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.
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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...
10-02-2019
Mysterious Radar Anomalies Reported Near Sydney Australia
Mysterious Radar Anomalies Reported Near Sydney Australia
Late in 2018, a series of anomalies appeared on weather radar systems over the US states of Illinois, Kentucky, Maine, Florida, and Indiana. The anomalies were eventually blamed on a newexperimental type of chaff, an aircraft countermeasure designed to mask aircraft activity over a given area and generally confuse enemy radar systems.
While that explanation may have been sufficient for that week’s news cycle, many aviation experts noted that chaff usually doesn’t linger in place as these mysterious clouds seemed to. Were these anomalies indeed the product of chaff testing, or was military activity merely a convenient scapegoat as has been alleged in many other anomalies aerial phenomena?
A pair of B-1B Lancers deploy chaff and flares during a military exercise.
The mystery deepened this week as similar radar anomalies were reported in Australia and again blamed on chaff. Many Sydney residents were startled when they saw weather radar displaying what appeared to be ominous rain clouds heading their way when a glance outside revealed crystal blue skies. Australian Broadcasting Corporation meteorologist Graham Creed quickly explained the radar anomaly on social media, stating that like in the American radar anomalies, this was the product of chaff:
It’s the Williamtown RAAF base and they’re putting what’s known as chaff in the atmosphere. The idea of it is that it hides what they’re doing underneath it. They’re doing manoeuvres with their aircraft. They drop this chaff and it spreads out and then it creates an echo so you can’t see individual movements.
The Williamtown RAAF base and Australian Department of Defence were contacted by the ABC but did not comment on the anomaly. What was the RAAF hiding, and from whom?
Chaff canisters
Like in the case of last year’s radar anomalies in America, I’m left to wonder why experimental aircraft technology would be tested near densely populated areas where weather radar systems are so common. If you wanted to hide experimental aircraft tests, why not do it somewhere more secretive? Or was that the point: to determine how well civilian radar systems can be fooled? To what end?
Long Dark UFO Seen Over California Hills Two Day Ago, Feb 8, 2019, Video, UFO Sighting News.
Long Dark UFO Seen Over California Hills Two Day Ago, Feb 8, 2019, Video, UFO Sighting News.
Date of sighting: Feb 8, 2019 Location of sighting: Lampoc, California, USA Source: MUFON This cigar shaped UFO was seen a few days ago over Lampoc, California hills. The UFO is very close to Vandanburg Air Force Base, so this could be a military craft or even a blimp. From this distance its really hard to tell, but if we use what we see...the details...then it tells us what its not. You see, the object is flying over the hill top and as you see there is a tall power line pole, not the usual pole, but the giant size all steel type...and this flying object is below the electical wire level and would have been insane for any blimp pilot to fly into those wires. So...its not a blimp. UFOs however are often seen above mountain ridges like this and also often seen along electrical and phone power lines...like this. So, I would conclude it really is a UFO...an unidentified flying object. But we need close up video of this craft from a different angle to be 100% sure. Scott C. Waring Eyewitness states:
Witness large object hovering and then moving along the horizon above a mountain or hill.
I was checking out the NASA Apollo 11 archives when I noticed a jar shaped object in a few photos. Four or five photos contained this object. The artefact is an ancient jar of unknown origins at the feet of Buzz Aldrin. The ancient jar is very similar to the ancient Aztec jar in the photo next to it. The shape and the size would be almost equal, but the age of the jar on the moon seems to be in the tens of thousands of years. The astronaut even stepped on it, but the tread marks on his boots made no impression on it due to the jars hardness.
I believe we are opening up an entirely new era of archeology. An era of scientists that will search for, discover and record ancient alien artefacts off world, on moons and planets in our own solar system.
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- Gemiddelde waardering: 0/5 - (0 Stemmen) Categorie:Ruins, strange artifacts on other planets, moons, ed ( Fr, EN, NL )
Mysterious ‘Underwater Wall’ That Circles The ENTIRE Planet Found On Google Earth (Video)
Mysterious ‘Underwater Wall’ That Circles The ENTIRE Planet Found On Google Earth (Video)
A mysterious video posted on YouTube claims there is a supermassive wall located beneath Earth’s oceans, encompassing the entire planet.
This mysterious wall, found by a YouTube channel called ‘Flat Earth Arabic’ claims the massive wall tens of thousands of miles across beneath the ocean.
In the distant past, UFO enthusiasts and conspiracy theorists have found countless unexplained things on Google Earth. From pyramids to mysterious towers, petroglyphs, and even sunken cities, Google Earth has unleashed the imagination of people around the globe.
Not long ago we reported about a supposed discovered just off the coast of Mexico—12°8’1.5″N, 119°35’26.4″W—where a researcher discovered a humongous underwater pyramid. Among the many structures that are said to remain hidden beneath the ocean, ‘researchers’ have found things that—supposedly—challenge everything we know about our history.
Last year, a teenager using Google Earth ‘discovered’ what researchers are calling one of the largest, previously unknown ancient cities belonging to the Maya.
In similar ways, researchers all around the globe have been hunting for Pyramids and lost structures that have eluded experts for decades.
In 2012, American researcher Angela Micol discovered ‘Pyramids larger than those found on the Giza Plateau, using satellite images.
But countless different discoveries have been made using Google Earth.
Last year we reported about a complex of structures that stretch for a staggering 76 miles at its furthest points.
The formations found off the coast of Baja California include mysterious tube-like constructions that are roughly 2.4 miles in width. Given the curious shape and distinguishable lines, many believe these are just some of the many underwater structures on our planet.
However, these new claims go beyond anything we’ve probably ever come across.
This wall’s sheer size and its adherence to linearity indicate it is not a natural formation to many. In fact, many people are convinced that due to the numerous discoveries made across the globe which completely contradict history as we have been taught in school, something like this is entirely possible. After all—they say—Earth is millions of years old and we are begging to uncover evidence that suggests many ancient civilizations inhabited Earth in our planet’s long history.
BUT, HOLD ON A SEC, THIS CAN’T BE A WALL, RIGHT?
Zooming in on the provided coordinates you clearly see what seems to be a MASSIVE structure. But who could have erected such a wall? If it really is an artificial structure, how old is it? What was its purpose?
Many disagree and don’t believe we are looking at an actual wall. In fact, there even might be a perfectly reasonable explanation for the enigmatic finding.
What if we are looking at a Google Earth glitch?
Due to the fact that Google Earth uses different images while ‘mapping the planet’, it isn’t uncommon to encounter parts of the map that just didn’t quite match perfectly, resulting in a MASSIVE wall that encompasses the entire planet.
One of the most likely explanations for this ‘impressive find’ is that we are looking at a digital seam in the mapping of the Poles.
SATELLITE IMAGE STITCHING ERROR?
Image stitching or photo stitching is the process of combining multiple photographic images with overlapping fields of view to produce a segmented panorama or high-resolution image.
Commonly performed through the use of computer software, most approaches to image stitching require nearly exact overlaps between images and identical exposures to produce seamless results.
Image stitching is widely used in today’s world and was used in the satellite images we are seeing on Google Earth.
BUT AN ENTIRE WALL THAT ENCOMPASSES EARTH?
A lot of things can have played a role in creating such an effect. Illumination, point of view, reference, and many other things may have played a crucial role in this massive error. One of the most likely reasons for the seam appearing could be the background changing between two images for the same continuous foreground.
CHECK OUT THE VIDEO BELLOW:
What are we looking at there? A Supermassive wall as the above video claims? Or just another glitch in the image processing techniques in Google maps?
Sometimes it might seem like life on Earth has taken a few bizarre twists and turns in the last few years, but if it helps you feel better, it’s not just us. In reality, the entire galaxy is bent out of shape—literally. Astronomers have created a new 3D map of the Milky Way galaxy, and ina new paper published in Nature Astronomy, illustrate that the galaxy as a whole has a warped structure, progressively twisting out into a spiral.
This isn’t exactly the biggest surprise. For decades, astronomers have observed a twisting pattern of hydrogen gas out in the far reaches of the galaxy. But since that gas layer extends so far out, it was never really clear whether individual stellar bodies in the galaxy were exhibiting the same kind of warping, and whether there was a consistent warp throughout the Milky Way.
This new 3D map wasn’t even intended to trace the galaxy’s warp. “Most science is serendipitous,” says Richard de Grijs, an astronomer based at Macquarie University in Sydney, and a coauthor of the new study. It was his former graduate student, lead author Xiaodian Chen, now at the National Astronomical Observatories of Chinese Academy of Sciences, who had previously compiled a large collection of observations of over 50,000 stars in the galaxy, particularly in infrared. Chen decided to use observations of the Cepheids—a class of young, bright, pulsating stars—to attempt to outline the shape of the Milky Way.
The Cepheids are particularly useful for any astronomical investigation requiring you to trace distance through outer space. They show period changes in brightness over time, and measuring the cycles in those brightness can basically tell you the distance between two points down to an incredibly accurate scale. And since dust and gas doesn’t absorb much of the light on longer wavelengths, astronomers use infrared to look at those cycles.
Ultimately, the team ended up with 1,339 Cepheid observations made with NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, covering most of the Milky Way. “We knew their positions in the sky, and their distances—that means you have a three-dimensional distribution,” says de Grijs. “By simply plotting that with respect to the distance of the sun, we could see the shape of the Milky Way as constrained by the Cepheids.”
Because we don’t have a telescope sitting outside of the Milky Way, we have to figure out its shape from inside of itself; de Grijs and team analogizes this method as being akin to trying to figure out the shape of Australia from a garden in Sydney, or the shape of China from a park in Beijing. It’s much easier to determine the shape of almost anything if you can look at it from the outside.
Typically, the warped shape of a galaxy is caused by instabilities on the disk’s edge, where the galaxy’s gravitational forces are weaker and objects are more prone to bending and twisting. It’s a common phenomenon for spiral galaxies.
And while the warping of the galaxy isn’t a new revelation, Elena D’Onghia, an astronomer at the University of Wisconsin who was not involved with the study, thinks it’s interesting how the team took advantage of the Cepheids in creating the new galactic map that can characterize the warp at a rather high accuracy.
D’Onghia does note, however, that the origin of the warp still needs a more detailed explanation, especially since the hydrogen gas still seems to twist more rigorously then the stars do. “It could be due to torques exerted by a large satellite galaxy like the Large Magellanic Cloud, or the Sagittarius dwarf galaxy that impacted the Milky Way disk not long ago,” she says. “It could be by torques exerted by the inner disk, as the authors claim. [They] do not really explore the different ways to generate the warp as compared to the data.”
Still, there are some larger astronomical questions the findings ought to help resolve, especially when it comes to dark matter. About 85 percent of the universe is thought to be made of dark matter. We can’t directly observe it, but its presence is implied because it gravitationally affects the movements of other celestial structures whirring around through outer space. “We know we need it to explain the motions of the stars in the Milky Way,” says de Grijs. Understanding the shape of the Milky Way means we can get a better handle on where that dark matter is located in the galaxy.
The findings also ought to help the European Space Agency’s Gaia mission, which is tasked with making observations of approximately one billion astronomical objects (about one percent of the Milky Way galaxy). The new map could give the Gaia project a benchmark with which to compare measurements as they come in.
And let’s not forget that Chen’s catalog of 50,000 is ripe for more thorough analysis to unveil more mysteries of the Milky Way. “There’s a lot more we can do with this and continue to explore what’s in the data,” says de Grijs.
The truth is out there! Scientist who investigated UFOs for 20 years for the government coined the phrase Close Encounters of the Third Kind - and had a cameo in Spielberg’s hit film - turned from skeptic to believer, inspiring a new TV show
The truth is out there! Scientist who investigated UFOs for 20 years for the government coined the phrase Close Encounters of the Third Kind - and had a cameo in Spielberg’s hit film - turned from skeptic to believer, inspiring a new TV show
In the late 1940s, reports of 'flying saucers' flooded in from throughout the U.S.
In 1948, the air force was tasked with looking into the reports to calm the public
They brought on accomplished astronomer Dr J. Allen Hynek, who for nearly 20 years looked into the UFO reports and called for them to be scientifically studied
Hynek initially thought the sightings were a fad but eventually changed his mind
He coined the phrase ‘Close Encounters of the Third Kind,' had a cameo in Steven Spielberg’s 1977 hit movie, and later said he saw UFOs on two occasions
A new scripted TV show, 'Project Blue Book,' takes a fictionalized look at his life
Forty-five years before the catchphrase, The Truth is Out There, was on the tip of many tongues, a man searched for scientific explanations for the inexplicable lights and objects that streaked and whizzed and zoomed across the night sky.
Dr J. Allen Hynek was no Fox Mulder but rather the real deal: an accomplished astronomer the United States government tasked to help figure out what was happening in the skies after World War II.
Dr J. Allen Hyenk, pictured, was an accomplished astronomer who consulted for years on the U.S. Air Force's project to investigate UFO reports. In the late 1940s, reports flooded in from around the country
In the late 1940s, ‘flying saucer’ reports flooded in from across the country and the air force had no idea what to do with them. Hynek, a professor, was asked to consult for the air force’s Project Sign, which was to investigate them.
Initially, the man of science pegged the sightings as a fad, a manifestation of a country suffering from the aftereffects of the war and the bombing of Pearl Harbor. But as the unidentified flying object reports continued unabated, Hynek went from labeling them ‘sheer nonsense’ to calling for the phenomenon to be scientifically studied to declaring that he saw UFOs twice. In the process, he satisfied neither side of the UFO debate.
An encouraging father of five children, Hynek would become a celebrity of sorts, found the Center for UFO Studies, write several books, and coin the phrase ‘Close Encounters of the Third Kind,’ complete with a cameo in Steven Spielberg’s 1977 hit movie of the same name.
‘He was this very straight-laced, by-the-book scientist and astronomer who, you know, only believed what he could see,’ Mark O’Connell, author of ‘The Close Encounters Man: How One Man Made the World Believe in UFOs,’ told DailyMail.com.
A new scripted TV series, ‘Project Blue Book,’ on HISTORY takes a fictionalized look at Hynek, his life, his investigations into UFOs during the early 1950s, a time period gripped by the Cold War and nuclear war fears, and the question that we are still wrestling with today: are we alone in the universe.
When Dr J. Allen Hynek, pictured, first heard about 'flying saucers' in 1948, he said he thought 'they were sheer nonsense, as any scientist would have.’ That year, the U.S. Air Force started Project Sign, which was to investigate the unidentified flying object reports that were coming in from around the country, according to Mark O’Connell's book ‘The Close Encounters Man: How One Man Made the World Believe in UFOs.' Above, Hynek is at a press conference in 1966 where he said the flying saucer looked more like a 'chicken feeder'
At first, Dr J. Allen Hynek thought the sightings, which started pouring in during the late 1940s, were a fad. He thought they were a nervous public reaction to Pearl Harbor coupled with what was then a current worry about Soviet bombers attacking the United States, Mark O’Connell, author of ‘The Close Encounters Man,' told DailyMail.com. But Hynek started to change his mind after the reports continued unabated. Above, a newspaper clipping from 1947 about a 'mysterious object' that crashed near Roswell, New Mexico that the U.S. Air Force said was a weather balloon
Hynek, a professor, looked through unidentified flying object reports for the U.S. Air Force in 1948 and 1949, and then went back to teaching and ‘and kind of forgot about it,’ author O’Connell told DailyMail.com. But around two years later, the air force approached him again to consult on their UFO investigative project. ‘So he’s very surprised after a couple of years that the craze hasn’t faded away,’ O’Connell said. Above, a shot of an unidentified flying object taken in 1966
Born May 1, 1910 in Chicago, Hynek was just five days old when Halley’s Comet passed by the Earth – a celestial moment that would be repeated toward the end of his life when he died at aged 75 on April 27, 1986.
As a young boy, he battled a bout of scarlet fever, was restricted to bed for several weeks, and spent his time reading everything he could, including ‘Elements of Astronomy,’ according to O’Connell’s 2017 book.
The die was cast, and a telescope given to him at aged 10 sealed his pursuit of astronomy. In 1932, Hynek graduated with a master’s degree from the University of Chicago, and married his first wife, Martha Alexander. After getting his PhD in astrophysics, he started teaching at Ohio State University in Columbus three years later.
Strange sky sightings seeped into the public consciousness during World War II when pilots described seeing unusual lights and objects on missions – dubbing them ‘foo fighters’ – around 1944. (There were other stories and tales before then, of course.) But the dam broke after a private pilot and businessman Kenneth Arnold recounted that he saw nine ‘bright saucer-like objects’ race by at 1,200 miles per hour in June 1947, according to news reports at the time.
For almost 20 years, Dr J. Allen Hynek consulted for the U.S. Air Force's project to investigate UFO sightings. Afterwards, Hynek found the Center for UFO Studies and wrote several books. In his 1972 book, ‘The UFO Experience: A Scientific Inquiry,’ Hynek detailed what he termed ‘close encounters:’ the first was a person seeing a UFO but from a distance; the second was UFOs ‘physical effect on the environment,’ such as crop circles; and the third was a person interacting ‘with beings that appear with the UFOs.’ Above, Hynek in his cameo during Steven Spielberg’s smash hit ‘Close Encounters of Third Kind,’ released in late 1977
A movie poster for ‘Close Encounters of Third Kind.' Hynek wrote director Steven Spielberg after he had heard the upcoming film and its title. Spielberg wrote the astronomer back, paid Hynek $1,000 to use his phrase and hired him as a technical advisor for the film at $500 a day, according to Mark O’Connell's book ‘The Close Encounters Man.' Hynek would have a cameo in the hit 1977 film
‘All summer long reports kept coming from every corner of the country… The trouble was there was not a soul on earth who knew what to do with them,’ O’Connell wrote.
‘”Confusion” was the watchword for the flying saucer phenomenon in those early days.’
In 1948, the government set up Project Sign, which would later be called Grudge and then Blue Book, to investigate the reports. It was headquartered at an air force base near Dayton, Ohio, which is not so far from Columbus, and O’Connell wrote that the air force ‘needed a professional astronomer to validate’ its conclusions. Enter Hynek.
By then, Hynek’s first marriage to Martha Alexander had ended in 1939 in divorce. He married Mimi Curtis in 1942, and they would stay together until his death in 1986, and have five children together – Scott, Roxane, Joel, Paul and Ross.
In his 1972 book, ‘The UFO Experience: A Scientific Inquiry,’ Dr J. Allen Hynek detailed what he termed ‘close encounters:’ the first was a person seeing a UFO but from a distance; the second was UFOs ‘physical effect on the environment,’ such as crop circles; and the third was a person interacting ‘with beings that appear with the UFOs.’ When Hynek heard about Steven Spielberg's upcoming film and its title, 'Close Encounters of the Third Kind,' he wrote the director, according Mark O’Connell's book ‘The Close Encounters Man.' Hynek worked as a technical advisor on the movie, which was released in late 1977, and he is seen above in front of his trailer on the set
‘Our dad is known in some circles especially now for his work with UFOs, but first and foremost he was a scientist and an astronomer. One of the things that I think that he inculcated in us was just this love of science and learning about the world,’ Paul Hynek, who worked as a consultant on the TV show with his brother Joel, told DailyMail.com.
‘Our dinner table if it was not interrupted by phone calls from people reporting UFOs and whatnot, it was about ideas.’
Joel Hynek added: ‘One of the things my father instilled in all of us was this love of science and the idea that everyone should keep an open mind to whatever’s out there.’
Initially, Hynek buttressed the government’s findings and conclusions.
‘In 1948, when I first heard of the (flying saucers), I thought they were sheer nonsense, as any scientist would have,’ Hynek wrote, according to O’Connell’s book.
‘Most of the early reports were quite vague: “I went into the bathroom for a drink of water and looked out of the window and saw a bright light in the sky. It was moving up and down and sideways. When I looked again, it was gone.” ‘
Strange sky sightings seeped into the public consciousness during World War II when pilots described seeing unusual lights and objects on missions – dubbing them ‘foo fighters’ – around 1944. (There were other stories and tales before then, of course.) But the dam broke after a private pilot and businessman Kenneth Arnold recounted that he saw nine ‘bright saucer-like objects’ race by at 1,200 miles per hour in June 1947, according to news reports at the time. Above, Kenneth Arnold, center, looks at a photo of an unidentified flying object in 1947. To his left is E.J. Smith, and Ralph E. Stevens is to Arnold's right
In 1947, there was a sighting near Roswell, New Mexico - an event that lingered in the public's mind. The U.S. Air Force said that what was seen was a weather balloon that crashed. The next year, the air force started Project Sign, which was to investigate the sightings, and brought on Dr J. Allen Hynek to consult. Above, the air force's Brig. General Roger M. Ramey, left, and Col. Thomas J. Dubose, right, look at the metallic fragments found by a farmer near Roswell, New Mexico
After initially dismissing the UFO sightings as 'sheer nonsense,' Dr J. Allen Hyenk, center, would change his mind about the reports. The first time Hynek consulted for the air force in 1948, author Mark O’Connell said: ‘They just plopped a pile of case reports on a desk in front of him and said please go through all of these and tell us which ones are just misidentifications of astronomical objects.’ Hynek was able to explain away 80 percent of the reports, but not the other 20 percent, but he thought that with 'enough time and resources they could probably explain away those 20 percent also,’ O’Connell said. Above, Hynek, center, in 1956
After World War II, people saw things in the sky that they couldn't explain. Dr J. Allen Hynek, who investigated the sightings with the U.S. Air Force for years, was often a source of information for the public, and took part in press conferences, such as the one above in 1966. The photograph he is holding was reportedly taken in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Hynek said the sighting was swamp gas - an explanation that did not satisfy many at the time
Hynek thought the sightings were a nervous public reaction to Pearl Harbor coupled with what was then a current worry about Soviet bombers attacking the United States, O’Connell explained.
‘So of course they’re looking up in the sky and seeing things and getting nervous about what they see if it’s something that they can’t identify and they can’t explain,’ he told DailyMail.com.
The first time Hynek consulted for the air force in 1948, O’Connell said: ‘They just plopped a pile of case reports on a desk in front of him and said please go through all of these and tell us which ones are just misidentifications of astronomical objects.’
‘And Hynek thought, okay, easy work, he went through them all. He was able to explain away about 80 percent of them and the other 20 percent didn’t really bother him. He thought with enough time and resources they could probably explain away those 20 percent also.’
In 1932, Hynek graduated with a master’s degree from the University of Chicago, and married his first wife, Martha Alexander. After getting his PhD in astrophysics, he started teaching at Ohio State University in Columbus three years later. By 1948, Hynek’s first marriage to Martha Alexander had ended in 1939 in divorce. He married Mimi Curtis in 1942, and they would stay together until his death in 1986, and have five children together – Scott, Roxane, Joel, Paul and Ross. Above, a photo of the family taken at the Hynek home in Evanston, Illinois in 1960. From left, Roxane, Mimi, Joel, Dr J. Allen Hynek, who is holding the cup, and Scott
Hynek and his wife, Mimi, had five children, shown above from left, Ross, Paul, Joel, Roxane, and Scott. The photo was taken at the Hynek family cabin in Ontario, Canada in 1973. Two of Hynek's children - Paul and Joel Hynek - worked as consultants for a new scripted TV show, 'Project Blue Book,' on HISTORY, that fictionalizes their father's life in the early 1950s. Paul Hynek told DailyMail.com: ‘Our dad is known in some circles especially now for his work with UFOs, but first and foremost he was a scientist and an astronomer. One of the things that I think that he inculcated in us was just this love of science and learning about the world’
After UFO sightings persisted, Dr J. Allen Hynek, pictured, started to call for the phenomenon to be scientifically studied. His son, Joel Hynek told DailyMail.com: ‘One of the things my father instilled in all of us was this love of science and the idea that everyone should keep an open mind to whatever’s out there.’ Hynek, above, is on the set of Steven Spielberg's hit film, 'Close Encounters of The Third Kind,' which was released in late 1977
Dr J. Allen Hynek started to change his mind about unidentified flying object reports after they continued unabated. ‘For several years I was saying there was nothing to it… I thought the whole thing was a fad, a craze – and would pass from the scene as fads invariably do. Back in 1948, when I first started, I would have taken just about any bet that by 1952 the whole matter would be forgotten. It was the persistence of the phenomenon, not in the United States, but over the world, that finally grabbed my attention,’ Hynek said, according Mark O’Connell's book ‘The Close Encounters Man.' Above, two photos showing possible UFO sightings
The UFO investigator who witnessed two sightings
Dr J. Allen Hynek, an astronomer who worked with the government for nearly 20 years to investigate sightings, saw UFOs on two occasions.
‘He didn’t see them very close up. They were brief, brief momentary sightings. He saw one through the window of a passenger airplane. He was able to take a couple of photos of that, but honestly, they just look like a blob of light in a black field, which unfortunately is often the case of UFO photos,’ Mark O’Connell, author of ‘The Close Encounters Man: How One Man Made the World Believe in UFOs,’ told DailyMail.com.
The other sighting was at his family’s cottage in Ontario, Canada, he said.
‘But neither one of those sightings was a close encounter. He didn’t get close enough to actually see any detail or outline and shape or anything.’
In a 1981 radio interview, Hynek said: ‘It was obviously an object, it was flying, and has remained unidentified to this day. But I’ve never had a close encounter, that is never anything really close-by that I could say, ‘My gosh, this is really something!’
‘…I feel somewhat left out.’
In the TV show, ‘Project Blue Book,' almost right off the bat, Hynek, who is played by Aidan Gillen of ‘Game of Thrones’ fame, questions the government’s conclusions – meteors, a weather balloon – for the unexplained things people see and experience. He is also given a partner, a fictional Captain Michael Quinn, played by Michael Malarkey. The show is set in the early 1950s, a time when the Soviet Union, the Cold War and the possibility of nuclear war loomed large.
David O'Leary, the show’s creator, said that the real Project Blue Book looked at over 12,000 UFO reports and roughly 700 of those remain unexplained. Since childhood, he has had a fascination with the question of whether humans are alone in the universe.
‘I personally don’t think that you can look at that the question honestly without examining the UFO phenomenon,’ O'Leary, who conceived of the TV show as the ‘real life X-Files set in the time of Mad Men,’ told DailyMail.com.
‘I also became fascinated with, you know, America’s very strange and mysterious history with this phenomenon and, of course one of the big big pieces of that is the fact that we really did openly investigate unidentified flying objects in our skies officially though the U.S. Air Force.’
‘The show is a piece of entertainment but my goal always was for it to also spark curiosity, towards educating people about these real life cases and about this era.’
In the show, which airs on Tuesdays at 10pm Eastern time, Hynek and Quinn crisscross the country – from Fargo, North Dakota to Flatwoods, West Virginia to Lubbock, Texas – to investigate. Each episode is based on a real case or a collection of real incidents. In the series’ second episode, the pair looks into the Flatwoods monster, where a mother and her two young children insist they saw a spaceship and an alien creature. To quell panic in the town, Hynek puts the sighting down to an owl.
It took the real Hynek longer to come around. O’Connell said that after working for the air force in 1948 and 1949, he went back to teaching ‘and kind of forgot about it.’
But around two years later, the air force approached Hynek to consult again.
‘So he’s very surprised after a couple of years that the craze hasn’t faded away,’ O’Connell said.
‘He starts looking through this new batch of UFO reports and, surprise, there are still 20 percent that he can’t explain. So for him that 20 percent consistency that was a trend, that was something that piqued his interest and he wanted to find out more. And that was when he started to change his mind about UFOs.’
Hynek started to push for UFOs to be handled scientifically.
‘For several years I was saying there was nothing to it… I thought the whole thing was a fad, a craze – and would pass from the scene as fads invariably do. Back in 1948, when I first started, I would have taken just about any bet that by 1952 the whole matter would be forgotten. It was the persistence of the phenomenon, not in the United States, but over the world, that finally grabbed my attention,’ Hynek said, according to the book.
‘… It appears, indeed, that the flying saucer along with the automobile is here to stay.’
Hynek's sons, Paul, left, and Joel, right, worked as consultants on a new scripted TV show, 'Project Blue Book,' on HISTORY, and are seen above at its premiere in January. Both told DailyMail.com that their father instilled in them a love of science and keeping an open mind. Joel said that their father was in an awkward position when it came to UFOs and ‘he tried to be several things to different groups:’ the air force wanted him to find an explanation for what people saw in the sky while those that believed in UFOs and extraterrestrials wanted Hynek to come out and support that hypothesis
Above, the cast of 'Project Blue Book,' a new scripted TV series that takes a fictionalized look at Dr J. Allen Hynek, his life, his investigations into UFOs during the early 1950s, a time period gripped by the Cold War and nuclear war fears, and the question that we are still wrestling with today: are we alone in the universe. From left, Laura Mennell as Mimi Hynek, Aidan Gillen as Dr J. Allen Hynek, Neal McDonough as General James Harding, Michael Harney as General Hugh Valentine, Michael Malarkey as Captain Michael Quinn, and Ksenia Solo as Susie Miller
David O'Leary, the show’s creator, said that the real Project Blue Book looked at over 12,000 UFO reports and roughly 700 of those remain unexplained. Since childhood, he has had a fascination with the question of whether humans are alone in the universe. ‘I personally don’t think that you can look at that the question honestly without examining the UFO phenomenon,’ O'Leary, who conceived of the TV show as the ‘real life X-Files set in the time of Mad Men,’ told DailyMail.com. Above, Aidan Gillen portraying Dr J. Allen Hynek in Episode 104: Operation Paperclip
The new series, which premiered in January, has ten episodes and David O'Leary, the show’s creator, said that he looks at the show like a ten-hour movie. O'Leary told DailyMail.com: ‘The show is a piece of entertainment but my goal always was for it to also spark curiosity, towards educating people about these real life cases and about this era.’ Above, Laura Mennell as Mimi Hynek and Aidan Gillen as Dr J. Allen Hynek. The real couple married in 1942, and they would stay together until Hynek's death in 1986, and have five children together – Scott, Roxane, Joel, Paul and Ross
After the government shut down Project Blue Book in 1969, Hynek, who was then teaching at Northwestern University, launched the Center for UFO Studies in 1973 and penned books. In his 1972 book, ‘The UFO Experience: A Scientific Inquiry,’ Hynek detailed what he termed ‘close encounters:’ the first was a person seeing a UFO but from a distance; the second was UFOs ‘physical effect on the environment,’ such as crop circles; and the third was a person interacting ‘with beings that appear with the UFOs.’
It was the last gradation that inspired director Steven Spielberg’s smash hit ‘Close Encounters of Third Kind,’ released in late 1977. By then, Hynek was a popular author who also had cachet within the scientific community.
O’Connell pointed out in his book that Hynek wrote Spielberg after he had heard about the director’s upcoming film and its title. Spielberg wrote the astronomer back, paid Hynek $1,000 to use his phrase and hired him as a technical advisor for the film at $500 a day, according to the book.
‘While on set, Hynek got to talking with Spielberg about making a “Hitchcok-type” cameo in the movie,’ O’Connell wrote, ‘and Spielberg loved the idea so much that he filmed a whole sequence with Hynek interacting with the childlike aliens who have emerged from the “mothership.” ‘
Paul and Joel Hynek fondly recalled their father’s brush with celebrity after the film came out.
‘All of my friends thought it was extra cool to have dad in the big Hollywood movie,’ Paul said.
Paul Hynek noted that while his father did think there was something to UFOs, he was not completely sold on the idea of extraterrestrials, and had other theories about them, ‘more likely something like interdimensional travel or something even perhaps more exotic.’
‘I think one of the biggest misconceptions of my father is that he went from a, you know, confirmed skeptic of the bunkum of flying saucers to a dedicated believer in extraterrestrials having visited us,’ he said.
Their father, Joel noted, was in an awkward position when it came to UFOs and ‘he tried to be several things to different groups:’ the air force wanted him to find an explanation for what people saw in the sky while those that believed in UFOs and extraterrestrials wanted Hynek to come out and support that hypothesis.
‘He walked a fine line there to keep the whole alive, if you will,’ Joel said.
By 1981, the man who had dismissed UFOs as ‘sheer nonsense,’ said in a radio interview that he had seen them twice.
‘I have seen, on two occasions, two things which satisfy the definition of UFO,’ Hynek said, according to the book. ‘It was obviously an object, it was flying, and has remained unidentified to this day. But I’ve never had a close encounter, that is never anything really close-by that I could say, ‘My gosh, this is really something!’
A Japanese asteroid probe will snag samples of its target space rock later this month, if all goes according to plan.
TheHayabusa2 spacecraft, which has been studying the 3,000-foot-wide (900 meters) near-Earth asteroid Ryugu up close since last June, will make its first sample-grabbing dive just two weeks from now.
"The touchdown operation to collect a sample from Ryugu will be between February 20th-22nd. Hayabusa2 is scheduled to begin the descent from February 21 and touch down on the surface of Ryugu around 8 a.m. on February 22 (JST). It is the pinnacle of the mission!" Hayabusa2 team members said via Twitter Wednesday (Feb. 6). [Japan's Hayabusa2 Asteroid Mission in Pictures]
The 3,000-foot-wide (900 meters) carbon-rich asteroid Ryugu, photographed by Japan's Hayabusa2 probe in June 2018.
Credit: JAXA, University of Tokyo, Kochi University, Rikkyo University, Nagoya University, Chiba Institute of Technology, Meiji University, University of Aizu, AIST
Japan Standard Time is 14 hours ahead of U.S. Eastern Standard Time, so the touchdown will take place on the night of Feb. 21 for folks in North and South America (and around midnight for people throughout Europe).
This month's operation was originally scheduled to take place in October, but mission team members delayed the activity to give themselves more time to take stock of Ryugu's unexpectedly complex and rugged surface.
HAYABUSA2@JAXA@haya2e_jaxa
The touchdown operation to collect a sample from Ryugu will be between February 20th - 22nd. Hayabusa2 is scheduled to begin the descent from February 21, and touchdown on the surface of Ryugu around 8am on February 22 (JST). It is the pinnacle of the mission!
Hayabusa2 will make two additional sample-grabbing sorties after this month's activity, including one trip to snag material from a fresh crater. The spacecraft will create this crater itself, sending a "kinetic impactor" barreling into Ryugu.
The various bits of Ryugu material will travel to Earth in a special return capsule in December 2020, if current schedules hold. Scientists around the world will then study the cosmic dirt and gravel, looking for clues about the solar system's early history and the role that carbon-rich asteroids like Ryugu may have played in life's emergence on Earth.
The mission has already touched Ryugu's surface multiple times. The Hayabusa2 mothership deployed two tiny, hopping rovers onto the space rock last September, then dropped a European-built lander called MASCOT onto the asteroid less than two weeks later.
NASA is operating an asteroid-sampling mission of its own, with similar goals to those of Hayabusa2. The U.S. space agency's OSIRIS-REx probe entered orbit around the 1,650-foot-wide (500 m) asteroid Bennu — a carbonaceous rock, like Ryugu — on Dec. 31.
OSIRIS-REx is expected to snag its samples in the middle of next year; this material will come to Earth in September 2023.
Mike Wall's book about the search for alien life, "Out There," was published in November 2018 by Grand Central Publishing.
Officially, 2018 has been the 4th hottest year on record, fulfilling a dreadful pattern: the past five years have been the hottest since mankind started recording global temperatures in 1880. This is no coincidence — it’s a clear exemplification of the warming trend our planet is experiencing, and that we are causing.
Global average annual temperature anomalies from NASA’s global Land-Ocean Temperature Index data set (1951-1980 base period).
“The key message is that the planet is warming,” Gavin Schmidt, the director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York City, told reporters at a news conference. “And our understanding of why those trends are occurring is also very robust. It’s because of the greenhouse gases that we[‘ve] put into the atmosphere over the last 100 years.
Both NOAA and NASA have confirmed that 2018 was the 4th hottest year on record. They also double-checked their data with other external and independent groups, further confirming the results: last year, global land- and ocean-surface temperatures were 1.42 degrees Fahrenheit (0.79 degrees Celsius) above the 20th-century average.
The warming wasn’t uniform, however. In North America, temperatures were closer to the century average, but the difference was more than made up for in other parts of the world.
Credits: NOAA.
Yet even without elevated temperatures, the effects of climate change were visible in the US. It was the third wettest year on record — yet at the same time, drought ravaged parts of the country. There were also much more extreme weather events than normal, something which is increasingly attributed to climate change.
Researchers also warned that the climate change and the damage will pale in comparison to what we will experience in the future, especially if we continue to spew carbon at the rate we currently are.
All models and measurements consistently show that the planet is warming.
Credits: NASA Earth Observatory / VOX.
The data in case is extremely reliable, and climate scientists have gone to great lengths to avoid any potential uncertainties. For instances, they factored in how different methodologies for data acquisition and processing may have changed over the years and factored in the “urban heat island” effect” in which cities are warmer than the surrounding environment. Nowadays, agencies collect most of the data from rural areas — which is also controlled for.
Overall, you could hardly imagine more convincing data to show that climate change is happening. So one can only wonder — for those people who don’t “believe” in climate change (although believing in a scientific reality doesn’t really mean anything), what would it take to convince them? Would that even be possible? Or is it a “hoax” or a “liberal conspiracy” no matter what the evidence says?
Now is a really good time to remember that science is non-partisan, and the science says we’re causing a lot of trouble for ourselves and the rest of the planet. It’s time to reduce emissions and start cleaning up after ourselves.
In July 2018, the UK space agency announced a competitionto name the rover, which is scheduled to launch in 2020 as part of the ongoing ExoMars mission. Over 36,000 people from all over the European Unionsent their proposals and suggestions. Apparently, the ESA learned from the previous “Boaty McBoatFace” experience and instead of choosing the most popular suggestion, they had a team of experts select from the proposals.
The ESA has a long tradition of naming its missions after famous researchers, and this was no exception. British astronaut Tim Peake announced the decision: the rover will be named Rosalind Franklin.
Rosalind was a British chemist and X-ray crystallographer who contributed to unraveling the double helix structure of our DNA. However, her contribution was ignored and even denied in subsequent years. This is a well-deserved recognition of her contribution.
“This name reminds us that it is in the human genes to explore. Science is in our DNA, and in everything we do at ESA. Rosalind the rover captures this spirit and carries us all to the forefront of space exploration,” says ESA Director General Jan Woerner.
Rosalind herself was much enamored with space exploration, although unfortunately, she did not get to witness to much of it.
“In the last year of Rosalind’s life, I remember visiting her in hospital on the day when she was excited by the news of the [Soviet Sputnik satellite] – the very beginning of space exploration,” Franklin’s sister, Jenifer Glynn, said according to the BBC. ”She could never have imagined that over 60 years later there would be a rover sent to Mars bearing her name, but somehow that makes this project even more special.”
The new ExoMars rover will be the first of its kind, being able to combine the capability to roam around Mars and to study its subsurface. The mission is being run by the European Space Agency (ESA) and Russia’s Roscosmos. ExoMars was originally supposed to have three parts: an orbiter, this rover, and a lander, named Schiaparelli after an Italian astronomer. However, Schiaparelli crashed into Mars, a disaster that was likely caused by a software bug.
If everything goes according to plan, the mission will launch in 2020, and Rosalind Franklin will land on Mars in 2021, offering us a new understanding of the geological processes on the Red Planet.
“This rover will scout the martian surface equipped with next-generation instruments – a fully-fledged automated laboratory on Mars,” says Tim Peake.
Astronomers have just found an asteroid that zips around the sun every 165 Earth days.
That's the shortest year for any asteroid known to humankind, discovery team members said. And the space rock, called 2019 AQ3, could be part of a vast and virtually unknown population zooming through the inner solar system, quite close to the sun.
"We have found an extraordinary object whose orbit barely strays beyond Venus' orbit — that's a big deal," Quanzhi Ye, a postdoctoral researcher at the Infrared Processing and Analysis Center (IPAC), an astronomy data and science facility at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in Pasadena, said in a statement. [Watch: Asteroid 2019 AQ3's Superfast Orbit Around the Sun]
2019 AQ3 is a "very rare species," Ye said, adding that "there might be many more undiscovered asteroids out there like it." To be clear, asteroid 2019 AQ3's orbit isn't the fastest of any object. The planet Mercury makes one trip around the sun every 88 days. But the space rock is unique, researchers said.
Ye spotted 2019 AQ3 on Jan. 4, in images captured by the Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF), a sky-surveying camera installed on the 48-inch (122 centimeters) Samuel Oschin Telescope at the Palomar Observatory in Southern California.
The orbit of the asteroid 2019 AQ3 is shown in this diagram. The object has the shortest year of any recorded asteroid, with an orbital period of just 165 Earth days.
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
The ZTF, which began operations in March 2018, scans the entire visible northern sky every three nights. Its wide field of view and rapid surveying frequency make the ZTF a great observer of supernova explosions, asteroids and other “transients” — astronomical objects and phenomena that are visible only temporarily.
Indeed, the camera has already spotted 60 new near-Earth asteroids, ZTF team members said.
Ye reported the discovery of 2019 AQ3 to the IAU (International Astronomical Union) Minor Planet Center, the organization responsible for collecting and coordinating data about asteroids and comets in our solar system.
Multiple research groups then observed the object on Jan. 6 and 7, using a variety of telescopes. Astronomers reviewed archived data as well, finding evidence of 2019 AQ3 in images captured by the Panoramic Survey Telescope and Rapid Response System (Pan-STARRS) in Hawaii dating back to 2015.
Putting all this information together, Ye and his colleagues were able to map 2019 AQ3's orbit in detail. The asteroid zooms around the sun on an elliptical path that takes it inside Mercury's orbit at closest approach and slightly beyond Venus at its most distant point, the researchers determined. And 2019 AQ3's orbit is inclined, out of the plane of the paths taken by Earth and the solar system's other big planets.
2019 AQ3 therefore appears to belong to the Atira (also known as Apohele) class of asteroids, which have orbits interior to that of Earth. Just 20 or so space rocks, out of 800,000 known asteroids, are Atiras, researchers said.
"The origin of Atiras is an intriguing and open question," discovery team member Wing-Huen Ip, a professor of astronomy and space science at the Institute of Astronomy and Space Science at the National Central University in Taiwan, said in the same statement. "With every additional object, we get closer to formulating and testing models about that origin, and about the history of our solar system."
Many more Atiras likely exist and the ones that line up Earth in their crosshairs could be especially dangerous, the researchers said. That's because these asteroids would be coming from the direction of the sun and would thus be hard to spot because of our star's overpowering glare.
2019 AQ3 is not dangerous, however. Its orbit never brings it closer to Earth than about 22 million miles (35.4 million kilometers), the researchers said.
While the size of the newfound asteroid is unclear, observations suggest that it could be almost 1 mile (1.6 km) wide. If that's the case, 2019 AQ3 would be one of the biggest Atiras known.
"In so many ways, 2019 AQ3 really is an oddball asteroid," Ye said.
Mike Wall's book about the search for alien life, "Out There" (Grand Central Publishing, 2018; illustrated by Karl Tate) is out now.
SpaceX's new astronaut taxi won't make its inaugural trip to the International Space Station (ISS) this month after all.
SpaceX and Boeing are developing commercial space capsules — called Crew Dragonand CST-100 Starliner, respectively — to carry NASA astronauts to and from the orbiting lab.
"The agency now is targeting March 2 for launch of SpaceX's Crew Dragon on its uncrewed Demo-1 test flight. Boeing's uncrewed Orbital Flight Test is targeted for launch no earlier than April," NASA officials wrote in the status update.
Artist’s illustrations of Boeing’s CST-100 Starliner (left) and SpaceX’s Crew Dragon capsules in orbit.
Credit: Boeing/SpaceX
"These adjustments allow for completion of necessary hardware testing, data verification, remaining NASA and provider reviews, as well as training of flight controllers and mission managers," they added.
The next big box to check after these demonstration flights will be tests of the private vehicles' emergency escape systems, which would get the capsules away from danger if a problem arose during launch. Boeing plans to run this test in May, and SpaceX will perform its version in June.
Then will come huge milestones — crewed test flights to the ISS. Astronauts haven't launched to orbit from American soil since July 2011, when NASA retired its space shuttle fleet. Since then, the space agency has been dependent on Russian Soyuz rockets and spacecraft to perform this taxi service.
Crew Dragon's crew-carrying demonstration is currently scheduled for July, and Starliner's for no earlier than August, according to the new NASA update. Operational flights will begin sometime thereafter, assuming everything goes well.
The latest delay is far from the first for the commercial-crew program. When NASA inked its big multibillion-dollar deals with SpaceX and Boeing in 2014, for example, agency officials said they expected Crew Dragon and Starliner to be in operation by 2017.
"There still are many critical steps to complete before launch, and, while we eagerly are anticipating these launches, we will step through our test flight preparations and readiness reviews," Kathy Lueders, NASA's commercial crew program manager, said in today's update. "We are excited about seeing the hardware we have followed through development, integration, and ground testing move into flight."
Mike Wall's book about the search for alien life, "Out There," was published in November 2018 by Grand Central Publishing.
NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) captured this view of China’s Chang’e 4 lander on Jan. 30, 2019. The area around the lander is enlarged by a factor of two relative to the native pixel scale; the bright speck between two arrows is the lander. The large crater in the center (just right and below arrows) is about 1,440 feet (440 meters) wide.
Credit: NASA/GSFC/Arizona State University
China's history-makingChang'e 4 missionhas been spied by one of its robotic moon-studying brethren.
NASA'sLunar Reconnaissance Orbiter(LRO) recently caught a glinty glimpse of the Chang'e 4 lander, which on Jan. 2 became the first-ever spacecraft to make a soft touchdown on the moon's mysterious far side.
On Jan. 30, LRO rolled 70 degrees to the west as it approached Chang'e 4's landing site, the floor of the 115-mile-wide (186 kilometers) Von Kármán Crater. The maneuver brought the Chinese lander into view for LRO, though the mission's rover, named Yutu 2 ("Jade Rabbit 2"), escaped detection. [Photos from the Moon's Far Side! China's Chang'e 4 Lunar Landing in Pictures]
"Because LRO was 330 kilometers (205 miles) to the east of the landing site, the Chang'e 4 lander is only about two pixels across (bright spot between the two arrows), and the small rover is not detectable," LRO team members wrote in a description of the image, which was released today (Feb. 6).
"The massive mountain range in the background is the west wall of Von Kármán Crater, rising more than 3,000 meters (9,850 feet) above the floor," they added.
Arrows indicate the position of China’s Chang'e 4 lander on the floor of Von Kármán Crater in this image captured by NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) on Jan. 30, 2019. The sharp crater behind and to the left of the landing site is 12,800 feet (3,900 meters) wide and 1,970 feet (600 m) deep.
Credit: NASA/GSFC/Arizona State University
The Chang'e 4 lander-rover duo carry a variety of scientific instruments, which they're using to characterize the surface and near-subsurface of Von Kármán Crater. (Yutu 2 rolled down twin ramps from atop the lander a few days after touchdown.)
The mission could help scientists understand why the moon's near and far sides are so different from each other, Chinese officials have said. For example, dark volcanic plains known as maria cover most of the near side but are rare on the far side.
The Chang'e 4 lander also totes a biological experiment, which contains fruit-fly eggs and seeds of a few plants, including cotton. The cotton seeds sprouted, becoming the first non-human organisms ever to live on the lunar surface (not counting the microbes that hitched a ride with NASA’s Apollo astronauts). The little plants froze to death soon thereafter, however.
And in case you were wondering: The moon has a far side and a near side because it's "tidally locked" to Earth, meaning it always shows the same face to our planet. (That would be the near side.)
LRO has been circling the moon since 2009. The spacecraft's high-resolution imagery assists a wide variety of scientific studies and also aids planning for future robotic and human missions to Earth's nearest neighbor, NASA officials have said.
Mike Wall's book about the search for alien life, "Out There," was published in November 2018 by Grand Central Publishing.
With our busy lives and fairly stable day-to-day environment, it’s easy to forget that we’re actually sitting on a huge rock hurtling through space. Only a thin atmospheric and magnetic cushion is what separates us from total annihilation. This cushion is fairly good at keeping some cosmic intruders at bay, such as smallasteroids, but larger objects could wreak havoc if they were to collide with Earth. Throughout our planet’s history, this has happened countless times, the dinosaur extinction being a prime example.
For some time, NASA has been working on an asteroid-deflection strategy and will soon launch a test mission to asteroid 65803 Didymos — a pair made of a smaller object called Didymoon that orbits around the larger 780-meter Didymos asteroid. The Double Asteroid Redirect Test (DART) project involves slamming a small probe into Didymoon, which measures only 160 meters in diameter, about the size of the Great Pyramid in Giza. The impact would slightly veer Didymoon away from its normal orbit around Didymos, informing NASA what kind of punch would be needed to deflect a real threat to Earth.
Danger from above
An impact with an asteroid isn’t the likeliest thing to happen in the universe. However, despite its low probability, such a scenario is a high-consequence event which requires “some degree of preparedness,” according to the authors of the new 18-page document titled the “National near-Earth Object Preparedness Strategy and Action Plan”.
NASA has so far cataloged about 18,310 objects of all sizes, of which just over 800 are 140 meters or larger. A 2005 congressional mandate tasked the agency with tracking 90 percent of the near-Earth objects larger than 140 meters. NASA is just one-third of the way there, however.
While big asteroids, such as the kind that wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago, are absolutely brutal, that doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t be worried by anything smaller. For instance, a 40- to 60-meter asteroid that exploded over Tunguska, Russia, leveled 2,000 square kilometers of forest. If the same were to happen over New York City, it would cause millions of casualties.
Didymoon will be by far the smallest asteroid ever explored by us — but even at its seemingly puny size, it would be enough to cause a continental-scale catastrophy if it slammed into Earth. The plan is to launch DART in 2021, with the goal of ramming into Didymoon in 2022 in order to change the course of the tiny world. In 2022 the double asteroid system will be only 11 million km (about 7 million miles) from Earth, which is why NASA is in quite a hurry.
Illustration of Hera at smallest asteroid ever visited.
Credit: ESA.
If all goes well, the European Space Agency (ESA) will launch a follow-up mission called HERA in order to examine the impact.
“Such a binary asteroid system is the perfect testbed for a planetary defense experiment but is also an entirely new environment for asteroid investigations. Although binaries make up 15 percent of all known asteroids, they have never been explored before, and we anticipate many surprises,” Ian Carnelli, Hera project manager, told Earth Sky.
Using a small fleet of CubeSats, the HERA mission will measure the masses of the two asteroids, their surface properties, their new orbits, and the impact site itself. ESA hopes to launch the mission by 2026.
“This will give us a good estimate of the impact’s momentum transfer, and hence its efficiency as a deflection technique,” explains ESA’s Hera project scientist, Michael Küppers. “These are fundamental parameters to enable the validation of numerical impact models necessary to design future deflection missions. We will better understand whether this technique can be used even for larger asteroids, giving us certainty we could protect our home planet if needed.”
Scientists with NASA will unveil the latest climate trends and global temperature measurements for Earth today (Feb. 6) and you can follow the announcement live online.
SNASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) "will provide the annual release of global temperatures data and discuss the most important climate trends of 2018" in a teleconference today at 11:30 a.m. EST (1630 GMT). The audio will stream atNASA.gov/liveandwill be simulcast on Space.com here, courtesy of NASA.
The participants will include Gavin Schmidt, director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, and Deke Ardnt, chief of the global monitoring branch of NOAA's National Centers for Environmental Information, NASA officials said in a statement. [What Is the Temperature of Earth?]
Scientists with NASA and NOAA will discuss the Earth's 2018 global temperatures and climate conditions on Feb. 6, 2018. Shown here are 2017 global temperature data from satellites. Higher than normal temperatures are shown in red. Lower than normal temperatures are shown in blue.
Credit: NASA's Scientific Visualization Studio
NASA and NOAA independently monitor the Earth's surface temperatures and changes based on observations of both land areas and oceans, using a network of satellites scattered in Earth orbit. While most people associate climate change with rising sea levels and melting glaciers, the effects of global warming are more profound than most realize.
For example, scientists from scientists from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) – and five other organizations – discovered last year that human-induced climate change is even extending into the atmosphere. Carbon dioxide emissions flow into the troposphere (the lowest level of Earth's atmosphere) and increase the contrast between cold winters and hot summers.
A separate University of Iowa-led 2018 study of hurricanes suggests that some of these massive storms throw down 10 percent more rainfall today, compared with the period before climate change. That's expected to worsen to up to 30 percent more rainfall, according to simulations. Peak wind speeds could also pick up by as much as 33 mph (53 km/h).
'Oumuamua, the first known visitor frombeyond our solar system, is long gone, but it's still leaving scientists guessing. A new explanation proposes that the strange object was a "monstrous fluffy dust aggregate" — that's a technical term, apparently — produced by a busted-up comet.
That's the explanation laid out by Zdenek Sekanina, an astronomer at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, in a new, unpublished paper. The explanation draws on observations of comets breaking apart as they get closer to the sun.
'Oumuamua is the interstellar object that astronomers detected whizzing through our solar system in October 2017. It was the first interstellar object scientists ever spotted, although they expect thousands more have gone unnoticed. Ever since 'Oumuamua's appearance, scientists have debated what the object is: asteroid or comet, ripped-up planetesimal, or of course, the least likely explanation, an alien probe.
The new paper adds another loop to the already-knotty issue by suggesting that the object changed during its brief time in our solar system. Scientists caught sight of 'Oumuamua only when it was already on its way out of the neighborhood, after all. So, while the object appeared reddish, long and thin during its exit, it may have started out with different properties. ['Oumuamua in Photos: The Solar System's 1st Interstellar Visitor Explained]
An artist's depiction of the interstellar object now called 'Oumuamua.
Credit: M. Kornmesser/ESO
Starting with that idea, the new paper compared 'Oumuamua to other faint but more mundane comets that astronomers have observed. Typically, when these faint comets come within a quarter of Earth's distance from the sun, they don't survive the visit. And a comet's death is not a quiet process; instead, these comets experience a so-called outburst that triggers their disintegration.
Specifically, the paper considers a comet called C/2017 S3 (Pan-STARRS), which crept in from the Oort Cloud, which surrounds our solar system. This comet experienced two of these violent outbursts before finally falling to pieces. Observers gathered some strange data that suggested C/2017 S3's remains had become "a monstrous, extremely fluffy aggregate of loosely bound dust grains" before it even reached its closest approach to the sun.
While 'Oumuamua's precise origins and structure have confused scientists, this explanation offers a new complication: that the object wasn't actually a solid body when scientists first spotted it but was instead a clump of remnants. The new paper proposes that a similar fate to C/2017's befell 'Oumuamua, with its outburst coming before any scientific observations occurred, thus disguising the object's original structure.
The paper was posted to the pre-print server arXiv.org on Jan. 30.
US Coast Guard Discloses Unexplained Disappearances of Submarines After UFO Activity (Video)
US Coast Guard Discloses Unexplained Disappearances of Submarines After UFO Activity (Video)
There are many strange facts surrounding a number of missing submarines. Joseph was on duty on an Ocean Station patrol on the Coast Guard Cutter Mellon.
It was during this patrol that they had a number of unique UFO sightings that included radar and visual verification by a number of witnesses.
Three objects passed over the ship traveling at 3500mph having approached the ship from the direction of where the sub was lost. Flying time of note from OSV to that site at that speed recorded and verified was approximately 10 minutes.
It is highly possible that the UFO phenomenon, and what could have been a very dangerous “rogue” operation gone array, possibly leading to what could have been one of the most significant event.
Even thought this may only be anecdotal data it may help penetrate the veil of secrecy and mystery surrounding the Submarines.
Alexander Weygers, a Renaissance man in the mold of the tech industry’s stated ideal, inspired an art dealer to become an acolyte.
Alexander Weygers made numerous detailed drawings of an aircraft called the “Discopter”, a vertical liftoff aircraft that looked very much like what was to be later termed “flying saucer” and other drawings of an American cities specifically flying saucers in San Francisco and as well as a port in Chicago.
He sent these detailed plans to all the branches of the U.S. Military and was eventually told that they were intrigued by the concept and the design of the craft but were not prepared at that time because the war effort superseded its development.
However he did indeed patent the design for the “Discopter” in January 1944 with the U.S. Patent Office and it served as the prototype for other similar aircraft that have been developed up to the present day.
Ashlee Vance visits the dealer whose curiosity about Weygers has evolved into an obsession.
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WETENSCHAPRusland wil over twaalf jaar voor het eerst kosmonauten naar de maan brengen. Na 2031 zou er jaarlijks een bemande vlucht naar de satelliet van de aarde gestuurd worden. Dat blijkt ook uit een rapport van het Russische ruimtevaartagentschap Roskosmos, waarover het persbureau Ria Novosti vandaag berichtte. In 2032 zal naar verluidt de tweede bemanning op de maan landen en een speciaal voertuig meenemen voor excursies van toekomstige kosmonauten.
Rusland wil ook deelnemen aan het Amerikaanse project voor een ruimtestation, dat rond de maan draait. De constructie ervan zou in 2034 kunnen beginnen, aldus het rapport. Gehoopt wordt dat vanaf daar vluchten diep in de ruimte mogelijk zijn. Voor de bouw van een dergelijk station, ontwikkelt Rusland zware raketten, zei de baas van Roskosmos, Dmitry Rogozin, eind vorig jaar. Rusland wil met de maanmissie terug aanknopen waar de Sovjetunie tientallen jaren geleden stopte. Na technische ongelukken bevroor Moskou in de jaren zeventig zijn dure plannen voor een maanlanding. Deze keer werken de Russen bij de exploratie van de maan samen met de VS, Europa en China.
Two geologists who were on a field trip to study volcanic rocks in Namibia came upon another huge discovery –Africa once had ice streams. Graham Andrews and Sarah Brown, who are geologists at West Virginia University, were exploring the South African desert country when they noticed an odd land formation.
The land consisted of flat desert along with hundreds of steep, long hills. The landscape was shaped by drumlins which are hills that are commonly found in areas that once had glaciers. Needless to say, glaciers – even ancient ones – are not what one would expect in the desert.
Andrews explained that they knew exactly what they were looking at, “We quickly realized what we were looking at because we both grew up in areas of the world that had been under glaciers, me in Northern Ireland and Sarah in northern Illinois.”
Once Andrews returned home from the trip, he did some research on the drumlins in Namibia but found out that nobody had ever studied them. He said, “The last rocks we were shown on the trip are from a time period when southern Africa was covered by ice,” adding, “People obviously knew that part of the world had been covered in ice at one time, but no one had ever mentioned anything about how the drumlins formed or that they were even there at all.”
That’s when he partnered up with Andy McGrady, who is a geology senior at West Virginia University, and they used morphometrics to measure the shapes of the drumlins to see if they could find any regular patterns from when they were carved by the ice.
Normal glaciers don’t move a lot, but they discovered that there are big grooves in the drumlins that indicate that the ice must have been fast-moving in order to create the grooves. Those large grooves indicate that there was in fact an ice stream in the southern part of Africa around 300 million years ago during the late Paleozoic Age.
“The ice carved big, long grooves in the rock as it moved,” Andrews explained, “It wasn’t just that there was ice there, but there was an ice stream. It was an area where the ice was really moving fast.”
What they discovered shows that the southern part of Africa was over the South Pole during that time period. “These features provide yet another tie between southern Africa and south America to show they were once joined,” Andrews confirmed.
For some unknown reason, UFO reports seem to be on the decline even in the face of recent so-called “disclosures” of government research into unidentified aerial phenomena. What’s behind this mysterious decline? Have we become jaded and over-saturated with UFO reports thanks to the innumerable conspiracy YouTube channels publishing endless streams of shaky, out-of-focus videos of lens flares, or could something else be afoot?
As all things UFOs, it’s hard to say. Whatever the cause is, there seems to have been a sharp decrease in annual UFO sightings reported since 2014. That’s according to Cheryl Costa, a reporter with the Syracuse News Times who tracks NUFORC reports throughout the state of New York. According to her most recently published data, UFO sighting reports peaked in 2012 with 378, only to begin dropping in 2014. In 2018, only 103 sightings were reported in New York.
It’s important to remember that the term ‘UFO’ doesn’t necessarily imply an extraterrestrial craft, merely something unidentified in the skies.
New York’s downward trend is reflective of national data; UFO sighting reports nationwide in the US peaked in 2014 with 13,985 and fell to just 6,933 in 2018, a 50% decline. Despite the decrease, UFO hot spots Las Vegas, Nevada and Phoenix, Arizona once again remain at the top of the list of cities with the highest numbers of UFO sightings, with 52 and 40, respectively. What’s behind this decrease in UFO sightings? Is this a sociological phenomenon, or are anomalous objects actually disappearing from our skies?
One would think that UFO sightings would be increasing along with the rise of aerial drones, but the opposite is true. Could it be that drones have created a go-to explanation and have led to fewer anomalous aerial phenomena to be reported? Or are urban light pollution and the digital zombification caused by mobile technology keeping us from gazing up at the skies as much as we used to? Is that all by design? Any guess is as good as any at this point.
Shhh. Quit asking questions and keep your eyes pointed downward at your device. Always at your device.
Are people losing interest in UFOs due to over-saturation, or are these phenomena actually less frequent than they once were? For those of us who track and research anomalous phenomena for a living, either explanation should be worrying.
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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 74 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.
Can you solve some of the world’s biggest UFO mysteries?...
US government spent MILLIONS researching invisibility...
