Filer’s Files #23 -2016 Douglas Aviation Studied UFOs - PART II

Geschreven door peter om 00:16 Stuur door

Zaterdag 4 juni 2016

Weird Shapes on Pluto Hint at Icy 'Face-Lift' Over Time

Weird Shapes on Pluto Hint at Icy 'Face-Lift' Over Time

By Charles Q. Choi, Space.com Contributor

The strange polygon-shaped terrain on Pluto can be seen clearly on the right side of this image captured by NASA's New Horizons spacecraft during its historic flyby on July 14, 2015. Scientists say the strange shapes are signs of geologic activity from churning nitrogen ice that can change the face of Pluto over time.

Credit: NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI

Strange geometric shapes miles wide seen on Pluto's icy surface likely formed because of a churning sheet of frozen nitrogen more than a half-mile thick, two new studies find. The findings reinforce the idea that Pluto is not cold and dead but surprisingly geologically active, the researchers say.

The findings could shed light on how other icy dwarf planets far beyond Pluto in the solar system might behave, the researchers added.

Scientists analyzed the most prominent geological feature on Pluto — a vast, oval-shaped basin informally named Sputnik Planum. The area, which stretches across Pluto's equator, is about 347,500 square miles (900,000 square kilometers) and at least 1.2 to 1.8 miles (2 to 3 km) deep. Its shape and surrounding mountains suggest it is a crater left over from a giant cosmic impact "maybe 4 billion or more years ago," said William McKinnon, a planetary geophysicist at Washington University in St. Louis and lead author of one of the two studies analyzing Pluto. [See the Amazing Pluto Pictures by New Horizons]

The surface of Pluto’s icy Sputnik Planum — seen here in a photo captured by NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft during its close flyby of the dwarf planet on July 14, 2015 — is covered with churning ice “cells” that are geologically young and turning over due to convection.

Credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute

The mystery of Pluto's polygons

Sputnik Planum is filled with ice made up predominantly of nitrogen. This frozen nitrogen is broken up into odd, irregular polygons about 6 to 25 miles (10 to 40 km) across, and the centers of some of these polygons rise about 165 feet (50 meters) above their sides.

To discover the origins ofthese mysterious polygons, which the researchers also called "cells," the scientists analyzed data from NASA's New Horizons spacecrraft, which made the first-ever flyby of Pluto in July 2015. Their computer models suggest that convection, or churning that arises from the rising and sinking of warmer and cooler matter, could help explain the giant sizes of these cells. (Pluto's innards are warmer than its surface because of heat from long-lived radioactive material.)

Pluto's polygon-shaped terrain is located in Sputnik Planum, a region that forms the bright, western half of the heart-shaped region near the center of this enhanced image of Pluto from NASA's New Horizons flyby.

Credit: NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI

Specifically, the research team's models suggest that layers of nitrogen ice more than 0.6 miles (1 km) thick are convecting to create these cells. "The convection you're seeing here is unlike anything seen before in the solar system, because the material that's convecting isn't rigid and strong — everything here is softer," McKinnon told Space.com. "Nitrogen ice is not soft like a gummy bear is soft, but still more pliable than water ice on Earth, so it's convecting vigorously and forming these polygonal cells."

A face-lift for Pluto

The scientists estimated that convection likely leads the surface of Sputnik Planum to renew itself about every half-million years. This makes it one of the youngest surfaces in the solar system.

McKinnon noted that in the past, "Pluto's internal heat flow would have been higher, so the convection would have been even more vigorous, and could even have led to melting of the solid nitrogen at depth, which, by being buoyant, would have erupted as a very fluid 'lava.'"

Pluto, the most famous dwarf planet in our solar system, underwent a well-publicized (and somewhat controversial) reclassification that took away its title as the ninth and most distant planet from the sun. So, how well do you know this fascinating world?

Hubble Space Telescope photo of Pluto is most detailed ever seen.

The researchers suggested that similar convective processes may also occur at other dwarf planets, such as those in the Kuiper Belt, the shadowy disk-shaped region beyond the orbit of Neptune that scientists think is populated by a trillion or more comets as well as hundreds of thousands of icy moon-size objects. Such convection might help explain why some icy Kuiper Belt objects are as shiny as they are — such churning would continuously give them new faces of reflective ice relatively unmarred by craters and dust.

The scientists detailed their findings in two papers, one here and the other here, in the June 2 issue of the journal Nature.

Follow Charles Q. Choi on Twitter @cqchoi. Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook and Google+. Original article on Space.com.

{ http://www.space.com/ }

Geschreven door peter om 00:10 Stuur door

Vrijdag 3 juni 2016

Picture sensation: Does viral image show crashed UFO on its way to mysterious Area 51?

Picture sensation: Does viral image show crashed UFO on its way to mysterious Area 51?

A photo of a flatbed semi-hauler snapped on Friday morning — March 4, 2016 — as it transported a mysterious saucer-shaped object draped in tarpaulin on Arizona State Route 77 near Holbrook, has gone viral on social media. Public curiosity about the mysterious object was piqued after inquiries with the Arizona Department of Public Safety (DPS) by a local Arizona station elicited a “cryptic response.”

The photo (see below) was uploaded to social media by Charlene Yazzie. She passed the truck while driving on Arizona State Route 77 near Holbrook in Arizona. She was surprised when she noticed the truck was escorted by black Department of Public Safety (DPS) vehicles. She wondered what the covered flying saucer-shaped object could be and snapped a picture.

“I was driving north and the truck was headed south to the freeway,” she told local Arizona station KPHO. “It was escorted by three DPS vehicles.”

She uploaded the picture to Facebook where it attracted a lot of attention. Members of the UFO community speculated freely about it.

UFO Being Towed in Nevada near Area 51 April 2015

https://youtu.be/-2WvZFCRnWc

When KPHO approached the DPS for an explanation of the mysterious tarp-draped object, the Duty Office responded, saying, “Unfortunately we do not know what that is but it looks interesting.”

UFO BEING TOWED IN NEVADA NEAR AREA 51? APRIL 28, 2015 (EXPLAINED)

https://youtu.be/3drZDZabAyw

The response fuelled suspicion and sparked even wilder speculation, with conspiracy theorists construing it as an acknowledgment that the object was top secret and that the DPS personnel who escorted it had also been kept in the dark about what it was.

UFO hunters alleged that the “higher ups” were hoping they could get away with transporting alien technology newly recovered from a crash site to Area 51 in broad daylight.

UFO conspiracy theorists believe that the military and government agencies have recovered crashed UFOs from multiple sites in the past and that government scientists and engineers are working in multiple top-secret bases to reverse-engineer the propulsion technologies of the UFOs.

“According to UFO hunters the ‘higher ups’ were transporting an alien UFO newly recovered from a crash site to Area 51 in broad daylight.” [Image via Shutterstock]

According to conspiracy theorists, the first case known to the public occurred in 1947 when an alien UFO allegedly crashed at a ranch near Roswell in New Mexico. It was rumored that the military authorities recovered alien corpses from the crash site. Some conspiracy theorists claim that alien survivors in the crash were housed secretly in Area 51 and forced to help government scientists to reverse-engineer the spacecraft’s propulsion technology.

Related conspiracy theories that emerged in the decades after the Roswell incident claim that the U.S. government entered into military-technology alliance with advanced alien races that helped the Nazis to develop the V-2 rocket technology.

Major breakthroughs in the U.S. space program in the era after the Second World War were due to assistance received from advanced alien races, such as the Grays, the Tall Whites, and the highly evolved Arcturian races.

Reports of ongoing advanced research into “impossible” EM Drive technology at NASA’s Eagleworks Laboratory and a new technology called “directed energy propulsion,” which could make a journey to Mars last only 30 minutes, have fuelled speculation that major breakthrough has been achieved in decades-long efforts to reverse-engineer UFOs recovered from UFO crash sites.

According to conspiracy theorists, government agencies are deliberately teasing with snippets of information released to the media to prepare the public for the unveiling of new radical technologies derived from alien spacecraft reverse-engineering projects.

UFO blogger Scott C. Waring also asserted that the semi-hauler was carrying a flying saucer UFO, and that it was being transported from the top-secret Area 51 military base in the Nevada Desert.

He suggested that the UFO could be the latest advanced technology from the U.S. government’s alien allies.

“This could be some of the alien tech being moved out of Area S4, part of Area 51,” he wrote. “For the USAF to be transporting it and not flying it, means this is the newest alien tech — probably given recently from aliens to the USAF as a gift.”

But some skeptics criticized Waring’s assumption that the government would transport “earth shattering secret equipment down a civilian roadway.”

“Ha ha! What is dumber than transporting a potentially earth shattering piece of secret equipment down a civilian roadway? Do it during the light of day! C’mon guys,” one skeptic wrote.

Another commented, “But it is a well-known fact that Scott don’t have a clue what he is talking about. This is no UFO nor is it alien tech.”

[Image via Shutterstock]
Source www.inquisitr.com

{ http://alien-ufo-sightings.com/ }

Geschreven door peter om 23:59 Stuur door

Vrijdag 3 juni 2016

Artificial Intelligence: What We Have to Look Forward to and What We Have to Fear

Artificial Intelligence: What We Have to Look Forward to and What We Have to Fear

Getty

IN BRIEF

"Everything we love about civilization is a product of intelligence, so amplifying our human intelligence with artificial intelligence has the potential of helping civilization flourish like never before – as long as we manage to keep the technology beneficial."

Max Tegmark

WHAT IS AI?

From SIRI to self-driving cars, artificial intelligence (AI) is progressing rapidly. While science fiction often portrays AI as robots with human-like characteristics, AI can encompass anything from Google’s search algorithms to IBM’s Watson to autonomous weapons.

Artificial intelligence today is properly known as narrow AI (or weak AI), in that it is designed to perform a narrow task (e.g. only facial recognition or only internet searches or only driving a car). However, the long-term goal of many researchers is to create general AI (AGI or strong AI).

While narrow AI may outperform humans at whatever its specific task is, like playing chess or solving equations, AGI would outperform humans at nearly every cognitive task.

WHY RESEARCH AI SAFETY?

In the near term, the goal of keeping AI’s impact on society beneficial motivates research in many areas, from economics and law to technical topics such as verification, validity, security and control. Whereas it may be little more than a minor nuisance if your laptop crashes or gets hacked, it becomes all the more important that an AI system does what you want it to do if it controls your car, your airplane, your pacemaker, your automated trading system or your power grid.

The creation of strong AI might be the biggest event in human history…it might also be the last.

Another short-term challenge is preventing a devastating arms race in lethal autonomous weapons.

In the long term, an important question is what will happen if the quest for strong AI succeeds and an AI system becomes better than humans at all cognitive tasks. As pointed out by I.J. Good in 1965, designing smarter AI systems is itself a cognitive task. Such a system could potentially undergo recursive self-improvement, triggering an intelligence explosion leaving human intellect far behind.

By inventing revolutionary new technologies, such a superintelligence might help us eradicate war, disease, and poverty, and so the creation of strong AI might be the biggest event in human history. Some experts have expressed concern, though, that it might also be the last, unless we learn to align the goals of the AI with ours before it becomes superintelligent.

There are some who question whether strong AI will ever be achieved, and others who insist that the creation of superintelligent AI is guaranteed to be beneficial. At FLI we recognize both of these possibilities, but also recognize the potential for an artificial intelligence system to intentionally or unintentionally cause great harm. We believe research today will help us better prepare for and prevent such potentially negative consequences in the future, thus enjoying the benefits of AI while avoiding pitfalls.

the concept of thinking.background with brain.the file is saved in AI10 EPS version. This illustration contains a transparency. - stock vector

HOW CAN AI BE DANGEROUS?

Most researchers agree that a superintelligent AI is unlikely to exhibit human emotions like love or hate, and that there is no reason to expect AI to become intentionally benevolent or malevolent. Instead, when considering how AI might become a risk, experts think two scenarios most likely:

The AI is programmed to do something devastating: Autonomous weapons are artificial intelligence systems that are programmed to kill. In the hands of the wrong person, these weapons could easily cause mass casualties. Moreover, an AI arms race could inadvertently lead to an AI war that also results in mass casualties. To avoid being thwarted by the enemy, these weapons would be designed to be extremely difficult to simply “turn off,” so humans could plausibly lose control of such a situation. This risk is one that’s present even with narrow AI, but grows as levels of AI intelligence and autonomy increase.
The AI is programmed to do something beneficial, but it develops a destructive method for achieving its goal: This can happen whenever we fail to fully align the AI’s goals with ours, which is strikingly difficult. If you ask an obedient intelligent car to take you to the airport as fast as possible, it might get you there chased by helicopters and covered in vomit, doing not what you wanted but literally what you asked for. If a superintelligent system is tasked with a ambitious geoengineering project, it might wreak havoc with our ecosystem as a side effect, and view human attempts to stop it as a threat to be met.

As these examples illustrate, the concern about advanced AI isn’t malevolence but competence. A super-intelligent AI will be extremely good at accomplishing its goals, and if those goals aren’t aligned with ours, we have a problem.

You’re probably not an evil ant-hater who steps on ants out of malice, but if you’re in charge of a hydroelectric green energy project and there’s an anthill in the region to be flooded, too bad for the ants. A key goal of AI safety research is to never place humanity in the position of those ants.

WHY THE RECENT INTEREST IN AI SAFETY

Android holding a holographic Earth - stock photo

Stephen Hawking, Elon Musk, Steve Wozniak, Bill Gates, and many other big names in science and technology have recently expressed concern in the media and via open letters about therisks posed by AI, joined by many leading AI researchers. Why is the subject suddenly in the headlines?

The idea that the quest for strong AI would ultimately succeed was long thought of as science fiction, centuries or more away. However, thanks to recent breakthroughs, many AI milestones, which experts viewed as decades away merely five years ago, have now been reached, making many experts take seriously the possibility of superintelligence in our lifetime.

Since it may take decades to complete the required safety research, it is prudent to start it now.

While some experts still guess that human-level AI is centuries away, most AI researchers at the 2015 Puerto Rico Conferenceguessed that it would happen before 2060. Since it may take decades to complete the required safety research, it is prudent to start it now.

Because AI has the potential to become more intelligent than any human, we have no surefire way of predicting how it will behave. We can’t use past technological developments as much of a basis because we’ve never created anything that has the ability to, wittingly or unwittingly, outsmart us. The best example of what we could face may be our own evolution. People now control the planet, not because we’re the strongest, fastest or biggest, but because we’re the smartest. If we’re no longer the smartest, are we assured to remain in control?

FLI’s position is that our civilization will flourish as long as we win the race between the growing power of technology and the wisdom with which we manage it. In the case of AI technology, FLI’s position is that the best way to win that race is not to impede the former, but to accelerate the latter, by supporting AI safety research.

RECOMMENDED REFERENCES

human study and cybernetics - stock photo

Videos

Media Articles

Essays by AI Researchers

Research Articles

Research Collections

Case Studies

T he Asilomar Conference: A Case Study in Risk Mitigation (Katja Grace, MIRI)
Pre-Competitive Collaboration in Pharma Industry (Eric Gastfriend and Bryan Lee, FLI): A case study of pre-competitive collaboration on safety in industry.

SF-snufjes }, Robotics and A.I. Artificiel Intelligence ( E, F en NL )

Geschreven door peter om 23:44 Stuur door

Vrijdag 3 juni 2016

Are We Alone? ISS Video Shows ‘Fireball-Like UFO Streaking Through Space’

Are We Alone? ISS Video Shows

‘Fireball-Like UFO Streaking Through

Space’

© YouTube/SecureTeam10

Footage from the International Space Station’s live feed on Thursday captured an amazing scene of what appears to be a large fireball streaking through space.

The footage, posted to YouTube by UFO investigators from SecureTeam 10, has extraterrestrial hunters excited, and has sparked debate over whether the fireball is an alien spacecraft.

The video, which had been viewed nearly 20,000 times within hours of being posted, has been flooded with comments from people debating the fireball, with claims ranging from a comet, to a meteor or just an old-school UFO.

"This amazing piece of ISS footage that was just emailed to me a few minutes ago has got me very excited,” Tyler Glockner of the UFO-spotter’s group told the Mirror.

© PHOTO: PIXABAY

Out There: Obama May Release Tons of UFO Secrets Before Leaving Office

"We have posted a lot of ISS videos showing these UFOs up there," he added.

Glockner opined that the object could not be a fireball, as there is no oxygen in space, and therefore material cannot combust.

"It comes out of the darkness of space,’ he declaimed, “flies up behind the ISS and we can actually see, just before it disappears, some red lights shining on the ISS.”

"When the ISS finally comes into view of the sun and you can see the Earth beginning to show underneath it and you can see in the exact spot where this object appears, there is nothing there."

Still, most suggest that the fireball is simply a meteor entering Earth’s atmosphere.

© PORTLAND POLICE

Portland Police Dashcam Captures Huge Fireball Over Maine (VIDEO)

“It's a meteor. If you continue the line of the earth's borders it matches up with the spot where the "ufo" appeared. It's quite obviously a meteor hitting the atmosphere,” a commenter posted.

"Looks like a view from the ISS of the meteorite exploding over Arizona,” another said.

Conspiracy theorists remain unappeased, however, as one user posts: "2 times last year I went to the live feed of the I.S.S. and both times within 15 mins or so… I seen a ship coming into view of the camera one was unbelievable and they cut the feed."

Believers will believe what they want, but the image remains a spectacular sight.

Related:
ISS UFO Sighting: Is It a Bird? Is It a Plane? Is It a Mark on the Window?

Are We Alone? Hillary Promises to Declassify UFO Files if Elected

X-Files Declassified: A Trove of UFO-Related Info Released by CIA

I Want to Believe: Possible UFO Spotted in Austria

Winning Big: UFO Catcher Candy Jackpot

Tags:

Outerspace, Meteor, Aliens, UFO, ISS, SecureTeam 10, International Space Station, Tyler Glockner

{ http://sputniknews.com/science/}

Geschreven door peter om 23:27 Stuur door

Vrijdag 3 juni 2016

Study Asserts That Earth is Not The First Intelligent Civilization In The Universe

Study Asserts That Earth is Not The First Intelligent Civilization In The Universe

Exoplanet Kepler 62f. Credit: NASA Ames/JPL-Caltech/T. Pyle

Cumberg

IN BRIEF

Two scientists from the University of Rochester and the University of Washington have developed an “archaeological form” to the famous Drake equation, which will allow us to determine how many technological civilizations have formed in the history of the universe. And it seems there may be a number of them.

THE TRUTH IS OUT THERE

Are we alone? It is, perhaps, one of the most significant questions human beings have ever asked—right up there with “Why are we here?” and “How did it all begin?”

Indeed, as soon as we understood that the universe was not circumscribed by the Earth’s horizons, but extended outward for unfathomable distances and contained within its compass innumerable worlds like our own, we began to wonder whether we are unique and alone, or if there might not be others out there—like us, and yet very unlike us.

The famous “Drake equation,” formulated by astronomer Frank Drake in 1961, sought to establish a mathematical, probabilistic framework to understand the question of whether or not humanity is really alone in the cosmos; it used a number of ingenious terms to estimate the number of technological civilizations in our galaxy.

The problem with Drake’s formulation was that three of those terms, in particular, were just too uncertain to permit a reliable estimate.

According to Adam Frank, astronomy and physics professor at the University of Rochester, and a coauthor of the paper (appearing in the journal Astrobiology): “We’ve known for a long time approximately how many stars exist. We didn’t know how many of those stars had planets that could potentially harbor life, how often life might evolve and lead to intelligent beings, and how long any civilizations might last before becoming extinct.”

Infographic of the Drake equation and its new “Archaeological form” addendum. Credit: University of Rochester

SETTING SOME LIMITS

Recent exoplanet research, particularly with the Kepler Space Telescope, has constrained the first of these terms, determining that about one-fifth of stars possess planets within their habitable zones.

That leaves the second and third terms—the probability for advanced life to evolve, and the longevity of technological civilizations—but Frank and his colleague, Woodruff Sullivan of the University of Washington, simply altered the math a little. They eliminated the second term by calculating the odds against humankind being the only advanced civilization in the universe; and they dismissed the third by formulating a “cosmic archaeological question”—how often does intelligent life evolve throughout cosmic history?

Their new equation, which they call the “Archaeological form” of the Drake equation, looks like this—N_ast x f_bt.

Nast, the number of habitable planets, is defined as N_ast= N* x f_p x n_p, where N* is the total number of stars, f_p is the fraction that form planets, and n_p is the average of those planets circling in the habitable zones of their parent stars. The second term of the Archaeological form equation, f_bt, is defined as the likelihood of an advanced technological civilization arising on one of these habitable planets.

The results suggest that humankind is only likely to be unique if the odds of another civilization developing on a habitable world are less than one in 10²².

That’s a very—some might say improbably—small number.

“To me, this implies that other intelligent, technology producing species very likely have evolved before us,” says Frank. “Think of it this way: before our result you’d be considered a pessimist if you imagined the probability of evolving a civilization on a habitable planet were, say, one in a trillion. But even that guess, one chance in a trillion, implies that what has happened here on Earth with humanity has in fact happened about 10 billion other times over cosmic history!”

Source: Rochester

Geschreven door peter om 20:41 Stuur door

Vrijdag 3 juni 2016

A White Mars: The Red Planet Is Just Emerging From Its Last Ice Age

A White Mars: The Red Planet Is Just Emerging From Its Last Ice Age

NASA

IN BRIEF

A new study finds that Mars just exited its last ice age, which blanketed much of its surface with snow and ice. This leaves us with much water for terraforming the planet.

THE ICE OF AGES PAST

While not many people know a great deal about the solar system, most know what color each planet is. Earth is blue, so are Uranus and Neptune. Saturn is yellow. Jupiter is a mix of yellow and orange. While Mercury and Venus are burnt yellow. And Mars is red. That’s one of the first things we knew about Mars, that it is the red planet.

But what if it wasn’t always that way?

Astronomers from the US have discovered that, just a few hundred thousand years ago, Mars would have been blanketed in the pure white of snow. That’s because it just got out of a particularly extreme ice age.

NASA

In the study published in Science, the team used cameras and a radar-pinging device on board NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter to look into the layers of snow and ice packed onto the Red Planet’s northern pole. They found out that its last ice age wouldn’t have been more than 370,000 years ago.

When Earth’s scientists want to turn back the clock and look at our planet’s ancient climate, they take long, tubular ice cores and study the particles locked into the ice of the poles. Here, they did something similar. They used NASA’s Shallow Subsurface Radar to look at (and beneath) Mars’ ice caps—about 2 km deep, to be precise.

UNLOCKING POTENTIALS

The Red Planet’s ice ages come from its peculiar orbit: Its spin variation of about 60 degrees (compared to Earth’s 2 degrees), and an orbit that can bring it up to 12 percent away from the Sun. What they saw was that Mars is actually in a lull between ice ages. The next one is expected to come around 150,000 years in the future.

Which gives us plenty of time to “unlock” Mars’ potentials. Terraforming is predicated on our ability to release its gases and liquids into the atmosphere, and the radar mapping of the poles reveals a lot of H2O and CO2 trapped there.

Source: Popular Mechanics

Geschreven door peter om 20:34 Stuur door

Vrijdag 3 juni 2016

Clinton Plays the “UFO” Card and Snags the ‘Alien’-ated Crowd

Clinton Plays the “UFO” Card and Snags the ‘Alien’-ated Crowd

For those who are not yet current on the UFO phenomenon—get ready—but also for the rest of us, for whom these infuriating delays are like, testing our mettle.

Seriously, how can we like, take any politician seriously who actually uses “like” this way? Maybe WE could have, like, a task force and throw you in jail like we should have done years ago.

Unless you live under a mossy rock, you like, had to know this campaign promise was coming! How could it not after the witty late-night television repartees? And, like nearly all campaign promises in America, it, too would get swept into the ditch and wind up in the sewer drain—IF—Clinton were elected. But she won’t be.

Even with Holder’s campaign fund raiser (see that story below) the criminals cannot pull this off. They’re thick as thieves and protect and support each other—which will make it that much easier to round them up.

The email security issue aside—Benghazi, the blatant lies, the money laundering, the pedophilia, the murders… The FBI like, HAS to indict Clinton, and if they don’t—there will be some serious repercussions in America.

Americans not only have guns, they like, know how to use them, and we don’t want to go there. We had better hope destiny unfolds in favour of The People and set a powerful intention for a peaceful transition. ~ BP

With vows to open files, Clinton pulls in UFO vote

By Amy Chozick New York Times May 11, 2016

When Jimmy Kimmel asked Hillary Clinton in a late-night TV interview about UFOs, she quickly corrected his terminology.

“You know, there’s a new name,” Clinton said in the March appearance. “It’s unexplained aerial phenomenon,” she said. “UAP. That’s the latest nomenclature.”

Known for her grasp of policy, Clinton has spoken at length in her presidential campaign on topics ranging from Alzheimer’s research to military tensions in the South China Sea. But it is her unusual knowledge about extraterrestrials that has struck a small but committed cohort of voters.Clinton has vowed that barring any threats to national security, she would open up government files on the subject, a shift from President Barack Obama, who typically dismisses the topic as a joke. Her position has elated UFO enthusiasts, who have declared Clinton the first “E.T. candidate.”

“Hillary has embraced this issue with an absolutely unprecedented level of interest in American politics,” said Joseph G. Buchman, who has spent decades calling for more transparency in government about extraterrestrials.

Clinton, a cautious candidate who often bemoans being the subject of Republican conspiracy theories, has shown surprising ease plunging into the discussion of the possibility of extraterrestrial beings.

She has said in recent interviews that as president she would release information about Area 51, the remote Air Force base in Nevada believed by some to be a secret hub where the government stores classified information about aliens and UFOs.

In a radio interview last month, she said, “I want to open the files as much as we can.” Asked if she believed in UFOs, Clinton said, “I don’t know. I want to see what the information shows.” But, she added, “There’s enough stories out there that I don’t think everybody is just sitting in their kitchen making them up.”

When asked about extraterrestrials in an interview with The Conway Daily Sun in New Hampshire late last year, Clinton promised to “get to the bottom of it.”

“I think we may have been” visited already, she said in the interview. “We don’t know for sure.”

While Americans typically point to issues like the economy and terrorism as top priorities for the next president, a desire for answers about aliens has inspired a passionate bloc of voters, who make their voices heard on social media.

Stephen Bassett, who lobbies the government on extraterrestrial issues, views a Clinton presidency as a chance to finally get the United States to disclose all it knows about life beyond Earth. Since November 2014, Bassett’s organization has sent roughly 2.5 million Twitter messages to presidential candidates, elected officials and the media urging a serious discussion of the issue.

“That was a storm and now it’s like a steady drip,” Bassett said.

The movement viewed Clinton’s decision to correct Kimmel’s use of the term UFO, which some view as loaded and more rooted in science fiction rather than in science, in particular, as a breakthrough because it “suggested she’d been briefed by someone and is not just being flippant,” Buchman said.

In fact, Clinton had been briefed. She was prepped by her campaign chairman, John D. Podesta, who is not only a well-respected Washington hand, having served as a top adviser to Obama and President Bill Clinton, but is also a crusader for disclosure of government information on unexplained phenomena that could prove the existence of intelligent life outside Earth.

“The time to pull back the curtain on the topic is long overdue,” Podesta wrote in his foreword for the 2010 book “UFOs: Generals, Pilots and Government Officials Go on the Record” by Leslie Kean, an investigative journalist.

Hillary Clinton’s position is not a political response to public sentiment — 63 percent of Americans do not believe in UFOs, according to an Associated Press poll. But it reflects the decades of overlap between the rise to power of Bill and Hillary Clinton and popular culture’s obsession with the universe’s most mysterious questions.

In 1996, Hillary Clinton was ridiculed after Bob Woodward reported, in his book “The Choice,” that as first lady she had held discussions with her deceased role models, Eleanor Roosevelt and Mohandas K. Gandhi. The offbeat tabloid Weekly World News dreamed up sensational headlines about Hillary Clinton adopting an alien baby and having a “UFO love nest.”

Bill Clinton’s presidency also coincided with the hit television series “The X-Files” and movies like “Independence Day,” which gave way to an era of fascination with the existence of aliens and the possibility of a government cover-up.

John Podesta

Podesta, an “X-Files” fanatic, ran a fan club for the show in the Clinton White House. “The X-Files fan club would like to invite you and Mulder to lunch at the White House. Don’t let the boss know,” he wrote in a 1998 email, referring to the show’s fictional FBI agents Dana Scully and Fox Mulder, according to White House documents. In 1999, Podesta had an “X-Files”-themed 50th birthday party that the Clintons attended.

When Podesta left the White House last year, before joining Hillary Clinton’s campaign, he posted on Twitter: “Finally, my biggest failure of 2014: Once again not securing the #disclosure of the UFO files. #thetruthisstilloutthere.”

Podesta declined to comment for this article.

Clinton, who speaks frequently about her childhood aspirations to be a NASA astronaut, has been sympathetic to Podesta’s efforts.

In 1995, when she was photographed visiting Laurance S. Rockefeller, the billionaire philanthropist, in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, she had tucked under her arm a copy of “Are We Alone?: Philosophical Implications of the Discovery of Extraterrestrial Life” by Paul Davies.

Before that meeting, John H. Gibbons, former director of the White House Office’s of Science and Technology Policy, had warned Clinton about Rockefeller, who had spent years pressuring the government to release files relating to a 1947 crash at a ranch near Roswell, New Mexico, that had become the source of theories about a cover-up of an alien spaceship. He will “want to talk to you about his interest in extrasensory perception, paranormal phenomena and UFOs,” Gibbons wrote.

The meeting enthralled conspiracy theorists and, in turn, inspired Hollywood writers.

“If you look at our mythology, there are elements of those kinds of meetings,” said Chris Carter, creator and executive producer of “The X Files,” said in an interview. Carter, who is supporting Clinton, added, “If I have to become a fundraiser to get an invite to her opening up the files, I’ll do it.”

When Clinton started to talk openly about UFOs and government disclosure in her 2016 campaign, some activists traced the remarks back to the 1995 meeting with Rockefeller.

To this subset of Americans who say the government is covering up what it knows about aliens, and who are incredibly vocal on social media, Clinton’s discussion of extraterrestrials signaled an important turn.

Other activists do not care as much about Clinton’s vow to “open the files,” but do want prominent politicians to seriously acknowledge that humans may not be the only intelligent life in the universe. A major victory, some say, would be for the candidates to be asked about the topic in a presidential debate.

“It shouldn’t be a source of embarrassment to discuss it,” said Christopher Mellon, a former intelligence official at the Defense Department and the Senate Intelligence Committee.

“We should be humble in terms of recognizing the extreme limits of our own understanding of physics and the universe.”

Source

{ http://www.starshipearththebigpicture.com/}

Geschreven door peter om 20:27 Stuur door

Vrijdag 3 juni 2016

Clinton Plays the “UFO” Card and Snags the ‘Alien’-ated Crowd

Clinton Plays the “UFO” Card and Snags the ‘Alien’-ated Crowd

For those who are not yet current on the UFO phenomenon—get ready—but also for the rest of us, for whom these infuriating delays are like, testing our mettle.

Seriously, how can we like, take any politician seriously who actually uses “like” this way? Maybe WE could have, like, a task force and throw you in jail like we should have done years ago.

With vows to open files, Clinton pulls in UFO vote

By Amy Chozick New York Times May 11, 2016

When Jimmy Kimmel asked Hillary Clinton in a late-night TV interview about UFOs, she quickly corrected his terminology.

“You know, there’s a new name,” Clinton said in the March appearance. “It’s unexplained aerial phenomenon,” she said. “UAP. That’s the latest nomenclature.”

When asked about extraterrestrials in an interview with The Conway Daily Sun in New Hampshire late last year, Clinton promised to “get to the bottom of it.”

“I think we may have been” visited already, she said in the interview. “We don’t know for sure.”

“That was a storm and now it’s like a steady drip,” Bassett said.

John Podesta

Podesta declined to comment for this article.

Clinton, who speaks frequently about her childhood aspirations to be a NASA astronaut, has been sympathetic to Podesta’s efforts.

The meeting enthralled conspiracy theorists and, in turn, inspired Hollywood writers.

When Clinton started to talk openly about UFOs and government disclosure in her 2016 campaign, some activists traced the remarks back to the 1995 meeting with Rockefeller.

“It shouldn’t be a source of embarrassment to discuss it,” said Christopher Mellon, a former intelligence official at the Defense Department and the Senate Intelligence Committee.

“We should be humble in terms of recognizing the extreme limits of our own understanding of physics and the universe.”

Source

{ http://www.starshipearththebigpicture.com/}

Geschreven door peter om 20:27 Stuur door

Vrijdag 3 juni 2016

Astronomers just picked up a hydrogen signal from this galaxy 5 billion light-years away

Astronomers just picked up a hydrogen signal from this galaxy 5 billion light-years away

Amazing!

safe_image.php?d=AQBSH2gdexgqg2A4&w=158&h=158&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.sciencealert.com%2Fimages%2Farticles%2Fprocessed%2FGALAXY-and-GAS_highres-1_1024.jpg

PETER DOCKRILL

Scientists have broken a new astronomical record, detecting the faint signal of hydrogen in an extremely distant galaxy located some 5 billion light-years away.

The team made the find using the Very Large Array of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in New Mexico, which just had a substantial upgrade to the antennae, allowing them to pick up on hydrogen signals from almost double the distance of the previous record.

"Due to the upgrade of the Very Large Array, this is the first time we've been able to directly measure atomic hydrogen in a galaxy this far from Earth," said one of the researchers, Ximena Fernandez from Rutgers University in New Jersey. "These signals would have begun their journey before our planet even existed, and after 5 billion years of travelling through space without hitting anything, they've fallen into the telescope and allowed us to see this distant galaxy for the very first time."

The researchers say the galaxy would once have contained billions of young, massive stars, created from the fuel of surrounding neutral hydrogen (HI) gas.

hydrogen-signal-1

Hubble Space Telescope image of the galaxy with overlay of the hydrogen emission that was recently discovered.

Credit: Fernandez et al, NRAO/AUI/NSF, NASA

"Hydrogen is the basic element in the universe. That's where everything had to start," astronomer Attila Popping from the University of Western Australia told Garrett Mundy at the ABC. "It's the first building block of gas and stars and galaxies. So with the survey we tried to understand the evolution of HI. How it evolves over time."

The team says the ability to peer so far across the Universe – and so far back in time as a result – is crucial to learning more about galaxy formation, and finding how the process has changed across galaxies over billions of years.

"This is precisely the goal of the project, to study how gas in galaxies has changed through history," said Fernandez. "A question we hope to answer is whether galaxies in the past had more gas being turned into stars than galaxies today. Our record-breaking find is a galaxy with an unusually large amount of hydrogen."

hydrogen-signal-2

Artist's impression of the gas cloud and galaxy.

Credit: ICRAR/Peter Ryan

But the snapshot the researchers have taken – seen in a composite image above, along with an artist's impression underneath it – is not the way the galaxy would look like now, with billions of years of stellar activity likely to have radically altered the composition of the star system.

"The hydrogen has probably been turned into stars," Popping told the ABC. "It's been eaten by the galaxy and become a supernova explosion and expelled again. The gas itself is probably in a different state now than as we can see it."

The findings are reported in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

{ http://www.sciencealert.com/ }

Geschreven door peter om 19:02 Stuur door

Vrijdag 3 juni 2016

Roofvogels schakelen vijandelijke drones uit

Roofvogels schakelen vijandelijke drones uit

Caroline Kraaijvanger

Vijandelijke drones uit laten schakelen door grote roofvogels. Dat is het idee van een Nederlands bedrijf. Werkt het ook?

Misschien heb je ze wel eens gezien tijdens roofvogelshows: grote roofvogels die indrukwekkend goed naar hun trainer luisteren. En als die vogels kunnen leren om op commando terug te keren of het luchtruim te kiezen, waarom zou je ze dan ook niet kunnen leren om een drone uit de lucht te halen? En dat laatste is exact wat een Nederlands bedrijf doet. Het traint roofvogels om vijandelijke drones uit te schakelen.

Low-tech
“De overheid zoekt al enkele jaren naar oplossingen om ongewenst dronegebruik te bestrijden,” vertelt oprichter van het bedrijf – Guard from Above – Sjoerd Hoogendoorn. En het antwoord op dat high-tech probleem blijkt heel low-tech te zijn. “Door gebruik te maken van het dierlijk instinct van roofvogels bieden wij een doeltreffende oplossing voor deze nieuwe dreiging.”

Afbeelding: Guard from Above.

Snel en wendbaar
Het idee is niet zo gek. Drones zijn snel en wendbaar. Als je ze uit wilt schakelen, moet je dat ook zijn. En daar draaien roofvogels hun poot niet voor om. “Twee van de opvallendste eigenschappen van roofvogels zijn hun kracht en wendbaarheid,” vertelt Ben de Keijzer, mede-oprichter van Guard from Above. “Die gebruiken ze dagelijks bij het jagen: zij zijn de heersers van het luchtruim. Door deze roofvogels specifiek te trainen, kunnen we ze nu ook inzetten om drones te onderscheppen.”

Afbeelding: Guard from Above.

Politie
De afgelopen jaren hebben Hoogendoorn en De Keijzer het idee – roofvogels gebruiken om drones uit te schakelen – uitgebreid verkend. Met verschillende soorten roofvogels perfectioneerden ze hun technieken. Inmiddels is het bedrijf zover dat het zijn diensten ook daadwerkelijk aan kan gaan bieden. “We werken voornamelijk voor nationale en internationale overheidsinstanties in het veiligheidsdomein,” zo laat het bedrijf op de site weten. “Een belangrijke klant waar we nauw mee samenwerken is de Nationale Politie. We onderzoeken gezamenlijk in een innovatieproject in hoeverre roofvogels ingezet kunnen worden tegen ongewenst dronegebruik.”

https://youtu.be/HifO-ebmE1s

https://youtu.be/FX3uOQiZs0A

Maar is het bestrijden van drones niet gevaarlijk voor de roofvogels? Dat valt volgens het bedrijf wel mee. Men wijst erop dat roofvogels gewend zijn om grote en gevaarlijke prooien te pakken en van nature beschermd zijn tegen bijvoorbeeld beten van hun prooi door schubben op de klauwen. Wel wordt er continu gekeken of er extra maatregelen moeten worden genomen om de vogels te beschermen. Tevens onderzoekt TNO momenteel of het bestrijden van drones een impact heeft op de klauwen van de roofvogels.

Bronmateriaal:

"Guard from Above"

{ http://www.scientias.nl/ }

Diversen (Eng, NL en Fr)

Geschreven door peter om 18:51 Stuur door

Vrijdag 3 juni 2016

Was J. Allen Hynek Secretly Involved in U.S. Air Force Misinformation?

hynek

Was J. Allen Hynek Secretly Involved in U.S. Air Force Misinformation?

Micah Hanks

As far as the scientific study of unidentified flying objects in the 20th century goes, few names would stand out in the minds of UFO researchers, past and present, like that of J. Allen Hynek.

Hynek served as the official scientific advisor to the U.S. Air Force and its UFO study program, Project Blue Book, throughout the 1950s and 60s. Later, with the formation of the Center for UFO Studies, Hynek would go on to become one of the leading proponents of the idea that the UFO mystery represents a real and valid phenomenon, capable of scientific study, and the possible rewards that might result from such studies.

With his salutary place in the history of UFO research, it was of little surprise that while reviewing a copy of Greg Bishop’s new book, It Defies Language: Essays on UFOs and Other Weirdness, Hynek’s name came up early in the book, in a section where the author was discussing the sad affair that involved Paul Bennewitz in the 1980s (this, of course, is a subject Greg Bishop knows all too well, having written a fine book on the subject called Project Beta: The Story of Paul Bennewitz, National Security, and the Creation of a Modern UFO Myth).

However, what Greg had to say was indeed rather disturbing, rather than presenting the usual kind of “sunny” perspectives on the life of one of the most visible UFOlogists of the last century.

Greg writes:

“In 1980, Paul Bennewitz was trying to figure out what he was hearing on his home–built radio receiver, with its antenna array pointed at the Kirkland Air Force Base and the NSA’s coded microburst tests. With his knowledge of electronics, he was just beginning to figure out what was zipping into his DIY master control maze, which it almost filled his den and was starting to spill into the bedroom. His home-built computers and software were reeling off a frightening array of alien transmissions. Because of his special relationship with the Air Force, he told them what he was picking up, and what he thought it was.”

The story Greg begins to outline here is a pretty familiar one in UFO circles, having been previously outlined in the aforementioned Project Beta. The short version of the story here is that the Air Force got antsy about what Bennewitz had managed to uncover, but rather than spilling the beans and warning him that this was classified information, a dodgy misinformation campaign began against Bennewitz, with the objective of scrambling the information so that, rather than hiding it altogether, Bennewitz would continue to obtain new data, and with the help of the Air Force, misinterpret it horribly.

Greg continues:

“To this and, an unnamed computer scientist was hired to write a program specifically for Bennewitz. Instead of words like “telemetry,” “range,” and “target,” others were substituted. The same signals would now spit out things like “aliens,” “Home planet,” and “death ray.” Now, the whole thing needed to be delivered to Bennewitz’s doorstep.”

This is where things get really strange, however. In 1982, UFO researcher Bill Moore would be in attendance at a MUFON annual symposium, the same year J. Allen Hynek of the Center for UFO Studies had been there lecturing. According to Bishop, Moore told him that while talking with Hynek over drinks at the bar that year, Hynek admitted to having presented the “bogus” computer setup to Bennewitz, describing it as one of the last “official” actions he carried out during his tenure with the USAF.

This is unsettling data, to say the least, and it suggests a number of things about Hynek and his work. These range from Hynek apparently being complicit with one of the most infamous and well-known Air Force misinformation campaigns against the UFO community, as well as questions raised in relation to just how much official work he may have continued to carry out for the U.S. government after his tenure with the Air Force.

Greg Bishop at the grave of Paul Bennewitz (photo courtesy of Nick Redfern)

“If true,” Greg notes of the incident, “this throws new light on the sort of dealings that some major ufologists may go through in order to keep a line of communication (however tainted) open to authorities who can push the right buttons and make the right calls when they are needed.”

And in hindsight, maybe it bolsters some of the suspicions many in the UFO community have had over the years, especially as it pertains to the long-held concern that those in government — no matter how benign their individual intentions — may nonetheless serve as some part of a broader apparatus that does not want the public to know the full truth about UFOs.

TAGS: Greg Bishop, It Defies Language, Paul Bennewitz, Project Beta

{ http://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }

Geschreven door peter om 18:44 Stuur door

Vrijdag 3 juni 2016

Is er een wolk ontdekt in de atmosfeer van Pluto?

Is er een wolk ontdekt in de atmosfeer van Pluto?

Tim Kraaijvanger

Negentien minuten na de scheervlucht langs Pluto keek de New Horizons-ruimtesonde terug en fotografeerde een in duisternis gehulde dwergplaneet. Op de foto is mogelijk een wolk te zien.

De lichte kring rondom Pluto is de atmosfeer. Er zijn nevels te zien die tot zo’n 130 kilometer boven het oppervlak van Pluto reiken. “Mijn mond viel open toen ik deze eerste foto van een buitenaardse atmosfeer in de Kuipergordel zag,” stelt onderzoeker Alan Stern.

silhouet2

Maar nu onthult deze foto opnieuw een geheim. Wie goed naar het midden van de inzet (rechtsboven) kijkt, ziet een heldere zweem. Deze zweem is mogelijk een wolk met een lengte van tientallen kilometers. Als dit klopt, dan is dit de eerste wolk die is aangetroffen in de atmosfeer van de dwergplaneet. Het is overigens geen gekke gedachte, want uit atmosferische modellen van Pluto blijkt dat methaanwolken zouden kunnen ontstaan.

De tweede inzet toont de zuidpool van Pluto. Het terrein is ruw, waardoor de valleien en scherpe pieken op een afstand van 21.550 kilometer van de dwergplaneet nog duidelijk te onderscheiden zijn. Het gebied is enkele dagen voor de scheervlucht ook al gefotografeerd, alleen toen van een veel grotere afstand. Het donkere terrein kan dus gebruikt worden als een soort ankerpunt om de hoogte van het terrein beter te bepalen.

Inmiddels is New Horizons alweer ver van Pluto verwijderd. Het ruimtevaartuig is onderweg naar Kuipergordelobject 2014 MU69 en zal daar naar verwachting in januari 2019 langs scheren.

Bronmateriaal:

"Secrets Revealed from Pluto’s ‘Twilight Zone’" - NASA

{ http://www.scientias.nl/ }

Geschreven door peter om 18:21 Stuur door

Vrijdag 3 juni 2016

Asteroïde explodeert boven de Amerikaanse staat Arizona

Asteroïde explodeert boven de Amerikaanse staat Arizona

Tim Kraaijvanger

Gisteren verbrandde er een twee meter grote asteroïde in de atmosfeer boven de staat Arizona. In de wijde omgeving was er een flinke knal te horen, maar gelukkig zijn er geen slachtoffers gevallen.

De ruimtesteen explodeerde kort voor 04:00 uur lokale tijd, waardoor er een lichtflits ontstond die tien keer zo helder was als een volle maan. Volgens de Amerikaanse ruimtevaartorganisatie had dit brokstuk een gewicht van enkele duizenden kilo’s en kwam er bij de explosie ongeveer een halve kiloton aan energie vrij. Dit betekent dat de explosie te vergelijken is met het ontploffen van 500 ton TNT.

Volgens ooggetuigen bewoog het object boven het Tonto nationale bos ten oosten van het dorp Payson. De asteroïde werd voor het laatst gespot op een hoogte van 35 kilometer boven hetzelfde bos. Wetenschappers sluiten niet uit dat kleine fragmenten van de meteoriet op de aarde zijn beland. De asteroïde veroorzaakte een bijzonder patroon in de lucht, die te zien is in de onderstaande video en op de foto bovenaan dit artikel (gemaakt door Mike Lerch).

Deze video laat de baan van de asteroïde zien.

De laatste video toont de kracht van de lichtflits van de vuurbol. Deze video is gemaakt door de Sedona Red Rock Cam.

Het is niet de zwaarste inslag van de afgelopen jaren. In 2013 stortte een meteoriet neer in Rusland, die een spoor van vernieling achterliet. De meteoriet brandde deels op in de atmosfeer, waarna er kleinere stukken op aarde vielen. Wetenschappers schatten dat de Russische asteroïde twintig meter groot was en dat er bij de inslag zo’n tachtig keer zoveel energie vrijkwam dan bij de explosie boven Arizona. Zo’n grote inslag komt gemiddeld een keer per honderd jaar voor. De laatste keer dat een meteoriet van deze grootte op aarde belandde, was in 1908. Een meteoriet stortte toen neer in Tunguska (Siberië).

BRONMATERIAAL:

"Fireball Lights Pre-Dawn Sky over Arizona" - NASA

{ http://www.scientias.nl/ }

Geschreven door peter om 18:16 Stuur door

Vrijdag 3 juni 2016

Heelal dijt mogelijk sneller uit dan verwacht

Heelal dijt mogelijk sneller uit dan verwacht

Tim Kraaijvanger

Astronomen hebben de Hubble-ruimtetelescoop ingezet om de afstanden tot sterren in negentien verschillende sterrenstelsels te bepalen. Wat blijkt nu: het universum dijt sneller uit dan verwacht.

Het universum groeit vijf tot negen procent sneller dan dat wetenschappers eerder hebben berekend. “Dit is een belangrijke vondst, omdat het ons inzicht geeft in mysterieuze zaken, zoals donkere energie, donkere materie en donkere straling”, vertelt astronoom Adam Riess van de Johns Hopkins universiteit.

De snelheid waarmee het heelal uitdijt komt niet overeen met de expansiesnelheid kort na de oerknal. Eén mogelijk verklaring voor de snelle uitdijing is het bestaan van een nieuw subatomisch deeltje, die kort na het ontstaan van het heelal wellicht invloed heeft gehad op de evolutie van het universum. Een andere verklaring is dat het effect van donkere energie groter is dan verwacht.

Hubblecostante
De verhouding van de snelheid waarmee een bepaalde lengte groter wordt door de uitdijing van het heelal wordt de Hubbleconstante genoemd. Wetenschappers hebben de Hubbleconstante nu vastgesteld op 73,2 kilometer per seconde per megaparsec. Stel, twee sterrenstelsels staan één megaparsec (=3,26 miljoen lichtjaar) uit elkaar, dan groeit de afstand tussen deze twee stelsels met een snelheid van 73,2 kilometer per seconde. De New Horizons-ruimtesonde reist met een snelheid van 50.000 kilometer per uur, maar zelfs dat is bij lange na niet genoeg om van het ene sterrenstelsel naar het andere sterrenstelsel te reizen. Sterker nog: pas bij een snelheid van ruim 263.000 kilometer per uur is er sprake van break-even en blijft de afstand tussen het ruimtevaartuig en het doel (het andere sterrenstelsel) gelijk.

Het einde van het heelal
Het onderzoek van de astronomen zegt in principe weinig over de toekomst van het heelal. Er zijn verschillende scenario’s, zoals de Big Freeze (het heelal blijft uitdijen), de Big Crunch (het heelal krimpt) en de Big Rip (het heelal scheurt uit elkaar). Het idee van een Big Rip is niet gek. Een Big Rip ontstaat mogelijk wanneer het universum steeds sneller en sneller uit blijft dijen. Dat zou dan na een tijdje zó snel gaan, dat het universum letterlijk ‘uit elkaar wordt getrokken’. Toch lijkt het alsof we te maken gaan krijgen met de Big Freeze: het heelal blijft uitdijen en alle materie dooft op een bepaald moment uit. Dit stervingsproces gaat overigens heel langzaam. Zo is 75% van alle sterren in de Melkweg een rode dwergster en zo’n rode dwergster gaat mogelijk tien biljoen jaar mee. Dat duurt dus nog even!

Bronmateriaal:

"Hubble finds Universe may be expanding faster than expected" - Hubble

{ http://www.scientias.nl/ }

Geschreven door peter om 18:09 Stuur door

Vrijdag 3 juni 2016

Winnipegger details Canada's most famous UFO sightings

Winnipegger details Canada's most famous UFO sightings

BY DOUG LUNNEY, WINNIPEG SUN

An example of a UFO crash that Chris Rutkowski considers more compelling than Roswell is from Wallaston Lake, Sask., where this fragment from a “space vehicle” was found and taken to the National Research Council of Canada in Ottawa.

The 1947 UFO incident in Roswell, New Mexico is the most famous of its kind, but Chris Rutkowski believes there are more compelling cases that have happened in Canada — they just haven't received the same attention because they happened north of the U.S. border.

Rutkowski, a Winnipegger who has researched UFOs since the 1970s, spent a few months studying UFO crashes in Canada. He was surprised to find "more than a dozen well-witnessed and well-documented examples of odd or unexpected objects apparently descending from the sky and landing or crashing on Canadian soil."

Rutkowski, who listed the incidents on his blog (uforum.blogspot.ca), defined the crashes as anything unexplained that was witnessed to have fallen from the sky and didn't fly away.

"Certainly the Roswell one is the most famous one, but the purpose of this report was to show that there are many such cases not just around the world, but here in Canada," Rutkowski, research co-ordinator for UFOlogy Research of Manitoba, said Thursday. "To find more than a dozen, I think that's pretty interesting.

"Roswell has such a tremendous machine behind it to promote it ... it's taken on a mythology of its own. The fact is we actually have better cases, it's just that we're not Roswell."

The only Canadian example that received its share of attention globally happened in Shag Harbour off the coast of Nova Scotia in 1967, Rutkowski said, adding it's sometimes called "Canada's Roswell."

"This classic case is actually a bit better than Roswell, because a number of official documents have been located suggesting something really happened, unlike Roswell," he wrote in his report.

A glowing disc-shaped object was witnessed to have been flying over the harbour before it crashed into the water about 200 feet from shore, then floated for a moment. RCMP were called to the scene and attempts were made to reach the object, thought to be a crashed plane.

However, they failed to reach it before it sunk into the ocean, leaving a thick yellow foam.

Another example Rutkowski considers more compelling than Roswell is from Wallaston Lake, Sask., where a fragment from a "space vehicle" was found and taken to the National Research Council of Canada in Ottawa. One of the pages of RCMP documents is titled: "U.F.O. Found in Northern Saskatchewan."

Manitoba had an incident in 1792 in Thicket Portage "when something fell to earth that sounded like it was a massive jelly, according to explorer David Thompson," Rutkowski said.

The brilliant object broke into many luminous pieces after hitting the river ice, Thompson noted in his diary. When he went to see the hole in the ice the object should have made, there was no sign of impact.

"If he says that happened, we can be fairly sure that it actually did happen," Rutkowski said, noting Thompson was a respected explorer who wrote extensively about his discoveries in Manitoba.

The most famous Manitoba UFO case happened in May 1967 at Falcon Lake. Stephen Michalak claimed he witnessed a UFO land and take off again while prospecting in the Whiteshell Provincial Park, but this incident isn't included in Rutkowski's report as it wasn't considered a crash.

Unlike the U.S., records of UFO incidents in Canada are easy to obtain, Rutkowski said.

"In Canada, there's a tremendous amount of information that's been available since the 1940s on objects seen in the sky and crashing," he said.

"It's good that we have relative open access to information."

{ http://www.winnipegsun.com/ }

WATCH: ABC News' Coverage of Apollo 11 Moon Landing

Geschreven door peter om 18:01 Stuur door

Vrijdag 3 juni 2016

PROJECT HORIZON: U.S. DECLASSIFIES PLANS FOR SECRET MOON BASE

PROJECT HORIZON: U.S. DECLASSIFIES PLANS FOR SECRET MOON BASE

DUSTIN WICKSELL

safe_image.php?d=AQDbaB6K-aCvxR8i&w=158&h=158&url=http%3A%2F%2Fcdn.inquisitr.com%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2F2014%2F07%2FHorizon-670.jpg

More than 50 years ago, before man had ever set foot on the moon, the United States military hatched a daring plan to best the Soviet Union with a secret spy base on the lunar surface, dubbed Project Horizon.

The Project Horizon study was declassified by the National Security Archive last week, on the 45th anniversary of Apollo 11’s historic moon landing, as io9 reports, and is a fascinating look into a cold war mentality that placed victory over the Soviet Union above all else. Project Horizon was originally published in 1959, and at over 100 pages long, it details a plan to construct a “moon-to-earth surveillance system,” that would allow “communications with and observation of the earth.”

PHOTO: The moons surface is shown with the earth in background in this composite photograph.

The United States military once planned to build a surveillance station on the moon.

Code named "Project Horizon," a declassified report released today on the 45th anniversary of Neil Armstrong's historic moonwalk outlines the military's detailed plans to install a moon-to-Earth surveillance system that would have been used for "facilitating communications with and observation of the earth." The report that was originally published in 1959 exceeds 100 pages.

Project Horizon also included a proposal to build a moon-based weapons system that would have allowed the military to launch offensives from the moon towards Earth and even into outer space.

The declassified documents also reveal that the military attempted to investigate the effects of detonating a nuclear weapon on and in the vicinity of the moon.

Although no such detonation occurred, the report tries to speculate the effects nuclear radiation would have had on alien lifeforms.

Another declassified report entitled "The Kidnapping of the Lunik" details how American operatives stole and later returned a Soviet space capsule called the Lunik during a Soviet exhibition tour in order to gather intelligence on Soviet space capability.

SLIDESHOW: Apollo 11 Anniversary

Researchers at the time advocated setting up the Project Horizon base as a permanent installation, and recommended that construction begin as soon as possible:

“The program to establish a lunar base must not be delayed and the initial base design must meet military requirements. For example, the base should be designed as a permanent installation, it should be underground, it should strive to be completely self-supporting, and it should provide suitable accommodations to support extended tours of duty.”

Some ideas haven’t changed in the past half-century. As The Inquisitr previously reported, recently discovered holes in the moon, thought to be a byproduct of lava tubes, are being considered by NASA as a pre-formed shelter for astronauts sent to establish a permanent presence on the moon’s surface.

Infowars Updates‏@InfowarsUpdates

U.S. Reveals Secret Plans for ’60s Moon Base http://www.infowars.com/u-s-reveals-secret-plans-for-60s-moon-base/ … #Science #tcot #tlot #Infowars

As ABC News reports, the Project Horizon documents also reveal that the military wished to investigate the effects of detonating a nuclear device “on and in the vicinity” of the moon. The plan was to send several astronauts to the moon to scout ahead, with reinforcements to follow soon after. The astronauts would have to construct a nuclear reactor once they arrived, and would be supplied with specially outfitted tractors to handle all foreseeable construction needs. The military even considered launching poultry and fish to the base, as sources of food for the 12 astronauts that would staff the moon base.

WKRNVerified account‏@WKRN

US military once planned to build surveillance station on moon: http://wkrn.tv/1ruLBLI #ProjectHorizon

While scientists conceded that the technology didn’t exist to implement Project Horizon at the time, they nonetheless believed that it was only a matter of time before a permanent moon base was a fact of life:

“Based on present knowledge, the study has concluded that it is technically feasible to establish a manned base on the moon. “Technically feasible” is not meant to imply that the equipments are available, or the techniques are completely known.”

The full report on Project Horizon is available online at The National Security Archive.

[Image via Gizmodo]

{ http://www.inquisitr.com/ }