New Crucifixion Evidence Sheds Light on the Death of Jesus Christ

An investigation into crucifixions reveals evidence using the latest medical technology on how the horrific form of execution was slow and excruciating, providing new insights into the death of Jesus Christ.

An Excruciating Death

A new TV documentary on the Smithsonian Channel called Crucifixion Mystery discusses the latest theories by medical experts. Dr. Per Lav Madsen, a Danish cardiologist believes the whole process was to cause immense suffering before death. “ Crucifixion was a horrible way of killing people because it took so long. It was a slow way of dying and that’s the reason they used crucifixion in the first place.”

The length of time and suffering varied, according to Dr. Kristina Killgrove. “Someone might have survived on the cross for as long as four or five days until they died of dehydration.”

Rare Skeletons Provide Insights Into Death of Jesus

The documentary also investigates two rare examples of skeletons believed to have been crucified.

The most recent archaeological discovery was in 2007, when a construction team in northern Italy’s Gavello municipality accidentally uncovered an isolated skeleton from a Roman-era burial. Scientists believed the man who was in his thirties was crucified. Using the latest technological advances to study the skeleton, this could offer up new insights into the death of Jesus Christ .

Grave of the man from Gavello during excavation by the provincial archaeological superintendency. 

(Soprentendenza Archeologia, Belle Arti e Paesaggio Per Le Province Di Verona, Rovigo e Vicenza )

The research team included Emanuela Gualdi-Russo, Ursula Thun Hohenstein, and Nicoletta Onisto from the University of Ferrara and Elena Pilli and David Caramelli from the University of Florence. They extracted DNA from the remains and were able to rule out an accidental origin for a hole in the calcaneus – the heel bone.

The hole was circular, passing from the inside of the foot to the outside, with evidence showing it was caused at the time of death. “In our interpretation,” the archaeologists wrote in A multidisciplinary study of calcaneal trauma in Roman Italy: a possible case of crucifixion? : “We found a particular lesion on the foot of a skeleton from an isolated Roman burial discovered by excavation in 2007 in northern Italy. Here we suggest crucifixion as a possible cause of the lesion.”

Right calcaneus from 1st c AD Gavello, Italy, showing possible evidence of crucifixion. This archaeological evidence has provided new clues to the death of Jesus.

(Emanuela Gualdi-Russo & Ursula Thun Hohenstein / University of Ferrara )

The researchers believed that “the type of lesion found on the right calcaneus from Gavello is compatible with a position of the body [...] contorted to the right with legs and feet in contact to allow a single nail to pierce both heels, [or with] knees in an open position and feet with heels overlapping and fixed on the medial side by a single nail.”

The skeleton was dated to the Roman era as archaeologists discovered fragments of typical Roman bricks and tiles nearby, which places this crucifixion on or near the time of Christ’s death.

Why did the Romans Use Crucifixion as a Form of Punishment?

This form of execution was reserved for the lowest of the low - slaves, disgraced soldiers, Christians, foreigners and political activists.

During the 1st century AD, large numbers of rebels against Rome were crucified in Palestine.  It’s believed that Christ was crucified on the pretext that he instigated rebellion against Rome, who were ruthless in suppressing political dissent.

The first example of possible crucifixion came from an excavation in 1968 of a cemetery in Giv’at ha-Mivtar just outside of Jerusalem. It revealed a heel bone with a nail still skewered through it. Yehohanon ben Hagkol is the name on the tomb – and he may also have been a political activist like Jesus Christ.

The calcaneus of Yehohanon ben Hagkol, with transfixed nail, which provided insights into the death of Jesus.

( Israel Museum / Ilan Shtulman)

Even the Romans themselves thought crucifixion was barbaric. The Roman orator Cicero noted that “of all punishments, it is the most cruel and most terrifying.” He added that it was the most “extreme and ultimate punishment for slaves.”

Seneca, the Roman philosopher, described the various ways in which crucifixion took place. “I see crosses there, not just of one kind but made in different ways: some have their victims with their head down to the ground, some impale their private parts, others stretch out their arms,” he wrote in 40AD.

The victim could have also had their eyes pulled out or their tongue excised. One of the worst cases of sadism was recorded by Josephus during the reign of Antiochus IV, where the condemned man’s strangled child was placed around his neck.

The Lex Puteolana tablet reveals the ritual and economics of crucifixion in the Roman world. The 2,000-year-old tablet, now housed in a medieval castle on the Bay of Naples, was found in the town of Puteoli. It’s the only inscription which details the precise practice of crucifixion. The inscription tells us how much the workers who flogged the slaves to be crucified were paid – as well as the executioner. The standard fee for an execution team was four sesterces each – the price of a glass of wine.

In an ironic twist, during later rebellions, the Romans were themselves crucified. According to historians, in AD 9 local Germanic tribes crucified many of the Roman general Varus’ defeated soldiers. In AD 28, the detested Roman tax collectors also met the same fate at the hands of Germanic tribesmen.

How did Jesus Christ die?

The crucifixion of Jesus Christ is believed to have taken place in Jerusalem under Roman rule between AD 30-36. No confirmed archaeological evidence of that event has been found, although Christ is mentioned by Jewish and Roman historians.

Tacitus mentions that Christ was executed while Pontius Pilate was the Roman prefect in charge of Judaea (AD26-36), during the reign of Tiberius. According to biblical accounts, Jesus died after six hours, nailed to the cross. The two thieves who died with Christ were Gestas who was on the left and Dismas on the right. 

In Roman law, a person condemned to crucifixion was scourged first, usually with a wooden stave. Short whips with studded leather thongs were also used to flay the skin. The person was stripped naked, tied to an upright wooden post and then flogged across the back, buttocks and legs by Roman legionnaires.

A depiction of Jesus Christ being scourged.

(Hans Leonhard Schäufelein / CC0)

Death may have been due to cardiac arrest after the scourging or dehydration. Many scientists have come to the conclusion that it was progressive asphyxia caused by impairment of respiratory movement. The Roman guards were only allowed to leave once the victim had expired. Due to impatience, the soldiers may have sped up matters by breaking their legs or stabbing the chest.

• Sir Isaac Newton’s Astronomical Dating of Christ's Crucifixion
• Second (Or Third) Ever Skeleton with Evidence of Crucifixion Discovered
• The Bizarre Crucifixion of Margaretta Peter: The Short Life of a Prodigy and Devoted Christian

Crucifixion in Modern Times

Shockingly, this horrific form of execution is still used today. Amnesty International recorded a case of crucifixion in Yemen in 2012, when an Islamist group found a 28-year-old guilty of planting electronic devices in vehicles. He was executed first and then hung on a cross.

In Iraq during 2016, a man revealed that his brother-in-law was crucified after being tortured for five hours. “My wife’s brother was crucified by Daesh (Isis),” he told the charity ADF International. “He was crucified and tortured in front of his wife and children, who were forced to watch. They told him that “if he loved Jesus that much, he would die like Jesus.” Isis then cut his stomach open and shot him before leaving him to die on a cross.

Every Good Friday in the Philippines (which is 80% Catholic), a man playing the role of Jesus Christ is nailed to the cross. Since the 1980s, Ruben Enaje has had four-inch nails hammered into both his hands and feet and then hoisted on a wooden cross for around five minute

In 2016, Enaje decided that would be his last crucifixion. The significance was that this was the Filipino’s 33rd time. According to religious tradition, Jesus was 33 years old at the time of his crucifixion.

• Top image: Main: depiction of the crucifixion/death of Jesus Christ and the thieves, Gestas and Dismas. (Andrea Mantegna / Public domain ).       
• Inset: The calcaneus of Yehohanon ben Hagkol, with transfixed nail. ( Israel Museum / Ilan Shtulman)

By Fiona Keating

{ https://www.ancient-origins.net/ }

60,000-Year-Old Underwater Forest May Hold Next Medical Breakthrough!

About 60,000 years ago, pre-historic humans began emerging out of Africa and shared hunting places and cave residences with Neanderthal populations in what is today Europe. Meanwhile, on the other side of the world, a vast cypress tree forest carpeted riverbanks off the coast of Alabama in Mobile Bay in the Gulf of Mexico. The ancient underwater forest of withering trees and the shipworms they contain were entombed beneath encroaching sediments and sea waters until Hurricane Ivan tore up the Gulf Coast in 2004 and exposed the ancient forest, which was discovered 60 feet below the surface water of Mobile Bay.

The Ancient Secrets of Modern Medicine

A new documentary film by Ben Raines produced by This is Alabama, reveals how dive shop owner Chas Broughton first discovered evidence of the ancient forest and invited an environmental journalist and scientists from the National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration ( NOAA) to assess his find. The results were published on the NOAA Ocean Exploration & Research website, saying this ancient submerged forest has remained undisturbed for thousands of years and that it holds “the secret to the creation of new medicines .”

• Medieval Medicine: 1,000-year-old Onion and Garlic Salve Kills Modern Bacterial SuperBugs
• Intentional Forest Fires Shaped Forests in the USA More than Climate Change
• Snake Oil Has Long Been Deemed A ‘Fake Medicine’, But It’s Not Guilty, It Really Does Cure!

A report in Nature World News says Dr. Kristine DeLong from the Louisiana State University (LSU); marine scientist Robin Cobb from LSU; and Dr. Grant Harley, a dendrochronologist from the University of Southern Mississippi collected and analyzed tree samples to determine the type of marine environment in which the forest had been entombed, and what the climatological conditions were like when the forest was alive.

300 Ancient Animals Found Entombed in Submerged Forest

A sample of tree sap was recovered from within the bark of one tree, that when cut released resin strong enough to “permeate the air” and the tree’s fibers and growth rings were still visible. Dr. Harley said the tree’s growth rings were narrower and were more uniform in size than those of modern cypress trees, indicating the environment was much colder than our current climate , and Dr. DeLong radiocarbon dated the sample at 40,000-45,000 years old.

Collected from an ancient cypress forest submerged in Mobile Bay, this log contains hundreds of marine organisms that either burrow into the wood or live in burrows made by other organisms.

( Brian Helmuth )

Last December, NOAA-funded an expedition of scientists from the University of Utah and Northeastern University , and marine and environmental sciences professor Brian Helmuth, who determined that the ancient trees were very well preserved under sediment layers that had prevented oxygenation and decomposition. It was Francis Choi, a senior lab manager at Northeastern University Marine Science Center , who looked at organisms buried within the wood and discovered 300 ancient animals.

This dried specimen of Teredo navalis was extracted from the wood and the calcareous tunnel that originally surrounded it and curled into a circle during preservation. The two valves of the shell are the white structures at the anterior end; they are used to dig the tunnel in the wood.

( Public Domain )

The Anti-Viral Property of Ancient Shipworms

Sometimes called “termites of the sea,” shipworms are tiny marine bivalve mollusks(saltwater clams) with long, soft, naked bodies, and they are notorious for boring into wood immersed in sea water. As these worms bore their way into organic matter, what comes out the other end is converted into animal tissue.

In this study, one hundred bacterial strains from shipworms, many of which were novel, were dated to being at least 60,000 years old. The team of scientists DNA-sequenced 12 of the strains, determining that they could be applied in the creation of new antibiotics for treatment against “parasites, pain and anti-cancer drugs, antimicrobial activity, and possibly anti-viral drugs”, according to University of Utah medicinal chemistry research professor Margo Haygood.

Ocean Genome Legacy Center Director Dan Distel removes a shipworm. The bacteria that shipworms create may lead to new life-saving medicines.

( Brian Helmuth )

This is not the first time scientists have studied shipworms in a medical context, in 2017 a paper by Northeastern University scientists titled “'Unicorn' shipworm could reveal clues about human medicine, bacterial infections” was published by Science Daily . Researchers discovered a “dark slithering creature four feet long” dwelling in foul mud in a remote Philippines lagoon and this “giant shipworm”, with pinkish siphons at one end and an eyeless head at the other, was said to have added to the scientific understanding of how “bacteria cause infections and, in turn, how we might adapt to tolerate, and even benefit from them.”

• Medieval Medical Books Could Hold the Recipe for New Antibiotics
• Critically Endangered South American Forests were Planted by Ancient Peoples
• Scientists Find 280-Million-Year-Old Fossilized Forest…in Antarctica

Modern Virus Halts Research on Ancient Anti-Virus

According to East Idaho News , the COVID-19 pandemic has put a stop to diving at the ancient forest site in the Gulf of Mexico, but Dr. Choi and his team plan to launch unmanned underwater robots to provide 3D visualizations of the forest and Dr. Haygood and her team plan to study more tree samples next year, which NOAA said might have applications in “textile, paper, food, renewable fuel, animal feed, and fine chemical production.”

• Top Image: Wood from an ancient bald cypress forest buried off the coast of Alabama was uncovered by storms. Newly exposed wood offers a unique habitat for marine organisms and creates a novel ecosystem in the Gulf of Mexico. 
• Source: Francis Choi

By Ashley Cowie

{ https://www.ancient-origins.net/ }

UFO sighting: Mysterious 'man-made' crafts in Siberia stun top scientists - watch footage

A BIZARRE UFO sighting in northern Siberia has stunned Russian scientists, who have failed to come up with a logical explanation for the footage - amid odd claims of alien involvement.

A NEW, VIOLENT ORIGIN STORY FOR 'OUMUAMUA EXPLAINS THE INTERSTELLAR OBJECT’S WEIRD SHAPE

In 2004, when I visited Puerto Rico for the first time – in search of the Chupacabras – I was told of the account of a former civil-defense employee. He had seen a gigantic, unknown craft rise silently out of the coastal waters of the island, while he was on an early-morning jog in the spring of 1999. In this case, the vast device, which was viewed at a distance of around half-a-mile off the coast, or perhaps slightly more, wobbled slightly – rather like a falling-leaf – as it took to the skies, and then streaked vertically at a fantastic speed, before finally vanishing from view as it grew ever smaller, and was finally lost due to the effects of the bright, rising sun. It’s a fact that there are more than a few cases on record of these “falling leaf”-type UFO encounters.

In September 1952, a notable UFO encounter occurred at Royal Air Force Topcliffe, a military base in Yorkshire, England. One of the witnesses, Flight Lieutenant John Kilburn, said of the incident: “Sir, I have the honor to report the following incident which I witnessed on Friday, 19th September, 1952. I was standing with four other aircrew personnel of No. 269 Squadron watching a Meteor fighter gradually descending. The Meteor was at approximately 5000 feet and approaching from the east. [Flight Officer R.N.] Paris suddenly noticed a white object in the sky at a height between ten and twenty thousand feet some five miles astern of the Meteor.”

Kilburn continued: “The object was silver in color and circular in shape, it appeared to be traveling at a much slower speed than the Meteor but was on a similar course. It maintained the slow forward speed for a few seconds before commencing to descend, swinging in a pendular motion during descent similar to a falling sycamore leaf…After a few seconds, the object stopped its pendulous motion and its descent and began to rotate about its own axis. Suddenly it accelerated at an incredible speed towards the west turning onto a south-easterly heading before disappearing.”

From the 1953 files of NICAP (the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena) comes the following, which occurred over Barter Island, Alaska: ” 4:50 a.m. local time. Captain R. E. Barnes was thawing and heating a C-47 at Barter Island air strip when he heard a noise that seemed to be out of synchronization with the Herman Nelson heaters running nearby. He ducked out of the wheel well and walked over to the heaters located in front of the left main gear. He immediately realized that the noise was emanating from a large, round, bright object which was descending over the building area about 3/4 of a mile away. This object appeared to be at approximately 5,000 feet in altitude and descending in a sort of falling leaf pattern. Captain Barnes estimated the distance covered by the side to side movements at about 200 feet. Approximately 45 seconds later the object had reached an estimated 2000 feet directly over the building area.

“The object was described as round in shape and brilliant white in color and approximately 30-40 feet in diameter. Small ray-like appendages appeared on either lower side. After hovering for approximately 45 seconds, the object began an ascent using the same pattern as it did for the descent. During the climb out, 1st Lt. Lewis E. Griffin arrived at the aircraft and Capt. Barnes pointed out the object for Lt. Griffin. a rated pilot. At this time the object was directly overhead at an estimated altitude of 10,000 to 15,000 feet. The two witnesses continued to watch the object for two more minutes as it traveled to the east blinking as it went. Capt. Barnes is an F-94 jet pilot with 1470 hours of flying time.”

The cases that I have shared with you above are just a few of many. Are those falling leaf movements signs of malfunctions in the craft? Problems soaring through our atmosphere? I have to admit that I have no idea. All I can say for sure is that the falling leaf aspect of UFO encounters is one that dates back to the very early years of Ufology – and that still continues.

{ https://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }

In October 2017, an odd-shaped space object was discovered with characteristics unlike any ever seen. It immediately lived up to its unusual name by defying definition, deceiving some into thinking it might be a spaceship and stumping all as to where it came from, let alone how it got here or how it got its cigar shape. Two astronomers have been pondering this space cigar since it lit up our telescopes and think they have the answers to what ‘Oumuamua is, how it formed and why they think there may be trillions … yes, trillions … more objects like it.

“It is really a mystery, but some signs, like its colors and the absence of radio emission, point to ‘Oumuamua being a natural object.”

Yun Zhang, postdoctoral researcher at the Université Côte d’Azur, co-authored the study – published this week in Nature Astronomy — of all of the available data on ‘Oumuamua. The origin in another star system, elongated shape and slight rate of acceleration not caused by gravitational forces caused him and co-author Douglas Lin, professor emeritus in the department of astronomy and astrophysics at the University of California, Santa Cruz, to speculate that ‘Oumuamua was once a planet or planetoid that was broken apart with a force that shattered it into odd-shaped pieces and flung them out of their solar system. A model gave them an idea of how this happened.

“Zhang and Lin ran high-resolution computer simulations to model the dynamics of an object closely flying by a star. They found that the star can dramatically split the object, if it comes enough close to the star, into extremely elongated fragments, and then eject them into the interstellar space.”

In a press release announcing the study results, Zhang and Lin explain that the model generated some elongated pieces with a greater than a 10-to-1 length-to-width ratio. The fragments may have melted but managed to stay together long enough to cool down again, giving them the same kind of surface as ‘Oumuamua, while trapping moisture inside, allowing them to release a very small vapor trail that could cause a spin like ‘Oumuamua’s. This Icarus-like event caused by space objects as large as planets or as small as disk debris getting too close to a star can explain a lot of space and interstellar objects.

“The discovery of ‘Oumuamua implies that the population of rocky interstellar objects is much larger than we previously thought. On average, each planetary system should eject in total about a hundred trillion objects like ‘Oumuamua.”

Carl Sagan

If Carl Sagan were alive today, he’d be saying “trillions and trillions” instead of “billions and billions” as he described what astronomers now expect to see when the Vera C. Rubin Observatory astronomical observatory opens later this year in Chile. The more that look like ‘Oumuamua, the closer this new model will come to fact.

Let’s just hope nothing in our own solar system gets too close to the Sun. Are you listening, Planet X?

{ https://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }

Have you ever wondered what multidimensional beings look like? David Nemes did once, but he developed a tool for viewing them and now has thousands of images of multidimensional beings on his Facebook page. Have you ever wondered what a multidimensional being is? He’s a good person to answer that. Most believers in a multiverse or multiple universes don’t often talk about any beings living in them, other than parallel universes with some alternate form of us. Neme’s photos of multidimensional beings or entities look nothing like humans. He posts them quite frequently, so viewing them can be a welcome, albeit just as scary, alternative to watching pandemic news. (A video containing many of the images can be viewed here.)

“It is an electronic Ouija board, with image and sound, the project is quite advanced.”

According to an interview with MysteriousTimes.com, Nemes was a science and astronomy buff growing up in Madrid, Spain, and is now a scientist and inventor in Colombia. Using “mathematical calculations and optical experiments,” he developed a device that uses “special lenses, ultrasensitive screens of his invention and above all sunlight. The process – which he calls “Energivision” – allegedly generates images of … things. Some look like faces, others like bodies, sometimes with wings. With his Facebook comment about the device being an “electronic Ouija board,” he obviously thinks these could be beings that are evil and he’s convinced they exist in other dimensions or planes.

It would be nice if the images were this clear.

“The only way I have to publicize my invention and the captures are by Facebook, since 2015 I have posted 1000 photos on my facebook.”

Nemes claims he’s tried to show Energivision to the scientific community, although he doesn’t say how, and was rejected – not a surprise. He also claims the mainstream media has ignored the photos and his theories. That’s not surprising when you consider some of the comments of those who agree with him – often referring to astral planes, which is more religious of occult than science. In addition, most of the photos appear to be split mirror images – like a Rorschach inkblot. As anyone who has looked at those for any length of time can attest, the imagination, anthropomorphism and pareidolia kick in quickly and it’s easy to see faces, winged creatures, horned beings and other scary things. Finally, the faces all appear to be looking straight into the Energivision device – like multidimensional mugshots.

Rorschach inkblot – see anything?

This is not to discredit Nemes’ photos – just to point out that to make a scientific analysis, it would be helpful to know more about his Energivision device, the process he uses, the locations where he finds these beings, etc. To his credit, Nemes’ comments on Facebook have a definite philosophical and psychological angle – he promotes positive thinking and vibrations and warns viewers to avoid negative thoughts … which would probably attract these things out of their dimension and into ours – if they’re real.

Nothing wrong with using scary pictures and stories of evil beings to get people to think positive amidst the stream of round-the-clock negativity we’re getting exposed to these days. For that, and to expose your mind to the possibility that he really has invented a way to photograph multidimensional beings, it’s worth a trip to the Facebook page of David Nemes.

{ https://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }

Giant Energy Entity Near Earths Sun Stops For 22 Min Then Moves Light Speed! NASA Video, UFO Sighting News.

Date of discovery: April 12, 2020
Location of discovery: Earths sun
Source: 

• https://helioviewer.org
  

My curiosity got the best of me today and I was looking over some sun photos from NASA Helioviewer.org when I found something...something seen before, but yet, mysterious in and of itself. 

The object is huge, looks planet size, but I believe to be about 1.5km across and very close to the satellite and moves in jumps from place to place, often at or around the speed of light, sometimes leaving trails seen on camera, but here...one stopped, rested a bit, move a bit closer to the sun resting again, then jumped away into the directing it came from...space. The object jumping like that and seeing trails of others similar shaped objects zooming around the sun makes me wonder are these living beings made of energy? Energy travels at the speed of light too...and this would explain the speed of the objects. I believe these are incredibly large energy beings...intelligent beings. But the way some move around is like they are children at play, chasing each other across a grassy playground. Odd I know, but true observation of their behavior. 



So...are these energy beings ships not beings? Not likely, why would an energy being need a ship? Are they gods? Maybe in our terms of what a god is...they are. But god the creator...I don't thinks so. Just god like beings...still beings, still a species, not our god, but have incredible powers...speed being one of them. Where are the species arms and legs you ask? Why would an omnipotent being need arms, legs or a head? We as humans view things as if everything must happen according to our rules...however the universe has its own rules...and doesn't care about ours. 
Scott C. Waring - Taiwan

{ https://www.etdatabase.com/ }

Scott C. Waring, owner of the website ETdatabase, was looking over some sun photos from NASA Helioviewer.org when he found something...something seen before, but yet, mysterious in and of itself.

According to Scott: The object is huge, looks planet size, but he believes to be about 1.5 km across and very close to the satellite and moves in jumps from place to place, often at or around the speed of light, sometimes leaving trails seen on camera before it jumped away into the directing it came from...space.

Similar large planet sized objects flying by the sun has been captured by BruceSeesAll during a time in 2017 and 2018 that a lot of activity was being seen on the moon too. (Watch Video).

Jump to 2:45 to see actual video of the mile long UFO moving.

  

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

Several days ago a resident from Kwa Zulu Natal, South Africa captured an incredible image of a huge cigar-shaped UFO/USO at the moment it emerged from the ocean off coast Umtuntweni beach nearthe city of Kwa Zulu Natal.

USOs are defined as unknown craft that are sighted in the water, sighted rising up out of the water, or diving into the water. There's a long history of this kind of sightings but till now we don't know whether these UFOs/USOs are secret government craft or of extraterrestrial origin.

If we look at this huge flying object, we see that it is comparable to several UFOs / USOs that were caught by an American submarine years ago.

UFO off coast  Kwa Zulu Natal, South Africa.

Two UFOs captured by by an American submarine.

Sanderson, a renowned zoologist with a keen interest in the paranormal, puts forward the curious theory that OINTS" - 'Other Intelligence's' living in the Earth's oceans.

This underwater, parallel, civilization may be twice as old as Homo sapiens, he proposes, and may have developed what we call space flight.

What better place to have an impenetrable base than deep within the oceans of the planet.

  

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

Amada of UFOs in the sky above – United States

This UFO footage was filmed somewhere over United States in April 2020. Similar sightings were recorded over different places in the USA recently. What are those unknown lights?

Please leave your comments below!

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

Weird alien planet may be core of stripped-down gas giant

By Charles Q. Choi

The bizarre newfound world resides in the mostly barren 'hot Neptunian desert.'

An artist's depiction of the exoplanet NGTS-4b, one of the few known Neptune-sized worlds that orbit very close to their stars. The odd newfound planet TOI-849b also resides in this “hot Neptunian desert.”

(Image: © University of Warwick/Mark Garlick)

A distant world about 40 times more massive than Earth may be the remnant core of a giant planet, or a giant planet in the making whose growth stalled, a new study reports.

These findings may help shed light on what the mysterious cores of giant planets look like, researchers said.

Scientists investigated the exoplanet TOI-849b, which NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) first detected in 2018 and whose existence the La Silla Observatory in Chile later helped confirm. This alien world orbits the sunlike star TOI-849 about 730 light-years from Earth. 

• Related: The strangest alien planets (gallery)

With a mass about 40 times that of Earth, TOI-849b is nearly half as massive as Saturn. At the same time, data from the Paranal Observatory in Chile and the Las Cumbres Observatory Global Telescope helped reveal that the exoplanet has a diameter about 3.45 times that of Earth, comparable to Neptune's. Altogether, this information suggests the exoplanet has a density similar to Earth's, making it the densest Neptune-size planet discovered to date.

TOI-849b circles its star in a fast, tight orbit just 18.4 hours long. This brings it scorchingly close to its star at a distance of just 1.5% of an astronomical unit (AU), the average distance between Earth and the sun (which is about 93 million miles, or 150 million kilometers). 

The newfound exoplanet therefore lies in the middle of the so-called "hot Neptunian desert," an apparent (and mysterious) dearth of Neptune-size worlds that orbit very close to their stars. 

"There are not a lot of planets in this in-between place, so to see a planet this size this close to a star is pretty cool," Sean Raymond, an astrophysicist at the Observatory of Bordeaux in France, who did not take part in this research, told Space.com.

Previous models suggested that nascent planets more than 10 to 20 times Earth's mass should have strong enough gravitational fields to gobble up huge amounts of material from the protoplanetary disks of gas and dust that surround their newborn stars. Such worlds should therefore swell to become gas giants similar to Jupiter or Saturn. As such, one might think that TOI-849b is the remnant of a gas giant that lost most of its weight somehow, perhaps due to the heat it experiences orbiting so close to its star.

However, as much as the light from TOI-849b's star would sear the exoplanet, the scientists noted such heating alone might still not strip a gas giant's atmosphere down to nearly the planet's core. They estimated the star is about 6.7 billion years old. Given that amount of time, as well as TOI-849b's distance from its star, they calculated a Jupiter-like gas giant would have lost only a few percent of its mass due to stellar radiation to date.

This is the first clear image of a planet forming from the disk of gas and debris surrounding its host star. The planet, PDS 70b, is visible as a bright point to the right of the center of the image, which is blacked out by the coronagraph mask used to block the star's blinding light.

ESO / A. Muller et al.

As such, the researchers suggest that TOI-849b may be the remnant core of a gas giant that lost mass through a different mechanism. Perhaps it collided with other giant planets, for example, or the gravity of its star peeled off much of its gas envelope. Alternatively, if TOI-849b were slung to its current position due to gravitational clashes with other planets, the energy the exoplanet would have experienced as its star's gravity pulled TOI-849b into its current circular orbit would have greatly heated that world, potentially leading to significant mass loss.

Another possible explanation for TOI-849b's current state has to do with arrested development. Perhaps TOI-849b formed late, when much of its system's protoplanetary disk was gone, the researchers said. Alternatively, perhaps as TOI-849b developed in orbit around its star, it carved off all the material available to it for its growth within the protoplanetary disk.

All in all, TOI-849b may give scientists a glimpse at what the core of a gas giant looks like. Future research may directly observe that core's composition by analyzing evaporated material in the exoplanet's remaining atmosphere. 

Further work may also investigate whether this exoplanet actually was a gas giant whose atmosphere was stripped away by the light from its star.

"They claim that it's unlikely, but these calculations are hard to do," Raymond said.

The new study, which was led by David Armstrong of the University of Warwick in England, has been accepted by the journal Nature. You can read a preprint of the paper for free at arXiv.org.

• 7 ways to discover alien planets
• NASA's TESS exoplanet-hunting mission in pictures
• NASA's TESS is finding hundreds of exoplanets. It's poised to find thousands more

Follow Charles Q. Choi on Twitter @cqchoi.

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Trailblazing Mars helicopter attached to Perseverance rover for July launch

By Mike Wall

The little chopper will attempt to pioneer a new type of off-Earth exploration.

The Mars Helicopter, visible in lower center of the image, was attached to the belly of NASA's Perseverance rover at Kennedy Space Center on April 6, 2020. The helicopter will be deployed onto the Martian surface about two-and-a-half months after Perseverance lands.

(Image: © NASA/JPL-Caltech)

The newest Mars rover's pioneering passenger has come aboard.

Technicians attached the first-of-its-kind Mars Helicopter to the belly of NASA's Perseverance rover on Monday (April 6) at the agency's Kennedy Space Center in Florida, where the robot is being prepped for its upcoming launch. That liftoff will take place during a three-week window that opens on July 17.

Prep work on the rover is officially in high gear. For example, over a four-day span in late March, mission team members finished installing Perseverance's parachute system and also put on the robot's six wheels.

• More: NASA's Mars 2020 rover Perseverance in pictures

The Mars Helicopter and its Mars Helicopter Delivery System were attached to the Perseverance Mars rover at Kennedy Space Center on April 6, 2020. The helicopter will be deployed about two-and-a-half months after Perseverance lands.   (Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech)

Perseverance's descent stage was also fueled up last weekend, just before the helicopter integration, NASA officials said.

The descent stage is the rocket-powered sky crane that will lower Perseverance onto the Martian dirt via cables in February 2021. Gassing up the crane was no trivial task; the craft's four tanks hold a total of 884 lbs. (401 kilograms) of hydrazine propellant, agency officials said.

"The last hundred days before any Mars launch is chock-full of significant milestones," David Gruel, the Mars 2020 assembly, test and launch operations manager at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California, said in a statement. (JPL built Perseverance and is the lead center for the rover's mission, which is called Mars 2020.)

"Fueling the descent stage is a big step," Gruel added. "While we will continue to test and evaluate its performance as we move forward with launch preparations, it is now ready to fulfill its mission of placing Perseverance on the surface on Mars."

That placement will occur inside Jezero Crater, a 28-mile-wide (45 kilometers) hole in the ground that hosted a lake and a river delta in the Red Planet's ancient past. Perseverance will hunt for signs of long-dead Martian life, characterize the region's geology and perform a number of other tasks, chief among them collecting and caching samples for a future return to Earth.

The Mars 2020 mission will also demonstrate several new technologies, including an instrument that will generate oxygen from the carbon-dioxide-dominated Martian atmosphere and the 4-lb. (1.8 kg) Mars Helicopter, which will be the first rotorcraft ever to ply the skies of a world beyond Earth.

If all goes according to plan, the helicopter will be deployed in May 2021, 2.5 months after Perseverance's touchdown. The little solar-powered chopper will then conduct a series of short flights during a test campaign that will last up to 30 days.

The Mars Helicopter won't gather any scientific data during these excursions; it carries no instruments. But a successful test campaign could pave the way for extensive aerial exploration of the Red Planet in the not-too-distant future, mission team members have said.

• Mars 2020: The Red Planet's next rover
• Meet 'Perseverance': NASA's Mars 2020 rover has a new name
• Photos: Ancient Mars lake could have supported life

Mike Wall is the author of "Out There" (Grand Central Publishing, 2018; illustrated by Karl Tate), a book about the search for alien life.

Follow him on Twitter @michaeldwall.

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Ozone hole three times the size of Greenland opens over the North Pole

By Brandon Specktor 

Ozone holes open over the South Pole every year. Holes at the North Pole are much, much rarer.

A satellite image shows the new ozone hole spreading over the North Pole.

(Image: © European Space Agency)

Scientists have detected what may be the largest hole in the ozone layer ever recorded over the North Pole.

The ozone hole covers an area roughly three times the size of Greenland, scientists from the European Space Agency (ESA) said in a statement, and could expose people living at far northern latitudes to high levels of ultraviolet radiation if it grows much larger. Fortunately, the hole looks likely to close on its own in the next few weeks, the ESA researchers said.

Holes form in the ozone layer — which is a sheet of gas in Earth's atmosphere that absorbs much of the harmful ultraviolet light emitted by the sun — every year over Antarctica due to seasonal changes in cloud cover. Ozone holes over the Arctic, however, are rarer. The last time an Arctic ozone hole opened was in 2011, and it was significantly smaller than the hole seen now, the researchers said.

"From my point of view, this is the first time you can speak about a real ozone hole in the Arctic," Martin Dameris, an atmospheric scientist at the German Aerospace Center, told Nature.

• Related: Banned ozone-depleting chemical was used illegally in China

The Antarctic ozone hole opens every year due to the combination of frigid temperatures and man-made pollution. When temperatures plummet at the start of Antarctica's winter, high-altitude clouds form over the South Pole. Industrial chemical pollutants, including chlorine and bromine, trigger reactions in these clouds that eat away at the surrounding ozone gas.

The Arctic, which has more variable temperatures, doesn't usually see the same ozone-depleting conditions, the researchers said. But this year, powerful winds trapped cold air in a "polar vortex" above the Arctic.  That led to colder temperatures and more high-altitude clouds than normal. Hence, North Pole ozone-depletion began.

Fortunately, with the sun slowly getting higher over the Arctic, atmospheric temperatures are already beginning to increase, which means the conditions causing the ozone hole should soon change, the researchers said. However, if the hole continues to expand south, Arctic residents — like those living in southern Greenland — may need to apply sunscreen to prevent UV damage.

The much larger Antarctic ozone hole will remain a seasonal feature, as it has for roughly four decades, though that hole has begun shrinking in size. A 2018 assessment by the World Meteorological Organization found that the southern ozone hole has been shrinking by about 1% to 3% per decade since the year 2000, with the 2019 hole measuring smaller than it ever has since 1982. The shrinking of the southern ozone hole is thanks largely to a global ban on ozone-depleting chemicals initiated in 1987, though some key nations still do not appear to be participating. According to a 2018 investigation, factories in China still appeared to be pumping large quantities of ozone-depleting chemicals into the atmosphere.

• Images of melt: Earth's vanishing ice
• The reality of climate change: 10 myths busted
• Top 10 ways to destroy Earth

Originally published on Live Science.

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• Courtesy The Brush Banner
• Journalist Dane Edwards

During the 1970s, thousands of ranchers and farmers across America woke up to discover a bizarre and horrible thing in their fields and pastures. They found that not only had one of their cows or bulls died, but that it had been bizarrely mutilated. The lifeless body would be lying on its side completely drained of blood, the desiccated corpse staring up at them with empty eye sockets, the flesh cut away from the nose and jawbone creating a macabre grin. The anal cavity was bored out, and the sex organs completely removed. There were no signs of footprints, or any other kind of forensic evidence to point to any kind of perpetrator, human or animal. The ranchers filed reports with local brand inspectors, the sheriff’s office, and in some cases even federal investigators, but investigations resulted in no suspects, leads or explanations.

This exact scenario played out this summer in eastern Oregon. Five previously healthy bulls from the Silvies Valley Ranch were suddenly found dead, drained of blood, and with organs and pieces of their soft tissue precisely removed. There were no footprints or signs of predation, and authorities currently have no explanation. The story was covered by national news outlets like NPR and USA Today.

“The common denominator for every one of these is the lack of blood,” says Chuck Zukowski, a Colorado Springs resident and the deputy director of Animal Mutilation Investigations for MUFON (Mutual UFO Network) International, which has more than 4,000 members and has been investigating UFO phenomena since 1969. Zukowski has 35 years of experience researching paranormal phenomena, including cattle mutilations. He is also the subject of the Travel Channel’s TV show Alien Highway. “Not only that, but the lack of evidence of blood. How much blood is in a cow?” asks Zukowski. “There’s a lot of blood in a cow, and for that blood not to be there when a carcass is found is unusual.”

These kinds of cattle mutilation cases rose to national prominence in the 1970s, when thousands of carcasses across 21 states were discovered to be mutilated. By 1975, the response to the problem had reached a fever pitch amongst ranchers across the Midwest. Many were carrying guns and patrolling their fields at night. The Bureau of Land Management ran ads in eastern Colorado newspapers urging ranchers not to shoot at survey helicopters. The prevailing theory at the time was that these killings were the work of a nefarious cult. The horrific Manson family murders were recently seared into social memory in the U.S., so it seemed like a plausible explanation. When satanists were hiding in the lyrics of rock ‘n’ roll songs, in the pages of fantasy novels, and in American basements in the form of the tabletop game Dungeons and Dragons, certainly it had to be their work when it came to the cattle as well.

• RELATED The strange disappearance of Dane Edwards

In August 1975, the Colorado Springs Gazette Telegraph (now the Gazette) reported on a study conducted by eastern Colorado law enforcement officials who were dealing with the approximately 60 mutilation cases reported so far that year. The Gazette said the study provided “a glimpse into a satanic organization with national political overtones which has grandiose plans of bringing about a 1,000-year reign of terror and darkness.”

As law enforcement officials desperately searched for proof of cult involvement, the mutilations increased in number and frequency, popping up in Crowley, El Paso, Elbert, Douglas, Las Animas, Washington and Morgan counties here in Colorado — and in 20 other states across the country.

Courtesy ufonut.com

Local Chuck Zukowski is a nationally recognized UFO investigator.

The most comprehensive media coverage of the phenomena at the time came from an unlikely publication out of a small farming community just east of Fort Morgan. It was there that Dane Edwards, a recent Colorado transplant who had allegedly spent time in “Europe, the Middle East and Far East filing wire service reports,” acted as editor and publisher of the now-defunct Brush Banner, Brush's weekly newspaper. Information about Edwards' life prior to Colorado is limited, but a “Meet Your Editor, Publisher” column from a July, 1975 issue of the Banner boasts “17 years newspaper experience, Former member of the President’s Council on Youth Opportunities, and in August, 1972, Invited to the White House by the President.”

Edwards' first mutilation story ran on July 30, 1975. Grisly black-and-white photographs of mutilated cattle adorn the front page of the Banner with the headline, “Cattle Mutilations Hit Near County.” He documented an incident from Woodrow, where a 1,000- pound cow “had its nose, one eye, an ear and its tongue cut away.” Edwards noted that “while massive mutilations often occur, little blood is found in the area of the carcasses. In some instances, officials report that scavenger animals and birds refuse to touch the body.”

The owner of the mutilated cow, John Kalous, told Edwards, “There wasn’t a sign of a footprint in the area either.” In spite of the lack of human-generated evidence, though, the Washington County Sheriff’s Department noted that the cow’s tracks were clearly visible, thanks to a recent rain. Moreover, law enforcement officials were unable to photograph the evidence. “After several attempts, both the Morgan County and Washington County officers were unable to take a photo of the carcasses with a Polaroid camera. … The photos were consistently dark and even when the camera settings were changed to compensate for the conditions, the pictures were without contrast,” Edwards wrote.

“I can’t explain it,” Washington County Undersheriff Bob Jones was quoted as saying, “I’m not going to try.”

The following week the Banner ran another story about the first mutilation reported in Morgan County, and Edwards was one of the few journalists at the time to critically analyze the cult hypothesis. He interviewed Lorin Paull, an Episcopal priest who claimed, “in considering what is cut from the animal, the mutilations do not suggest cultism of a satanic nature. None of the items removed from the cattle are used in satanic rites.”

Edwards also interviewed a coven of Denver witches, who provided him with a symbol, a stylized variation of the evil eye, which was supposed to “ward off the activities of satanic followers.” Displaying the symbol would supposedly stop the satanists from “further acts until the symbols have been removed.” The Banner ran the symbol with the story. “By printing the symbols in each of our 6,500 papers,” Edwards wrote, “they obviously cannot be removed.” Edwards also was able to track down the origins of the cult story, which came from federal prisoner Kenneth Bankston. Bankston had read an article about the wave of mutilations that took place in Minnesota in 1975 and wrote to the author of the article, who forwarded Bankston’s letter to an agent within the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms. That agent took Bankston’s claims seriously and launched an investigation. According to Edwards, Bankston claimed that the mutilations were “the work of a cultist operations, and that the group had also drawn up a list of future human victims that included notable political figures such as Hubert Humphrey.”

The Gazette reported on the “bizarre Satanical group somewhat reminiscent of the Charles Manson ‘family’” in August 1975, quoting a “field investigator.”

“There’s a right wing, white supremacist faction to the cult which has planned the assassination of a number of prominent liberal-type political figures.”

In return for his cooperation with the investigation, Bankston was transferred to a lowersecurity facility, from which he escaped on May 31, 1975. No member of the “Sons of Satan,” the alleged name of the cult, was ever arrested. The cult theory quickly became a dead end for both law enforcement and journalists.

With satanists out of the picture, ranchers and law enforcement began looking for other explanations. The scope of the mutilations led many to believe it was the work of a vast government conspiracy, and others to look to the stars for an extraterrestrial explanation.

By the end of August and into September, Edwards was reporting on new twists in the cattle mutilation incidents: menacing aircraft and strange lights at the mutilation sites. Edwards collected reports from Elbert County, Elizabeth, Franktown and Simla of unmarked helicopters “buzzing” farmers and “chasing” people. “Several people reported having seen a flashing ‘strobe’ light,” wrote Edwards, “travelling from east to west at an extremely fast rate of speed and changing directions with a staccato effect in the sky.”

Edwards allegedly began working with the Colorado Bureau of Investigation, providing them with evidence gathered during the course of his investigations, after reporting that “agencies such as the FBI stated there is no evidence of federal crimes.” Edwards was frustrated with the response, noting that “it would mean that 21 groups of mutilators have operated in 21 states. Since it is a federal offense to commit interstate crimes that would open the door for their participation in the investigation.”

It wasn’t until Edwards began receiving threats at the Banner to “lay off the investigations of the cattle mutilations,” that Colorado Senator Floyd Haskell finally sought the FBI’s assistance within the mutilation investigations.

In October of 1975, the Gazette reported that the Banner, with reporting by Edwards, was “the only newspaper in Colorado known to have conducted a full scale investigation into the matter of mysterious deaths and mutilations of livestock in Colorado.” Edwards was interviewed in the Gazette to announce that this phenomenon was actually “an outcropping of a program” that began in 1961, and that he would be writing a book that “will tell how the project was conceived, how it progressed and why.” Edwards admitted in the interview that “anger made me interested in the cattle mutilations. It disturbed me that the public would take the word of officials, that no one was willing to look into it himself.”

But in that same interview, he alleged that not everyone appreciated his investigations, saying, “my office had been broken into twice and things gone through. Blood was thrown on my glass storm door at my home.”

Edwards also criticized law enforcement officials, who were beginning to ditch the cult theory for claims that the mutilations were actually the natural result of predation, scavengers and the decomposition process. This would be the conclusion of both a CBI investigation and an FBI investigation into the matter. Edwards called the investigations “an unimaginative job” and noted that “the most popular but weakest theory is that the mutilations are caused by predators. This is a good one for law men who can’t solve cases, since they don’t have to pursue the case any further.”

Shortly after Edwards’ interview with the Gazette, he was terminated at the Brush Banner. The new publisher, Drusilla Georgsson, said it was for “poor business practices.”

Then, on Dec. 10, 1975, the Banner’s headline read: “Ex Banner Publisher Presumed Missing.” The paper reported that Edwards’ wife filed a missing person’s report five days earlier, after he failed to contact her “as was his policy while he was away.” The Banner also noted that, “While in the Banner’s employ Mr. Edwards expressed concern for his well being on various occasions.”

Edwards’ car was found abandoned at a truck stop, and no one in Brush ever heard from him again.

“There’s two ways of looking at what happened with this guy,” says MUFON’s Zukowski. “He got caught into something and he got threatened bigtime and he went underground. I can think of one other person who that happened to. They went off the grid.” Zukowski also mentions the case of Max Spiers, a UK conspiracy theorist and UFO investigator who died in Warsaw, Poland under mysterious circumstances, allegedly vomiting black goo. “There are issues with doing different types of UFO investigations that could cause you to step over the proverbial line, so to speak,” warns Zukowski. “You have to be careful what you do. When you do UFO investigations and you go too far, you will get silenced.

Courtesy ufonut.com

The team of Travel Channel's show, Alien Highway

“Then you have the case where he just started a new life,” adds Zukowski. “There’s always the possibility he left his wife and used the conspiracy theory to cover his tracks.”

Zukowski works full-time as a microchip engineer and has served as a reserve deputy for the El Paso County Sheriff’s Office. He says he applies scientific and forensic methodology to his mutilation investigations, and has also reported strange findings with mutilated remains, some similar to Edwards’ findings from decades ago, and some uniquely weird. “I’ve had a few cases where the animal is lying in a round ground depression — not a crop circle — but a ground depression, where something pressed the vegetation down, 16 to 22 feet in diameter,” he explains. “I’ve taken soil samples from inside the ground depression and compared it to a test sample outside the ground depression, and the nutrients, the soil itself, in the ground depression is less water-soluble. The cations and CECs are different.” Zukowski implies that something, presumably whatever the deceased bovine had come in contact with, was able to change some fundamental atomic aspects of the soil. Cation exchange capacity (CEC) is a measure of a soil’s ability to hold positively charged ions — it's an inherent soil characteristic and is difficult to alter significantly. “That tells me that whatever made the round ground depression that the animal is laying in the middle of might have been a high energy source," he says. "I’ve also picked up EMF, electromagnetic field, from these ground depressions.”

As for what Edwards observed in the ’70s, many of those anomalies still occur.

“Unmarked helicopters will show up after the fact,” explains Zukowski. “August 2014 in Walsenburg, I investigated eight cows that were mutilated within a couple of miles of each other. The majority of the cows were found lying in the same direction. All the animals had the same type of cuts. The dewclaws were cored out. I interviewed two ranchers who reported helicopters in the area with spotlights where the animals were mutilated. There were also reports of lasers that diverted commercial air traffic. A week after the last mutilation, the rancher’s daughter saw a UFO.”

Zukowski has collected findings that cause him to doubt the predator theory, which Edwards also thought was bogus. “One thing we’ve learned is that the animal is picked up from location A — wherever it was grazing — it’s taken to a location B and it is mutilated and drained of blood, and then it’s taken to a location C, which is in the vicinity of Location A, not exactly, but close by. There was a case in Trinidad where we actually found the tracks of the cow where it ended, and then a good 60 yards away was the cow laying on the ground. Did it jump?”

The alleged predators’ choice in prey has also caused suspicion in some of Zukowski’s cases. “There was another case in the Walsenburg area,” recounts Zukowski, “where a cow had calved. The next day the cow was found mutilated. It was void of blood and the milk sack was cut out. A good 50 or 60 feet away was the newborn calf and the half-eaten placenta. Predators don’t go after a 1,000-pound animal and leave a 100-pound calf.”

Chuck Zukowski

Zukowski still documents cattle mutilation cases.

Others have also questioned the predation theory. The Gazette covered a mutilation in October 1976, a year after the Banner’s initial investigations: Logan County Sheriff Harry Graves found signs that a coyote had approached the mutilated animal, but “he never got closer than 22 ½ feet from the animal. Other cattle and horses in the same pasture were spooked and wouldn’t approach the dead steer either.”

Additionally, during the few field autopsies that were able to be performed, in cases where the time of death could be estimated, veterinarians discovered various anomalies. In January, 1976, the Gazette reported that Dr. Susan Colter of the Trinidad Animal Clinic was able to examine “various parts of the animal including the heart, lungs, kidneys and liver and she sent specimens to the extension laboratory in La Junta. She was especially interested in the way the animal’s organs turned to mush in a short time.”

Cattle mutilations have lessened in frequency since 1975, but continued. Many cattle mutilation cases allegedly go unreported. In 1975, Edwards noted that “one hundred and eleven mutilation cases held in the files of the Nebraska Brand Inspector’s office had never been turned over to law enforcement agencies.”

Zukowski attributes the under-reporting to what he calls the “giggle factor.” He notes that “ranchers don’t want to speak out and report something just to be made fun of.” Zukowski’s most recent mutilation investigation took place in Westcliffe in 2018. Since 1975, no arrests have been made in any of the over 10,000 cases involving cattle mutilations.

Forty-four years after mutilations originally terrified American ranchers, explanations of this phenomena remain controversial. The mutilators, whatever or whoever they are, have been able to keep their secrets this whole time, while conducting operations around the nation, without any defectors, leakers or whistle-blowers. UFO investigators, like Zukowski, are seen as conspiracy theorists at best. With unsatisfying official findings, and recent publicized cases, old explanations are resurfacing.

Colby Marshall, Vice President of the Silvies Valley Ranch in Oregon, which recently saw five bulls mutilated under mysterious circumstances, said in USA Today, “We think that this crime is being perpetuated by some sort of a cult.”

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New Horizons’ view of Sputnik Planitia on Pluto, which makes up half of Pluto’s “heart” feature. A new study of odd ripples on the opposite side of the dwarf planet supports previous evidence that Pluto has a subsurface ocean.

Image via NASA/ SwRI/ JHUAPL/ Science News.

Not all that long ago, scientists thought that Earth was the only place in the solar system with an ocean. But then we learned – surprise! – that several icy moons in the outer solar system are also water worlds. They’re true water worlds, too, in the sense that most, if not all, of their oceans are global. These alien oceans are different from Earth’s oceans: they’re not on the surfaces of the moons, but below the moons’ surface crusts of ice. Now, evidence is building for yet another such ocean, this time not on a moon but on the dwarf planet Pluto. The evidence is based on what the scientists called “ripples” on Pluto’s surface.

Scientists presented the latest findings about ripples in Pluto’s surface – and a possible ocean below Pluto’s crust – at the virtual 51st Lunar and Planetary Science Conference. The evidence suggests that Pluto has a deep ocean between its crust and core. The conference had been scheduled to be held from March 16-20 in The Woodlands near Houston, Texas, but was changed to a virtual-only format this year due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

This latest update on a possible Plutonian ocean was also the subject of a new article by Theresa Machemer in Smithsonian Magazine on April 1, 2020. The results are based on a new paper that was first pre-published on ArXiv in October 2019, and is still waiting for peer review. Lead author is a name you may recognize. It’s Alan Stern, who spearheaded the New Horizons mission to Pluto for decades, from concept to reality. 

The main focus of the new paper was to study the far side terrains of Pluto, and how they formed. From the paper:

The New Horizons spacecraft provided near global observations of Pluto that far exceed the resolution of Earth-based data sets. Most Pluto New Horizons analysis hitherto has focused on the encounter hemisphere of Pluto (i.e., the anti-Charon hemisphere containing Sputnik Planitia). In this work, we summarize and interpret data on the far side (i.e., the non-encounter hemisphere), providing the first integrated New Horizons overview of the far side terrains.

The unusual dark “ripples” on the far side of Pluto (circled). Pluto’s far side was only able to be seen in lower resolution during the New Horizons flyby, but the images still provide valuable clues as to the possibility of a subsurface ocean.

Image via New Horizons Team/ Science News.

The evidence for a Pluto ocean comes from dark ripple-like features on the far side of Pluto. How did these ripples form? Scientists think they were produced by the same large impact that created Sputnik Planitia, which is a huge smooth plain of primarily nitrogen ice on the other side of the dwarf planet. This shallow basin composes one half of the distinctive huge “heart” feature on Pluto. As Purdue University planetary scientist Adeene Denton told Lisa Grossman in a statement to Science News:

If the impact is large enough, the planet itself can act like a lens, and focus the wave energy at the exact opposite point on the planet from the impact.

Denton and her colleagues had run computer simulations to see how the shock waves from the impact might have affected Pluto’s interior. The simulations suggested that an ocean was necessary to explain the ripples. As Denton said:

We got the fun answer.

Diagram of what the interior of Pluto might look like below Sputnik Planitia (the cellular terrain on the right side, on top). The ice crust above the water is thinner in this region.

Image via James Tuttle Keane/ Medium.com/ Starts With a Bang!.

The ocean would need to be at least 90 miles (150 km) deep, and Pluto’s core must contain minerals, such as serpentine, that form through interactions between rock and water. Denton said:

It’s certainly not exactly a smoking gun. But it’s exciting.

This new modeling of Pluto’s interior is the latest of a growing number of studies suggesting that Pluto could still have liquid water beneath its surface. Previously, in 2016, scientists also showed that fissures on the surface, and the spherical shape of Pluto itself, were evidence for a subsurface ocean. Pluto’s orientation may also be a clue. Another study from last year contends that the rocky body that collided with Pluto and created Sputnik Planitia actually broke through the dwarf planet’s icy crust. This allowed the ocean to briefly flow on the surface before freezing, which affected Pluto’s axis orientation.

The new research is compelling, although not conclusive yet. It’s still possible that there is another explanation for the rippled terrain on the far side. As James Tuttle Keane, a planetary scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, told Scientific American in a statement:

There’s a lot of weird stuff on that far side of Pluto. And there are a lot of different ways that you can imagine creating some of those odd patterns that we see.

Close-up view of the unusual cellular terrain in Sputnik Planitia, composed of nitrogen ice. Water ice mountains are on the edge of this region.

Image via NASA/ JHUAPL/ SwRI/ Medium.com/ Starts With a Bang!.

Whether the newest research really does indicate an ocean on Pluto remains to be seen. But if it does, that would greatly help scientists understand how such subsurface oceans can exist on worlds that are otherwise too cold and too far from the sun, including possibly other small objects in the Kuiper Belt – a ring of small rocky and icy bodies orbiting the sun beyond Neptune – where Pluto resides. As Denton told Scientific American:

We might need to think a little differently about the Kuiper Belt itself and all of these distant worlds in it and maybe look at them a little bit closer. They could all host such incredible, rich geologic histories.

If there really is an ocean on Pluto, then how and when did it form? As planetary scientist Carver Bierson of the University of California, Santa Cruz, told Science News:

If there’s an ocean today, it raises the question of, when did that ocean get there?

According to Bierson, if Pluto had a “cold start,” then the water would have been frozen from the beginning, before melting later on due to decaying radioactive elements in the dwarf planet’s core. It would then partially re-freeze again. But if Pluto had a “warm start,” then the ocean would have always been liquid, and probably still is today, with perhaps only partial re-freezing. Cracks would form from the water partially re-freezing, and this is what the New Horizons images seemed to show. Bierson said:

That means maybe Pluto did start off warm. Maybe it started with a liquid ocean really early on.

Pluto backlit by the sun, as seen by New Horizons. The thin atmosphere glows an ethereal soft blue color.

Image via NASA/ JHUAPL/ SwRI.

So if Pluto has had an ocean for the past few billion years, could it be habitable? Could Pluto’s ocean actually support life? If Pluto’s core does contain minerals as hypothesized, then water-rock interactions at the ocean bottom could conceivably provide the necessary energy and nutrients, as in oceans on Earth and possibly ocean moons like Europa and Enceladus. And if Pluto could be habitable, what about other bodies in the Kuiper Belt? As Keane surmised in Science News:

This lays out one of the coolest hypotheses that a future Pluto mission could test. If Pluto can have an ocean and potentially be habitable, it’s very likely that other bodies in the Kuiper Belt also are ocean worlds and also are potentially habitable.

Although New Horizons’ mission at Pluto is long over, the data sent back will keep researchers busy for decades to come. As noted in Scientific American by Jani Radebaugh, a planetary scientist at Brigham Young University:

It’s amazing how we squeeze every little bit out of it.

Alan Stern of the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI), Principal Investigator of the New Horizons mission to Pluto and lead author of the new study.

Image via SwRI.

New Horizons found that Pluto is a complex little world, with vast, smooth icy plains of frozen nitrogen, the surface of which is divided into large “cells” (known as cellular terrain) and mountains composed of water ice with methane “snow” on top. Pluto also has a very thin atmosphere of nitrogen, methane and carbon monoxide, and when New Horizons viewed Pluto backlit by the Sun, the atmosphere glowed softly as a blue ring around the dwarf planet. And even though Pluto is much smaller than Earth, it has no less than five moons! If there is an ocean below as well, that would make this already bizarre world even stranger.

• Bottom line: Odd ripples on Pluto’s far side add to the evidence for a subsurface ocean.
• Source: Pluto’s Far Side
• Via Smithsonian Magazine
• Via Science News
• Via Scientific American

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THE DISCOVERY OF MICROBIAL LIFE ON EARTH OFFERS A NEW HOPE FOR LIFE ON MARS

“I am now almost over-expecting that I can find life on Mars.”

This Is the Pentagon's 'Real Men in Black' Investigation of Tom DeLonge's UFO Videos

The report contradicts public claims the Pentagon has made about its UFO program.

Tim McMillan

IMAGE: EMMA MCINTYRE/GETTY IMAGES FOR KROQ

A new document acquired by Motherboard shows that the Air Force launched an investigation into the release of classified UFO videos by former Blink-182 singer Tom DeLonge’s UFO outfit To the Stars Academy.

At the end of last year, we revealed the U.S. Air Force's Office of Special Investigations had looked into several videos, which The Pentagon claims show "Unidentified Aerial Phenomena" or UFOs. This news was particularly curious considering the videos were initially filmed by the Navy (not the Air Force) in 2004 and 2015. Since the videos were published in a New York Times article in December 2017, the Air Force has refused to discuss anything related to UFOs.

The new document, obtained from the Air Force Office of Investigations (embedded below), shows that after that New York Times article, AFOSI looked into the classification of the released videos, called “GoFast,” “Gimble,” and “FLIR.” Originally, it found “all three videos were classified” and that, though a declassification request had been made for these videos, it was never granted. As we reported in December, AFOSI has become known as "The Real Men in Black" in the UFO community.

The AFOSI investigation also contradicts the Pentagon's claims that Luis Elizondo, the man who says he ran the Pentagon's UFO program, called Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, never worked on UFOs at all.

Though his name is redacted, the investigation is clearly focused on Elizondo, who left the Pentagon, spoke to the New York Times, and has since joined DeLonge’s To the Stars Academy. Before leaving his position as an intelligence specialist in the Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence’s Office, it was Elizondo who applied for the release of the three UFO videos.

In the years since the videos’ release, the Pentagon has contentiously denied the existence of a current Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, and has denied that Elizondo investigated UFOs for the DoD. This appears to be disputed by this investigation. The AFOSI report states, “[Elizondo] disclosed his involvement (to several news outlets) with the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, which focused research issues on Unidentified Flying Objects.”

Similar to what’s implied in the OSI report, since Fall of 2019 when the Pentagon made it known the videos weren’t cleared for public release, the court of public opinion has widely assumed Elizondo was responsible for side-stepping regulations and releasing the videos before leaving the DoD.

However, during a previous investigation, I was able to locate a former colleague of Elizondo who was involved in the process. According to them, any errors in the process were the fault of the Defense Office of Prepublication and Security Review (DOPSR) agency, and not Elizondo. When asked who was responsible for the videos not being cleared, Pentagon spokesperson Susan Gough acknowledged to me, “DOPSR in this specific case.”

“I did everything I was supposed to do to request the release, and even went above and beyond by also engaging Foreign Disclosure personnel; which I did not have to do by regulation,” Elizondo told Motherboard.

According to the report, three months into OSI’s investigation, an unnamed official with the Unauthorized Disclosure Office said the videos were finally determined to be “Unclassified and For official use only.” The official also told OSI agents the videos were submitted to multiple offices within the Navy for review, and it was determined they contained “No sensitive symbology or other items of concern.”

In one final interview detailed in the report, another unnamed official said “100% of all F-18 videos go through his office for declassification and public release,” however, the videos in question, “never went through his office.” The official says there’s no indication the videos were ever classified and it’s uncertain where exactly they came from since “individual units kept track of their own footage.”Intriguingly, the official told OSI, “Some videos were kept for training purposes and some for situations such as SUBJECT’s public release of unauthorized videos.” What isn’t clear, is if the “situations” being referenced relates to video taped encounters with UFOs, or if this was a reference to unauthorized releases generally.

"There are still elements within the Pentagon who are very sensitive about this topic and are unhappy with this information being brought forward for public discussion"

Almost four months after launching their investigation, the report says on April 13, 2018 OSI closed the case after it was determined the three UFO videos were “unclassified,” and the Unauthorized Disclosure Program Management Office equally considered the matter “closed.”

What’s still unclear is why the Air Force was investigating Navy videos.

“I find it strange the Pentagon would assign an Air Force unit to investigate alleged data spills involving Navy information, technology, and data,” Elizondo said. “Especially, when there are NCIS [Naval Criminal Investigative Service] representatives in the same building.”

When OSI’s involvement became known in December of 2019, Motherboard asked DoD spokesperson Susan Gough if she could clarify why the Air Force’s investigative service would have been involved with the Navy’s UFO videos. Gough initially agreed to provide a response, however, she subsequently failed to respond, and ignored numerous follow-up requests.

Other journalists have expressed similar frustrations when it comes to the DoD’s sudden silence to anything UFO related. Tyler Rogoway of The War Zone recently published an entire feature detailing the DoD’s refusal to answer his inquiries related to the 2004 Nimitz UFO event.

After being provided with a copy of the report, Motherboard asked Elizondo if he had any significant takeaways from it or the DoD’s current silence. Elizondo said, “Even though there was no wrongdoing on the part of my office, there are still elements within the Pentagon who are very sensitive about this topic and are unhappy with this information being brought forward for public discussion.”

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