The New Trailer for the Alien Occupation Thriller Captive State Just Might Blow You Away

 Germain Lussier

No, it’s not a Shadow of the Colossus movie. It’s Captive State.

Photo: Focus Features

We hate to be presumptuous, but this new trailer blew us away, so there’s a chance it might do the same for you.

So far, trailers for Captive State have been good. No better, no worse, just good. The framing of the film, set in a world years after aliens have invaded and won, is excellent, but so far its trailers have focused on the film’s more personal aspects. This new trailer, though? Holy shit. It opens things up in a major, major way. Check it out.

Look at all those aliens! Those spaceships! That political intrigue! The father-and-son dynamics! All of those things and more (like that awesome cast: John Goodman! Vera Farmiga!) make this movie look pretty special. Then again, that’s the job of a trailer—to make anything look good—so there’s always an outside chance the movie won’t live up to all this promise.

But, we don’t think so. That footage and cast are too good, and director Rupert Wyatt is too talented to waste such an incredible premise. If the movie ended up being bad, it would be an awful disappointment.

Captive State opens March 29.

{ https://gizmodo.com/ }

The Parker Solar Probe takes its first up-close look at the sun

The spacecraft broke speed and distance records on its initial solar flyby

BY LISA GROSSMAN 

 

FIRST LOOK  One of the first images NASA’s Parker Solar Probe took during its close encounter with the sun shows a streamer of plasma in the outer solar atmosphere, or corona. The probe took this image November 8 at a distance of about 27 million kilometers from the sun’s surface. The bright dot below the streamer is Jupiter.

PARKER SOLAR PROBE/NASA AND NAVAL RESEARCH LABORATORY

{ https://www.sciencenews.org/ }

Risk of impact! Dangerous asteroid "BENNU" racing towards the earth

The asteroid "Bennu" is still racing towards our planet (TAG24 reported). It weighs 79 million tons and has a diameter of 500 meters. What can save us now?

Or better, who can save us now? Answer: NASA! They already have a "plan" to avert the impact and annihilation of mankind.

NASA has sent the "Osiris Rex" probe into space for this purpose. And now - after two years and over 650 million kilometres covered - it has finally reached "Bennu"!

"We have arrived", was the message from the US space agency Nasa on Monday. The arrival position of the probe, which was launched in September 2016 from the Cape Canaveral spaceport, is about 20 kilometres from "Bennu".

"Osiris Rex" will now spend about a year investigating Bennu and finding a suitable site for taking a sample.

"Osiris Rex" (short for: Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, Security-Regolith Explorer) is the first US missile to set off for an asteroid and send a sample back.

If everything goes according to plan, the probe, which is about six meters long and weighs 2100 kilograms, will approach Bennu in 2020 so far that it can absorb a sample of 60 to 2000 grams.

In 2023, a capsule with the sample is to return to Earth. The NASA scientists hope that the mission, which will cost around one billion dollars, will provide them with insights into the origin of our solar system. According to the scientists, the asteroid is to be destroyed.

{ https://www.disclose.tv/ }

{ https://www.disclose.tv/ }

{ https://www.disclose.tv/ }

Huge lake of liquid water found on Mars

 Michael Irving

{ https://newatlas.com/ }

10-year study documents massive, mysterious ecosystem deep beneath our feet

   Michael Irving

Researchers have cataloged the extensive biosphere of life deep beneath the surface of the Earth

(Credit: sazori/Depositphotos)

Earth is teeming with life, but a new project shows most of it isn't where you'd expect. A decade-long study has now taken a census of one of the largest and least-understood ecosystems on the planet – the "deep biosphere" that extends several kilometers into the planet's crust. Among the finds are bizarre creatures that can survive at record depths, pressures and temperatures, and even "zombie" bacteria that may live (in a loose sense of the word) for millions of years at a time.

{ https://newatlas.com/ }

Mars InSight's 'Mole' Should Start Burrowing into the Red Planet Next Month

Of course, this is space exploration, and that means there's still a chance that something could go wrong. "They're speaking about the seven minutes of terror on landing, now I'm saying we have two months of terror in front of us when we penetrate into the surface," said Tilman Spohn, a planetary scientist at the German space agency, which is known by its German acronym, DLR. [NASA's Mars InSight Lander: 10 Surprising Facts]

The heat probe needs to wait its turn, with the lander's supersensitive seismometer and its protective shielding being deployed first. That process will take about a month and is scheduled to begin next week, Spohn said.

If that goes well, the heat probe will be the next to move, with deployment beginning in mid-January. The drilling process will take about two months, since the probe regularly stops to produce a burst of heat and measure how that heat moves through the rock at its current depth.

What worries Spohn is that a large rock — 3 feet (1 m) in diameter or so — would stymie the probe's drilling mechanism, which relies on pushing aside dirt. Smaller rocks it can either push aside or burrow around, and has demonstrated that ability during tests in rock chambers here on Earth.

If a blockage does occur, how far the probe has managed to travel will determine how helpful the results are to scientists. "The less we penetrate, the worse it will be," Spohn said. If it's just 3 feet (1 m) or so deep, the team will need to rely on more intensive modeling. But if it reaches 10 feet (3 m), which should occur around mid February, the team will be pleased — and if it can reach the full depth of 16 feet (5 m) around March 10 or so, all the better.

Spohn is pleased with InSight's landing site, which is just as flat and rock-free as scientists were hoping for. "We had a lot of luck, we have to say," he said, noting that the robot touched down near — but not inside — a crater. "Had we landed there we would have been in some trouble."

• Email Meghan Bartels at mbartels@space.com or follow her @meghanbartels.
• Follow us @Spacedotcom and Facebook.
• Original article on Space.com.

{ https://www.space.com/ }

Auroras, Lightning and Rings of Jupiter Amaze in Surprising NASA Juno Photos

Its main job is to spot the stars, but an ultrasensitive navigation camera on NASA's Juno spacecraft is returning amazing images of Jupiter's rings, auroras, lightning, and even its moonlit dark side.

Scientists discussed the results from the camera alongside other Jupiter revelations during a briefing Dec. 12 at the American Geophysical Union's annual meeting in Washington, D.C. Juno is approaching the halfway point on its primary mission, with its 16th science pass by the planet set for Dec. 21.

That camera is called the Stellar Reference Unit, or SRU for short. According to Heidi Becker, Juno's radiation monitoring investigation lead at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, the camera's "day job" is to cut through interference from the intense radiation surrounding Jupiter to spot the stars, comparing them to a database to figure out Juno's precise location and orientation during its 53-day, elongated orbits of the gas giant. [In Photos: Juno's Amazing Views of Jupiter]

"It's really hard to do that engineering job on Juno because we're flying Juno through the most violent planetary radiation environment there is," Becker said during the briefing, which was webcast live online. "Even though we had to shield the SRU more than six times heavier than we've shielded the radiation vault [which protects Juno's main computer and other sensitive components], there still are very high-energy electrons in that environment that will penetrate the SRU shielding and create this static that you see in the star image."

But rather than seeing a disruption, the team at JPL uses that "snow" to make measurements of how intense the radiation is over different parts of Jupiter — they've already noticed that the high-latitude radiation belt is less powerful than models suggested.

"We use noise as data to figure out what the environment is on the outside of Juno, because we're flying where nobody flew before," Becker said.

During its first data-collecting dive past Jupiter in August 2016, SRU grabbed the first-ever view of Jupiter's faint rings from the inside. The image also reflects the navigation side of SRU — Orion's Belt can be seen dotting down the lower right of the image, and the blazing star Betelgeuse can be seen just above the ring.

And that view was only the beginning: "Once we started to get a sense of what else the SRU can do as a low-light camera, my team and I kind of got addicted and kept asking the question: What else can this camera bring back that's new, that's never been seen before, or that's never been seen in the way that only the SRU can see it?" Becker said.

The spacecraft's main visible-light camera, called JunoCam, has been returning spectacular images for the public to process, and has proved useful for science in its own right, researchers said at the briefing. And in the low-light conditions on Jupiter's dark side, Becker said, SRU has returned views that rival that camera's detailed view of the planet's swirls.

"When we first saw this image, we thought 'did our data get mixed up with JunoCam's?'" Becker said. But, no, it was indeed from the SRU, with the planet's cloud tops lit by sunlight reflected off the volcanic moon Io, taken just 66,000 miles from the cloud tops. 

In addition, the researchers spotted two bright dots of lightning — visible to the right of the image — providing the closest view of Jupiter's lightning from any imager. Because the spacecraft's microwave radiometer, which has also proved a good lightning detector, faces the same way as the SRU, researchers can eventually combine their measurements to learn about the phenomenon in more depth.

Juno's other instruments have provided incredible views of the planet's auroras in ultraviolet and infrared light, but because of its dark-side views SRU has been able to contribute in the visible spectrum, too, showing the ghostly lights circling the planet's pole.

"This is another first: This is the closest view of Jupiter's aurora that has ever been made by a visible[-light] camera," Becker said. "It's an amazing complement to what Juno is already bringing back in the ultraviolet and in the infrared. And, again, we're seeing amazing structure because of the high resolution of the camera and Juno's close flight to the camera."

This image also reveals another dot of lighting, in the lower right, and the squiggles of high-energy electrons beaming off the planet's poles — "so SRU was doing three kinds of science when it took this picture."

"It's really exciting to see what we can see out of an engineering camera, and we're really erasing all the boundaries between who or what can make a contribution to engineering or science or art," Becker added.

The $1.1 billion Juno mission launched toward Jupiter in August 2011 and arrived in orbit around the planet in July 2016. Since then, it's examined the planet during its long, looping orbits to learn about its interior, cloud patterns and weather, magnetic field, radiation and more.

"We have already rewritten the textbooks on how Jupiter's atmosphere works, and on the complexity and asymmetry of its magnetic field," Scott Bolton, principal investigator for Juno and a researcher at Southwest Research Institute in Texas, said in a statement. "The second half should provide the detail that we can use to refine our understanding of the depth of Jupiter's zonal winds, the generation of its magnetic field, and the structure and evolution of its interior."

• Email Sarah Lewin at slewin@space.com or follow her @SarahExplains.
• Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook.
• Original article on Space.com.

{ https://www.space.com/ }

Linda Moulton Howe Reveals What Extraterrestrials Really Want!

Whistleblowers from the military and government explain that Earth is caught in the middle of a battle to retain ownership of our planet, and we are simply pawns in a galactic chess game.

Linda Moulton Howe conveys information she has collected from several insiders who have come forward to reveal what they know about extraterrestrial races, long-term genetic projects involving humans and much more.

  

{ http://ufosightingshotspot.blogspot.com/ }

I feel the earth move under my feet
I feel the sky tumbling down
I feel my heart start to trembling
Whenever you’re around

Carole King was obviously referring to a guy in her iconic song, but today those same lyrics might apply to a newly-discovered world of “intraterrestrials” living deep under the feet of virtually every human in a pristine environment that excited researchers are calling a “subterranean Galapagos.” In fact, it’s making them “get hot and cold, all over, all over, all over, all over.” Let’s find out why.

Two types of microbes—bacteria and archaea—dominate Deep Earth. Among them are millions of distinct types, most yet to be discovered or characterized. This so-called microbial “dark matter” dramatically expands our perspective on the tree of life. Deep Life scientists say about 70% of Earth’s bacteria and archaea live in the subsurface.

Deep microbes are often very different from their surface cousins, with life cycles on near-geologic timescales, dining in some cases on nothing more than energy from rocks.

The genetic diversity of life below the surface is comparable to or exceeds that above the surface.

While subsurface microbial communities differ greatly between environments, certain genera and higher taxonomic groups are ubiquitous – they appear planet-wide.”

In a statement released prior to the American Geophysical Union’s annual meeting, over 1,000 scientists from 52 countries with the Deep Carbon Observatory unveiled the results of their 10-year project which involved drilling hundreds of deep (up to 3 miles/4.8 km) holes on the surface and under the oceans. They found that 70% of Earth’s bacteria and archaea exist in the subsurface, with many of them being alive for thousands of years, moving only when there are earthquakes, volcanic eruptions or plate shifts.

Not only are these organisms old and diverse, they’re strange. One found 1.5 miles/2.5 km down appears to live on methane instead of sunlight and doesn’t reproduce but instead has just been repairing itself for eons. Another lives in hydrothermal vents on the ocean floor at 250 degrees Fahrenheit (121 degrees Celsius), above the boiling point of water at 212 degrees F (100 degrees C).

And there’s not just a few of them in holes … there’s TONS of them everywhere – an estimated 2 to 2.3 billion cubic km (almost twice the volume of all oceans) with a carbon mass of 15 to 23 billion tons, which is 245 to 385 times greater than the carbon mass of all humans on the surface.

Is your heart trembling at the thought of being outnumbered and outlived by so many subsurface intraterrestrials? Robert Hazen, a mineralogist at the Carnegie Institution for Science, thinks this study is just scratching the subsurface.

“We must ask ourselves: if life on Earth can be this different from what experience has led us to expect, then what strangeness might await as we probe for life on other worlds?”

How would that make Carole King feel?

I feel the sky tumbling down, a’tumbling down,
A’tumbling down, a’tumbling down, a’tumbling down, a’tumbling down, tumbling down!

{ https://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }

Occasionally, I’m asked for my thoughts on the claims that there’s a huge “alien base” below Dulce, New Mexico. Well, I don’t think such a thing exists, but I can definitely see why people think there just might be. Dulce is a pleasant and inviting town that is situated in New Mexico’s Rio Arriba County. It’s a small town of less than 3,000 people and which is around thirteen square miles in size. It was founded in the latter part of the 19^th century and, today, is the home of the Jicarilla Apache Nation. There is nothing particularly unusual or out of the ordinary about Dulce – at least, not at first glance. Look a little bit closer, though, and you’ll find yourself in a world filled with dark secrets and terrifying tales of the cosmic and conspiratorial kind. And, “by closer,” I mean below your feet. Way below your feet; maybe even miles down.

Since the late 1970s, rumors have swirled to the effect that deep within the massive Archuleta Mesa, which dominates the town, there is a secret and futuristic facility that has been out of bounds to the U.S. Government since 1979. Today, it’s said that the installation is under the complete control of hostile and deadly extraterrestrials – the so-called “Greys” of UFO lore, those dwarfish, black-eyed, large-headed entities that are practically part of popular culture. So the story goes, it was in seventy-nine that a violent confrontation between military personnel and the aliens broke out – and we were the losers. The base, which was once a hub of human / alien interaction, is now theirs – and theirs alone. Witnesses talk of people going missing, and of vast, cavern-like rooms in which people are devoured by voraciously hungry aliens. Are the tales true? How did the rumors begin? Let’s take a trip back in time to the mid-to-late 1970s.

Paul Bennewitz was a scientist who, at the time, ran a company in Albuquerque called Thunder Scientific – a company that quite literally backed onto the well-guarded fences of Kirtland Air Force Base. It was around 1978 that Bennewitz – who had a pre-existing interest in UFOs – began to hear of more and more so-called alien abduction events in and around Albuquerque and further up into northern New Mexico. On top of that, strange signals were picked up by Bennewitz on his radio equipment. He saw weird-looking aircraft soaring silently across the skies over Kirtland late at night and in the early hours of the morning. He was given accounts of abductees being secretly taken to Kirtland and grilled by U.S. intelligence agents, who were deeply concerned about the growing number of people seemingly being kidnapped from their homes and subjected to terrifying and bizarre experiments of a genetic nature.

As the weeks and months progressed Bennewitz came to believe something incredible: that deadly ETs were secretly getting ready to take over the planet. They were planning on doing so from their command post deep below the town of Dulce. Worldwide invasion and the enslavement of the human race were lurking just around the corner – as Bennewitz saw it, at least. Suspecting that the end really was possibly getting nearer and nearer, Bennewitz prepared a dossier on his findings and theories. He called it Project Beta. Bennewitz mailed copies of the controversial report to the FBI, to the CIA, to the NSA, to every branch of the military, and even to the White House. People had to be warned – and warned now, Bennewitz said.

Notably, Bennewitz was not written off as a crank, as many might expect him to have been. In fact, quite the opposite was the case: intelligence agents at Kirtland Air Force Base quickly established a secret liaison with Bennewitz. They warned him about digging any further into things that could be dangerous – even to Bennewitz’s life, no less. But, those same agents also confided in Bennewitz something incredible: that he was on the right track. They did all they could to keep Bennewitz quiet, almost to the point of begging him to keep his mouth shut on what he knew. For Bennewitz, though, this was like a red rag to a bull: the somewhat veiled threats to keep his nose out of things only served Bennewitz to push further for answers.

As a result, U.S. intelligence fed Bennewitz more and more horror stories of what was supposedly going on several miles below Dulce, including tales of the aliens using captured people – in their thousands – as food. It’s no wonder – given the nature of the stories and that they were coming directly from the military – that Bennewitz became more and more paranoid. Eventually, he became completely unhinged, and to the point where he ended up spending time in a local medical facility, where he was treated for stress, anxiety, and, finally, what practically amounted to a complete mental collapse. Thankfully, he recovered, but was careful to keep his distance from Ufology.

Today, some UFO researchers dismiss Bennewitz’s theories and conclusions – preferring, instead, to suspect that Bennewitz had stumbled on not alien activity but top secret programs of the U.S. military and intelligence community. By steering Bennewitz down a path filled with fictitious tales of dangerous aliens, the government would be able to divert him away from the far more down to earth truth, so the theory goes. On the other hand, Bennewitz, who died in 2003, still has a huge following of UFO sleuths who are absolutely certain that below Dulce something abominable is going on – and has been for years. Maybe even for centuries.

While Bennewitz’s Project Beta report reads like something straight out of the early years of The X-Files, there is absolutely no doubt that Dulce itself is a very weird place, one where strange activity has been reported for years. For example, in the 1960s the area around Dulce became the site of a classified U.S. Atomic Energy Commission program called Gasbuggy. It was part of a larger operation code-named Plowshare. The plan was to explode a significantly-sized atomic device, underground, deep below the Carson National Forest, which just happens to be only a few miles from Dulce. The reason was to try and access massive and precious supplies of natural gas. The bomb was detonated on December 10, 1967 – more than four thousand feet below the surface. Although the Plowshare program continued in the area until the late 1970s, even today digging underground in the area is strictly forbidden.

In light of all of Bennewitz’s findings, it’s not at all surprising that there are those in the UFO community who believe that the Plowshare program was actually a cover story – one created to mask the fact that the U.S. Government had tried to destroy the alien base under Dulce with a nuclear weapon. That just such a weapon really was exploded, underground, and only a few minutes’ drive from Dulce, only ensures that the rumors of an alien presence in the area continue to thrive. And, that people are warned not to dig underground in the area only adds to the suspicions that there is something very sinister going on below Dulce.

Not only that, in 1989, and thanks to the provisions of the Freedom of Information Act, the FBI declassified into the public domain its extensive files on so-called “cattle mutilations” in the Dulce area, most of which occurred in the 1970s. Such mutilations have been reported all across the county and since 1967, but Dulce is renowned for the huge number of cases in its midst, as the FBI learned. Cattle are found lacking major organs. Blood is removed from the bodies in astonishingly quick time. And, black and unmarked helicopters are seen in the areas of mutilation – as are strange lights in the sky, and UFOs too. Incredibly, all of these issues are discussed at length in the FBI’s official files on the mutilations in and around Dulce, all of which can be read online at the FBI’s website, The Vault. So, yes, there is definitely something strange going on at Dulce – and something which has been going on for an extraordinarily long time. But, that base? I’m saying “No.”

{ https://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }

Virgin Galactic doet geslaagde test in aanloop naar ruimtetoerisme - HLN.be

Bron: belga

Vanuit de Mojave-woestijn in Californië vertrok het raketvliegtuig met als testpiloten Mark “Forger” Stucky en Rick “C.J.” Sturckow even na 17.00 uur Belgische tijd met het moedervliegtuig VMS Eve. Op 13 km hoogte “dropte” dit het SpaceShipTwo. Na een vrije val steeg dit met zijn eigen motoren tot meer dan 80 km hoog. Die hoogte is voor Virgin Galactic de grens van de ruimte. Daarna keerde het SpaceShipTwo veilig terug. 

Lees ook

Richard Branson: “Virgin Galactic binnen enkele weken de ruimte in, een paar maanden later volg ik”

De geslaagde vierde test met het ontsteken van de raketmotoren is een opsteker voor de plannen van Branson en co om toeristen kort even in de ruimte te brengen. De volgende stap is naar eigen zeggen het simuleren van het gewicht van de passagiers die het ruimtevliegtuig moet meevoeren. Dat zal gebeuren met vier wetenschappelijke nuttige ladingen die deel uitmaken van een programma van het Amerikaanse ruimtevaartbureau NASA.

Virgin Galactic zegt dat reeds meer dan 600 mannen en vrouwen van over de hele wereld een zitje hebben gereserveerd. Het bedrijf wou naar verluidt niets zeggen over mogelijke Belgische reislustigen. 

{ https://www.hln.be/ }

Russische geheime dienst onderzoekt gat in bemande Sojoez-capsule, mogelijk sprake van sabotage - HLN.be

Bron: Belga

Op 30 augustus viel even wat druk weg in het ISS ten gevolge van een gaatje in de wand van het “woongedeelte” van de Sojoez MS-09 capsule die voor bemand transport naar en van het ISS zorgt. Het twee millimeter groot gaatje werd snel gedicht en de druk bleef ondertussen stabiel.

Lees ook

ISS-bemanning naar buiten om mysterieus gaatje te inspecteren

Om de nog onbekende oorzaak te achterhalen maakten de kosmonauten Oleg Kononenko en Sergej Prokopjev dinsdag een riskante en controversiële ruimtewandeling die zes uur en 31 minuten heeft geduurd. Ze hadden meer dan een uur langer nodig dan gepland om hun taken af te ronden. Ze namen stalen die met de bewuste Sojoez op 20 december naar de Aarde terugkeren. De container met het materiaal verhuist dan naar een laboratorium van de FSB.

Naar verluidt beschikt de Russische ruimtevaartindustrie niet over een lab “met de vereiste competentie en technische uitrusting” voor zo een scheikundige analyse. De Russische ruimtevaartindustrie Roscosmos had geen commentaar op deze wending. Zijn hoofd Dmitri Rogozin had gisteren gezegd dat de container naar de “competente diensten” zou gaan.

Rogozin had eerder gezegd dat het gaatje mogelijk bij de bouw van de Sojoez-capsule is geboord. Degene die het gat in de romp heeft geboord, heeft mogelijk meer beschadigd dan alleen de binnenkant. Mogelijk is er sprake van sabotage. Rogozin sluit zelfs niet uit dat iemand in de ruimte het station bewust heeft gesaboteerd.

Drie ruimtevaarders van het ISS moeten op 20 december met die Sojoez MS-09 naar huis terugvliegen. 

{ https://www.hln.be/ }

VIDEO. Kosmonauten inspecteren mysterieus lek aan boord ISS - HLN.be

Bron: Kameraone

Twee Russische kosmonauten maken een ruimtewandeling van maar liefst 6 uur om een mysterieus lek op het ISS te inspecteren. De autoriteiten vermoeden dat het lek gemaakt werd met een drilboor, en dus geen ongeluk zou zijn.

REUTERS ISS

 REUTERS ISS

{ https://www.hln.be/ }

Linda Moulton Howe Reveals What Extraterrestrials Really Want... it's Not Good! (Video)

Unbeknownst to a vast majority of the population, humanity has a long and complicated history with extraterrestrial beings. 

Whistleblowers from the military and government explain that Earth is caught in the middle of a battle to retain ownership of our planet, and we are simply pawns in a galactic chess game.

Linda Moulton Howe conveys information she has collected from several insiders who have come forward to reveal what they know about extraterrestrial races, long-term genetic projects involving humans, what happens to a soul as it reincarnates across many lifetimes, and much more.

{ https://beforeitsnews.com/v3/ }

A strange radar blip crawled over southern Illinois for 10 hours. What was it?

The radar signature meandered over southern Illinois for 10 hours on Monday.

It definitely wasn’t precipitation, the National Weather Service said.

But that seemed for days to be the only sure thing about the blob, which floated for nearly 140 miles before scattering into nothing after it crossed into western Kentucky.

So what was it?

Birds? Meteors?

The National Weather Service in Paducah posted this message on Facebook at 1:00 a.m. this morning:

The first volley of a coordinated campaign to distract military aircraft from alien sorties?

Chris Noles, a meteorologist at the National Weather Service outpost in Paducah, Ky., first observed the disturbance.

And it was … strange.

• [Thousands of tiny satellites are about to go into space and possibly ruin it forever]

Objects in the sky have a certain amount of reflective potential for radar signals to bounce back from, Noles told The Washington Post on Wednesday.

And this disturbance had a lot of potential.

Solid objects with greater surface area cause those signals to come through stronger.

NWS Paducah

✔@NWSPaducah

Interesting radar return over Wabash County IL, moving south off KPAH radar.

• 94

11:24 PM - Dec 10, 2018

• 83 people are talking about this

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So when you’re watching severe weather crawl across the radar screen, Noles said, yellow and red typically show hail or snow. Those are strong.

Rain and drizzle are not so solid and appear as weaker signals, in blue and green hues.

This disturbance, then, was puzzling and churned with a core of yellow and red signatures as it pushed along a southeastern wind, producing radar signals from as high as 10,000 feet.

Birds don’t appear that way on radar, Noles said.

So: ̶b̶i̶r̶d̶s̶.

Meteors are pretty solid. But they don’t move at 14 miles an hour.

So: ̶m̶e̶t̶e̶o̶r̶s̶.

North American Aerospace Defense Command, which oversees air sovereignty in the United States, said it was following the incident but did not have information on what the object could have been.

What about aliens then?

“NORAD does not track UFOs or alien aircraft,” spokesman Michael Kucharek said, though he explained that NORAD would be aware of unauthorized aircraft in the United States.

Kucharek referred further questions to the Federal Aviation Administration, which referred back to NORAD.

(NORAD does, however, track Santa’s flight across the world. But it’s too early for Santa to show up on radar.)

Back at the National Weather Service, Noles offered another explanation.

Perhaps the slow-moving band that tracked with wind patterns on that clear day was a countermeasure launched from a military aircraft.

Chaff is a cloud of light aluminum-coated material deployed in the air to fool and overwhelm radar signals that may be tracking the aircraft. An incident in southern Missouri in the 1990s that Noles observed was similar, he said.

But an NWS report on chaff and its impact on weather radar said chaff typically lingers for two to five hours. Monday’s incident was twice as long as the high end of that window.

A longer event is not unprecedented, however.

During a training exercise in 2013, a military aircraft launched chaff over Alabama, where it lingered in the atmosphere for about the same amount of time — 10 hours, according to the NWS report.

Two military installations relatively close to the path of the most recent radar anomaly — Scott Air Force Base in Illinois and Fort Campbell in Kentucky — told the Evansville Courier and Press that their aircraft were not responsible.

An Evansville meteorologist said he was told by an unnamed pilot that chaff came from a military C-130 transport aircraft but did not say where it originated.

The mystery continued Wednesday, even for those who would eventually know what really happened.

It was chaff released from a C-130H aircraft piloted by the 130th Airlift Wing of the West Virginia Air National Guard during a training operation, state guard spokeswoman Capt. Holli Nelson said.

The pilots were required to expend the material, potentially for safety reasons, Nelson said, and received air traffic control permission to do so.

Officials at the National Guard Bureau began to piece together that news by the afternoon.

“I woke up, and I was having my coffee, picking through news and saw the headline myself,” said Army Master Sgt. Mike Houk, a Bureau spokesman. “And I didn’t know what it was.”

Now he does.

So: ̶m̶y̶s̶t̶e̶r̶y̶.

Read more:

• A mild Tennessee earthquake was felt in Atlanta — and even the Braves had jokes
• Head of Pentagon’s secret ‘UFO’ office sought to make evidence public

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