Dit is ons nieuw hondje Kira, een kruising van een waterhond en een Podenko. Ze is sinds 7 februari 2024 bij ons en druk bezig ons hart te veroveren. Het is een lief, aanhankelijk hondje, dat zich op een week snel aan ons heeft aangepast. Ze is heel vinnig en nieuwsgierig, een heel ander hondje dan Noleke.
This is our new dog Kira, a cross between a water dog and a Podenko. She has been with us since February 7, 2024 and is busy winning our hearts. She is a sweet, affectionate dog who quickly adapted to us within a week. She is very quick and curious, a very different dog than Noleke.
DEAR VISITOR,
MY BLOG EXISTS ALREADY 12 YEARS AND 11 MONTHS.
ON 06/05/2024 MORE THAN 1.972.210
VISITORS FROM 134 DIFFERENT NATIONS ALREADY FOUND THEIR WAY TO MY BLOG.
THAT IS AN AVERAGE OF 400GUESTS PER DAY.
THANK YOU FOR VISITING MY BLOG AND HOPE YOU ENJOY EACH TIME.
The purpose of this blog is the creation of an open, international, independent and free forum, where every UFO-researcher can publish the results of his/her research. The languagues, used for this blog, are Dutch, English and French.You can find the articles of a collegue by selecting his category. Each author stays resposable for the continue of his articles. As blogmaster I have the right to refuse an addition or an article, when it attacks other collegues or UFO-groupes.
Druk op onderstaande knop om te reageren in mijn forum
Zoeken in blog
Deze blog is opgedragen aan mijn overleden echtgenote Lucienne.
In 2012 verloor ze haar moedige strijd tegen kanker!
In 2011 startte ik deze blog, omdat ik niet mocht stoppen met mijn UFO-onderzoek.
BEDANKT!!!
Een interessant adres?
UFO'S of UAP'S, ASTRONOMIE, RUIMTEVAART, ARCHEOLOGIE, OUDHEIDKUNDE, SF-SNUFJES EN ANDERE ESOTERISCHE WETENSCHAPPEN - DE ALLERLAATSTE NIEUWTJES
UFO's of UAP'S in België en de rest van de wereld In België had je vooral BUFON of het Belgisch UFO-Netwerk, dat zich met UFO's bezighoudt. BEZOEK DUS ZEKER VOOR ALLE OBJECTIEVE INFORMATIE , enkel nog beschikbaar via Facebook en deze blog.
Verder heb je ook het Belgisch-Ufo-meldpunt en Caelestia, die prachtig, doch ZEER kritisch werk leveren, ja soms zelfs héél sceptisch...
Voor Nederland kan je de mooie site www.ufowijzer.nl bezoeken van Paul Harmans. Een mooie site met veel informatie en artikels.
MUFON of het Mutual UFO Network Inc is een Amerikaanse UFO-vereniging met afdelingen in alle USA-staten en diverse landen.
MUFON's mission is the analytical and scientific investigation of the UFO- Phenomenon for the benefit of humanity...
Je kan ook hun site bekijken onder www.mufon.com.
Ze geven een maandelijks tijdschrift uit, namelijk The MUFON UFO-Journal.
Since 02/01/2020 is Pieter ex-president (=voorzitter) of BUFON, but also ex-National Director MUFON / Flanders and the Netherlands. We work together with the French MUFON Reseau MUFON/EUROP.
ER IS EEN NIEUWE GROEPERING DIE ZICH BUFON NOEMT, MAAR DIE HEBBEN NIETS MET ONZE GROEP TE MAKEN. DEZE COLLEGA'S GEBRUIKEN DE NAAM BUFON VOOR HUN SITE... Ik wens hen veel succes met de verdere uitbouw van hun groep. Zij kunnen de naam BUFON wel geregistreerd hebben, maar het rijke verleden van BUFON kunnen ze niet wegnemen...
15-10-2020
US President Trump Seems to Threaten UFOs with Advanced Military that “We’ve Never Had Before”
US President Trump Seems to Threaten UFOs with Advanced Military that “We’ve Never Had Before”
Fox News host Maria Bartiromo asked Mr Trump in an interview to explain why the Department of Defense has formed the UFO task force and if there are UFOs.
Mr Trump answered that he heard it, and he’s going to have to check on it. He then quickly segued into a boast about the country’s military might, which some people on Twitter interpreted to be the president threatening aliens with the US weaponry.
He revealed the US had created a military that we’ve never previously had, in terms of equipment. Mr Trump said that he hoped the equipment and the weapons that we have wouldn’t be used.
He further announced that Russia and China are envious of what we’ve had – all built in the USA and rebuilt for $2.5trn. As far as the other question, he said that he’d have to check on it.
The snowcapped mountains of Pluto's Pigafetta Montes and Elcano Montes and the Alps on Earth are seen side by side in this view. (Image credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute, Thomas Pesquet/ESA)
Mountains on Pluto have snowcaps that may have formed from the top down as opposed to the bottom up, the reverse of how snow caps form on Earth, a new study finds.
When NASA's New Horizons spacecraft flew by Pluto in 2015, it revealed a surprisingly complex and diverse landscape on the faraway world. Pluto's frozen surface varies greatly, featuring regions dominated by different kinds of ices — from frozen methane to frozen nitrogen and even water ice.
"The bedrock of Pluto is made of water ice, but it is so cold that the ice is harder than rock," study lead author Tanguy Bertrand, a planetary scientist at NASA Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California, told Space.com. "The mountains on Pluto are made up of this cold hard water ice."
At the mountain chains Pigafetta Montes and Elcano Montes in Pluto's dark equatorial Cthulhu region, scientists detected frosted peaks "strikingly resembling snowcapped mountain chains seen on Earth," Bertrand said. "Such a landscape had never been observed elsewhere in the solar system."
For example, the summits of Pigafetta Montes, which can rise nearly 2.2 miles (3.5 kilometers) above their bases, possess brightly reflective caps at altitudes above about 1 mile (1.5 km). Similar frosts were seen on crater rims and walls in the Cthulhu region.
The exact composition of this frost on Pluto was unclear. While researchers identified methane, it was unknown whether it is pure frozen methane, frozen methane diluted with frozen nitrogen or a mix of both. The uncertainty about the frost's composition made it unclear how it might have formed.
To help solve these mysteries, scientists in this new study examined high-resolution data from New Horizons, focusing on the composition of the frost at high altitudes. This new analysis revealed that the snowcap frost "is almost pure methane ice, with traces of nitrogen ice," Bertrand said.
The researchers also developed high-resolution computer simulations of Pluto's climate. They focused on how methane circulates around the dwarf planet.
On Earth, mountain snowcaps are formed when moist winds rise upslope and cool, as temperatures drop with increasing altitude. The rising moisture condenses as it gets colder, forming snow on the tops of mountains.
This diagram shows how snow caps form on Earth's mountains (top) and how scientists think they form on Pluto. (Image credit: Tanguy Bertrand et al)
"Methane is a trace gas on Pluto, as water vapor is on Earth, so initially it seemed logical that the high-altitude frosts seen on Pluto could form like on the Earth," Bertrand said.
However, "on Pluto, the opposite occurs," Bertrand said. "We discovered that a new and unique atmospheric process forms these snowy mountains on Pluto. It is remarkable to see that two very similar landscapes on Earth and Pluto can be created by two very dissimilar processes."
The new simulations revealed that atmospheric circulation on Pluto may concentrate methane gas a few miles above the plains of the dwarf planet. This, in turn, can result in methane condensing as frost on mountaintops.
Pluto's thin atmosphere gets heated by the sun and actually gets warmer as altitude increases, whereas its surface temperature remains uniformly cold, Bertrand explained. "Pluto's atmosphere has more gaseous methane at its warmer, higher altitudes, allowing for that gas to saturate and freeze directly on the mountain peaks tall enough to reach the enriched zone," he said. "At lower altitudes, the concentration of gaseous methane is lower, and it cannot condense."
Such activity might also help to explain how other methane reservoirs formed on Pluto, the researchers said.
"This discovery teaches us that there are still plenty of physical and dynamical processes out there in space that we do not know about, and that climates can be very different than that of Earth, despite forming similar landscapes," Bertrand said. "It is important to study Pluto and other planetary bodies because they are natural laboratories to explore and investigate the diversity of possible climates, which gives us more perspective on our own climate."
In addition, this work "also teaches us what is common and what is unique for planetary climates, and helps to understand where Pluto's climate, a dwarf planet's climate, fits in with the other climates we know of in the solar system — Earth, Mars, Venus, Titan, Triton," Bertrand said.
The scientists detailed their findings in a paper published Oct. 13 in the journal Nature Communications.
Follow Charles Q. Choi on Twitter @cqchoi. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook.
When you reflect on big-time science at the moon, think small.
NASA's new megarocket, the Space Launch System (SLS), is scheduled to launch from Florida in late 2021 on its debut mission. That flight, known as Artemis-1, will send NASA's Orion spacecraft on an uncrewed trip around the moon — and loft more than a dozen tiny cubesats to test inventive technologies as well.
Among those bantam spacecraft are Lunar IceCube, Lunar Flashlight and LunaH-Map. And we can soon add to the moon mix Lunar Trailblazer, a smallsat mission headed for flight in 2024 as a hitchhiker payload on NASA's Interstellar Mapping and Acceleration Probe (IMAP) mission.
The three NASA-sponsored cubesats and the smallsat are being readied for moonbound treks to help quench a thirst for new data about lunar water ice. Such data could help sustain an Artemis Base Camp for wide-ranging lunar exploration, NASA officials have said.
All that said, hunting for moon water remains no slam dunk.
Measurement strategies
A long-time advocate of cubesat investigation of the moon is Pamela Clark, director of the Cubesat Development Lab at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Southern California. She is the science principal investigator on Lunar IceCube, which is being built at Morehead State University in Kentucky.
"All of these cubesat missions have the search for volatiles, especially water in various forms, as a primary goal," Clark said.
Lunar IceCube, for instance, will be placed in a nearly polar equatorial periapsis orbit (the point at which the orbiting craft is closest to the moon), with a "repeating" coverage pattern allowing it to observe swaths of the lunar surface at different times of day over several 28-Earth-day lunar cycles, Clark told Space.com.
Lunar IceCube will carry an instrument called the Broadband InfraRed Compact High Resolution Explorer Spectrometer (BIRCHES), which will prospect for water in ice, liquid and vapor forms.
While the coming smallsat and cubesat missions have differing observational and measurement strategies as they orbit the moon, Clark said that each spacecraft will provide a unique perspective on lunar water distribution. That collected data, when combined, "will greatly increase our understanding of the origin and history and current locations of volatiles as potential resources on the moon and analogous surfaces throughout the solar system," she said.
Lunar Flashlight has been developed by a team from JPL, NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama and the University of California at Los Angeles. This mooncraft will use near-infrared lasers to shine light into shaded polar regions near the south pole to detect volatiles on the moon. Meanwhile, an onboard reflectometer carried by the briefcase-sized orbiter will gauge surface reflection and composition.
UCLA will be providing the ground data system, which will plan the instrument observations and process the data.
"The observations made by the low-cost mission will provide unambiguous information about the presence of water ice deposits inside craters that would be a valuable in-situ resource for future Artemis missions to the lunar surface," explains JPL's website about the mission.
Then there's Arizona State University's Lunar Polar Hydrogen Mapper, or LunaH-Map for short. The "H" in the probe's name is silent "because the hydrogen is hiding in the permanently shadowed regions," explains the ASU mission website.
The shoebox-sized LunaH-Map will chart hydrogen enrichments within permanently shadowed regions of the lunar south pole. The probe has a miniaturized propulsion system, attitude control, power and communications systems to maneuver into orbit around the moon. It will navigate into a low-altitude polar orbit, attaining its lowest point smack-dab over the lunar south pole.
Temperature profiles
The California Institute of Technology's Lunar Trailblazer is the "smallsat" of the bunch, a larger spacecraft intended to investigate lunar water and lunar geology. Lunar Trailblazer is outfitted with an instrument called the High-resolution Volatiles and Minerals Moon Mapper (HVM3) from JPL, and another, the Lunar Thermal Mapper, from the University of Oxford in England.
In July 2020, Lockheed Martin Space was selected as the new partner for Lunar Trailblazer's flight system. The company will design and build the spacecraft, integrate the instruments, and work with rideshare services to ready Lunar Trailblazer as a secondary payload aboard IMAP's launch atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket.
"Our goal is to determine the form, abundance, and distribution of water on the moon, including water ice in the permanently shadowed regions," said Lunar Trailblazer principal investigator Bethany Ehlmann, a scientist at Caltech and JPL. Lunar Trailblazer is designed to provide the best maps of the distribution of water ice at the surface in the permanently shadowed regions via direct detection with the HVM3 imaging spectrometer, she said.
HVM3 data, paired with simultaneously measured temperature profiles, will allow researchers to zero in on the abundance of water and how temperature controls it, Ehlmann told Space.com.
Remaining unknowns
While researchers are confident the moon's polar regions are enhanced in volatiles, there remain some unknowns about the form and physical distribution of these volatile species.
For example, are there skating rinks of ice on those permanently shadowed crater floors? Or are those floors studded with ice-coated rock grains, or ice grains separate from rock grains?
Those are questions posed by Kirby Runyon, senior staff scientist for planetary geology and exploration at Johns Hopkins University's Applied Physics Laboratory in Maryland.
"We really don't know how the ice is distributed or how it's concentrated in the moon's polar regions," Runyon said. "Smallsats orbiting very low — just thousands of feet above the south pole's craters — can use neutron detectors and maybe radar to map out the ice. Once we know where it is and how it's concentrated, then surface vehicles can be designed to go mine it."
Experts agree that there's early need for more and finer data about the chemistry of lunar water ice, including possible contaminants, and the physical form of ice-regolith mixes. Without that information in hand, planning mining projects, setting up processing plants and establishing production checklists will remain pipe dream
The most important resource at the lunar poles are the areas of sustained illumination that can be found in both the north and south, said Samuel Lawrence, a planetary scientist at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston. He is also an emeritus chair of the Lunar Exploration Analysis Group (LEAG), an advisory group to NASA.
Lawrence said that there are only a handful of these areas, which will enable NASA and its commercial and international partners to bootstrap existing or planned technologies available in the near term, particularly for power generation. That work, in turn, will enable sustained habitation for gradually increasing amounts of time.
"So, in a very real and immediate sense, it is actually the sustained illumination regions which are the most important near-term resources … and the reason why the Artemis program is targeting polar landing sites for the Artemis Base Camp," Lawrence said. But the global resource potential of the moon — meaning both polar and nonpolar resources — is vast, he added.
"Fifty years from now, people will be making a profit from lunar resources. We want American companies to be part of that story, and the steps we will take in the next decade are the first chapter in an exciting story," Lawrence concluded.
Leonard David is author of the recently released book, "Moon Rush: The New Space Race" published by National Geographic in May 2019. A longtime writer for Space.com, David has been reporting on the space industry for more than five decades. Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook or Google+. This version of the story published on Space.com.
Struck by menacing ultraviolet radiation? Water bear don’t care. According to an intriguing new study, water bears, also known as tardigrades or moss piglets, have a newly discovered ability that allows them to survive in some of the most extreme environments in the universe — even in outer space. When they’re hit by UV light, these microscopic creatures absorb the radiation with a fluorescent substance, which emits back blue light.
This striking display of extreme survival was discovered in a new tardigrade species, dubbed Paramacrobiotus BLR, by researchers from the Indian Institute of Science. As a stroke of luck, the tardigrades were first discovered in moss growing on the walls of the campus.
The most extreme organisms on Earth
Tardigrades are the most indestructible known complex organism on Earth, and perhaps the cutest of all microorganisms.
To pull off these death-defying feats, tardigrades employ a couple of tricks. When faced with the prospect of annihilation, either due to lack of food or due to exposure to absolute zero temperatures, the water bear essentially dries out and retracts its head and its eight legs. It then enters a deep state of suspended animation that closely resembles death. Its metabolism slows to 0.01% of the normal rate and the body becomes almost devoid of water.
Additionally, the reddish-brown Paramacrobiotus tardigrades have another ace up their sleeve. When the Indian researchers exposed these tardigrades to 1 kilojoule per square meter of UV light — enough to kill bacteria and roundworm after just 5 minutes — they all survived. Even after the radiation dose was upped four times, about 60% of the reddish-brown bears still lived for more than 30 days.
In order to learn more about this strain of Paramacrobiotus, the researchers examined tardigrade samples with an inverted fluorescence microscope. Much to their surprise, under UV Light, the reddish tardigrades appeared blue due to fluorescent pigments located under the animals’ skin.
Not all tardigrades seem to have this ability. When Hypsibius exemplaris tardigrades were exposed to UV light for 15 minutes, all died within 24 hours.
The researchers also extracted some of these fluorescent pigments and sprayed them on Hypsibius exemplaris tardigrades and several earthworms to see if the UV-protection rubs off them. The creatures that were coated with the pigments survived almost two times better than those without the shielding. Bearing in mind the very hot summer days in southern India, the Paramacrobiotus tardigrades likely evolved the UV-shielding as a local adaptation.
SCIENTISTS MAY HAVE SOLVED THE MYSTERY BEHIND PLUTO'S SNOWCAPPED MOUNTAINS
SCIENTISTS MAY HAVE SOLVED THE MYSTERY BEHIND PLUTO'S SNOWCAPPED MOUNTAINS
This process has never been observed before on any other planetary body.
WHILE FLYING BY PLUTO IN THE YEAR 2015, NASA's New Horizons spacecraft caught a glimpse of a landscape that seemed all too familiar. The famous dwarf planet revealed icy mountain tops that looked very similar to the ones found on Earth.
These frosty tips aren't merely uncanny — they have not been observed on any other world.
Since then, scientists have sought to discover how snow could form on Pluto's mountain tops, and whether it was through a process similar to that on Earth.
Now, an international team of scientists led by the French National Centre for Scientific Research may have discovered the atmospheric process behind Pluto's snowcapped mountains. It is starkly different than anything we may have expected from what we know about Earth's own weather systems.
The new findings are detailed in a study published Tuesday in the journal Nature.
NASA's New Horizon's mission captured these images of a newly discovered mountain range lies near the southwestern margin of Pluto’s Tombaugh Regio.NASA/JHUAPL/SWRI
Tanguy Bertrand, a postdoctoral fellow at NASA's Ames Research Center, and lead author of the new study, recalls seeing the images of Pluto's mountain tops and wondering how this snow could have formed, and whether it formed the same way it does on Earth's mountain tops.
"We wanted to know if Pluto’s atmosphere behaves the same as Earth’s atmosphere," Bertrand tells Inverse.
The team first looked at the New Horizon's images to uncover what the snow on Pluto is actually made of. Unlike the water that makes up Earth's snow, that found on Pluto is made of methane, a type of greenhouse gas which, on this icy planetary body, acts like water vapor does on Earth.
The researchers then simulated the atmospheric cycle that drives ice formation on Pluto using climate models similar to ones used to forecast weather on Earth.
"When we used this model, we discovered that the conditions on Pluto were completely different than the ones on Earth," Bertrand says.
On Earth, the lower part of the atmosphere is warm and wet, so water vapor forms in this region. The warm air rises from the bottom up, expanding and cooling on its way up. That leads to more moisture in the air.
The water vapor freezes on top of Earth's mountains, resulting in snowcaps.
On Pluto, the process is completely opposite.
Pluto's atmosphere is warmer at higher altitudes due to solar radiation. And the methane vapor is more abundant at higher altitudes. The methane only condenses to form snow on mountains that are high enough to reach this level of the atmosphere.
This climate mechanism may be unique to Pluto, and has never been observed anywhere else in the universe.
"Pluto is very interesting because there are many landscapes that remind us of Earth, sometimes much more than any other planet in the Solar System," Bertrand says. "Despite the fact that they have similar landscapes, there’s still plenty of dynamical processes in space that we don’t know about."
Now that they have solved the mystery of Pluto's snowcapped mountains, the scientists are turning their attention to other mysteries of the dwarf planet's atmosphere and geology. One enigma is what causes Pluto's steep, narrow ridges of ice, which resemble massive knife blades.
"Now that we know how methane forms snow on Pluto's mountain tops, maybe we are going to explore the formation of these dunes next," Bertrand says.
Abstract:
Pluto is covered by numerous deposits of methane, either diluted in nitrogen or as methane-rich ice. Within the dark equatorial region of Cthulhu, bright frost containing methane is observed coating crater rims and walls as well as mountain tops, providing spectacular resemblance to terrestrial snow-capped mountain chains. However, the origin of these deposits remained enigmatic. Here we report that they are composed of methane-rich ice. We use high-resolution numerical simulations of Pluto’s climate to show that the processes forming them are likely to be completely different to those forming high-altitude snowpack on Earth. The methane deposits may not result from adiabatic cooling in upwardly moving air like on our planet, but from a circulation-induced enrichment of gaseous methane a few kilometres above Pluto’s plains that favours methane condensation at mountain summits. This process could have shaped other methane reservoirs on Pluto and help explain the appearance of the bladed terrain of Tartarus Dorsa.
Some of the most outstanding and spectacular UFO encounters are those that leave behind some physical evidence or trace. This can take many forms, but typically it is very intriguing in that we have something left behind to remind us of their presence. This can sometimes be taken to extremes, and while UFOs mostly don’t cause a lot of damage there are those cases in which they cause chaos and collateral damage. Here we will look at some rare cases of when UFOs have, either intentionally or not, left behind devastation in the form of fire.
One of the stranger cases of a UFO connected to a fire comes to us from the country of South Africa. In September of 1965, two police constables by the names of John Lockem and Koos de Klerek were on patrol along the Pretoria-Bronkhorstspruit highway, and that evening started out as just a normal, mundane shift for them. As the lane lines flickered by in the night and the evening danced by, they were ready for this to be just another uneventful shift, but that would soon change. At around midnight, their quiet daydreaming was interrupted by something very odd blooming into the headlights from the murky gloom ahead. The startled two constables caught sight of some sort of metallic object that they at first took to be some vehicle stopped on the road, but it very quickly became apparent that this was no normal car or truck.
The thing in the road appeared to be a copper-colored, domed, disc-shaped object about 30 feet in diameter, and as they approached it at first just sat there silently. After a few seconds, before the two men could even really process what they were seeing or what was going on, the disc suddenly launched up at great velocity into the air, while copious jets of flame erupted from beneath it to light up the night. It looked as if the fire was spouting from two tubes underneath the craft, with the flames actually bouncing about three feet up in the air from the asphalt, and the heat was so intense that the highway purportedly actually caught fire and the officers were unable to get closer. This fire apparently went on for some time before it subsided enough for the two policemen to approach, and they found that the asphalt had actually melted, and that there was a caved in portion where something very heavy had been. The scorched area was reportedly around 6 feet in diameter, and the heat had been so formidable that the gravel had actually separated from the tar.
According to UFO researcher John Hall, the two constables reported the incident, but it was sort of brushed under the carpet by the government, with a Lt. Col. J.B. Brits, District Commandant of Pretoria North, saying the event was “of a highly secret nature and an inquiry is being conducted in top circles,” and that was that. There has been no other word on it since, and it was only briefly covered in an article for the Associated Press, Johannesburg, South Africa, in 1965 and later in English by NICAP in 1969. Adding to the mystery of it all is that there were supposedly samples taken from the site that were sent off to be analyzed, but results have never been forthcoming and nothing more has been released to the public.
At least in this case the fire left behind by the object was contained, but this doesn’t seem to always be the case. One Reddit user called “Echatoner” claims to be a firefighter working in Utah, and one call he got would be something he would never forget. He claims that he was called to a wildfire just south of Dugway Proving Grounds and as he and his crew sped off towards the emergency with a convoy of four trucks, they saw a formation of eight black military helicopters that fell in with them as if they were escorting them. This went on for about 10 miles before the helicopters veered away to fly off, and things would only get stranger from there. The witness says:
A little while later we are parked and about to start hiking to the fire line when suddenly a thin column of smoke shoots probably about two hundred feet into the sky, it was a good mile away but the concussion was pretty significant when it hit us and the noise was still ridiculously loud. We thought it was probably no big deal, we knew we were near a strike zone. A good five minutes later an aircraft like nothing I have ever seen flew by us at maybe five hundred feet. It was flat black and sort of rectangular but with fins and wells on the underside. It was moving pretty slow and was dead silent so I have to assume it was some sort of stealth glider. It sounds ridiculous but it immediately reminded me of a huge, flying bat mobile, Time Burton era.
After that some military personnel got on our radio frequency and instructed us to leave the area immediately, when our crew chief asked who it was and why they signed off and the Incident Commander (the guy in charge of managing the entire situation) came on the radios and said we were evacuating the area. They sent us to a completely different fire about a hundred miles to the south and never told us why except that it was higher priority which was bullshit, it was already out when we got there and we just assisted crews in the mop up operation. The thing that confuses me about this is that if the army didn’t want us to see that shit or if it was dangerous why didn’t they keep us clear of the area in the first place? Either a communications breakdown or they had a now shit situation going down and had to get us out of there without warning.
The witness came away with the impression that the strange craft he had seen had caused the fire and riled up the military, but beyond that it is all a mystery. Was this a UFO, some experimental aircraft, or what? What connection did it have to the fire? We will probably never know. In 2019 there was a massive wildfire at Katon-Karagay national park, in East Kazakhstan, which quickly enveloped an estimated 82.2 hectares of wilderness, and before long there were rumors that the blaze had been caused by a UFO. One Vladimir Sanarov, inspector of flying-industrial service KazAviaForestGuard, would say of this:
According to the witnesses who saw this falling unidentified flying object and filmed in on the phone cam, an object fell from the sky and caused fire. Firefighters didn’t manage to put it out immediately as the locality is difficult to approach, it took three days to extinguish the fire. Liquidation works are underway. The main task is to prevent repeated fire.
One of the main theories is that this was all due to a rocket stage falling to earth, but considering that there doesn’t seem to be much further information on this we are left to speculate. A similar incident that also went down in 2019 comes to us from the Chilean port city of Dalcahue on the island of Chiloé. On September 25, 2019, reports began to come in from frightened residents who claimed to have witnessed strange a red ball glowing in the sky, and many of these local witnesses insisted that the object was causing fires. Some even claimed that they had seen the object faltering and crashing into the wilderness. At least six wildfires broke out in the region during this flurry of UFO reports, and firefighters on the scene described how the areas were permeated by a strange smell and smoke that was “not smoke from material but rather from stone, like Sulphur.” Alejandro Verges, Director of Chile’s National Office of Emergencies of the Interior Ministry (ONEMI), made a statement, saying:
The fires are attributable to an object that, so far, has not been identified. There cannot be six sources of fire in a radius of 200 meters and all of them isolated. It’s like if small balls of fire have fallen. Some burnt the roots and others burned a little more. It is very strange.
The main idea at the time was that the fires and sightings had been caused by a meteorite or space debris, but no sign of either of these were turned up. In fact, a follow up investigation carried out by Chile’s National Service of Geology and Mining led them to rule out the possibility that this had been caused by a disintegrating meteorite after not a shred of space rock was turned up at any of the fire sites. Searches also didn’t turn up any signs of metal that could have been from a fallen satellite or other space junk, and the Chilean fires and the UFO reports surrounding them have remained mysterious.
Perhaps one of the most well-known incidents involving mysterious fires and talk of UFOs occurred between 2003 and 2005, in the area of Canneto di Caronia, Siciliy, in Italy. It started in December of 2003, when a local resident reported that his television had inexplicably sparked and exploded, followed by various unexplained fires spontaneously erupting throughout the home at all hours. Before long, other residents of the area were reporting the same thing, with cars, mattresses, beds, furniture, fuse boxes, air conditioners, kitchen appliances, computers, and even wedding presents bursting into flame for no discernible reason, all confined to one delineated area. Some of these fires would start in the same place over and over again, and at least one witness said that his TV had caught fire on five separate occasions. In more serious cases, entire homes were burned to the ground by the mystery blazes, and these fires continued even after the utilities company cut power to the neighborhood. From January to March of 2004 a total of 92 fires were reported, and in none of the cases were officials able to find a rational cause. It was causing a panic, and 39 residents would be evacuated from the area during the scare, all fueled by strange reports of the flames acting oddly, appearing to move almost with purpose or jump place to place.
In the meantime, an interdisciplinary research group coordinated by Francesco Venerando Mantegna from the Sicilian Protezione Civile, reportedly found evidence of unusual electromagnetic activity in places where the fires had broken out, as well as strange reports of unexplained lights in the sky and a helicopter that experienced allegedly anomalous rotor damage. This soon had frightened locals whispering rumors of the fires being caused by ghosts, witches, demons, secret U.S. military tests of radiation weapons or “Tesla technology,” and of course UFOs, only further fueled by sightings of strange lights in the sky at the same time the fires were going on. The mayor of the town explained it as the result of “unknown electromagnetic radiation,” and one government report supposedly read that the blazes were “caused by a high power electromagnetic emissions which were not man-made and reached a power of between 12 and 15 gigawatts,” but no one knew for sure. One ufologist by the name of Nigel Watson would say of the fires and their connection to possible alien forces:
Spontaneous combustion of electrical appliances or interference with them is often associated with UFO sightings. There are literally hundreds of cases of cars stalling and their electrical systems being messed up in the presence of UFOs.’ In the town of Caronia, northern Sicily, there was a spate of appliances, machines, mattresses and electrical wiring suddenly bursting into flame. Geophysicists and electrical experts were puzzled by this phenomenon, but the villagers noted that this was an area that was suffering from a high concentration of UFO sightings.
What was going on here? It was eventually thought to be the work of arsonists, but no one was ever arrested and fire authorities never were able to explain how the fires had started. Curiously, the phenomenon would return to the area in 2014, and this time an arsonist named Giuseppe Pezzino was arrested, but it is unknown what connection this has to the 2003-2005 mystery fires. What happened at Canneto di Caronia? It is uncertain just how true any of these cases are, or if UFOs really were involved or not, but they serve to make us think, and show us that not all supposed alien encounters are of the benevolent variety. What was going on here? Who knows? They will likely never be solved for sure, and they serve to add more to the lore of this very strange phenomenon.
Over the last week or so I have written various articles on matters relative to the Majestic 12 documents, counterintelligence, spies, disinformation projects, and Deep Throat-like characters hiding in the shadows – and all in relation to how U.S. intelligence used the UFO subject to strange and alternative degrees from the late 1970s and into the 1980s. This provokes an inevitable question: was Soviet Intelligence doing something similar? Or, maybe, almost identical? In relation to that question, there’s no doubt that the Russians were doing something along those same lines. As we shall now see. Today’s revelations revolve around one of the 1950s-era Contactees, Orfeo Angelucci. Like George Adamski, George Van Tassel, Dana Howard, and Truman Bethurum, they all claimed close encounters with human-looking aliens who warned of the dangers of atomic weapons. With that said, let’s now see how Angelucci became a key figure in a Russia-based operation designed to infiltrate – and manipulate – the Contactee scene in the United States of the Fifties.
By the mid-1950s, Angelucci and his family were living in Twentynine Palms, San Bernadino County, California. And, with his book, The Secret of the Saucers, on the bookshelves, he was becoming a familiar face at UFO lectures and conferences. It was in this period that Angelucci caught the attention of the FBI – and for a very curious reason. As he became more adept at public speaking, and more comfortable about discussing his claimed encounters with aliens, Angelucci revealed something disturbingly eye-opening. It was something which soon had the Feds on his tail. According to Angelucci, as his profile as one of the Contactees grew and grew, he found himself approached on several occasions by what he described as a “subversive element.” This small group – “foreigners,” as he worded it – first approached Angelucci while he was engaged in a series of lectures along the east coast in the 1950s. Regular UFO enthusiasts, they were certainly not. They did their very best to try and encourage Angelucci to suggest to his listeners and readers that his alien comrades were communists. And, that communism was good.
In correspondence with Jim Moseley, Angelucci claimed that these mysterious characters bought him dinner on three occasions and plied him with plentiful amounts of booze, in plush, New York hotels and bars. Angelucci admitted to Moseley that he was “flattered” by the attention, but remained very uneasy about the agenda. Angelucci would later say of this curious affair: “Failing in their desperate attempts to convert me to communism and slant my talks along the Party Line, they invariably defiantly demanded: ‘Well, then, just what do you think is wrong with Communism?'” Shortly before Angelucci publicly revealed that a certain “subversive element” was mixing and stirring left-wing, extremist politics with extraterrestrials, the FBI came knocking on the front-door of the Angelucci home. While we don’t know the full story, we do at least have the bones of it, thanks to Jim Moseley. According to what Angelucci told Moseley, a pair of FBI agents visited Angelucci at his Twentynine Palms home, telling him that they had heard of the actions of this east coast group – from who, though, was something that the FBI was not prepared to reveal. The questions posed to Angelucci were many: How did he first meet the group? Did they give their names? Were they Americans? Did they offer him money to slant his tales down a politically-driven path? The list of questions went on and on.
Evidently, the meeting with the FBI shook Angelucci severely; in fact, so severely that he decided to release the following statement, probably to ensure that the FBI fully understood that he was not someone with communist leanings: “Communism is the negation of all that is honest and good in the world and in humanity. They would enslave the human mind. Their obstructiveness is willful and planned. We must eventually meet this murderous element at Armageddon; when it will be victory for one side or the other. Good will triumph, or evil! Every entity in the world and the adjoining planes is now aligned definitely upon one side or the other. No matter what the outcome of the conflict, the positive element of good will ultimately attain a greater life and progression; whereas the negative will meet death, destruction and a new beginning in a more hostile environment. As you have made your choice, so be it!”
So far as can be determined, Angelucci’s “foreigners,” who did their utmost to turn him onto communism, were never identified. It seems very likely, however, this was some kind of strange Soviet operation.
Orange UFOs were seen passing over a freeway two weeks ago. The UFOs were round, bright and orange. This color of UFOs have been seen around the world, but mostly over the ocean off Florida coast and around Costa Rica back in the 1970s. They are round, unlike Chinese lanterns which are long ovals with openings on the bottoms. I live in Taiwan and see lanterns every year...but have never seen a lantern like this before. Without an opening on its bottom...how do they put the candle in that powers the paper balloon? Its not lanterns. However I will place other videos below of similar craft seen, same color, same shape, same brightness. 100% alien no doubt about it.
Scott C. Waring - Taiwan
News states:
A Middlebury couple, preferring to remain anonymous, told The Eagle that they observed four, slow-moving "glowing orange globes" while driving north in a car along U.S. Route 7 near the town of Pittsford. The sighting took place during the evening of Sept. 19. The couple saw the objects at approximately 8:30 p.m. and reported the sighting to local police and 911. The Vermont State Police dispatcher in Rutland confirmed to The Eagle that the alleged unidentified flying objects (UFOs) were sighted over Rutland County during the evening of Sept. 19 but could not provide specific details beyond what the couple reported. At the time of the sighting, the Vermont Air National Guard was not flying any of its fixed-wing or rotor aircraft, The Eagle learned. After first sighting the "globes", the couple turned their car around and drove southbound on Route 7 to get a better view. "The globes were flying in tandem," one of the pair said. "The sky was crystal clear and the stars were visible. But these things weren't stars or planets. They moved slowly and in a distinct pattern and direction. They were not erratic and appeared to be under intelligent control just like regular aircraft."
A glowing UFO was seen over Milton Keynes, England two weeks ago. The UFO was seen to shoot out green/blue lasers and had several smaller UFOs near it which were sometimes visible. I have read about many UFO incidences in Project Blue Book files that have described a single craft that had smaller orbs rotating around it. This fits the Project Blue Book descriptions. The lasers, the colors and the power of flashes emanating from it all point to this being a real UFO.
Scott C. Waring - Taiwan
News states:
Tom Marvin, from Broughton, captured the incident on video. He said: "It first caught our attention as the beam shone through our bedroom window and it was really bright. My first thought was that it was a search light from a police helicopter but, after seeing the light shine as high into the sky as we could see, we knew it wasn’t. "When we looked again we thought it was a huge UFO-shaped drone going up and down through the beam. This drone let off another beam which was shining in all different directions."
Pilot films bright object which stays stationary at 10,000 feet
Pilot films bright object which stays stationary at 10,000 feet
More and more people are seeing strange lights in the sky around the world. These objects remain in the sky for a while before disappearing. Now a pilot noticed such a bright light in the sky over Iowa.
Flying my personal airplane across the country, 10-8-2020 , Thursday was day three and final day of the trip. I took off at 0400 hours. I was over Iowa.
After approximately 30 minutes into the flight I noticed a stationary light in the sky. To low to be a star, no blinking lights. It remained a constant distance from my aircraft to my front and high.
As dawn arrived and the sun broke from the horizon the light seemed to get lower in the sky. I was at 5,500 feet, it may have been at 10,000 feet and to my front by several miles away. As the sun rose the light was gone in an instant. Mufon case 111802
A giant star died, blasting its guts out into space. But before the star detonated, some stellar thief had already stolen the giant's skin. Now, astrophysicists think they've identified the culprit: another star blasting its own guts out nearby.
Supernovas are fairly common in space. Most very large stars end their lives as stellar explosions. When they die, hot clouds of gas spread across space. Those clouds are full of the heavy atoms the stars fused into being in the nuclear engines of their bellies. But usually there's hydrogen — the element that stars initially fuse into helium to get their engines started — in the clouds too: These simple, single-proton atoms remain in the outer skin of the star, where pressure and heat never got high enough to fuse them together into heavier elements. It's unspent fuel, in other words. Sometimes, however, that skin vanishes. Usually gravity from a nearby star —— such as a binary twin in the same system — strips that outer envelope of hydrogen away. Sometimes, however, it's not clear where all the hydrogen-rich skin went. For a long time, that was the case for the supernova remnant Cassiopeia A (Cas A). But not anymore.
In a new paper, researchers describe a scenario that could produce a solitary, "stripped-envelope" supernova like Cas A's. Their story, like most skinless supernova tales, begins with two sibling stars in a tight binary orbit around one another. Critically, these siblings were born at the same time in the same place and at nearly the same mass. As a result, the two stars would also live for similar lengths of time, become swollen red giants in their old age, and die in short succession, one after the other.
If Cas A's sibling went first, that first supernova would have effectively sandblasted the surviving big red supergiant (in other words, Cas A), just as Cas A was nearing the end of its own life.
The researchers, a team at the ARC Center of Excellence for Gravitational Wave Discovery (OzGrav) in Melbourne, Australia, simulated how this would work.
"Snapshots" from the simulation show how a supernova blast could strip off a star's outer layer. (Image credit: Ryosuke Hirai)
Their simulations showed between 50% and 90% of the surviving star's outer skin of hydrogen gets blasted away in the wind of the first supernova, as long as the two stars orbit very close together.
"This is enough for the second supernova of the binary system to become a stripped-envelope supernova, confirming that our proposed scenario is plausible," lead study author Ryosuke Hirai, an OzGrav astrophysicist,said in a statement.
It's also possible for the first supernova to rip off just some of its sibling's envelope, causing that star to be in an unstable state; in this scenario, the instability leads to more hydrogen being expelled from the star before it goes supernova. The star would react like it had just been shot with a shotgun, convulsing and losing fuel to space before its demise, the simulations showed.
If this version of star death happens, it's likely rare, the researchers wrote — occurring in just 0.35% to 1% of supernovas.
And the scenario hasn't been confirmed, though the researchers think it might apply to two other known supernovas, RX J1713.7-3946 and G11.2-0.3.
But Cas A is the most exciting example for a simple reason: The simulation predicts that there should still be a signature of that envelope lost in the first supernova: a puff of hydrogen-rich gas drifting through space 30 to 300 light-years away from the supernova remnant. And in the case of Cas A, they found one such puff, just 50 light-years away — precisely fitting what their model predicted.
See amazing sun views from NASA's IRIS space observatory.
Scientists might have zeroed in on the phenomenon that heats the sun's outer atmosphere, or corona, to mind-bogglingly hot temperatures.
NASA's Interface Region Imaging Spectrograph (IRIS) spacecrafthas captured the first clear images of nanojets, which are bright thin lights that move perpendicular to magnetic structures in the solar atmosphere. These jets, in turn, show the existence of nanoflares, which are believed to drive coronal heating on the sun, which can reach over a million degrees Fahrenheit.
Nanoflares are small, but move rapidly and are difficult to spot on the bright sun. Researchers saw the bright jets on April 3, 2014 during a "coronal rain event." This occurred when cooled plasma (superheated gas) fell from the corona to the much cooler surface of the sun.
This NASA video of images from the Interface Region Imaging Spectrograph shows nanojets on the sun captured on April 3, 2014. They may explain why the solar corona is so hot. (Image credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center)
"Nanojets are considered a 'smoking gun,' key evidence of the presence of nanoflares," NASA said in a statement. "Each nanojet is believed to be initiated by a process known as magnetic reconnection, where twisted magnetic fields explosively realign. One reconnection can set off another reconnection, creating an avalanche of nanojets in the corona of the sun, a process that could create the energy that is heating the corona."
More studies are planned to learn how often nanojets and nanoflares occur, and how much energy they dump into the solar corona.
Two missions are peering at the sun up close, including NASA's Parker Solar Probe and the European Space Agency's Solar Orbiter. The hope is that by imaging the poles and dipping close to the sun, as these spacecraft will allow researchers to do, we will learn more about the processes that heat the solar corona.
Black holes are perhaps the strangest, least-understood objects in our universe. With so much potential — being linked to everything from wormholes to new baby universes — they have sucked in physicists for decades.
But as strange as these known objects are, even stranger types of black holes could be dreamed up. In one upside-down, hypothetical version of the universe, a bizarre type of black hole could exist that is stranger than an M.C. Escher sketch. Now, a team of researchers has plunged into the mathematical heart of so-called charged black holes and found a slew of surprises, including an inferno of space-time and an exotic fractal landscape … and potentially more.
There are all sorts of potential, hypothetical black holes: ones with or without electric charge, ones spinning or stationary, ones surrounded by matter or those floating in empty space. Some of these hypothetical black holes are known for certain to exist in our universe; for example, the rotating black hole surrounded by infalling matter is a pretty common presence. We've even taken a picture of one.
But some other kinds of black holes are purely theoretical. Even so, physicists are still interested in exploring them — by diving into their mathematical foundations, we can realize new relationships and implications of our physical theories, which can have real-world consequences.
One such theoretical black hole is an electrically charged black hole surrounded by a certain kind of space known as anti-de Sitter. Without getting into too much of the nitty-gritty, this kind of space has constant negative geometric curvature, like a horse saddle, which we know is not a good description of our universe. (A cosmos with anti-de Sitter space, all else being the same, would have a negative cosmological constant, which means that any matter would tend to condense into a black hole, versus the known accelerating expansion that is flinging the universe apart.
This horse-saddle space doesn't exist in our universe, But that's okay: It turns out that these exotic black holes still have surprisingly intricate structures worth exploring.
One of the reasons it's worth exploring is that charged black holes share a lot of similarities with rotating black holes, which certainly do exist in our universe, but charged black holes are mathematically simpler to grapple with. So by studying charged black holes we can gain some insights into real-world rotating black holes.
Also, physicists have found that when these black holes become relatively cool, they build up a "haze" of quantum fields around their surfaces. This haze sticks to the surface, pulled inward by the never-tiring gravity of the black hole itself, but pushed outward by the electric repulsion of the same black hole. A haze of quantum fields operating in stability on a surface is also known as a superconductor. Superconductors have real-world applications (namely, they can transmit electric current with no resistance), so seeing how superconductors play out in these exotic scenarios helps us understand their mathematical structures, which can potentially lead to new insights with actual applications.
In a study published Aug. 28 to the preprint database arXiv, a team of researchers has recently used the language of superconductivity to discover what lies farther beneath the surface of these hypothetical black holes.
Let's dive in.
The almost-wormhole
"Normal" charged black holes — those surrounded by a typical garden-variety space-time that you might find in our universe — have a few quirks on their inside. First, beyond the event horizon (the boundary of every black hole, where once you fall in you can't get out) lies something called an inner horizon, a region of intense quantum energies. Beyond that is a wormhole, a bridge to a white hole in some other lonely section of the universe (at least, according mathematics).
I should note here that we don't really know whether wormholes like this exist in real life, because the mathematics of charged black holes breaks down at the inner horizon, and nothing more can be learned until we develop new physics. Fortunately, the charged black holes surrounded by anti-de Sitter space, which for now we'll call superconductor black holes, avoid this problem.
The good news is that the inner horizon of a superconductor black hole breaks down, allowing you to smoothly sail past it without getting spaghettified as you would in an ordinary, stationary black hole. The bad news is that the wormhole bridge inside a superconductor black hole also tears itself apart, so you don't get to transport yourself to the distant stars.
But that doesn't mean that nothing interesting happens to you. Just inside what would have been the inner horizon, the interior of a superconductor black hole gets a little frothy.
Normally, particles in a real-life superconductors can oscillate, supporting waves sloshing back and forth in an effect known as Josephson Oscillations. And deep inside these black holes, space itself vibrates back and forth. If you were to physically fall into one of these beasts, you'd be in for a bumpy ride.
A strange universe
But once you made it past the vibrating space-time, what comes next is truly mystifying. The researchers discovered that the innermost regions of a superconductor black hole can feature an expanding universe in grotesque miniature, a place where space can stretch and deform at different rates in different directions.
What's more, depending on the temperature of the black hole, some of these regions of space can trigger a new round of vibrations, which then create a new patch of expanding space, which trigger a new round of vibrations, which then create a new patch of expanding space, and so on and so on at ever smaller scales.
It would be a mini fractal universe, repeating endlessly from large scales to small. It's downright impossible to describe what it would be like to traverse such a landscape, but it would surely be weird.
At the center of this strange fractal, chaotic mess is the singularity: the point of infinite density, the place where every bit of matter that ever fell into the black hole resides.
Unfortunately, even with their super-charged superconducting mathematical techniques, the researchers can't describe what happens at the singularity. All known physics breaks down, requiring new theories of gravity to fully describe.
Who knows what you'll find at the center of a superconductor black hole, but at least you'll enjoy the ride down.
China's Tianwen-1 Mars probe is seen by a tiny camera ejected from the spacecraft in a photo captured 15 million miles from Earth. (Image credit: CNSA)
China'sTianwen-1 spacecraft has beamed home some deep-space selfies snapped by a small camera jettisoned during its journey to Mars.
A small camera with wide-angle lenses on both sides was ejected from the outside of the spacecraft in the depths of outer space. The small camera took one image every second and sent the data to Tianwen-1, which then transmitted the images to Earth.
One image shows the gold, hexagonal body of the Tianwen-1 Mars orbiter, two silver solar arrays and the conical aeroshell containing the mission rover, all against the blackness of deep space; A second image provides a more distant view of the spacecraft. Tianwen-1 is an ambitious mission that includes an orbiter as well as China's first Mars lander and rover.
Tianwen-1 also took images of the jettisoned camera as it tumbled away from the main spacecraft.
On Friday at 15:00 UTC Tianwen-1 also completed a deep space maneuver. The spacecraft’s main engine fired for over 480 seconds to adjust the spacecraft’s orbit and trajectory.
China's Tianwen-1 Mars probe is seen by a tiny camera ejected from the spacecraft in a photo captured 15 million miles from Earth. (Image credit: CNSA)
Chen Lidan, a chief designer of Mars Mission Control Team, told CCTV that the maneuver adjusted the orbital inclination of Tianwen-1 from 1 degree to 1.8 degrees to match that of Mars.
Tianwen-1 was 18.3 million miles (29.4 million kilometers) from the Earth on Friday, having covered a total flight distance of 116.8 million miles (188 million km).
Tianwen-1 launched on July 23 from Wenchang on a Long March 5 rocket. The spacecraft will arrive at Mars in February and enter orbit around the planet. The rover landing attempt will take place around April.
A still shot of the small ejected camera used by China's Tianwen-1 Mars probe to take a selfie in deep space. (Image credit: CNSA)
The six-wheeled, solar-powered rover is designed to operate on the surface for 90 Martian days (93 Earth days). The orbiter, which carries seven science payloads, is expected to carry out its own investigations for one Martian year, or two Earth years, while also acting as a communications relay between the rover and Earth.
The U.S. Navy recently admitted that, indeed, strangely behaving objects caught on video by jet pilots over the years are genuine head-scratchers. There are eyewitness accounts not only from pilots but from radar operators and technicians, too.
In August, the Navy established an Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP) Task Force to investigate the nature and origin of these odd sightings and determine if they could potentially pose a threat to U.S. national security.
The recently observed UAPs purportedly have accelerations that range from almost 100 Gs to thousands of Gs — far higher than a human pilot could survive. There's no air disturbance visible. They don't produce sonic booms. These and other oddities have captured the attention of "I told you so, they're here" UFO believers.
But there's also a rising call for this phenomenon to be studied scientifically — even using satellites to be on the lookout for possible future UAP events.
Philippe Ailleris is a project controller at the European Space Agency's Space Research and Technology Center in the Netherlands. He's also the primary force behind the Unidentified Aerospace Phenomena Observations Reporting Scheme, a project to facilitate the collection of UAP reports from both amateur and professional astronomers.
There's a need for the scientific study of UAPs and a requirement to assemble reliable evidence, something that could not be so easily ignored by science, Ailleris told Space.com.
It is necessary to bring scientists objective and high-quality data, Ailleris said. "No one knows where and when a UAP can potentially appear, hence the difficulty of scientific research in this domain."
New tools
Recent years have seen rapid advances in information and communication technologies — for example, open tools and software, cloud computing and artificial intelligence with machine and deep learning, Ailleris said. These tools offer scientists new possibilities to collect, store, manipulate and transmit data.
Ailleris points to another potent tool. "The location over our heads of satellites is the perfect chance to potentially detect something," he said.
Working in the space sector, it occurred to Ailleris that Earth-observation civilian satellites could be used to search for UAPs. One avenue is tapping into free-of-charge imagery collected by the European Union's Copernicus satellites, an Earth-observing program coordinated and managed by the European Commission in partnership with ESA.
Also, there are more and more Earth-scanning spacecraft being launched to take the pulse of our globe. Such work is no longer limited to major countries or powers, Ailleris said; private actors have also entered the planet-viewing scene.
"This evolution will stimulate forward-thinking ideas across different domains, including controversial topics," Ailleris said. "And why not the UAP research field?"
The "Gimbal" UAP, observed off the U.S. East Coast by a Navy jet in 2015. (Image credit: DOD/U.S. Navy)
UAP expedition
Working with Ailleris to employ satellite imagery to detect and monitor UAPs is Kevin Knuth, a former scientist with NASA's Ames Research Center in California's Silicon Valley. He is now an associate professor of physics at the University at Albany in New York.
"We are looking into using satellites to monitor the region of ocean south of Catalina Island where the 2004 Nimitz encounters occurred," Knuth said, referring to UAP sightings reported by pilots and radar operators based aboard the aircraft carrier USS Nimitz.
That area will also be the target for a 2021 UAP expedition carried out by Knuth and other researchers. The goal of the outing is "to provide unassailable scientific evidence that UAP objects are real, UAP objects are findable and UAP objects are knowable," according to the website for the project, which is called UAPx.
The UAPx team includes military veterans and physicists, as well as research scientists and trained observers that will use specialized gear to observe any would-be UAP.
"We are hoping to detect UAPs, determine their characteristics, flight patterns and any patterns in activity that will allow us to study them more effectively," Knuth told Space.com. "In addition to monitoring a region for UAPs, we are also looking into using satellites to obtain independent confirmation of prominent UAP sightings and to obtain quantifiable information about those UAPs."
The "GoFast" UAP, observed by a U.S. Navy jet in 2015. (Image credit: DOD/U.S. Navy)
Science problem
"I certainly think that UAP deserve to be studied, just like we would do with any other problem in science," said Jacob Haqq-Misra, an astrobiologist with the Blue Marble Space Institute of Science in Seattle, Washington.
In August, Haqq-Misra helped organize a NASA-sponsored interdisciplinary workshop, called TechnoClimes 2020, that sought to prioritize and guide future theoretical and observational studies of non-radio "technosignatures" — that is, observational manifestations of technology, particularly those that could be detected through astronomical or other means.
Haqq-Misra said his knowledge regarding UAPs stems from the public domain, such as the recently released Navy videos and Department of Defense comments. But otherwise, he has not conducted any of his own investigations into the problem.
"I also remain agnostic as to any particular hypothesis that might explain UAP, at least until we have more data to consider," Haqq-Misra said. "The non-human intelligence hypothesis is a popular one, but I don't necessarily have any indication that it is more probable than any other hypothesis at this point."
Logo of the UAPx expedition, which involves military veterans, physicists, as well as research scientists and trained observers. They want to provide unassailable scientific evidence that UAP objects are real, findable and knowable. (Image credit: DOD/U.S. Navy)
'Outlaws' of physics
Ravi Kopparapu is a planetary scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland who studies planetary habitability, climate modeling and chemistry in the context of exoplanet atmosphere characterization. He views the UAP/UFO phenomena as a scientifically interesting problem, driven in part by observations that seem to defy the laws of physics.
That said, Kopparapu said he's wary of bringing the term "extraterrestrial" into the conversation. "That's because there is absolutely no concrete evidence that I know of that points to them as being extraterrestrial," he said.
"There's a fundamental problem that we have right now to scientifically study UAP," Kopparapu said. "We do not have proper data collection of this phenomena that can be shared among interested scientists to verify claims and filter out truly unexplainable events."
Also, the entire UAP topic has been much maligned by being associated with ET, Kopparapu added. This association prevents a thorough scientific investigation by the science community, he feels, essentially because of a taboo surrounding ET claims.
"I think people immediately think about 'aliens' when they hear UFOs/UAPs, and I want scientists to not fall for that," Kopparapu said. "Be strictly agnostic and don't let preconceived ideas cloud judgments. Have an open mind. Consider this as a science problem. If it turns out these have mundane explanations, so be it."
Kopparapu and like-minded colleagues are proposing a completely unbiased, agnostic approach to study UAP, he said: "Let the data lead us to what they are."
Leonard David is author of the recently released book, "Moon Rush: The New Space Race" published by National Geographic in May 2019. A longtime writer for Space.com, David has been reporting on the space industry for more than five decades. Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook or Google+. This version of the story published on Space.com.
The asteroid Bennu’s brittle boulders may make grabbing a sample easier
The asteroid Bennu’s brittle boulders may make grabbing a sample easier
NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft is about to collect material from the space rock
Almost two years after NASA’s OSIRIS-REx arrived at asteroid Bennu, scientists have completely mapped the asteroid. This false-color image of Bennu’s rocky surface provides clues to how solid its boulders are.
When NASA’s OSIRIS-REx arrived at near-Earth asteroid Bennu, scientists were dismayed to find a surface covered with hazardous-looking boulders.
But new research suggests that those boulders are surprisingly brittle. That’s potentially good news for the spacecraft, which is charged with grabbing a piece of Bennu on October 20 and returning it to Earth in 2023 (SN: 1/15/19). If the rocks are crumbly, that could lower the risk of damaging the spacecraft’s equipment.
That kind of rock also may be too fragile to survive the trip through Earth’s atmosphere without burning up. If so, scientists may be close to getting their hands on a never-before-seen kind of space rock, researchers report in a collection of papers published October 8 in Science and Science Advances.
Data taken from Earth before OSIRIS-REx launched suggested that Bennu’s surface would be sandy. So it was a shock to find a rough landscape strewn with boulders when the spacecraft arrived in 2018 (SN: 12/3/18).
“We had really convinced ourselves that Bennu was a smooth object,” says Daniella DellaGiustina, a planetary scientist at the University of Arizona in Tucson and member of the OSIRIS-REx team. “As everyone saw from the first pictures, that was not the case.”
The team found a relatively clear crater, nicknamed Nightingale, from which to retrieve a sample of the space rock (SN: 12/12/19). Still, the worry remains that the boulders might pose a safety hazard for the sampling system, which was designed to handle pebbles only a few centimeters across.
From late April through early June 2019, planetary scientist Ben Rozitis of the Open University in Milton Keynes, England, and colleagues mapped the way Bennu’s boulders retain heat, a clue to the rocks’ structure. Denser materials hold heat better than finer-grained ones, like how a sandy beach cools quickly after sundown, but single large rocks remain warm.
This map shows where carbon-bearing minerals (represented by redder colors) are located on Bennu’s surface. The opportunity to analyze those minerals could help scientists figure out how carbon got to the early Earth.A. SIMON ET AL/SCIENCE 2020
Based on those maps — and maps of other surface properties, described in the series of papers released October 8 — Bennu’s boulders seem to come in two flavors: darker-colored rocks that are weaker and more porous and lighter-colored, denser rocks that are stronger and less porous. Even the denser rocks are much more porous and brittle than meteorites from similar asteroids that have been found on Earth. The least dense meteorites are about 15 percent porous; Bennu’s rocks seem to be between 30 and 50 percent porous, Rozitis and colleagues found.
“This is exciting,” says DellaGiustina, a coauthor of the new papers. The spacecraft and its instruments might “encounter some boulders at the sample site that might otherwise be difficult to ingest,” she says, but “if they’re porous and weak, then they might just break down,” making them easier to collect.
The lighter, denser rocks also appear to be shot through with veins of carbonate, which suggests that they were in the presence of flowing water at some point in their past (SN: 12/10/18). NASA chose Bennu as an asteroid to visit partly because it resembles carbonaceous chondrite meteorites, which scientists think are time capsules of the early solar system. Similar space rocks could have delivered water and organic materials to Earth billions of years ago.
But Bennu’s more porous rocks appear to be unlike anything in scientists’ current assortment of meteorites, Rozitis says. “This is one of the cool things about OSIRIS-REx — it’s quite likely it will pick up new material that isn’t in our meteorite collection,” he says.
That’s believable, says meteor scientist Bill Cooke of NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala. Observations of meteors have shown that low-density space rocks and dust burn up higher in Earth’s atmosphere than higher-density rocks.
“The old conventional wisdom was that the low-density stuff was from comets, and the high-density stuff was from asteroids,” he says. But recent observations show that some of the low-density rocks come from the orbits of asteroids. “So it is very plausible that low-density stuff from Bennu … would ablate higher in the atmosphere and not have a chance to create meteorites at all.”
If Bennu represents a missing piece in our understanding of the solar system’s history, studying that material in labs on Earth “will help us fill in an additional piece of the jigsaw,” Rozitis says.
Today, most life on Earth is supported by oxygen. But ancient microbial mats existed for a billion years before oxygen was present in the atmosphere. So what did life use instead?
Purple microbial mats offer clues to how ancient life functioned.
Billions of years ago, life on Earth was mostly just large slimy mats of microbes living in shallow water. Sometimes, these microbial communities made carbonate minerals that over many years cemented together to become layered limestone rocks called stromatolites. They are the oldest evidence of life on Earth. But the fossils don’t tell researchers the details of how they formed.
Our team of geologists, physicists and biologists had found hints in fossilized stromatolites that arsenic was the chemical of choice for ancient photosynthesis and respiration. But modern-day versions of these microbial communities still live on Earth today. Perhaps one of these used arsenic and could offer proof for our theory?
So we joined a surveying expedition of Chilean and Argentinian scientists to look for living stromatolites in the extreme conditions of the High Andes. In a small stream deep in the Atacama Desert, we found a big surprise. The bottom of the channel was bright purple and made of stromatolite-building microbial mats that thrive in the complete absence of oxygen. Just as the clues we’d found in ancient fossils suggested, these mats use two different forms of arsenic to perform photosynthesis and respiration. Our discovery offers the strongest evidence yet for how the oldest life on Earth survived in a pre-oxygen world.
Modern organisms make oxygen during photosynthesis and use it in respiration, but other elements, like arsenic, shown here as As, can work too.
For the last 2.4 billion years, photosynthetic organisms like plants and blue-green cyanobacteria have used sunlight, water and carbon dioxide to make oxygen and organic matter. In doing this, they turn energy from the Sun into energy to be used by life. Other organisms breathe in oxygen as they digest organic carbon, gaining energy for their respiration in the process.
Microbes in the ancient world also captured energy from sunlight, but their primitive machinery could not make oxygen from water or use oxygen for respiration. They needed another chemical to do this.
From a biochemical perspective, there are only a few possible candidates: iron, sulfur, hydrogen or arsenic. A lack of evidence in the fossil record and minuscule amounts of some of these chemicals in the primordial soup suggests neither iron, sulfur nor hydrogen would be likely candidates for the earliest form of photosynthesis. That leaves arsenic.
In 2014, our team found the first clue that stromatolites were produced by arsenic-assisted photosynthesis and respiration. We collected pieces of 2.72-billion-year-old stromatolites from the pre-oxygen world by drilling into an ancient reef in the Outback of Australia. We then took these samples to France and cut them into thin slivers. By measuring the X-rays that came off these samples when we bombarded them with photons, we made a map of the chemical elements in the sample. If two kinds of arsenic are present in the map, then it is a sign that life was using arsenic for photosynthesis and respiration. In these relics of ancient life we found lots of both forms of arsenic, but not iron or sulfur.
This was tantalizing, but we wanted more proof: a modern analog to help prove our arsenic theory. No researchers had ever found a microbial mat community living in a place completely free of oxygen, but if we found one, it could help explain how the first stromatolites formed when our planet’s oceans and atmosphere were lacking oxygen.
Samples taken from the microbial mats had high levels of arsenic and lithium, but no oxygen.
The Atacama Desert in Chile is the driest place on Earth, flanked by volcanoes and exposed to extremely high UV radiation. It’s not too different from how the Earth looked 3 billion years ago and not exactly supportive of life as we know it. Here – with the help of a team that spanned four continents and seven countries – we found what we were looking for.
Or destination was Laguna La Brava, a very salty shallow lake deep into the harsh desert. A shallow stream, fed by a volcanic groundwater spring, led into the lake. The streambed was a unique, deep purple color. The color came from a microbial mat, thriving quite happily in waters that contained unusually high amounts of arsenic, sulfur and lithium, but missing one important element: oxygen.
A piece of the microbial mats living at the bottom of the oxygen-free stream.
Could these slimy purple blobs offer answers to an ancient question?
We cut a piece of the mat and looked for evidence of minerals. A drop of acid made the minerals fizz – carbonates! – this microbe community was forming stromatolites. So our team went to work, camping out at the site for days at a time.
We measured the chemistry of the water and the mat with our field equipment during day and night, summer and winter. Not once did we find oxygen, and back in the laboratory we confirmed that sulfur and arsenic were abundant. Looking through the microscope, we saw purple photosynthetic bacteria, but oxygen-producing cyanobacteria were eerily absent. We had also collected DNA samples from the mat and found genes for arsenic metabolism.
In the lab, we mixed up microbes from the mat, added arsenic and exposed the mix to sunlight. Photosynthesis was happening. The microbes used both arsenic and sulfur, but preferred the arsenic. When we added a minuscule amount of organic matter, a different arsenic compound was used for respiration and preferred over sulfur.
All that was left was to show that the two types of arsenic could be detected in the modern stromatolites. We went back to France, and using an X-ray emission technique made chemical maps from the Chilean samples. Every experiment we performed supported the presence of a vigorous arsenic cycle in the absence of oxygen in this unique modern stromatolite. This validates, beyond doubt, the idea that the fossil Australian samples that we studied in 2014 held evidence of an active arsenic cycle in deep time on our young planet.
Laguna La Brava is closer to the Martian environment than most places on Earth.
The harsh conditions of the Atacama are so similar to Martian and early Earth environments that NASA scientists and astrobiologists turn to the Atacama to answer questions about how life began on our planet, and how it might start elsewhere. The arsenic-cycling mats we discovered at Laguna La Brava offer strong clues to some of the most fundamental questions about life.
On board the Mars 2020 Perseverance rover that is currently hurtling through space is an instrument that can observe elements using the exact same process we used to make our element maps. Perhaps it will discover that arsenic is abundant in layered rocks on Mars, suggesting that life on Mars also used arsenic. For over a billion years, it did so on Earth. Under the harshest conditions life finds a way, and it is that way we are trying to understand.
Bottom line: Microbial mats existed for a billion years before oxygen was present in the atmosphere. New research suggests that arsenic was the chemical of choice for ancient photosynthesis and respiration.
Video: Microbes survive under seafloor for over 100 million years
Video: Deep sea microbes that laid dormant for 100 MILLION years are 'revived' in a lab after being fed certain minerals
This video shows interviews with Steven D'Hondt, Professor of Oceanology and Yuki Morono, Senior Scientist, at JAMSTEC, on their study that found 100 million-year-old sea microbes are alive and thriving, even with...
Beste bezoeker, Heb je zelf al ooit een vreemde waarneming gedaan, laat dit dan even weten via email aan Frederick Delaere opwww.ufomeldpunt.be. Deze onderzoekers behandelen jouw melding in volledige anonimiteit en met alle respect voor jouw privacy. Ze zijn kritisch, objectief maar open minded aangelegd en zullen jou steeds een verklaring geven voor jouw waarneming! DUS AARZEL NIET, ALS JE EEN ANTWOORD OP JOUW VRAGEN WENST, CONTACTEER FREDERICK. BIJ VOORBAAT DANK...
Druk op onderstaande knop om je bestand , jouw artikel naar mij te verzenden. INDIEN HET DE MOEITE WAARD IS, PLAATS IK HET OP DE BLOG ONDER DIVERSEN MET JOUW NAAM...
Druk op onderstaande knop om een berichtje achter te laten in mijn gastenboek
Alvast bedankt voor al jouw bezoekjes en jouw reacties. Nog een prettige dag verder!!!
Over mijzelf
Ik ben Pieter, en gebruik soms ook wel de schuilnaam Peter2011.
Ik ben een man en woon in Linter (België) en mijn beroep is Ik ben op rust..
Ik ben geboren op 18/10/1950 en ben nu dus 73 jaar jong.
Mijn hobby's zijn: Ufologie en andere esoterische onderwerpen.
Op deze blog vind je onder artikels, werk van mezelf. Mijn dank gaat ook naar André, Ingrid, Oliver, Paul, Vincent, Georges Filer en MUFON voor de bijdragen voor de verschillende categorieën...
Veel leesplezier en geef je mening over deze blog.
