Daytime UFOs in the sky above Phoenix, Arizona?
This footage was just submitted to me through our Facebook page. It was recorded recently (April 2020) in the sky above Phoenix, Arizona.
Witness added that “They looked like birds at first”. What do you think this is?
Please leave your comments below!
Pentagon formally releases 3 Navy videos showing
Washington — The Pentagon on Monday formally released three unclassified videos taken by Navy pilots that have circulated for years showing interactions with "unidentified aerial phenomena."
One of the videos shows an incident from 2004, and the other two were recorded in January 2015, according to Sue Gough, a Defense Department spokeswoman. The videos became public after unauthorized leaks in 2007 and 2017, and the Navy previously verified their authenticity.
"After a thorough review, the department has determined that the authorized release of these unclassified videos does not reveal any sensitive capabilities or systems, and does not impinge on any subsequent investigations of military air space incursions by unidentified aerial phenomena," Gough said.
The 2004 incident occurred about 100 miles out in the Pacific, according to The New York Times, which first reported on the video in 2017. Two fighter pilots on a routine training mission were dispatched to investigate unidentified aircraft that a Navy cruiser had been tracking for weeks.
The Navy pilots found an oblong object about 40 feet long hovering about 50 feet above the water, and it began a rapid ascent as the pilots approached before quickly flying away. "It accelerated like nothing I've ever seen," one of the pilots told The Times.
The pilots left the area to meet at a rendezvous point a
bout 60 miles away. When they were still about 40 miles out, the ship radioed and said the object was at the rendezvous point, having traversed the distance "in less than a minute," the pilot told The Times.
The two other videos of incidents in 2015 include footage of objects moving rapidly through the air. In one, an object is seen racing through the sky and begins rotating in midair.
"Dude, this is a f--king drone, bro," a pilot exclaims on the video. Another person says "there's a whole fleet of them."
"They're all going against the wind. The wind's 120 knots to the west. Look at that thing, dude!" the first person says. "It's rotating!"
In the other 2015 video, an object is shown from above speeding over the ocean, prompting the pilot to excitedly remark, "What the f--k is that?"
Five Navy pilots who spotted the objects in 2015 told The Times in 2017 that they had a series of interactions with unidentified aircraft during training missions in 2014 and 2015 along the East Coast from Virginia to Florida. The episodes prompted the Navy to clarify how pilots should report experiences with "unidentified aerial phenomena," which had been studied under a Pentagon program from 2007 to 2012.
Gough, the Pentagon spokeswoman, said the department was formally releasing the videos to address questions about their veracity.
"DOD is releasing the videos in order to clear up any misconceptions by the public on whether or not the footage that has been circulating was real, or whether or not there is more to the videos," Gough said. "The aerial phenomena observed in the videos remain characterized as 'unidentified.'"
David Martin contributed reporting.
First published on April 27, 2020 / 11:33 AM
Pentagon geeft nu zelf drie gelekte UFO-video’s vrij, gemaakt door Amerikaanse marinepiloten - HLN.be
Bron: The Guardian, CNN
De grijze, korte, onduidelijke, maar wel ophefmakende beelden begonnen in 2007 en 2017 te circuleren na een ongeautoriseerd lek. Ze tonen wat marinepiloten zagen tijdens trainingsvluchten in 2004 en 2015. Twee video’s werden eerder gepubliceerd door The New York Times, de andere video werd vrijgegeven door een private organisatie. Te zien is hoe ongeïdentificeerde vliegende objecten pijlsnel door de lucht bewegen, ze worden maar heel kort opgepikt door infraroodcamera’s.
Het gebeurde extreem abrupt, als een pingpongbal die van de muur afketst. Alsof het iets raakte en in de andere richting werd gekatapulteerd
Marinepiloot
Vooral het commentaar van de betrokken piloten in de twee video’s uit 2015 is fascinerend. Ze zijn duidelijk onder de indruk van de snelheid van de objecten en kunnen hun ogen niet geloven. “My god. Het gaat tegen de wind”, zegt een stem. “Kijk naar dat ding!”, klinkt het. “Het is aan het draaien!” In de andere video juicht een piloot: “Yes, ik heb het”, als hij het in zijn camera kan vastgrijpen. “Kijk hoe het vliegt! Wow.”
In 2017 verklaarde de intussen gepensioneerde marinepiloot David Fravor, die de beelden uit 2004 maakte (zonder geluid), dat het object dat hij had gezien, “bewoog op manieren die hij niet kon uitleggen”.
(Lees verder onder de foto)
Het Pentagon zegt dat het de beelden nu besluit vrij t
e geven “om eventuele misvattingen bij het publiek weg te nemen over het vraagstuk of het circulerende beeldmateriaal wel echt was en of er meer aan de video’s was”, zo luidt het in een statement van het ministerie van Defensie.
“Na een diepgaand onderzoek heeft het ministerie besloten dat een geautoriseerde vrijgave van deze video’s geen enkele gevoelige informatie qua capaciteiten of systemen onthult en ook geen afbreuk doet aan eventuele nog volgende onderzoeken naar ongeïdentificeerde luchtverschijnselen in het militaire luchtruim”, is te lezen. Verder klinkt het dat de fenomenen geobserveerd in de video’s onder de noemer blijven van ‘ongeïdentificeerd’.
Dat het Pentagon de video’s nu zelf vrijgeeft, draagt bij tot de legitimering van de beelden. Het zal ongetwijfeld alleen maar de speculaties voeden dat mensen mogelijk in contact zijn gekomen met buitenaardse wezens.
Het Pentagon bestudeerde eerder opnames van luchtontmoetingen met onbekende objecten als deel van een ‘classified program’ dat in 2007 werd opgezet in opdracht van de toenmalige Amerikaanse Democratische Senaatsfractieleider Harry Reid. Maar in 2012 eindigde het geheime programma - het ‘Advanced Aviation Threat Identification Program’ - omdat er werd geoordeeld dat er andere prioriteiten waren die budgetten nodig hadden.
Het voormalige hoofd van het programma, Luis Elizondo, verklaarde in 2017 aan CNN dat hij gelooft dat er “overtuigend bewijs is dat we misschien niet alleen zijn”. “Deze vliegtuigen - laten we het vliegtuigen noemen - hebben kenmerken die niet bekend zijn”, zei hij over de objecten die hij had bestudeerd.
Ex-senator Reid tweette maandag dat hij “blij” is dat het Pentagon “eindelijk” de video’s heeft vrijgegeven, maar dat het “maar het topje van de ijsberg is van het onderzoek en beschikbaar materiaal”.
Senator Harry Reid ✔@SenatorReidI’m glad the Pentagon is finally releasing this footage, but it only scratches the surface of research and materials available. The U.S. needs to take a serious, scientific look at this and any potential national security implications. The American people deserve to be informed.
China’s Mars mission named Tianwen-1, appears on track for July launch
HELSINKI — China has named its first independent interplanetary mission Tianwen-1, with the combined Mars orbiter and rover spacecraft apparently proceeding towards launch in July.
The name and mission logo were unveiled at a China National Space Administration online ceremony to mark the 50th anniversary of the launch of the country’s first satellite. DFH-1 launched on a Long March 1 rocket from Jiuquan April 24, 1970, making China the fifth country to independently launch a satellite.
Tianwen-1, meaning ‘questions to heaven’, is taken from the name of a long-form poem by Qu Yuan, a poet born in the fourth century B.C., according to CNSA chief engineer Ge Xiaochun.
The ‘Lanxingjiutian’ logo includes representations of the Latin letter ‘c’, referring to China, cooperation, and the cosmic velocity required to undertake planetary exploration. Further Chinese planetary missions will also carry the Tianwen name.
China is understood to be planning a Mars sample return mission, a Jupiter orbiter and considering possible missions to icy giants and interstellar space. A joint near-Earth asteroid sample return and comet rendezvous mission has also been proposed.
Few details of the Tianwen-1 mission have been released so far. The Tianwen-1 spacecraft is expected to have a wet mass of around 5 metric tons. Launch on a Long March 5 launcher is expected from Wenchang early in the short launch window to Mars open in late July and early August.
The YF-77 liquid oxygen-liquid hydrogen engines for the Long March 5 passed tests in January. The same engines were the cause of the failure of the second Long March 5 launch in 2017.
Comprehensive software and hardware tests of the spacecraft were completed in March. The spacecraft has apparently been delivered to Wenchang Satellite Launch Center.
The test launch of the Long March 5B—currently expected in early May—will likely need to succeed for the Tianwen-1 mission to proceed. Following that mission, the Yuanwang-21 and -22 cargo vessels will collect the components of the Long March 5 for Tianwen-1 from Tianjin, north China, for delivery to Wenchang on the southern island of Hainan.µ
The Tianwen-1 orbiter will be equipped with a high-resolution camera comparable to HiRise on board NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. It also carries a medium-resolution camera, subsurface radar, mineralogy spectrometer, neutral and energetic particle analyzers and a magnetometer. The orbiter will also play a relay role for the mission rover.
The roughly 240-kilogram solar-powered rover is nearly twice the mass of China’s Yutu lunar rovers. It will carry a ground-penetrating radar, multispectral camera, a Laser Induced Breakdown Spectroscopy instrument and payloads for detecting the climate and magnetic environment. The rover has a mission design lifetime of three Earth months. The rover will receive a name through a public vote closer to launch.
China has outlined two landing areas, with a candidate landing site in Utopia Planitia. The landing ellipse is understood to be around 100 x 40 kilometers. Site selection was driven by a range of factors including flight system engineering constraints and the challenges of entry, descent and landing (EDL) on the Red Planet, and the science goals of the mission.
The Tianwen-1 spacecraft is expected to reach Mars around February 2021. However, the rover landing attempt may not take place immediately. There are suggestions that the landing segment of the mission will be conducted months later, in April. This would allow mapping and observation of the landing site, despite the availability of high-resolution NASA imagery from HiRise.
The Tianwen-1 mission will join NASA’s Perseverance Mars 2020 rover and the United Arab Emirates’ Hope Mars orbiter, which this week shipped to its launch site in Japan, in launching during the July-August Mars launch window. ESA’s Rosalind Franklin ExoMars rover has been delayed to the next opportunity in 2022.
SpaceX's SN4 Starship prototype passes key pressure test
Starship SN4 just took a big step toward a test flight.
The newest prototype of SpaceX's Starship Mars-colonizing spacecraft just passed a crucial pressure test, likely setting the stage for a test flight in the near future.
Starship SN4 survived a "cryo pressure test" late Sunday night (April 26) at SpaceX's South Texas site, near the village of Boca Chica, company founder and CEO Elon Musk announced.
"SN4 passed cryo proof!" Musk said via Twitter late Sunday Texas time (early morning on Monday, April 27, EDT), in a post that included a "relieved" emoji. "Great work by SpaceX engineering!" he added in another tweet.
Elon Musk ✔@elonmuskSnowing in Texas
Elon Musk ✔@elonmuskSN4 passed cryo proof!
Musk's excitement is understandable, for success was far from guaranteed. This trial, in which the vehicle is filled with frigid liquid nitrogen to simulate the conditions experienced during operational missions, which will use ultracold propellant, felled three previous prototypes over the past five months.
The SN4 can now progress to the next step of the development campaign: engine tests, which will culminate with a static fire of its single Raptor engine on the ground. In yet another late-night tweet, Musk said SpaceX aims to conduct the static fire later this week.
Provided that goes well, the SN4 ("Serial No. 4") will be cleared to fly, on an uncrewed test with a target altitude of 500 feet (150 meters) or so. SN4 would be the first full-size Starship prototype to fly, and the second of any sort; a stubby test vehicle called Starhopper got off the ground briefly last year but was soon retired.
Future Starship prototypes will go higher, powered by more Raptors. For example, the SN5 will sport three of the powerful, next-generation engines, Musk said in another tweet.
Both vehicles will be reusable. Super Heavy will come down to Earth for vertical touchdowns shortly after liftoff, just as the first stages of SpaceX's Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy rockets do now. Each Starship, meanwhile, will be able to fly many missions between Earth and Mars, or Earth and the moon, or anywhere else people (or payloads) need to go. (Starship will be powerful enough to launch itself off Mars and the moon, which have relatively weak gravitational pulls. Super Heavy is needed to get the craft off Earth, however
And SpaceX will make many Starships, if all goes according to plan. Musk's long-term vision involves sending a huge fleet of the 100-passenger vehicles off to Mars every 26 months, when the Red Planet and Earth are properly aligned for interplanetary trips. He sees Starship and Super Heavy as potentially slashing the cost of spaceflight enough to make Mars colonization — a driving ambition for the billionaire entrepreneur, and the main reason he founded SpaceX back in 2002 — economically feasible.
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.
Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom or Facebook.
Cutting-Edge Brain Implant Lets Paralyzed Man Move and Feel Again
A cutting-edge implant has allowed a man to feel and move his hand again after a spinal cord injury left him partially paralyzed, Wired reports.
According to a press release, it’s the first time both motor function and sense of touch have been restored using a brain-computer interface (BCI), as described in a paper published in the journal Cell.
After severing his spinal cord a decade ago, Ian Burkhart had a BCI developed by researchers at Battelle, a private nonprofit specializing in medical tech, implanted in his brain in 2014.
The injury completely disconnected the electrical signals going from Burkhart’s brain to his hands, through the spinal cord. But the researchers figured they could skip the spinal cord to hook up Burkhart’s primary motor cortex to his hands through a relay.
A port in the back of his skull sends signals to a computer. Special software decodes the signals and splits them between signals corresponding to motion and touch respectively. Both of these signals are then sent out to a sleeve of electrodes around Burkhart’s forearm.
But making sense of these signals is extremely difficult.
“We’re separating thoughts that are occurring almost simultaneously and are related to movements and sub-perceptual touch, which is a big challenge,” lead researcher at Battelle Patrick Ganzer told Wired.
The team saw some early successes regarding movement — the initial goal of the BCI — allowing Burkhart to press buttons along the neck of a “Guitar Hero” controller.
But returning touch to his hand was a much more daunting task. By using a simple vibration device or “wearable haptic system,” Burkhart was able to tell if he was touching an object or not without seeing it.
“It’s definitely strange,” Burkhart told Wired. “It’s still not normal, but it’s definitely much better than not having any sensory information going back to my body.”
Are these 19 eccentric asteroids from other star systems?
Illustration depicting one of the Centhers think originated from interstellar space. It was orbiting the sun in an orbit highly perpendicular to the protoplanetary disk of dust and gas, and still maintains that orbit today.
Image via NASA/ CNRS.aur asteroids, which the researc
You likely heard about ‘Oumuamua, the strange asteroid-like object that entered our solar system from interstellar space in 2017. More recently, astronomers found a second interstellar object – definitely a comet this time, labeled 21/Borisov – in 2019. Both of those objects were only visitors to our solar system, passing through for a time before heading back out into interstellar space. Meanwhile, in 2018, the asteroid 2015 BZ509 was also identified as being of interstellar origin. But this asteroid isn’t just passing through. It’s a permanent member of our solar system, orbiting the sun. Now, researchers from the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) say they’ve found the first known population of 19 interstellar asteroids, now-permanent members of our solar system that apparently originated from somewhere else in space.
Like 2015 BZ509, they are permanent residents of the solar system, belonging to a group of objects called Centaurs, small rocky bodies orbiting between the Trojan asteroids near Jupiter and the Kuiper Belt objects beyond Neptune.
The 19 new interstellar asteroids are in highly inclined orbits in contrast to other asteroids, comets or planets in our solar system.
The Centaurs (red dots) are small rocky objects generally between the Kuiper Belt beyond Neptune (N) and the Trojans near Jupiter (J).
Image via WilyD/ Wikipedia.
The new peer-reviewed findings were published in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society (MNRAS) on April 23, 2020. The study was conducted by lead author Fathi Namouni, a CNRS researcher in the Laboratoire Lagrange and Helena Morais, researcher at UNESP in Brazil.
While these asteroids have been orbiting the sun for a long time, they did not originate here, according to the new research. Analysis indicates that they were not part of the original protoplanetary disk of dust and gas that surrounded our sun when it was first born 4.5 billion years ago, where the young planets were forming, so they must have come here from somewhere else. Namouni said in a statement:
The close proximity of the stars meant that they felt each others’ gravity much more strongly in those early days than they do today. This enabled asteroids to be pulled from one star system to another.
2015 BZ509, discovered in 2018, was the first permanent asteroid in the solar system (unlike ‘Oumuamua or 21/Borisov) determined to have originated from interstellar space.
Image via Christian Veillet/ Large Binocular Telescope Observatory/ CNRS.
So how did Namouni and Morais determine the interstellar origin of these asteroids?
They developed a precise computer simulation of the orbits of these asteroids. By doing so, they could “go back in time” to find out what the positions of the asteroids were in the distant past. The simulations showed that, like now, the asteroids were eccentric, orbiting the sun highly perpendicular to the orbits of the young planets and other objects at the time. They were also located far away from the protoplanetary disk itself. These two findings indicate that the asteroids did not form in the protoplanetary disk along with all the other objects in our solar system, but rather they must have originated from somewhere else, perhaps another star, and were caught by the sun’s gravity early in the solar system’s history.
Morais commented:
The discovery of a whole population of asteroids of interstellar origin is an important step in understanding the physical and chemical similarities and differences between solar system-born and interstellar asteroids. This population will give us clues about the sun’s early birth cluster, how interstellar asteroid capture occurred, and the role that interstellar matter had in chemically enriching the solar system and shaping its evolution.
Artist’s concept of ‘Oumuamua, whose actual appearance is unknown. While it was actually the first rocky interstellar visitor identified, in 2017, it didn’t remain in our solar system like the asteroids discussed in the new study have.
Image via ESO/ M. Kornmesser.
These asteroids are similar to 2015 BZ509, which shares an orbit with Jupiter, but is traveling in the opposite direction. In 2018, the same researchers, Namouni and Morais, found that the asteroid has always had that retrograde orbit, going back to the birth of the solar system. This suggested it came from a nearby star system, and was captured by Jupiter’s gravity. 2015 BZ509 was first spotted in the Pan-STARRS survey in 2015.
It’s still possible that there could be another explanation for asteroids like these, but as they explained in a recent Gizmodo article on April 23, 2020, Namouni and Morais seem confident in their conclusions. They’ve faced some skepticism from other scientists, but so far no peer-reviewed papers have been published refuting their results. Only time will tell if their results continue to stand up to scrutiny, but at the moment, it seems that they have established a good case for some Centaurs (and perhaps some other similar objects in the solar system?) having an extraterrestrial origin.
Objects like ‘Oumuamua and 21/Borisov were more difficult to study, since they were only in our solar system for a relatively short amount of time. But these other 19 asteroids, although far away from Earth, keep orbiting the sun, making it easier to observe them remotely over long time periods. If they truly are interstellar, then they offer a unique opportunity to examine asteroids that are alien to our solar system, and compare them to asteroids that were already here when the solar system began to form. Additional analysis could show how they differ in appearance or composition to asteroids that formed here, and provide valuable clues as to how asteroids and other rocky bodies form around other stars.
Scientists Discover 19 Interstellar Asteroids Hiding Between Jupiter And Neptune
Astronomers have found nineteen interstellar asteroids orbiting the sun between Jupiter and Neptune. These asteroids previously belonged to a distant star system and have been orbiting our sun for approximately 4.5 billion years –the same time as the birth of our solar system.
It is believed that when the universe expanded, these asteroids were grabbed from their original star system and ended up staying in our own solar system because of the gravitational pull from our sun. “The close proximity of the stars meant that they felt each other’s gravity much more strongly in those early days than they do today,” explained Fathi Namouni who is from the Observatoire de la Cote d’Azur in France and is the lead author of the study (which can be read in full here). “This enabled asteroids to be pulled from one star system to another.”
‘Oumuamua
These interstellar asteroids are part of a group called Centaurs which has baffled scientists since the first one called Chiron was identified back in 1977. It has been suggested that these bodies were once part of the Kuiper Belt in the outer part of our solar system prior to travelling to the more interior region.
Dr. Namouni and co-author of the study Maria Helena Morais from the Universidade Estadual Paulista in Brazil performed computer simulations and found that billions of years ago the asteroids were orbiting the sun on a plane perpendicular to planetary motion. During that time when our solar system was forming, there was tons of debris floating around that would eventually form into Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars, but the interstellar asteroids were able to avoid the debris as they were orbiting at a further distance.
2I/Borisov
Dr. Morais went into further detail about this significant revelation, “The discovery of a whole population of asteroids of interstellar origin is an important step in understanding the physical and chemical similarities and differences between Solar System-born and interstellar asteroids.” “This population will give us clues about the Sun’s early birth cluster, how interstellar asteroid capture occurred, and the role that interstellar matter had in chemically enriching the Solar System and shaping its evolution.”
This is such an incredible discovery as only two interstellar visitors have been previously discovered – ‘Oumuamua (which was found in October of 2017) and 2I/Borisov (noticed in August of 2019 but is now breaking apart).
With nineteen newly found interstellar asteroids, there are surely a bunch more hidden in our solar system, so the next question is ‘how many more?’
Rolling Stones Sing About a Ghost Town, Have Real Encounters With Ghosts and UFOs
I’m a ghost
Living in a ghost town
I’m a ghost
Living in a ghost town
“Living In A Ghost Town”
The Rolling Stones
There are many who believe that The Rolling Stones possess some sort of magic elixir or have made a pact with some supernatural being to make them seemingly immortal, because they’ve not only outlived but out-played and out-recorded virtually all of their contemporaries while indulging in the rock star lifestyle (especially Keith Richards) that has ended the careers – fatally or otherwise – of so many others. Yet here they are in 2020, releasing a song that quickly became their first chart-topping hit in decades. “Living in a Ghost Town” is the perfect song for these times, even though it was written long before the coronavirus pandemic turned many places into ghost towns (can they see the future too?). Having avoided becoming ghosts in real life, this writer (full disclosure – a longtime fan of the band) wondered if Mick, Keith and the boys have had their own experiences with real ghosts. Turns out they have … and aliens too!
“Mick Jagger of The Rolling Stones stated that his family saw headless ghosts at one of the holiday homes in France which they believe may be the ghosts of the building’s former residents who died during the French Revolution.”
Mick Jagger
The book “Paranormal Case Files of Great Britain (Volume 2)” recounts one of Mick Jagger’s ghostly encounters. According to “Keith Richards: The Biography” by Victor Borkris, Keith lived in a five-story Queen Anne house on the Thames in London in 1969 which his longtime girlfriend Anita Pallenberg turned it into a “hippie’s dream pad.” However, there were some things she couldn’t change.
“A number of people who stayed there claimed the house was haunted.”
That was the same year band co-founder Brian Jones died, and Keith had an eerie encounter with Jones’ ghost many years later while recording “Blue & Lonesome.”
“The last time I ever played ‘Little Rain’ was with Brian Jones. Now, I’m playing ‘Little Rain’ in the studio and suddenly Brian is looming in front of me…”
Keith Richards
Keith probably had more that he can’t remember – after all, this is the guy who snorted his late father’s ashes (“My dad wouldn’t have cared, he didn’t give a shit.”). Drummer Charlie Watts hasn’t reported any ghost encounters, nor has Ronnie Wood, but Wood and his wife Jo have had a number of UFO and alien experiences, which Jo has retold many times in books and lectures.
“A blue-green orb floated alongside my window. My son Tyrone, who was 15 at the time, saw it too. I had the same feeling as I did on the beach in Brazil: that it was not from this planet.”
Jo says Ronnie has seen the UFOs too, but doesn’t talk about it as much. So has Mick Jagger, who claims his first encounter was with a luminous cigar-shaped ship when he went camping in Glastonbury in 1968 with his then girlfriend, singer Marianne Faithful. He also claimed to have seen a UFO during The Rolling Stones’ 1969 Altamont Concert in California and has some sort of UFO detector installed at his British estate. He should have loaned it to Keith, because Richards claimed to have seen UFOs landing at his Redlands estate in West Sussex in 1968.
“I’ve seen a few, but nothing that any of the ministries would believe. I believe they exist – plenty of people have seen them. They are tied up with a lot of things, like the dawn of man, for example. It’s not just a matter of people spotting a flying saucer… I’m not an expert. I’m still trying to understand what’s going on.”
The Stones are not known for burying messages about paranormal experiences in their song lyrics. Is “Living in a Ghost Town” an attempt to tell us something?
Outside of “We’re still alive!” and still recording great music, we’ll have to wait to find out.
Russia Becoming More Suspicious as Space Force Unveils First Weapon
“…expeditionary, deployable, reversible offensive space control (OCS) effects applicable across the full spectrum of conflict. It prevents adversary Satellite Communications (SATCOM) in Area of Responsibility (AOR) including Command & Control (C2), Early Warning and Propaganda, and hosts Rapid Reaction Capabilities in response to Urgent Needs.”
As reported in Popular Mechanics, that’s US Space Force-speak for its first weapon, the Counter Communications Systems (CCS) Block 10.2 – a jammer that effectively cuts the electronic cord between ground troops and the satellites they use to communicate with their generals, allies and each other. This is much more effective than trying to know out the transmitter on the ground or the satellite in space, and the latest generation of these jammers covers a greater frequency spectrum than ever before. Needless, to say, Russia is not pleased.
“We also have a lot of questions. We asked them quite a long time ago and want to have an answer after all. A full-fledged meaningful Russian-US dialogue on a wide spectrum of issues of space activities security Russian and US senior diplomats agreed on on January 16 will help resolve mutual concerns.”
Russian Foreign Ministry Spokeswoman Maria Zakharova told TASS that her government is not pleased with what it perceives to be a first step towards an arms race in space. She’s right about a “race” because Russia’s military already has a similar satellite jammer that’s believed to be not as robust as the Space Force’s. Of course, this is also a war of words, as Zakharova was responding to criticism by Gen. John Raymond, chief of space operations for the Space Force, about Russia’s alleged testing of an anti-satellite missile.
“Previously, such claims were voiced by US Assistant Secretary of State Christopher Ford. We have commented on each and every such anti-Russian attack which are all nothing but the United States’ attempt to divert public attention from real threats in space and to justify its moves to deploy weapons in outer space and obtain extra financing for such causes.”
That’s a diplomatic in-your-face response from Zakharova. This may seem like much ado about nothing since the satellite jammer is ground-based, but anything that’s launched must communicate with satellites to get to space. In fact, it’s becoming clear that nearly everything on Earth depends on satellites. The Space Force is part of the Air Force, so using jets to rapidly deploy the jammers around the world seems like a good idea. Meanwhile, NASA and Elon Musk (the distinction between these two is slowly beginning to blur) are covering space with satellites – perhaps in an attempt to overwhelm Russia’s anti-satellite missiles or its own jammers.
“It is obvious that serious concerns, if any, cannot be resolved by means of such statements, by means of fakes. It is necessary to use the existing channels for expert and political dialogue for that. We do have such channels and it is necessary simply to use them. Unwillingness to do so is rather an evidence of insufficiently grounded position of our American colleagues.”
Sigh. Even space cannot escape from ‘fake news’ and ‘insufficiently grounded positions’. Are we doomed to resume the Cold War’s massive arms race in space? Strategic space command. Lt. Col. Steve Brogan gives Interesting Engineering an answer.
“CCS is the only offensive system in the United States Space Force arsenal. This upgrade puts the ‘force’ in Space Force and is critical for Space as a warfighting domain.”
Sigh.
Videos, selected by peter2011
When the Black Eyed Children Grow Up
Of the BEC and the BEA, Tracie told me: “I have a friend named Dana; she works in timeshare, at a resort out here in Las Vegas, on the far end of the strip. She was working one day – this was in April 2016 – when she said this lady was sent over to her, with two kids: a young boy and a girl. The girl was about six or seven and the boy was about four or five. The woman was wearing dark brown pants and had long brown hair. And the reason why the woman was sent over was because Dana gave the gifting in the timeshare company. When you listen to a presentation, you’re given a gift. But, the woman said she didn’t want a gift and Dana said, ‘When she looked at me and said that, I saw that she had total black eyes.’ There were no whites whatsoever. And the kids were exactly the same. But, in every other sense they were completely normal; they weren’t wearing the hoodies.”
Tracie continued as follows: “Dana commented, ‘I wish I had said something, like how do you see with those eyes?’ When she said that, I thought you can’t really ask them something like that. Maybe you could say, ‘Wow, your eyes are beautiful.’ But, maybe that’s bringing attention to something they don’t want you to know about. But, they could wear sunglasses all the time and no-one would know. So, maybe they are testing our reactions, they want their eyes to be seen. The kids were quiet; they didn’t say anything to her. Dana asked the woman how long she was going to be staying at the resort. And she said just one night and then they left.”
And there was one more story from Tracie: “I also have a friend who had an experience with a Black-Eyed Man; this was in a Wal-Mart in Michigan where she saw him. I was living in California at the time and this would have been about 2004, Christmas time. They were at the check-out and he insisted that he gave a gift to her son. It was a Spiderman clock. She said where he stood in line, there was someone in between her and this man. But, when he gave the gift, it was like his hand reached through the person between them; just passed right through the flesh of this person. And what freaked her out was that he had the pure black eyes. She didn’t want him to accept the clock, with him being a stranger. But, he insisted.”
Christina is the founder of the Psychic Paranormal Research Society, and someone who had a truly disturbing encounter in 2012 that involved a Black Eyed Woman and two BEC. As Christina told me: “Back in the summer of 2012 myself and a few members of my paranormal group, here in Sacramento, went up to see a client about a report of being abducted. He was claiming he had an implant and was experiencing paranormal activity; this was in Redding, California. We finished up our investigation and headed back home.” It was when Christina got home that things turned very weird. Dangerous, maybe. A woman and two children were outside of her home.
Christina continued: “All three of them, in unison, turned from the waist back and looked dead at me, as if they knew I was looking at them. It was almost like robotic. All three did it at the exact same time, and it startled me. But, not only did it startle me, one of the things I was looking at, I locked eyes with them.” Christina added: “All I could see, now, was complete black. I even looked at the little boy, because I’m thinking, he was a little faraway and I’d not seen him up close. But I look at this little boy and, again, complete black. It almost made their eyes look bigger, like the eyelid wasn’t closed over it; very prominent. I lock eyes with them. I will tell you I have never felt such fear in my life.” Equally disturbing is the fact that the creepy trio vanished at an impossible speed – to the extent that it was almost as if they had de-materialized. That may have been exactly what happened.
Are Camouflaged Aliens Walking Among Us?
Without a doubt that is a controversial question! The fact is, though, that some alleged extraterrestrials do seem to be trying to move among us and without being noticed for what they really are. In fact, it may have been going on for not just years, but decades. We’ll begin with the Men in Black. Not the Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones type. Rather, the real Men in Black: the pale, scrawny, weird-looking Men in Black who surfaced in the early 1950s and who have never gone away. There is strong evidence to show that the Men in Black realize there are certain differences between us and them. As a result of this, they do their best to make them look like us. Those who have unfortunately crossed paths with the MIB state that their black-suited visitors wore make-up and lipstick. In some cases, they even had what were clearly painted-on eyebrows – as bizarre as it all sounds. On occasion, the MIB will wear large, wraparound sunglasses. This is clearly done for camouflage: in some cases the MIB are described as having large, abnormal eyes that they hide behind those glasses. Often, though, they don’t do a good job of hiding those bulging eyes – which is why we sometimes get to see those creepy eyes.
Very much the same can be said about the Women in Black – who also terrorize witnesses to UFOs. The WIB are described as wearing long black wigs and sunglasses. Like the MIB, the WIB mask their milk-white skin with make-up. While there is no evidence that the Black Eyed Children are connected to the UFO subject, it is a fact that there are some similarities. For example, the BEC very often wear hoodies, which they pull down to hide their large, completely black, eyes. In many occasions, the Black Eyed Children keep their eyes firmly aimed at the ground – clearly to try and prevent people from seeing those eerie eyes. In issue 187 of Fortean Times magazine, writer Mark Pilkington did a review of the FortNite 2004 gig. Pilkington highlighted certain material that was disclosed at the gig by Budd Hopkins, the author of Missing Time: “…in order to better blend in with us humans, the greys have taken to wearing wigs and sunglasses…the aliens are also experimenting with growing hair on the heads of their genetic hybrid grey-human creations…they’re also developing pupils to get around those giveaway wraparound black eyes.”
Eris Andys had an encounter with one of these human-appearing things in the later part of the 1980s. She detailed it in a 2004 feature for Fortean Times, which was appropriately titled “A Quiet Invasion.” While walking down one particular street (location not stated) Andys encountered a humanoid creature with “waxy, grey” skin, “…with no pores and no hair. It looked damp. The mouth was small, the nose tiny, and the chin pointed.” She added: “The most amazing thing was the pair of glasses ‘he’ wore – made of some yellow reflective stuff, they wrapped around the sides of the head like some futuristic ski-wear.”
This all reminds me of Mac Tonnies’ “Cryptotererstrials.” In his theory, Tonnies suggested that ancient humans lurk among us, and do so in ways that will ensure we don’t get to see the subtle differences between them and us. Tonnies said: “I envision the cryptoterrestrials engaged in a process of subterfuge, bending our belief systems to their own ends. And I suggest that this has been occurring, in form or another, for an extraordinarily long time. I think there’s a good deal of folkloric and mythological evidence pointing in this direction, and I find it most interesting that so many descriptions of ostensible ‘aliens’ seem to reflect staged events designed to misdirect witnesses and muddle their perceptions.” Tonnies suggested that the Cryptoterrestrials – like our aliens – may employ the likes of wigs, make-up, sunglasses and hats, in an effort to try and deflect attention away from their slight differences. A creepy thought, to be sure.
Videos, selected by peter2011
Rapport waarschuwt voor 10 gevaren die het voortbestaan van de mensheid bedreigen: het coronavirus is er slechts één van - HLN.be
Bron: Science Alert
1. Klimaatverandering
2. Achteruitgang van het milieu
3. Kernwapens
4. Schaarste aan levensnoodzakelijke natuurlijke hulpbronnen (waaronder water)
5. Voedselonzekerheid
6. Gevaarlijke en oncontroleerbare nieuwe technologieën
7. Overbevolking
8. Chemische vervuiling
9. Pandemieën
10. Mislukken in het preventief optreden tegen deze risico’s
De onderzoekers roepen overheden op om actie te ondernemen met behulp van hun gebundelde lijst. Ze stellen nog dat niemand ter wereld “een plan heeft om de risico’s het hoofd te bieden”. “Het gebrek aan paraatheid betekent onoverkomelijk dat de mensheid getroffen zal blijven worden door onvoorziene crises.” En of we al dan niet iets ondernemen de komende jaren, zal bepalen of huidige en toekomstige generaties “een veilige, duurzame en welvarende toekomst tegemoet gaan”, zo luidt het besluit van het rapport.
De Commision for the Human Future – vrij vertaald naar de commissie voor de toekomst van de mens – is een organisatie die bestaat uit tal van wetenschappers en burgers. Ze focussen op de mondiale uitdagingen waarmee de mensheid worstelt.
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Planetoïde scheert binnenkort voorbij de aarde mét mondmasker - HLN.be
Bron: University of Central Florida
Wetenschappers verbonden aan het Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico bestuderen de naderende planetoïde al een tijdje: op die manier houden ze in de gaten of die een gevaar zal vormen voor de aarde. Dat blijkt niet het geval te zijn. In tegendeel, het lijkt wel alsof de planetoïde zich voorbereidt op de pandemie op aarde. De radarbeelden van de ruimtesteen tonen iets wat volgens sommigen verdacht veel op een mondmasker lijkt.
“Aangezien we allemaal aan Covid-19 denken, zorgen de topografische kenmerken ervoor dat het lijkt alsof 1998 OR2 eraan gedacht heeft een mondmasker te dragen”, vertelt onderzoekster Anne Verkki.
Of het radarbeeld een mondmasker toont of niet is voor discussie vatbaar. Wat vaststaat is dat 1998 OR2 twee kilometer groot is en iets meer dan vier uur nodig heeft om een rondje rond zijn eigen as te voltooien.
Verder kunnen de beelden van het Arecibo Observatory voorspellen hoe de planetoïde zich in de toekomst voortbeweegt: “De radarmetingen stellen ons in staat om heel nauwkeurig vast te stellen waar de planetoïde in de toekomst – onder meer tijdens scheervluchten langs de aarde – zal zijn.” Dit jaar blijft de planetoïde nog ver weg van de aarde – op een afstand die zestien keer groter is dan de afstand tussen de aarde en de maan - maar in 2079 komt 1998 OR2 alweer wat dichterbij. “In 2079 zal 1998 OR2 ongeveer 3,5 keer dichter bij de aarde in de buurt komen dan dit jaar het geval is. Daarom is het is belangrijk om de baan heel nauwkeurig te kennen”, legt onderzoeker Flaviane Venditti uit.
Video's, geselecteerd door peter2011
American President Ronald Reagan Tried Many Times To Leak The Existence Of Aliens, Video, UFO Sighting News.
American President Ronald Reagan Tried Many Times To Leak The Existence Of Aliens, Video, UFO Sighting News.
videos peter2011
Astronomers discover mysterious red planet that never existed?
Triangle UFO filmed over Statue of Liberty, NY 5-Mar-2020
This amazing video was just submitted through our Facebook page. It show some kind of a triangular-shaped craft maneuvering in the sky above the Statue of Liberty in New York. This happened on 5th March 2020.
What do you think this is? Please leave your comments below!
Founder of the Center for UFO Physical Trace Research, Ted Phillips Has Died
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| A young Ted Phillips |
| Ted Phillips, the founder and director of the Center for Physical Trace Research died, on March 10, 2020. Phillips was born in 1942 and spent his life in Missouri. He began investigating UFOs in 1964 and met Dr.J. Allen Hynek during the investigation of the Socorro UFO landing. Phillips was trained as an engineer and was a professional photographer. He was involved in the Vanguard Satellite Program and was a field engineer on the Minuteman Missile Project. He was also employed as an inspector for the Missouri State Highway Department, an associate of the J. Allen Hynek Center for UFO Studies, and made presentations at the MUFON Symposiums. |
.jpg "Kevin Randle") A Different Perspective 3-11-20 |
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| Ted Phillips at the Illinois conference |
The available facts are mostly statistical, but by taking a large number of reports, we can begin to develop a fairly clear picture of the objects observed and the traces left behind. Obviously, a report involving a landed object is of much greater value than a nocturnal light case. The landed object immediately eliminates a number of possibilities. One would not expect a balloon to land, leave unusual traces, and then ascend vertically at high speed. Stars and planets do not appear at ground level between witnesses and a line of trees. When several witnesses observe a disk-shaped object with a metallic surface, no wings and no sound, landing, ascending vertically, they have, with their descriptions, eliminated most of the natural or conventional explanations. When these objects then leave traces at the landing site, we have something tangible to examine I believe, after thirteen years of investigation, the data indicates a nonterrestrial origin.Ted Philips, truly one of the pioneers in scientific UFO research and a dedicated investigator is dead at 78.
Plate tectonics may have started 400 million years earlier than we thought
As early as 3.2 billion years ago, a portion of Earth's crust (seen this artist’s interpretation) moved relatively quickly across the planet's surface, a hallmark of modern plate tectonics.
A. BRENNER/HARVARD UNIV.
By
Modern plate tectonics may have gotten under way as early as 3.2 billion years ago, about 400 million years earlier than scientists thought. That, in turn, suggests that the movement of large pieces of Earth’s crust could have played a role in making the planet more hospitable to life.
Geologist Alec Brenner of Harvard University and his colleagues measured the magnetic orientations of iron-bearing minerals in the Honeyeater Basalt, a layer of rock that formed between 3.19 billion and 3.18 billion years ago. The basalt is part of the East Pilbara Craton, an ancient bit of continent in Western Australia that includes rocks as old as 3.5 billion years.
This craton, the researchers found, was on the move between 3.35 billion and 3.18 billion years ago, drifting around the planet at a rate of at least 2.5 centimeters per year. That’s a speed comparable to modern plate motions, the team reports April 22 in Science Advances.
The basalt layer, which burbled up as lava and hardened during the journey, contains iron-bearing minerals that can act as tiny signposts pointing the way toward Earth’s magnetic poles. While the lava was still molten, the minerals rotated, orienting themselves to align with either the north or south magnetic pole. By tracking the changes in orientation within the lava as more basalt formed during the journey, the researchers were able to determine how quickly the craton was moving.
Scientists have long used such preserved magnetic signposts to reconstruct plate motions, retracing the steps of drifting bits of continent. But the constant grinding and shifting of Earth’s tectonic plates over the last few billion years have reworked Earth’s surface many times over, leaving few outcrops that are older than 3 billion years.
The Honeyeater Basalt, however, is a rare site, both ancient and relatively unworked by metamorphism, the heat and pressure from which could have altered the minerals and reset their magnetic orientation. The team examined 235 samples of the basalt using an instrument called a quantum diamond microscope that can detect traces of magnetism at the micrometer scale. From these analyses, the researchers created a high-resolution map of magnetic orientations within the rock.
Based on the map, the team estimates that about 3.2 billion years ago, the East Pilbara Craton was at a latitude of about 45°, but whether north or south isn’t certain, Brenner said April 21 in a video news conference. That’s because researchers aren’t sure whether Earth’s magnetic poles at the time were in their current orientation or reversed. Either way, this bit of ancient crust moved in a gradual, steady motion — a hallmark of modern plate tectonics, the researchers say. Today, the craton is located at about 21° S, just north of the Tropic of Capricorn.
Plate tectonics is generally thought to have become a well-established global process on Earth no earlier than around 2.8 billion years ago. Before that, Earth’s interior was considered to be too hot for cold, rigid plates to form at the surface, or for deep subduction to occur, in which one crustal plate dives beneath another.
An earlier start to plate tectonics would have implications for the evolution of life on Earth, Brenner told reporters. Whether the process was in operation when the first single-celled organisms emerged, currently thought to be at least 3.45 billion years ago, isn’t clear, he said (SN: 10/17/18).
But it is clear that plate tectonics is currently closely tied to the biosphere, he added. It promotes chemical reactions between once-buried rocks and the atmosphere that can modulate the planet’s climate over millions to billions of years. “So if [plate tectonics] happened on the early Earth, these processes were likely playing a part in the evolution of life,” Brenner said.
Active, modern-style plate tectonics is the most likely explanation for the data, the researchers say. But they acknowledge other possible explanations can’t yet be ruled out, including an early, episodic, fit-and-start style of plate tectonics.
Some researchers have proposed that, during the Archean Eon that lasted from about 4 billion to about 2.5 billion years ago, there was a proto-plate tectonics process in which bits of crust moved in fits and starts as the planet began to cool after its formation (SN: 4/9/12). Sediment eroded from Earth’s earliest continents may also have helped grease the wheels, setting the stage for modern plate tectonics (SN: 6/5/19).
The researchers’ data could support episodic rather than gradual plate motion, perhaps as a precursor to modern plate tectonics, says Michael Brown, a geologist at the University of Maryland in College Park. Those data suggest that after its initial burst of speed, the Honeyeater Basalt’s progress slowed considerably, from 2.5 centimeters per year to 0.37 centimeters per year, he says.
It’s still unclear how similar proto-plate tectonics may have been to the modern process. “We know too little to answer this question with confidence,” says geophysicist Stephan Sobolev of the University of Potsdam in Germany. Sobolev has suggested previously that, for about a billion years during the Archean, plate tectonics occurred regionally: Plates could have been broken apart by large meteorite impacts or powerful plumes rising from the mantle, generating regional cells in which ancient continents formed and small blocks of crust subducted.
Such a regional cell may have formed the East Pilbara Craton in Australia, Sobolev suggests. But for that bit of ancient continent to have traveled so far so quickly, he says, “large-scale subduction must have been involved” — a surprising possibility for early Earth’s history.
Is life a gamble? Scientist models universe to find out
Scientists suspect that the complex life that slithers and crawls through every nook and cranny on Earth emerged from a random shuffling of non-living matter that ultimately spit out the building blocks of life.
Even so, the details to support the idea are lacking.
But researchers recently got creative in figuring out the probability of life actually emerging spontaneously from such inorganic matter — a process called abiogenesis.
In the study, Tomonori Totani, a professor of astrophysics at the University of Tokyo, modeled the microscopic world of molecules across the epic scale of the entire universe to see if abiogenesis is a likely candidate for the origin of life. He was essentially looking at whether there were enough stars with habitable planets in the universe at the time to allow complexity to arise. His results, published Feb. 3 in the journal Nature, show the betting odds for life emerging are not good, at least for the observable universe.
RNA is made up of a chain of nitrogen-based molecules called nucleotides. Researchers think that in order for RNA to perform its essential function of copying itself, it needs to be composed of a chain of nucleotides longer than 40 to 60 nucleotides.
So, how would these RNA molecules made up of at least 40 to 60 nucleotides have popped up on their own? Nucleotides have been shown experimentally to randomly organize into RNA given enough time and under the right conditions. But these experiments show that the abundance of RNA rapidly decreases with the length of their chains and none of the experiments could consistently produce strands longer than 10 monomers.
"It has been experimentally confirmed that RNA polymerization can occur by a basic random process," Totani said. "Some experiments claimed that more than 50 (monomer long) RNA were produced, but these are not reproducible. One problem is that aggregates are easily mistaken for a long RNA polymer."
Totani's model uses the most conservative method of RNA polymerization, where each monomer is attached randomly one-by-one until a chain of monomers is formed. Scientists have suggested that polymers (each made up of multiple monomers) could attach to each other to speed up the process, but Totani said such a process is "highly speculative and hypothetical."
Scientists think life emerged on Earth around 500 million years after the planet formed. Given that there are an estimated 10 sextillion (10^22) stars in the observable universe, it may seem that the odds of life popping up in the universe should be good. But researchers have found that the random formation of RNA with a length greater than 40 is incredibly unlikely given the number of stars — with habitable planets — in our cosmic neighborhood. There are too few stars with habitable planets in the observable universe for abiogenesis to occur within the timeframe of life emerging on Earth.
"However, there is more to the universe than the observable," Totani said in a statement. "In contemporary cosmology, it is agreed the universe underwent a period of rapid inflation, producing a vast region of expansion beyond the horizon of what we can directly observe. Factoring this greater volume [of stars with habitable planets] into models of abiogenesis hugely increases the chances of life occurring."
After our universe flashed into existence some 13.8 billion years ago during the Big Bang, it underwent a period of rapid expansion that continues today. If we think of the universe as a loaf of bread baking in the oven, our observable universe is like a bubble of air trapped in the dough, where the walls of the bubble are the farthest distance light can travel since the Big Bang. As the loaf rises (inflation), our bubble grows while other pockets of air within the bread get farther away. Our observable bubble of air is all that we can see, even though the rest of the loaf is out there.
It is estimated that the whole universe could contain more than 1 googol (10^100) stars. When Totani factored in this new abundance of stars, he found that the emergence of life was no longer improbable, but very likely.
This may be good news for the RNA world hypothesis, though it could also mean that the search for life in the universe is a hopeless pursuit.
If life first got its start in RNA, "life on Earth was created by a very rare chance of producing a long RNA polymer," said Totani. "Most likely, Earth is the only planet harboring life in the observable universe. I predict that future observations or explorations of extraterrestrial life will yield no positive results.
If by chance, life is discovered elsewhere in our cosmic neighborhood, Totani believes it would likely be of the same origin as life on Earth. Life may have hitched a ride from comets and asteroids across interplanetary or interstellar space, seeding the local universe with life from a single origin event.
Totani's work is far from an answer to one of science's most existential questions but it may guide further research on the origins of life. Whether we are alone in the universe still remains unanswered, but if Totani's numbers tell us anything, you shouldn't bet on it.
Originally published on Live Science.
