UFO'S of UAP'S, ASTRONOMIE, RUIMTEVAART, ARCHEOLOGIE, OUDHEIDKUNDE, SF-SNUFJES EN ANDERE ESOTERISCHE WETENSCHAPPEN

As most credible UFOlogists readily admit, proving that extraterrestrial spacecraft have visited our planet is a maddeningly difficult chore.

“The hassle over the word 'proof' boils down to one question: What constitutes proof?” Edward J. Ruppelt, who headed the U.S Air Force’s secret investigation of UFOs in the early 1950s, once wrote. “Does a UFO have to land at the River Entrance to the Pentagon, near the Joint Chiefs of Staff offices? Or is it proof when a ground radar station detects a UFO, sends a jet to intercept it, the jet pilot sees it, and locks on with his radar, only to have the UFO streak away at a phenomenal speed? Is it proof when a jet pilot fires at a UFO and sticks to his story even under the threat of court-martial? Does this constitute proof?”

More recently, Investigative journalist Leslie Keen, author of the 2011 book “UFOs: Generals, Pilots and Government Officials Go on the Record,” has noted that in roughly 90 to 95 percent of UFO sightings, observers turn out actually to have seen weather balloons, ball lightning, flares, aircraft, and other mundane phenomena. But another five to 10 percent of sightings are not so easily explainable, but that’s not the same as demonstrating that they are extraterrestrial in origin. Nevertheless, she argues, the hypothesis that UFOs are visitors from other worlds “is a rational one, and must be taken into account, given the data that we have.”

Here is some of the most compelling reasons that UFOs may be more than simple misidentifications of natural phenomena or terrestrial aircraft:

• The long, documented history of sightings.

UFOs were around, in fact, long before humans themselves took to the air. The first account of a UFO sighting in America was back in 1639, when Massachusetts colony governor John Winthrop noted in his journal that one James Everell, “a sober, discreet man,” and two other witnesses watched a luminous object fly up and down the Muddy River near Charlestown for two to three hours. There are documented sightings of what were then called “airships” during the 1800s as well, such as the July 1884 sighting of a Saturn-shaped UFO (a ball surrounded by a ring) in Norwood, NY, and a fast-moving object that briefly hovered over the startled townspeople of Everest, KS in 1897.

• Numerous modern sightings by credible, well-trained professional observers.

In Ruppelt’s 1955 book , “The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects,” he documented numerous instances of military service members, military and civilian pilots, scientists and other credible professionals who had observed UFOs. In one instance, Ruppelt describes the experience of a pilot of an Air Force F-86 fighter jet, who was scrambled to track a UFO and got to within 1,000 yards of a saucer-shaped object that abruptly flew away from him in a burst of speed after he fired upon it. He also mentions a 1948 UFO encounter in which two airline pilots got to within 700 feet of a UFO and saw two rows of windows with bright lights.

• Consistencies in the descriptions of purported alien ships.

Over the decades, witnesses who’ve seen UFOs have shown remarkable consistency in the shapes and other characteristics of the objects they’ve described. In 1949, the authors of the report for Project Sign, one of the early military investigations of UFOs, identified four main groups of objects—flying disks or saucers, cigar or torpedo-shaped craft without wings or fins, spherical or balloon-shaped objects that were capable of hovering or flying at high speed, and balls of light with no apparent physical form that were similarly maneuverable. Nearly a quarter-century later, a French government investigation headed by Claude Poher of the National Center for Space Research found similar patterns in more than 1,000 reports from France and various countries. One caveat is that in recent years, reports of wedge-shaped UFOs—which bear a similarity to the latest terrestrial military aircraft—have begun to supplant some of the traditional shapes.

• Possible physical evidence of encounters with alien spacecraft.

The 1968 University of Colorado report, compiled by a team headed by James Condon, documented numerous instances of areas where soil, grass, and other vegetation had been claimed by witnesses to have been flattened, burned, broken off, or blown away by a UFO. A report by Stanford University astrophysicist Peter Sturrock, who led a scientific study of physical evidence of UFOs in the late 1990s, describes samples of plants taken from a purported UFO landing site in France in 1981. French researchers found that the leaves had undergone unusual chemical changes of the sort that could have been caused by powerful microwave radiation—which was even more difficult to explain, considering that they found no trace of radioactivity at the site.

• Physiological effects on UFO witnesses.

The Sturrock report describes in detail various symptoms reported by individuals who had encountered UFOS, ranging from burns and temporary deafness to persistent nausea and memory loss. Among the most vivid examples: Betty Cash, Vickie Landrum and Landrum’s young grandson Colby, who reportedly happened upon a “large, diamond-shaped object” hovering over a Texas road in December 1980. All three became ill afterward; Cash, for example, developed large water blisters on her face and swelling that closed her eyes, in addition to severe nausea and diarrhea. The effects persisted for years, and she was hospitalized more than two dozen times.

Comment:

STEPHEN WENG

All these UFO sightings throughout history and other compelling pieces of evidence are more than enough to justify an official investigation into this phenomenon. Skeptics say "provide real evidence", but "real evidence" as in like an alien spaceship is hard to come by. What do want MUFON and every other UFOlogist to do? Try to hijack a UFO? If these are actual alien spacecrafts, then even if you have every single plane, nuke, bullet, cannon, anti-aircraft batteries, etc at your side, it would probably be totally useless. UFOs can supposedly go at tremendous speeds that could completely leave our best fighter jets in the dust. Reports say they can accelerate instantaneously. There is also some sort of bias against anyone who claims he or she has seen a UFO. Mainstream news outlets and scientists very rarely mention UFOs at all. Of course I can also look at this from the skeptics' point of view. Good evidence is almost nowhere to be found. There are too many nutcases who only disrupt credible UFOlogists and other people who genuinely want to see if there's something to this phenomenon. Frankly, the only chance I see of there being a real concern about this in mainstream news is if the aliens decide to fly their ships in broad daylight over the White House or any other famous landmark. You may think that all we can do is just wait and see, but the government is almost surely aware of the fact that UFOs are a genuine concern. We can do something about all the questions we have about these objects. Whether you want to disprove or prove that these UFOs are alien crafts or not, an official investigation should be launched.

{ http://channel.nationalgeographic.com/ }

What Are Cosmic Rays? — Showers of high energy particles occur when energetic cosmic rays strike the top of the Earth's atmosphere. Most cosmic rays are atomic nuclei: most are hydrogen nuclei, some are helium nuclei, and the rest heavier elements. Although many of the low energy cosmic rays come from our Sun, the origins of the highest energy cosmic rays remains unknown and a topic of much research. This drawing illustrates air showers from very high energy cosmic rays.
Credit: Simon Swordy (U. Chicago), NASA

Cosmic rays are atom fragments that rain down on the Earth from outside of the solar system. They blaze at the speed of light and have been blamed for electronics problems in satellites and other machinery.

First discovered in 1912, many things about cosmic rays remain a mystery more than a century later. One prime example is exactly where they are coming from. Most scientists suspect their origins are related to supernovas (star explosions), but the challenge is that cosmic ray origins appear uniform when you look across the entire sky.

History

While cosmic rays were only discovered in the 1900s, scientists knew something mysterious was going on as early as the 1780s. That's when French physicist Charles-Augustin de Coulomb — best known for having a unit of electrical charge named after him — observed an electrically charged sphere suddenly and mysteriously not being charged any more.

At the time, air was thought to be an insulator and not an electric conductor. With more work, however, scientists discovered that air can conduct electricity if its molecules are charged or ionized. This would most commonly happen when the molecules interact with charged particles or X-rays.

But where these charged particles came from was a mystery; even attempts to block the charge with large amounts of lead were coming up empty. On Aug. 7, 1912, physicist Victor Hess flew a high-altitude balloon to 17,400 feet (5,300 meters). He discovered three times more ionizing radiation there than on the ground, which meant the radiation had to be coming from outer space.

But tracing cosmic ray "origin stories" took more than a century. In 2013, NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope released results from observing two supernova remnants in the Milky Way: IC 433 and W44.

Among the products of these star explosions are gamma-ray photons, which (unlike cosmic rays) are not affected by magnetic fields. The gamma rays studied had the same energy signature as subatomic particles called neutral pions. Pions are produced when protons get stuck in a magnetic field inside the shockwave of the supernova and crash into each other.

In other words, the matching energy signatures showed that protons could move at fast enough speeds within supernovas to create cosmic rays.

Current science

We know today that galactic cosmic rays are atom fragments such as protons (positively charged particles), electrons (negatively charged particles) and atomic nuclei. While we know now they can be created in supernovas, there may be other sources available for cosmic ray creation. It also isn't clear exactly how supernovas are able to make these cosmic rays so fast.

Cosmic rays constantly rain down on Earth, and while the high-energy "primary" rays collide with atoms in the Earth's upper atmosphere and rarely make it through to the ground, "secondary" particles are ejected from this collision and do reach us on the ground.

But by the time these cosmic rays get to Earth, it's impossible to trace where they came from. That's because their path has been changed as they travelled through multiple magnetic fields (the galaxy's, the solar system's and Earth's itself.)

According to NASA, cosmic rays therefore come equally from all directions of the sky. So scientists are trying to trace back cosmic ray origins by looking at what the cosmic rays are made of. Scientists can figure this out by looking at the spectroscopic "signature" each nucleus gives off in radiation, and also by weighing the different isotopes (types) of elements that hit cosmic ray detectors.

The result, NASA adds, shows very common elements in the universe. Roughly 90 percent of cosmic ray nuclei are hydrogen (protons) and 9 percent are helium (alpha particles). Hydrogen and helium are the most abundant elements in the universe and the origin point for stars, galaxies and other large structures. The remaining 1 percent are all elements, and it's from that 1 percent that scientists can best search for rare elements to make comparisons between different types of cosmic rays.

Scientists can also date the cosmic rays by looking at radioactive nuclei that decrease over time. Measuring the "half life" of each nuclei gives an estimate of how long the cosmic ray has been out there in space.

Space radiation concerns

Earth's magnetic field and atmosphere shields the planet from 99.9 percent of the radiation from space. However, for people outside the protection of Earth's magnetic field, space radiation becomes a serious hazard. An instrument aboard the Curiosity Mars rover during its 253-day cruise to Mars revealed that the radiation dose received by an astronaut on even the shortest Earth-Mars round trip would be about 0.66 sievert. This amount is like receiving a whole-body CT scan every five or six days.

A dose of 1 sievert is associated with a 5.5 percent increase in the risk of fatal cancers. The normal daily radiation dose received by the average person living on Earth is 10 microsieverts (0.00001 sievert).

The moon has no atmosphere and a very weak magnetic field. Astronauts living there would have to provide their own protection, for example by burying their habitat underground.

The planet Mars has no global magnetic field. Particles from the sun have stripped away most of Mars’ atmosphere, resulting in very poor protection against radiation at the surface. The highest air pressure on Mars is equal to that at an altitude of 22 miles (35 kilometers) above the Earth’s surface. At low altitudes, Mars’ atmosphere provides slightly better protection from space radiation.