NASA eyes ion engines for Mars orbiter launching in 2022

India’s Mars Orbiter Mission captured this image of the red planet soon after arriving in September 2014. Credit: ISRO

NASA officials want the agency’s next Mars orbiter to pull double duty as a communications relay station for a fleet of surface landers and as a trailblazer for a future round-trip sample return mission and human expeditions to the red planet.

Worried its fleet of Mars orbiter is aging, NASA intends to dispatch the spacecraft to the red planet in September 2022 to link ground controllers with rovers and extend mapping capabilities expected to be lost when the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter stops functioning.

Engineers also want to add ion engines to the orbiter and fly the efficient electrically-powered thruster system to Mars for the first time, testing out a solar-electric propulsion package that officials say will be needed when astronauts visit the red planet.

Ion engines produce just a whisper of thrust, using electric power to ionize atoms of a neutral gas and spit out the particles at high speed. While the drive given by the thrusters is barely noticeable in one instant, they can operate for months or years, burning scant fuel compared to traditional chemical rockets.

A Mars orbiter launching in 2022 is a prime candidate to test out new technologies — like ion drive engines, better solar arrays, and lightning-fast broadband communications between Earth and Mars — to help scientists return samples from the Martian surface, and eventually send humans there, according to Charles Whetsel, who oversees formulation of future Mars missions at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.

“The ability to do round-trip missions, including robotic sample return, but also paving the way for human exploration, is a very high priority for the agency,” Whetsel said in a Feb. 24 meeting of the Mars Exploration Program Analysis Group, a panel of scientists chartered by NASA to help plan future scientific research at the red planet.

A rover NASA plans to send to Mars in 2020 will scoop up rock samples and store them for retrieval on a later mission. An orbiter with ion engines to get the material back to Earth will come later, along with a rocket to launch the specimens from Mars into space for pickup by the return craft.

Adding solar-electric propulsion to the 2022 Mars mission would allow the probe to swoop through different orbits around the red planet, passing by the Martian moons Deimos and Phobos and through a so-called “areostationary” orbit about 11,000 miles above the Mars equator.

The areostationary orbit is similar to the type of orbit around Earth used by communications satellites, which circle the planet at the same speed as its rotation, appearing to hover over a fixed location.

Such an orbit is ideal for communications, but most scientific observations of Mars require a closer viewpoint.

That is not a problem with solar-electric propulsion, said Robert Lock, who is leading the concept studies for the 2022 orbiter.

An orbiter equipped with ion engines — and highly-efficient solar panels to generate the power for the thrusters — would likely launch into a high-altitude Earth orbit, then fire its electric rocket jets to gradually break free of Earth’s gravity and fly to Mars. Instead of the usual transit time of less than a year, it might take two years for a probe with ion propulsion to get to the red planet, where it would initially enter a looping orbit far from Mars, before using its electric engines spiral closer.

“(Solar-electric propulsion) is easy,” Lock told NASA’s Mars science panel Feb. 24. “It’s like an electric light switch. You turn the motor off, do some science, turn the motor back on and continue spiraling. Doing science on the way through the Mars system is actually a very easy thing to do, and you’ve got loads of power to do it with.”

This image shows a cutting edge solar-electric propulsion thruster in development at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

Lock said in-space electric propulsion — thought of as an unproven cutting edge technology not long ago — is now mature enough to rely on for a robotic mission to Mars. He said the 2022 probe could mark the start of a new generation of Mars orbiters, much like the way the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter — with its telescopic imaging camera, sounding radar and large size — represented a leap in capabilities when it lifted off in 2005.

NASA’s Dawn spacecraft now approaching the dwarf planet Ceres would not be possible without ion engines, and a pair of Boeing-built communications satellites launched just Sunday using only xenon-ion propulsion to complete their missions.

“In the decade since MRO was launched and got to Mars, significant new things have happened,” Lock said. “Deep Space 1 and Dawn proved that electric propulsion can be taken out into the solar system and used successfully. In the meantime, our commercial friends were using electric propulsion to replace complex and risky chemical propulsion systems to do their jobs easier and more cheaply for telecom satellites.”

NASA could elect to send an orbiter to Mars with conventional liquid-fueled propulsion system, purely as a replacement for the communications relay and scientific survey capacity from previous missions.

But Whetsel and Lock said infusing the 2022 mission new technologies like electric propulsion or high-speed optical communications would expand the orbiter’s scientific output while simultaneously paving the way for later voyages.

“Getting to Mars and then getting back again with sample return is turning out not to be so much of a challenge if we start off with a solar-electric propulsion type basis,” Lock said.

According to Lock, one orbiter design under discussion is based on the probe NASA has proposed sending to collect an asteroid and return it to the vicinity of the moon for a visit by astronauts. The Mars mission model based on the asteroid retrieval mission would have enough power from its ion engines to launch to the red planet and return to Earth, and still fit in the envelope of a Falcon 9 or low-end Atlas 5 rocket, he said.

One of several concepts under review by NASA for a Mars orbiter that could launch in 2022. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Charles Whetsel/Robert Lock

Officials said all the concepts under consideration for the 2022 mission are targeted to cost between about $500 million and $1 billion, in line with NASA’s most recent Mars orbiters. If the orbiter includes things that apply to future human expeditions to Mars, the cost could be shared among NASA’s science, human exploration and space technology divisions, which each have their own funding lines.

Lock pitched using ion drives on the 2022 mission to the Mars science community by highlighting how the orbiter could support more scientific sensors than existing probes. The electric thrusters are power-hungry, requiring upgraded solar panels to charge the spacecraft’s batteries, but that leaves extra power for research instruments when the engines are switched off.

“We have a lot of capability, and the trick is going to be dialing in who wants what out of the mission, who is going to contribute what to the mission, and how do we share the landscape in terms of funding all the things we want to do,” Lock said.

NASA also has a more logistical reason behind the mission: Officials are not sure how many of the space agency’s existing orbiters will still be working by the early 2020s.

Launch opportunities for Mars missions are spaced approximately 26 months apart, when the planets are properly aligned to make the interplanetary journey feasible.

Engineers will spend the next year studying several concepts for the 2022 mission, and officials hope to finalize the orbiter’s purpose and architecture in time to kick off development by the end of 2016, according to Jim Watzin, head of NASA’s Mars exploration program at NASA Headquarters.

NASA’s network of spacecraft circling Mars — currently consisting of the Mars Odyssey probe, the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, and the MAVEN mission — may be whittled down to as few as one by 2022.

Besides science data collected by the orbiters, the spacecraft are critical to support landers and rovers parked on the Martian surface. They relay signals between Earth and the craft on Mars, enabling the return of imagery, data and telemetry at a much faster rate than possible with direct links.

“One of my biggest worries is some of our spacecraft are getting old,” said Fuk Li, director of Mars programs at JPL. “Looking into the early ’20s and having an orbiter around (Mars) to provide a rejuvenation of communications and reconnaissance capability is one of the critical things we can add to the program. It provides a lot more resiliency and robustness to how we do operations around Mars.”

This diagram illustrates how orbiters around Mars help link ground controllers with rovers on the surface. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

Mars Odyssey — in orbit since October 2001 — is battling problems with reaction wheels it uses for pointing, and MRO will mark a decade since its launch later this year. MAVEN is a newcomer to Mars after it arrived in September.

The European Space Agency’s Mars Express mission is also in orbit and can beam back data from the rovers, but it has been at Mars since December 2003.

The next two U.S. missions to Mars will go to the surface. The InSight lander will launch in March 2016 and measure seismic activity from a stationary position near the Martian equator, and modified copy of the Curiosity rover is set to blast off toward the red planet in July 2020.

The focus on surface missions leaves a gap in new U.S. orbiters.

ESA is in the final stages of building a methane-sniffing orbiter for launch on a Russian Proton rocket in January 2016. It will host a U.S.-made Electra radio package to connect with the Curiosity and Opportunity rovers, giving them a new conduit to send back results to scientists on Earth.

India’s Mars Orbiter Mission, which reached the red planet in September, does not carry the radio system required for linkups with the rovers.

“Although there’s a lot of open territory and a lot of landscape to be explored in the coming decade, we’ve done enough exploration of that to understand that building from the 2020 surface mission … it feels like the right thing to do is to move forward with an orbiter mission concept,” Whetsel said.

“We’ve been exploring what that orbiter might look like,” Whetsel said. “We don’t have one firm concept. We’ve got a family of concepts, but we know enough about those now to reach out to the science community and talk about the different capabilities that orbiter might have.”

Follow Stephen Clark on Twitter: @StephenClark1.

{ http://spaceflightnow.com/ }

The Putakawagan UFO picture Real or fake ?

This is the picture that i want your opinion on.

It shows us what looks like a disc shaped object with the classic "dome" in the middle.

The Guy that took the picture said that it "jumped" out of the sky and was hanging in the air just long enough til he could take a picture, and then it flew up and out through the skies again.

Whats your thoughts on it ??

You need Adobe Flash Player to view this content.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=vwGoaC1VJls

The picture below is the picture that was uploaded on twitter some years ago.

Categories: UFO Blogs

   Spectra                  

door Jan De Ceuster

In een vorig ¨onderzoek van lichtverschijnselen bij UFO´s met MHD propulsie ¨werd het spectrum besproken van het zogenaamde Bubba fenomeen op 7 Februari 1992 in Gulf Breeze (Florida –USA) .

             Hieruit is gebleken dat er een duidelijk verschil is tussen spectra van een UFO fenomeen en dat van een pyrotechnisch gebeuren waarbij door verbranding van stoffen lijnen optreden in het spectrum. Een typisch voorbeeld hiervan zijn de chinese ballonnen die tijdens festiviteiten wel eens worden opgelaten en die door sommige waarnemers voor UFO´s worden aanzien.

            In de studie van het Bubba fenomeen werd voor het pyrotechnisch voorbeeld de fakkel genomen ,dewelke zeer dikwijls door de Amerikaanse Luchtmacht als uitleg voor een UFO waarneming gebruikt wordt ,maar waarbij   de optredende spectraallijnen dan wel voorkomen in het spectrum als   verbrandingsproducten van Strontium en Barium .

            Voor het spectrum van een UFO en dat van een fakkel werd voor beide overwegend rood en groen , constant in amplitude voor het UFO fenomeen en gerafeld voor de fakkel opgemerkt vermits de verbranding met horten en stoten plaatsgrijpt, en voor beide een zwakke inhoud aan blauw.

            Wat opvalt is dat de gele kleur niet optreedt in het UFO spectrum

Deze karakteristiek werd als eigen aanzien voor het UFO gebeuren en als kenmerk voor een UFO spectrum vooropgesteld .

Het is nu zo dat uit spectrummetingen uitgevoerd op het Hessdalen fenomeen en de daarop uitgevoerde analyses door de ploeg van de Italiaanse Dr Massimo Teodorani op het typische ¨doublet¨ verschijnsel dit voor Bubba vooropgestelde UFO spectrum bevestigt. Een overwegende rood-groene inhoud treedt immers op in de verschillende opnames. Beide meetgegevnes respectievelijk van het Bubba fenomeen in Gulf Breeze in 1992 en deze van het Hessdalen spectraalonderzoek vertonen een duidelijk ontbreken van geel in het spectrum.

            Een spectrum met spectraallijnen van een Natrium lamp doet dienst als referentie . Een continu spectrum wordt tevens afgebeeld van een autolamp zowel als 2 Hessdalen spectra van een doublet

            De conclusie omtrent de spectraalinhoud voor een typisch UFO fenomeen is slechts mogelijk geworden door deze vergelijkende studie tussen Bubba en Hessdalen.

            Referenties: 1 UFO symposium proceedings 1992 My Bubba is back

                                 2 Optical spectrum analysis of the Hessdalen phenomenon

                                       Report 2007 Bjorn Gitle Hauge

     zie artikel in bijlage voor de lichtschema's        

Daily UFO Headlines 3/4/15

(Before It's News)

openminds.tv

• UP IN THE SKY! Local man believes he saw a UFO – Your Houston News
• Fireball Over Utah Was Alien UFO Spacecraft Not Chinese Space Junk, UFO Hunters Say – The Inquisitr
• British UFO encounter “gave me heart failure”, says US airman after military chiefs agree to pay his medical bills – Mirror
• ‘Have You Hugged Your Alien Today?’ teaches valuable lesson – Inside Ottawa Valley
• DNA Analysis Claims Ancient Elongated Peruvian Skulls Are NOT HUMAN – moviepilot

The post Daily UFO Headlines 3/4/15 appeared first on Openminds.tv.

Source: http://www.openminds.tv/daily-ufo-headlines-3415/32422

Army Helicopter’s UFO Scare Still A Mystery, 40 Years Later

(Before It's News)

Forty years ago today, a four-man crew of an Army Reserve helicopter was flying over Mansfield, Ohio, around 11:00 p.m. when they “encountered a near midair collision with an unidentified flying object,” according to the official report, signed and submitted by the crew after the incident.

A full explanation for this terrifying UFO close encounter has never been offered, and to this day, the helicopter-UFO incident remains one of the most credible — and terrifying — in the history of the subject.

The commander of the helicopter, Maj. Larry Coyne, and his crew, thought at first that the light on the horizon was a radio tower beacon.

“We were flying along at about 2,500 feet when the crew chief on the helicopter observed a red light on the east horizon. He then informed me that the light was closing on the helicopter — that it was coming at us on a collision course,” Coyne told this reporter in 1975.

“I looked to the right and observed that the object became bigger and the light became brighter, and I began to descend the helicopter toward the ground, to get out of the collision course path. We were descending and this object was like a missile locked onto the helicopter, only it came at us on a perpendicular angle, to hit us almost broadside.

“It looked like we were going to collide with it and we braced for impact, and then I heard the crewmen in the back say, ‘Look up!’ and I observed this craft stopped directly in front of us — stopped — it was hovering, right over the helicopter!” (See main story illustration above)

Watch this video excerpt of the Coyne account from a documentary report. The story continues after the video.

With the unknown object hovering in the air above the helicopter, Coyne and his crew suddenly noticed a light coming out of the aft end of it — a light that swung 90 degrees and came into their cabin.

“It was a bright green light. And all of the red night lights that we utilize for night navigation were dissolved in this green light — the whole cabin turned green. It hit all of us directly in the face.”

Coyne and his crew knew they were encountering something extraordinary.

“We assumed it was a high-performance fighter, but when it stopped directly in front of us, then all four of us realized that was no high-performance aircraft. This craft, from the angle that we saw it, was cigar-shaped. It had no wings, no vertical or horizontal stabilizer, was approximately 60 feet long, 15-20 feet in height.”

What occurred next was like something out of science fiction.

“We were at 1,700 feet,” Coyne recalled. “Then this craft began to move slowly to the west away from us. At this time, I was worried we were going to hit the ground, and I looked at my altimeter and our helicopter was at 3,500 feet, climbing 1,000 feet a minute with no changes in the control. We went from 1,700 feet to 3,500 feet in a matter of seconds and never knew it!”

The helicopter topped out at 3,800 feet and the four men felt a bump, “like turbulence, at which time we had control of the aircraft again. I had control and we went back down to 2,500 feet and then continued on to Cleveland,” Coyne said.

“As far as the vehicle itself, there’s no doubt in our minds what it looked like. A craft that can move at terrific speeds in excess of 1,000 knots, and then stop on a dime, maintains altitude, can change altitude, climb, descend. To encounter a UFO when it approaches your aircraft, you have no idea what it is. I think if it wanted to collide with us, it could have. You can’t get away from it — you don’t have that much time to respond!”

Lending credibility to this case were eyewitnesses on the ground who observed the UFO-helicopter encounter. The Army didn’t prevent Coyne and his crew from speaking out about their experience. In fact, Coyne was allowed to recount the UFO incident to the United Nations in 1978, as seen below, under the sponsorship of Grenada.

his 1973 UFO incident, while certainly dramatic and terrifying for the helicopter crew involved, is not the only time that conventional aircraft have had encounters with unknown objects.

Many crew members of major airlines have witnessed unusual objects near their aircraft but have been reluctant to tell their stories publicly.

In 1999, Richard Haines, a retired senior research scientist for the NASA-Ames Research Center in California, created the National Aviation Reporting Center on Anomalous Phenomena, or NARCAP, to give pilots and air traffic controllers a confidential place to report their own unusual sightings of what Haines refers to as unidentified aerial phenomena, or UAP.

“We have two objectives: To make flying safer with regard to unidentified and poorly understood phenomena in the atmosphere. And the second objective is to collect, analyze and then report high quality data from the aerospace world on the phenomena, to help us understand them better,” Haines, 76, told The Huffington Post.

According to Haines, on an average daily basis, since the creation of NARCAP, he’s received six to 12 reports a year. He absolutely believes there are real dangerous or safety issues that come up between pilots and some UAP.

“Based upon analysis of past cases, a potential for a very serious event does exist,” Haines said. “We have reviewed a great many encounters in flight where several things can happen. One of them is an electromagnetic effect in close proximity to the phenomenon, where cockpit instrumentation are affected — it might be a magnetic field, radio interference or even an inertial effect, and that’s obviously unsafe. Pilots don’t want to be flying airplanes where they can’t trust their instruments.”

Another area of concern that Haines and his colleagues have found is similar to what Coyne and his helicopter crew experienced in 1973.

“It’s where a UAP is near the airplane, perhaps ahead of the plane, and the pilot makes a rapid emergency dive to avoid a perceived collision. That’s not very common, but it would have to be reported. It has happened in the past and there are still near-misses that occur which sometimes are associated with a nearby UAP.”

Haines has always been impressed with the Coyne helicopter incident.

“It qualifies as a genuine UAP encounter. Multiple witness cases are very important and should command the attention of aviation officials. In the Coyne case, its color, speed and apparent shape — those are all important physical characteristics that can be related to other pilot sightings.

“I think the Coyne case ranks very, very high in credibility. One reason is Coyne’s reputation as a good pilot before this happened. And his courage — the fact that he was willing to come forward with this very bizarre story and to stand by it says an awful lot. And he would give encouragement to other pilots to do the same.

“If everybody remains silent, we’re never going to get to the bottom of this.”

Source: Huffingtonpost

The Link Between Pharaohs and ETs? Alien Artifacts Discovered in Jerusalem

(Before It's News)

The Link Between Pharaohs and ETs? Alien Artifacts Discovered in Jerusalem

The discovery of several remarkable relics could change the way we perceive ancient history. The artifacts were allegedly discovered in former house belonging to Sir William Petrie, hidden in a secret chamber behind a bookshelf. A pioneer archaeologist, Sir Petrie excavated many of the most important ancient Egyptian archaeological sites.

His most famous findings are housed in the Petrie Museum in London but it seems he kept his most important ones to himself. It is believed he found them inside a secret chamber inside the Great Pyramid in Giza.

Among the many items found in the secret room were two small mummified bodies with long, slender arms and elongated heads with large eye sockets. Could these be the remains of extraterrestrial beings?

Another interesting relic was a disk-shaped gold object the size of a small plate. The object had a transparent top and an intricate mechanism inside. Unknown symbols were etched into its sides and they do not appear to be Egyptian hieroglyphs. 

Last but not least and perhaps the most shocking is an item similar to a pharaoh mask. However, instead of the typical human face we might expect on such an item, this mask features a head that is identical to what we call ‘gray aliens’. The left side of the mask contains symbols that could very well be depicting alien encounters and what appears to be a spaceship.

Could these relics be the sought-after connection between the ancient Egyptians and an alien civilization? Strangely enough, Petrie mysteriously abandoned his efforts in Egypt and spent the remainder of his days excavating sites in Palestine. Perhaps he had uncovered clues that led him there.

It’s higly unlikely we’ll ever see these relics again as sources claim that shortly after their discovery, the artifacts were supposedly taken by representatives of the Rockefeller Museum. This could all be an elaborate hoax or publicity stunt, but what if it isn’t?

Take a look at the video below:

Strange UFO Clouds Captured Over Washington State, British Columbia, Bulgaria and Mexico (Video)

(Before It's News)

Strange cloud formations have left residents in Washington State and British Columbia perplexed, after showing up in the sky several times this month.

On March 1, 2015 another odd cloud was spotted over Bulgaria. This cloud is almost identically with a cloud captured in Mexico, last year. Both cloud formations are looking out of place in a surrounding clear sky.

It is said that these hole punch clouds actually be evidence of UFO activity while UFOs also have the ability to generate clouds to hide within, like the strange clouds over Bulgaria and Mexico.

Below, short videos of these odd cloud formations.

  

Thanks http://ufosightingshotspot.blogspot.com/

UFO Caught on Tape Leaving Earth

(Before It's News)

A UFO has been spotted near the International Space Station in footage broadcast after astronauts evacuated part of the orbiting craft.

Alien spotters noticed a strange object disappear behind the ISS, leaving Earth.

Footage of the UFO was shown on the news channels, sparking furious debate among online conspiracy nuts. It is not clear whether the film was stock footage, or taken from NASA’s live feed.

UFO video here:

12,000-Year-Old Alien Disks: Mystery of the Dropa Stones

(Before It's News)

12,000-Year-Old Alien Disks: Mystery of the Dropa Stones 

SETI Pioneer Believes Sending Out Signals In The Milky Way Makes No Sense (Video)

(Before It's News)

Many believe that it makes no sense to send out signals to search for ET life because of the idea that their existence started millions of years ahead of humanity, which makes them advanced enough to monitor Earth thousands of years. The idea believes that aliens saw bonfires set by ancient Egyptians and other Earthly activities around that time.

Astronomer Frank Drake is one of those people who are against sending out signals to search for extraterrestrial life because, for them, it makes no sense at all.

Drake was behind the first modern hunt for ET life in the 1960s and also the Drake equation, which quantifies the number of civilisations in Milky Way based on probability.

Currently, researchers at the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) are listening out radio signals rather than sending them to potentially habitable planets. The search for intelligent alien life has received mix reactions with some saying that mankind might end up coming across an alien race that can do more harm than good.

Drake, 84, stated in a recent interview that he is against sending out signals not because of fear that evil aliens might know about mankind and when they do, they will come and invade our planet. Drake explains that he is against sending out signals because aliens have known humanity more than we know ourselves. So, sending out messages to let them know our existence makes no sense, according to Drake.

Drake said that aliens want mankind to be aware of their existence, so the efforts of listening to signals are more reasonable than sending out messages. He explained that aliens are doing us a favour to communicate with them, and it is up for humanity to listen what they want to tell us.

Thanks http://www.latest-ufo-sightings.net/

UFO schiet satelliet uit de lucht

Enkele dagen gelden explodeerde een Amerikaanse militaire satelliet nadat de sensoren een onverwachte stijging in temperatuur hadden gemeten.

Dit gebeurde op hetzelfde moment als dat er een grote UFO bij de zon werd waargenomen.


De satelliet die explodeerde was niet één van de meest moderne en werd in de praktijk ook al niet meer gebruikt.

Dat een dergelijke satelliet opeens explodeert nadat er een enorme toename wordt geconstateerd van de temperatuur, is uiteraard niet normaal en degene die daar een verklaring voor heeft is ufoloog Scott Waring.

Volgens hem heeft het alles te maken met de volgende UFO die rond hetzelfde tijdstip werd waargenomen in de buurt van de zon. 

Het is de mening van Scott dat deze UFO verantwoordelijk is voor het uit de lucht schieten van de satelliet. Hij heeft daar ook een aantal redenen voor.

Ten eerste wordt de geëxplodeerde satelliet al jarenlang niet meer gebruikt. Dit betekent dat er geen brandbare brandstofcomponenten meer aan boord van de satelliet zijn. Ook is volgens hem alle elektronica zo goed als ontkoppeld, juist zodat dit soort problemen niet zouden ontstaan.

De reden waarom deze UFO de satelliet vernietigde is volgens Scott een waarschuwing aan de mensheid en een demonstratie om te laten zien waartoe ze in staat zijn. Mogelijk ook om te voorkomen dat de mens te nieuwsgierig wordt over wat zij nu precies bij de zon aan het doen zijn.

Aan de vorm van het object bij de zon te zien, wordt in ieder geval duidelijk dat we hier niet te maken hebben met een asteroïde, meteoor of ander natuurlijk verschijnsel.

Ook deze UFO is weer groot. Je moet dan denken aan ongeveer de grootte van de maan.

Bronnen:

Ufo Sightings Daily
Telegraph

{ www.NIBURU.nl }

SETI Pioneer Believes Sending Out Signals In The Milky Way Makes No Sense

Many believe that it makes no sense to send out signals to search for ET life because of the idea that their existence started millions of years ahead of humanity, which makes them advanced enough to monitor Earth thousands of years. The idea believes that aliens saw bonfires set by ancient Egyptians and other Earthly activities around that time.

Astronomer Frank Drake is one of those people who are against sending out signals to search for extraterrestrial life because, for them, it makes no sense at all.

Drake was behind the first modern hunt for ET life in the 1960s and also the Drake equation, which quantifies the number of civilisations in Milky Way based on probability.

Currently, researchers at the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) are listening out radio signals rather than sending them to potentially habitable planets. The search for intelligent alien life has received mix reactions with some saying that mankind might end up coming across an alien race that can do more harm than good.

Drake, 84, stated in a recent interview that he is against sending out signals not because of fear that evil aliens might know about mankind and when they do, they will come and invade our planet. Drake explains that he is against sending out signals because aliens have known humanity more than we know ourselves. So, sending out messages to let them know our existence makes no sense, according to Drake.

Drake said that aliens want mankind to be aware of their existence, so the efforts of listening to signals are more reasonable than sending out messages. He explained that aliens are doing us a favour to communicate with them, and it is up for humanity to listen what they want to tell us.

{ http://www.latest-ufo-sightings.net/ }

Underwater Extraterrestrials: Declassified Russian Navy Records Say They’re Real!

(Before It's News)

Underwater Extraterrestrials: Declassified Russian Navy Records Say They’re Real! 

Unidentified Flying Objects – The Reality, The Cover-Up And The Truth 

What we can also seen as a "UFO"...

Femac 2012 Smart Bird by Festo

 GIANT 1/3 SCALE  RC B-25 MITCHELL 2 X 400 cc MOKI 5 CYL - WESTON PARK 2014 - LEGENDARY FIGHTERS

Roger Knobel ( A-12) SR-71 Blackbird Giant Remote Control Turbine Jet

e-volo Firmenportrait Volocopter VC200

Festo - Air_ray

Those are a few clips with images of different drones. As you can see, there are a lot of drones that people can see as a "UFO". Those drones will it make very difficult to do research in the UFO-PHENOMENOM. What wil we do with the existence of the unknown militairy drones? I'm sure we will see them as a "UFO".. Good luck!

peter2011

Fireball explosion over Kerala, India on 27th February 2015

New interesting video footage of a mysterious fireball explosion recorded in the sky above Kerala, India on 27th February 2015.

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Related posts:

UFO sighting recorded in the space between Earth and Sun on 1st March 2015

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The Myth and Truth about the 13.000 Year - Old Alien Satellite

Some of you might have heard about the infamous Black Knight Satellite and its associated mystery. For those of our readers who haven’t, we’ve prepared this article. Enjoy!

The story begins in 1954, three years before mankind launched its first artificial satellite, the Soviet Sputnik 1. On May 14, 1954, several newspapers published articles centered on a statement belonging to retired Major D. E. Keyhoe. At the time, Keyhoe believed the Earth was circled by one — if not two artificial satellites. Scientists at the famous White Sands government facility in New Mexico were actively researching this possibility and trying to determine the purpose and origin of these objects.

Later that summer, Aviation Week magazine attempted to explain the mystery by saying the two satellites’ orbits had been mapped out at an altitude of 400, respectively 600 miles above Earth.

• Pentagon scare over the observance of two previously unobserved satellites orbiting the Earth has dissipated with the identification of the objects as natural, not artificial satellites. Dr. Lincoln LaPaz, expert on extraterrestrial bodies from the University of New Mexico, headed the identification project. One satellite is orbiting about 400 miles out, while the other track is 600 miles from the Earth. Pentagon thought momentarily the Russians had beaten the U.S. to space explorations.”

Keep in mind that this was all happening during the space race, when spirits were high and tensions were higher. The competition between the United States and the Soviet Union fueled the paranoia as each nation raced towards the sky.

Many astronomers suspected a large satellite was indeed orbiting the Earth and by 1960, even the U.S. Department of Defense acknowledged this alien presence.

• WASHINGTON, Feb. 10 — An unidentified, silent satellite has been discovered circling the Earth in a near-polar orbit by United States tracking stations, the Defense Department said today. The identity of the mystery satellite — which has been dubbed “the dark satellite” are not known despite nearly two weeks of tracking.”

It wasn’t long before people made the connection between the unknown object and Nikola Tesla. In 1899, he had detected a repeating radio signal and believed it originated in outer space. The enigma surrounding the black satellite was deepened by its strange behavior. Virtually all the artificial satellites had been launched on West to East orbits (following our planet’s natural rotation) while this one circled Earth on a polar orbit, from North to South. Interestingly enough, polar orbits are employed by modern observational satellites that carry out mapping missions. So, was the Black Knight Satellite an observational unit? If so, who put it there?

Some astronomers who claimed to have observed it said the object would disappear, only to reappear in a different place, traveling along a different orbit. They also reported it was moving twice as fast as any other known satellite.

The Black Knight is often mentioned in conjunction with astronaut Gordon Cooper’s historic flight. In 1963, on the last of his 22 days spent in orbit, Cooper radioed Muchea Tracking Station in Australia, telling them that he was able to see a glowing green object rapidly approaching his capsule. Although his sighting had received live coverage by the National Broadcasting Company, reporters were forbidden to question him upon his return to Earth. Although Major Cooper was a stern believer in aliens and their presence here on Earth, there is no link between his sighting and the Black Knight.

An interesting yet unverified aspect is the alleged decoding of the radio message the satellite is said to broadcast. As the story goes, ham radio operators who picked up the alien transmission managed to interpret it as a star map that pointed to Epsilon Boötis, a star in the Boötes constellation, located at a distance of 52 light years from Earth. Interestingly enough, in Babylonian mythology, the Boötes constellation was depicted as the god Enlil, the chief divinity among the Anunnaki on Earth.

Almost every article on the Black Knight Satellite mentions its age of 13,000 years without referencing the origin of this claim. In 1973, Scottish astronomer and science fiction writer Duncan Lunan said he had succeeded in decoding the message caught by two Norwegian physicists in the 1920’s. The message was said to have come from a probe orbiting the Earth in the same Lagrangian point as the Moon and that probe had been sent a long time ago by the inhabitants of a planet orbiting Epsilon Boötis. The message read:

• Start here. Our home is Epsilon Boötes , which is a double star. We live on the sixth planet of seven, coming from the sun, which is the larger of the two. Our sixth planet has one moon. Our fourth planet has three. Our first and third planets each have one. Our probe is in the position of Arcturus, known in our maps.”

The star Arcturus was pictured in the deciphered star map in the position it occupied 13,000 years ago, hence the supposed age of the Black Knight.

Lunan’s theory was picked up by Time magazine and included in several documentaries. However, in 1976 he acknowledged it was flawed and withdrew it, only to revise and reinterpret part of it in 1998.

There are a number of famous photos that allegedly show the alien satellite. The official explanations for the object they show is that it’s nothing more than a thermal blanket that had come off one of the many satellites we’ve put up there. While this might be the case, it only explains the photos and not the Black Knight itself, as the unknown object had been reported prior to these photos.

Another aspect is that these famous photos show an object far smaller than the one indicated in earlier reports, which was said to be as large as a city block. On a side note, the vimanas portrayed in ancient Hindu texts were of similar size. Perhaps there’s a connection between the two.

And since no one can deny the size and scope of the UFO phenomena, it stands to reason that among all reports of flying saucers in our skies and oceans we can fit one more: a huge alien satellite orbiting above our planet.

Like with most things related to the unexplained, there is an aura of misinformation surrounding the Black Knight Satellite. Keep in mind, this is the internet, the place where things come to get blown out of proportion.

One last thing, before you go. In medieval times, a black knight was one who had no allegiance or opted to hide it by covering his colors and emblems, effectively stating that he served no lord. Quite a fitting name for an enigmatic alien watcher, isn’t it?

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