Speaking of the Air Force’s Project Blue Book, a new series UFO Witness aired on Discovery+ last Thursday

"UFO Witness" is available on the discovery+ app starting January 14, 2021. The series follows UFO researcher Ben Hansen as he revisits cases originally investigated by Dr. J. Allen Hynek of the Air Force's Project Blue Book. With the help of researcher Mark O'Connell and Hynek's assistant Jennie Zeidman, Hansen compares the archives from Hynek to look for patterns repeating in modern-day UFO cases. See sneak peek at +/- 2:07.

CIA declassifies treasure trove of UFO documents for anyone to download

Jeff Parsons ** Wednesday 13 Jan 2021 9:38 am

The CIA has finally made public its records on UFO investigations

A treasure trove of UFO-related documents has been published online by the CIA so that anyone can download a copy of it.

The database contains hundreds of formerly top secret files on what the CIA calls ‘Unidentified Aerial Phenomena’ (UAPs).

The campaign to make the documents public dates back to the 1980s and was spearheaded by John Greenwald Jr. He now operates the website – known as ‘Black Vault’ – where the contents of the dossiers can be downloaded.

Many of the UAPs in the files may be tricks of the light or a misjudgment by a pilot. But some of them became targets investigated by the Pentagon.

‘Around 20 years ago, I had fought for years to get additional UFO records released from the CIA,’ Greenewald told Motherboard on Monday.

‘It was like pulling teeth! I went around and around with them to try and do so, finally achieving it. I received a large box, of a couple thousand pages, and I had to scan them in one page at a time.’

According to Greenwald, the documents are the result of 10,000 Freedom of Information reports. And the government agency made it as difficult as possible for anyone else to get eyes on their findings.

‘The CIA has made it INCREDIBLY difficult to use their records in a reasonable manner,’ Greenwald told the site. ‘They offer a format that is very outdated (multi page .tif) and offer text file outputs, largely unusable, that I think they intend to have people use as a “search” tool.  In my opinion, this outdated format makes it very difficult for people to see the documents, and use them, for any research purpose.’

Greenwald said there have been thousands of downloads of the files within the first 24 hours of them being made available.

And some of the scenarios described within the documents could have come straight out of The X-Files.

In one case, a small Russian town suffered an explosion ripping the roofs from buildings, blowing apart windows and leaving a 90-foot wide crater. Residents reported seeing a ‘moving fiery sphere’ but the local military concluded it was just an ammonium nitrate blast.

UFO enthusiasts have been attempting to get access to the files for 20 years

(Credits: Getty Images)

Another story deals with a Bosnian fugitive who claimed to have come into contact with aliens.

Yet another file deals with a CIA Assistant Deputy Director for Science and Technology who ‘exhibited interest’ in a redacted object ‘which was handcarried to his office’.

Interestingly, this information comes just as the Pentagon is expected to release yet more classified UFO documents into the public domain.

In December, President Trump signed a $2.3 trillion Covid-19 relief bill that included an act stating government agencies must publish a report in the next six months.

Attached to the bill was a provision requested by Sen. Marco Rubio who chairs the Senate Intelligence Committee to include ‘detailed analysis of unidentified phenomena data’ in restricted US airspace.

This provision, attached as a ‘committee comment’, also requests data and intelligence collected or held by the Office of Naval Intelligence.

It means the Pentagon could reveal even more information relating to a highly sensitive investigation government project called the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP).

It has previously been confirmed that the US has studied a range of futuristic technologies which would allow it to exercise global military dominance for decades to come. The programme is dedicated to exploring ‘ unexplained aerial phenomena’ and is believed to have written a 490-page report which collects together UFO sightings from around the world.

In March last year, the Pentagon piqued global interest in UFOs by releasing three declassified videos showing what it tagged as a UAP.

Astonished navy fighter pilots filmed objects apparently moving at angles and speeds far outstripping any man-made craft.

Navy pilots filmed this UAP travelling faster than man-made craft

(US Navy)

Curiously, the Pentagon released the videos without having any obligation to do so. The trickle of clues has also included pictures of the secretive Area 51 military base, reported on by Metro.co.uk on Thursday, showing a strange triangular shape inside a hanger.

Nick Pope, a British UFO expert who worked for the Ministry of Defence, told Metro: ‘The clock is now ticking on the Senate Intelligence Committee’s demand for a report on the UFO phenomenon from the Director of National Intelligence.

‘A response is due within 180 days of the enactment of the Covid-19 relief bill, because this bill contained the Intelligence Authorization Act, where the UFO requirement was articulated.

‘But the US Department of Defense has known since June of the committee’s request, and the US Navy’s Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP) Task Force is probably already working on drafting the response, so we may get it sooner than the late June deadline. This report, important though it may be, is only one part of a wider process.

‘There’s a lot going on and we’re going to see some big UFO stories in 2021.’

MORE : 

• UFO expert says ‘clock is ticking’ on possible seismic revelations

MORE : 

• Private journals of man who investigated 1947 Roswell UFO crash opened for the first time

Get your need-to-know latest news, feel-good stories, analysis and more

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{ https://metro.co.uk/ }

A Look at the Black Triangle UFOs

{ peter2011 }

Some of the more spectacular and eyebrow-raising accounts within the UFO field have to do with what are usually termed alien abductees. These are those individuals who have been allegedly whisked away by alien entities for inscrutable reasons we will probably never understand, and they very often have incredibly weird stories to tell. Among these ranks is a former CIA agent, who not only claims to have been abducted by aliens on numerous occasions, but who also claims that this is going on on a wider scale than we ever realized and who has dedicated himself to hunting these entities down.

One of the more fascinating personalities right now in the world of alien abductees is Derrel Sims, a former military police officer, CIA agent, and current full-time ufologist, who claims to have had a lifetime of very strange UFO and alien encounter experiences. Sims claims that his very first conscious experience happened back in 1952 when he was just 4 years old. At the time it was evening at his home in Midland, Texas, and he was lying in bed trying to fall asleep when he had the sudden, unshakable feeling that there was someone else there in that darkened room with him. Sims said that he did not feel any particular fear at first, but sensed that it was not his mother or father, but rather an “it.” As his eyes adjusted to the dark further, details began to congeal in the gloom, pure white skin, very large elliptical eyes, an inhumanly thin frame, all of which suggested that it was not human. Even then Sims says he felt no fear or panic, but this was about to change. He would explain the series of bizarre and frightening events that would unfold in a 2007 edition of Journal of Abduction Encounter Research:

No speech or communication of any kind comes from this “thing,” whatever it is. The arms and legs are long and skinny, the body and neck, thin. The bulbous head, like an upside down teardrop, is cocked slightly to the side. I can see him from head to crotch, and he doesn’t have a “tee tee” or a belly button! Does he have knees? I can’t see them and I want to know what his feet look like too. He had a strange faint smell. It smelled awful. . . .I think it is a he, though I don’t know exactly why. It sure doesn’t have any mom or lady qualities about it. Suddenly, I realize it has become aware that I am aware and that I am able to move. Horror wraps around my small frame as his eyes seem to move or rotate. He definitely is now in control of me physically. Suddenly I Am Paralyzed. I cannot understand how I was fine (as I always had been) and now I am paralyzed and overwhelmed with a horrific fear, all while conscious. I wasn’t paralyzed until now! Why? I have never felt fear before. This is the moment in time. . .when I suddenly realize there is something wrong with the perfect world in which I live. For me, that moment was, “Mommy and daddy aren’t coming. He is, or they are!” He convincingly suggests that my parents don’t love me. They are not my parents! I suddenly know there are others like him, and they do other things. . .

I feel the paralysis hit me as he just stands there, emotionless and motionless with those large black, doll-like, shark-like eyes looking at me. Immense fear overwhelms me as he moves toward me. Because of his suggestion, I think I cannot move or make a sound. I fight the paralysis as the entity comes closer, bringing his face right up to mine. I squirm my tiny frame as hard as I can to get away. When the feel of the wall is against my shoulder, I push so hard the old army-styled single bed pulls away from the wall. This seemed to startle the entity (and me!) as with a thud, I hit my shoulder blades against the cold, hard floor. I can protect my head, and do; the paralysis is wearing thin here.

Derell Sims

Sims looked under the bed and could see that the thing was still standing there, its odd, duck-like feet planted on the floor, and it then bent down to look under the bed right at him. As it peered under the bed at him with those otherworldly, inscrutable eyes, Sims claims that its image then began to change, its features morphing and twisting right before his eyes into something else. He would later come to the conclusion that this was the entity manipulating his perceptions, and he says of this:

Next begins the most horrifying part of the experience for me. As he crawls slowly toward me, he begins making himself look like a pure white clown with large doll-like eyes. I know inside, “He wants me to remember this as a bad dream of a clown.” This is to make clear to me what I am to remember. However, since this hasn’t happened yet, how can I know it is what I will remember? Once again, I wonder, “How does he do that? He crawls under the bed, his large head next to mine, and makes his eye contact. “I will not believe this clown. I will not forget. It is not a clown. It is not a clown! I will not forget!” It gets very dark as I tell myself for the last time that night, “I will not forget. It is not a clown.” In the morning, I am back in bed, and cold. Numerous things tell me what I remember from the night before really happened. The soreness on my back where I hit the floor. . .the bed is no longer square against the wall. My covers come only near to my shoulders. (I always had them up to my head to keep me warm.) The sheets are a mess! . . .I definitely freaked in the morning.

Creepy indeed, and it was so traumatizing for him that he refused to sleep in his room alone, for several nights sleeping with his mother and father, although the mysterious entity would return. When it did, Sims says that even though he screamed out, his parents wouldn’t wake up, as if they had been kept in a deep sleep state by the creature. He says that this time there was more than one of them, and that as they plucked him out of the bed from right between his parents he blacked out. He would wake in his own bed later and not be able to remember what had happened until many years later under hypnosis, when he recalled that they had done experiments on him. Sims would have similar frightening experiences with the very same entities numerous times throughout his life, but it would get more horrifying when he was a married adult with children, when he claims they began to come for his own 6-year-old son. It was a turn of events that would change the course of his life and put him on a mission to warn of these creatures and do anything he could to stop them, and he says of the first incident:

In December 1980, my wife, two children and I lived. . .in a large ranch home on 4 acres near Huffman, Texas. [One night] I awoke suddenly with a feeling of dread. . . .In the dark, I ran as fast as I could to the living room, where I stood watching in horror: There was my 6-year-old son looking out the window. He was not asleep. He was deep in trance. They had come and, like my own dad, I was not there for him. . . .”Oh God,” I thought, “not my son, too.” The fact is you can mess with me or abduct me and I can live with it (I did). You mess with or abduct my son and I will come after you. I will protect and even avenge my children. Now, they — the alien — have my full attention. I am not sure this is what they wanted. It is certainly what they are getting for the trouble. This may have been a serious mistake on their part. Now, I hunt them that hunted me and later hunted my son. . . I am known as the “Alien Hunter.”

Sims went on to devote his whole life to understanding these mysterious entities more, to collecting and analyzing medical and scientific evidence of the alien presence such as anomalous marks on the body or alien implants, digging up classified information the government has on them, and helping other abductees to deal with their own traumatic otherworldly encounters, investigating over 2,000 such cases. He says there are at least seven types of alien species on Earth at present, as well as various hybrids, and when talking about alien abductions and the alien agenda, it does not take long at all to see that he has a very negative view of these beings. He says that they are here for malevolent purposes, and that their experiments on us are not in the best interests of human beings, that they are cruel, spiteful creatures that we should avoid at all costs. He has decried efforts to contact them, saying “It’s an uninformed position for them to get in contact with whoever’s out there. Some people have done that and died as a result. Some people have been injured.”

Sims also frequently mentions the aliens as being manipulative and deceitful, changing their appearance as it suits them and doctoring the memories that people have of them, and he also claims that much of the time the aliens prefer not to be seen at all, often surprised when someone can see them. He has said of the memories that abductees have, “In most cases, whenever you remember the event, it is a mistake on their part, or else, what you “remember” isn’t memory at all; it is an “installed memory” for you.” There is also the fact that, according to him, there are far more people who have had their memories successfully wiped and are blissfully unaware of what has happened to them, and that the abductees who remember are in the minority. Indeed, by his estimates there could be millions who have been abducted by aliens and just don’t know it. You can read all about Sims’ stories at his page here, and make up your own mind, but we are left to wonder just what is going on here. He seems to be a fairly reliable individual with solid credentials, so what are we to make of his stories. It remains unknown, but it is certainly another story to add to the many in the UFO field.

{ https://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }

It seems one can’t throw a stone or a dried camel turd in Egypt without hitting an ancient tomb with coffins and sarcophagi dating back to the pharaohs, but hitting an actual pharaoh or queen’s tomb is still a rarity. That may be why news of the recent discovery of 22 burial shafts, with one containing 54 coffins, and dozens of mummies and artifacts was quickly overshadowed by the announcement of the uncovering of the funerary temple of Queen Nerat, the wife of King Tati (or Teti), whose pyramid is nearby. The discovery is in the Saqqara archaeological site in Memphis where hundreds of coffins and well-preserved mummies have been found recently. Why does the head of the project say this discovery “rewrite the history of Saqqara during the New Kingdom, in addition to confirming the importance of the worship of King Teti during the 19th Dynasty of the New Kingdom”?

“The mission discovered the layout of the temple in which the queen’s tomb was being revived, and the mission also found within the temple three mud-brick warehouses attached to the temple in the southeastern side – these stores were built to store temple provisions, offerings and tools.”

Sistrum inscribed with the name of Teti.

While the popular movie depictions of ancient Egypt and mummies generally imply that most if not all of them were pharaohs or their relatives, this site and discovery – described in a Facebook post – led by Dr. Zahi Hawass with help from the Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities and Bibliotheca Alexandrina, shows that coffin-building and mummification was a thriving business for the common folk as well. Not only were there rooms for the carpenters and mummifiers, the shafts were filled with hundreds of wooden coffins from the New Kingdom (16th century BCE to 11th century BCE). (Photos here and here.)

An adorned wooden sarcophagus is displayed during the official announcement of the discovery by an Egyptian archaeological mission of a new trove of treasures at Egypt's Saqqara necropolis south of Cairo, on January 17, 2021.

(Khaled DESOUKI / AFP)

CORRECTS DAY OF WEEK TO SUNDAY -- A trove of ancient coffins and artifacts on display that Egyptian archaeologist Zahi Hawass and his team unearthed in a vast necropolis, in Saqqara, south of Cairo, Egypt, January 17, 2021.

(AP Photo/Nariman El-Mofty)

An ancient coffin is on display that Egyptian archaeologist Zahi Hawass and his team unearthed in a vast necropolis filled with burial shafts, coffins and mummies dating back to the New Kingdom 3000 BC, January 17, 2021, in Saqqara, south of Cairo, Egypt.

(AP Photo/Nariman El-Mofty)

CORRECTS DAY OF WEEK TO SUNDAY -- The excavation site where Egyptian archaeologist Zahi Hawass and his team unearthed a trove of ancient coffins, artifacts, and skulls in a vast necropolis south of Cairo, Egypt, January 17, 2021, in Saqqara, south of Cairo, Egypt.

(AP Photo/Nariman El-Mofty)

An ancient coffin is on display that Egyptian archaeologist Zahi Hawass and his team unearthed in a vast necropolis filled with burial shafts, coffins and mummies dating back to the New Kingdom 3000 BC, January 17, 2021, in Saqqara, south of Cairo, Egypt.

(AP Photo/Nariman El-Mofty)

Egyptian security officers man their station across from the step pyramid of Djoser at the Saqqara necropolis south of Cairo, on January 17, 2021.

(Khaled DESOUKI / AFP)

“The discoveries found in the shaft are considered one of the most important findings uncovered in the Saqqara region, and date back to the New Kingdom.

Inside the shafts, the mission discovered large numbers of archaeological artifacts and a large number of statues that represent deities such as the god Osiris and Ptah-Soker-Osiris, in addition the mission found a papyrus, whose length reached four meters and one meter in width, representing Chapter 17 from the Book of the Dead, and the name of its owner is recorded on it (Pw-Kha-Ef). The same name was found on four ushabti statuettes, and on an anthropoid wooden coffin. Many beautiful ushabti statuettes made of wood, stone and faience have been found dating back to the New Kingdom.”

Pyramid texts from Teti I’s pyramid at Saqqara

Not much is known or revealed about Queen Neit (or Nearit in some announcements). It appears this may be Iput, the mother of Pepi I, the third pharaoh of the Sixth Dynasty. As the press release points out, the big deal is the shaft filled with coffins and artifacts that appears to have never been looted. All of this means King Tati and his queen (at least the first one) were revered a thousand years after their deaths and the funeral business boomed as a result. Based on that, more shafts, coffins, mummies, temples, and artifacts will undoubtedly be found – with or without the benefit of a camel turd toss. And that is the real reason why this discovery is so important to Egypt.

“Dr. Zahi Hawass confirms that this discovery is considered the most important archaeological discovery during the current year and will make Saqqara, along with other discoveries, an important tourist and cultural destination.

ALL RELATED VIDEOS, selected and posted by peter2011

{ https://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }

Now and again I get asked about “missing government files” (or “hidden files”) on UFOs. It’s an issue that a lot of people don’t seem to understand – and it’s also something that demonstrates a great amount of naivety on the part of the questioner. I’ll explain what I mean. It relates to both those who believe there are UFO conspiracies and those who don’t – but for very different reasons. On many occasions, when I’m in debate with skeptics and debunkers, someone will say something like this: “There can’t be any truth to Rendlesham Forest or to Roswell because nothing of any significance has ever surfaced through the Freedom of Information Act.” That is such a pathetic and uninformed approach to take. And, it’s also a misinformed stance. A few day ago, I used the words “La La Land” in an article here at Mysterious Universe. I’ll use it again: “La La Land.” I use it because that’s where some of the debunkers and skeptics are happy to dwell. The same goes for those who think they actually have a chance in Hell of finding anything significant.

The fact is that numerous countries around the world have FOIA legislation. The long list includes Australia, the U.K., Belgium, Germany, Iceland, Japan, Sweden, and Uruguay. In fact, the number of countries that have FOIA legislation is now eight-five. That doesn’t mean – as a few debunkers have suggested to me – that the FOIA allows for everything to be released into the public domain. The reason? Because sometimes the material doesn’t even make it to the FOIA. Also, sometimes the reason why we don’t get to see anything – despite trying to use the Freedom of Information Act – is because of what are known as Special Access Programs (SAPs). You may wonder: what are they? Well, I’ll tell you. The Drive say: “For the better part of the last twenty-five years, the manner in which the U.S. government safeguards and restricts access of highly classified information is through a set of compartmentalization protocols termed ‘Special Access Programs.’ Thanks to the government’s love affair with condensing words, most people are likely familiar with this formalized system of security’s acronym—’SAP.’ For most of us stuck on the outside trying to get an idea of what’s inside, the term ‘Special Access Program’ is often misunderstood as being itself a classification level. In truth, SAPs are merely a set of security protocols limiting access of sensitive information to only authorized and necessary individuals. Cue the cliché, ‘That information is need to know, and you don’t have a need to know!'”

The Federation of American Scientists provide us the following: “The procedures for establishing, managing and overseeing special access programs (SAPs) in the Department of Defense are spelled out in an updated DoD Instruction that was issued yesterday.  See ‘Management, Administration, and Oversight of DoD Special Access Programs,’ DoD Instruction 5205.11, February 6, 2013. A special access program is a classified program that employs security measures above and beyond those that would normally be used to protect ordinary (or ‘collateral’) classified information. Such measures may include special eligibility reviews, polygraph testing, cover, and other controls on information.  Within DoD, SAPs fall into three broad topical categories: intelligence, acquisition, and operations and support.”

Not only that, there’s the matter of destroyed documents. If you think that Top Secret files don’t get destroyed, you would be very wrong. For example, when, back in the 1990s, the U.S. Government Accountability Office went digging for information on the Roswell affair of 1947,  the GAO said that: “…the Chief Archivist for the National Personnel Records Center provided us with documentation indicating that (1) RAAF records such as finance and accounting, supplies, buildings and grounds, and other general administrative matters from March 1945 through December 1949 and (2) RAAF outgoing messages from October 1946 through December 1949 were destroyed.” So, not only are we up against the SAPs, but now we know that material sometimes gets destroyed and will never be seen again.

The same applies to the aforementioned Rendlesham Forest affair of December 1980. There’s no doubt in my mind that what happened in the woods had nothing to do with aliens and everything to do with secret experiments And why can’t we find those files via the FOIA? Here’s why: one of the claims I’ve heard on a few occasions is that when the technology designed to make the personnel in the woods believe they were seeing aliens and UFOs (rather than being deceived by advanced holograms, which is the real story), there was no need to continue to keep the original papers. So, for safety and security, it was destroyed. This happens more times than you might think. Here’s one example of many. It’s the matter of  the CIA’s “mind-control” programs, the most well-known being MK-Ultra, much of which involved the experimental use of psychedelics. Yes, a large amount of that material is still available today, but back in 1973 huge amounts of papers on the programs were burned to a collective shred.

CIA Director Richard Helms chose a man named Sidney Gottlieb to take control of the situation – Gottlieb having been the person who ran the CIA’s occult-driven Operation Often program, which began in the latter part of the 1960s. Helms ordered Gottlieb, on the morning of January 30, 1973, to drive over to a certain installation owned by the CIA in Warrenton, Virginia. And burn as much as possible. Gottlieb followed his orders. The reasoning behind the destruction was simple: the program was in danger of being compromised by the U.S. media and the U.S. Senate. As the work of MK-Ultra, by 1973, had long been perfected, the old, historical records – which told the stories of the abuses that went on in the program – were deemed vital to be destroyed. From Roswell to MK-Ultra and to Rendlesham, files have been destroyed and will never be seen again. As for SAPs, they are a perfect way to to ensure that sensitive material will remain hidden.

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{ https://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }

Something really strange happened on January 16, 2021 when the Secchi Stereo Ahead EUVI 171 probe captured an enormous flash that then revealed a giant object in the vicinity of the sun. 

Blue beams, possible electrically charged, are visible on both sides of the object, apparently emanating from the object. 

The object, which looks like a giant UFO, comes from another dimension and arrives through a portal near the sun? 

A portal is an extraordinary opening in space or time that connects travelers, in this case a giant UFO, to distant realms. 

Source: https://www.helioviewer.org/ 

Stereo-A, Secchi, EUVI 171

Flash - date: 2021/1/16 Time:05.38.00 

Object - Date: 2021/1/16 Time: 05.43.00 

Flash and object only visible within a split second.

  

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

Former Chief of Israeli Space Security Says Extraterrestrials Exist, and U.S. Government Knows About It

An ex-Israeli space security head has made a buzz recently by saying that earthlings have been in contact with ETs from a galactic federation.

Haim Eshed, former chief of Defense Ministry’s space directorate in Israel, said that the UFOs have asked not to make public that they’re here as humanity isn’t ready yet.

Respected professor Eshed revealed that aliens were equally curious about humanity and were looking to understand the universe’s fabric.

Check out this amazing book about the top 10 UFO cases in the history.

Get your’s on Amazon: Top 10 UFO Sightings: Best Cases: Aliens are visiting us

Eshed stated there are signed cooperation agreements between species, including a base located underground in the depths of Mars where alien representatives and American astronauts have been holding their meeting.

He said U.S. governments and the extraterrestrials are signing an agreement to do experiments here. Eshed added that U.S. President Donald Trump was aware of the space aliens’ existence and had been on the brink of disclosing information but was asked not to prevent mass hysteria.

Eshed said they have been waiting until today for earthlings to develop and reach the level where we’ll understand what space and spaceships are in general.

Retired general Eshed, who oversaw several Israeli satellites into space, said he was only speaking now because people’s attitudes were changing and seemed more receptive. He said he has nothing to lose as he already received his degrees and awards and respected in universities abroad.

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

Oldest Tool Use Thrown Back To Two million Years In Oldupai Gorge Find

An interdisciplinary team of researchers have unearthed the oldest stone tools at the oldest archaeological site in the famous Oldupai Gorge, popularly known as the Cradle of Humankind. Their discoveries also reveal how the earliest hominins coped with climate change two million years ago.

An Acheulean hand-axe from the Olduvai Gorge is pictured in an undated file photo. 

PHOTO BY GERALD CORSI /iStock/Getty Images Plus

The new study is published in  Nature Communications  and provides an ecological perspective on early human adaptability two million years ago. It is focused on Ewass Oldupai - the oldest archaeological site in Oldupai (formerly Olduvai) Gorge. The study demonstrates how hominins adapted to the region’s diverse environmental conditions over a 200,000 year period.

New interdisciplinary field work has led to the discovery of the oldest archaeological site in Oldupai Gorge, which shows that early humans used a wide diversity of habitats amidst environmental changes across a 200,000 year-long period.

( Michael Petraglia )

Discoveries at Oldupai Gorge, the Famous Cradle of Humankind

Oldupai Gorge  is a very important paleoanthropological site located in Tanzania in the Great Rift Valley. For more than a century, researchers have been excavating in this area, and cumulatively they have found hundreds of fossils and stone tools which date back millions of years. The site was made famous by  Louis and Mary Leakey  and is a UNESCO World Heritage site.

EurekAlert! reports that, despite the long history of surveys and excavations at the Oldupai Gorge, there has been a lack of ecological studies associated with the cultural remains which have been found there. This allows the new study to cast light on the environmental contexts in which the early hominins lived.

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The study comes from an international and interdisciplinary team of researchers from the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Germany, the University of Calgary in Canada, and the University of Dar es Salaam in Tanzania. The researchers convened for excavations at the Ewass Oldupa and they have unearthed the oldest Oldowan stone tools ever found at Oldupai Gorge. The stone tools date from roughly 2 to 1.8 million years ago.

Excavations at Ewass Oldupa uncovered the oldest Oldowan stone tools ever found at Oldupai Gorge, dating to ~2 million years ago, and also unearthed fossils of mammals, reptiles and birds.

( Michael Petraglia )

Remaining Stable in Changing Environments

Paleoanthropologists at the site studied fossils from a variety of animals, including primates, wild cattle and pigs, hippos, panthers, lions, hyenas, reptiles, and birds. They found that over 200,000 years, the habitat changed and included fern meadows, woodland mosaics, naturally burned landscapes, lakeside palm groves and dry steppe environments.

Outcrop geometry, stratigraphic architecture, and idealized vegetation at Ewass Oldupa. a) Post-eruptive, fern meadow. b) Coarse Feldspar Crystal Tuff  mosaics. c) Woodland with palms and ferns. d) Grasslands. e) Open woodland. f) Asteraceae-dominated scrub.

(Mercader, J. et al.  Nature 2021 )

The combined paleoanthropological and archaeological evidence shows that hominin activities recurred, but were periodically absent in the changing environment. Dr. Pastory Bushozi of Dar es Salaam University, Tanzania,  said that “the occupation of varied and unstable environments, including after volcanic activity, is one of the earliest examples of adaptation to major ecological transformations.”

Even though the environment was changing, the researchers found that the prehistoric hominin toolkits remained more or less the same. The iconic  Oldowan pebble and cobble cores, sharp-edged flakes, and polyhedral cobbles were still used to butcher animals and process plants, no matter how the habitat changed over the 200,000 years.

Who Made the Ewass Oldupa Tools?

You may be wondering by now which group of our prehistoric ancestors made the oldest Oldowan  stone tools  ever found at Oldupai Gorge. The possible toolmaker group is not certain, since no hominin fossils have been found at Ewass Oldupa yet, but it has been narrowed down to three possible hominin species.

Selection of stone tools from Ewass Oldupa.  

(Mercader, J. et al.  Nature 2021 )

One possibility is that  Homo habilis  created the tools. Their fossils have been found in 1.82-million-year-old deposits at a location just 350 meters (1148.29 ft.) away from Ewass Oldupa. Professor Julio Mercader of the University of Calgary  stated that “these early humans were surely ranging widely over the landscape and along shores of the ancient lake.”

But Mercader also noted that  australopithecines were also around Ewass Oldupa at the time and probably making and using stone tools in the area and members of the  Paranthropus genus also lived in Oldupai Gorge in the same time period; both of these groups could be not be ruled out as the prehistoric toolmakers.

Setting the Stage for Bigger Things

The researchers  write that their findings at Oldupai Gorge are “unique for this period and depicts complex behavior among early  Pleistocene hominins.” They explain  that the ability of the hominins to adapt to the changing environments at Oldupai Gorge prepared our prehistoric ancestors for bigger goals.

Combining the recent Oldupai Gorge discoveries with other finds across eastern Africa suggests that by 2 million years ago, hominins had the behavioral abilities they needed to expand into  new ecosystems , and they used those abilities. As Professor Michael Petraglia of the Max Planck Institute  noted that “This behavioural flexibility arose in the context of the dawn of the evolution of our own genus, Homo, and it set the stage for the eventual global, invasive  spread of Homo sapiens .”

• Top Image: The excavations uncovered the oldest Oldowan stone tools ever found at Oldupai Gorge, dating to ~2 million years ago.
• Source:  Michael Petraglia / Mercader, J. et al.,  Nature 2021

By Alicia McDermott

{ https://www.ancient-origins.net/ }

Titanoboa: The Monster Snake that Ruled Prehistoric Colombia

You may not want to read about this frightening creature if you suffer to any degree from ophidiophobia, or even if you are about to embark on a camping trip. Titanoboa fossils show it was the largest snake in the world. It lived during the Paleocene epoch, about 60 million years ago, so you are safe from its bone crushing grip now, but the image of the huge prehistoric snake slithering around South America is still a terrifying one.

So far, the South American country of Colombia has the only known fossils of the huge serpent. It is through these few fossils that paleontologists were able to estimate the size of this prehistoric creature. This estimation was then used to create a life-size model of Titanoboa, which was exhibited in 2012 in New York City’s Grand Central Terminal as a promotion for the Smithsonian Channel documentary entitled Titanoboa: Monster Snake.

The "Titanoboa: Monster Snake" exhibit from the Smithsonian at the Natural History Museum.

(Ryan Quick/ CC BY 2.0 )

A Titanic Boa

Titanoboa simply means ‘titanic boa’ and is an apt name for this prehistoric snake. According to estimates made by paleontologists, it could have grown to a length of between 42 feet and 49 feet (between 12.8 meters and 14.9 meters) and weighed up to a massive 2500 pounds (1134 kg). In addition, the thickest part of the snake’s body is reckoned to have had a diameter of 3 feet (0.9 meters).

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As a comparison, the anaconda, one of the largest snakes today, is known to reach lengths of over 20 feet (6.1 meters) and weigh more than 500 pounds (227 kg). Titanoboa was obviously a giant compared to the largest snakes we have today.

Artistic representation of Titanoboa.

(tuomaskoivurinne/ Deviant Art)

Discovering Titanoboa

The discovery of Titanoboa was made during the first decade of the 21st century in Cerrejón, a coal mine in the northern part of Colombia. The campaign that led to the discovery began in 1994, when the Colombian geologist Henry Garcia found an unfamiliar fossil which he labelled as ‘Petrified Branch’ and placed it in a display case of the coal company.

In 2003, a Colombian undergraduate geology student by the name of Fabiany Herrera was at Cerrejón for a field trip when he discovered fossilized plant remains . As the area had not been explored previously by paleontologists, an expedition was soon organized. One of the researchers invited to join the expedition was Scott Wing, the curator of fossil plants at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History.

A Titanoboa vertebra dwarfs that of a modern 17-foot anaconda

( Brian Tietz )

It was Wing who realized that Garcia’s fossil was not from a plant. He sent photos of it to another expert, Jonathan Bloch, a paleontologist at the University of Florida. Bloch identified the fossil as part of a jawbone of a land animal.

This was exciting news, as fossils of terrestrial vertebrates from the Paleocene epoch had not been found in that part of South America before then. It was believed that more fossils of such animals were to be found at the site, and this proved to be true.

Identifying the Monster Snake

It was not until 2007, however, that the vertebra of a Titanoboa was identified, when a shipment of fossils labelled ‘crocodile’ was being inspected. When this discovery was made, fresh expeditions were conducted in the hopes of finding more vertebrae of this animal. Eventually, a total of 100 snake vertebrae from 28 animals were collected. With the vertebrae, the paleontologists were able to make estimations as to the size of the prehistoric snake.

Titanoboa with a dyrosaur and a turtle.

( Jason Bourque/University of Florida )

In 2012, another important discovery about the Titanoboa was made. This time, a snake skull was found. Such a find is extremely rare, as snake skulls are very fragile and usually fall apart after the animal dies.

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What Did Titanoboas Eat?

One of the peculiarities of this skull is that it has closely packed teeth, even more than modern day boas. This has led experts to speculate that Titanoboa was a specialized fish-eater. Still, considering its size, Titanoboa could have easily preyed on prehistoric turtles and crocodiles, which lived in the same habitat as this snake.

Titanoboa.

(darkwaterlilly/ Deviant Art )

These later discoveries prompted the 2012 creation of a life-size model of Titanoboa exhibited in New York City’s Grand Central Terminal to promote the Smithsonian Titanoboa documentary. Some people also believe that Titanoboas still live deep in the Amazon.

• Top Image: Titanoboa.
• Source: Michael Rosskothen /Adobe Stock

By Wu Mingren  

RELATED VIDEOS, selected and posted by peter2011

{ https://www.ancient-origins.net/ }

Northern lights in Alaska.

Image via Manish Mamtani Photography.

Throughout human history, people have witnessed the aurora, both the northern and southern lights, and sought to explain and make sense of these dancing patterns in stories and myths.

In the modern world, science has revealed most of the secrets of the northern lights (aurora borealis) and southern lights (aurora australis). We understand that auroras form when solar particles collide with Earth’s upper atmosphere. Larger solar storms cause a greater influx of particles, which can cause auroras to reach lower latitudes and appear to a greater number of observers. The colors of the aurora are determined by which gases are excited by the solar plasma.

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All this scientific knowledge slowly started accumulating more than 2 1/2 centuries ago. But even now, when we look up at the trembling curtains of red, green or blue, a feeling of awe and mystery can pervade this ghostly show. It’s easy to see how many of these centuries-old myths referred to an otherwise unreachable world.

The folklore begins with the name “aurora” itself. Aurora is the Roman goddess of the dawn. The lights, usually starting as a subtle brightening on the northern horizon (in the Northern Hemisphere), appeared to be an out-of-place and untimely arrival of morning.

Image via Jörgen Norrland Andersson.

Tying the mystical lights to gods was an easy step for early cultures. The Algonquins on Manitoulin Island in Lake Huron thought an aurora was a sign of good will from their creator, Nanahbozho. The Chuvash of Siberia believed the aurora borealis was their heaven god helping women in childbirth.

One of the most common legends surrounding the northern lights concerned those who have passed into the Great Beyond. The people of the Six Nations Confederacy believed the northern lights showed the entry point to the Land of the Souls. The Vikings thought auroras were reflections from shields of the Valkyries, maidens who take dead warriors to Valhalla (heaven). The Salteaus of Eastern Canada and the Kwakiutl and Tlingit of southeastern Alaska all saw dancing souls in the flickering sky, sometimes of humans and sometimes of animals such as whales or seals. East Greenland Inuits viewed the lights as children who died at birth. In contrast to the many myths surrounding those who have passed on, the Lakota Sioux interpreted the lights as spirits of generations yet to be born.

View at EarthSky Community Photos. | David Kakuktinniq at Rankin Inlet, Nunavut, Canada, captured the aurora borealis and Mars on September 12, 2020. He wrote: “Northern lights over the Hudson Bay, with Mars near the center of the image.” Thanks, David!

Violence and war frequently made an appearance in these myths. The Sami people of northern Scandinavia believed that the souls of those who died a violent death made up the energy of the northern lights. Fox Indian tribes of Wisconsin feared the lights as ghosts of their slain enemies, trying to rise up again. For this reason, auroras were regarded as an omen of war and pestilence.

Another predominant story found in aurora myth involved games played with balls. Many Inuits’ myths involve the dead playing ball with a walrus head. The Wabanaki of Maine had a story of ball-playing people who had peculiar-colored lights on their heads and rainbow belts that resulted in the aurora.

Tying various animals to the lights was common around the world. Some Scandinavian people from medieval times saw the flickering lights and believed them to be caused by gigantic schools of herring in the sea, the light of their shimmering bodies reflected into the sky. One Finnish myth claims that foxes made of fire flung sparks into the air with their tails. Spotting the northern lights in China is less common, but a myth still evolved that these displays were the result of fire-breathing dragons.

The stunning Dragon Aurora appeared over Iceland in February 2019.

Copyrighted image via Jingyi Zhang & Wang Zheng.

The production of these lights was often blamed on mysterious groups of people who lived beyond the horizon. The Mandan of North Dakota told stories of people in northern nations using giant stew pots to simmer their dead enemies, the reflections of which were cast upon the sky. In Washington state, the Makah people also saw fires of those in the far north, only they spoke of a tribe of dwarves boiling blubber. Menominee Indians of Minnesota and Wisconsin thought the auroras were torches of friendly northern giants used in spearfishing at night. The Maori of New Zealand interpreted their glimpses of the aurora australis as reflected light from torches or campfires from previous generations who had traveled south and settled there.

Sometimes the northern lights figured into part of the weather forecast, as in the Penobscot of Maine believing an aurora foreteold windy weather. In Scotland, auroras are called “merry dancers.” Some believed that the quick motions of the dancers meant unsettled weather, while slow and graceful movements foretold favorable weather.

While we no longer blame auroras for a turn in the weather, they are a part of space weather. The sun can unleash a geomagnetic storm at any time, triggering another round of magnificent auroral displays. Watch the next event and decide for yourself what the lights mean to you.

• Bottom line: For millennia, people have viewed the southern and northern lights and created their own myths and folklore explaining the dancing lights they saw in the sky.

RELATED VIDEOS, selected and posted by peter2011

{ https://earthsky.org/ }

Autonomous robot swarm swims like a school of fish

These underwater robots operate as a collective artificial intelligence.

 by Tibi Puiu

Researchers have devised a swarm of small fish-inspired robots that can synchronize their movements by themselves, without any human input. The autonomous robots essentially mimic the behavior of a school of fish in nature, exhibiting a realistic, complex three-dimensional collective behavior.

Each robo-fish (called a ‘Bluebot’) is equipped with cameras and sensors that enable it to track its neighbors and get a sense of direction. This is a step beyond the typical multi-robot communication system, in which individual bots have to communicate with each other via radio and constantly transmit their GPS data.

The team of engineers at Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) and the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering even mimicked a fish’s locomotion, opting for flapping fins instead of propellers. The fins actually improve the submersibles’ efficiency and maneuverability compared to conventional underwater drones.

“It’s definitely useful for future applications, for example, a search mission in the open ocean where you want to find people in distress and rescue them quickly,” Florian Berlinger, the lead author of a paper about the research that appeared in Science Robotics on Wednesday, told AFP.

Berlinger added that other applications for these cute underwater bots include environmental monitoring or the inspection of infrastructure.

Credit: Harvard University.

Each robot measures just 10 centimeters (4 inches) in length and the casing is 3D printed. Their design was partly inspired by the blue tang fish, native to the coral reefs of the Indo-Pacific (Dora from Finding Nemo is a blue tang fish).

During a test, a swarm of Bluebots was inserted in a water tank with a light source and no other external input from the researchers. When one of the bots was the first to detect the light, its movements signaled to the others to gather around. The robots could operate similarly in a search-and-rescue mission, the researchers said.

Berlinger hopes to alter the design in the future so that the robo-fish don’t require LEDs to track the direction of the swarm. This way they could be used outside the lab for conservation projects, such as for coral reefs. Ultimately, this remarkable fit of engineering may also one day reveal hidden insights about collective intelligence in nature.

RELATED VIDEOS, selected and posted by peter2011

{ https://www.zmescience.com/ }

A Secret Roswell Journal Becomes The Focus Of A New UFO Documentary

A secret journal offers new clues about the nature of the alleged 1947 AD UFO crash at Roswell in the New Mexico desert, or does it? Before we kick off, this isn’t one of these Reddit stories that emerged from some basement decorated with posters of the Starship Enterprise and Chewbacca. Quite the opposite.

Live Science is one off the internet’s more respected academic media outlets and today they tell the story of a hitherto unknown personal diary belonging to Major Jesse Marcel, a head intelligence officer at the Roswell Army Air Field. The secret Roswell journal could change the narrative of this famous UFO event. In particular, the secret Roswell journal may contain secret coded observations that will help to “clarify” what really happened in Roswell in 1947 AD.

Marcel investigated the famous Roswell site in New Mexico where in 1947 a UFO is believed by many to have crashed. Furthermore, he claimed to have recovered some of the debris from whatever ditched in the desert that July night near the Roswell Army Air Field (RAAF). Newspaper photos at the time showed Marcel with pieces of metallic material and on the afternoon of July 8, 1947 AD he disclosed to the media “the crash and recovery of a flying disc.” However, the following day, an army official made a statement saying that a weather balloon had fallen to earth, “not a flying saucer.”

This is a road sign near the original UFO crash site in Roswell. Hopefully, the secret Roswell journal of Major Jesse Marcel will reveal more about what “really” happened in New Mexico on that day!

Source: spiritofamerica / Adobe Stock

Will The Secret Roswell Journal Change Everything?

The Roswell story now takes a new turn since Major Marcel's family revealed they had kept his personal secret Roswell journal which contains “hitherto unknown clues about the crash.” The secret diary and its equally secret contents will soon be presented on History Channel´s History's Greatest Mysteries series in an episode called Roswell: The First Witness . The episode was released on December 12th, Saturday, 2020 AD. The show host, Ben Smith, is a former CIA operative and the show's lead investigator. He thinks it is very unusual that the day after the government claimed they had recovered a UFO they switched stories and maintained it was merely “a weather balloon,” Smith told Live Science .

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This story is another in a long line of recent reports pertaining to UFOs. According to The Guardian in 2017 AD a former Pentagon official confirmed the existence of a federal agency that had been “secretly investigating UFOs since 2007.” Then, in 2018, U.S. Navy pilots reported “three encounters with fast-moving UAP, or unidentified aerial phenomena” better known to us civies as UFOs. And building up this emerging alien narrative, officially declassified videos of these occurrences were published in April of this year, as previously reported on Live Science .

Secret Roswell Journal: A Problem Of Might, May And Could

Let´s now return to Major Jesse Marcel, the author of the secret Roswell journal. He investigated the site at Roswell and recovered what he believed to be debris from a flying saucer . In 1997 AD, Time published an article saying Marcel told an interviewer at the time that “he believed” the object that crashed in the New Mexico desert had extraterrestrial origins. Now, a forensic analysis of Marcel´s secret Roswell journal “could reveal” coded messages that he wrote about the crash at the time that it happened, Ben Smith said.

When it comes to UFOs and aliens there are believers and there are skeptics. But no one really knows.

( Alperium / Adobe Stock)

This application of the word “could” will no doubt have skeptics raging, because they all know what’s most probably coming here. If the diary really contained any actual evidence that the Roswell incident was nothing more than a collapsed weather balloon we would certainly have heard about it by now. Unless of course thousands of unpaid interns and staff at the network have all kept quiet, doubters can argue. Perhaps the skeptics greatest argument is presented in plain sight in the newspaper photograph of Marcel on the evening of the crash. To all but the most committed believers in extraterrestrials it is perfectly clear that Marcel is holding a piece of a crumpled (crashed) weather balloon.

When the History Channel episode airs and unavoidably “no evidence” of extraterrestrials is offered, perhaps then maybe some “believers” will consider the content of the Ancient Origins news article I wrote about this only last month.

A team of Oxford University researchers recently applied statistics to the question “are we alone” and concluded that “life on earth is probably a unique universal phenomena, and that it´s ‘extremely unlikely’ that any other intelligent life exists anywhere else in the universe.” This is a profound claim that sceptics love and believers loathe.

And the same extreme opinions are likely to flood across social media channels when the details of Major Marcel's secret Roswell journal are revealed.

• Top image: A UFO flying over the New Mexico desert. The secret Roswell journal may provide new information about what actually happened in Roswell in 1947 AD. ( aleciccotelli / Adobe Stock)

By Ashley Cowie

RELATED VIDEOS, selected and posted by peter2011

{ https://www.ancient-origins.net/general }

An Indonesian cave painting of a warty pig, sporting a pair of large bumps on its neck, ranks among the oldest known artistic portrayals of an actual object or living thing, researchers say.

M. AUBERT

The truth is in there! CIA declassifies TWO THOUSAND documents on UFOs dating back to 1970s that reveal a mysterious object was analyzed by agency's chief scientist in 1976

• A dossier with more than 700 files about Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAPs) was published on The Black Vault website on Thursday

• Black Vault founder John Greenewald Jr spent two decades suing the CIA to release the records and then scanning the pages one by one

• A DailyMail.com review of about one-tenth of the files in the Black Vault database revealed a few perplexing examples of UAP sightings

• One of the reports describes how seemingly urgent UFO information was hand-delivered to the CIA's deputy director for science and technology in 1976

• In another report, CIA officials discuss the possibility that UFOs were behind a 'mysterious blast' in the small Russian town of Sasovo in 1991

By MEGAN SHEETS FOR DAILYMAIL.COM 

A treasure trove of newly-unsealed CIA records has revealed chilling accounts of hundreds of UFO sightings across the globe dating back to the 1950s - along with international intelligence agencies' efforts to understand them.  

The XXXX dossier with nearly 3,000 pages of documents about Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAPs) - the government's official term for what are commonly called UFOs - was published on The Black Vault website last week.  

Thousands of paranormal enthusiasts have already started poring through the collection of more than 700 individual documents, according to Black Vault's founder John Greenewald Jr, who has spent the past two decades suing the CIA to release the records and then scanning the pages into his database one by one.  

The CIA purports that the files account for its 'entire' collection of declassified UAP intel, but Greenewald cautions that there's no way to verify that claim and has vowed to continue searching for further records.  

The dossier was released ahead of a June deadline for US intelligence agencies to reveal everything they know about UFOs to Congress under a clause slipped into the $2.3trillion coronavirus relief bill signed into law by President Donald Trump in December.   

An ongoing DailyMail.com review of the files has uncovered a bevy of perplexing - yet unverified - accounts of mysterious disks tracking across the sky, spewing beams of light across small towns, causing explosions and even a few claims of military officers confronting aliens that come out of outlandish vehicles.  

Other documents show correspondence between CIA officers about the UFO sightings. Sometimes the officers brush off observers' stories as purely superstitious, even when another explanation isn't clear. But in several instances the officers show genuine concern that perhaps something XXXXX is at play. 

Russian airliner crew describes coming within 50 kilometers of a yellow disk shooting beams of light in Belarus in 1985 

Many of the documents included in the Black Vault archive describe UFO sightings in the former Soviet Union - but this one is particularly detailed. 

An article from Moscow's Trud newspaper dated January 30, 1985, describes how an airline crew en route from Rostov, Russia, to Tallinn, Estonia, came upon what they perceived to be a UFO about 120 kilometers from Minsk, Belarus, at about 4am.  

The article dramatically recounts the incident from the perspective of the crew. 'Glancing over his portion of the sky, the copilot noticed a large star that was not flickering on his upper right. But this is no star, this yellow speck the size of a 5-kopeck coin, stretched out along the edges.

'"No matter..,"' he told himself calmly, "refraction of light in the atmosphere or something else..." A very thin beam of light emerged from the speck and fell vertically down to the ground itself.' 

The pilot nudged his three comrades in the cockpit and they watched as the 'beam of light suddenly opened up, turning into a luminous cone. ... A second cone emerged, wider, ... then a third one, broad and quite bright.' 

 The pilot recommended that they report the sight to the ground, but the commander stopped him, unsure of how they would even describe it.  

The men estimated that the object was only about 40 to 50 kilometers away. The copilot pulled out a paper to draw it before 'the beam of the "projector" rose from the ground and focused on the aircraft.'

'The commander was still hesitating: should he report what is taking place or not? But something that put an end to his doubts happened here. The white spot flashed up, and a green cloud emerged in its place.'

The commander recalled seeing the object rush toward his plane, before it suddenly disappeared. 'Well, now they will say we weren't in our right minds.' 

The article goes on to describe the crew's conversations with dubious ground controllers.  

It concludes with a statement from N. A. Zheltukhin, deputy chairman of the Commission on Aerodynamic Phenomena, who said: 'The commission is conducting a systematic study of [UFO] sightings over the territory of the Soviet Union. 

'However, we have to note that regrettably, all the accounts which we have at our disposal suffer from being one-sided or fragmentary to one degree or another.' 

Swedish pilot and flight mechanic spot a 'completely unorthodox, metallic object' flying at 'the speed of sound' outside Stockholm in 1953

A CIA report from April 1954 includes three newspaper articles about a purported UFO sighting five months earlier in Sweden. 

Captain Christiernsson and flight mechanic Olle Johansson were flying a Trasnair Airlines plane between Malmo and Stockholm on December 17, 1953, when the object appeared in the sky in front of them. 

'I do not doubt for an instant that it was not a jet plane,' Christiernsson told the Dagens Nyheter newspaper. 'What I saw was a completely unorthodox, metallic, symmetric, round object which was unlike anything I have seen before.  

'The silhouette was thin and it approached me at a very high velocity. Olle Johansson and I have discussed the matter of its speed, and we have estimated the speed to be about that of sound. The whole business took place fantastically quickly, but I believe that I was able to see the object for four to five seconds.' 

Johansson said: 'What I saw was an ellipse with sharp outlines and something between silver and white in color. It was approaching from the north in a direction opposite to ours, at a speed of about 1,200 kilometers per hour. It was flying entirely above the clouds. Since we had the automatic pilot on, we had no chance to turn quickly enough to see where the object went.' 

More than 700 declassified CIA reports about UFOs dating back to the 1970s were published on The Black Vault website on Thursday (file photo)

Urgent UFO information is hand-delivered to the CIA's top scientist for review in 1976 

Asked about which documents had piqued his interest, Greenewald highlighted a report about seemingly urgent UFO information being hand-delivered to an Assistant Deputy Director for Science & Technology at the CIA in April 1976. 

Most details about the information were redacted in the document, but Greenewald said he is determine to uncover more through further FOIA requests. 

The name of the deputy director was also redacted but records indicate that Carl Duckett served in that position at the time.  

The document states: 'We contacted A/DDS&T (Dr [redacted]) to see if he knew of any UFO program and also to answer the questions posed by [redacted]. 

'Dr [redacted] exhibited interest in [redacted] which was handcarried to his office. After a short examination of its contents Dr [redacted] advised us that he would personally look into the matter and get back to us.' 

A second document from June of 1976 appears to request an update on the review, but there is no record of the ordeal after that.  

The heavily redacted report above describes seemingly urgent UFO information being hand-delivered to an Assistant Deputy Director for Science & Technology in April 1976

CIA officials discuss the possibility that UFOs were behind a 'mysterious blast' in the small Russian town of Sasovo in 1991 

In another report, CIA officials discuss the possibility that UFOs were behind a 'mysterious blast' in the small Russian town of Sasovo - about 400 kilometers southwest of Moscow - in 1991. 

Residents reported seeing a 'fiery sphere' descend from the sky before a shockwave tore through the town, leveling an entire block. 

The report said investigators had failed to come to a conclusion about the cause of the explosion, leaving open the possibility of UFOs. 

It states: 'Some people are talking about munitions left buried since the last war, while others claim that a powerful bomb fell. A third group blame it on a meteorite, and a fourth group blame UFOs... There are people who supposedly saw a moving "fiery sphere".' 

Among the more than 700 files in the Black Vault database is this report, where CIA officials discuss the possibility that UFOs were behind a 'mysterious blast' in a small Russian town

UFO enthusiast hounds the CIA for information about a sighting at Ohio Air Force Base 

Several of the files appeared to reference the same incident, in which a possible UFO was sighted at the Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio in 1978. 

The reports refer to someone named Dr Leon Davidson who made multiple requests for information about the matter and did not appear to be getting any response. 

He is believed to be the same Dr Leon Davidson who studied UFOs for decades beginning in 1949, according to Columbia University, which was gifted a collection of the engineer's research on the subject after his death in 2007. 

One report states: '[Redacted] received a letter from Davidson [redacted] in which Davidson asked if the [redacted] tape had been analyzed at Wright Field.

'[Redacted] replied that the tape was forwarded to proper authorities for evaluation and no information was available concerning results. 

'[Redacted] then received a second letter dated 19 March from Davidson in which he said since [redacted] was not in a position to make enquires he would like the address of proper parties to make them to. 

'[Redacted] replied that he understood the proper address for forwarding information on "flying saucers" is Air Technical Intelligence Center, Wright Patterson Air Force Base. 

'Subsequently, [redacted] learned that Davidson made enquiries there. Apparently they stalled him.'

In May of that year another report asks: 'What progress has been made? This correspondence is more than a month old. I am afraid the longer we procrastinate the more fuel we add to the fire. Also, the people at Wright Field are holding their breaths awaiting advice.'

A third report, for which the date is illegible, says: 'Davidson is on our backs again. He wants a verbatim translation of the "space" message and the identification of the transmitter from which it came.'  

In a fourth report - which indicates that the case is 'closed' - the author states that Davidson was writing an article about the incident entitled: 'The Air Force and the Saucers, Part Three: The Central Intelligence Agency becomes involved with Saucers.'

It indicates that the CIA did provide Davidson with some information, but does not disclose what that information was. 

In the final report on the matter, the author indicates that the CIA will no longer be responding to Davidson's correspondence. 

Wright-Patterson AFB has long been linked to conspiracy theories about alien life, after serving as the headquarters of an Air Force program- dubbed 'Project Blue Book', which studied UFOs from 1947 to 1969.  

Over the course of those two decades the project garnered more than 12,600 reports of UFO sightings - 701 of which were never 'identified', according to the Dayton Daily News.  

Several of the files appeared to reference the same incident, in which a possible UFO was sighted at the Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio in 1978. The reports refer to someone named Dr Leon Davidson who made multiple requests for information about the matter and did not appear to be getting any response

In May of that year another report asks: 'What progress has been made?'

A third report, for which the date is illegible, says: 'Davidson is on our backs again. He wants a verbatim translation of the "space" message and the identification of the transmitter from which it came'

In a fourth report - which indicates that the case is 'closed' - the author states that Davidson was writing an article about the incident entitled: 'The Air Force and the Saucers, Part Three: The Central Intelligence Agency becomes involved with Saucers'

In the final report on the matter, the author indicates that the CIA will no longer be responding to Davidson's correspondence

UFO sighted in Morocco in 1976 

One of the most heavily-redacted documents reviewed by DailyMail.com is dated September 23, 1976, and features the words: 'To immediate director - with personal request to investigate UFO sighted in Morocco.' 

The full-page report is covered in 25 black lines that appeared to have been made directly with a pen. 

The report was first approved for release in February of 2010, a footnote indicates. 

One of the most heavily-redacted documents reviewed by DailyMail.com is dated September 23, 1976, and features the words: 'To immediate director - with personal request to investigate UFO sighted in Morocco'

Many of the files are similarly redacted to remove nearly every little detail beyond the word UFO. 

Some in the mix merely mention the keywords 'UFO', 'UAP' or 'extraterrestrial' in the context of unrelated topics, offering little to no insight about the CIA's overall knowledge about those keywords. 

For example, one document entitled 'Hypervelocity Test Techniques Discussed' describes a French study of a force which could be used to deflect UFOs - defined in the document as 'undesired flying objects' - not unidentified ones. 

Another document joined the pile because it features a newspaper column about a Bosnian fugitive, in which the author mocks the Pentagon's failure to find the man despite 'communicating regularly with extraterrestrial beings'. 

One document entitled 'Hypervelocity Test Techniques Discussed' describes a French study of a force which could be used to deflect UFOs - defined in the document as 'undesired flying objects' - not unidentified ones

Another document joined the pile because it features a newspaper column about a Bosnian fugitive, in which the author mocks the Pentagon's failure to find the man despite 'communicating regularly with extraterrestrial beings'

'It was like pulling teeth': Greenewald recounts the 20 years he's spent fighting for access to CIA records on UFOs 

Black Vault's founder John Greenewald Jr (pictured) has spent the past two decades suing the CIA to release the records and then scanning the pages one by one

Greenewald began investigating the US government's research on UFOs when he was just 15 years old in 1996. 

He described his painstaking efforts to Motherboard on Monday, saying he filed countless Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests to unseal the records. 

'Around 20 years ago, I had fought for years to get additional UFO records released from the CIA,' Greenewald said.

'It was like pulling teeth. I went around and around with them to try and do so, finally achieving it.

'I received a large box, of a couple thousand pages, and I had to scan them in one page at a time.'

The dossier contains both the records that Greenewald requested and others that the CIA had already released publicly and compiled into a CD, which Black Vault purchased last year. 

In a blog post Greenewald noted that while the CIA claims it has released all of its UAP documents, there is no way to verify whether some documents may have been withheld.  

In a Twitter thread on Tuesday he explained how the records available on the CIA's website are incomplete, despite the agency 'giving the illusion' that everything is there. 

He posted screengrabs of a CIA site search which produced 415 results for UFO-related FOIA requests - compared to the 713 files on the Black Vault.  

In a Twitter thread on Tuesday Greenewald explained how the records available on the CIA's website are incomplete, despite the agency 'giving the illusion' that everything is there

Greenewald also emphasized how the CIA releases its records in a format that is far from user-friendly. 

'The CIA has made it incredibly difficult to use their records in a reasonable manner,' Greenewald told Motherboard.

'They offer a format that is very outdated (multi page .tif) and offer text file outputs, largely unusable, that I think they intend to have people use as a "search" tool. 

'In my opinion, this outdated format makes it very difficult for people to see the documents, and use them, for any research purpose. 

'Researchers and curious minds alike prefer simplicity and accessibility when they look at data dumps such as these.' 

Despite the inconvenience, Greenewald said thousands of people had already downloaded the archive on the first day it was posted on the Black Vault.  

He's offering the archive for free but set up a Patreon account for anyone who wants to donate money to support his past and future efforts to uncover CIA records. 

'Plain and simple, the public has a right to know,' Greenewald said. 

'When I began researching nearly 25 years ago at the age of 15, I knew there was something to this topic. Not because of viral internet hoaxes. Not because of back door meetings wherein I can’t tell you who, but I promise it was mind-blowing information. No, none of that. 

'It was simply because of the evidence that I got straight from the CIA. And the NSA. And the Air Force. And the DIA. I feel I am achieving what I set out to do. Easy access, to important material, for people to make up their own minds on what is going on.'

Greenewald (pictured) began investigating the US government's research on UFOs when he was just 15 years old in 1996. His Black Vault database is the result of countless different Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests

US intelligence faces six-month deadline to submit unclassified UFO report to Congress 

UFO detectives like Greenewald may soon have even more intel to sift through, with the upcoming deadline for US intelligence agencies to submit an unclassified report about 'unidentified aerial phenomena' to congressional intelligence and armed services committees.

The director of National Intelligence and the secretary of defense have just under six months to do so, after a stipulation in the 'committee comment' section of the Intelligence Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2021 was included in the huge bill, according to CNN.

The Senate intelligence committee's directive said that the report should be unclassified, but it can contain a classified annex. Therefore, it is unlikely to reveal the discovery of extra-terrestrial life reaching earth.

It does, however, state that the report must contain detailed analysis of UFO data and intelligence collected by the Office of Naval Intelligence, the Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force and the FBI. 

Detail of 'an interagency process for ensuring timely data collection and centralized analysis of all unidentified aerial phenomena reporting for the Federal Government' must be included, and it should designate an official responsible for that process.

A spokesperson for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence confirmed the requirement for the report to the fact-checking website Snopes. 

Navy pilots believe they spotted a UFO just off the coast in Jacksonville in 2015 (pictured)

In April last year, the Pentagon released three short videos - one from 2004 and two from 2015 - that showed 'unidentified aerial phenomena', which had earlier been confirmed to be real by the US Navy. 

The videos, recorded by infrared cameras, showed what appeared to be unidentified flying objects quickly moving across the sky.

In the background of two of the videos, service members can be heard reacting as they watch the objects, with one speculating it could be a drone.

In August, the Pentagon announced that it was setting up a task force to investigate the objects, but it is still unclear what the objects are or where they came from.

Both Pentagon officials and members of Congress have been concerned about the appearance of unidentified objects flying over US military bases, with some suggesting the objects in the video could be drones collecting intelligence.

In June last year, the Senate Intelligence Committee voted to have the Pentagon and intelligence community provide public analysis of such encounters.

This is not the first time the Pentagon has investigated aerial encounters with UFOs, having previously studied recordings of such incidents as part of a classified program launched by former Senator Harry Reid, that has since been shut down.

That program was launched in 2007 and closed in 2012, the Pentagon says, after it decided there were higher priority areas that required funding.

{ https://www.dailymail.co.uk/ }

CIA releases entire collection of UFO-related documents to truth-seeking website

By Brandon Specktor  

The 'Black Vault' documents cover everything from mysterious Russian explosions to top government officials being hand-delivered UFO intel.

U.S. Navy videos of alleged UFO sightings were declassified in 2020.

(Image: © U.S. Navy)

More than three decades' worth of government UFO records are now yours to download and peruse, thanks to the efforts of some intrepid truth-seekers.

The massive data dump includes more than 2,700 pages of UFO-related documents declassified by the CIA since the 1980s. (The U.S. government also calls them "unidentified aerial phenomena, or UAP). According to The Black Vault — an online repository of UFO-related documents operated by author John Greenwald Jr. — the documents were obtained through a long string of Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests filed over the last quarter century .

Over time, so many requests piled up that the CIA created a CD-ROM full of declassified documents, known as "The UFO collection." In mid-2020, Greenwald purchased the CD-ROM, and he recently finished uploading its contents as a series of searchable PDF files on his website. (You can find them at The Black Vault.)

• Related: Flying saucers to mind control: 22 declassified military & CIA secrets

The documents cover dozens of incidents, including the 1976 account of the government’s then-Assistant Deputy Director for Science & Technology being hand-delivered a mysterious piece of intelligence on a UFO, to the description of a mysterious midnight explosion in a small Russian town.

"Although the CIA claims this is their 'entire' [declassified] collection, there may be no way to entirely verify that," Greenwald wrote in a statement on The Black Vault website. "Research by The Black Vault will continue to see if there are additional documents still uncovered within the CIA's holdings."

The data dump arrives months before officials from the U.S. Department of Defense and intelligence agencies are due to appear before Congress and spill their guts on everything they know about UFOs, the New York Post reported. A provision attached to the nearly 5,600-page COVID-29 relief bill passed in late December 2020 requires the agencies, "to submit a report within 180 days … to the congressional intelligence and armed services committees on unidentified aerial phenomena."

Repository of sensitive government intelligence, or bootleg 'X-Files' DVD? This CD-ROM actually contains nearly 2,700 pages of declassified CIA documents, according to the Black Vault.  (Image credit: The Black Vault)

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The provision follows a banner year for UFOs, when startling footage of an unidentified object darting around several U.S. Navy planes in 2004 and 2015 was finally declassified.

While the new data dump is significant, it's also just a drop in the bucket of The Black Vault's enormous archive. The website reportedly contains more than 2.2 million pages of UFO-related material in its archive, which Greenwald obtained through more than 10,000 FOIA requests. According to the Vault website, Greenwald filed his first FOIA request in 1996, when he was just 15 years old.

• Originally published on Live Science.

{ https://www.space.com/ }

Artist’s concept of a red giant star scorching a planet in orbit around it.

Image via ESO/ L. Calçada.

Earth exists thanks to our sun, having formed in orbit around it from a huge cloud of gas and dust in space, 4.5 billion years ago. Likewise, the sun will ruin Earth for living things, some 5 billion years from now. As the sun evolves, it’ll expand to become a red giant star and fry our planet to a cinder. What’s more, the death of the Earth will happen against a backdrop of change on a galactic scale. Our Milky Way galaxy and the Andromeda galaxy will be in the midst of a colossal collision that’ll forever alter our galactic home in space.

Our sun is a G-type star currently about halfway through its life cycle. This type of star is very stable for the majority of its life, quietly fusing hydrogen into helium in its interior for billions of years. One day, the hydrogen in the sun’s interior will be depleted. At that point, the inward pressure of gravity will win out over the outward pressure of the sun’s internal fusion, until the sun heats up enough to start fusing helium. At that point, the sun will balloon outward to become a red giant star.

• EarthSky lunar calendars are back in stock! We’re guaranteed to sell out. Get one while you can!

As the sun heats up and expands, its outer layers will envelop the innermost planets, Mercury and Venus. The outer edge of the sun will grow to reach roughly the orbit of Earth. Our planet’s water and atmosphere will boil away, leaving nothing behind but a charred, lifeless rock. Mars will take a while to heat up, but, eventually, Mars will be outside the habitable zone for humans, too. At that point, the moons of the outer planets – like Jupiter and Saturn – will be the only places left in our solar system for human colonies.

But these locations, too, will be only temporary fixes in the search for a new home.

As our sun expands into the red giant phase, the habitable zone around it will be pushed outward in the solar system.

Image via NASA/ Wendy Kenigsburg.

The red giant phase of the sun might continue for a billion years or so, but eventually the helium will run out, too. Then the sun will blow off an envelope of gas. Astronomers peering through telescopes in other star systems will see our sun as what we call a planetary nebula, a great shell of gas surrounding a dying star. Ultimately that shell will dissipate off into space, and what’s left of our sun will become a white dwarf star.

Earth’s astronomers can look outward into space to glimpse of Earth’s future. For example, 400 light-years away, a star known to astronomers as SDSS J1228+1040 is a white dwarf with its gas nebula funeral shroud, and within it astronomers have found the signature of a planetesimal still orbiting its home sun long after its calamitous death.

And what of the Milky Way galaxy itself, the great island of stars containing our Earth and sun? By the time our sun is ballooning into the red giant phase – long before it settles down as a white dwarf – the Milky Way itself will be undergoing a long process of inevitable collision with the giant spiral galaxy next-door, the Andromeda galaxy. The last humans on Earth – if any humans are left a couple of billion years from now – will see the Andromeda galaxy growing larger and brighter in the night sky. It’s currently barely visible to the unaided eye from a dark-sky site. But, a couple of billion years from now, the Andromeda galaxy will be a breathtaking, unmistakable whirl of stars easily visible in the night sky of any and all Earthly inhabitants.

As Andromeda and the Milky Way move closer to each other, the Andromeda galaxy’s great mass will begin to affect the stars in our Milky Way. Our galaxy is wide and flat, like a pancake. We on Earth currently see its stars on a dark August evening as a great hazy band across the sky. But as the gravity of Andromeda distorts their paths, the Milky Way’s stars will be strewn across our sky.

It may seem incredible, but stars within galaxies are so far apart that even when the two giant spirals collide there will be few fireworks from collisions between stars. However, gas clouds in the two galaxies will likely collide, forming vast conglomerations of new stars.

This series of illustrations shows the predicted merger between our Milky Way galaxy and the neighboring Andromeda galaxy.

Image via NASA.

Ultimately, the Milky Way and Andromeda galaxies will settle down to form a new massive blob-shaped galaxy. By this point, Earth, our sun and the rest of our solar system might be in some entirely new location with respect to the galactic center. At present, Earth lies some 25,000 light-years from the center of the Milky Way. After Andromeda and the Milky Way merge, astronomers believe our home in space will have been ripped outward to a new galactic orbit some 100,000 light-years from the center of the new, large Andromeda-Milky Way combo galaxy. As theorist T.J. Cox of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics said:

You could say that we’re being sent to a retirement home in the country.

And what will be the fate of humanity? That’s impossible to say. If it survives, humanity’s future will depend on our ability to travel away from our dying sun and set up camp elsewhere.

Fortunately, we have a few billion years to figure out how to accomplish this monumental task.

• Bottom line: What will be Earth’s fate? Earth is bound to become a dry, scorched rock, as our sun becomes a red giant star. What’s more, as the Milky Way and Andromeda galaxies collide, our sun and Earth (and the rest of our solar system) are expected to be hurled outward, away from the galactic center, to the outskirts of a new large galaxy created in the collision.

RELATED VIDEOS, selected and posted by peter2011

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2020’s sea ice minimum in the Arctic Ocean came on September 15. Arctic sea ice on that date covered an area of 1.44 million square miles (3.74 million square km). It was the 2nd-lowest Arctic sea ice extend since modern record keeping began. How do we know? Scientists at NASA and the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) determined 2020’s sea ice minimum via an analysis of satellite data. 

See an animation of this image, from NASA’s Scientific Visualization Studio.

• Originally published by NASA Earth Observatory on January 6, 2021

Throughout 2020, the Arctic Ocean and surrounding seas endured several notable weather and climate events. In spring, a persistent heatwave over Siberia provoked the rapid melting of sea ice in the East Siberian and Laptev Seas. By the end of summer, Arctic Ocean ice cover melted back to the second-lowest minimum extent on record. In autumn, the annual freeze-up of sea ice got off to a late and sluggish start.

But any single month, season, or even year, is just a snapshot in time. The long view is more telling, and it is troubling.

Image via NASA Earth Observatory.

Forty years of satellite data show that 2020 was just the latest in a decades-long decline of Arctic sea ice. In a review of scientific literature, polar scientists Julienne Stroeve and Dirk Notz outlined some of these changes: In addition to shrinking ice cover, melting seasons are getting longer and sea ice is losing its longevity.

The longer melting seasons are the result of increasingly earlier starts to spring melting and ever-later starts to freeze-up in autumn. The map above shows trends in the onset of freeze-up from 1979 through 2019. Averaged across the entire Arctic Ocean, freeze-up is happening about a week later per decade. That equates to nearly one month later since the start of the satellite record in 1979.

The change is part of a cycle called the ice-albedo feedback. Open ocean water absorbs 90% of the sun’s energy that falls on it; bright sea ice reflects 80% of it. With greater areas of the Arctic Ocean exposed to solar energy early in the season, more heat can be absorbed, a pattern that reinforces melting. Until that heat escapes to the atmosphere, sea ice cannot not regrow.

Image via NASA Earth Observatory.

The chart above demonstrates another way the Arctic is changing: the average age of sea ice is becoming younger. At the start of the satellite record, much of the ice covering the Arctic Ocean was greater than four years old. Today, most of the ice covering the Arctic Ocean is “first-year ice,” ice that forms in winter and does not survive a single summer melt season. (After sea ice reaches its minimum extent each September, the remaining ice graduates to second-year status.)

Dominated by thin first-year ice, along with some older ice thinned by warm ocean water, the Arctic sea ice pack is becoming more fragile. In summer 2020, ships easily navigated the Northern Sea Route in ice-free waters, and even made it to the North Pole without much resistance.

Fortunately, summers are still not entirely ice-free. Stroeve, a researcher at University of Manitoba, said:

We’ve been hovering for some time around 4 million square kilometers [1.5 million square miles] of Arctic sea ice each summer.

She added that she intends to examine which conditions and processes could push sea ice to the next “precipitous drop,” when the extent of summer ice cover drops to a new benchmark of 3 million square kilometers (1 million square miles).

Ice floes in the Laptev Sea, which lies north of the Siberian coast. This part of the Arctic Ocean is usually a factory for new sea ice. But sea ice in the Laptev Sea reached a record low in 2020.

Image via Olenyok/ Shutterstock.

• Bottom line: Satellite data show that 2020 was just the latest in a 40-year-long decline of Arctic sea ice.
• Source: Changing state of Arctic sea ice across all seasons
• Via Earth Observatory

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