Dit is ons nieuw hondje Kira, een kruising van een waterhond en een Podenko. Ze is sinds 7 februari 2024 bij ons en druk bezig ons hart te veroveren. Het is een lief, aanhankelijk hondje, dat zich op een week snel aan ons heeft aangepast. Ze is heel vinnig en nieuwsgierig, een heel ander hondje dan Noleke.
This is our new dog Kira, a cross between a water dog and a Podenko. She has been with us since February 7, 2024 and is busy winning our hearts. She is a sweet, affectionate dog who quickly adapted to us within a week. She is very quick and curious, a very different dog than Noleke.
DEAR VISITOR,
MY BLOG EXISTS ALREADY 13 YEARS AND 2 MONTH.
ON 06/08/2024 MORE THAN 2.161.100
VISITORS FROM 135 DIFFERENT NATIONS ALREADY FOUND THEIR WAY TO MY BLOG.
THAT IS AN AVERAGE OF 400GUESTS PER DAY.
THANK YOU FOR VISITING MY BLOG AND HOPE YOU ENJOY EACH TIME.
The purpose of this blog is the creation of an open, international, independent and free forum, where every UFO-researcher can publish the results of his/her research. The languagues, used for this blog, are Dutch, English and French.You can find the articles of a collegue by selecting his category. Each author stays resposable for the continue of his articles. As blogmaster I have the right to refuse an addition or an article, when it attacks other collegues or UFO-groupes.
Druk op onderstaande knop om te reageren in mijn forum
Zoeken in blog
Deze blog is opgedragen aan mijn overleden echtgenote Lucienne.
In 2012 verloor ze haar moedige strijd tegen kanker!
In 2011 startte ik deze blog, omdat ik niet mocht stoppen met mijn UFO-onderzoek.
BEDANKT!!!
Een interessant adres?
UFO'S of UAP'S, ASTRONOMIE, RUIMTEVAART, ARCHEOLOGIE, OUDHEIDKUNDE, SF-SNUFJES EN ANDERE ESOTERISCHE WETENSCHAPPEN - DE ALLERLAATSTE NIEUWTJES
UFO's of UAP'S in België en de rest van de wereld In België had je vooral BUFON of het Belgisch UFO-Netwerk, dat zich met UFO's bezighoudt. BEZOEK DUS ZEKER VOOR ALLE OBJECTIEVE INFORMATIE , enkel nog beschikbaar via Facebook en deze blog.
Verder heb je ook het Belgisch-Ufo-meldpunt en Caelestia, die prachtig, doch ZEER kritisch werk leveren, ja soms zelfs héél sceptisch...
Voor Nederland kan je de mooie site www.ufowijzer.nl bezoeken van Paul Harmans. Een mooie site met veel informatie en artikels.
MUFON of het Mutual UFO Network Inc is een Amerikaanse UFO-vereniging met afdelingen in alle USA-staten en diverse landen.
MUFON's mission is the analytical and scientific investigation of the UFO- Phenomenon for the benefit of humanity...
Je kan ook hun site bekijken onder www.mufon.com.
Ze geven een maandelijks tijdschrift uit, namelijk The MUFON UFO-Journal.
Since 02/01/2020 is Pieter ex-president (=voorzitter) of BUFON, but also ex-National Director MUFON / Flanders and the Netherlands. We work together with the French MUFON Reseau MUFON/EUROP.
ER IS EEN NIEUWE GROEPERING DIE ZICH BUFON NOEMT, MAAR DIE HEBBEN NIETS MET ONZE GROEP TE MAKEN. DEZE COLLEGA'S GEBRUIKEN DE NAAM BUFON VOOR HUN SITE... Ik wens hen veel succes met de verdere uitbouw van hun groep. Zij kunnen de naam BUFON wel geregistreerd hebben, maar het rijke verleden van BUFON kunnen ze niet wegnemen...
02-11-2018
SOMS ZIE JE TOCH ECHT MOOIE UFO'S VLIEGEN ( VIDEO )
SOMS ZIE JE TOCH ECHT MOOIE UFO'S VLIEGEN ( VIDEO )
Alhoewel de laatste tijd misschien wat minder in het nieuws, ze zijn er nog steeds die ufo's, oftewel de niet geïdentificeerde vliegende objecten.
Nu is er bij beelden van UFO's veel kaf onder het koren, maar soms duiken er beelden op die wel degelijk echt lijken te zijn.
We zouden graag zeggen: opnames die echt zijn, maar dat kan eigenlijk niet meer tegenwoordig, omdat er zo ontzettend veel wordt geknoeid met beeldmateriaal.
Wel zijn er bepaalde dingen waaruit je soms kunt afleiden dat beelden waarschijnlijk echt zijn. Youtube is wat dat betreft een hele slechte bron, omdat 99 procent van wat daar wordt geplaatst totale nep is. De filmpjes worden gemaakt in de hoop dat ze viraal gaan, er veel mensen naar kijken en dan op een advertentie klikken, wat dan inkomsten oplevert.
Opnames die gemaakt zijn door privé mensen die bij Mufon worden ingeleverd om onderzocht te worden, zijn een ander verhaal. Men heeft er niets bij te winnen door daar nepbeelden te deponeren en wat je dan bij Mufon tegenkomt is vaak echt.
Lake Tahoe is een groot zoetwatermeer in de Amerikaanse Sierra Nevada, op de grens tussen Californië en Nevada, ten westen van Carson City. Lake Tahoe is het grootste alpiene meer in Noord-Amerika.[1] Met 501 meter diepte is het tevens het op een na diepste meer van de Verenigde Staten, na Crater Lake in Oregon. Bovendien is Tahoe qua volume het zesentwintigste meer in de wereld.
Een UFO die van rechts naar links met hoge snelheid voorbij vliegt aan een groep vakantiegangers.
Het object heeft de klassieke of retro vorm en ziet eruit zoals je zou verwachten dat een vliegende schotel eruit ziet.
Degene die de opname heeft gemaakt en ingediend bij Mufon zegt dat ze in die streek met vakantie waren en helemaal niets hebben gemerkt van de UFO. Pas toen ze thuis waren en de beelden rustig bekeken, verscheen daar de vliegende schotel.
Bij Ufocasebook hebben ze de volgende video gemaakt met vertraagde beelden en ook een aantal foto's zodat de UFO goed zichtbaar is. Deze verschijnt voor het eerst in beeld rond 18 seconden in de video en wel aan de rechterkant.
Dawn is dead. Kepler is dead. Rover is missing and presumed dead. This is not the opening scene of a new murder mystery … it’s the news coming out of NASA as it reports the recent demise of many of its most famous and productive spacecrafts and space equipment. Why do they seem to be dying all at once? Something is killing the great crafts of NASA … and it may not necessarily be old age.
“Following an analysis of the progress of the listening campaign, NASA will continue its current strategy of attempting to contact the Jeep-rig Opportunity during the foreseeable future. The winds may increase over the next few months on Opportunity’s location on Mars, resulting in dust being torn from the vehicle’s solar panels. The agency will reassess the situation in January 2019.”
The Opportunity rover has been on Mars since January 2004 and its original 90-day mission has been constantly and surprisingly extended annually as it broke the record for the longest distance driven by any sort of wheeled vehicle on a space body other than Earth. Then the dust storm hit. While Opportunity has obviously survived plenty of Martian dust storms, this on in June was apparently the Mother of all Martian Dust Storms and the thick layer of particles on its solar panels have prevented it from recharging its batteries. Even though NASA is giving its overachieving rover until January 2019 in hopes that another dust storm will blow off the panels, the first people on Mars may be looking over their dead dog rover.
An even bigger loss is the death of another overachiever – the Kepler space telescope. Launched in March 2009, Kepler outlasted its original 3.5-year mission and solidified its place in the space hall of fame by discovering 2,681 exoplanets. It also survived devastating injuries that would have ended the season of other space players (get ready … more football references coming) – Kepler lost two of its four orientation-maintaining reaction wheels and was put on the disabled list. NASA’s team doctors got it back in the game by using the remaining wheels and gave it a new playbook called K2 where it found more confirmed exoplanets and 2,900 waiting for likely confirmation. Unfortunately, Kepler finally ran out of fuel and NASA forced its retirement this week, shutting everything down but leaving it on the playing field in a safe orbit around Ceres.
Vesta photographed by Dawn
Running out of gas has also put Dawn out of commission. After missing two scheduled check-ins this week, NASA announced that Dawn is now a sunset and its asteroid-visiting days are over. After being launched in September 2007, Dawn traveled 4.3 billion miles (6.9 billion km) on its cosmic road trip, stopping first at Vesta, the second largest rock in the main asteroid belt, and then taking on the belt’s #1 asteroid and dwarf planet Ceres, where it will now orbit in perpetuity. Mission Director and Chief Engineer Marc Rayman pointed out in a press release/obituary that Dawn leaves behind a huge collection of data still to be examined.
This mosaic of a bright spot on the dwarf planet Ceres known as Cerealia Facula combines images captured by NASA’s Dawn spacecraft from altitudes as low as 22 miles (35 kilometers) above Ceres' surface. The mosaic is overlain on a topography model based on images obtained during Dawn's low-altitude mapping orbit (240 miles, or 385 km altitude). No vertical exaggeration was applied.
Credit: NASA
“The demands we put on Dawn were tremendous, but it met the challenge every time. It’s hard to say goodbye to this amazing spaceship, but it’s time.”
So, these three space stalwarts may have been senior citizens but they acted more like the cosmic version of “60 is the new 40,” outperforming their younger counterparts and turning up their nose cones at retirement. That explains why Dawn and Kepler ran out of fuel – no one expected them to be around this long. On the other hand, Opportunity was more like they guy who says “If I had known I was going to live this long, I would have taken better care of myself” when he realizes he should have exercised enough to run behind a rock and out of the dust storm. They’re all proof that NASA can and does build some really good stuff.
Over the course of the last few years, here at Mysterious Universe, I have written far more than a few articles on the Men in Black. And, as I have noted in some of those articles, there’s no doubt that encounters with the MIB can range from puzzling to downright terrifying. With this issue in mind – namely, the way in which the witness/victim can be severely affected by such an encounter – I thought I would share with you the words of a good friend of mine – Kimberly Rackley – who has encountered the Men in Black on a number of occasions. Kim is a gifted psychic and her trauma-filled experiences with the MIB serve to demonstrate just what it really feels like to come face-to-face with these black-suited things. Put it this way: it’s not good. In the summer of 2016 (specifically June 22), Kim shared the following with me:
“Had an experience last night / morning. A little drained this morning. Freaked me out. I was awoken by what seemed like thousands of voices that were excited and upset. I sometimes hear the astral plane at night but this was crazy. I need to make it stop so I lift into astral and all these entities are everywhere in agitated state.
“I ask what’s wrong and they all circle me and then this being very tall and slender all in black suit but with a long coat and gray eyes comes straight for me. The entities circling me close in tighter. They are trying to protect me. But he pushes them away with flick of his hand and I’m suddenly back in my body. There in my room was the man. He had same non-aura energy, like MIB. He pointed at me and the place in my wrist where the previous MIBs always try to place a chip in me started burning. Then I passed out. I feel electric inside, like I’m going to jump out of my skin and I’m nauseated. Kind of frightened. I look like death.”
Kim continued: “If you feel like death warmed-over then you most definitely look like death warmed-over as I discovered this morning when I ungraciously made my way to the bathroom. You would feel and look the same if you experienced the more than unnerving events I had. Yours truly is still trembling, not quite certain if it is from the panic of the frightening encounter or the electrical jolt received. Being a medium I am not fearful of the supernatural or unearthly, but there is one thing that has filled me with terror since I was a child and that is the MIB. I’ve told the story of my repetitive MIB encounters before but it suffers repeating because I believe it is significant to the most recent encounter.
“From the time I was 8 and witnessed a glowing figure slightly similar to a grey walking down the hallway of my home, I have been subject to frequent MIB visits. These visits are always from the same two men, mostly in my dream state until I began realizing my abilities as a medium and then the visits would occur in meditation or altered states of consciousness. Never before this newest encounter has one been a physical encounter. The two men come to me, usually appearing through my bedroom window. My normal MIB’s resemble ninja’s or soldiers, always in black skin-tight clothing or fatigue uniforms, and always with the aura of intense panic. They will point at me and say ‘No, Kya, not yet.’ I have no idea why they call me Kya. Is it too much to hope for that they have me confused with someone else? I also have no inkling of what ‘not yet’ signifies. They then pull up a holographic ball where they show me that I will be taken away and put in this metal room, underground. The room has one single chair and surrounding me is a bluish force field. Sounds like a science fiction movie, right? Then they point at my right wrist, and a chip appears under my skin. They vanish, leaving me always in full panic mode.
“I know you are wondering about the chip. I have yet to discover its purpose but each occasion that they place the chip, I immediately remove it. Alien or dimensional implants are more common than you might imagine and can be detected when you are in the theta state. These implants have an etheric vibration which means they can be removed etherically as well. Lucky for me I am a Theta Facilitator.”
Kim had much more to say: “This newest encounter was much different than the above so let me get on with the story. I was awoken around 4am to a thousand voices in my head. It is quite common for me to hear the astral plane but this was like a war going on. I know I have to stop the voices before I end up on Zany Street with men in white coats chasing me. I lift up to the astral where I find the entities in an agitated and anxious state. Curiously they are all gathered in a very close proximity to each other.
“I ask what is wrong and the entities immediately circle me. I am not afraid as I have been to the astral many times and have friends here. Suddenly, a very tall man comes from the mist. He is in a black suit and wearing a long coat. The man is whitish-gray, bald, and no facial hair, yeah not even an eyelash. I’m filled with immediate panic because I see no aura or residual of life force energy. The same non-energy I see with the MIB. However, there was an electrical charge around him which is something I always see around the MIB of my past encounters. The entities attempt to tighten the circle around me but the being in black swipes them away with a flick of his hand. I fall back into my body, sit up and to my horror the being is standing in my room. He raises his arm, palm out and I am jolted with a shot of intense energy. I pass out.
“When I awaken, it all comes flooding back to me. My body feels as if I am going to jump out of my skin and I am nauseated. I realize that the astral voices may have been attempting to warn me and certainly they were trying to protect me. This indicates that whatever MIB are, even the astral plane is aware and afraid of them. Could it be that my recent talk with friend and author Nick Redfern on this very subject have triggered this encounter? I believe the MIB have every account of who attempts to reveal them. I’m always left with sheer panic and more questions after an encounter with the MIB. The panic I experience however, won’t stop me from seeking the truth nor will it stop me from being who I am or doing what I do.”
The Future of Cryptocurreny and the UFO Crash in Antarctica Time Cross
The Future of Cryptocurreny and the UFO Crash in Antarctica Time Cross
Interesting information about the future of Cryptocurrency, and the UFO crash in Antarctica. Full disclosure, I have a sizable investment in Ripple for the reasons stated in video.
A CHILLING WARNING! (UFOs) are just a tip of the ICEBERG!
A CHILLING WARNING! (UFOs) are just a tip of the ICEBERG!
If I haven’t had a direct experience with a highly evolved technology, I would have never believed such claims for any reason. And even after I having had this experience, it took a couple of days for me to digest the fact that this is real, there’s a highly evolved technology out there. Not only that this bizarre experience literally challenged me to rethink my fundamental beliefs about the world in a way that I have never expected. So I started deeply researching into various fields, fields including neuroscience, future physics, ancient stone structures, specifically the Giza Pyramids, ancient advanced knowledge, our religions, ancient high-tech tool marks, mental illnesses, demonic possessions and various other phenomena like channeling of alien beings, channeling of deceased people, dancing mania, witchcraft etc.. to make sense of the world and end of the day, I came to a conclusion that the highly evolved technology belongs to a group of human beings on Earth and your destiny has been planned long ago than you can possibly imagine.
Unless a person carries out a massive research with an open mind and gains the right knowledge and the right worldview, such a conclusion will not make sense to another human being. Your time is limited on Earth. Not being able to understand this complicated truth, we have been ridiculing our fellow human beings for quite a long time, however, I must say that these unidentified flying objects or extremely advanced flying machines and its related phenomena are actually a humongous crime against humanity that is being committed by a group of human beings who are living in Switzerland today. Again, there’s a complicated reasoning behind this claim and I urge you to take this warning seriously and give your utmost attention to research and understand the truth behind UFOs and its related phenomena without a delay. Someone could say that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, however, it is just a bunch of words only, let’s be realistic, if someone uses a technology that is 1000+ years or 10000+ years ahead of ours to commit a crime, is it possible for us to prove it unless we giving an extraordinary effort? Is it possible for us to understand and classify a particular phenomenon as a crime against humanity with our current scientific understanding? That said, let me unfold the complicated story of the planet Earth.
1). Anecdotal Evidence For the Existence Of the Phenomenon. Highly educated and intelligent people are coming forward to expose the truth today.
2). Is it possible to hide an advanced technology on Earth? Yes, it’s entirely possible, we just need to master 3 things only.
3). Is it possible to remove the evidence for the existence of highly advanced global societies from the face of the Earth? Yes, it’s entirely possible, again, we just need to master 3 things only. A reply that a theoretical physicist and a neuroscientist would understand. After all, this is a mind-boggling technology, and the related phenomena cannot be understood by every human being on Earth, experts in neuroscience, theoretical physics, and other experts must dig into the issue without a delay. These people must be open minded and trust pure logic, not beliefs.
4). Which means, this could be a technology that belongs to a group of human beings on Earth? Yes, that’s correct and that’s the truth. Which also means, they are secretly ruling the world for quite a long time using their high-tech toys and that’s why the UFO phenomenon can be traced back to ancient times too. Not only that this is why an extremely high number of yearly UFO activities on Earth.
5). Which means, the perpetrators behind the UFO phenomenon are trying to establish the ET visitation belief among human beings? That’s correct, by using a highly evolved technology, it’s quite easy to establish such a belief in human beings. From a highly evolved technological standpoint, we only need genetically modified beings and 2 high-tech toys to establish this belief on human beings and roam the Earth freely using their extremely advanced machines. And this has raised the unidentified flying object phenomenon in the world.
6). So extraterrestrial beings (ET’s) visitation is a deception? A misunderstanding? A false claim? Yes, that’s correct, we could further analyze the following hypothesis to make sense of this further.
Extraterrestrial Hypothesis
Terrestrial Hypothesis
7). The Extraterrestrial Hypothesis. Its related phenomena are a carefully constructed narrative to deceive the society.
8). The Terrestrial Hypothesis. A staggering amount of evidence is in plain sight but we must think out of the box to understand the evidence that supports the terrestrial hypothesis.
Extremely high number of UFO-related activities per year. Clues for the use of high-tech toys on a daily basis by a group of human beings on Earth.
The UFO phenomenon can be traced back to ancient times. A clue that a group of human beings using the technology for quite a long time on Earth.
From a highly evolved technological standpoint, UFO-related phenomena show the existence of a highly advanced neuro/psychotronic weapon on Earth and this can be traced back to ancient times too.
I). The missing time phenomenon II). Alien beings channeling phenomenon III). Deceased people channeling phenomenon IV). Multiple personality phenomenon. This is a quite new phenomenon and it’s history goes back to 15th century only. A personality reflecting sophisticated human actions cannot be seen prior to the 15th century in MPD/DID cases V). Psychic Phenomenon VI). Automatic writing phenomenon VII). “Targeted Individuals” phenomenon VIII). The voice of God phenomenon IX). Prophets and the Prophetic phenomenon
(This evidence is not yet recognized. When you closely look into the above cases, you would understand that these cases are due to a mind-boggling AI-based applications only. A global satellite grid has been deployed to create these phenomena on Earth and this grid monitors brain activities of human beings 24/7. After all, is there an element of truth behind all-seeing eye? or is it just a myth?)
Highly advanced knowledge can be seen in some unique ancient books clearly supporting the terrestrial hypothesis.
A ton of evidence can be seen in ancient stone structures revealing an advanced knowledge and an advanced technology supporting the terrestrial hypothesis.
9). Other supporting evidence for the terrestrial hypothesis.
10). The Crop circle phenomena, its connections to UFOs and ancient Egypt.
11). Who are the perpetrators and where do they stay?
12). Final thoughts & the future of humanity.
Anecdotal Evidence For the Existence Of the Phenomenon:
There is overwhelming anecdotal evidence from people all over the world, supporting the existence of the phenomenon and they claim that the technology is highly advanced. On top of this, today, there's a staggering number of highly educated, credible and respected people are coming forward to expose the phenomenon and this group including astronauts, pilots, scientists, military personnel, police officers, doctors etc... Here are some of their testimonies related to the UFO phenomenon:
1). Cliff Stone – Army UFO Consultant, US Military – Retired:
“As a result of my involvement, I was able to ascertain that the united states government knew a lot more about UFOs and it wasn’t telling the American public, that there was an intelligence involved, that there was a highly evolved technology. I learned that to a degree, we were carrying on a dialogue with this intelligence”
Further, Cliff Stone says:
“We also had an officially sanctioned deception program. This was in total disregard as to the impact this would have on the individual witnesses and also on their families”
2). Robert Dean – NATO intelligence analyst, US Military – Retired:
“I read first-hand reports, verifiable NATO military material that indicated that the UFOs were not only real that they represented something far beyond anything that I had ever imagined before. When the study was concluded in 64 they concluded that they were four different groups apparently coming and visiting us. Out of those four different groups one group looked exactly like we do. So much so that they could sit beside you in a restaurant, there in an airplane or in a theatre and you would never know and that particular point bothered the military guys a lot”
3). Further testimonies: Citizen Hearing On Disclosure 2013:
“40 researchers and military/agency/political witnesses to the National Press Club in Washington to testify for 30 hours over 5 days before 6 former members of the U. S. Congress regarding events and evidence for extraterrestrial related phenomena since 1947”
Earth is not the only ocean world in the solar system. In fact, there are several. A new paper just published in Astrobiology seeks to plan out the best ways to explore these alien oceans.
Jupiter’s moon Europa is the best known of the ocean worlds in the solar system – apart from Earth of course.
Not all that long ago, it was thought that Earth was the only place in the solar system with liquid water. Other planets and moons were either too hot or too cold. But now, thanks to various spacecraft sent out to explore these worlds, we know that is not the case. Water is actually abundant throughout the solar system, and some moons even have more water than Earth does. We just can’t see it on their surfaces – the water is, instead, below ground.
Hendrix and Hurford co-chair the Roadmaps to Ocean Worlds (ROW) team of NASA’s Outer Planets Assessment Group. The ROW team wants to see emphasis placed on not just studying known water worlds, but also other candidate ones, as explained by Hendrix:
The overarching goal of an ocean worlds program, should be to identify ocean worlds, characterize their oceans, evaluate their habitability, search for life, and ultimately understand any life we find.
The investigation “roadmap” for the exploration of ocean worlds.
The charter of ROW includes the following recommendations:
Identify and prioritize science objectives for ocean worlds over the next several decades.
Design roadmap(s) to explore these worlds to address science objectives (including mission sequences, considering a sustained exploration effort).
Assess where each ocean world fits into the overall roadmap.
Summarize broad mission concepts (considering mission dependencies and international cooperation).
Recommend technology development and detailed mission studies in support of the next Decadal Survey.
Currently, the moons Europa, Enceladus and Titan are considered to be the highest priority for further study. Neptune’s moon Triton is the highest priority of still-unconfirmed ocean worlds.
Saturn’s moon Enceladus is a high-priority target for further study. It not only has an underground ocean, but also huge plumes of water vapor that erupt through cracks at the south pole.
As the paper also notes, the foundation for studying these alien oceans should be our own oceans here on Earth, as outlined by Hendrix:
Progress needs to be made in the area of collaborations between Earth ocean scientists and extraterrestrial ocean scientists. In addition, to map out a coherent ocean worlds program, significant input is required from studies here on Earth; rigorous research and analysis studies are called for to enable some future ocean worlds missions to be thoughtfully planned and undertaken. The overarching goal of an ocean worlds program should be to identify ocean worlds, characterize their oceans, evaluate their habitability, search for life, and ultimately understand any life we find.
So just what are ocean worlds, according to the paper? Basically any moon or other body in the solar system (since Earth is the only planet to have one) that has a current liquid water ocean. The ocean does not need to be global although it does seem to be in most cases, in particular on Europa and Enceladus. The big difference is that Earth’s ocean is on the surface while all the other ones are subsurface.
As well as the methane/ethane seas and lakes on the surface, Saturn’s moon Titan is also thought to have a global subsurface water ocean.
Image via A. D. Fortes/UCL/STFC.
Even Neptune’s moon Triton, in the far outer solar system, may have an underground ocean.
Image via NASA/JPL/USGS.
Exploring these otherworldly oceans is exciting because, of course, our own oceans are teeming with life. Could the same be true for some of these other oceans as well? Scientists certainly see the potential, which is a major reason to study them to begin with. Everywhere on Earth there is water, there is life. There is growing evidence that the oceans on Europa and Enceladus have conditions favorable for some kinds of life, even if only microbial (but perhaps more), such as hydrothermal activity on the ocean floors. On Earth, even in the deepest waters, such environments are oases for a wide range of life, where vents provide heat and nutrients. Titan may also be of particular interest. From the paper:
Although Titan possesses a large subsurface ocean, it also has an abundant supply of a wide range of organic species and surface liquids, which are readily accessible and could harbor more exotic forms of life. Further, Titan may have transient surface liquid water such as impact melt pools and fresh cryovolcanic flows in contact with both solid and liquid surface organics. These environments present unique and important locations for investigating prebiotic chemistry and, potentially, the first steps toward life.
Bottom line:The new paper makes a strong case for why the ocean worlds in our solar system should be explored as thoroughly as possible, using knowledge about our own oceans as a roadmap. And maybe – just maybe – that exploration will result in the discovery that Earth’s oceans are not the only ones to be inhabited.
St. Elmo’s Fire is a colorful discharge of atmospheric electricity that typically occurs during a thunderstorm. When a sharp object (such as a ship’s mast) comes in contact with an extraordinarily high electrical field and a large number of electrons, the electrons can glow in various colors, like a neon sign, resulting in this rare phenomenon. St. Elmo is a derivation of St. Erasmus of Formia, one of the two patron saints of sailors.
At first glance, this jarring sight looks like a giant tsunami rolling in from the ocean, but it’s actually a massive amount of fog. When conditions are just right in late spring or early summer, the condensation from warm air merging with cool ocean water can create this dramatic effect.
Weather system that caused a meteotsunami in New Jersey, June 2013. Image via Buddy Denham.
3. Meteotsunami
Meteotsunamis have characteristics similar to earthquake-generated tsunamis, but they are caused by air-pressure disturbances often associated with fast-moving weather systems, such as squall lines. These disturbances can generate waves in the ocean that travel at the same speed as the overhead weather system. Development of a meteotsunami depends on several factors, such as the intensity, direction, and speed of the air pressure as it travels over a water body. Like an earthquake-generated tsunami, a meteotsunami affects the entire water column and may become dangerous when it hits shallow water, which causes it to slow down and increase in height and intensity. Semi-enclosed water bodies like harbors, inlets, and bays can greatly intensify a meteotsunami.
A waterspout is a spinning column of air and mist that forms on lakes, rivers, and at sea. Waterspouts fall into two categories: fair weather and tornadic. Tornadic waterspouts are tornadoes that form over water, or move from land to water. They are associated with severe thunderstorms and are often accompanied by high winds and seas, large hail, and dangerous lightning. The tornadic variety are more dangerous than fair weather waterspouts, which generally are not associated with thunderstorms, and usually form along the dark flat base of a line of developing cumulus clouds. While tornadic waterspouts develop downward in a thunderstorm, a fair weather waterspout develops on the surface of the water and works its way upward. Fair weather waterspouts form in light wind conditions so they normally move very little.
A maelstrom is a strong whirlpool that forms when opposing currents meet to form swirling water. Its name comes from the Dutch words malen (to whirl or grind) and strom (stream). A maelstrom can be dangerous due to powerful currents that occur below the surface, which can pull surrounding objects into its vortex.
There's one problem, though. It's about something I don't believe exists. Let me explain: I don't believe that aliens exist, but let's say I did and they come in UFOs — and let's assume you believe in them, too. This map is one of the best data visualizations I have seen in my entire life.
If aliens have visited Earth, this is the greatest map of all time
Metrocosm compiled more than 90,000 reports of UFO sightings in the United States since 1905 into an impressively detailed, interactive map:
The map uses data from the National UFO Reporting Center and Mutual UFO Network; the Inquisitr called it "credible." And 1905 was a long time ago — it's the year Albert Einstein presented his theory of relativity. The philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre was born in 1905. There are more than 90,000 stories collected, so let's dig into some of them. Assuming all of the reported sightings are credible is an important part of enjoying this. The dots represent witness reports. They come in three sizes: small (individual report), medium (small group reports), and large (multiple witness reports).
Fire balls in the sky, form triangle, lasted 5 minutes.
Second Sighting 45 minutes later lasted 5 minutes. There were 3 Fire balls at 8:20pm they formed in a straight line in the east sky, then they formed into a triangle, one then moved quickly out of sight traveling North then the other two disappeared. What was strange about 45 minutes later another fireball appeared South east, just one , it also lasted about 5 minutes. I took pictures on my digital camera and have night vision video on both sightings , In the video it appears as a white ball, when you look in the sky it looks as tho they barely move, but when researching the video it is moving all over the place at at times it looked as tho it was right on top of the screen. In the pictures the camera captured the light movement which is very interesting. I blew the photos up on the computer and in some it looks like they wrote something. My daughter and I had the chills. I never experienced anything like this.
Fishers Island, Long Island Sound there was a large lamp shade/flashlight light in the sky for 10 seconds+ it fadded away into the sk
Beach party early in the night. 20+ people saw most of the event. 10+ saw it "turn on" and then called out to the rest. There was a light in the sky like a huge lamp or a flash light. It was turned on over Long Island Sound and very obvious light. We saw it and then it faded slowly UP outward away from us. It did not go right, left or down, it just faded away. the light lingered in the sky for 20-30 seconds and everyone sort of got over it. It still bothered some of us. It was nothing like anyone had ever seen not a plane or satalite or anything people who live on an island and looking at the sky had ever seen.
It is dark and boring here, we all look at the sky all the time.
It was the night of Thursday, March 13, 1997. I was living in an apartment in Phoenix Arizona at the time and had some friends over that night. We all went outside and I noticed several lights in the sky over Phoenix. Soon my friends and I were all staring at these lights in the sky. There was no noise at all coming from these lights. They were yellowish-orange in color. As I focused my eyes on the lights I could make out the shapes of actual solid craft in the sky. It wasn’t one large craft, it was several craft which made a large triangle shape, then a large oval shape! My friends also could see the shape of these craft in the sky. These craft would move up and down, and left to right but didn’t move all that much. They didn’t shoot across the sky or anything like that. But I could see the shape of these craft in the sky. This lasted for about 30 minutes and the lights turned off and the craft disappeared. I have spent 8 years in the Army and I know what flares look like and how they act. These were not flares. I can say this with confidence.
The U.S. Government stone walled the people of Phoenix.
Thousands of people had to have witnessed this event that night.
3 craft sighted by several witnesses in clear daylight conditions. Timepiece anomoly also occured
At the annual UFO Conference put on by the UFO Watchtower in Hooper, CO several people had the opportunity to witness UFOs. About 2:00 PM Stan Romanek (one of the featured speakers at the event) was near the parking area outside the presentation building and was excited as he told me about the UFO he had just witnessed and taken some pictures of. He was really excited that he got pictures of it. He pointed out a spot above a patch of clouds near where the object was about 4 fingers (at arms length) above the distant mountain horizon in the northwest sky.
He mentioned what he saw to a couple other people earlier and walked across the field to the RV he was staying in about 1:30 PM. He was going to put the image on his laptop computer and bring it back so we could all see what the picture looked like. He returned and set the laptop up on a table outside under the shade of a canopy of an RV set up to serve food. As he got the computer set up I continued to scan the skies, especially in the area he had seen the object. We were excited to see that he did get a picture of it. It was white in color and although it was a digital image at a distance you could make out the classic saucer shape with a bubble protrusion on top. A few of us were taking turns looking at the image because the brightness of reflection of the sky in the monitor made it difficult to see well unless you stood directly in front of it.
While about 5 or 6 people were marveling at the picture Stan had just taken (with a Nikon Coolpix 6 mega pixel digital camera) I saw what appeared to be the same object in the same location off in the distant N/W horizon. I would guess the distance to be at least 35 miles away based on the distance of the mountain range it appeared to be over. It was very white and was dramatically accentuated by the darker blue sky background. It was also about 4 fingers (arms length) above the distant mountaintop to the northwest about the width of my pinkie finger above the white cloud bank below.
I described the location as I pointed to the object for the others to identify also. They were as excited as I was to realize for themselves how fascinating it was to watch. You could easily see that the object was not a cloud, balloon or plane. It stood perfectly still and the distinct sharpness of the edges eliminated it being a cloud as you could compare it to other clouds in the area.
We all watched as the stationery object defied cloud movement and all other rational or logical cross references we could use. Someone noticed an identical object about a pinkie width directly above the one we were watching. The one above slowly moved downward toward the original object until it was directly over the other nearly touching it.
After watching the object for a minute or two to eliminate any plausible explanation for what I was witnessing I went to get my camera and took 3 pictures. The 5 mega pixel Kodak photos were not distinct as the ones Stan took and only showed a white spot with no definition. At that time I left to tell others in the nearby building attending the conference about what was happening outside. By the time I returned both objects had left in different directions according to those watching it.
I served in the military in the mid- late 1960s in Naval Air Intelligence and was trained in aircraft identification. I am confident this was a physical object and not any kind of natural phenomenon. I have attached the 2 photos I took even though they are very poor quality compared to what we were visibly seeing.
Another odd note is that 6 individuals’ cell phones or watches were 1 hour off that morning plus another was 2 hours and another was off by 3 hours. The cell phone services were provided by at least 3 different services. No one had any explanation for this oddity.
Stayed and talked with my family and noticed orangish to red lights appear in the sky 3-4 times, no more than two at a time..
Asked my father-in-law who was in the Navy to pay attention to see if they were flares.
Then the lights appeared again but began to make multiple lights (6-8) forming a straight line in the SE to S sky.
He looked at me and said "that was no flare".
Indeed.
2002: Palo Alto, California
This is an interesting one. Metrocosm's map includes 10 stories, all with an AP wire writeup corresponding to the event, which describes a US Air Force missile test. Who do you believe?
white light and gaseous tail resembling a comet tracking through upper atmosphere, which exploded like a firework
I swear I saw this, and I was an Astronomy student, and I have no idea what the hell this was, but here it is. I was looking out my window to watch the sky darken (it was a little before dusk) and I saw what looked like light resembing what you would see when a plane comes in to land in the fog. Judging by the height (it seems as high as a jetliner would fly while cruising) I saw a light with a fog seeming to trail behind it, but I found it strange that if it were an aircraft with a light on in the upper atmosphere the "fog" would be opposite the direction it was moving. Anyway, as it travelled along, I was waiting for what I thought would be where the light would be pointed directly in my direction, when all of the sudden, it exploded into a faint, white fireball, that resembled what looks like a firework burst. All white, with symmetric white arms - just like what you'd see on July 4. Then they fissled out and it was gone. I have never seen anything like this. I'm guessing that it was a meteor, but it was moving so slow, and I have seen those before. There was no "fire trail" or sparks, and it was moving as if it were a jetliner. MAN, I wish I knew.
((NUFORC Note: Missile launch from Vandenberg AFB. Please see article. PD))
((BEGIN ASSOCIATED PRESS ARTICLE ABOUT LAUNCH))
Air Force Test Missile Out West
Fri Sep 20, 1:25 AM ET
VANDENBERG AIR FORCE BASE, Calif. (AP) - An Air Force missile test Thursday provided a spectacular light show seen over California and much of the West, as far away as Utah and New Mexico.
The colorful contrail was seen soon after the unarmed Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missile blasted off at 7:36 p.m. from an underground silo at the Vandenberg military base north of Santa Barbara.
"The smoke went up in spirals as the sun was setting and turned into an orange, amber color. It was like a flower going into bloom pretty quickly," said Simon Cox, who saw it from a restaurant terrace in Santa Barbara.
The missile traveled about 4,200 miles in about 30 minutes, striking a predetermined target at the Kwajalein Missile Range in the western chain of the Marshall Islands, the Air Force said.
Vandenberg spokeswoman Kelly Gabel said clear conditions were responsible for the spectacular light show.
"We do this two or three times a year, but because the weather was so perfect we decided to launch it early," Gabel said. As a result, people were still awake to see it, and although the sun had set, sunlight below the horizon glinted off unspent fuel particles and water droplets.
"Suddenly we're getting calls from people as far away as New Mexico who saw it and want to know what it is," Gabel said.
The mission was directed by the 576th Flight Test Squadron at Vandenberg and the 341th Space Wing and the 341st Space Wing, from Malmstrom Air Force Base in Montana.
The purpose was to test launch systems and the missile's accuracy and reliability.
If you answered that you believe the AP — we do, too. For now.
Although a modest shower, perhaps offering 5 meteors per hour, the Taurid shower is known for producing some dramatic fireballs.
Taurid fireball through light clouds – November 1, 2018 – by Eliot Herman in Tucson, Arizona. Notice the moon, just rising, on the left.
The South and North Taurid meteor showers aren’t known for their large numbers of meteors, but they do offer a high percentage of fireballs, or exceptionally bright meteors. This shower made a huge splash three years ago, in 2015, when there were many, many reports and photos featuring Taurid fireball sightings. Higher rates of Taurid fireballs appear to happen in seven-year cycles. Grand fireball displays did indeed take place in 2008 and 2015. No elevated levels of fireballs are expected in 2018, but the absence of moonlight will make this a fine year for watching the South Taurid shower on and around its expected peak date of November 5.
So watch out for Taurid meteors – and possible fireballs – starting now and throughout the weekend.
Taurid fireball on the evening of October 21, 2017 – 10:27 p.m. – from Joanne West at Gold Canyon, Arizona. Eliot Herman in Tucson caught this same meteor. Read more about the 2 photos.
The prime time viewing hours are from late night until dawn, with the peak viewing coming just after the midnight hour. In general, the South Taurids offer about five meteors per hour at their peak, but the North Taurid shower may add a few more meteors to the mix. How many you’ll see will depend on how far from city lights you are … and how bright the meteors are. If they’re bright enough, they’ll overcome skies beset by light pollution.
Taurid meteors radiate from the constellation Taurus, but they’ll appear in all parts of the sky.
The Taurid meteor stream consists of an extremely wide roadway of far-flung debris left behind by Comet 2P/Encke. When Earth travels through this belt of comet debris, bits and pieces of Comet 2P/Encke smash into the Earth’s upper atmosphere to vaporize as rather slow-moving Taurid meteors (28 km/17 miles per second).
Apparently, the original Taurid stream has been perturbed by Jupiter into two branches: South and North Taurids.
Bottom line: With no moonlight to ruin the show, we’re hoping to see at least a smattering of Taurid fireballs in 2018! It’s time to start watching for them. What to expect from the South Taurid shower, and when to watch.
The GRAVITY instrument on the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope has discovered new details about the Milky Way’s central supermassive black hole. This illustration visualizes some of them, chiefly newfound hot clumps of gas that orbit the black hole at 30 percent the speed of light. Credit: ESO/Gravity Consortium/L. Calçada
Just in time for Halloween, astronomers have delivered the best-yet view of a real-life cosmic monster—Sagittarius A*, a supermassive black hole lurking at the center of the Milky Way. Or, rather, a view of hot clumps of gas that orbit it, teetering on the edge of oblivion. The results reveal new, previously unknown properties of our galaxy’s largest black hole and point the way toward a deeper understanding of gravity.
Black holes, like all truly terrifying monsters, can scarcely be comprehended, let alone seen. Even Einstein doubted they existed, despite his theory of general relativity predicting that they must. They are knots of gravitation bound so tightly that within them spacetime dissolves; spectral shadows so voracious they devour light itself. Yet they can be glimpsed indirectly, like apparitions at the corner of your eye. Most spectacularly, when they eat stars or other black holes they can give off gravitational waves, ripples in the fabric of reality that scientists first directly detected in 2016. Scientists can also measure a black hole’s mass through swarms of stars orbiting around it—showing, for example, Sagittarius A* has somehow swallowed the equivalent of four million suns. (Those in other galaxies can be far larger, tipping the scales at billions of solar masses.) And, ironically, although black holes do not shine, the gas and dust that piles up in spinning accretion disks around their maws can be heated to billions of degrees, becoming hundreds of times more luminous than a star and occasionally ejecting even brighter sprays of radiation. When they come from supermassive black holes, those outbursts can shape and perhaps even sterilize a galactic host—and such black holes seem to squat at the center of every large galaxy. For more than 40 years astronomers have warily studied such circumstantial evidence like bones and ashes scattered at the threshold of a dragon’s lair.
Now, an international team of scientists has studied the Milky Way’s monster using an instrument called GRAVITY to combine the infrared light from four eight-meter telescopes at the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope in Chile. Combining light from multiple telescopes is a technique called interferometry, and can dramatically boost the sensitivity and precision of astronomical observations. The results appeared October 31 in Astronomy & Astrophysics. “This is a major breakthrough,” says Reinhard Genzel, an astrophysicist at Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics and leader of the group. “We have observed the galactic center by using four telescopes as a gigantic single telescope with an effective 130-meter diameter to make interferometric images about a thousand times fainter than what has been done before.” This is not the first breakthrough from GRAVITY: In May of this year the team successfully measured the relativistic distortion of light from a star, S2, during the its closest approach to Sagittarius A* in its 16-year-orbit around the monstrous black hole.
This latest discovery unfolded during and shortly after those same observations of S2, when GRAVITY team members Oliver Pfuhl and Jason Dexter, both study co-authors at Max Planck, noticed three flares, or “hot spots,” that emanated from Sagittarius A*’s accretion disk between mid-May and late July. To appreciate the GRAVITY team’s feat, imagine looking up at the moon from the Earth and discerning on the lunar surface a quarter coin (Sagittarius A*—or at least its shadow) sitting on a beach ball decorated with Christmas lights (Sagittarius A*’s accretion disk and accompanying flares).
These hot spots are thought to be “magnetic thunderstorms” that occur when intense magnetic fields form filaments that snap apart and reconnect, releasing copious energy to heat nearby gas within a black hole’s accretion disk. Each hot spot is akin to a short-lived, 10-million-kilometer-wide lightbulb—after perhaps an hour, it cools and shears apart in the whirling, turbulent maelstrom. That would make studying them exceedingly challenging—particularly if their emissions were being warped and occluded by various extreme relativistic effects predicted to arise in the vicinity of a black hole. Those same effects, in turn, could be studied to put Einstein’s theory of gravity to increasingly stringent tests, potentially leading to new physics.
Such outbursts have been detected before, but for the first time GRAVITY allowed the astronomers to precisely measure the flares’ positions and motions before they dissipated, showing each one moved at 30 percent light-speed in a roughly 45-minute orbit around some unseen central object weighing four million suns. GRAVITY’s data also measured each flare’s polarization, which shifted in accordance with each spot’s motion through the disk’s powerful magnetic fields, further reinforcing the orbital interpretation. “When we saw the first one, we had to ask ourselves, ‘Is this real or not?’ but then we found two more,” Pfuhl says. “They all showed the same rotation, the same orientation and the same scale, which reassured us.”
When first presented with the data, Genzel initially reacted with shock. “I couldn’t believe my eyes,” he says. “No one believed we could do this—we didn’t really think we could do it, either—but there it was, this beautiful orbital motion.” Besides being fortunate enough to catch multiple flares in the act, the GRAVITY team also seems to have been blessed with a quirk of geometry—their best estimates of the hot spots’ orbits suggest Sagittarius A*’s accretion disk is coincidentally oriented almost face-on rather than edge-on to Earth, allowing astronomers to study its swirling hot spots much like meteorologists use satellite views to track thunderstorms in a hurricane. “This is like winning the lottery, because the a priori probability that you would see something like this face-on is very low,” Genzel says. “It almost seems that somebody has arranged this for us; I guess the galactic center is a place for lucky people.”
One person relatively unsurprised by the result is Avi Loeb, an astrophysicist at Harvard University who was not directly involved with GRAVITY’s studies. More than a decade ago, while working with then-postdoc Avery Broderick (now at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Canada), Loeb developed models of hot spots around Sagittarius A* and suggested methods for observing their orbital motion. “Seeing is believing,” he says. “This is fully consistent with what we expected…. Most everyone I talked to about this back then regarded our hot spot model as naive, but amazingly enough nature has proved kinder than many of my colleagues.”
The most important overlap between such predictions and GRAVITY’s observations is that Sagittarius A*’s hot spots seem to be perched just above a long-predicted point of no return—an “innermost stable orbit” for material at the accretion disk’s inner cusp. Beyond this boundary any object will precipitously plunge down through the black hole’s event horizon—the proverbial end of the line past which even light cannot escape—effectively passing out of the observable universe and into the unknown. Because the exact location of any black hole’s innermost orbit depends on its most basic properties, GRAVITY’s measurement is telling us something profound and new about Sagittarius A*. “By themselves, black holes are simple objects—mass, spin and [electric] charge is all you get,” says Andrea Ghez, an astronomer at the University of California, Los Angeles, who leads a team that has used the twin Keck telescopes in Hawaii to compete with Genzel’s group for more than a decade. “The innermost stable orbit is tied to the black hole’s mass and spin—and we already know [Sagittarius A*’s] mass—so if you believe the hot spot is emitting from there, you could pin this black hole’s spin and measure this fundamental property. That fundamental property is tied to how these things grow, which tells you how they form and evolve over time. Black holes are basic constituents of our universe, so when you study them, you are asking about the building blocks of the cosmos.”
Unfortunately, for now further empirical validation of GRAVITY’s result may be limited to that instrument alone. In 2012 NASA pulled the plug on an initiative to give the Keck telescopes an interferometric capability similar to that used by GRAVITY on the Very Large Telescope; without it, independent observations—and confirmation—from Ghez’s team will likely have to wait until sometime in the 2020s when two as-yet-unbuilt 30-meter-class U.S. observatories, the Giant Magellan Telescope and the Thirty Meter Telescope, are slated to debut.
In the meantime, GRAVITY will observe the galactic center for more flares beginning next spring, and additional corroboration may come from the realm of radio astronomy. The Event Horizon Telescope, which seeks to image the enigmatic shadow of Sagittarius A* by interferometrically linking radio observatories from around the world, should soon publish early results from its first full-scale observing run performed last year. That work probes much closer to the black hole, where gravity traps light in a revolving ring just outside the event horizon. But according to the project’s director, Sheperd Doeleman, those observations might also reveal radio blips produced by the circulation of hot spots farther out.
“Whether you’re looking at them in infrared or radio or gravitational waves, black holes really are the crux, one of the universe’s deepest and most profound mysteries,” Doeleman says. “How can there be a one-way doorway out of our universe? What does that even mean? Right now we are still just seeing bones outside the dragon’s lair—we haven’t seen the dragon.”
WETENSCHAPVlak na de ruimtetelescoop Kepler verliezen de Verenigde Staten een tweede verkenner. De ruimtesonde Dawn zit zonder brandstof en doet het niet meer.
De Dawn is in 2007 gelanceerd. Hij onderzocht de grote rotsblokken Vesta en Ceres. Die liggen tussen Mars en Jupiter en draaien in een baan rond de zon. Het onderzoek moest wetenschappers meer leren over het ontstaan van ons zonnestelsel. Anders dan de aarde zijn de rotsblokken nooit uitgegroeid tot echte planeten.
Sinds 2015 draait de sonde rond Ceres. Die rots bevat mogelijk ingrediënten voor het ontstaan van leven. Die mogen niet vervuild worden en daarom is ruimtevaartorganisatie NASA heel voorzichtig. De vluchtleiding laat de sonde niet crashen op de rots, maar laat hem nog zeker twintig en mogelijk vijftig jaar lang eromheen draaien. Eerder deze week maakte de NASA het einde van de ruimtetelescoop Kepler bekend. Ook daar is de brandstof op. De Kepler heeft sinds het begin van de missie in maart 2009 ongeveer 2.600 planeten ontdekt buiten ons zonnestelsel.
En er dreigt nog een derde Amerikaanse missie af te lopen. De Opportunity, een karretje dat veertien jaar lang op Mars rondreed, heeft al tijden niets meer van zich laten horen. Sinds een maandenlange stofstorm is het stil. Misschien is de wagen onherstelbaar beschadigd of is de accu leeg.
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Could Oumuamua Be an Extra-Terrestrial Solar Sail?
Could Oumuamua Be an Extra-Terrestrial Solar Sail?
On October 19th, 2017, the Panoramic Survey Telescope and Rapid Response System-1 (Pan-STARRS-1) in Hawaii announced the first-ever detection of an interstellar asteroid, named 1I/2017 U1 (aka. ‘Oumuamua). In the months that followed, multiple follow-up observations were conducted that allowed astronomers to get a better idea of its size and shape, while also revealing that it had the characteristics of both a comet and an asteroid.
Interestingly enough, there has also been some speculation that based on its shape, ‘Oumuamua might actually be an interstellar spacecraft (Breakthrough Listen even monitored it for signs of radio signals!). A new study by a pair of astronomers from the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) has taken it a step further, suggesting that ‘Oumuamua may actually be a light sail of extra-terrestrial origin.
The study – “Could Solar Radiation Pressure Explain ‘Oumuamua’s Peculiar Acceleration?”, which recently appeared online – was conducted by Shmuel Bialy and Prof. Abraham Loeb. Whereas Bialy is a postdoctoral researcher at the CfA’s Institute for Theory and Computation (ITC), Prof. Loeb is the director of the ITC, the Frank B. Baird Jr. Professor of Science at Harvard University, and the head chair of the Breakthrough Starshot Advisory Committee.
Artist’s impression of the first interstellar asteroid/comet, “Oumuamua”. This unique object was discovered on 19 October 2017 by the Pan-STARRS 1 telescope in Hawaii. Credit: ESO/M. Kornmesser
To recap, ‘Oumuamua was first spotted by the Pan-STARRS-1 survey 40 days after it made its closest pass to the Sun (on September 9th, 2017). At this point, it was about 0.25 AU from the Sun (one-quarter the distance between Earth and the Sun), and already on its way out of the Solar System. In that time, astronomers noted that it appeared to have a high density (indicative of a rocky and metallic composition) and that it was spinning rapidly.
While it did not show any signs of outgassing as it passed close to our Sun (which would have indicated that it was a comet), a research team was able to obtain spectra that indicated that ‘Oumuamua was more icy than previously thought. Then, as it began to leave the Solar System, the Hubble Space Telescope snapped some final images of ‘Oumuamua that revealed some unexpected behavior.
After examining the images, another international research team discovered that ‘Oumuamua had increased in velocity, rather than slowing down as expected. The most likely explanation, they claimed, was that ‘Oumuamua was venting material from its surface due to solar heating (aka. outgassing). The release of this material, which is consistent with how a comet behaves, would give ‘Oumuamua the steady push it needed to achieve this boost in velocity.
To this, Bialy and Loeb offer a counter-explanation. If ‘Oumuamua were in fact a comet, why then did it not experience outgassing when it was closest to our Sun? In addition, they cite other research that showed that if outgassing were responsible for the acceleration, it would have also caused a rapid evolution in ‘Oumuamua’s spin (which was not observed).
Basically, Bialy and Loeb consider the possibility that ‘Oumuamua could in fact be a light sail, a form of spacecraft that relies on radiation pressure to generate propulsion – similar to what Breakthrough Starshot is working on. Similar to what is planned for Starshot, this light sail may been sent from another civilization to study our Solar System and look for signs of life. As Prof. Loeb explained to Universe Today via email:
“We explain the excess acceleration of `Oumuamua away from the Sun as the result of the force that the Sunlight exerts on its surface. For this force to explain measured excess acceleration, the object needs to be extremely thin, of order a fraction of a millimeter in thickness but tens of meters in size. This makes the object lightweight for its surface area and allows it to act as a light-sail. Its origin could be either natural (in the interstellar medium or proto-planetary disks) or artificial (as a probe sent for a reconnaissance mission into the inner region of the Solar System).”
Based on this, Bialy and Loeb went about calculating the likely shape, thickness, and mass-to-area ratio that such an artificial object would have. They also attempted to determine whether this object would be able to survive in interstellar space, and whether or not it would be able to withstand the tensile stresses caused by rotation and tidal forces.
What they found was that a sail that was only a fraction of a millimeter thick (0.3-0.9 mm) would be sufficient for a sheet of solid material to survive the journey through the entire galaxy – though this depends greatly on ‘Oumuamuam’s mass density (which is not well-contrained). Thick or thin, this sail would be able to withstand collisions with dust-grains and gas that permeate the interstellar medium, as well as centrifugal and tidal forces.
Artist concept of lightsail craft approaching the potentially habitable exoplanet Proxima b. Credit: PHL @ UPR Arecibo
As for what an extra-terrestrial light sail would be doing in our Solar System, Bialy and Loeb offer some possible explanations for that. First, they suggest that the probe may actually be a defunct sail floating under the influence of gravity and stellar radiation, similar to debris from ship wrecks floating in the ocean. This would help explain why Breakthrough Listen found no evidence of radio transmissions.
Loeb further illustrated this idea in a recent article he penned forScientific American, where he suggested that ‘Oumuamua could be the first known case of an artificial relic which floated into our Solar System from interstellar space. What’s more, he notes that lightsails with similar dimensions have been designed and constructed by humans, including the Japanese-designed IKAROS project and the Starshot Initiative with which he is involved.
“This opportunity establishes a potential foundation for a new frontier of space archaeology, namely the study of relics from past civilizations in space,” Loeb wrote. “Finding evidence for space junk of artificial origin would provide an affirmative answer to the age-old question ‘Are we alone?’. This would have a dramatic impact on our culture and add a new cosmic perspective to the significance of human activity.”
On the other hand, as Loeb told Universe Today, ‘Oumuamua could be an active piece of alien technology that came to explore our Solar System, the same way we hope to explore Alpha Centauri using Starshot and similar technologies:
“The alternative is to imagine that `Oumuamua was on a reconnaissance mission. The reason I contemplate the reconnaissance possibility is that the assumption that `Oumumua followed a random orbit requires the production of ~10^{15} such objects per star in our galaxy. This abundance is up to a hundred million times more than expected from the Solar System, based on a calculation that we did back in 2009. A surprisingly high overabundance, unless `Oumuamua is a targeted probe on a reconnaissance mission and not a member of a random population of objects.”
IKAROS spaceprobe with solar sail in flight (artist’s depiction) showing a typical square sail configuration. Credit: Wikimedia Commons/Andrzej Mirecki
According to Loeb, that there’s also the fact that ‘Oumuamua’s orbit brought it to within 0.25 AU of the Sun, which is a good orbit for intercepting Earth without experiencing too much solar irradiation. In addition, it came to within 0.15 AU of Earth, which could have been the result of orbital corrections designed to facilitate a flyby.
Alternately, he states that it is possible that hundreds of such probes could be sent so that one of them got close enough to Earth to study it. The fact that the Pan STARRS-1 survey barely detected ‘Oumuamua at its closest approach could be seen as an indication that there are many other such objects that were not detected, bolstering the case for ‘Oumuamua being one of many such probes.
Considering that astronomers recently concluded that our Solar System has likely captured thousands of interstellar objects like ‘Oumuamua, this opens the possibility for future detections which could help prove (or disprove) the case for an interstellar light sail.
Naturally, Bialy and Loeb acknowledge that are still too many unknowns to say with any certainty what ‘Oumuamua really is. And even if it does happen to be a piece of natural rock, all other asteroids and comets that have previously been detected have had mass-to-area ratios orders of magnitude larger than the current estimates for ’Oumuamua.
Oumuamua as it appeared using the William Herschel Telescope on the night of October 29th, 2017. Credit: Queen’s University Belfast/William Herschel Telescope
That, and the fact that radiation pressure appears to be capable of accelerating it, would mean that ‘Oumuamua represents a new class of thin interstellar material that has never before been seen. If true, that opens up a whole new set of mysteries, such as how such material was produced and by what (or whom).
While it has been beyond the reach of our telescopes for almost a year now, ‘Oumuamua is sure to remain the subject of intense study for many years to come. And you can bet astronomers will be on the lookout for more of them! After all, “the Ramans do everything in threes”, right?
Is Oumuamua een buitenaards zonnezeil? Deze astronomen suggereren van wel
Is Oumuamua een buitenaards zonnezeil? Deze astronomen suggereren van wel
Is het langwerpige, roodkleurige object van 400 meter lang en 40 meter breed dat in oktober vorig jaar werd gespot door astronomen een buitenaards zonnezeil? Sommige wetenschappers denken van wel.
Sterrenkundigen van het Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) suggereren in een nieuw onderzoek dat het object, Oumuamua geheten, mogelijk een buitenaards lichtzeil is.
Algemeen wordt aangenomen dat Oumuamua een komeet is, maar daar zijn Shmuel Bialy en professor Abraham Loeb het niet mee eens.
Uitgassing
“Als het een komeet was, waarom werden er dan geen sporen van uitgassing waargenomen toen hij het dichtst bij onze zon stond?” vroegen ze.
En als uitgassing verantwoordelijk wordt gehouden voor de versnelling, dan moet Oumuamua ook sneller rond zijn as zijn gaan draaien (iets wat niet is waargenomen), aldus het tweetal.
Bialy en Loeb houden rekening met de mogelijkheid dat Oumuamua een lichtzeil is, een ruimteschip dat voor zijn aandrijving afhankelijk is van stralingsdruk.
Tekenen van leven
Dit lichtzeil is mogelijk door een andere beschaving gestuurd om ons zonnestelsel te verkennen en te zoeken naar tekenen van leven.
Zo’n zeil is volgens de astronomen theoretisch gezien in staat om de reis door het sterrenstelsel te overleven.
Het is mogelijk dat de sonde niet langer werkzaam is en onder invloed van de zwaartekracht en straling door de ruimte vliegt.
Buitenaardse radiogolven
Dit zou kunnen verklaren waarom onderzoekers niets hoorden toen ze het sigaarvormige object scanden op buitenaardse radiogolven.
Het is ook goed mogelijk dat Oumuamua een buitenaardse sonde is die nog wel werkt en die gebruikt wordt door aliens om het zonnestelsel te verkennen, stelt Loeb.
The twin Voyager 1 and 2 spacecraft are exploring where nothing from Earth has flown before. Continuing on their more-than-41-year journey since their 1977 launches, they each are much farther away from Earth and the sun than Pluto.
In August 2012, Voyager 1 made the historic entry into interstellar space, the region between stars, filled with material ejected by the death of nearby stars millions of years ago.
Scientists hope to learn more about this region when Voyager 2, in the “heliosheath" — the outermost layer of the heliosphere where the solar wind is slowed by the pressure of interstellar medium — also reaches interstellar space.
Both spacecraft are still sending scientific information about their surroundings through the Deep Space Network, or DSN.
In 1977, twin golden records (Phonograph records, 12-inch gold-plated copper disks) were sent into space on the Voyager 1 and 2 spacecraft.
Still sailing through space at nearly 60,000 km per hour, the records contain sound, songs, and images from earth.
But how did NASA include images on an analog record? Here, we decoded the audio, and see the images the way that aliens were intended to see them.
It’s another Great Pyramid “This could explain everything!” moment. Researchers digging at an alabaster quarry where the Egyptians carved out the stones used for the massive construction project have uncovered the remains of what appears to be a ramp, stairs and pole holes that helped workers move the huge stones to the surface where they were then transported to the pyramid site at Giza. While similar systems have been found at limestone quarries, this is the first in an alabaster mine and shows that this primitive yet effective technology dates back to Cheops.
“The mission successfully discovered a unique system to pull and transfer the stone blocks from the bottom of the quarry after removing the debris used to cover it which can be dated to the reign of King Khufu of the 4th Dynasty. The moving system consists of the central ramp surrounded by two set of stairs contain poles holes which help lifting the alabaster stone block through at least 20% coarse ramp.”
Dr. Yannis Gourdon of the Institut Français d’Archéologie orientale is the co-director, with Dr. Roland Enmarch ot the University of Liverpool), of the Hatnub Epigraphic Projectwhose purpose is “recording texts commemorating pharaonic expeditions to the Egyptian alabaster quarries at Hatnub (in the desert c. 18km south-east of Amarna).” He revealed the new discovery there in the Luxor Times (including photos) and explains in LiveScience that the stones were first placed on a sled before being pulled out at a 20-degree angle. In addition to the ramp system, the researchers also found inscriptions and drawings linking the quarry to Cheops/Khufu.
The ramp system may have been used both at the quarry and the construction site
“There are at least 100 inscriptions discovered commemorating pharaonic expeditions to the alabaster quarries at Hatnub from the Old Kingdom to the New Kingdom. Studying the inscriptions on the detected construction devices, we came to the conclusion that this ramp belongs, at a minimum, to the reign of Pharaoh Cheops, who ordered the construction of the Great Pyramid at Giza. This means that even in the times of Cheops, the ancient Egyptians knew how to move huge stone blocks even on very steep slopes.”
While the outside of the Great Pyramid is made of 2.3 metric ton limestone blocks, some alabaster was also used on the exterior but its primary use was for flooring, statues and coffins. Mustafa Waziri, Secretary-General of the Egyptian Ministry of Antiquities, confirms that this is the first evidence that shows how heavy blocks were lifted and moved from quarries.
A ramp is so much more elegant
Unfortunately, the discovery is tempered by bad news. The Institut Français d’Archéologie Orientale web site points out that the quarry is now known to the general public and is in danger of being turned into a working operation again, eventually destroying this and other evidence of how the pyramids were built. It’s hoped that this can at least be delayed until researchers learn how this ramp system was used to build the Great Pyramid … not to mention what happened in between to get the stones from one location to the other.
For all of the civilizations that have shared this lump of rock we call Earth with us, it is often a sobering thought to realize that a great many of them have actually faded into the oblivion of forgotten history, forever lost to the eternal midnight of vanished knowledge that we can no longer see into. Often these civilizations were magnificent, sprawling, and advanced, yet they have nevertheless managed to melt away into the abyssal depths of time. These are the civilizations that have for whatever reasons become lost to us, invisible to our efforts to gaze upon them and learn more about them, as hard as we try. Whether it be due to a lack of written records, their sudden disappearances, or their often baffling monuments that they have left behind, these peoples have managed to defy understanding, leaving only perplexing clues in their passing. One such civilization once lived upon the Mediterranean island of Sardinia, a once proud people who have left behind mysterious structures and monuments that are as enormous as they are inscrutable.
-Going back into the mists of time, from the Bronze Age of around the 18th century BC, the island of Sardinia, in the Mediterranean Sea, was once ruled by the mysterious Nuragic civilization. This lost culture lasted until the time of the Romans, who came to the island in 238 BC, after which the enigmatic Nuragic faded into obscurity and out of existence. The Nuragic civilization left behind no written history of their people, merely romanticized and exaggerated tales told by the Greeks and Romans, and they largely remain a perplexing mystery. One of the only legacies they did leave imprinted upon the land and its history are the many megalithic stone structures they left behind, such as the nuraghe, which are ancient fort-like structures with their purposes mysterious and long lost to time, numbering in the thousands, scattered all around the Sardinian landscape. There are also the mysterious immense stone tombs that dot the landscape here, called the Tomba dei gigantic, or “The Tombs of Giants,” due to their gigantic size.
Nuragic ruins
These massive funerary monuments were constructed of enormous slabs or blocks that rose up to 13 feet high which were arranged around an even bigger central stele or portal stone with a doorway carved into it, to form corridors and rooms or chambers that can measure as much as 50 feet in length. The most famous one of these giant’s tombs is one that can be found at a place called Coddu Vecchiu, in Arzachena, northern Sardinia, and which was built between the years of 1800 to 1600 BC and first uncovered in 1966. The tomb at Coddu Vecchiu has a forecourt made of eleven granite stones standing in a semi-circle, and is composed of a central stele standing 13 feet high, which marks the entrance to the tomb, and a corridor within measuring 33 feet long.
This tomb and others like it have many legends attached to them. Since they were found to hold within them large numbers of human remains, in past ages they were said to be the leftovers from some wicked giant’s meal of human flesh, and other lore said that they served as the graves or giants or even their residences. Yet in fact they were most likely used as massive public communal graves, with the doorways serving as a passage through the barrier to the afterlife, but this doesn’t make them any less mysterious, as the rituals involved with creating them and the significance of their designs are poorly understood, and we know little about the people who made them.
One interesting idea is that the arrangement of the stones was designed to channel the telluric current and magnetic forces of the surrounding granite and energy lines, possibly for the purpose of rejuvenation and regeneration, or to provide a smoother transition to the afterlife. It is speculated that these tombs were perhaps purposefully built over earth energy lines, that the semicircular layout would focus these powers, and that not only would the dead would come here, but also the sick or wounded, hoping that these mysterious forces would heal them. This has been somewhat supported by the many visitors to such tombs who have reported feeling invigorated while there, or of feeling a thrumming energy in the air and the stone. Did this ancient people understand these forces and seek to harness them through the construction of these gigantic toms It is unclear, and for now the exact nature of the Tombs of Giants remains a mystery.
The Tomb of Giants at Coddu Vecchiu
In addition to Tombs of Giants, Sardinia has another mystery of actual giants, or at least statues of them. In 1974, some random, nondescript farmland near Monte Prama yielded quite an amazing find. There in the earth were found the broken remains of a total of over 40 massive statues, crafted into the likenesses of armored warriors, each around 2 meters in height and fashioned from solid stone, which had been abandoned there to the elements for millennia. Oddly, the statues do not appear human, but rather have outlandish and creepy visages with large concentric circles for eyes and very small, sometimes nonexistent mouths, as well as elongated necks, which along with their fierce weaponry and armor lend them a rather unsettling and formidable appearance.
The statues, which were dubbed the Kolossoi, were most certainly made by the Nuragic civilization, and were thought to have possibly been constructed as intimidating warrior guardians of the dead for a nearby necropolis, but this is uncertain, as is the reason why they look the way they do. At the time, it was quite a groundbreaking discovery, as no other such collection of larger than life sized sculptures had ever been found in Europe, and they were enigmatic in their design and purpose. Despite this, the statues were whisked away and stored in a museum vault, where they would sit in the darkness much as they had for centuries, collecting dust until decades later, when in 2006 researchers sort of rediscovered them and began piecing together some of the broken parts, a daunting task, especially since many of the fragments are missing.
One of the Sardinia giants
The reconstruction work took a total of 4 years, and 25 of the ancient warrior statues were restored to some semblance of the way they might have once looked, complete with bows, shields, swords, armor, and horned helmets. In 2014, these amazing statues were put on display at the national archaeological museum, in Cagliari, in southern Sardinia, much to the awe and amazement of visitors. The statues themselves, although finally brought into the light after so long, still keep their mysteries close. No one is really sure why they were made, how they were once arranged, or even exactly where they originally stood, and they remain another mystery of Sardinia’s lost Nuragic people.
These mysteries have managed to remain elusive and murky, the remnants of a culture who left little in the way of information about themselves except these massive stone structures and statues, practically the only evidence that they ever even existed at all. Yet even though we have these relics of the past to use in order to try and peer through the window of history, that window remains rather foggy, what lies beyond indistinct and fleeting. The Tombs of Giants, giant warrior statues, and other such structures scattered about Sardinia have managed to remain as cryptic puzzles that fire the imagination and offer hints, but no real answers, the people who made them just as mysterious as they ever were, their culture and ways lost to time even as their grand, giant constructions live on.
Massive triangle hovering above Selma, North Carolina 31-Oct-2018
Massive triangle hovering above Selma, North Carolina 31-Oct-2018
Here’s one new video of a massive triangle hovering above Selma in North Carolina. This happened yesterday.
Witness report:
Massive triangle hovered over my house. Was walking my dog and noticed some strange red lights in the sky, they were shaped like a triangle. I had my phone in my hand so I filmed the whole event. It was a massive triangle shaped craft, at first i thought it was a group of planes but i quickly dismissed that. The object was huge and was blocking out the stars as it passed, there was no sound.
Alien discovery: UFO seen WITHDRAWING energy from the sun
Alien discovery: UFO seen WITHDRAWING energy from the sun
A UFO as big as the Earth and shaped like a cube has been spotted near the sun, leading conspiracy theorists to believe it was using the star to refuel.
Alien discovery: UFO seen WITHDRAWING energy from the sun
(Image: NASA)
The strange cube-like object was spotted on NASA cameras, sending alien enthusiasts into a frenzy.
The UFO was spotted on NASA’s SOHO camera Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) satellite by Scott C Waring, author of website UFO Sightings Daily.
The cube-UFO looks as if it has a huge plume coming out of the top, which may be being used to withdraw energy from the sun so that it can propel itself into deep space, according to a theory from Mr Waring.
He writes on UFO Sightings Daily: “The UFO has a yellowish plume as if its been using the sun’s material as a propulsion of some sort.
"It is strange that NASA has not made some kind of announcement about this UFO since every sun camera in the world of astronomy probably caught it.”
This is not the first time an alleged alien spaceship has been spotted near the sun.
In early September, Maria Hill from Salem, Indiana, as snapping images of the sun believes she saw a huge UFO followed by a massive fleet of smaller crafts passing behind.
The UFO is relatively large
(Image: NASA)
Ms Hill wrote on Facebook alongside the images: “This is what showed up in my camera after I took a picture of the sun in the eastern sky this morning. iPhone 8 with a camera lens adapter.
“A green circular door-like object is at the centre of the vortex/worm hole and a serpent snake at the top right above it, by a circular disc. I am sure this has a symbolic meaning with the snake and the disc.”
Two unexplained UFO sightings in Canada in the ’60s still draw tourists to the wilds of Manitoba and the Nova Scotia coast to puzzle over the incidents—and yes, enjoy the scenery.
Jennifer Bain
Jennifer Bain
Driving the Extraterrestrial Highway with a detour to Area 51 is a perfectly legit reason to visit Nevada, and we all know why people go to Roswell, New Mexico. But Canada?
Yes, Canada, too, has a couple of top-tier UFO sites worth checking out, and both also happen to be located in picturesque, tourist-friendly settings.
Horseback riding to a UFO encounter site in the Manitoba woods is a mind-expanding outing. And at a modest interpretive center in a Nova Scotia fishing village, talking to a guy who actually saw an unidentified flying object crash into the ocean makes things real.
“Canada’s UFO guy,” Chris Rutkowski, has a diplomatic take on the polite rivalry between the country’s two best-documented sightings.
The Falcon Lake encounter in Manitoba generated hundreds of official documents, from police and doctors to atomic energy experts. There was only one witness, but he endured bizarre injuries.
The Shag Harbour sighting in Nova Scotia, Rutkowski reasons, didn’t produce as many documents, but the police, coast guard, and air force were involved from the start—and there were multiple witnesses.
Both cases happened in 1967 and remain unexplained. Both deserve the same name recognition enjoyed by Roswell. Neither has aggressively courted attention (it’s Canada) but welcome the curious.
If it feels like UFO sightings are waning, they’re not.
Falcon Lake UFO binder.
JENNIFER BAIN
“There still is a desire to think we’re not alone in the universe,” says Rutkowski, a Manitoba science writer who has helmed the annual Canadian UFO survey since 1989. There were 1,101 sightings in Canada last year—an average of three a day. A tantalizing 8 percent were deemed unexplained.
Still, none have the complexity of Falcon Lake, a case that Rutkowski will go out on a limb and “argue that in some ways it was better than Roswell.”
On May 20, 1967, industrial mechanic Stefan Michalak went amateur prospecting for precious metals in Whiteshell Provincial Park about 90 minutes east of Winnipeg.
As he ate lunch alone in the woods, two “cigar-shaped objects with humps” appeared and one landed nearby. He studied and sketched it, heard muffled voices and figured it was an experimental U.S. military craft. When he touched the craft, the heat burned his glove. The craft took off, knocking him to the ground, setting his shirt and undershirt ablaze and leaving him with significant chest burns from a beam of heat. A bizarre, grid-like burn erupted on his stomach. There are photos of it and of the marks left at the site.
Michalak was treated in a Winnipeg hospital and at the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota as strange electrical smells oozed out of his body. Canadian and American police and military authorities conducted extensive investigations.
“No explanation,” they all concluded. Michalak, a Polish immigrant whose story never wavered, died in 1999. It should be remembered that UFO stands for unidentified flying object—the words alien and extraterrestrial aren’t part of the definition.
Flash forward to 2018 and young couple Devin and Kendra Imrie runFalcon Beach Ranch, offering cabin stays and horseback rides, including one that goes to the encounter site.
“Everyone always asks if I’ve seen anything and I always have to say I haven’t, unfortunately,” Devin admits. “It would be better if I had a great UFO story.”
Well, he does. It’s just not his own.
Devin’s dad bought the ranch in 1978 and he grew up on the story. The remote site was long forgotten—or deliberately ignored—until Unsolved Mysteries came calling for a 1992 episode. It’s tough to drive or walk through the dense bush and swampy land to the site, so horses do the best job until you must dismount and walk the final few feet to a flat, rocky area by a quiet pond.
“Even if you’re not into UFOs, it’s a beautiful ride and a beautiful location,” points out Devin on my two-hour ride. “The site itself is totally pristine. Not even a plaque.”
“Well, it would be nice to add a plaque.”
There’s no word on whether the government is game to do that in a provincial park.
For last year’s 50th anniversary weekend, the Imries put on extra rides and attracted “some really keen UFO folks,” including one with a Geiger counter.
Devin brings a tattered black binder full of old clippings, notes andsketches on all UFO rides. He sells some UFO paraphernalia in his western-themed gift shop, but the Laughing Loon in town sells more.
The federal government has taken a recent shine to the Falcon Lake mystery. The Royal Canadian Mint just released a $20 silver collector coin in April. All 4,000 coins quickly sold out—at $129.95 a pop.
“As soon as this one launched, it spread like wildfire,” confirms the coin’s product manager, Erica Maga.
Ontario illustrator Joel Kimmel captures Michalak knocked on his back, one arm pointed skyward, as a saucer-like craft takes off. The ovoid (egg-shaped) coin came with a black light flashlight that makes it glow in the dark with a reddish-purple craft and yellow beam-like blast.
In Canada, collector coins highlight serious things, like anniversaries, natural heritage, history, and achievements, but also interesting unique Canadian experiences. Maga, for one, was “really thrilled” with the UFO coin and the “reception it has received.”
What intrigues me about 1967—Canada’s centennial year—is that it links to two more significant UFO moments.
St. Paul, Alberta built the world’s first UFO landing pad in June that year, correctly betting that it would draw people to the town two hours northeast of Edmonton. Queen Elizabeth and Mother Teresa are among those who have dropped by, though perhaps for other reasons. There is a UFO exhibit and apparently a UFO hotline, although nobody can tell me what the number is.
On Canada’s east coast, two-and-half hours south of Halifax, the fishing village of Shag Harbour makes the most of its Oct. 4, 1967 brush with a UFO.
That evening, a number of people (including a commercial airline pilot) spotted an object with flashing lights hovering over the ocean and feared it was an aircraft in trouble. One police officer even glimpsed the strange object before it crashed, changed shape, and glowed in the water. But rescue boats found only a massive yellow foam slick. Navy divers turned up nothing. No military or civilian aircraft were ever reported missing.
Now one can ponder the case from an ocean-side bench beside an old gazebo and a new lobster sculpture painted as an alien. The volunteer Shag Harbour UFO Incident Society hosts an annual conference that this year drew the diving and filmmaking grandchildren of legendary ocean explorer Jacques Cousteau and boasted hotspot bus tours and crash site boat trips.
Easier to access is the society’s seasonal interpretive center with a $2 entry fee.
“It’s not a museum,” stresses society president and retired fisherman Laurie Wickens. “You’ve got nothing to show people. All you’ve got is a story.”
He called police after spotting something strange in the sky and then in the ocean. The yellow foam was gone by the time his rescue boat pulled up, and “nobody saw any little green men.”
To support the non-profit society, I load up on books about the incident, a retro mug, a hand-painted rock and—best of all—a postcard with an actual postage stamp about the UFO sighting. Wickens promises to pop the card in the mail so the post office can then put the government-sanctioned “Shag Harbour: Home of the ’67 UFO Visit” cancellation stamp on it.
Wickens shows me around the one-room center, with typed witness stories taped to the walls and tables full of newspaper clippings, UFO books, and even a child’s class project on the famous story.
How does Wickens feel about telling the same story for 51 years and counting, I ask.
“Whether you like it or not, you’re part of it,” he replies. “I’ll leave it at that.”
He’s confident that Shag Harbour will soon get its own collector coin like Falcon Lake did. Rutkowski, meanwhile, firmly believes that both UFO encounters “deserve films.”
Mysterious ‘Pterodactyl’ UFO casting shadow over clouds ‘could be cloaked spaceship’
Mysterious ‘Pterodactyl’ UFO casting shadow over clouds ‘could be cloaked spaceship’
Jeff Parsons
A mysterious craft travelling over a US Air Force base in Ohio has drawn comparisons with an extinct flying dinosaur.
Conspiracy theorists are locked in debate over whether the ‘Pterodactyl’ UFO is an alien craft visiting us from another planet.
‘The UFO is also throwing a shadow onto the cloud below…which is 100% amazing, because this means that UFO was freaking huge,’ wrote paranormal expert Scott C. Waring on his website UFO Sightings Daily ‘
I’m talking several times bigger than a 747.
‘This UFO must have been cloaked because something that big would normally stand out.’
(Picture: Scott Waring/ufosightingsdaily.com)
(Picture: Scott Waring/ufosightingsdaily.com)
‘The object also resembles a Pterodactyl…a flying dinosaur. Because its throwing a huge shadow on the cloud, that means this was giant in size, ruling out remote control planes, drones, kites, balloons…this one is a true mystery.’
A video posted to YouTube that dives in to the sighting has racked up over 5,000 views in less than a week.
Weird ufo. The sightings are increasing worldwide. We are definitely not alone,’ commented YouTube user Xavier Perkins.
The original image of the UFO was snapped just after 4pm on September 3 over Mansfield Lahm Air National Guard Base in Ohio, USA. According to the original photographer, who submitted the photo to a US non-profit organisation called the Mutual UFO Network, the craft made no noise as it travelled overhead.
(Picture: Scott Waring/ufosightingsdaily.com)
In fact, it was only discovered when looking back at the original photo. Magnification shows that the craft created a shadow on a cloud it was flying past.
‘I checked with numerous personnel at the 179th Air Lift Wing, the C-130 facility in Mansfield. No one indicated that there were any unusual arrivals of fly-bys at Mansfield Lahm Regional Airport,’ read a caption on the photo.
Some have speculated that it could be some kind of stealth fighter testing conducted by the US Air Force.
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Over mijzelf
Ik ben Pieter, en gebruik soms ook wel de schuilnaam Peter2011.
Ik ben een man en woon in Linter (België) en mijn beroep is Ik ben op rust..
Ik ben geboren op 18/10/1950 en ben nu dus 73 jaar jong.
Mijn hobby's zijn: Ufologie en andere esoterische onderwerpen.
Op deze blog vind je onder artikels, werk van mezelf. Mijn dank gaat ook naar André, Ingrid, Oliver, Paul, Vincent, Georges Filer en MUFON voor de bijdragen voor de verschillende categorieën...
Veel leesplezier en geef je mening over deze blog.