Will 2016 Be the Year Elon Musk Reveals his Mars Colonial Transporter Plans?

There are several space stories we’re anticipating for 2016 but one story might appear — to some — to belong in the realm of science fiction: sometime in the coming year Elon Musk will likely reveal his plans for colonizing Mars.

Early in 2015, Musk hinted that he would be publicly disclosing his strategies for the Mars Colonial Transport system sometime in late 2015, but then later said the announcement would come in 2016.

“The Mars transport system will be a completely new architecture,” Musk said during a Reddit AMA in January 2015, replying to a question about the development of MCT. “[I] am hoping to present that towards the end of this year. Good thing we didn’t do it sooner, as we have learned a huge amount from Falcon and Dragon.”

Big Rockets

As far as any details, Musk only said that he wants to be able to send 100 colonists to Mars at a time, and the “goal is 100 metric tons of useful payload to the surface of Mars. This obviously requires a very big spaceship and booster system.”

He has supposedly dubbed the rocket the BFR (for Big F’n Rocket) and the spaceship similarly as BFS.

He has supposedly dubbed the rocket the BFR (for Big F’n Rocket) and the spaceship similarly as BFS.

And he wants it to be reusable, which Musk and SpaceX have said is the key to making human life multiplanetary. The recent successful return and vertical landing of the Falcon 9’s first stage makes that closer to reality than ever.

While SpaceX has no publicly shared concept illustrations as of yet, a few enthusiasts on the web have shared their visions of MCT, such as this discussion on Reddit , and the drawing below by engineer John Gardi, who recently proposed his ideas for the MCT on Reddit.

A sketch shows how the top section of the Mars Colonial Transporter might be configured.

Credit: John Gardi.

Most online discussions describe the MCT as an interplanetary ferry, with the spaceship built on the ground and launched into orbit in one piece and perhaps refueled in low Earth orbit. The transporter could be powered by Raptor engines, which are cryogenic methane-fueled rocket engines rumored to be under development by SpaceX.

The future line-up of Falcon rockets is compared to the famous NASA Saturn V. The first Falcon Heavy launch is planned for 2015. Raptor engines may replace and upgrade Heavy then lead to Falcon X, Falcon X Heavy and Falcon XX. The Falcon X 1st stage would have half the thrust of a Saturn V, Falcon X Heavy and XX would exceed a Saturn V’s thrust by nearly 50%. (Illustration Credit: SpaceX, 2010)

The Challenge of Landing Large Payloads on Mars

While the big rocket and spaceship may seem to be a big hurdle, an even larger challenge is how to land a payload of 100 metric tons with 100 colonists, as Musk proposes, on Mars surface.

As we’ve discussed previously, there is a “Supersonic Transition Problem” at Mars. Mars’ thin atmosphere does not provide an enough aerodynamics to land a large vehicle like we can on Earth, but it is thick enough that thrusters such as what was used by the Apollo landers can’t be used without encountering aerodynamic problems such as sheering and incredible stress on the vehicle.

Another fan-based illustration of the modular sections of John Gardi’s MCT concept sitting on the surface of Mars.

Credit: George Worthington. Used by permission.

“Unique to Mars, there is a velocity-altitude gap below Mach 5,” explained Rob Manning from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in our article from 2007.“The gap is between the delivery capability of large entry systems at Mars and the capability of super-and sub-sonic decelerator technologies to get below the speed of sound.”

With current landing technology, a large, heavy human-sized vehicle streaking through Mars’ thin, volatile atmosphere only has about 90 seconds to slow from Mach 5 to under Mach 1, change and re-orient itself from a being a spacecraft to a lander, deploy parachutes to slow down further, then use thrusters to translate to the landing site and gently touch down.

90 seconds is not enough time, and the airbags used for rovers like Spirit and Opportunity and even the Skycrane system used for the Curiosity rover can’t be scaled up enough to land the size of payloads needed for humans on Mars.

Artist’s rendering of a hypersonic inflatable aerodynamic decelerator technology concept.

Credit: NASA.

NASA has been addressing this problem to a small degree, and has tested out inflatable aeroshells that can provide enough aerodynamic drag to decelerate and deliver larger payloads. Called Hypersonic Inflatable Aerodynamic Decelerator (HIAD), this is the best hope on the horizon for landing large payloads on Mars.

The Inflatable Reentry Vehicle Experiment (IRVE-3) was tested successfully in 2012. It was made of high tech fabric and inflated to create the shape and structure similar to a mushroom. When inflated, the IRVE-3 is about 10-ft (3 meter) in diameter, and is composed of a seven giant braided Kevlar rings stacked and lashed together – then covered by a thermal blanket made up of layers of heat resistant materials. These kinds of aeroshells can also generate lift, which would allow for additional slowing of the vehicle.

“NASA is currently developing and flight testing HIADs — a new class of relatively lightweight deployable aeroshells that could safely deliver more than 22 tons to the surface of Mars,” said Steve Gaddis, GCD manager at NASA’s Langley Research Center in a press release from NASA in September 2015.

NASA is expecting that a crewed spacecraft landing on Mars would weigh between 15 and 30 tons, and the space agency is looking for ideas through its Big Idea Challenge for how to create aeroshells big enough to do the job.

With current technology, landing the 100 metric tons that Musk envisions might be out of reach. But if there’s someone who could figure it out and get it done, Elon Musk just might be that person.

Additional reading: Alan Boyle on Geekwire, GQ interview of Elon Musk.

{ http://www.universetoday.com/ }

08-01-2016 om 17:11 geschreven door peter  

‘Best piece of UFO evidence in years’ filmed by NASA as Tim Peake docked with ISS

THIS footage of the International Space Station apparently surrounded by Unidentifed Flying Objects (UFOs) this week as been branded “the best piece of evidence in years” for the existence of aliens.

By Jon Austin

The footage has caused a storm after being uploaded on a video by YouTube channel Mister Enigma entitled “UFOs seeen everywhere during Soyuz docking on NASA USTREAM.”

It shows a portion of the docking between the Russian Soyuz TMA-19M spacecraft and International Space Station (ISS) on December 15, when Tim Peake became the first British astronaut to board the space station.

In the video, the narrator, who speaks with a creepy robotic voice, says: “This video, which was taken by the ISS on Tuesday during the docking between the Souyez spacecraft and the ISS is the best piece of UFO evidence captured in years.

“Dozens of UFOs can be seen in the background – some zipping off in the distance, others gently floating by, and even one gigantic doughnut-shaped UFO that seems to inspect the event.

“Once the camera zooms out the sun seems to light them up.”

In the video, the narrator, who speaks with a creepy robotic voice, says: “This video, which was taken by the ISS on Tuesday during the docking between the Soyuz spacecraft and the ISS is the best piece of UFO evidence captured in years.

“Dozens of UFOs can be seen in the background – some zipping off in the distance, others gently floating by, and even one gigantic doughnut-shaped UFO that seems to inspect the event.

“Once the camera zooms out the sun seems to light them up.”

Several objects are seen passing the ISS in the clip including the doughnut (ringed)

The new footage has been likened to the “Tether UFO incident” of 1996, when a satellite which was tethered to a space shuttle broke off.

When it was later filmed by the astronauts on board, it appeared to be swarmed by hundreds of “UFOs” that appeared like organisms swimming in a sea.

The narrator continued: “How crazy is this?

“The footage is like the infamous UFO tether video that took place in the 90s, and it’s very strange that it aired live and did not get cut off like most ufo’s that are seen on the NASA screen.”

During the tether incident footage the objects are brushed off by the astronauts as being “some of the debris that follows us being caught by sunlight.

Others have said these weird anomalies in NASA space videos are ice particles or just lens flares.

Source: Express UK

{ http://www.theeventchronicle.com/ }

08-01-2016 om 16:50 geschreven door peter  

Scientists Figured Out Where Aliens Might Be Hiding — And How We Could Talk to Them

At the edges of our galaxy, tens of thousands of light-years away, massive, dense clusters of stars glom together like a humongous interstellar house party. This is where, according to astrophysicists from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, we might find intelligent alien life.

The CFA's lead author, Rosanne DiStefano made this hypothesis at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society on Wednesday, and — believe it or not — her logic checks out.

Let's say finding intelligent life is a hypothetical one-in-a-million chance. By the center's estimation, there are 150 globular clusters in our Milky Way galaxy, each holding roughly a million stars per 100 million light years. Plus, they're old — like, 10 billion years old — and stable, meaning they didn't get nailed by cataclysmic, planet-destroying gamma-ray bursts..

It could be that these globular clusters are full of planets twice as old as our own, that had billions more years to develop. The Fermi paradox, a theory of why alien life hasn't found us yet, refers to these clusters as Planet X.

To date, according to the center, only one planet has been found in a globular cluster. This may be because, according to current theories, the globular clusters in our galaxy don't have the heavy elements to build stable planets.

But DiStefano and her colleague, Alak Ray from the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research in Mumbai, said it's premature to say there aren't planets in these clusters. Exoplanets, or planets that orbit a stars other than our own, have been found near stars that have just one-tenth of the heavy elements of our own sun.

In fact, if these globular clusters do have planets, they're probably extremely close together. That means those planets could communicate much easier with one another than with Earth. "We call it the 'globular cluster opportunity,'" DiStefano said on Wednesday. "Sending a broadcast between the stars wouldn't take any longer than a letter from the U.S. to Europe in the 18th century."

So there could be a chance that Earth is missing out on a huge game of galactic Telephone that's being played on the edge of the Milky Way, with intelligent societies working together to noticeably expand farther into the universe. But according to Robin Hanson, a research associate at Oxford University's Future of Humanity Institute, that would've happened by now.

"If there were life thousands of light years away, it could've been around for millions or billions of years," he told Mic. "If someone is alive out there, they would've long since developed as much as they can. If they didn't spread out [to Earth], it means they're stuck. And just being near other civilizations [in the globular cluster] doesn't make them any less stuck, no matter how much they developed economically and socially."

That doesn't mean we couldn't communicate. 

The issue is that communication is a two-way street. Two civilizations need to look for each other at the same time, know exactly where the other one is and know how to contact it.

"If everyone is looking in random directions, the chance of coordinating communication is small," Hanson told Mic. "You have to find another coordination structure."

-Hanson told Mic about a theory for sending a signal to an alien race, as long as that race has a particular human tendency. It involves really, really bright lights — in this case, a supernova.

.

A supernova is a rare event in which a star violently explodes at the end of its life, giving off a huge amount of light and energy. A civilization would need to turn that flash into what you might call a cataclysmic carrier pigeon.

"Right after you see a supernova, you piggyback off that and send a signal in the same direction," Hanson told Mic. "When you see that light, it will move past the cluster. So there will be that burst of light, and right behind it, the signal. You're going to be waiting a while, but when you see that, we can use it to figure out how to talk effectively."

But keep this in mind when you're thinking about potential planets on the edge of the galaxy. The Milky Way galaxy is roughly 100,000 light-years across. The nearest globular clusters, NGC 6397 and Messier 4, are about 7,200 light-years away. So if we try to send communications to any of the who-knows-how-many planets within them, it would take 7,200 years to receive.

So if you read Mic, aliens, please pick up some of our galactic slack and say hi — we promise we won't try to kill off your entire species.

{ http://news.yahoo.com/ }

08-01-2016 om 16:34 geschreven door peter  

      By John Wenz

 

Whether or not you believe in Earthly visitation by alien beings, it's undeniable that UFOs have, at the least, become an essential part of modern day folklore. And in a bevy of stories that have added on to that treasure trove of fantastic tales, there's one document that, according to Atlas Obscura, has become the most popular FBI file among UFO truthers. 

The document is just called "Guy Hottel," named after an agent in an FBI field office. It's publicly available on the FBI Vault website, among a handful of other UFO and related cases. In one page, it describes an incident relayed second or third hand of a three separate but related UFO crashes around 1950 in New Mexico, with three alien bodies described as having a "human shape" but only being three feet tall, clothed in a metallic fabric. "Each body was bandaged in a manner similar to the blackout suits used by speed fliers and test pilots," Hottel said. The craft itself was described as being 50 feet in diameter. 

The agency denies that it's related to Roswell, or that they even seriously investigated it. "Finally, the Hottel memo does not prove the existence of UFOs; it is simply a second- or third-hand claim that we never investigated," it says. "Some people believe the memo repeats a hoax that was circulating at that time, but the Bureau's files have no information to verify that theory."

• FBI

As Atlas Obscura points out, it's likely connected to a sort of space age snakeoil peddler namedSilas Newton, whose claims were usually to spurious mining operations along with a series of UFO crash claims. According to TopSecretWriters, Newton finally got caught in 1970 after just under 20 years of FBI investigations for selling land to out-of-state speculators, claiming it had precious ore. Of course, that land just happened to be some of the land he claimed UFOs crashed on. The memo could be related to Newton's Aztec UFO hoax, one that Newton and an accomplice duped journalist Frank Scully into believing.

Though Newton wasn't tied to the Roswell incident, it's interesting to note that Roswell itself hadfallen into obscurity from 1947 until 1978 when Stanton Friedman resurrected it. Most investigations into the matter, after the initial crash of the terrestrial experimental aircraft, took place at that time from second and third hand accounts. In fact, the reason for the crash at Roswell was declassified in the early 1970s, before Friedman's investigations into the matter.

The FBI rarely touched UFO cases at the time, with the Air Force handling most investigations under Project Bluebook. Bluebook dug up no conclusive proof of UFOs, though a few investigations proved vexxing. 

It's also interesting to note that from the 1920s to the 1950s, New Mexico was ground zero for rocketry research. Robert Goddard carried out much of his early research there, with Nazi rocket engineer turned NASA pioneer Wehrner Von Braun further developing rocketry technology for the nascent American space program at the White Sands Missile Range. In other words, there was a lot going on in the skies of New Mexico for quite some time, and some of it was definitely coming back down from high in the skies. 

So there you have it. The Hottel memo was either something so spurious that the FBI passed on investigating it (only relaying it to J. Edgar Hoover because of the director's paranoia on all things) or obvious evidence of a massive cover-up. But given the actors involved, it's safe to say it's the latter. That won't kill it off for sure, of course. Hillary Clinton allegedly wants to "get to the bottom" of UFO investigations if elected president. Of course, as with Area 51 and Goddard's work, it could all just be highly classified weapons testing. 

The biggest proof of alien life is unlikely to come from Freedom of Information Act releases of long declassified documents. Instead, it'll probably come from a NASA mission to Mars or Europa, or maybe, just maybe, the Breakthrough Listen Initiative that pumped unprecedented amounts of money into the scientific search for technologically advanced life. But who knows. An alien craft could just fall out of the sky. But it's not likely. 

Source: Atlas Obscura

{ http://www.popularmechanics.com/ }

08-01-2016 om 16:25 geschreven door peter  

NASA verspreidt adembenemend panorama van duinen op Mars - HLN.be

Bron: NASA, National Geographic

© NASA.

Tijdens zijn weg naar de top van Mount Sharp heeft Marsrover Curiosity even de tijd genomen om een adembenemende panoramafoto te maken  van de Bagnold-duinen. De duinen bestaan uit een strook zwart zand op de noordwestelijke flank van de berg.

Het panorama is samengesteld uit meerdere foto's, die de Curiosity midden december nam. Volgens de Amerikaanse ruimtevaartorganisatie NASA zal de Marsrover minstens enkele weken in het gebied doorbrengen, om duidelijkheid te scheppen over de werking van winden op Mars.

Satellietbeelden hebben onthuld dat de duinen op Mars elk jaar een meter verschuiven. De wind doet het zand op de helling van Mount Sharp belanden, waar het zich opstapelt tot er steile duinen ontstaan. Daarna schuift het zand als een mini-lawine naar beneden. De duin die op deze foto te zien is, is ongeveer 5 meter hoog.

08-01-2016 om 11:21 geschreven door peter  

Very Strange UFO Sightings that could be real!

The 1965 Sighting In Kecksburg, Pennsylvania

You know you’ve made it in the world of mysterious alien encounters when people refer to your UFO sighting as a bona fide “incident.” Such is the case of the 1965 Kecksburg, Pennsylvania encounter, in which multiple people claimed to have witnessed something crashing into the woods near the town not far from Pittsburgh.

People who saw it claimed the object that fell from the sky was roughly the size of a Volkswagen Beetle, and say that almost immediately after it crashed to earth; the US army arrived and roped off the area. The official report is that it was a meteor crashing down into the woods, though obviously most of the folks who were present to see the object for themselves remained skeptical of this explanation.

To this day the case remains a mystery, a good evidence of a real UFO sighting.

The very strange 1964 sighting in Socorro, New Mexico

One of the most famous UFO sightings in modern United States history took place in the town of Socorro, New Mexico, back in 1964 with the chief witness being none other than a police officer named Lonnie Zamora. Zamora was in pursuit of a speeding car when he saw an object in the sky, shaped like an oval and bearing a bizarre red insignia on its side.

He claims to have seen this object rise from the ground and take off into the distance, and his story drew tremendous media and government attention, including leading to the CIA filing a report on the incident. Zamora came to be known as something of a kook, however, and retired from the police force shortly after the incident.

Case unsolved: The official police reports released 30 years after the event ask more questions than it solves!

The strange mystery of the 1991 sighting in Mexico City

In July of 1991, people living in Mexico City reportedly spotted something strange in the sky at a time when they were expecting to see nothing more or less than a solar eclipse.

However, they were met with something far more out of the ordinary, with numerous people saying they saw an unidentified flying object , with actual journalists reportedly having captured this bizarre flying object on video when trying to film the eclipse. Since this time, there have been numerous reports of UFO’s in the area, but none more peculiar than the UFO spotted that summer by multiple people looking from various positions in the huge city. A few months later, a similar UFO was spotted during an air show in the area, but no explanation has ever been offered.

The shocking sighting of 1991 in Ontario, Canada

In the town of West Carleton, Ontario, a woman named Diane Labenek claimed to have seen an unidentified flying object above a field near her home after hearing her dogs barking. Shortly after the ship took off and vanished, she claimed that a government helicopter appeared at the scene, quickly investigating before heading off in the same direction as the UFO, though there are of course no records of this. However, a few months later, a UFO researcher named Bob Oeschler received a package that included supposed military documents and a videotape featuring the same exact UFO that Labenek had supposedly seen.

All of this is unconfirmed, of course, but makes this one of the most peculiar unsolved UFO sightings in recent history. It is believed to have most likely been a hoax, but it’s still too difficult to determine just who could have perpetrated the hoax, or why.

The odd sighting of 1967 in Manitoba, Canada

Another of the most bizarre supposed UFO sightings in modern history took place at Falcon Lake in Manitoba, Canada, and involved a man named Stephen Michalak. Michalak was a prospector who claims to have encountered not one, but two UFO’s, and after investigating the objects, he was blasted with some sort of hot gas from an exhaust vent that left him with bizarre markings on his midsection and led to his being hospitalized. This remains one of the most bizarre cases of a UFO sighting on record simply because it’s one of the few in which the person who claims to have made contact with alien life suffered a very real, very strange injury.

He suffered from nausea, headaches, and the odd burn markings in a very distinct grid shape across his abdomen. He was probably just into something super kinky, but neither he nor we can come up with a reasonable explanation, so let’s stick with a close encounter for no

{ http://coolinterestingstuff.com/ }

08-01-2016 om 00:27 geschreven door peter  

OVNIS VS UFOS

Some highly unusual groups of aerial lights appeared over Santiago, Chile, in December, and while the exact date of the incident isn't known, a video caught the objects moving around in very interesting patterns.

After looking at the two-part video, it's easy to wonder why only one person captured the event and from only one vantage point.

According to the Daily Mail, an unidentified woman videotaped the lights from her window while she and others are heard excitedly talking about what they're seeing in the sky.

The first two minutes show four long strips of hovering multiple lights (seen above). Then, one by one, the strips move slowly away from each other. As they do this, you can see smaller, flashing lights on each of them -- they look almost like aircraft on a landing trajectory to an airport.

Here's the complete video:

The second half of the video shows up to seven individual lights or orbs that enter the scene from right in a straight line and appear to come around in a long circle, heading back to the right and out of the picture. The following image is from that formation.

OVNIS VS UFOS

Online comments and explanations for these alleged UFOs included drones, planes, cars coming down a background hill, Chinese lanterns, window reflections and the ever-popular digital editing.

"I found that, for the first part of the video where you see the several sets of four lights traveling in a line, also has within it blinking strobes in typical aircraft strobe patterns. Perhaps it was part of a viral stunt over Santiago," said image and video analyst Marc Dantonio.

"My bet is that it's a light array hanging from ordinary aircraft or from drones. Confirmation of sightings from other locations could tell us if it's more likely aircraft or drone," Dantonio told HuffPost in an email. He's an expert in computer-generated imagery and has been commissioned to create special working models for such clients as the U.S. Joint Chiefs in Washington, Congress, the U.S. Navy and the Smithsonian Institution.

Dantonio noticed that the strip lights in the Chile video tended to sag under their own weight, "slanting slightly downward in the opposite direction of overall travel. I felt that, watching this, I was seeing a situation much like the aircraft that tow those big banners. In those cases, the banner sags and is lower than the altitude of the aircraft. All you need is wind resistance and forward motion."

The video expert also suggests that, where the lights appear to hover, they're more likely heading directly away from you or toward you -- always in some sort of forward motion.

And what about the second part of the video with the individual lights?

"As they make their curved path, you see the light brighten up a lot," Dantonio observes. "This will happen if someone attaches a light fixture to a drone or an aircraft and turns directly toward the camera and points more or less directly at it. So it could be an LED fixture with lights. I also see strobing lights on these, as well, which are common on drones."

"For now," he concludes, "it appears to be a human-made hoax."

Reporting on the UFO Sightings Daily website, Scott Waring takes all of this up a notch.

"This UFO event is not unknown to Santiago, but is actually a yearly thing, when fleets of UFOs leave the underground base in the mountains along Santiago. It is a yearly event for aliens."

So...what exactly does that mean? ETs pick this time of year to fly south for the winter? 

What do you think? 

{ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/weird-news/ }

07-01-2016 om 23:43 geschreven door peter  

STANFORD PHYSICIST REMINDS US THAT WE HAVE PHYSICAL EVIDENCE OF UFOS

Please scroll down for video 1.1K Peter Sturrock is an emeritus professor of applied physics at Stanford University and one of the very few scientists who has publicly expressed a great deal of interest in UFOs and acted on that interest by twice surveying colleagues on the subject which resulted in some very surprising findings. He is also unambiguous on one particular category of UFO evidence which he happens to know a little bit about . . . . radar reports.

“Yes – radar is physical evidence,” Sturrock stated in an email exchange he was generous enough to grant me.

Professor Sturrock’s involvement with radar dates back to World War II. While studying mathematics at Cambridge University, he interrupted his studies to help in the war effort and joined the Telecommunications Research Establishment in 1942, now known as the Royal Radar Establishment, where he helped develop radar systems.

Skeptics commenting on the UFO phenomenon often claim that a major problem with UFOs is the only evidence are witness sightings, claim they are unreliable and cite a lack of physical evidence. While that is often the case, there are notable exceptions where physical evidence does exist in the form of radar reports and they corroborate the accounts of multiple credible witnesses. There have been a number of famous UFO cases that have involved radar reports and two of the most famous contemporary incidents are the JAL Alaska case from 1986 and the Stephenville, Texas sightings of 2008.

On November 17, 1986, a Japan Air Lines 747 cargo jet, piloted by Captain Kenju Terauchi, was flying westward near Mt. McKinley when he spotted a UFO. “Then there was a kind of reverse thrust, and the lights became dazzlingly bright. Our cockpit lit up. The thing was flying as if there was no such thing as gravity. It sped up, then stopped, then flew at our speed, in our direction, so that to us it looked like it was standing still. The next instant it changed course. There’s no way a jumbo could fly like that. If we tried, it’d break apart in mid-air. In other words, the flying object had overcome gravity,” Terauchi said.

Terauchi and his crew had the sighting but John Callahan, the FAA Division Chief of the Accidents and Investigations branch, had the data. The radar report covered more than a half hour. Callahan states in the following video interview, “As far as I’m concerned, I saw a UFO chase a Japanese 747 across the sky for over half an hour on radar.”

He goes on to say that members of President Reagan’s Scientific Study Team, the FBI and the CIA he met with about the incident expressed excitement at the data.

The Stephenville, Texas case of January 2008 featured dozens of residents of the Texas town and its’ surroundings sighting UFOs. Some reported aircraft the size of a football field and larger. Freedom Of Information Act requests were quickly sent to the FAA, National Weather Service and local Air Force bases by radar expert Glen Schulze and Robert Powell, MUFON Director of Research, seeking radar data for January 8.

In their summary, Schulze and Powell wrote, “The enormous size of the object, its’ complete silence and its’ ability to travel at high rates of speed and to also remain stationary or travel at slow speeds is not explained by any known aircraft. Based on approximate distance of the object and witness descriptions of degrees of sky covered by the object indicated an object closer to 1000 feet in size. Twice, radar picked up an unknown object flying at 1900-2100 mph.”

They discussed their findings in the CNN interview below and the full radar report is available at this link.

I also asked Professor Sturrock if he had a favorite UFO case and he replied, “The Coyne helicopter case.”

On October 18, 1973, the four-man crew of an Army Reserve helicopter heading towards Cleveland from Columbus had an otherworldly encounter with a UFO at about 10:30 PM as they were flying near Mansfield, Ohio.

“This craft, from the angle that we saw it, was cigar-shaped. It had no wings, no vertical or horizontal stabilizer, was approximately 60 feet long, 15-20 feet in height. We were at 1,700 feet, then this craft began to move slowly to the west away from us. At this time, I was worried we were going to hit the ground, and I looked at my altimeter and our helicopter was at 3,500 feet, climbing 1,000 feet a minute with no changes in the control. We went from 1,700 feet to 3,500 feet in a matter of seconds and never knew it!,” Lawrence Coyne, the commander of the helicopter recalled.

There were civilian witnesses on the ground as well.

“I had driven a few blocks from my house and was driving north on Paul Boulevard. I stopped the car once I saw how close the UFO was above the tree line over-looking Sunset Park. The chopper was beneath my view. Here in plain view was the UFO, green light on the front, white light and a red light on the rear on a nearly sixty-foot long dark metallic-grey object that had the appearance of a cigar shaped stogie. I sat in my car marveling at its appearance. It made no sound. Suddenly the UFO shot off towards the northwest and in literally seconds it was the size of a star in the distance. Even faster, the object disappeared from sight.” said Bill Carver, brother of Jim Carver, the author of the article linked above.

Not surprisingly, skeptic Phil Klass attempted to explain the case away but the credibility of the witnesses involved and the detail of their reports render his explanation implausible.

“Any theory of the object’s being a meteor (UFO skeptic Philip Klass maintains that the object was a “fireball of the Orionid meteor shower”) can readily be rejected on the basis of:

      (1) the duration of the event (an estimated 300 seconds);

    (2) the marked deceleration and hard-angle maneuver of the object at closest approach;

       (3) the precisely defined shape of the object; and

    (4) the horizon-to-horizon flight path. The possibility of a high-performance aircraft likewise is untenable when one examines the positions and colors of the lights with respect to the flight path of the object. To have presented the reported configurations, and been in accordance with FAA regulations, an aircraft would have had to be flying sideways, either standing on its tail, tail-to to the helicopter, or upside-down head-on.”

Below is a segment about the case from the 1990s TV show Sightings.

Finally, I asked the professor about his own research into UFOs. In 1973, Professor Sturrock distibuted two questionaires, one to members of the San Francisco chapter of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, the other to members of the American Astronomical Society.

The AIAA survey results indicated that “a sample of scientifically trained persons reports aerial phenomena similar to so-called “UFO reports,” and the AAS survey revealed that “a small fraction (of order 5%) are likely to report varied and puzzling observations, not unlike so-called “UFO reports” made by the general public,” according to the professor.

He also noted that, “if you want to find out whether scientists see UFOs you must ask them, and you probably must guarantee them anonymity. Scientists have no doubt been discouraged from taking the problem seriously by the bizarre nature of some of the reports and emphasis upon the “extraterrestrial hypothesis” (ETH).

” Professor Sturrock’s full papers on his findings are available here and here.

Specifically, I asked Professor Sturrock about his opinion on expanding future queries to include social scientists like historians, sociologists and psychologists, professionals who I thought might also have some interest in and be able to contribute to the UFO field.

“I would encourage similar surveys of other professions. Then the results could be compared,” he replied.

Finally, I’d like to thank Professor Sturrock for taking the time to answer my questions and I would also like to thank my good friend, fellow UFO researcher and the pride of Surrey in the UK Peter Mandeville for providing the tip that led to this article.

MORE: The Illusion Of Matter: Our Physical Reality Isnt Really Physical At All

MORE: Paul Walker's tragic death reminds us all that life is fragile 

{ http://www.disclose.tv/ }

07-01-2016 om 23:22 geschreven door peter  

Documents Show JFK Was Murdered Days After Demanding Answers About UFO’s From The CIA

ST-C232-1-63 27 June 1963 President Kennedy’s trip to Ireland. The President greets relatives at a tea held at the home of Mrs. Mary Ryan, the President’s second cousin, in Dunganstown, Ireland, the President’s ancestral homestead. President Kennedy, Mrs. Mary Ryan (flowered dress), Mrs. Josie Ryan (light blue dress), guests, others. Photograph by Cecil Stoughton, White House, in the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, Boston. (Wikimedia)

In declassified documents obtained and published by Scott C Waring, editor of UFO Sightings Daily, John F. Kennedy wrote a letter to the head of the CIA demanding their research on alien life and UFOs just days before his death.

The memo is authentic and is a confirmed declassified document released by the CIA.

JFK wrote the memo to CIA on November 12, 1963, only to be killed on November 22, 1963.

In the memo, JFK wrote: “It would be very helpful if you would have the high threat cases reviewed with the purpose of identification of bona fide as opposed to classified CIA and USAF sources. It is important that we make a clear distinction between the knowns and unknowns in the event the Soviets try to mistake our extended cooperation as a cover for intelligence gathering of their defense and space programs. I would like you to arrange a program of data sharing with NASA where unknowns are a factor.”

That same day he wrote a separate memo to NASA asking for “cooperation with the former Soviet Union on mutual outer space activities.”

The situation was obviously of great concern for JFK, because just four days later he visited NASA at Cape Canaveral, Florida, although the details and specifics of his visit are unknown.

More recently, Jimmy Carter promised during his campaign that if he was elected, he would encourage the government release “every piece of information” relating to UFOs and alien life. Coincidentally, there was actually an assassination attempt on Carter during his presidency.

The recent revelations about JFK’s interest in UFO’s have even prompted a response from Presidential Candidate Hillary Clinton, who promised to “get to the bottom” of the UFO mystery if she was elected.

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

However, UFO expert Scott C Waring says that Clinton is in over her head.

“Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton doesn’t know it yet, but she does not have the power to release such information. CIA would kill her before she could, just like they did JFK. Hillary will be too scared of the CIA to release such information,” Waring said.

This article (Documents Show JFK Was Murdered Days After Demanding Answers About UFO’s From The CIA) is free and open source. You have permission to republish this article under a Creative Commons license with attribution to the author and TrueActivist.com.

John Vibes is an author and researcher who organizes a number of large events including the Free Your Mind Conference. He also has a publishing company where he offers a censorship free platform for both fiction and non-fiction writers. You can contact him and stay connected to his work at his Facebook page. You can purchase his books, or get your own book published at his website www.JohnVibes.com.

{ http://www.trueactivist.com/ }

07-01-2016 om 23:06 geschreven door peter  

Tout l’univers sur une seule photo

Voici le genre de photo qui exige vraiment un objectif grand angle: le musicien Pablo Carlos Budassi a créé une image censée représenter l’univers observable dans sa totalité. Pour ce faire, il a utilisé un grand nombre de photos de la NASAainsi que des cartes logarithmiques établies par l’université de Princeton. Au centre, Budassi a placé  le soleil et le système solaire, entourés par plusieurs galaxies dont notre Voie Lactée et Andromède. Puis, apparaissent le fond diffus cosmologique -ou rayonnement fossile- et l’anneau de plasma, tous deux générés par le Big Bang. 

Il fallait y penser…

L’ idée pour le moins ambitieuse de ramener l’univers aux dimensions d’une seule photo lui est venue de la plus simple des manières: Pablo Carlos Budassi cherchait un cadeau pour le premier anniversaire de son fils qui devra donc attendre quelques années avant de comprendre toute la complexité de cette image. Comme le précise le site Tech Insider, les logarithmes constituent le véritable secret de fabrication de la photo: « Représenter l’univers sous une forme linéaire est peine perdue. En revanche, chaque anneau contient un large pan du cosmos à une échelle bien plus importante que le précédent ce qui permet de faire tenir l’infini dans un cercle.

Une forme parfaite qui était déjà celle privilégiée par les philosophes antiques dont Platon: « Celui qui constitua le monde (…) lui donna comme figure celle qui lui convenait et qui lui était apparentée. (…) Aussi est-ce la figure d’une sphère, dont le centre est équidistant de tous les points de la périphérie, une figure circulaire, qu’il lui donna comme s’il travaillait sur un tour -figure qui entre toutes est la plus parfaite et la plus semblable à elle-même… »

Voici l’image en grand format:lien de l’image

{ http://michelduchaine.com/ }

07-01-2016 om 22:50 geschreven door peter  

CES: Geen last van stakingen met eerste zelfvliegende passagiersdrone

 Wim Kopinga

Redacteur DataNews.be

07-01-2016 om 22:31 geschreven door peter  

Fishermans Close Encounter In Australia

(Before It's News)

07-01-2016 om 22:22 geschreven door peter  

Judy Schmidt/ESA/NASA

Globular clusters such as Terzan 1 (shown here) contain some of the oldest known stars.

Astronomers may be looking for alien life in all the wrong places. They should be hunting in the dense, old neighbourhoods of stars known as globular clusters, a new study suggests.

Until now, scientists have largely discounted the idea of finding extraterrestrial civilizations in globular clusters, which each contain thousands to millions of stars. Only one of the thousands of known extrasolar planets occurs in such a cluster, and many astronomers think that gravitational interactions among the tightly packed stars would have long ago hurled any accompanying planets into deep space.

But the proximity of all those stars may actually be an advantage for supporting life, says Rosanne Di Stefano, a theoretical astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Lots of closely packed stars could also mean lots of planetary systems not very far from one another. “If there is an advanced society in an environment like that, it could set up outposts relatively easily, because we’re dealing with distances that are so much shorter,” she says.

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With such networking, civilizations in a globular cluster might endure for billions of years, and thus be available for humans to communicate with today or in the future.

Di Stefano reported the work — which she did with Alak Ray of the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research in Mumbai, India — on 6 January at an American Astronomical Society meeting in Kissimmee, Florida.

Fertile ground?

In contrast to the defined architecture of a galaxy, globular clusters contain blobs of stars that hover together like swarms of fireflies. The Milky Way is home to about 150 globular clusters, which contain some of the oldest known stars — dating back 10 billion years or more.

In 1974, scientists beamed one of the most famous SETI (search for extraterrestrial intelligence) messages to the globular cluster M13, using the Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico. But in the decades since, globular clusters have fallen out of favour for SETI hunts. The only planet known to reside in a globular cluster orbits an ancient pulsar, an environment unfriendly for life¹. And targeted searches have failed to turn up more exoplanets in these clusters². 

But that does not mean that such planets do not exist, says Luca Pasquini, an astronomer at the European Southern Observatory in Garching, Germany. He and his colleagues found planets in an open cluster, a group of stars that is typically billions of years younger and less densely packed than globular clusters³. Astronomers had been sceptical of finding planets in open clusters until they looked, he notes; for globular clusters, he says, “there is room for very exciting discoveries” if astronomers continue to probe.

Stellar sweet spot

DiStefano and Ray began their work after thinking about the advantages that a globular cluster could offer alien life. If a civilization is close to another star system, “interstellar travel becomes a whole different thing,” DiStefano says. Civilizations could theoretically hop from star to star if threatened by cosmic dangers or extinction.

This ease of travel, combined with the ancient age of globular clusters, suggests that intelligent life could exist in these systems longer than in many other places, DiStefano adds. “The civilization might eventually be destroyed,” she adds, “but it would have a better opportunity at transferring members of itself and its knowledge.”

By analyzing the distances between stars in various globular clusters, DiStefano and Ray identified a “sweet spot” where conditions would be stable enough for a planet to form and survive for billions of years. The sweet spot varies from cluster to cluster, but corresponds to an interstellar distance of roughly to 100 to 1,000 times the Earth-Sun distance. If stars are spaced at roughly this distance within a cluster, then civilizations on planets around those stars would not have all that far to travel — or to communicate — with the next star system.

Finding these hypothetical planets is the next challenge. Di Stefano has a list of globular clusters she would like planet hunters to target, topped by one called Terzan 5 near the center of the Milky Way.

Science-fiction readers would be more than happy for her to find some. Isaac Asimov’s classic short story “Nightfall” involves a civilization that lives in a globular cluster, and then loses its collective mind when all six of its suns set at once.

Nature

 

doi:10.1038/nature.2016.19124

07-01-2016 om 22:14 geschreven door peter  

WATCH: UFO filmed entering ‘swirling portal’ over Large Hadron Collider

IT HAS been the fear of some that the mysterious Large Hadron Collider may one day accidentally create a black hole that would swallow the Earth or open a portal to another dimension through which some evil entity or aliens would emerge.

By JON AUSTIN

07-01-2016 om 22:06 geschreven door peter  

The Westall ‘UFO’ incident still remains a mystery 50 years after it occurred

The truth is out there.

It’s the mystery that has left an Australian suburb divided with witnesses wanting answers.

This year will mark the 50th anniversary of the Westall Incident and those involved are no closer to finding out what occurred on that fateful autumn morning.

It was 11.00am on April 6, 1966, when Australia’s largest mass UFO sighting took place.

Students and teachers from Westall High School and Westall State School, and members of the public claim to have watched as three metallic objects with no obvious markings manoeuvred silently through the sky.

The objects landed in a paddock adjacent to the schools before quickly flying away, leaving large circles of flattened grass with well-defined, discoloured edges behind.

In the hours following the incident, emergency services, the military and the media were in attendance trying to make sense of the baffling encounter.

Several witnesses claim sharply-dressed men in dark suits warned them from speaking about the incident.

The warnings failed to have an effect with a number of witnesses sharing their accounts.

The Dandenong Journal ran with coverage of the incident on its front page for consecutive issues and Nine News also reported the story on its 6.00pm bulletin.

However, the film canister containing the footage from the incident has since been found empty in the station archives.

Despite the initial coverage and a number of possible explanations, the incident still remains shrouded in mystery.

The front-page of the Dandenong Journal newspaper following the incident.

WITNESS ACCOUNTS

Researcher Shane Ryan has spent the last decade of his life investigating the incident and after speaking with more than 100 primary witnesses, he believes something strange occurred.

“It was so unusual ... it occurred in broad daylight and had been seen by so many people landing on the ground, before taking off again,” he told news.com.au

“The event was obviously sizeable enough to muster a big response. Whatever it was that happened led to government agencies examining the site and taking soil samples.”

Mr Ryan said he believes there has been a concerted effort to keep the incident under wraps.

“[The media] kept meeting an official wall of silence, so it just stopped being a story and only remained as a memory for those involved,” he said.

Joy Clarke was 12 and a half at the time and vividly remembers the events that occurred that day.

“I was in class when students rushed in and told us the story. We rushed down to the oval and I saw three flying saucers on that day,” she told news.com.au

“My personal belief is they weren’t of this world. They were definitely from somewhere else because I have never seen anything like it all.

“The army had arrived and the police were there. We were told we were hysterical and it didn’t happen, while men in black interviewed some of the other kids.”

More coverage from the local paper.

Source:Supplied

Terry Peck was playing cricket on the school oval when she saw the saucer and decided to chase it to Grange Reserve.

“I was about six metres away from it. It was bigger than a car and circular. I think I saw some lights underneath it,” she told the Herald Sun.

“Two girls were there before me. One was terribly upset and they were pale, really white, ghostly white. They just said they had passed out, fainted. One was taken to hospital in an ambulance.”

The now-56-year-old said no time was wasted in covering up the incident.

“We all got called to an assembly ... and they told us all to keep quiet,” she said.

“I’d absolutely just like someone to come forward from the services just to say ‘yes, it did happen, and it landed and there was a cover-up’.’’

Jacqueline Argent said she was one of the first three kids over the fence to look for the UFO landing site.

“Originally I thought it must have been an experimental-type aircraft, but nothing has emerged like that after all these years,’’ she said.

The now-58-year-old told how she was called into the headmaster’s office and interrogated by three men immediately following the incident.

“They had good-quality suits and were well-spoken,” she said.

“They said, ‘I suppose you saw little green men’.

“I spoke to my parents about it at the time and they were pretty outraged.’’

Stephen Cairns also claims to have witnessed the strange phenomenon.

The then-seven-year-old was living in Dandenong and walking to school with his mother after a dentist appointment when it occurred.

“In the distance I saw a silvery disc-like object. However, at first, it was so far away I was not quite sure what it was,” he told news.com.au

“The silvery disc-like object moved with amazing speed until it was directly above us ... it hovered for a few moments then, as quickly as it came, it flew away.”

Suesan Crosthwaite, Pauline Kelly, Terry Peck and Kevin Hurley can remember vividly the 6th of April 1966 when mysterious flying objects flew overhead and landed a short distance away.

Source:News Limited

LOGICAL EXPLANATION

Although federal and state government agencies refused to comment about the incident at the time, government documents unearthed in 2014 offer an explanation for the sighting.

The documents revealed a secret radiation-testing project known as the HIBAL program — a joint US-Australian initiative developed to monitor atmospheric radiation levels using large silver balloons equipped with sensors between 1960 and 1969.

Each balloon was equipped with a 180kg payload and was followed by a light aircraft tasked with tracking it and triggering its 12m parachute via radio signal.

Researcher Keith Basterfield said examinations of the documents held by the National Archives and former Department of Supply indicate the mysterious flying object may have been a test balloon that was blown off course after being launched from Mildura.

“My hypothesis is that the incident involved not a UFO, but a high altitude balloon, its parachute and large payload,” he told News Corp.

“The Westall object was described as being a white/silver colour which could describe the colour of an HIBAL balloon or parachute.”

After performing a close review of all available documentation, including that searched through Freedom of Information laws, Mr Basterfield believes HIBAL flight number 292 to be the real culprit.

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However, he admits he can’t be certain because the paperwork for the launches scheduled for the day before the Westall incident appears to have been lost or destroyed.

“What is strikingly missing is a memo reporting on the actual four launches for April 1966, one of which was scheduled for April 5, 1966, the day before Westall,” he said.

“So we have no (official) knowledge of where flight 292 went.”

When asked about the balloon theory, fellow researcher Mr Ryan said he had his doubts.

“Nothing was collected or picked up from the site as far as witnesses are aware,” he told news.com.au.

“The flying saucer came down and took off again, flying at high speed leaving behind large circles with a well-defined edge around perimeter.

“When a balloon becomes deflated and the gondola goes down, nothing like that happens.”

Hazel Edwards was an English and maths teacher at Westall High on the day of the incident and believes it has been blown out of proportion.

The self-proclaimed skeptic suggests overly excited kids made up the story and were responsible for the media hype.

“I think there were a lot of kids that were hyped up,” she told news.com.au

“Look at the so-called evidence, most of it is just hearsay.”

Mr Ryan said while he is open to the idea of a down-to-earth explanation, none so far seems to fit the bill.

“What we’re hoping for is someone in an official capacity coming forward and talking about what happened.”

The landing site has since been turned into a memorial park to reflect the 1966 Westall UFO Incident.

Let Matthew Dunn know your thoughts on Twitter @mattydunn11

{ http://www.news.com.au/ }

07-01-2016 om 21:57 geschreven door peter  

Is This A UFO Vanishing Into A Wormhole Portal? Mysterious Ball Of Light Filmed Above Canberra

07-01-2016 om 21:44 geschreven door peter  

Burbage historian recalls Hinckley's UFO

"I hoped that one day I would see a UFO – but did not really believe that it would happen"

07-01-2016 om 21:26 geschreven door peter  

Mysterieuze ruimtebollen vallen uit de lucht in Vietnam

Het Vietnamese leger doet momenteel onderzoek naar de herkomst van drie metalen bollen die in het noorden van het land uit de lucht zijn gevallen.

Het grootste object weegt zo’n 45 kilo en is ontdekt in de provincie Tuyên Quang, meldt de websiteThanh Nien News. Een tweede bol kwam neer in een tuin in de provincie Yên Bái. De lichtste van de drie bollen kwam terecht op een dak en rolde vervolgens op de grond.

Ruimtebol van 45 kilo in Vietnam (VietnamNet)

Lokale bewoners hoorden vlak voordat de bollen werden gevonden een hard geluid dat deed denken aan donderslag. Het Vietnamese ministerie van Defensie vermoedt dat de objecten afkomstig zijn van een vliegtuig of raket. Ze zouden ongevaarlijk zijn.

Het ministerie zei dat de bollen gemaakt zijn in Rusland, maar voegde toe dat onduidelijk is of ze later zijn verkocht aan een ander land.

Ruimtevaartexpert professor Nguyen Khoa Son denkt dat de bollen onderdeel vormden van een oude satelliet die niet is opgebrand in de aardatmosfeer. Hij vertelde aan de website Vietnam Bridge dat de objecten niet beschadigd lijken te zijn, wat wijst in de richting van een mislukte satellietlancering.

[BBC]

© Copyright (c) NineForNews.nl

07-01-2016 om 21:12 geschreven door peter  

Het grote onbekende: Een reusachtige oceaan in het binnenste van de aarde

07-01-2016 om 21:09 geschreven door peter  

The Aurora Incident

by James L. Choro

One hundred and seven-odd years ago, a most unusual incident occurred in the tiny North Texas town of Aurora. It was here that one of the earliest documented encounters with an alien life form took place, in the early morning hours of April 19, 1897. 

Aurora, Texas, is literally "the town that almost was" as the town’s tiny history book states, and one of its few, if not its only, claim to fame is the burial site of an alien pilot that crashed there in his “airship”, the most memorable event in a string of UFO sightings which covered a three state area between 1895 and 1898.

Aurora is located just off US 287 west of Rhome, about a mile south, on State Highway 114 to Bridgeport. There is a sign beside the highway that says CEMETERY, and points south toward the graveyard. Interestingly enough, the historical marker at the site actually includes the word "spaceship". Newspapers, along with diaries and letters by local residents, reported that an alien craft hit a windmill and was torn to pieces, along with its occupant in April, 1897. A 1986 movie, "The Aurora Encounter," produced by Charles B. Pierce, tells the tale. The official historical marker was installed by the State of Texas, and although nobody knows exactly where the grave is located, it is certain that the alien was, in fact, buried in the Aurora Cemetery, after the efforts of the local doctor failed to save it’s life following the crash. There is, unfortunately, no sign of the tombstone. It was stolen some years ago and never recovered. There are, however, picture records of its existence. There is currently a renewed movement in town to exhume the body of the alien, replace the headstone and do a complete search for remains of the crash. Also, there have been several interesting pieces of metal found in the area that have been confiscated for analysis by the military and never returned.

Aurora Cemetery 
TE Photo, 2-04

The historical marker reads as follows:

“Aurora Cemetery”

“The oldest known graves, here, dating from as early as the 1860s, are those of the Randall and Rowlett families. Finis Dudley Beauchamp (1825-1893), a Confederate veteran from Mississippi, donated the 3-acre site to the newly- formed Aurora Lodge No. 479, A. F. & A.M., in 1877. For many years, this community burial ground was known as Masonic Cemetery. Beauchamp, his wife Caroline (1829-1915), and others in their family are buried here. An epidemic which struck the village in 1891 added hundreds of graves to the plot. Called "Spotted Fever" by the settlers, the disease is now thought to be a form of meningitis. Located in Aurora Cemetery is the gravestone of the infant Nellie Burris (1891-1893) with its often-quoted epitaph: "As I was so soon done, I don't know why I was begun." This site is also well-known because of the legend that a spaceship crashed nearby in 1897 and the pilot, killed in the crash, was buried here. Struck by epidemic and crop failure and bypassed by the railroad, the original town of Aurora almost disappeared, but the cemetery remains in use with over 800 graves. Veterans of the Civil War, World Wars I and II, and the Korean and Vietnam conflicts are interred here”.

*********************************************

Aurora brings up images of high-speed space travel. In fact, the newest space shuttle in the NASA fleet is named 'Aurora' after the UFO incident that took place in 1897. In 1997, the 100th anniversary of the crash of the unknown “airship” in Aurora, the TV show "Sightings" brought renewed interest to the topic with a special called “One Hundred Years of UFO Cover-ups”, that featured the crash, the efforts of the local doctor to help the dying alien, and the burial of his body in the town cemetery.

This incident has been covered up and ridiculed by the U.S. Government (a standard operating procedure of the MAJESTIC 12 group) and has been widely reported to be a hoax (a weather balloon?). This, to say the least, sounds a lot like Roswell in 1947? The US government has a long history of cover-ups in regards to such occurrences. It is hoped that the current, renewed interest in the incident will last, and that a new investigation will clear up the Aurora event for good, although much time has passed. It is tragic that most, if not all of the original witnesses are long dead, for, at one time, up until around the early seventies, there were quite a few people still living who had been children at the time and not only remember the crash, but remember a rash of “airship” sightings, all over East and North-Central Texas, as well as the stories which were passed down to them from their “elders”. Almost everyone who grew up in those parts of the state have heard stories from their grandparents, or other “old folks” about such events, many of whom were “substantial” citizens, including doctors, clergymen, judges, army personnel, sheriffs and other professionals.

The Aurora crash was, in fact, the culminating event in a rash of “airship” sightings in East and Northeast Texas, Oklahoma, North and Central Louisiana in the period between 1895 and 1898. Robert Atkinson, of Center, Texas, a veteran of the Spanish American War, often told of seeing, as a teenager, strange, “flashing lights” in the sky, as did Polk Burns of the same city. Similar incidents were recountered by Bud Knight, a prominent resident of San Augustine, Texas, who died in 1981 at the age of 108. Lee Choron, who died in 1976 at the age of 94 recalled seeing “moving lights flashing in the sky” while living in Swift, Texas (near Nacogdoches) while in his “teens”. Nor, were civic records and town newspapers of the time completely silent on the matter. Reports, although not common, do exist. On April 22, 1897 in the small central Texas town of Rockland, John M. Barclay was intrigued when his dog barked furiously and a high-pitched noise was heard. He went out, saw a flying object circling about 20 feet above ground. He described it as having an elongated shape, with protrusions and blinding lights, it went dark when it landed, only a short distance from his home. Barclay was met by a man who informed him that his purpose was peaceful and requested some common hardware items to repair the craft. He paid with a ten-dollar bill and took off "like a bullet out of a gun." 

On that same day, April 22, 1897, some one hundred miles away, in the community of Josserand, Texas, Frank Nichols, who lived some five miles east of Josserand, and was one of its most respected citizens, was awakened by what he called a “machine noise”. Looking outside, he saw a heavy, lighted object land in his wheat field. He walked toward it, but was stopped by two men who asked permission to draw water from his well. He then had a discussion with half a dozen “short, dark men” men, apparently the crew of the strange machine. He was told how it worked but could not follow the explanation. 

Three days later, on April 25, 1897, in Merkel, Texas. People returning from church served a heavy object being dragged along the ground by a rope or cable, attached to a “cigar shaped” lying craft. As the assembled crowd watched, the line managed to get caught in a railroad track. The craft was too high for its structure to be visible but protrusions and a light could be distinguished. After the craft hovered in place for about 10 minutes, a man came down along the rope cut the end free, and went back aboard the craft, which flew away toward the northeast. The man was described by all witnesses, as being small and dressed in a light blue uniform.

The next day, late in the evening of April 26, 1897, near the town of Aquila, in South Texas. A local lawyer, whose name was not reported by the press, was surprised to see a lighted object fly quietly overhead as he was riding from his office to his home, just outside the city limits. His horse was scared and nearly toppled his carriage. The object was large, and “oblong”, and sported a bright light that was observed to be sweeping the ground below the object. When the main light was turned off, a number of smaller lights became visible on the underside of the dark colored, metallic craft, which revealed an elongated, transparent canopy. It continued forward, toward a hill, some seven miles to the south of Aquila. When the witness passed the same way, approximately one hour later, he saw the object rising. It reached the altitude of the cloud ceiling and flew to the northeast at a fantastic speed with periodic flashes of light. 

These accounts, all given by respectable witnesses, separated by several hundred miles, yet all in a direct line with Aurora, describe a very similar object. It must be remembered that in 1897, distances were much greater than they are today, and news traveled at a much slower rate. It is inconceivable that there could have been any collusion between witnesses, and highly unlikely that people living in towns separated by several hundred miles, could have heard news or read accounts of happenings in other towns within the space of two or three days. This was a time, it must be remembered, when most news traveled by wire, or by railroad, and unless there was a critical need for residents of one region to have news of another, the expense of wiring such news was avoided. 

Much may be made, in some quarters of the “quaint” descriptions given of the object… it, indeed, must be a single object, or at least identical objects… such as the presence of “machine noises” and “ropes”. This is perfectly understandable in light of the fact that this was a time before sophisticated machinery, especially sophisticated flying machinery was common, or even, for that matter, known. It would be six years before the Wright Brothers would take their first, halting, leap above the ground, and the dirigible airships of such pioneers as the Count von Zeplein, were in the very early stages of development, a continent and an ocean away. Certainly no native ofEast, Central or South Texas had ever seen such an object. It is highly unlikely that very many of them had even heard of such things. Science Fiction of the day was limited to the works of Jules Verne, and the very early works of Herbert George Wells, and it is unlikely in the extreme that residents of a tiny Texas town, only a few years removed from fighting for it’s survival with the Apaches and Comanches would have access to such current works.

The point, is this. The residents of Aquila, Hillsboro, Merkel, Jossarand, Nacogdoches, Swift and Aurora, would describe what they saw in terms that they understood, and could relate to. Any unusual sound, emanating from an obviously “manmade” object would be described as a “machine sound”. Likewise, any form of line, tie-down or connector would be described as a rope, cable or line. A classic example of such a description would be the existence of the “cargo” cults of the South Pacific… religious sects of islanders who being members of a pre-industrial, stone age culture, worship the airplanes that their ancestors first saw during the Second World War, and revere the crews as Gods who brought gifts… “cargo” from the sky. Far fetched? Not at all. Imagine how anyone living today might describe an object from a thousand years or, or so, in our own future.

It is also worthwhile, at this point, to repeat the fact that people of this time and place, late 19th Century Texas, were extremely conservative in nature, skeptical by necessity, and most unlikely to take off on flights of fancy. There would simply be nothing to be gained from concocting a story concerning such a thing as an “airship." They would not only not be believed, their sanity, sobriety and competence would have come into serious question. Unlike today, when, as one must admit, such accounts are commonly hoaxed as an attempt to gain attention and momentary fame, this simply would not have been the case in 1897. The most likely result of such a story, unless absolutely and verifiably true would have been shunning by the community as the “village idiot” or as the “town drunk”. Worse, in the primarily Protestant Fundamentalist religious atmosphere of the time, which, by the way, has changed but little since that time, one would have been considered “blasphemous”, “sacrilegious” and possibly even “Satanic”, and definitely shunned by most “upright” and “upstanding” citizens of the community. 

**********************

The old “Judge Proctor” place in Aurora, site of the crash, is still locatable, and the town square is still in its original position, but unfortunately most of the original buildings of the town, those dating to the 1890s, are long gone. Some evidence, however, does endure to the present day. The original article, reporting the Aurora Incident, as written in 1897, in the April 19th edition of the Dallas Morning Newsreads as follows: ... next page >
© James L. Choron August 5, 2004

Aurora Encounter Forum:

• Subject: Aurora, Texas alien 
  I am the great-great-great granddaughter of Finis Dudley Beauchamp. Dudley is the person who donated the family cemetery to the town of Aurora. My great grandmother, Robbie Reynolds, was the 91 year old person that so many of the online articles mention as having been interviewed in the 1970's.
  
  As much as I wish the whole story were true, the fact of the matter is, it's not. My great-grandmother and I were very close. She said that the whole story was a hoax, and the original interview included that. I'm not sure how the story went from her saying it was a hoax to the story that her parents went to check out the situation, and wouldn't allow her to go. In your article you mention that most people of the time were illiterate. I know for sure that my great-grandmother and her mother and father could read and write very well. I also know that Robbie Townsend, the woman for whom my great grandmother was named, was a teacher. 
  
  I know the truth isn't nearly as cool as the stories that have been told for the last 100 years. I just wanted to set the story straight. -Sincerely, Robbie Fields, El Paso, Texas, April 09, 2005
  
  
• The Aurora story is a total hoax as far as I'm concerned. I spent eight hours searching at the cemetery where the alien is supposed to be buried and found nary a grave. Even if the headstone had been stolen you would think that some one would put something in it's place so people would at least know where he is buried. Plus it is said that photos exist of the headstone but none are ever posted on the internet. We have an eyewitness account that is completely false. The great granddaughter of the woman who supposedly witnessed it said that her grandmother had said it was a hoax at the time she was interviewed but instead it said she is quoted as saying she remember it happening as though it was real. As for the newspaper article in the Dallas Morning News I have searched their archives and no such article exists or was ever written. The only thing about Aurora in that days paper is the farm report. Also mentioned is the city's town square. Unless it was totally demolished in the last few years it doesn't exist either. I drove every road in and out of town and at some point I would have found the town square but never did. This is a very small town. If traveling on highway 114 you pass through the town in about 2:30 min and that's going 45 mph. I doubt one could miss a town square. The newspaper article in all websites but two I've seen credit it to a E.E. Hayden and on the other two the say it was written by a S.E. Haydon who was an amateur writer who wrote the story as a fictional account to help revitalize a dying community. I never found signs of an old military airfield although there is a road in town that is called old base road which seems to [suggest] there was some sort of base in the area. The town doesn't seem to be laid out in base fashion - it just looks like a very small country town with a population of 376. No town to speak of - just farms and houses no main street or town square. If any one can give me better geographic info I would be glad to go out there again and see what I can find because I could never find the "old Proctor place." If someone knows where these things are send it to me and I'll investigate. - Tomy Dudley, tomylee@rock.com, December 27, 2005
  
  
  See Also Texas Hoaxes by Clay Coppedge
  Aurora Spaceship, Big Foot...
  
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