Rojas: Yeah. I talked with Travis Taylor about some of those incidents.
Fugal: Yeah. Travis Taylor himself. I mean, Dr. Taylor, he ended up going to the hospital with injuries that were difficult to explain.
Rojas: How did you feel about the results of the first season of the show?
Fugal: Very pleased. In fact, when we commenced filming the team for season one of the investigative series, I gave the disclaimer to the crew and the History Channel that you can’t schedule or conjure up the paranormal or strange activity. It doesn’t work that way. The phenomena witnessed on the ranch is transient in nature and unpredictable. So I was surprised when, during the first day of flying Dr. Taylor out to the ranch for the first time on the helicopter, within minutes, he and our team started seeing things happening that were unusual. And it only got more pronounced as days and weeks passed by.
We conducted a series of experiments over several months, including, rocketry, balloon, instrumented, balloon experiments, ground penetrating radar, resistivity studies, and other research. On every occasion, both our team and third-party experts and consultants involved, experienced unusual activity and events.
Rojas: When it comes to the first season of the show, is there one incident or investigation that stands out to you as being the most compelling or shocking to you?
Fugal: Yeah, the cow dying and upon investigating the body, having a number of unusual events occur. Those included multiple types of smartphones malfunctioning while in the presence of the dead animal, trifield meters going crazy, and then, upon reviewing the cameras, surveillance footage, seeing an unidentified flying object up there, above the animal, just before its death. It all combined to present some of the most compelling evidence of high strangeness on the ranch. I mean, I am often reminded that correlation is not causation. However, you cannot ignore a rapid fire combination of events, including electromagnetic anomalies, physical distress, and what can only be described as UFO activity occurring without giving it some credibility. We immediately brought to the site a veterinarian to study the animal on camera and he concluded that the animal died of stress induced pneumonia. The circumstances surrounding the rapid death of the animal and the correlating strange events continue to baffle the team. In addition, the fact that the animal carcass has remained untouched by any scavenger activity since, underscores how unusual this event.
Rojas: I’ve talked to some of the previous investigators and your investigators. Something they have in common is this thing called the, I think it’s been labeled, the hitchhiker phenomenon, where when you go to the ranch and have an experience, sometimes they’re having unusual experiences after that, in their own homes. Have you experienced that?
Fugal: No, thankfully I have not had that experience, personally. But I do know members of my team and visitors that have had that experience. Strange activity following them home and even terrorizing their family.
Rojas: I’ve even got to talk to a couple of the spouses who are not happy about that, the weirdness that they’ve experienced after these guys would come home.
Fugal: Well, it’s a known fact that numerous participants, including military operatives, refuse to ever set foot on the property again due to the negative experiences that they have had, including phenomena following them home. Even Mr. Bigelow has had experiences that have followed him, resulting in his refusal to ever visit the property ever again.
Rojas: Wow. So, season two. I know Dr. Taylor’s very excited about what they have found and been able to record for season two. Can you tell us a little bit about the amount of compelling stuff that we’ll be seeing in season two of the show?
Fugal: Absolutely. What you will see is a definite progression regarding our efforts and investigation. We take more aggressive measures to study not only what is below, but above the ranch with this new season, and bring to bear our advanced instrumentation in service to learning the secret of Skinwalker Ranch.
Rojas: I guess my last question, because we’re about out of time, is, how do your colleagues feel? How have they reacted to you buying this ranch and participating in this sort of research?
Fugal: The business community has been surprisingly supportive and I have had a number of executives reach out to me privately with their own experiences. I never intended to reveal my identity as owner of the most infamous, scientifically studied paranormal hot spot on the planet. But I elected to go public last year in order to present the fully transparent account of our investigation. And my stewardship, even though the effort at Skywalker ranch is a dramatic departure from what I focus on 95% of the time in my conventional business efforts, it is an inspiring and intriguing part of my life.
A West Virginia witness at Barbour County reported watching and videotaping an object with four lights in a triangle shape, according to Case 79238 from the Mutual UFO Network (MUFON) witness reporting database.
Cropped and enlarged witness photo.
(Credit: MUFON)
The witness was outside at Stonewall Resort with three others at 6:18 a.m. on September 5, 2016, when the incident began.
“We were heading to the top of the hill to get our machinery out for the morning job,” the witness stated.“It was pretty dark out still so we sat there waiting for it to get a bit brighter out so we could see what we were doing.”
Cropped and enlarged still frame from witness video.
(Credit: MUFON)
The witness then noticed the object.
“I happened to look up at the stars like I do sometimes. I noticed a bright light moving in the sky. I pointed it out asking what the heck it was. One of our guys said it’s just an airplane. I disagreed. Airplanes have different lights. At the time it just looked like a solid light moving in a straight direction but shifting side-to-side as well.”
The witness was able to get some low level video of the object.
“I grabbed my phone and zoomed in as close as I could to get a video. My phone goes zoomed up to 4x, but it’s a cheap Android so the quality was bad. I decided to take a photo as well. There was another one some distance away you can see in the photo.”
Cropped and enlarged still frame from witness video.
(Credit: MUFON)
The witness then reviewed the photo and video at home.
I zoomed in on that photo and I was shocked. I showed my girlfriend as well. What was a single light was actually four lights in a triangle shape. The way they are facing doesn’t match the direction it moves.”
Barbour County is a county located in north-central West Virginia. Population 16,589. West Virginia State Director Fred Saluga is investigating. Please remember that most UFO sightings can be explained as something natural or man-made. The above quotes were edited for clarity. Please report UFO activity to MUFON.com.
The CHEOPS satellite accidentally spotted a rare exoplanet with no known equivalent. The satellite detected this unique exoplanet while looking for two exoplanets in a bright nearby star system.
This planet called ‘Nu2 Lupi d’ is located 50 light-years away in the constellation Lupus (Latin for Wolf), around a star called Nu2 Lupi. It is about 2.5 times the size of Earth and almost 9 times its mass.
What’s more, scientists used measurements with archival data from other observatories and numerical models to characterize the density and composition of the planet and its neighbors. They found that the planet has a rocky interior. It has far more water than the Earth. However, the water is not liquid; instead of taking high-pressure ice or high-temperature steam, making the planets uninhabitable.
The CHEOPS satellite was two exoplanets in a nearby planetary system that was found in 2019. In 2019, Swiss astronomers announced the detection of three exoplanets around this bright, Sun-like star. The three exoplanets have masses between those of Earth and Neptune (17 times the Earth) and take 12, 28, and 107 days to circle their parent star.
Yann Alibert, professor of astrophysics at the University of Bern and co-author of the study, said,“We knew that already for the two inner planets, which led us to point CHEOPS to the system in the first place. However, the third planet is quite far away from the star; no one was expected to see its transit!”
“This proved a game-changer, as it is the first time an exoplanet with a revolution period of over 100 days has been spotted transiting a star that is bright enough to be visible to the naked eye.”
Infographic of the Nu2 Lupi planetary system. Image: ESA
David Ehrenreich, professor at the University of Geneva and mission scientist of CHEOPS, who co-signed the study, said,“Due to its relatively long period, the amount of stellar radiation reaching the planet is mild in comparison to many other discovered exoplanets. The less radiation a planet receives, the less it changes over time. Therefore, a planet with a long period could have retained more information about its origin.”
“But so far, the few such exoplanets astronomers had found orbited faint stars. In other words: little of their light reaches Earth and therefore makes them difficult to study. Not this time: Since its bright host star is quite close to us, it is easier to study. This makes it a golden target for future study with no known equivalent.”
Photobomb is a term for an object when it suddenly enters into the camera’s field of sight during the taking of a photograph. The same case happened with CHEOPS. The satellite was taking pictures of a planetary system 50 light-years away, and suddenly it spotted this unique exoplanet photobomb.
The team was led by the Universities of Geneva and Bern and members of the National Center of Competence in Research PlanetS.
Journal Reference:
Delrez, L., Ehrenreich, D., Alibert, Y. et al. Transit detection of the long-period volatile-rich super-Earth ν2 Lupi d with CHEOPS. Nat Astron (2021). DOI: 10.1038/s41550-021-01381-5
If any of them represent advanced technology, high-resolution photographs might tell us whether they’re metaphorically labeled “Made in China” or “Made on Exoplanet X”
The Pentagon report on unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP) that was delivered to Congress on June 25 is intriguing enough to motivate scientific inquiry towards the goal of what these phenomena are. The nature of UAP is not a philosophical matter. It’s also not a puzzle that politicians should be asked to resolve—for the same reason that plumbers should not be asked to bake cakes. Policy makers or military personnel have insufficient training in science to solve this mystery, and hoping that they will somehow do so is like the frustrating experience of the characters in Samuel Beckett’s play Waiting for Godot.
Given these circumstances, scientists should find the answer through the standard scientific process, based on a transparent analysis of open data. The task boils down to getting a high-resolution image of UAP. A picture is worth a thousand words. More specifically, a megapixel image of the surface of an unusual object will allow us to distinguish whether it bears the metaphorical label “Made in China” or “Made in Russia” from the alternative: “Made on Exoplanet X.”
Consider an object the size of a person at a distance of one mile. Suppose we wish to resolve features as small as the width of a letter in this text. That is equivalent to resolving a thousandth of the person’s height, which would require obtaining a megapixel image. The Rayleigh criterion in optics implies that the best angular resolution of a telescope is at the so-called “diffraction limit,” roughly the wavelength of light divided by the aperture diameter. For visible light, the desired resolution in our example can be obtained by a telescope with a diameter of a meter, which can be purchased off-the-shelf online.
The telescope should be linked to a suitable camera, with the resulting data stream fed to a computer system—where optimized software would filter out the transients of interest as the telescope tiles the sky with its field of view. The initial survey could start from a large field of view, but then zoom in on the object of interest as it is tracked across the sky. UAP could change their sky position much faster than any astronomical sources located at great distances.
But they also need to be distinguished from birds, airplanes, satellites or instrumental artifacts. The actual fidelity of the image will be limited by blurring owing to atmospheric turbulence and will therefore depend on the elevation and distance of the UAP. The sky survey will also need to extend over a period of time long enough for the detection of UAP to be probable. These are all major challenges.
The telescope facilities can be placed in geographical locations that will maximize the chance of reproducing past UAP reports. Lower-cost video cameras with lower resolution can be distributed across more locations around the globe to achieve a comprehensive survey of the entire sky. There are astronomical facilities, such as ZTF, LCO, TAOS, ASASSN or PanSTARRS, already in place at remote locations for the different task of searching for transient objects that do not move across the sky as fast as UAP. The data volume will increase dramatically when the VRO/LSST facility in Chile commences operations in 2023. UAP debunkers often ask why cameras invariably capture fuzzy images of unidentified objects. The answer is simple: their apertures are hundreds of times smaller than the desired meter-scale telescopes.
The cost of establishing a network of suitable telescopes is lower than the amount invested so far in the search for the nature of dark matter. We do not know which particles constitute most of the matter in the universe. It is a search compromised by uncertainties, just like the search for UAP. But if some of the UAP are of extraterrestrial origin, the implications would be far greater for society than proving that dark matter is weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs) as opposed to something else. The extraterrestrial finding may well change the way we perceive our place in the universe, our aspirations for space, our theological and philosophical beliefs and even the way we treat other humans.
And all of these implications can be triggered by a single megapixel image obtained at a reasonable cost. In a forum that I attended recently concerning my book Extraterrestrial, I was asked about the prior probability assigned to the possibility that the weird interstellar object ‘Oumuamua or UAP are extraterrestrial in origin. I clarified that it is unknown just as in the case of dark matter being WIMPs. But since a megapixel image of UAP is affordable and is of great interest to the public and the government, we should simply obtain one. Indeed, a picture of an ‘Oumuamua-like object would be worth 66,000 words—the number of words in my book. We should not seek data from government-owned sensors that were not designed for this purpose, but instead collect our own state-of-the-art scientific data in a reproducible fashion. Most of the sky above us is not classified.
In a podcast interview I recently had with a young audience, they agreed: “Let’s just do it.” It was refreshing to see eye-to-eye with the torch bearers of the future, as well as with potential funders of the UAP imaging project, all within the same week. A day later, I was asked by Rahel Solomon of CNBC: “How do you plan to celebrate UAP Day?” Thankful for the reminder, I said: “We will probably need our computers to figure out the nature of UAP, and so my plan is to celebrate the day with my computer.”
This is an opinion and analysis article; the views expressed by the author or authors are not necessarily those of Scientific American.
Ankara, Aug 02: A Bizarre video shows a green-tinted meteor streaking over the city of Izimir, Turkey, falling in the mountains with a loud bang before disappearing behind the landscape with a bright flare. The occurrence sent shockwaves through social media, eliciting wild rumors.
Bizarre 'meteor' explosion caused the skies to turn green in Turkey.
Photo Credit: YouTube
The bizarre event happened on Saturday, which has shocked residents, has given rise to sparking speculation of the object being a falling satellite or an Unidentified flying object (UFO).
The video shows a ball of fire plummeting from the sky as it hides behind the clouds for a very brief moment, it bursts into a blinding light, turning the whole sky green.
The glow further intensifies until it makes everything disappear into white before the ball of fire collapses somewhere in the remote lands with a loud bang.
In yet another clip how an huge incandescent green glow before the meteor appears to crash into Earth at around 2am on Saturday.
The video clip of the incredible meteor fall, a piece of a space junk, a falling satellite, or even a crashing UFO, has been shared on various social media platform
Meanwhile, the associate director of the Aegean University Observatory, Dr. Hasan Ali Dal gave an explaination with a much more mundane and likely explanation for the occurrence. The scientist told local media the object was part of a meteor shower that began 'raining' over Earth last week and will continue to do so until the end of next month.
It usually peaks around August 11, with some 50 meteors per hour observed at that point. The objects are rarely large enough to reach the ground,
The green tint of the Izmir meteor has a simpler explanation, too. The color of its trail likely stems from its chemical composition, signaling that it contains large amounts of nickel.
HERE'S WHY THE US MILITARY RECRUITED OFFICIAL UFO HUNTERS
HERE'S WHY THE US MILITARY RECRUITED OFFICIAL UFO HUNTERS
BY S. FLANNAGAN
UFO hunters have been watching the skies in growing numbers since the Roswell incident in 1947, when rumors spread that a crash site in New Mexico — reported to be that of a U.S. Army air balloon — was, in fact, that of an extraterrestrial aircraft (via History). Since then,various sightings have reawakened a wave of public interest in UFOs, while the presence of aerial phenomena in popular culture arguably peaking in the 1990s, when the TV show "The X Files" became a worldwide smash and brought the idea of secret government agencies investigating classified occurrences into the mainstream. And interest in UFOs has only grown in the 21st century, thanks in part to the internet acting as a meeting place for like-minded enthusiasts and for the easy sharing of information (not all of it credible).
But in recent years, discourse around UFOs has reached fever pitch, thanks to a number of convincing videos of potential UFOs encountered by the U.S. military, as well as shocking reports that have outlined just how seriously the military is taking the threat. In 2017, The New York Times published a lengthy feature article exposing the presence of a secret Pentagon initiative called the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP), first established in 2007, the activities of which remained widely classified. The article reported that the program was run by Luis Elizondo, a former counterintelligence special agent who had previously served in the U.S. Army in South Korea (via The Infographic Show).
THE WORK OF THE ADVANCED AEROSPACE THREAT IDENTIFICATION PROGRAM
The New York Times article, titled "Glowing Auras and 'Black Money': The Pentagon's Mysterious U.F.O. Program," caused a stir because it conclusively showed that the U.S. military took UFO sightings seriously — and had done so for a long time. It claimed that the AATIP was initially established at the behest of Nevada Senator Harry Reid, who in 2007 was particularly prominent as the majority leader of the Senate, and that the program was awarded some $22 million over the course of its five-year existence, during which it investigated scores of UFO sightings from around the world.
Confirmation of the existence of the AATIP showed that the U.S. military's interest in UFOs was far from academic, while details emerging concerning the program's activities were highly pragmatic and related to concerns over national defense. As described by The Infographics Show, the military views UFOs as the presence of advanced military technology that far exceeds the capabilities of the current aircraft of the U.S. Air Force. As a result, the secondary function of the AATIP was to provide scientists with research funding into technologies emerging from the very edge of theoretical physics; research into dark matter, hyperdrives, and even interdimensional travel were all reportedly funded by the AATIP to explain the flight paths of UFOs — with the intention of integrating its findings into future U.S. military technology.
REAL STORIES BEHIND UFO SIGHTINGS
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BY DAVID G. TAYLOR
UFOs have been a mainstay of science fiction since at least the 1950s. Their persistence in popular culture is due to real-life witnesses sighting and identifying these supposedly unidentified flying objects as extraterrestrial spacecraft. Is such an outlandish claim the only explanation these sightings? As it turns out, many of the most famous UFO cases can be attributed to more mundane phenomena than extraterrestrials failing to turn on their vehicles' invisibility shields. Below are some notable UFO sightings and close encounters, along with alternative explanations.
MOUNT RAINIER SIGHTING
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The terms "flying saucers" and "UFOs" became nearly synonymous with one another during the twentieth century. The correlation likely originates from a June 1947 UFO sighting near Mount Rainier in Washington state. While flying his plane, Kenneth Arnold saw a group of objects soaring about 20-25 miles north of him in a V-formation. He estimated the objects were traveling about 1700 miles per hour, and described them as crescent-shaped. He notably stated that they flew "like a saucer if you skip it across the water."
Arnold reported the sighting, and the news spread like wildfire. A headline writer or editor somewhere misunderstood Arnold's description of the UFOs' movement and wrote that the objects looked, not moved, like saucers. Thus, the phenomenon of flying saucers entered popular culture. But what were the objects that Arnold saw? Most likely it was a flock of pelicans, and Arnold simply misjudged the size and distance.
THE ROSWELL INCIDENT
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Perhaps the most famous UFO incident of all time is the alleged alien spacecraft that crashed near Roswell, New Mexico in 1947. In June of that year, a rancher named William Brazel found some debris about 75 miles north of Roswell. Roswell Army Air Field sent investigators after they got word of the incident. The local newspaper, the Roswell Daily Record, initially reported that the debris was from a flying saucer. It later corrected this story, writing that the debris was actually a destroyed weather balloon.
The U.S. government disclosed in a 1994 report that the balloon was part of the once-classified Project Mogul, which involved attaching surveillance equipment to high-altitude balloons to detect Soviet nuclear tests. No one at Roswell Army Air Field knew anything about Project Mogul, so a weather balloon was the most rational explanation. Some UFO proponents, nevertheless, still contend that the U.S. Army covered-up the spacecraft's crash. The reality is that the "incident" was mostly forgotten until the National Inquirer re-published the uncorrected version of the story by the Roswell Daily Record about thirty years later. Conspiracy theories then began to multiply like rabbits.
HOPKINSVILLE GOBLINS
On August 21, 1955, the Sutton family was having a gathering of about eleven relatives and friends at their home near Hopkinsville, Kentucky. One of the guests, Billy Ray Taylor, went out to to get a pail of water from the family well, and allegedly saw a flying saucer streak through the sky and land nearby. Shortly afterward, at about 8 p.m., a horde of four-foot tall, gremlin-like aliens began to surround the house — the group shot at the creatures, but the aliens seemed impervious to bullets. The family then fled and reported the incident to the police.
The subsequent investigation by the local police found no evidence of the creatures. Most likely, the sighting was the combination of alcohol intoxication and an encounter with two great horned owls. These owls are nocturnal, territorial, and quite large. Running up on one at night would certainly be alarming. Furthermore, a meteor shower was occurring during that time, which would explain the "flying saucer" that Taylor witnessed.
BETTY AND BARNEY HILL
Perhaps the most famous UFO abductees are Betty and Barney Rubble — er, Hill. The couple was allegedly taken by aliens while returning from vacation to their home in New Hampshire, on September 19, 1961. The couple claimed to have seen a light in the sky and, after returning home, they realized that they had lost two hours of time. Under hypnosis, more than two years later, the Hills recounted that aliens took them aboard their ship and subjected them to experiments. They described the aliens as short, grey beings with big, black eyes. Does this sound familiar? It should, because this description is consistent with what is popularly known as "grey" aliens. The Hills are the ones largely responsible for popularizing this depiction of extraterrestrials.
The couple's tale is suspect, however, given that just a few days before their hypnosis sessions, on February 10, 1964, the popular science fiction show, The Outer Limits, broadcast an episode entitled "The Bellero Shield" that included a similar-looking creature. Moreover, Betty Hill drew a star map that she claimed to have seen on board the alien ship. Many UFO proponents argue that this is compelling evidence that her abduction took place. Scientist Carl Sagan, however, notably debunked Betty's map. Simply put, there is no evidence that the Hill abduction ever occurred. Nevertheless, the Hills' story was adapted into a popular book, Interrupted Journey, and the upcoming movie Captured.
THE BATTLE OF LOS ANGELES
During the night of February 24, 1942 and into the early morning of February 25, the U.S. military fired about 1400 anti-aircraft shells into the skies above Los Angeles. When the smoke cleared, there were thousands of distraught citizens, but no enemy aircraft wreckage littering the streets. The Los Angeles Times displayed the above picture in its February 26, 1942 issue, which appears to show searchlights honing in on an aircraft of some sort. Some UFO enthusiasts believe that the photo shows the military shooting at a flying saucer. More likely, the false alarm was caused by the sighting of a meteorological balloon (see pages 285-286 of this Air Force history document) combined with a case of twitchy nerves. The "Battle of Los Angeles" occurred less than three months after the Battle of Pearl Harbor. Tensions were high, as many believed that another attack by the Japanese military on the U.S. west coast was imminent.
But what about the picture? Back then, the editors of the Times used ink to darken the sky, and paint to brighten the searchlights and lens flares. The result is an image that seems to depict something in the sky. It's more difficult to reach this conclusion after viewing the original, untouched image.
WESTFALL UFO
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About 200 people allegedly saw a UFO in Melbourne, Australia on April 6, 1966. The witnesses — mostly students and teachers of the Westall High and State schools — reported watching three metallic objects drifting through the sky for about 20 minutes, starting at 11 a.m. The most likely explanation is that these UFOs were balloons from the HIBAL program — a joint US-Australian operation from 1960-1969 that sent large, metallic balloons up into the atmosphere to measure radiation levels. One balloon drifted off course and briefly touched down near the schools. It then took off again and several aircraft pursued it, which explains the multiple sightings. Plus, we have to consider the overactive imaginations of the children present at the time.
"FIRE IN THE SKY"
In 1975, Travis Walton was reportedly abducted by a UFO while working as a lumberjack in Arizona. Six of his friends and co-workers claimed to have witnessed his abduction. Walton reappeared several days later, and the story he told of being subjected to experiments by extraterrestrials eventually became the basis for his 1978 book, The Walton Experience, and the 1993 movie, Fire in the Sky.
However, the whole incident was probably a hoax perpetrated by Walton and his friends for financial gain. The story appeared in the National Inquirer days after the alleged incident — the publication awarded Walton and his friends $5,000 for their story, after the group passed polygraph tests that the tabloid funded. It is has also been reported that several members of the Walton family were UFO enthusiasts prior to Travis's abduction. The totality of this information, combined with a lack of testable evidence and the proven fact that polygraph results are totally useless, casts doubt on Walton's story.
WILLIAM SCHAFFNER: MIA
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William Schaffner was a pilot in the United States Air Force who, in 1970, was stationed at Royal Air Force Base Binbrook in Lincolnshire, England. UFO enthusiasts argue that on September 8, 1970, Schaffner was sent to intercept an unknown object over the North Sea, and was then abducted by extraterrestrials. Schaffner's plane, a RAF Lightning, was recovered virtually undamaged from the bottom of the sea. Most notably, the cockpit canopy was shut, meaning Schaffner hadn't ejected. Supporters of the abduction theory point toward the plane's pristine condition, combined with the absence of a body, to be evidence that the UFO scooped up Schaffner.
A BBC investigation, however, determined that Schaffner died due to a series of unfortunate events. Schaffner was not in pursuit of a UFO, but was engaged in an exercise that he was not sufficiently trained to complete. He attempted to fly low, under his target (a Shackleton reconnaissance aircraft), but hit the sea. His ejector seat failed, leading him to escape from the cockpit and drown shortly afterward.
THE PHOENIX LIGHTS
For about 106 minutes on the night of March 13, 1997, several hovering lights appeared in a V-shaped formation in the skies above Phoenix, Arizona. The Phoenix Lights, as they came to be called, are notable because hundreds of people witnessed and even videotaped the eerie event. Did these lights belong to a huge, silent UFO that wanted to get a closer look at the Phoenix area, or is there a more prosaic explanation?
It may be disappointing to some, but these lights were flares used by the military. More specifically, the flares seen by witnesses in 1997 were likely left from a training session by the visiting Maryland Air National Guard. The flares seem to be suspended in the night sky, because they are attached to parachutes that slow their descent.
UFO CRASH IN AURORA, TX
The small town of Aurora, Texas is perhaps most notable for an UFO that allegedly crashed into a windmill there in 1897. Several paranormal television programs, including the UFO Files, UFO Hunters, and Ancient Aliens have dedicated episodes to the crash. S.E. Haydon first reported the incident in an article for the Dallas Morning News in 1897. He claimed that the townspeople buried the sole occupant of the crash — possibly a Martian — in the local cemetery.
Haydon's story just sounds like a tall tale, so it should come as no surprise that he likely created it out of whole cloth. As a Time article from 1979 quoted one Aurora resident, Etta Pegues: "Haydon wrote it as a joke and to bring interest to Aurora. The railroad bypassed us, and the town was dying." Another theory is that Haydon and his friend, Judge J.S. Proctor, whose windmill the "alien" spacecraft destroyed, were simply trying to amuse themselves and their peers. Proctor wrote a similar far-fetched article about the crash in his local newspaper, the Aurora News. Either way, no one has been able to find the alien's remains, if they even exist, in the town's cemetery. Although those Martian flowers may be a dead giveaway.
Scientists confirm another one of Albert Einstein's predictions about gravity and light.(
Supplied: Dan Wilkins
Over a century ago, Albert Einstein predicted that the gravitational pull of black holes were so strong that they should bend light right around them.
Black holes don't emit light, they trap it; and ordinarily, you can't see anything behind a black hole.
Key points:
Scientists have seen light bouncing off the back of a supermassive black hole for the first time
The warped light was detected as faint flashes of X-rays emitting from a supermassive black hole 800 million light years away
The findings confirm a prediction Albert Einstein made over a century ago
But it seems Einstein's theory was right.
For the first time, astronomers have caught a glimpse of light being reflected — or "echoing" — from behind a supermassive black hole, 800 million light years away from Earth.
These "echoes" were in the form of X-ray flashes, according to a study published on Thursday in Nature.
While scientists have seen light bending around a black hole before, this is the first time they have been able to see the phenomenon happening from the other side.
"Any light that goes into that black hole doesn't come out, so we shouldn't be able to see anything that's behind the black hole,” said study co-author Dan Wilkins, an astrophysicist at Stanford University.
The anatomy of a cosmic beast
With their enormous gravitational pull, black holes chew up anything that comes too close to their event horizon, the region where not even light can escape their clutches.
Surrounding these cosmic beasts is the accretion disk, where gas and dust spiral towards oblivion.
As material gets sucked into the black hole, it releases a plume of super-hot particles called the corona, which emits X-ray flares.
Light in the form of X-rays bounces off the back of the black hole's hot accretion disk, producing reflections called "echoes".( Supplied: ESA )
"Supermassive black holes are objects of extreme density up to billions of times more massive than our own sun," said Michael Cowley, an astrophysicist at the Queensland University of Technology, who was not involved in the study.
The X-ray flares are generated when the black hole's giant magnetic field gets tangled up in its spin.
"This magnetic field getting tied up and then snapping close to the black hole heats everything around it and produces these high energy electrons, that then go on to produce the X-rays," Dr Wilkins said.
Catching hidden light
Dr Wilkins and his team were studying these X-ray flares spewing out from the supermassive black hole at the centre of a galaxy called I Zwicky 1.
Using NASA's Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array and the European Space Agency's XMM-Newton telescope, they saw the expected bright X-ray flashes — but there was also something strange going on.
Light echoing from behind a black hole(Gfycat)
The team detected fainter bursts of X-rays that had different wavelengths to the larger ones, indicating that they had bounced off the accretion disk from behind the black hole.
This occurs when some X-rays manage to slip past the black hole's massive gravitational pull, only to get sucked back in.
Some of these escapee X-rays reflect off the back of the accretion disk and are bent around the black hole by its formidable gravity.
It's this phenomenon that allowed Dr Wilkins and his team to detect these X-ray '"echoes" from the other side.
"I've been building theoretical predictions of how these echoes appear to us for a few years," Dr Wilkins said.
Discovery provides insight into supermassive black holes
In addition to proving Einstein's theory of relativity is right once again, the discovery could also help astronomers better understand supermassive black holes, Dr Cowley said.
"Their result provides further support for Albert Einstein's general theory of relativity, which continues to hold up well after more than 100 years since publication," Dr Cowley said.
Tamara Davis, an astrophysicist at the University of Queensland, added that while we've seen gravity bending starlight around the sun during an eclipse, it's exciting to see it happening around a black hole.
"It is very impressive that they have managed to interpret the flares they’ve seen as light that has lapped the black hole," said Professor Davis, who was not involved in the study.
"The exciting thing about this observation is that it is light bent around a black hole.
"It tells us what the material around the black hole is doing, at a resolution we couldn't ever hope to achieve with conventional telescopes."
University of Arizona professor to lead NASA project
Dr. Amy Mainzer is a Professor of Planetary Sciences at UArizona, and she will lead the NEO Surveyor project, which aims to track Near-Earth Objects that pose a threat to our planet. FOX 10's Stephanie Olmo reports.
PHOENIX - A University of Arizona professor has been appointed by NASA to lead a project that will track Near-Earth Objects.
Dr. Amy Mainzer is a Professor of Planetary Sciences at UArizona. She says she has always wanted to work on space, so this project that she has been appointed to lead is a dream come true.
"This is a really big deal because basically, we have the technology now to go out there," said Dr. Mainzer.
Asteroids may not be high on everyone's list of threat, but it's something scientists like Dr. Mainzer wants to get ahead of.
"The whole point of this project is to basically go out and look and see what is out there in our solar neighborhood. To see if there are any asteroids of comets that could potentially be heading our way that are large enough to cause any real damage," said Dr. Mainzer, who is leading a team building the Near-earth Object Surveyor Space Telescope, also known as the NEO Surveyor.
The plan for the NEO Surveyor is to send it into space, past the orbit of our moon.
"It's going to sit out there, and then, we'll just patrol back and forth, searching the sky for anything that moves. Will be using heat-sensitive detectors, so in other words ,we'll be looking for the faint heat that these asteroids emit," said Dr. Mainzer.
Although NASA has another mission, called NEOWISE, that involves a telescope in space, Dr. Mainzer says this mission is different.
"We've seen a such a small number of Near-Earth Objects, roughly about 1,000 or 2,000 or so, but we know that there are 10s, or even hundreds of thousands more out there," said Dr. Mainzer. "That is what the annual survey was designed to do. It is really going to go and mop up a large fraction of the near-Earth asteroids and comets that are big enough to cause severe regional damage."
Dr. Mainzer says she hopes to never find an asteroid or comet close to Earth, but she has a plan in case it does happen.
"We want to make sure we're going to find out where it's going to go, so that we have as much time as possible to plan any mitigation we might have to should we find something that is headed our way, so we're going to do our very best to get out there and do a really good look," said Dr. Mainzer.
Dr. Mainzer says they started what's called the preliminary design phase. The surveyor is expected to launch in early 2026.
New Harvard Project Will Investigate Alien Technology
New Harvard Project Will Investigate Alien Technology
Figuring out what UFOs are is "the job of scientists."
Image by NASA / Futurism
A strange space object, seemingly from another star system, has mystified astronomers ever since it was first spotted back in 2017 — and Harvard astronomer Avi Loeb is hellbent on finding out what it was.
To Loeb, the object — dubbed ‘Oumuamua — could be the smoking gun in a much larger scientific question. The astronomer has loudly expressed the belief that ‘Oumuamua could be evidence of an alien civilization sending a piece of its technology to visit us.
To further investigate that theory, Loeb has now created a new workgroup at Harvard called the Galileo Project. The project aims to “bring the search for extraterrestrial technological signatures of Extraterrestrial Technological Civilizations (ETCs) from accidental or anecdotal observations and legends to the mainstream of transparent, validated and systematic scientific research,” according to a mission statement.
Loeb also explored the theory in his recently published book “Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth.” The book led to several wealthy investors getting in touch, according to Science, donating a total of $1.75 million to kick the project off.
The topic of alien technologies has hit a fever pitch this summer. The project was formed shortly after the Pentagon released a high profile report on “Unidentifieed Aerial Phenomena” (UAPs), detailing mysterious sightings made by military pilots over the last two decades — but failing to offer up a compelling explanation.
In a Scientific American op-ed last month, Loeb explored the possible links between ‘Oumuamua and these recent UAP sightings, writing that “rather than simply wonder about possible scenarios, we should collect better scientific data and clarify the nature of UAP,” while conceding that “the possibility that any UAP are extraterrestrial is highly speculative.”
In his search, Loeb wants to look for physical evidence — not just electromagnetic signals — of extraterrestrial civilizations. The astronomer told USA Today that any objects from interstellar space “that look peculiar we should follow up by sending a camera on a space rocket that gets close to them and taking a close-up photograph.”
Loeb also called for a more scientific approach to investigating the Pentagon’s UAP sightings.
“If we find evidence for a smarter kid on our cosmic block, it will change the way we think about our place in the universe, our relations with each other,” he told the newspaper.
Methane gas on Enceladus, Saturn's sixth-largest moon, could indicate microscopic life, a new study claims.
Data gathered by NASA's no-longer-operational Cassini spacecraft reveals traces of the gas from an unknown origin, according to the study authors.
It could be the result of a process called methanogenesis – the formation of methane by microbes known as methanogens, they say.
Enceladus is a frozen sphere just 313 miles in diameter (about one-seventh the diameter of Earth's moon, 2,160 miles).
It's already known that Enceladus, which is just one of Saturn's 82 moons, hides liquid water beneath a shimmering layer of clean ice on its surface.
Artist's impression shows a cutaway view of Saturn's moon Enceladus, including giant water plumes erupting from the surface. There may be hydrothermal activity taking place on and under the seafloor of the moon's subsurface ocean, results from NASA's Cassini mission suggest
ENCELADUS: QUICK FACTS
Discovered: August 28 1789
Type: Ice moon
Diameter: 313 miles (504km)
Orbital period: 32.9 hours
Length of day: 32.9 hours
Mass: About 680 times less than Earth's moon
Source: NASA
It's one of few locations in the Solar System with liquid water, along with Earth and Jupiter's moon Europa, making it a target of interest for astrobiologists.
Giant water plumes erupt from Enceladus, indicative of a vast ocean that is believed to be sandwiched between the moon's rocky core and its icy shell.
When flying through the plumes during its nearly 20-year mission, Cassini detected a relatively high concentration of certain molecules usually associated with hydrothermal vents on the bottom of Earth's oceans – dihydrogen and carbon dioxide, as well as methane.
The amount of methane found in the plumes was particularly unexpected, according to the authors, from the University of Arizona and Paris Sciences & Lettres University.
'We wanted to know, could Earthlike microbes that "eat" the dihydrogen and produce methane explain the surprisingly large amount of methane detected by Cassini?' said study author Professor Regis Ferriere at the University of Arizona.
'Searching for such microbes, known as methanogens, at Enceladus' seafloor would require extremely challenging deep-dive missions that are not in sight for several decades.'
Therefore, Ferriere and colleagues constructed mathematical models to calculate the probability that different processes, including biological methanogenesis, might explain the data on the plumes emanating from Enceladus, captured by Cassini.
Data is consistent either with microbial hydrothermal vent activity, or with processes that don't involve life forms but are different from the ones known to occur on Earth, they conclude.
This artist's impression depicts NASA's Cassini spacecraft flying through a plume of presumed water erupting from the surface of Saturn's moon Enceladus
On Earth, hydrothermal activity occurs when cold seawater seeps into the ocean floor, circulates through underlying rock and passes a heat source, like a magma chamber, before spewing out into the water again through hydrothermal vents.
Methane, a powerful greenhouse gas, can be produced through hydrothermal activity on Earth, but at a slow rate.
Most of the production is due to microorganisms that use hydrothermally produced dihydrogen as a source of energy, and produce methane from carbon dioxide during methanogenesis.
The team looked at Enceladus' plume composition as the end result of several hypothetical chemical and physical processes in the moon's interior.
First, the researchers assessed what hydrothermal production of dihydrogen would best fit Cassini's observations, and whether this production could provide enough 'food' to sustain a population of Earth-like microbes that produce methane.
To do that, they developed a model for a hypothetical methanogen, whose thermal and energetic niche was modelled after known strains from Earth.
Enceladus (pictured in image from NASA's Cassini satellite) is the sixth-largest of Saturn's moons, with a diameter of around 310 miles. The moon is covered in a shimmering layer of clean ice, making it one of the most reflective bodies in the Solar System.
EARTH VS. ENCELADUS
Despite the fact Earth and Enceladus harbour water, the ocean on Enceladus is almost entirely unlike Earth's.
Earth's ocean is relatively shallow, with an average of 2.2 miles (3.6 km), and covers three-quarters of the planet's surface.
Our ocean is also warmer at the top thanks to the Sun's rays and colder in the depths near the seafloor, and has currents that are affected by wind.
Enceladus, meanwhile, appears to have a completely subsurface ocean at least 18.6 miles (30 km) deep, which goes all the way round the moon.
The authors then ran the model to see whether a given set of chemical conditions, such as the dihydrogen concentration in the hydrothermal fluid, as well as temperature, would provide a suitable environment for these microbes to grow.
They also looked at what effect a hypothetical microbe population would have on its environment – for example, on the escape rates of dihydrogen and methane in the plume.
'In summary, not only could we evaluate whether Cassini's observations are compatible with an environment habitable for life, but we could also make quantitative predictions about observations to be expected, should methanogenesis actually occur at Enceladus' seafloor,' said Ferriere.
Even the highest possible estimate of 'abiotic' methane production – in other words, methane production not from living organisms – is not enough to explain the methane concentration in the plumes, the team found.
Adding biological methanogenesis to the mix, however, could produce enough methane to match Cassini's observations.
In essence, microbial life under the moon's icy surface looks likely. The study authors say, however, there's there's still work to be done to conclusively prove life exists there.
'Obviously, we are not concluding that life exists in Enceladus' ocean,' said Ferriere.
Cassini is depicted here in a NASA illustration. Cassini launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida in October 1997
'Rather, we wanted to understand how likely it would be that Enceladus' hydrothermal vents could be habitable to Earthlike microorganisms. Very likely, the Cassini data tell us, according to our models.
'Biological methanogenesis appears to be compatible with the data. In other words, we can't discard the "life hypothesis" as highly improbable.
'To reject the life hypothesis, we need more data from future missions.'
One other potential explanation of the methane, which is arguably less exciting, is that it comes from the chemical breakdown of primordial organic matter in Enceladus' core.
This organic matter could be partially turned into dihydrogen, methane and carbon dioxide through the hydrothermal process.
This hypothesis is highly plausible if it turns out that Enceladus formed through the accretion of organic-rich material supplied by comets, Ferriere said.
WHAT DID CASSINI DISCOVER DURING ITS 20-YEAR MISSION TO SATURN?
Cassini launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida in 1997, then spent seven years in transit followed by 13 years orbiting Saturn.
An artist's impression of the Cassini spacecraft studying Saturn
In 2000 it spent six months studying Jupiter before reaching Saturn in 2004.
In that time, it discovered six more moons around Saturn, three-dimensional structures towering above Saturn's rings, and a giant storm that raged across the planet for nearly a year.
On 13 December 2004 it made its first flyby of Saturn's moons Titan and Dione.
On 24 December it released the European Space Agency-built Huygens probe on Saturn's moon Titan to study its atmosphere and surface composition.
There it discovered eerie hydrocarbon lakes made from ethane and methane.
In 2008, Cassini completed its primary mission to explore the Saturn system and began its mission extension (the Cassini Equinox Mission).
In 2010 it began its second mission (Cassini Solstice Mission) which lasted until it exploded in Saturn's atmosphere.
In December 2011, Cassini obtained the highest resolution images of Saturn's moon Enceladus.
In December of the following year it tracked the transit of Venus to test the feasibility of observing planets outside our solar system.
In March 2013 Cassini made the last flyby of Saturn's moon Rhea and measured its internal structure and gravitational pull.
Cassini didn't just study Saturn - it also captured incredible views of its many moons. In the image above, Saturn's moon Enceladus can be seen drifting before the rings and the tiny moon Pandora. It was captured on Nov. 1, 2009, with the entire scene is backlit by the Sun
In July of that year Cassini captured a black-lit Saturn to examine the rings in fine detail and also captured an image of Earth.
In April of this year it completed its closest flyby of Titan and started its Grande Finale orbit which finished on September 15.
'The mission has changed the way we think of where life may have developed beyond our Earth,' said Andrew Coates, head of the Planetary Science Group at Mullard Space Science Laboratory at University College London.
'As well as Mars, outer planet moons like Enceladus, Europa and even Titan are now top contenders for life elsewhere,' he added. 'We've completely rewritten the textbooks about Saturn.'
They discover signs of life 2,000 million kilometers from Earth
They discover signs of life 2,000 million kilometers from Earth
There is a good chance that microbial life exists almost 2,000 million kilometers from Earth: Enceladus, Saturn’s moon, not only contains molecular hydrogen, but also its methane would come from living beings.
Each time you delve a little deeper into the hidden worlds of Enceladus, one of Saturn’s 53 moons, hints that it may indeed contain microbial life grow.
In 2014, the Cassini-Huygens mission discovered that Enceladus contained a regional ocean of liquid water, about 40 kilometers below its surface. A year later it became known that this ocean was global.
In 2017 it was found that this immense ocean brings together several of the elements necessary for the formation of life and, even, that it can host small microbial ecosystems.
In 2020, a new study by the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) in Texas, carried out using computer models, confirmed that that ocean could have a diverse metabolic menu, capable of supporting a rich microbial community.
That research discovered molecular hydrogen, a possible food source for microbes, in the column of ice grains and water vapor that gushed from cracks in Enceladus’ icy surface.
Although both Saturn and its moons make up an icy world, Enceladus has hot spots due to its internal geological activity: ice and water volcanoes emit water vapor that turns into ice dust, where molecular hydrogen was located.
Also methane
As if these indications were not enough, a new investigation carried out by the University of Arizona and the University of Sciences and Letters of Paris, also using data obtained by the Cassini- Huygens mission , identifies methane as one more element that would confirm the necessary environment. for life.
The presence of methane in the plumes of water vapor emerging from the surface of Enceladus could be related to the existence of microbial life on the coldest moon of Saturn, according to the authors of this research.
Until now, those enormous amounts of methane in Enceladus’ atmosphere had been considered to be due to the hydrothermal dynamics of the moon, a hypothesis that the new research completely discards.
This finding is what has led them to the conclusion that the most plausible explanation for the presence of so much methane in Enceladus is that it is due to biological processes: microbes that devour hydrogen and produce methane, just as it happens on Earth.
There is another possibility: that the presence of methane is due to thermodynamic processes.
In this regard, the researchers suggest that methane could come from the chemical decomposition of primordial organic matter that may be present in the nucleus of Enceladus.
Computer models
To obtain these results, the researchers applied mathematical models, as scientists from the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) had done in 2020 , since at the moment there is no other way to approach the secrets of Enceladus.
Computer models for the new research combined data from geochemistry and microbial ecology to analyze data from the Cassini plume and model possible processes that would better explain the observations.
They concluded that the Cassini data is consistent, both with the activity of microbial hydrothermal vents, and with processes that do not involve life forms, but are different from those that occur on Earth.
“Obviously, we are not concluding that life exists in the ocean of Enceladus,” the researchers say in a statement, adding that they cannot consider the “life hypothesis” highly unlikely either.
We are talking about all these microbial processes probably taking place on the seventh satellite of a planet that is 1.4 billion kilometers from the Sun.
The scenario where all this could be happening is a moon that is around 500 kilometers in diameter, which is 25 times smaller than Earth, which is almost 10 times farther from the Sun and about 2 billion kilometers from Earth.
Can The Zoo Hypothesis Explain Why We Do Not Meet Aliens?
Can The Zoo Hypothesis Explain Why We Do Not Meet Aliens?
The zoo hypothesis speculates on the assumed behavior and existence of technically-advanced extraterrestrial life and the reasons they refrain from contacting Earth.
It is one of many theoretical explanations for the Fermi paradox. The hypothesis is that alien life intentionally avoids communication with Earth, and one of its main interpretations is that it does so to allow for natural evolution and sociocultural development, avoiding interplanetary contamination, similarly to people observing animals at a zoo.
The hypothesis seeks to explain the apparent absence of extraterrestrial life despite its generally accepted plausibility and hence the reasonable expectation of its existence.
Aliens might, for example, choose to allow contact once the human species has passed certain technological, political, or ethical standards. They might withhold contact until humans force contact upon them, possibly by sending a spacecraft to planets they inhabit.
Alternatively, a reluctance to initiate contact could reflect a sensible desire to minimize risk. An alien society with advanced remote-sensing technologies may conclude that direct contact with neighbors confers added risks to oneself without an added benefit.
Assumptions
The zoo hypothesis assumes, first, that whenever the conditions are such that life can exist and evolve, it will, and secondly, there are many places where life can exist (i.e. that there are a large number of alien cultures in existence).
It also assumes that these aliens have great reverence for independent, natural evolution and development.
In particular, assuming that intelligence is a physical process that acts to maximize the diversity of a system’s accessible futures, a fundamental motivation for the zoo hypothesis would be that premature contact would “unintelligently” reduce the overall diversity of paths the universe itself could take.
These ideas are perhaps most plausible if there is a relatively universal cultural or legal policy among a plurality of extraterrestrial civilizations necessitating isolation with respect to civilizations at Earth-like stages of development.
In a universe without a hegemonic power, random single civilizations with independent principles would make contact. This makes a crowded Universe with clearly defined rules seem more plausible.
If there is a plurality of alien cultures, however, this theory may break down under the uniformity of motive concept because it would take just a single extraterrestrial civilization to decide to act contrary to the imperative within our range of detection for it to be undone, and the probability of such a violation increases with the number of civilizations.
This idea, however, becomes more plausible if all civilizations tend to evolve similar cultural standards and values with regard to contact much like convergent evolution on Earth has independently evolved eyes on numerous occasions, or all civilizations follow the lead of some particularly distinguished civilization, such as the first civilization among them.
Fermi paradox
The Fermi paradox, named after Italian-American physicist Enrico Fermi, is the apparent contradiction between the lack of evidence for extraterrestrial civilizations and various high estimates for their probability.
With this in mind, a modified zoo hypothesis becomes a more appealing answer to the Fermi paradox. The time between the emergence of the first civilization within the Milky Way and all subsequent civilizations could be enormous.
Monte Carlo simulation shows the first few inter-arrival times between emergent civilizations would be similar in length to geologic epochs on Earth. Just what could a civilization do with a ten-million, one-hundred-million, or half-billion-year head start?
Even if this first grand civilization is long gone, their initial legacy could live on in the form of a passed-down tradition, or perhaps an artificial life form dedicated to such a goal without the risk of death.
Beyond this, it does not even have to be the first civilization, but simply the first to spread its doctrine and control over a large volume of the galaxy.
If just one civilization gained this hegemony in the distant past, it could form an unbroken chain of taboo against rapacious colonization in favour of non-interference in those civilizations that follow. The uniformity of motive concept previously mentioned would become moot in such a situation.
If the oldest civilization still present in the Milky Way has, for example, a 100-million-year time advantage over the next oldest civilization, then it is conceivable that they could be in the singular position of being able to control, monitor, influence or isolate the emergence of every civilization that follows within their sphere of influence.
This is analogous to what happens on Earth within our own civilization on a daily basis, in that everyone born on this planet is born into a pre-existing system of familial associations, customs, traditions and laws that were already long established before our birth and which we have little or no control over.
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Portage County Police Officers Pursues UFO In 1966
Portage County Police Officers Pursues UFO In 1966
The 1960s were a swinging time full of free love, way out fashions and television shows where rythmically challenged people that were far too old to pass as the teenagers they were meant to portray danced to the groovy sounds of Hammond organs.
For many this era of peace and love came to an end when the Ohio National Guard killed four students at Kent State in May of 1970. For a handful of police officers in the Kent area, however, the fun and games would come to an end 4 years earlier, on April 17th, 1966.
Things kicked off around 4am when Police Chief Gerald Buchert rushed home, grabbing his wife and his camera in an attempt to verify an odd object in the sky that had concerned citizens of Mantua, Ohio lighting up his phone lines.
He successfully captured a photograph that would later be a wrench in the engine of some very powerful governmental machinery, but the meat of the story would begin an hour later.
At 5:07am on an aforementioned morning Deputies Dale Spaur and Wilber Neff were driving to a hospital near Randolph, Ohio when they came across an abandoned vehicle. Stopping to investigate, Deputy Spaur noticed the car was filled with old radios and electronic equipment.
Stranger, still, was the symbol that Spaur noticed on the side of the jalopy: a triangle with a lightning bolt inside it and the words “Seven Steps to Hell” written above. By the time he read these words it was already too late for Dale Spaur, it seems.
Just as he was inspecting the car, Deputy Spaur noticed a bright light coming from the trees south of his position. Looking closer he observed a large, oval object with a bright bluish white light rising above the trees and moving towards his cruiser. The only sound heard coming from the mysterious craft was described as a “whisper behind a humming.”
At first the men felt they were unable to move, but as the craft took it’s position directly above them, Spaur and Neff summoned the will to jump into the cruiser and radioed police headquarters to descibe what they were witnessing.
The receiving officer, Deputy Robert Wilson, suggested they shoot at the UFO. Spaur declined, saying that seeing the object was like “looking down the middle of hell.” Deputy Wilson then requested they wait at their position while he dispatched a photographer. No sooner had he done so than the strange object began to move on down the road.
Spaur, a former stock car driver, must’ve grunted out an action movie quality “It’s on!” before throwing the cruiser into gear and engaging in hot pursuit of the E.T. and it’s wonderous flying machine.
The two followed the object for 86 miles, across the state line into Pennsylvania, with patrolman Wayne Huston joining the chase in East Palastine. As the chase was crossing into Pennsylvania, Spaur requested that fighter jets be scrambled to intercept the UFO. Shortly after crossing the state line his patrol car began to sputter from lack of gasoline.
Pulling into a gas station in Freedom, Pennsylvania they met Officer Frank Panzanella who had been independently following the craft. While the four officers stood at the gas station watching the object, confirmation came across the radio of the fighter jets deployment.
At that very moment, as if it were listening to the communication, the UFO shot straight up into the blackness of space, leaving the four men, with mouths gaping, wondering what the hell they had just witnessed.
One described it as smashed ice cream cone, another as a bisected football shape and another as a textured satin-like domed object with an antennae. In the end, hundreds of people across Michigan, Ohio and Pennsylvania reported seeing something in the sky that night.
Does all this sound familiar? Steven Spielberg based much of the first 2/3rds of “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” on this incident. Unlike the movie, the officers experiences didn’t wrap up with five little pleasant notes of music, though.
Dale Spaur describing the incident before his fall from grace.
Upon their return to Ravenna, Spaur and Neff were met with a flurry of reporters. The director of Project Blue Book, General Hector Quintanilla, rushed up from Wright-Patterson Air Force Base.
His mission, it seemed, was to belittle and discredit the deputies with the brunt of his govrnment-man assholery coming down on Deputy Dale Spaur. In fact, his first words to Spaur were “Tell me about this mirage you saw.”
Quintanilla’s official ruling was that the deputies had confused the planet Venus and the Moon interchangeably for an alien space craft and had foolishly chased the features of the eastern sky into Pennsylvania. Despite being told by Pentagon superiors that he was “in error”, Quintanilla stuck by his analysis.
Even though Spaur was the only officer mentioned in Project Blue Books report, the effects of this ridicule were devastating for all of the policemen involved.
Buchert, who photographed the object, lost 20 pounds in the three days that followed the sighting and afterward maintained “it’s something that should be forgotten…left alone.”
Spaur’s partner, Neff, refused to speak of the incident. His wife said her husband was as white as a sheet for hours after the chase and in a state of severe shock. He told her he would never say another word about flying saucers even if one landed in his backyard.
Panzella was also quiet about the incident and had his phone removed after that morning.
Huston resigned a few months after the experience, changed his name and moved to Seattle to become a bus driver.
As was said earlier, Dale Spaur had the worst time in the aftermath of the sighting. He began disappearing for days at a time and seemingly started to lose his mind. Within two months of following the UFO he flew into a rage and attacked his wife, consequently ending both his marriage and career in law enforcement.
Six months after the sighting he was a broken, lonely and haunted man living in a seedy motel on a minuscule painter’s salary. No matter who he turned to (his family, friends and even the church) he was ridiculed as the man who chased the flying saucer. When he would fall asleep it would only be a few minutes before nightmares of “the Incident” would jar him awake.
Eventually, Spaur moved to Amsted, West Virginia and became a taxi driver. It was during his time here that he was seriously injured when he fell into an abandoned mine shaft during a walk in the woods.
Rushed to the hospital in critical condition, Spaur slipped into a coma shortly after arriving. No one, outside of family, knew of Spaur’s past, though one nurse would end up getting a pretty good idea that his history was anything but ordinary.
He had been in a coma for several weeks and this particular nurse spent a great deal of time sitting with him in hopes of a miracle, until one day when she suddenly ran from the room screaming.
She never described what she saw that day, but refused to enter his room again saying only that he was an alien and possessed by something that was not of this world. Despite his new found lack of company, Spaur did make that miraculous recovery and returned to Ohio where he managed a Lakewood bar until his death in 1983.
Ohioans have reported THOUSANDS of UFO sightings over the past 70 years, including another well-documented sighting that involved multiple police witnesses in nearby Trumbull County on December 14th of 1994.
Strange Portals Connect The Earth To The Sun Every 8 Minutes
Strange Portals Connect The Earth To The Sun Every 8 Minutes
During the time you read this article, something will happen high above your head that until recently many scientists did not believe. A magnetic portal will open, connecting the Earth with the Sun at a distance of 150 million kilometers between them, reports NASA Science.
Tons of high-energy particles will pass through this opening before it closes again, around the time you reach the end of the page.
It’s called a “flux transfer event” or “FTE,” says space physicist David Seebeck of the Goddard Space Flight Center, a major NASA research laboratory. “In 1998 I was sure they didn’t exist, but now the evidence is irrefutable.”
Indeed, David Seebeck proved their existence and presented this evidence at an international meeting of space physicists at a plasma seminar back in 2008 in Huntsville, Alabama.
In the future, NASA fully confirmed that these portals linking the Sun and the Earth appear every 8 minutes.
Researchers have long guessed that the Earth and the Sun must be related. The Earth’s magnetosphere (the magnetic bubble that surrounds our planet) is filled with high-energy particles from the Sun that enter through the solar wind and penetrate the planet’s magnetic shielding.
“We used to think that this connection is permanent and that the solar wind could seep into near-Earth space anytime it is active,” says Seebeck.
“We were wrong. The connections are not at all random and do not depend on flares or the speed of flow of solar particles. These portals open every 8 minutes .”
Scientists talked about how these portals are formed:
On the daytime side of the Earth (the side closest to the Sun), the Earth’s magnetic field is pressed against the Sun’s magnetic field.
Roughly every eight minutes, these two fields briefly merge or “reunite”, forming a portal through which particles can pass. The portal has the shape of a magnetic cylinder the width of the Earth.
Four ESA Cluster spacecraft and five NASA THEMIS probes flew through these cylinders and surrounded them, measuring their sizes and registering particles passing through them.
“They do exist,” says Seebeck.
Now that Cluster and THEMIS have directly explored portals, scientists can use these measurements to model portals in their computers and predict their behavior.
Space physicist Jimmy Rader of the University of New Hampshire presented one such model at a seminar. He told his colleagues that cylindrical portals usually form above the Earth’s equator and then pass over the Earth’s winter pole:
December – portals connecting the Sun and the Earth pass through the North Pole
In July, the portals connecting the Sun and the Earth pass over the South Pole .
Seebeck believes that: “I think there are two kinds of these portals: active and passive.”
Active portals are magnetic cylinders through which particles pass fairly easily; they are important conductors of energy for the Earth’s magnetosphere.
Passive portals are magnetic cylinders that offer more resistance; their internal structure does not allow for such a light flow of particles and fields (Active FTEs are formed at equatorial latitudes when the IMF is directed to the south; passive FTEs are formed at higher latitudes when the IMF is directed to the north).
Seebeck has calculated the properties of passive FTEs and encourages his colleagues to look for their signs in the THEMIS and Cluster data.
“Passive FTEs may not be very important, but until we know more about them, we cannot be sure.”
There are many unanswered questions:
Why do portals form every 8 minutes?
How do magnetic fields inside a cylinder twist and curl?
“We are thinking hard about it,” says Seebeck.
Meanwhile, high above your head, a new portal is opening, connecting our planet to the sun. Reception and transmission of data?
Studies suggest that there are definitely alien life forms in outer space. Earthlings, such as yourself, have pondered for decades on the existence of extraterrestrial life, using a model that has been immortalized ever since.
Area 51 has drawn teems of tourists with wide eyed wonder, looking for the bug-eyed big-headed alien man. No one is really sure where this image originated, but it has no real standing with the discovery of alien life.
Is there life in the universe that excludes our own? Studies say there is definitely enough proof to verify that theory. The form of life is what has now left us astounded.
Unusual life forms
So we see that there is life on other planets – we are so close that we can almost hear the alien dialect. Well, not so much, but we have enough to set some cogs in motion. Science has discovered that there are indeed alien life forms that thrive from consuming electrons.
This just proves that we actually have no idea what else could be out there.
Scientists at the University of Southern California have discovered bacteria that survive by eating pure electrons rather than food. This brings a completely new understanding to what conditions are required for life to thrive, bringing in new questions about the existence and possibilities for extraterrestrial life.
“This is huge. What it means is that there is a whole part of the microbial world that we don’t know about.” – Kenneth Nealson, USC Scientist
This bacteria which feeds off electricity could be the next step to understanding why there is no need for certain elements on the other planets.
Unlike humans on the planet earth, who need water, sunlight and organic material to survive, this new life form thrives off rock and metal. Since there is plentiful rock and metal in the core of most planets, this bacteria could be just a plentiful. It just changes the entire way of thinking for earthlings.
We found this extraordinary life form by doing our own experiments. By placing electrodes in the deep rock of the ocean, we caused high voltages to be pushed out into the surrounding waters.
Bacteria started to consume the electrons. If the electrodes produced a weaker signal, the bacteria would start to emit electrons, thus making a current in the waters.
The exchange was phenomenal to the discovery of life. It is simple really, electrons produce energy, and energy is needed for life. Why we haven’t discovered that until now is a result of oversight and nothing more. Maybe we were too focused by a grander scale of thought.
What does this mean for us?
Now that it is established that there is extraterrestrial life, we can delve a little deeper. The main objective is to get rid of the limitations on the mind. The way that we see alien life is totally obscured and unrealistic.
We have to stop thinking on terms of earthlings and the comforts of home. The chances of life on other planets are now 100% certain, the chances that they look like us, is very low.
What matters is that we change our train of thinking and consider the fact that we are not alone, and time will show us more extraordinary reasons why we should always think… outside of the box.
There’s no doubt that the Roswell “UFO crash” of July 1947 is the most visible and talked about incident of its type. It’s a case that is noted for two important things that are relevant to today’s article. Number One: the U.S. government has changed its views time and time again on what happened outside of the city of Roswell all those years ago. Number Two: numerous civilians caught up in the maelstrom were “treated” to death-threats. The story was that a “Flying Disk” had come down. There was, however, a sudden retraction: it was all a big mistake. Nothing but a weather-balloon hit the ground on the Foster Ranch in Lincoln County, New Mexico. Sorry! Screw-Up! That explanation stayed firmly in place until the early 1990s. That’s when the U.S. Air Force changed its story. Apparently, the weather-balloon was not a weather-balloon, after all. It was a huge “Mogul” balloon designed to monitor for detonations of early atomic weapons of the Soviet Union. The Air Force, also in the 1990s, made it clear that because Mogul balloons didn’t carry people, there couldn’t have been any bodies (alien or human) at the crash-site. Ready for another explanation? Yeah, there is one. In 1997, the Air Force said there were bodies (of a sort, at least), after all. They were, the Air Force said, crash-test dummies. That’s a hell of a lot of different explanations for one, solitary case. No wonder the Roswell affair causes more than a few people to go “Hmm.” Even the U.S. media went “Hmm” when the government’s crash-test dummies report was reeled out for one and all to see. Particularly so, because it was quickly shown by journalists that the dummy tests didn’t even begin until the early 1950s, never mind what was going on in 1947. I think that deserves a third “Hmm.”
At the Roswell Crash Site
(Nick Redfern)
Now, let’s take a look at another angle of the Roswell mystery: the threats that were made to people involved in the immediate wake of the event. It’s a fact there are literally dozens of people who, back in 1947 – when everything went crazy for a few days and nights – were told not to talk about what they had seen. As in: ever. Fucking ever. We’re talking about debris, strange foil-like materials, and even small bodies scattered around and clearly damaged to a degree. There are claims that people had their lives threatened. Stay silent or else. And, we all know what “or else” means, right? Reportedly, those threats didn’t end when the materials and the bodies were scooped up. Some people were threatened for years. Decades, actually. There are reports of people in the Roswell area having had their phones “tapped” for ages. Right up until the 1990s, when they passed away, some of the key, military figures in the story – such as Sheridan Cavitt and Lewis Rickett – were extremely careful about what they said to UFO researchers. And what they didn’t say. Cavitt, particularly, was very concerned about being tied to the the matter of those bodies, whatever they may have been. And, we’re talking about decades after the whole thing was all over. Yet, even in the nineties, Cavitt and Rickett were still almost shitting bricks when the Roswell affair – and particularly word of the bodies – popped up. But, is it all over? That’s where we get to the crux of today’s article.
If the government had the whole Roswell story carefully wrapped up (in a secure “Hangar 18”-type scenario), and there was not a single bit of solid evidence hidden away by people in the area, there would have been no need, at all, for the death-threats. There would have been no need for endless phone surveillance. Why? Because the locals, the witnesses, and the rancher, W.W. “Mac” Brazel, would have had no evidence to make a case that something strange really happened. And the government would have been safe, knowing that everything was in a never-ending state of total lock-down. But, just maybe, the government isn’t safe. Not a bit. Consider this: both the government and the Air Force, of today, may not have a collective handle on what happened back in 1947. Maybe, more than a bit of debris still resides in the homes of the relatives of the original witnesses. And, sitting there until someone decides to come forward and hand it over to the media. Perhaps, there’s much more than a bit of debris hidden away in some of the old ranches of Lincoln County. Pieces of advanced technology, too, whether ours or “theirs.” Consider the following as a working scenario: that with all of the chaotic activity going on at the Foster Ranch (and its immediate surroundings) far more than what we know could have been quickly scooped up by local folk. Indeed, there is evidence that much was seen, touched and quickly stuffed in pockets before the military even had the chance to reach the ranch. Never mind close it down for a week or so.
Where “something” was found on the ranch
(Nick Redfern)
There’s also the fascinating story of the late “Dee” Proctor. In later years, and when his mother was elderly and in extremely ill-health, Proctor – who had seen just about everything there was to see on the legendary day something strange came down – chose to drive her to a part of the ranch about two miles from the primary site. When they arrived, Dee told his mom they were now at another site on the ranch where what was termed “something else” was found by rancher Brazel and Proctor himself. The inference was that a body (or more than one body) was stumbled upon at that location. And it was found before the military had the chance to get there first. In light of that, who really knows what went on in that period of chaos? There’s also the matter of a significant number of files from the Roswell base – dating from the 1940s to the 1950s – that cannot be found. Anywhere. Even the Government Accountability Office admitted that when they went looking after the truth of Roswell, the files were nowhere in sight. Maybe, some element of the government still has those voluminous files – hidden away, somewhere. What if, though, an Edward Snowden-type character carefully, and secretly, was able to get his or her hands on all of those potentially crucial 1940s-1950s-era Roswell files? And, in the process, handed them over to someone who, one day, just might choose to come forward with the answers to the mystery? Possibly, that’s exactly what has happened. We’re just waiting – patiently or not – for that person to reveal themself. But, we, the media, the Air Force and the government, just don’t know it. But, the government prays it never happens.
What all of this just might mean is that – in a situation that most people haven’t thought of – the government totally failed to secure all of the material and evidence found at the crash-site. The result? Crucial data was circulating all around the place. And the military – racing around like headless chickens – were trying to get the whole thing wrapped up; but, in the process, failing miserably. In a strange situation, kids at the time in the area, like Dee Proctor, probably knew way more back then than any of us do now. Even more than a lot of the military guys ordered to cordon the place, and begin the threats, knew less than Dee ever did. Many people might consider the finding of whatever-it-was that came down on the Foster Ranch as something amazing. But, with huge amounts of missing files, and debris quickly picked up and hidden by the ranchers and locals who were way ahead of the military, you can easily see how and why – for the Air Force – Roswell might become the U.S. government’s biggest nightmare. I can easily see a scenario in which those in government, today, who are still tasked with keeping the truth about Roswell hidden, are terrified not by what is hidden by them, but by what just might be held in someone’s old attic. Possibly, something in an old, rusty container buried two-feet-down on the fringes of the old ranch and that, one day, might come to the surface. Or, something amazing under someone’s floorboards. Something that might come tumbling out in a way that the government will be completely unable to foresee, control or confiscate. And, solely, because of one reason: the government wasn’t right on top of things when it happened.
The U.S. government released to the public some data on UFO/UAP encounters reported by military personnel and commercial airline pilots, but most people believe the data cache is far larger and may never see the light of day – at least in the general public arena. Based on comments and frustrations expressed by current and former members of Congress, that body may not see it either. We know that Great Britain has been much more dedicated to collecting UFO data, but former insiders like Nick Pope express the dame frustration. What about our friends to the great white north? It turns out they have a different problem – but the same frustrating results. What’s the problem, eh?
“Nav Canada essentially has discretionary power over the release of information about this issue. That makes it extraordinarily difficult for anyone seeking a greater understanding of these incidents.”
In a detailed investigation by VICE, Sean Holman, an associate professor of journalism at Alberta’s Mount Royal University and a researcher who focuses on Canada’s freedom of information laws, reveals why it’s more difficult to obtain data on UFO encounters by commercial pilots in Canada – its civil air navigation system – air traffic controllers, flight service specialists and technologists – work for the privately run, not for profit corporation Nav Canada. Founded in 1966, it is paid by the Canadian government to run its air traffic control system. Despite the government being its sole customer, Nav Canada is under no obligation to submit to public scrutiny or respond to public requests for information.
Why not ask us?
That doesn’t mean Canadian UFO data doesn’t exist. According to VICE, Canadian aviation regulations and procedures requires pilots over Canada to immediately alert air traffic controllers of “objects or activities that appear to be hostile, suspicious, unidentified, or engaged in possible illegal smuggling activity” and file a Communications Instructions for Reporting Vital Intelligence Sightings (CIRVIS) report. When it receives a CIRVIS, Nav Canada typically informs the Royal Canadian Air Force’s 21 Aerospace Control & Warning Squadron in North Bay, Ontario, which works with NORAD (North American Aerospace Defense Command). 21 Aerospace also files a report to Transport Canada, the federal transportation department. That means the military and the government has files on commercial pilot UFO sightings.
And then?
“Despite these notifications, there’s no indication Nav Canada, Transport Canada, or any branch of the Canadian Armed Forces investigates UFOs outside of initial security assessment. That is, as soon as it’s been determined a UFO isn’t something like a Russian fighter jet or a plane full of drugs, Canadian interest seems to officially end.”
Nothing. UFO investigators know that CADORS (the Civil Aviation Daily Occurrence Report System maintains for the public a digital of airline incidents and contains more than two decades of UFO reports from airlines. Unfortunately, the data is basic, preliminary, and not the final report. Besides, it doesn’t appear that UFO reports are investigated anyway.
“This isn’t an era of conspiracy theories and X-Files anymore. The public should have a right to know.”
Sean Holman doesn’t study UFOs … and it shows. This is definitely an era of conspiracy theories and X-files – otherwise, we’d have disclosure on UFOs … even if it’s to say “We don’t know” about more incidents than just the few in the recent US government report.
Kudos to VICE for exposing this Canadian UFO data problem. Perhaps what Canada needs are some rabble-rousing podcasters like Joe Rogan or some late night talk show hosts to have Nav Canada executives on as guests and taunt them into spilling some beans. That would be fun, eh?
STATEMENT : I was on a beach in Tampa FL. Around 5 am, the sky lit up and there was this crazy thing that split into 2 things the one one the right luminated some kind of ark of light from it the hole sky was lit up like a huge mushroom in front of this thing I thought it's worthy of posting what do you all think?
credit : Jerry Ward
note : no audio
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Strange Skies Over Guizhou, China ( July 27, 2021 )
This was sighted over Guizhou, a mountainous province in southwest China on July 27, 2021
STATEMENT : Guizhou, China July 27, 2021 : What is this? Can somebody please enlighten me. Thanks in advance.
credit : Beatriz Ingrid Medina
UFO With Tentacles Sighted Over New York ( July 28, 2021 )
UFO with tentacles! was sighted over New York on July 28, 2021. 9:00 am
STATEMENT : New York July 28, 2021. 9:00 am.
video submitted
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UFO Sighted in Rainbow Over Moab, Utah ( July 30, 2021 )
UFO Sighted Over Moab, Utah in the Arches National Park on July 30, 2021
Some footage from Russian Soyuz MS-18 spacecraft on July 29, 2021. Soyuz catching a fast moving UFO slow down, stop and then changes direction.
NEWS :The International Space Station (ISS) was thrown briefly out of control on Thursday when jet thrusters of a newly arrived Russian research module inadvertently fired a few hours after it was docked to the orbiting outpost, Nasa officials said. The seven crew members aboard — two Russian cosmonauts, three Nasa astronauts, a Japanese astronaut and a European space agency astronaut from France — were never in any immediate danger, according to Nasa and Russian state-owned news agency RIA. But the malfunction prompted Nasa to postpone until at least August 3 its planned launch of Boeing's new CST-100 Starliner capsule on a highly anticipated uncrewed test flight to the space station. The Starliner had been set to blast off atop an Atlas V rocket on Friday from the Kennedy Space Centre in Florida. Thursday's mishap began about three hours after the multipurpose Nauka module had latched onto the space station, as mission controllers in Moscow were performing some post-docking "reconfiguration" procedures, according to Nasa.
VIDEO 2 : This is where they are from
VIDEO 3 : Hear and Feel the sound of Aliens in the Helix Nebula
MUFON CASE : 117112 Santa Clara, California ( July 29, 2021 )
Mutual UFO Network : MUFON SUBMISSIONS : Traveling southbound I-101 near Fair Oaks exit 394 Long Description of Sighting Report
My daughter and her aunt were traveling southbound on the I-101 Southbound near Fair oaks exit 394 in Santa Clara, CA. On or around 5:33pm. My daughter caught footage of the event with her cell phone camera. The object seemed to hover or wobble and was traveling very swiftly (see video) object disappeared and could not be seen anymore.
Date Submitted : 2021-07-29 Date of Event :2021-07-29 MUFON SUBMITTER FILE :trim.27A951958B39410CB4E633F89A336753.MOV
VIDEO 2 :MUFON CASE : 117109 Levittown, Pennsylvania
Bright huge orb comes closer as recording Long Description of Sighting Report
9:20PM in Indian Creek, I witnessed a very white bright orb looking object appear from behind the trees going up, this video is clipped and I have a way longer recording of it, but I gotta take out the noise cause i'm bugging out crazy lol. But this came and then seemed to lose the bright light after it came past the trees in the video. A humming noise was heard slightly but couldn't pick it up on the phone. Turn up brightness if your having an issue seeing the trees, houses ect. I've had a pervious sighting posted up on mufon aswell.
Date Submitted : 2021-07-29 Date of Event : 2021-07-28 MUFON SUBMITTER FILE : Video.mov : no audio
UFOs Form Triangle Over New Hartford, New York, July 25, 2021, UFO Sighting News.
UFOs Form Triangle Over New Hartford, New York, July 25, 2021, UFO Sighting News.
Date of sighting:July 25, 2021 Location of sighting: Hartford, New York, USA Source:MUFON #117120
Watch this awesome video and you will see a fleet of glowing UFOs far in the distance with the moon behind them. The UFOs are not actually near the moon, however they are visible with the moon behind them. The UFOs are seen forming a triangle formation and the person recoding it seems to think its a code. Perhaps it is, but what does it say? It seems aliens are trying to tell us something...something that may change humanities future for the better.
Scott C. Waring - Taiwan
Eyewitness states:
11 UFO ORBS MAKE PATTERN NEXT TO MOON. I had second thoughts about releasing this video but later decided the world needs to see it. Maqybe somebody can figure out what the sign means. This sighting was witnessed by 2.
It's safe to say that UFOs, now branded UAPs, are back. In recent years, concerns have grown that supposed physics-defying craft are penetrating US airspace. This could represent a technological breakthrough by foreign competitors or something else entirely. But many people will no doubt have found the recent release of the Pentagon's highly anticipated UAP (unidentified aerial phenomena) report to be underwhelming.
Its results are inconclusive, despite the fact that it is the alleged weight of the data that led Congress to request the report in the first place. This raises serious questions as to how the intelligence process became so muddied, and why UFOs have rocketed up Washington's agenda.
While it puts many hypotheses forward, the report concedes that analysts cannot explain at least 143 out of 144 reported sightings. The problem, as they acknowledge, is that they lack the data to draw firm conclusions. The issue is not simply about whether the extraordinary things that have been reported belong to Russia, China or the Klingons, but more about whether anything extraordinary is even happening at all.
To an extent, this is unsurprising. In practically every UAP incident reported, nobody can agree whether something extraordinary — a physics-bending craft, for example — was actually witnessed. Skeptics argue that factors such as misreporting, technical and human error, or optical illusions, can explain much of what is happening in the skies.
Listen to experts talk about the cultural history and scientific taboo around UFOs in The Conversation Weekly podcast.
SANTA FE, N.M., Aug. 1, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Last month, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) released a preliminary report on possible threats posed by UFOs, now known as unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP), and the progress the Department of Defense Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force (UAPTF) has made in understanding any threats. The report provided an overview for policymakers of the challenges associated with characterizing the potential threat posed by UAP while also providing a means to develop relevant processes, policies, technologies, and training for the U.S. military and other U.S. Government (USG) personnel if and when they encounter UAP, so as to enhance the Intelligence Community's (IC) ability to understand the threat.
Dovetailing with the objectives of the ODNI's report, the Genesis 2 Project® (G2P) was established to pursue empirical investigations of forensically-validated UAP recordings and open legitimate questioning into the implications of such technologies on our national security.
Following a briefing of Bill Richardson, former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations and Governor of New Mexico, on its >4-year data collection effort and scientific investigation of UAP, G2P is currently preparing to extend the opportunity for further focused investigation to Senator Marco Rubio, Vice Chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, to aid in protection of our national security. G2P will be sharing still images and videos of the first scientifically-authenticated documentation of UAPs in U.S. airspace, including those captured with infrared technology.
G2P's bona fide scientific approach to the study of UAP relies on the critical first step of digital media forensic analysis, performed by Primeau Forensics. The scientific analyses are carried out according to the methodological standards outlined by the Scientific Working Group for Digital Evidence (SWGDE) and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). Chain of custody documentation of the evidence (digital files and the image-capturing devices) is strictly maintained, from intake to extraction and handling of the data.
Moreover, in G2P's ongoing efforts to combat the pseudoscience currently being pushed-forward against a valid empirical scientific approach for UAP, they have expanded their scientific team to include a former NASA physicist and a former FBI Special Agent and Forensic Scientist in the Evidence Response Team Unit at the FBI lab. These world-renowned experts enhance G2P's already strong team of principals and associates in the fields of science, security, and technology. All have signed non-disclosure agreements, recognizing the importance of maintaining focus on the integrity of the information itself, as all have carried secret clearances with DOD and/or DOE.
Yesterday, today, and tomorrow…UAP activity exists among us. G2P's systematic empirical study will help in solidifying the transition of UAP investigation from entertainment to scientific, while advancing our knowledge of physics and promoting forward-thinking ideas that will benefit science and technology.
David C. Henley: What the government says about UFOs
David C. Henley: What the government says about UFOs
By David C Henley
It was Thursday, June 3, and across America and around the world millions of people were anxiously awaiting the release of a major U.S. government report. “Suspense Builds Ahead of Pentagon Report” headlined a front page article in the Washington Times. “Breathless” was the word used by the San Diego Union-Tribune to describe the emotions of many of those waiting for the much-heralded document.
So what were the disclosures found in the report made public seven weeks ago by the Defense Department’s Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force in conjunction with the Office of Naval Intelligence and the FBI? In a nutshell, the report said that there is no conclusive evidence of the existence of unidentified flying objects, or UFOs, despite the fact that U.S. military pilots have issued 120 reports of UFO sightings the past several years. As National Public Radio stated, “This could have been the day that finally answered the burning question: Are there aliens out there? Sadly, we’ll still have to wait.” The government report conceded, however, “The very ambiguity of the findings meant the government could not definitely rule out theories that the phenomenon observed by the pilots might be alien spacecraft.” Transplanted into readable English, this means UFOs could, or could not, be flying around in the skies above us. UFO sightings are nothing new. They have been reported for centuries. A CBS News poll released two months ago revealed that 66% of Americans believe there is intelligent life on other planets, an increase of 10 percentage points from a poll taken in 2017. I am one of those who has seen an alien spacecraft, and I also met its four passengers. I previously told no one of my encounter because I figured they might think I had gone bonkers. This column today, then, is my first description of my most-unusual UFO experience that occurred on a cold, rainy and foggy day in January 2002, when I spied the UFO hovering over our house on the southern bank of the Carson River northwest of downtown Fallon. It was about 7 a.m. that morning, and I was en route to our newspaper office on North Maine Street to finish my weekly column that was due that afternoon. As I was backing out of the garage, the UFO landed in front of my car and I came to a quick stop. The UFO was torpedo-shaped, about 30 feet in length, and in a minute or two four women emerged from the craft and waved to me. Too shocked to say anything, I waved back and finally managed to utter a “hello, ladies.” The women were super-friendly, and we shook hands. They appeared to be in the late 20s or early 30s. I didn’t ask their ages because my mother always told me it was impolite to ask a woman how old she is. They were about 7 feet tall, had six fingers on each hand, large round heads, fair complexions, black hair and spoke perfect English with no foreign accent. “Where are you from and what are your names?” I asked. “We are from Galaxy X near the moon and our names are Mae, Fay, Kay and Rae,” responded Mae, the UFO’s pilot. “Why did you stop at my house?” I asked. “Your home looks very pretty and inviting, and it’s on a wide street so we had no trouble parking our craft,” answered Kay. “Why did you come to Fallon,” I then asked. “We’ve heard that Fallon is welcoming to visitors, and we want to go to a big store here to buy lipsticks and blonde hair dye that will make us the only ladies in our galaxy to have red lips and light-colored hair. Where should we go to shop?” continued Kay. I answered that Walmart is the largest store in Fallon, and it carried a large selection of colorful dresses that they also wanted to purchase. The four women wore long, white dresses that resembled wedding gowns which most females in Galaxy X wear, and they said they hoped to look more inviting to the men in their galaxy if they returned home wearing up-to-date American fashions. I told them to park their UFO behind my garage, as I didn’t want it to draw too much attention from the neighbors. The five of us then hopped in my 1998 Ford Explorer and we drove off to Walmart. Once inside, they drew stares from customers and employees, who, nevertheless, were warm and welcoming. The four ladies shopped for more than an hour, buying about a dozen dresses each and enough lipsticks and blonde hair dyes to last several years. Each woman also bought about 20 tubes of toothpaste. “The stuff sold in our stores tastes and smells like kerosene,” Fay said as we piled into the Explorer and drove back to my house. The ladies’ total purchases had come to nearly $1,500, which they paid in bitcoin. When we got home, I asked them to come inside to meet my wife, Ludie, but they said they didn’t have time because they needed to return to Galaxy X immediately to attend a welcome home party. “We also are looking forward to watching our two favorite American TV shows which will air in our spacecraft in a few minutes,” replied May. When I asked her what those shows were, she responded “Bachelor” and “QVC Shopping Show.” Before the women departed, they said they hoped to return someday and bring presents to Ludie and me. We shook hands, they kissed me on the cheek and flew off in their craft heading straight up to the heavens.
David C. Henley is publisher emeritus of the Lahontan Valley News and Fallon Eagle-Standard.
A white object is seen in Stealth Bomber photographs snapped in Mojave, California on May 24, 2021. The B-2 Stealth Bomber was headed from Edwards Air Force Base northwest into the southern Sierra Nevada Mountains.
Harvard? Galileo Project? ALIENS?!?! Here’s what you need to know
Harvard? Galileo Project? ALIENS?!?! Here’s what you need to know
We still don’t know whether 'Oumuamua was a spaceship or merely an inert lump of rock
Can we find alien technology? That is the ambitious goal of the Galileo Project, launched this week by Harvard astrophysicist Avi Loeb with substantial private financial backing.
The project is far from the first attempt to detect signs of civilizations beyond Earth. Loeb has been criticized in the past for his dismissive approach to previous efforts to find extraterrestrial life and his argument that an alien artifact passed through our solar system in 2017.
So why do Loeb and his collaborators think they have a chance of finding something where others have failed? There are three triggers that suggest they might.
Exoplanets, ‘Oumuamua, and UFOs
First, years of painstaking observations have shown that many stars host Earth-like planets. There is a real chance these “exoplanets” might be home to alien civilizations.
Second, five years ago, an interstellar visitor, dubbed ‘Oumuamua, tumbled through our solar system. It was a skinny object about 400 meters long, and we know from its speed and trajectory that it arrived from outside our solar system. It was the first time we had ever seen an interstellar object enter our neighborhood.
Unfortunately, it caught us on the hop, and we didn’t notice it until it was on its way out. So we didn’t get a chance to have a really good look at it.
Scientists were divided on the question of what ‘Oumuamua might be. Many thought it was simply an interstellar shard of rock, even though we had no idea how such a shard might be produced or slung our way.
Others, including Loeb, thought there was a chance it was a spacecraft from another civilization. Some scientists felt such claims to be far-fetched. Others pointed out that science should be open-minded and, in the absence of a good explanation, we should examine all plausible solutions.
Today, the question is still hanging. We don’t know whether ‘Oumuamua was a spaceship or merely an inert lump of rock.
The third trigger for the Galileo Project came from the US military. In June, the Office of the US Director of National Intelligence announced that some military reports of UFOs, or UAPs (Unidentified Aerial Phenomena) as they are now known, seem real.
Specifically, the report said some UAPs “probably do represent physical objects given that a majority of UAP were registered across multiple sensors” and there was no known explanation for them.
In other words, they aren’t meteorological phenomena, or faulty instruments, or weather balloons, or clandestine military experiments. So what are they?
Again, the question is left hanging. The report seems to rule out known technology, and suggests “advanced technology”, but stops short of suggesting it is the work of aliens.
Science to the rescue
Loeb takes the view that instead of debating whether either ‘Oumuamua or UAPs provide evidence of alien intelligence, we should do what scientists are good at, get some reliable data. And, he argues, scientists are the people to do it, not politicians or military staff. As the US report says, the sensors used by the military “are not generally suited for identifying UAP”.
Few subjects divide scientists as much as the existence of aliens. On one hand, there are serious SETI (Search for Extra-terrestrial Intelligence) projects, such as Project Phoenix and Breakthrough Listen, that use the world’s largest telescopes to search for signals from some extraterrestrial intelligence.
At the other extreme, few scientists are persuaded by the fuzzy photos and dubious eyewitness accounts that seem to characterize many UFO reports.
The Galileo Project is very different from SETI searches or collections of UFO sightings. Instead, it will explicitly search for evidence of alien artifacts, either in space or on Earth.
But is it science?
Is this science? Loeb is convinced that it is. He argues the Galileo Project will bring scientific techniques and expertise to bear on one of the most important questions we can ask: are we alone? And the project will build purpose-designed equipment, optimized for the detection of alien artifacts.
Will it find anything? The odds are poor, as Loeb admits. In essence, it’s a fishing expedition. But if there is a prima facie case for the existence of alien technology, then science has a duty to investigate it.
But suppose they do find something? Will we get to hear about it, or will it be locked up in some future Area 51?
The Galileo Project has promised all data will be made public, and all results will be published in peer-reviewed journals. Indeed, one of the reasons it will not use existing military data is because much of it is classified, which would restrict the project’s freedom to make the results public.
Or perhaps the project will find natural explanations for ‘Oumuamua and UAPs. But even that will be a new scientific discovery, perhaps revealing new natural phenomena.
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- Gemiddelde waardering: 0/5 - (0 Stemmen) Categorie:ALIEN LIFE, UFO- CRASHES, ABDUCTIONS, MEN IN BLACK, ed ( FR. , NL; E )
A gigantic “forgotten” alien ship on the surface of the Moon?
A gigantic “forgotten” alien ship on the surface of the Moon?
For many, the idea that secret missions to the Moon were carried out is something very difficult to believe. Especially when you add to that story that the alleged missions recovered alien technology.
While many believe that the existing Apollo 20 idea is just another conspiracy theory, there are many people around the world who believe that something like this is entirely possible.
In today’s world, ufologists trying to get to the bottom of the UFO phenomenon are having a very difficult time due to the many conspiracy theories and hoaxes circulating around the web.
While the so-called Apollo 20 mission could very well be one of those elaborate hoaxes, there are some interesting details that make it worth investigating further.
Officially, NASA ended its Apollo space program with the Apollo 17 mission, even though they had planned more missions to the Moon with the Apollo 18, 19, and 20 missions.
While these missions were “never” officially carried out, many people believe that NASA secretly sent three more missions to the moon where astronauts allegedly explored ancient structures on the lunar surface and recovered extraterrestrial technology.
One of the most interesting quotes about strange structures on the surface of the Moon comes from Dr. Brandenburg, who has provided what some call “substantial evidence” of extraterrestrial life present in our solar system.
“The Clementine Mission was a photographic reconnaissance mission, basically to see if someone was building bases on the Moon that we knew nothing about.” Brandenburg once recounted:
“We were sitting in a room with generals from the Army, Air Force and some Admirals, and we were watching what appeared to be a shootout in space. The senior general there turned to me and said, “Where do you think they’re from?” And he said, “I heard it’s 40 light years from here.”
Quotes like the one above have given people around the world a reason to believe that numerous top-secret missions to the Moon were carried out even after Apollo 17.
Interestingly, in 2007 several interesting videos were posted on YouTube by William Rutledge, a person who claims to have been part of the Apollo 20 mission.
Rutledge claims that there are countless structures on the far side of the Moon and they even showed videos of the structures and a supposed female alien that was found on a gigantic crashed alien ship.
The Italian researcher named Luca Scantumbarlo was able to find out more about the incredible “story” that Rutledge had made known to the public when he contacted Rutledge.
In an interview, Rutledge stated the following: “NASA did not employ me, the USAF did. He had worked in the study of extraterrestrial technology, but only that related to Russia. He had studied about the N1 project, AJAX plane project, and the MIG Foxbat 25.
I had some skills to use navigation equipment and was a volunteer for the MOL-Gemini project. The USAF chose me for Apollo 20 because I was a pilot who did not believe in God. “
According to reports, the so-called Apollo 20 mission was not only an American mission, but was, in fact, a joint venture between the Soviets and the US. The mission was carried out according to Rutledge in 1976.
Apollo 20 was sent to the far side of the Moon, to an area known as the Sports-Izsak region, in the vicinity of the Tsiolkovsky crater. His goal was to investigate a huge object that had been discovered by members of the Apollo 15 mission crew.
Once on the Moon, the Apollo 20 crew members encountered a colossal object, 2 miles (3,200 mtr. Approx.) Long. It was an alien spaceship, and not far from it, was another much smaller spacecraft.
Rutledge says: “It was called the ‘City of the Moon’, but it seemed to be space junk, as it was full of scrap metal and pieces of gold; but only one construction seemed intact, we called it the ‘Cathedral’.
We took photos of the metal pieces, of each part that had calligraphy, exposed to the sun. The city appears to be as old as the ship, but it is a very small place. In the rover video, the artifacts appear larger. ” ‘We entered the spaceship.
The main findings of the exploration were: it was a very old mothership that traversed the universe for at least 1 billion years.
I’m delighted to announce the release of a short film presenting the recent history of Antarctica and how a breakaway German colony established a presence in an extensive underground cavern system, and used it as a base of operations for building a fleet of reverse engineered alien spacecraft. The German “Dark Fleet” has evolved over decades to become a powerful force on Earth and in Deep Space. Learn why the existence of the Dark Fleet is to be exposed as a necessary condition for humanity entering a golden galactic age where we interact with highly advanced extraterrestrial civilizations who share advanced life changing technologies.
Premieres Today at 10 am Pacific, 1 pm East Coast, USA Watch on YouTube,Rumble or Vimeo
I wish to thank my inspired and incredibly talented wife, Angelika Whitecliff, for the many hours she devoted to creating this short film and raising public awareness of these critical issues.
Beste bezoeker, Heb je zelf al ooit een vreemde waarneming gedaan, laat dit dan even weten via email aan Frederick Delaere opwww.ufomeldpunt.be. Deze onderzoekers behandelen jouw melding in volledige anonimiteit en met alle respect voor jouw privacy. Ze zijn kritisch, objectief maar open minded aangelegd en zullen jou steeds een verklaring geven voor jouw waarneming! DUS AARZEL NIET, ALS JE EEN ANTWOORD OP JOUW VRAGEN WENST, CONTACTEER FREDERICK. BIJ VOORBAAT DANK...
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Over mijzelf
Ik ben Pieter, en gebruik soms ook wel de schuilnaam Peter2011.
Ik ben een man en woon in Linter (België) en mijn beroep is Ik ben op rust..
Ik ben geboren op 18/10/1950 en ben nu dus 73 jaar jong.
Mijn hobby's zijn: Ufologie en andere esoterische onderwerpen.
Op deze blog vind je onder artikels, werk van mezelf. Mijn dank gaat ook naar André, Ingrid, Oliver, Paul, Vincent, Georges Filer en MUFON voor de bijdragen voor de verschillende categorieën...
Veel leesplezier en geef je mening over deze blog.
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