Those who survived the panic caused by the less-trouble-than-expected Y2K or Millennium Bug that was supposed to shut down computers when they tried to move their clocks from 12/31/1999 to 1/1/2000 may scoff at the new April 6, 2019 bug that many predict will wreak havoc with the GPS systems drivers, pilots and many major industries depend on. Those who profited from the Y2K Bug (COBOL and assembler language programmers dragged out of retirement to fix old software) may be upset that no one told them about this one sooner. Those planning a flight or a road excursion on 4/6/2019 may suddenly be considering a postponement. The rest of us are wondering … what the heck is the April 6, 2019 bug?

“The GPS Internal Navigation Time Scale “GPS Time” is based on the weighted average of GPS satellites and ground station clocks. GPS Time is used for user navigation solutions. A nanosecond error in GPS Time can equate to one foot of position (ranging) error. The WN parameter is provided via a ten (10) bit parameter – or “counter.” The valid range of values for the WN parameter is 0 to 1023 (or 1024 total values). The WN parameter is incremented by one each week. At the end of the 1024th week, the counter experiences a rollover (resets) to 0. Each WN rollover event defines a new GPS Time Epoch. The WN value is referenced to the start of the current GPS Time Epoch. The last WN rollover was August 21, 1999. GPS Time is currently in the second Epoch. The next WN rollover is April 6, 2019.

GPS Time is adjusted by the U.S. Air Force GPS Directorate to maintain alignment with UTC as provided by the U.S. Naval Observatory. A GPS device that provides UTC time does so by converting GPS Time to UTC using multiple parameters – including WN – conveyed in page 18 of GPS sub-frame.

GPS devices with a poorly implemented GPS Time-to-UTC conversion algorithm may provide incorrect UTC following a WN rollover. Additionally, some GPS devices that calculate the WN value from a device-specific date rather than the start of the current GPS Time Epoch may provide incorrect UTC at some other device-specific date.”

That explanation came from a memorandum issued by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security in April, 2018. A one-year warning doesn’t seem like much time to fix old programs dependent on an antiquated 10-bit counter that bumps up one per week until it reaches binary 1111111111 (1023) and resets to zero, does it? DHS points out that this happened once before on August 22, 1999 and nothing bad happened then. Of course, that could be because most people were still folding paper maps in 1999 when GPS was still a new and much less used innovation.

(Image by cocoparisienne from Pixabay)

On the other hand, in 2019 it seems that every cell phone, vehicle, watch and just about anything with a chip in it has GPS. Will we all go spinning aimlessly on 4/6/2019? Here’s an answer from FalTech GPS, a company specialized in GPS repeater technology.

“Who will be affected? The list is long and varied; some industries come to mind immediately as they are known to use the accurate timing information provided by the GPS constellation. Financial markets, power generating companies, emergency services and industrial control systems may be affected, as well as fixed-line and cellular communications networks. GPS tracking devices installed in a fleet management system to schedule and monitor deliveries could cause system errors if they start to provide location data that is potentially up to 20 years out of date.”

All together now …. ahhhh! Why isn’t someone doing something about this? Well, the government and GPS makers have been for a while. Most modern GPS receivers shouldn’t be affected. Older devices that have been getting regular firmware updates should also be OK. A lot of GPS devices can run without UTC or can get it from other sources. And don’t forget – GPS systems survived August 22, 1999, just as we survived January 1, 2000.

And yet … Tom’s Guide reports that a security expert at the recent RSA Conference 2019 (RSA is a computer and network security company) said in a presentation:

“I’m not going to be flying on April 6.”

Does that sound like a warning? Is someone keeping things quiet? Who? This is no April Fool’s joke. If you survive April 1, make it to April 7 by being extra careful just in case on April 6.

One of America’s most mysterious archaeological sites is finally being returned to its rightful owners after 200 years. In the small town of Franklin, North Carolina, a small mound of earth can be found alongside US Highway 441. The grassy mound today stands just just a dozen or so feet high (4 meters) and occupies the space of roughly a city block. While the mound may be easily overlooked by the untrained eye, it remains one of the most unknown structures in the United States and predates even the oldest known oral histories of indigenous American peoples. Who built the Nikwasi Mound?

The mound today. US 441 can be seen in the right of this image.

When the earliest European settlers encountered the Cherokee nation in what is now Western North Carolina, they inquired about the mound. Cherokee tribal elders told the explorers that the mound predates their tribe’s history and was already ancient when the Cherokee arrived. The original builders of the mound remain unknown, and it is believed the mound was once part of a sprawling tribal town which thrived around 1,000 CE. Despite the mystery surrounding the Nikwasi Mound, the Cherokee people have revered the mound as a spiritual and ceremonial place for centuries and consider it to be one of the last known structures built by their mysterious predecessors.

The Eastern Band of the Cherokee Indians (EBCI) has worked for years to reclaim ownership of the mound and are finally poised to regain it. The Franklin City Council will soon vote to pass control of the mound to the nonprofit Nikwasi Initiative in the next few months, and the votes are expected to go in favor of the EBCI. “What this will do is allow the Cherokees — finally, after 200 years — to have some representation in the management of the mound,” Franklin Vice Mayor Barbara McRae told council members before the vote. “We have an opportunity to do something really historic, and to reverse that wrong.”

Main Street, Franklin NC. Make sure to check out Lazy Hiker Brewing if you’re ever in the area.

While it’s unknown who exactly built the Nikwasi Mound, it is believed that the Southern Appalachian Mississippians likely constructed it at some point nearly a thousand years ago. The Mississippian people were the predecessors to modern American Indian nations and inhabited what is now the eastern United States from the 9th century to the 15th century before European colonization.

Climate change at the end of the Little Ice Age, deforestation and overhunting, and the ensuing cultural collapse eventually brought about the decline of the Mississippian culture and the subsequent development of the Native American Indian nations and culture we know today. Because the Mississippian people left behind no writing system, little is known about this ancient culture outside of archaeological artifacts, mounds like the Nikwasi Mound, and the oral histories passed down through indigenous peoples for centuries.

The Nikwasi Mound is believed to have once been the site of a townhouse which served as the seat of Cherokee tribes in the area.

Because of its sacred status, the Nikwasi Mound has never been excavated, and the Cherokee people request that no one even climb on it in order to preserve it. Who knows what mysteries lie in the earth of the mound? Luckily, we may never know. Some mysteries are worth preserving.

Around 2,600 years ago, a huge solar storm hit Earth that was approximately ten times more powerful than any solar storm recorded in modern times. According to a new study, these massive solar storms were actually quite common in the history of the Earth. Unfortunately, with how many of us rely on technology and electricity, if one of those storms hit our planet today, our daily lives would nearly become unmanageable.

The sun could attack our planet with explosions of immensely energetic particles that are called solar proton events, and if these “proton storms” were to hit Earth, it could even damage electronics located in the air and in space. Raimund Muscheler, who is an environmental physicist at Lund University in Sweden, told Live Science, “Today, we have a lot of infrastructure that could be badly damaged, and we travel in air and space where we are much more exposed to high-energy radiation.”

When a proton storm hits Earth’s magnetosphere, our planet’s magnetic field traps it and when there is an interruption in our magnetosphere, that’s called a geomagnetic storm and that can destroy power grids all across the planet.

One example of this happening was in 1989 when a large solar storm put the entire Canadian province of Quebec in complete darkness, with the effects being felt all the way in New Jersey where some of their transformers were damaged. In fact, power grids in the United States from the mid-Atlantic to the Pacific Northwest were very close to shutting down.

A much more massive storm – approximately ten times more powerful than the one in Quebec – happened in 1859 and it’s called the Carrington Event. If a massive solar storm like the Carrington Event happened now, power outages could last weeks, months, or years, as we would have to wait for specific parts of the power grids to be replaced.

But wait, the massive Carrington Event may have been nothing compared to a solar storm that may have hit Earth in ancient times. Researchers have recently discovered radioactive atoms that were trapped in ice located in Greenland that seem to suggest that a gigantic proton storm hit our planet around 660 BC. Scientists studied two samples of ice from Greenland and noticed a spike of radioactive beryllium-10 and chlorine-36 from around 2,610 years ago. An even more interesting fact is that these findings coincide with tree rings that had a spike of carbon-14 around that same time period.

Two other major solar storms happened – one was around 993-994 AD, while the other happened around 774-775 AD – with the latter being the biggest-known solar eruption to have ever occurred.

“These enormous events are a recurring feature of the sun – we now have three big events during the past 3,000 years,” Muscheler said, adding, “There might be more that we have not yet discovered.” You can read the scientists’ findings in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by clicking here.

Solar flares are a common trait of the sun, but let’s hope that a massive storm like the ones mentioned above do not hit Earth anytime soon.

While many in the U.S. are still dealing with the after-effects of ‘springing forward’ one hour for Daylight Saving Time, a group of Russian scientists is celebrating falling back – not just by spinning their clocks but by actually resersing the forward trek of time. Does this mean do-overs are actually possible? Is Doc Brown’s DeLorean revving its engine? Is HG Wells begging for a trip back to Earth to change the ending of his novel?

“This is one in a series of papers on the possibility of violating the second law of thermodynamics. That law is closely related to the notion of the arrow of time that posits the one-way direction of time from the past to the future.”

Gordey Lesovik, a quantum physicist from the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology and lead author of the new study published in the journal Science Reports, describes in simple terms how his team apparently broke the second law of thermodynamics by returning a quantum computer to a state in its past life. And not just once, but a reliably reproducible 85 percent of the time. Lesovik’s Russian team worked with quantum researchers at the Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois using the public domain IBM Q System Hub, a universal quantum computing system with 20 superconducting qubits.

The second law of thermodynamics: an isolated system either remains static or evolves toward a state of chaos rather than order.

Phys.org gives a good, layman’s explanation of this discovery using billiard balls. When a triangle of 15 billiard balls is hit by a cue ball, they scatter into a chaotic state, never to return to that orderly triangle. What the Moscow team has done is returned two qubits (quantum bits) on the quantum computer back to their previous state after chaos and dispersion had begun. Sure, it’s just two qubits and not 15 colorful billiard balls, but it’s never been done before, and the fact that they could do it repeatedly puts the second law of thermodynamics on a walk of shame out of the physics books.

Is this still a big deal?

“Time reversal can help—we do time-reversal of the final state of the computer and run the same quantum program again. If the computation was correct we will arrive to the initial state of the computer.”

That’s a physicist’s “yes” from Gordey Lesovik, who sees this as a tool for testing programs on quantum computers. It won’t return a billiard table to its previous pre-break state, it’s not a time machine or even an age-reversing picture of Dorian Gray. For now, we have to take Lesovik’s word that it’s indeed a big deal.

Not much of a movie plot, but still a big deal.

The Internet can be a pretty wild place, a badlands of rumors, hearsay, tall tales, fake videos, and straight up misinformation at times, all unregulated and seeming a bit like the Wild West. Through this din of off-the-wall stories and outlandish accounts, every once in a while one will stand tall as particularly bizarre and absurd, yet managing to get picked up and talked about to the point that it takes on a life of its own. Surely one such tale is the story of a man who came forward with his experiences that deal with super soldiers, Martian bases, and intergalactic war, which he claims are all completely true. So strap yourself in and maybe put on your tinfoil hat, because we are about to blast off on a wild ride into the orbit of the truly odd.

In 2006, a man calling himself “Captain Kaye” (later found to be Randy Cramer but Captain Kaye sounds cool so we’ll stick with that) stepped from the shadows of top secrecy, claiming to be a member of the United States Marine Corps (USMC) and with quite the incredibly bizarre tale to tell. It began, he said, when he was just a very small child of just 3 or 4 years old, when members of a shadowy organization came to him in the night to covertly recruit him into a program called “Project Manequin.” According to him, this was an ultra-secretive government program designed to create super-soldiers who would be stronger, more efficient, and more obedient killers on the battlefield. Children were chosen because their young minds were seen as more malleable and easily warped, their bodies abler to withstand and adapt to the rigors of what awaited them, and he would claim of the whole training process:

The techniques used to make me have been described to me as a “with-the-grain” style of programming as opposed to most “against-the-grain” styles of programming that try to force Super Soldiers to kill anything, anytime, anywhere – and as human animals, most of us just aren’t made that way, so we resist – and the main function then becomes ‘suppressing’ the urge to resist. Rather than creating the best Super Soldier you can, you only create the most compliant. The “with-the-grain” style programming doesn’t try to create something that kills on command, but, rather, it creates a deep seated instinct to protect its tribe and its territory when threatened. So, as long as you can explain the threat credibly, the soldier will use all of its strength and cunning to destroy any that would harm those it’s genetically predisposed to protect.

To engage in this training, he says that these agents would whisk him away from his home in the middle of the night and take him to a secret base off-planet, where he was trained and indoctrinated for days or weeks at a time. In order to make sure that no one knew he was gone, time travel was used to bring him back to the exact moment he had been abducted, leaving the memories within his mind like a dream. Kaye, along with the 300 child recruits, would also take part in a program called “Project Moon Shadow,” which was next stage and according to him an offshoot of the government mind control program called MK Ultra.

When he turned 17 his training was considered complete, and he was supposedly sent to join what he calls the “Mars Defense Force “(MDF) part of the U.S. Secret Space Program (SSP), which had been established for the purpose of protecting Earth’s five Mars colonies and claiming Mars as a U.S. territory, as well as providing a safe place to retreat in the event of some world-ending cataclysmic event on Earth. Interestingly, this was purportedly a joint program run by the United States, China, and Russia, who were secretly working together to make everything run smoothly behind the scenes. These colonies had apparently been on the planet since the 1960s(!) and that the moon landings had been a cover to divert public attention from the real aims of NASA, which was Martian colonization and planetary defense.

In order to get to Mars, he claims that he was first taken to a cutting edge facility on our moon, after which he was whisked away to the Red Planet aboard a special shuttle and stationed at the colony he calls Aries Prime, at a secret MDF base called Forward Station Zebra. There were also teleport jump pads available, but at the time these were supposedly still seen as risky. Of his actual arrival on Mars he says that he was surprised that the atmosphere was breathable, and he says of his experience of disembarking:

We touched down at Aries Primus, HQ of the MCC (Mars Colony Corporation) and the MDF (Mars Defense Force). To my surprise, we walked down the gangplank and right out into the Martian air. The air was thin and cool, but the sun was beating down enough to feel it. Even though it’s dimmer, the sun can still be quite hot and bright in the direct light. We walked, in a line, to personnel with scanners in their hands who would scan your transfer packet, and then direct you to whichever shuttle pad was to take you to your duty station.

He would also be surprised to learn that humans were not alone on Mars, and that there were in fact two indigenous alien species on the planet. Stay with me now. One of these is described as an insectoid species, rather imaginatively called the “Insectoids,” which lives underground in elaborate hives, while the other is more reptilian in nature, and you don’t get any points if you guessed they are called the “Reptoids.” These two species had had a rather hit and miss relationship with the humans who had inhabited their world, going from indifference, to occasional skirmishes, to peace again on several occasions.

Captain Kaye would be stationed here for the next 17 years, during which time he claims he underwent flight training and he also says he participated in some of these battles himself, often wearing a powered suit, because hell yeah! Peace only truly came when the humans, Insectoids, and Reptoids joined forces to fight a race of evil alien invaders called the Draconians (MU Editorial Dept.- Hi Brent, could you change the references to Draconians to “Dracoids” from here on out? Our research shows that people respond to “oids” Thanks.) People, seriously, I am not making this up. Shortly before his two decades of duty were up, he says that there was a massive battle against the Dracoids that drove them off but left hundreds dead. Shortly after this Kaye’s tenure came to a close and he was moved back to the moon, where the story gets possibly even weirder than it already is.

At the moon base, Kaye says he went through a drawn out reverse-aging process of regressing him back to his younger self, and then sent back through time to Earth in 1987, at a point before he had even left. Before being sent back, there was a ceremony to honor the occasion, attended by none other than former secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld himself. Again, I am not making this up. It would then take him years to regain the lost memories, that had either been disrupted by the time travel process or intentionally wiped, but come back they did, and left him in a state of shock.

Right about now you might be wondering just why Captain Kaye felt that he could safely come forward with this world-changing information, and you might be surprised to know that according to him he was told to blow the whistle on the whole thing by his own superior officer. Kaye says that a mysterious Brigadier General Smythe, one of the top guys in the program, came to him with the permission to let the lid off of everything, and he says of this:

When he personally gave me the go-ahead (he said, and I quote, “I’m giving you the go-ahead to go public with everything you know…”), I asked, “Everything?” and he said, “EVERYTHING!”, and then we had a deal. As long as I had the assurance that my direct chain of command was behind me and that I had no restrictions on truthful content, I knew it was for real – and that HE was for real. No one – not even an enemy – would want me to do that, or tell me to do that. He even said I could use his name, which I just did, to let the people who need to know, that I answer to him, and only to him… and if they didn’t like it, they could take it up with him, or the CMC.

It all sounds completely and totally off the rails, and it is, but Captain Kaye has continued to assert that this is not some bad science fiction pulp story, but all very, seriously real. He has continued to write of his experiences, give interviews about it all, and even has his own newsletter devoted to it. While I have only covered the basics here there is much more to it all, about which he goes into incredibly, meticulous detail. His stories go as far as to explain the exact layouts of rooms, the equipment used, and the colors of all of the uniforms, and even what type of carpet the moon base has, and his story is so tight that he never contradicts himself. Adding to this, he tells his tale with such earnestness and at times raw emotion that rather than some hoax it is hard to think of it as anything other than that he either really did experience these things or that he is severely, deeply delusional.

Unbelievably, there have been other individuals who have come forward claiming to have been a part of the Mars Defense Force as well, spinning their own tales of sci-fi insanity, and one is left to wonder what to make of it all. Also rather incredible is the large number of people who seem to actually believe it all, coming to the conclusion that there really are moon and Mars bases and that these tales are true. Are these the ravings of disturbed individuals or a giant hoax? Do they really believe what they are talking about? Is there anything to it at all? No matter what camp you are in or what you believe, one thing I think most of us can agree on is that it is all a wild roller coaster ride of weirdness, and entertaining at the very least.

Something big happened along Florida’s storied Space Coast, and seismologists are currently clueless about what it may have been. On the evening of Friday, March 8, homes throughout east Central Florida were shaken by a powerful tremor around 10:45 pm local time. Residents reported doors shaking or walls vibrating for minutes, but luckily no severe damage or injuries were reported by what seismographs in the town of Century, Florida recorded as a 2.6 magnitude earthquake.

Florida is one of the least seismically active states, so geologists and seismologists aren’t exactly sure if the tremor was an earthquake per se. Some meteorological events can cause the ground to shake, and there are plenty of man-made phenomena which can rattle the ground forcefully enough to be recorded by seismographs; hundreds of such events have been recorded over the past few years. Is this event related to the mystery boom phenomenon I’m currently obsessed with?

It’s possible, especially given that due to the area’s proximity to space launch facilities and Air Force installations, many Florida residents suspected the tremor could have been caused by aerospace activity. “It could be something like a hypersonic jet, munitions…or a sonic boom,” says Paul Earle, a seismologist with the USGS. “Unfortunately, we can’t give a definitive answer on exactly what it was.”

Naturally, a spokesperson for Patrick Air Force Base gave a statement claiming there were no military air exercises that day which could have caused the tremor:

We’ve been informed that there have been reports of a rumbling noise in the Space Coast area this past Friday. Having checked with our local organizations within the 45th Space Wing, it does not appear to have come from us. So I cannot comment at this time as to its origin.

With little other information to go on, this mysterious tremor will be thrown on the already massive and still growing pile of evidence suggesting a mysterious natural or unnatural phenomenon is shaking the Earth throughout the United States. Will we ever know what’s behind these unexplained booms and tremors?

A very rare piece of rock art dating back 12,250 years old depicts odd carvings not typical for that time during the Paleolithic Period. In fact, it has several oddities that make it quite different from other Late Upper Paleolithic art pieces. This rock in particular featured carvings of birds rather than deer, goats, and bison that were normally seen in drawings. The fact that rock is portable is also quite rare.

In addition to the birds drawn on the rock, it appears to show an actual scene instead of just individual figures of animals and/or humans. That would mean that it’s one of the earliest forms of narrative art ever discovered in Europe.

The limestone art piece, which measures 11.8 inches wide, was found at the Hort de la Bequera archaeological site in Spain in 2011. And it’s the only piece of its kind to have been discovered at the site even though they’ve been excavating that location for fourteen years.

Ancient carving from the Paleolithic Period (not the one discussed in this article)

Whoever created the art piece used a flint tool to engrave the lines into the soft limestone and the artist was very neat as there were no messy stroke marks which had been previously found in other art pieces from that time. There are five images engraved onto the rock: two humans, one large bird (probably a crane), and a chick. As for the fifth motif, there is a strange image close to the second human-like figure that can’t be identified. You can see pictures of this fascinating rock art by clicking here.

Photorealistic 3D model with 2D digital drawings superimposed.

Image: Ine´s Domingo et al., 2019

Image: University of Barcelona

In addition to the great, well-preserved condition the rock was in, researchers also created a 3D digital model of the art piece. While it’s hard to say for sure what the image represents, it is believed that it’s in reference to hunting and motherhood.

Inés Domingo from the University of Barcelona, and who is the lead author of the new study, described the rock art in a press release, saying in part, “This is one of the few found scenes so far which suggest the birth of a narrative art in Europe, and this theme is unique… In the represented scene the birds catch the attention, they are copied or chased by two human figures. We do not know the meaning of the scene for prehistoric peoples, but what it says is that not only they [the birds] were regarded as preys but also as a symbol for European Paleolithic societies.”

Ancient rock art (not the one discussed in this article)

The details of this discovery were published in the science journal L’Anthropologie which can be read here.

The art piece indicates that the artists during that time were a lot more sophisticated than previously thought, as they were able to create stories on rocks for people to find and admire thousands of years later. Now that’s remarkable.