Dit is ons nieuw hondje Kira, een kruising van een waterhond en een Podenko. Ze is sinds 7 februari 2024 bij ons en druk bezig ons hart te veroveren. Het is een lief, aanhankelijk hondje, dat zich op een week snel aan ons heeft aangepast. Ze is heel vinnig en nieuwsgierig, een heel ander hondje dan Noleke.
This is our new dog Kira, a cross between a water dog and a Podenko. She has been with us since February 7, 2024 and is busy winning our hearts. She is a sweet, affectionate dog who quickly adapted to us within a week. She is very quick and curious, a very different dog than Noleke.
DEAR VISITOR,
MY BLOG EXISTS ALREADY 13 YEARS AND 2 MONTH.
ON 06/08/2024 MORE THAN 2.161.100
VISITORS FROM 135 DIFFERENT NATIONS ALREADY FOUND THEIR WAY TO MY BLOG.
THAT IS AN AVERAGE OF 400GUESTS PER DAY.
THANK YOU FOR VISITING MY BLOG AND HOPE YOU ENJOY EACH TIME.
The purpose of this blog is the creation of an open, international, independent and free forum, where every UFO-researcher can publish the results of his/her research. The languagues, used for this blog, are Dutch, English and French.You can find the articles of a collegue by selecting his category. Each author stays resposable for the continue of his articles. As blogmaster I have the right to refuse an addition or an article, when it attacks other collegues or UFO-groupes.
Druk op onderstaande knop om te reageren in mijn forum
Zoeken in blog
Deze blog is opgedragen aan mijn overleden echtgenote Lucienne.
In 2012 verloor ze haar moedige strijd tegen kanker!
In 2011 startte ik deze blog, omdat ik niet mocht stoppen met mijn UFO-onderzoek.
BEDANKT!!!
Een interessant adres?
UFO'S of UAP'S, ASTRONOMIE, RUIMTEVAART, ARCHEOLOGIE, OUDHEIDKUNDE, SF-SNUFJES EN ANDERE ESOTERISCHE WETENSCHAPPEN - DE ALLERLAATSTE NIEUWTJES
UFO's of UAP'S in België en de rest van de wereld In België had je vooral BUFON of het Belgisch UFO-Netwerk, dat zich met UFO's bezighoudt. BEZOEK DUS ZEKER VOOR ALLE OBJECTIEVE INFORMATIE , enkel nog beschikbaar via Facebook en deze blog.
Verder heb je ook het Belgisch-Ufo-meldpunt en Caelestia, die prachtig, doch ZEER kritisch werk leveren, ja soms zelfs héél sceptisch...
Voor Nederland kan je de mooie site www.ufowijzer.nl bezoeken van Paul Harmans. Een mooie site met veel informatie en artikels.
MUFON of het Mutual UFO Network Inc is een Amerikaanse UFO-vereniging met afdelingen in alle USA-staten en diverse landen.
MUFON's mission is the analytical and scientific investigation of the UFO- Phenomenon for the benefit of humanity...
Je kan ook hun site bekijken onder www.mufon.com.
Ze geven een maandelijks tijdschrift uit, namelijk The MUFON UFO-Journal.
Since 02/01/2020 is Pieter ex-president (=voorzitter) of BUFON, but also ex-National Director MUFON / Flanders and the Netherlands. We work together with the French MUFON Reseau MUFON/EUROP.
ER IS EEN NIEUWE GROEPERING DIE ZICH BUFON NOEMT, MAAR DIE HEBBEN NIETS MET ONZE GROEP TE MAKEN. DEZE COLLEGA'S GEBRUIKEN DE NAAM BUFON VOOR HUN SITE... Ik wens hen veel succes met de verdere uitbouw van hun groep. Zij kunnen de naam BUFON wel geregistreerd hebben, maar het rijke verleden van BUFON kunnen ze niet wegnemen...
13-08-2024
A Hopper Could Explore Over 150km of Triton’s Surface In Two Years
A Hopper Could Explore Over 150km of Triton’s Surface In Two Years
Neptune’s largest moon, Triton, is one of the most biologically interesting places in the solar system. Despite being hard to reach, it appears to have active volcanoes, a thin atmosphere, and even some organic molecules called tholins on its surface. However, Voyager only visited it once, in passing, 35 years ago. Technology has advanced a lot in the intervening decades, and a new push for a lander on Triton specifically has been garnering attention. One such mission was described by Steve Oleson and Geoffrey Landis of NASA’s Glenn Research Center. Their concept mission, known as Triton Hopper, was funded by NASA’s Institute for Advanced Concepts (NIAC) back in 2018 and utilized a cryogenic pump to extract propellant from Triton’s surface to power a “hopper” that could travel up to 5 km a month, and do some fascinating science along the way.
The first challenge to any mission on Triton is getting there. As part of the NIAC final report for the Triton Hopper, the authors performed a preliminary study examining different propulsion methods. Solar electric propulsion and aerobraking in Neptune’s larger atmosphere came out on top. The Hopper would have to hitch a ride with a larger orbital spacecraft responsible for trajectory planning of the “hops” and communicating with Earth.
Once safely deposited on Triton’s surface, a hopper could do lots of exciting science. The instrument payload described in the mission brief included ground-penetrating radar, spectroscopy equipment, a microscope, and even a seismometer. In total, the whole system weighed just under 300 kg—relatively light for an interplanetary mission.
Video describing the Triton Hopper mission in detail. Credit – Dreksler Astral YouTube Channel
But most of that weight wouldn’t be in the instrumentation—it would be in the Hopper’s unique propulsion system. The concept behind the propulsion system is simple enough: Get some propellant material into the spacecraft, then heat that material to a point where it is pressurized. Once enough pressure is built up, release it as a jet stream that would allow the 300 kg spacecraft to overcome the relatively weak gravity of Titan, which is only ½ the gravity of our own Moon.
The study focused on two main ways to get material into the Hopper – a shovel and a cryogenic pump. Each has its advantages, though the pump was more effective, at least in the theoretical simulations run as part of the Phase I project. The shovel suffered from potential contamination by other material being loaded into the propellant collection hopper and either blocking the nitrogen-rich ice and snow from entering it or itself being absorbed into the thermal chamber and sucking up some of the heat intended to melt the propellant.
On the other hand, a cryopump could use waste heat from the rover’s normal power-generating operations to directly melt the ice and snow the Hopper landed on and absorb that into a heating chamber, where it would be further heated before being used as a propellant. This methodology can be effective at gathering the best propellant options and providing an outlet for the lander’s waste heat that doesn’t just radiate into Triton’s thin atmosphere.
Fraser discusses why Triton is so interesting with Dr. Jason Hofgartner
Once enough pressure is built up by heating the propellant, the Hopper can take off from the moon’s surface and “hop” a short distance using its six power and four steering thrusters. The authors estimate about 50 seconds of specific impulse once a month. While that might not seem like a lot, it would allow the Hopper to cover about 150 kilometers over the course of a two-year mission.
It could find plenty of interesting scientific spots in those two years. However, the mission, which is also competing for resources with plenty of other mission concepts for Triton landers, appears to be on hold. It hasn’t received a Phase II, and there haven’t been any development updates in the last few years. But given the general popularity of the hopper concept even on other worlds in our solar system and the desirability of Triton as an exploration destination, it seems likely that someday some form of this mission will soar above the ice surface of Neptune’s biggest moon. It might just be a while before it does.
Most of us associate sinkholeswith frightening abysses, but in China, they’re considered “heavenly” for good reason.
Far from being mouths of doom, a number of these have been discovered containing pristine ancient forests.
Most recently, in August last year, cave explorers stumbled upon one of these giant holes, which experts said likely contained species of small animals that were unknown to science.
This extraordinary hole reportedly measures a whopping 300 metres (1,000 feet) in length, 150 metres (500 feet) in width and is more than 190 metres (630 feet deep).
It is located in China’s southwestern karst landscape and is now one of 30 such holes known as “tiankeng” – which translates as “heavenly pits” – in the region.
The reason for the trenches’ otherworldly name is that they are some of the last-remaining natural refuges for ancient forests and are home to species unseen anywhere else in the world.
Indeed, describing his own encounter with a tiankeng back in 2016, researcher Tang Jianmin wrote: “The scene down there was stunning: an underground pristine forest with no trace of human activities, with 40 metre-high ancient trees and a group of endangered wild plants from the times of dinosaurs.”
Given their depth, very little light reaches the bottom of the tiankeng, and yet, they harbour an abundance of plants.
For years it remained unclear how this was possible, but a new study, published on 20 July, has revealed how a number of species have been able to thrive in their depths.
The researchers found that nettles, ferns and other plants that live inside them thrive off of abundant stocks of nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium, calcium and magnesium.
These elements limit plant growth in other environments, where they are scarce, but because they are so bountiful in the tiankeng, the plants have evolved to devour them, enabling them to grow tall and benefit from the trickles of sunlight that reach them.
"Plants can adapt to adverse environments by adjusting their nutrient content," the study’s authors wrote, according to a translation by Live Science.
"Due to the towering cliffs and steep terrain of the tiankeng, it has been less disturbed by human activities.”
The deep holes host plants that favour moisture and shade, including species unique to the region, the researchers add. These include modern karst forest plants, such as the Nepali hog plum (Choerospondias axillaris) and the Chinese rain bell (Strobilanthes cusia).
So how do these tiankeng and their forests form?
These remarkable sinkholes emerge when the roof of an underground chamber enlarges and collapses, according to Jianmin.
Some 30 per cent of the world’s tiankeng are found in China’s Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous region among its World Heritage listed karst formations.
Karst landscapes are shaped by the erosion of soluble carbonate rocks such as limestone, creating features such as sinkholes, caves and underground rivers.
The South China Karst are a UNESCO World Heritage site
(Ko Hon Chiu Vincent via UNESCO)
In a piece for The UNESCO Courier, Jianmin further explains the formation of these sinkholes, writing: “Karst tiankeng is a relatively closed environment with high humidity, low temperature and a high concentration of negative oxygen ions.
“Its bottom is connected with underground water flow, nurturing a lush green oasis all year round.
“Primitive ecosystems with unique animal, plant and microbial resources are formed there.”
In total, 300 tiankeng have been discovered across the globe, with China home to two-thirds of them. They have also been found in Papua New Guinea, Malaysia and Madagascar, Slovenia, Croatia, Italy and Spain, among other countries.
Why are they important?
More than just a jaw-dropping natural phenomenon, these sinkholes are important ecological havens.
Jianmin noted that he and fellow researchers have discovered many rare and endemic plants in the tiankeng area, cementing its status as a “refuge for endangered plants and primitive forest ecosystems”.
“There is also a good chance that previously unknown species will be discovered in these environments,” he added.
Video released of Seffner sinkhole that claimed life of Jeff Bushyoutu.be
On July 8, 2023, one of the greatest UFO stories was told by Ross Coulthart to Project Unity host Jay Anderson. The investigative journalist claimed that there is ahuge UFO in the possession of the United States that could not be moved, and he knows the location of the craft. Coulthart clarified that the immovable craft is not in the US.
In the interview, Coulthart discussed the potential implications of the new US Senate intelligence bill. He referenced Douglas Dean Johnson’s writings about the bill, which purportedly mandate holders of non-earth origin or exotic UAP (Unidentified Aerial Phenomena) material to make it accessible to the All Domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) within six months.
Anderson raised concerns that this six-month window might offer enough time for those holding such materials to hide or conceal them. Coulthart acknowledged the possibility but suggested that certain UAP materials could be so large that relocating them is not feasible. He mentioned the existence of a building constructed over such a massive object in a foreign country, which might sound implausible to some.
This revelation left the UFO community curious about the place where the craft might be situated. Interestingly, the late former CIA pilot John Lear previously mentioned the existence of buried crafts too massive to move. In 2018, Lear posted on Facebook, recounting the enigmatic tale of a massive buried UFO near Garrison, Utah. This peculiar incident became a topic of discussion at a UFO conference in Las Vegas, piquing Lear’s curiosity.
The incident dates back to 1953 when a large UFO, measuring between 150 to 200 feet in diameter, crashed near Garrison, Utah. Lear explained that the UFO was so large that even the United States Air Force Security Forces’ “Blue Berets” could not relocate it. Consequently, a decision was made to bury the UFO on the spot. Lear wrote that a team of hundreds of soldiers dug the ground and managed to bury the craft 50 feet below ground level. (Earthfile source)
“While all of the digging to bury the saucer was going on, they also dug a tunnel from the saucer several hundred feet to the south, where they built 2 or 3 houses. The houses were constructed to appear about 75 years old, using old, weathered wood, nails, window frames, and roofing. The only hint that these houses might not be so old were the brand-new padlocks on the doors.
I don’t recall the exact description of the interior, except for a door leading to a stairwell that connected to the tunnel leading to the craft. Everything I’m telling you is from my recollection of the report, likely written by the person who accessed the buildings. My memory isn’t perfect. One of the houses contained a logbook in which visitors from various organizations like Air Force, Navy, Army, and others would inscribe their names.”
Lear and his associates intended to visit Garrison to witness this buried craft. They planned to use a helicopter, a fuel truck, and specialized equipment to explore underground. However, the trip never materialized for reasons unknown. Lear maintained his belief that the craft remains in place. He even shared Google Earth images indicating the potential location. He marked the houses on the images, but they no longer appear on Google Earth.
“About 300 yards east from this claim, there was an alleged Spanish treasure location. This treasure spot had been discovered by an individual from the Phoenix area with access to Spanish treasure maps, and this location was marked on one of the maps.
In a pile of rocks, there was a precisely square cutout approximately 10 inches wide and 16 inches deep. The bottom seemed like concrete. I had the underground radar team scan the area and found only a few potential returns. The area is now in an ACEC (Area of Critical Environmental Concern). Nevertheless, we were all set to convene for the Garrison expedition in 2 weeks, but somehow it never took off.”
Lear even provided the coordinates of the location: Latitude 38 degrees 37 minutes 40 seconds North, Longitude 113 degrees 40 minutes 40 seconds West. This further deepens the mystery, leaving people intrigued about the truth surrounding the buried UFO near Garrison, Utah.
Moreover, there is alleged John Lear’s statement on the alien presence, posted to Paranet on December 29, 1987. Here are the paragraphs published by UFOmind.com discussing the buried craft: [this page was first archived on January 31, 1997]
“Moore is also in possession of more Aquarius documents a few pages of which leaked out several years ago and detailed the supersecret NSA project which had been denied by them until just recently. In a letter to Senator John Glenn NSA’s Director of Policy Julia B. Wetzel wrote, “Apparently there is or was an Air Force project by that name Aquarius) which dealt with UFO’s. Coincidentally, there is also an NSA project by that name.”
NSA’s project Aquarius deals specifically with the ‘communications with aliens’ (the EBE’s). Within the Aquarius program was project ‘Snowbird’ a project to test fly A recovered alien aircraft at Groom Lake, Nevada. This project continues today at that location. In the words of an individual who works at Groom Lake ‘our people are much better at taking things apart than they are at putting them back together’. Another saw a saucer being trucked into the Nevada Test Site in March of 1988. Still another informant witnessed a saucer being buried at that location (for God knows whatever reason) during the second week of August 1988.”
There is another version of this statement: (Source)
“Germany may have recovered a flying saucer as early as 1939. General James H. Doolittle went to Sweden in 1946 to inspect a flying saucer that had crashed there in Spitzbergen…
In July of 1952, a panicked government watched helplessly as squadron of “flying saucers” flew over Washington, D.C., and buzzed the White House, the Capitol Building, and the Pentagon. It took all the imagination and intimidation the government could muster to force that incident out of the memory of the public.
Thousands of sightings occurred during the Korean war and several more saucers were retrieved by the Air Force. Some were stored at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, some were stored at Air Force bases near the location of the crash sight.
One saucer was so enormous and the logistic problems in transportation so enormous that it was buried at the crash sight and remains there today. The stories are legendary on transporting crashed saucers over long distances, moving only at night, purchasing complete farms, slashing through forests, blocking major highways, sometimes driving 2 and 3 lo-boys in tandem with an extraterrestrial load a hundred feet in diameter.”
Japan is no stranger to reports of unidentified flying objects. Next year will mark the 50th anniversary of the country’s most famous UFO sighting out of Kofu, the capital city of Yamanashi Prefecture, in which two boys claimed to have met a grounded alien following reports of flying saucers. A mini UFO that was supposedly captured in Kochi Prefecture in 1972 and multiple 1974 sightings in Hokkaido Prefecture round out what enthusiasts see as Japan’s classic “big three” incidents.
Throughout the 1970s, residents in and around the town of Iino, near Senganmori Mountain, began reporting frequent sightings that they credit to the region’s spiritual and magnetic forces. The town’s location in Fukushima Prefecture has continued to draw more UFO attention, especially over the last decade. In fact, a rash of recent UFO sightings in Japan have occurred around nuclear facilities. Online forums and YouTube accounts are stacked with descriptions and videos of moving lights and clustered Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (the modern-day term for a UFO) in the skies over Fukushima following the nuclear disaster there in 2011.
When strange UAP reports begin to pour in from a country’s nuclear or defense facilities, it seems governments start to take the threat more seriously.
Japanese officials met on May 28, 2024 to announce the formation of an 80-plus-member, bipartisan look into increased UAP sightings within the country, especially in the Fukushima region. The new investigative body comes on the heels of last year’s U.S. Navy disclosures—detailing pilots’ accounts of aircraft capable of impossible maneuvers—and Congressional investigations into those reports. As a result, the U.S. Department of Defense created the All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) in July 2022 to trigger a more serious look into the threats UAPs may pose.
Similarly, Japan’s response to ongoing sightings in the Land of the Rising Sun demonstrate how those lights in the sky are now considered legitimate national security threats, worthy of official mainstream investigation. But that doesn’t mean it will be easy to uncover the truth.
Aliens, Drones, Birds, or Myths?
Avi Loeb, Ph.D., is a physicist and professor at Harvard University. In a landscape where people make up their minds about UAP incidents before a proper investigation, Loeb applauds the Japanese approach of looking at its sightings from a more serious perspective.
“In the UAP field, there are skeptics and there are believers,” Loeb says. “Unfortunately, none of them are doing the hard work. That’s why it’s important to see government efforts such as AARO and this body in Japan approach UAPs objectively. In both cases, they’re considering possible security threats, but they’re not trying to debunk them.”
Loeb understands that citizens reporting UAP sightings in Japan, the U.S., or elsewhere most likely want to believe that they’re spotting extraterrestrial spacecraft. However, official efforts emerging from Japan and the Department of Defense must consider every possible explanation.
“I lead the Galileo Project at Harvard [the systematic scientific search for evidence of extraterrestrial technological artifacts],” Loeb explains. “In our work, we must first consider if an object is naturally occurring like a meteor or a bird, or if it’s human-made like a drone or a balloon. I think that is the approach these government agencies must take.”
As for why Japan has become a recent hotbed for UAP activity, the human psychology of mass hysteria and confirmation bias could play a role.
Mick West is a science writer with the Center of Inquiry, an Amherst, New York-based organization that investigates pseudoscience. He took a look at the Japanese claims of UAPs around Fukushima and would credit the decade’s worth of reports to people watching the area and wanting to get in on the proverbial UFO flap.
“We see a lot of videos and reports coming out of Fukushima because it’s a world famous site of a nuclear plant disaster,” says West, who has analyzed hundreds of UAP sightings. “There are a lot of 24/7 webcams around the power station. It’s natural for there to be more eyes looking at the area, and it’s likely those webcams are occasionally going to capture something people can’t identify such as a bird or an airplane. Once the public reports any of those images or videos as a UFO, people start going back looking for more images and videos to report as UFOs.”
As for Japan’s ongoing status as a UAP hotbed, West credits the clustering of reports to the true believers wanting to participate in the action or translating local superstitions into alien legends.
“You also see a town like Kofu wanting to brand itself as the Japanese Roswell to boost tourism,” West adds, drawing a comparison to the small New Mexico town that built international fame out of media reports of a crashed flying saucer in 1947.
It does seem possible that Japan’s myths, legends, and rich narrative tradition could be driving the suggestion of UAP reports, according to Joshua Frydman, Ph.D., an associate professor of Japanese at the University of Oklahoma who also wrote The Japanese Myths: A Guide to Gods, Heroes and Spirits in 2022. He says the foundational tales of eras past can inspire everything from pop culture trends to new faiths to the latest craze—and UAPs can easily fall into any of those categories.
“Ancient mythology is not only deeply incorporated into popular culture, but actively known and discussed in popular books, including ones on ‘secrets’ of being Japanese,” Frydman explains. “It’s also the foundation of several ‘new religions’ or the Japanese idea of cults, like the one responsible for the sarin gas attacks by Aum Shinrikyo on the Tokyo subways in 1995.”
Frydman notes that the influence of centuries-old stories on Japanese culture is somewhat recent as he claims it was not known as widely before the 1890s. He paints a portrait of an ancient society struggling to incorporate a late-hour introduction of the past’s mythology—while driving much of the world’s 20th- and 21st-century technological evolution.
“The current widespread knowledge of the ancient myths is related to the pre-World War II government’s attempt to make Shinto into a modern national religion by teaching the myths as actual history in schools,” he adds.
A Matter of Science and National Security
Given that the Japanese Parliament’s early summer announcement of its new UAP probe followed right on the heels of America’s creation of AARO, it might seem that the U.S. applied a form of international peer pressure to make UAP investigations a global effort.
However, Loeb believes potential threats from nations like China and North Korea have actually forced Japan and the U.S. into this position.
“Obviously, confirming extraterrestrial intelligence would be massively important for science as it would prove that we’re not alone,” Loeb explains. “But, importantly for national security, it’s essential for officials to admit we need to know what these objects are. In the case of Japan, there are nearby countries who want to spy on that nation. That government needs to know if they’re spotting drones or other devices used for espionage.”
As UAP investigations become a matter of public record in the U.S., Japan, and elsewhere, the PBS series NOVA will dig into the international question of UAPs in the upcoming January 2025 program, “What Are UFOs?” Julia Cort and Chris Schmidt, co-executive producers on the project, agree that efforts around the world to study the nature of UAPs will help to move the field beyond folklore or hype—and perhaps truly make some discoveries.
“It’s not just a question of what’s happening in Japan or the U.S. with these new official investigations,” Cort says. “This is a topic so many people are curious about, and the time is right to tackle it because the tone of the examinations and discussions around it have changed. There’s different kinds of evidence now, and it’s being taken more seriously.”
Schmidt hopes that UAP policy developments don’t become the main focus of what’s really going on in our skies.
“It’s important to look at what science can tell us about what [UAPs] are, rather than watch what defense departments are doing about them,” Schmidt says. “If any of us anywhere in the world see something they can’t explain or read a report about a sighting, there are questions we can ask to wrap our heads around possible explanations.”
Back in Japan, as the new UAP investigative body ramps up, the current government’s opposition leader, Yoshiharu Asakawa, went on the record opposing any concept of serious study on the topic. Via interpreted reports, he called UAPs “an occult matter that has nothing to do with politics.”
However, investigation member and former defense minister Yasukazu Hamada echoed the thoughts of Loeb and other scientists, insisting both national security and scientific exploration make UAP studies essential.
“It is extremely irresponsible of us to be resigned to the fact that something is unknowable and to keep turning a blind eye to the unidentified,” Hamada said.
An Ancient Martian Lake Was Larger Than Any Lake on Earth
In January 2024, DLR's HRSC on board ESA's Mars Express spacecraft captured the Caralis Chaos region, which has several interesting and sometimes puzzling landscape features – such as a field of small, light-coloured hills to the northeast (bottom-right of the image). The mounds are located in the remains of a depression that was once filled by a lake.Image Credit: ESA/DLR/FU Berlin (CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO)
An Ancient Martian Lake Was Larger Than Any Lake on Earth
The ESA’s Mars Express orbiter captured an image of the remains of a vast ancient lake on Mars. The remnant lake bed has been weathered and altered by the passing of billions of years. In the planet’s distant past, scientists say, it held enough water to fill Earth’s Caspian Sea almost three times over.
The leading image shows a region on Mars called Caralis Chaos.
At first glance, it just looks like a vague outline of a depression scrambled and scarred by time, with Mars’ ubiquitous impact craters sprinkled throughout the image. But for scientists who study planetary surface features, the image is rife with clues—clues that connect it to Mars’ warm and watery ancient past and to the ensuing episodes of change the planet underwent.
The following topographical map brings clarity.
Red is high elevation, and blue is low elevation. The lakebed boundaries curve up and away from the bottom centre of the frame towards the top right, skirting around the large central crater. This is one of several lakebeds in the region that were once joined into one vast lake named Lake Eridania. Image Credit: ESA/DLR/FU Berlin. Licence: CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO or ESA Standard Licence
The ancient lakebed consists of several basins surrounding and including the Caralis Chaos region. In the distant past, they were all joined into one big lake named Lake Eridania. It had a surface area of about 1.1 million square km. The largest non-ocean body of water on Earth is the Caspian Sea, with a surface area of 389,000 km.
This image puts the Caralis Chaos region into context. It’s from a 2015 paper that focused on two parts of the Eridania Lake system: Atlantis Chaos and Simois Colles. Image Credit: Adeli et al. 2015.
Liquid water was likely abundant on early Mars between about 4.1 and 3 billion years ago during the Noachian and Hesperian Periods. Mars may have even hosted a massive ocean that covered about one-third of its surface. Eridania Lake was likely a single lake until the late Noachian when Mars gradually lost its water. During that period, the lake was fragmented into multiple smaller lakes.
The ancient lakebed is now punctuated with mounds. Scientists think Mars’ dusty winds initially formed the mounds. Later, they were covered by water, then the water disappeared, and they were exposed to the wind again.
This perspective view shows the mounds on the floor of ancient Lake Eridani. Image Credit: ESA/DLR/FU CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO
The floors of all of the basins that comprised Eridania Lake are covered by light-toned materials containing Fe/Mg-phyllosilicates. The region also has chloride, indicating that a playa region once existed here as the water receded. Some of the geological evidence in the region suggests that some surface water may have survived until long after the Noachian.
This diagram shows how volcanic activity may have caused the deposition of minerals on the floor of Lake Eridania. Chlorides were deposited along the shoreline by evaporation. Image Credit: By Jim Secosky chose this image NASA – https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/spaceimages/details.php?id=PIA22060, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=63303061
There’s also evidence of volcanic activity. Two large faults called fossae run through the region. Collectively, they’re known as Sirenum Fossae.
This image shows the extent and depth of ancient Lake Eridania. It also shows Sirenum Fossae, two large faults in the Martian surface. Image Credit: By Jim Secosky modified NASA image – https://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/figures/PIA22059_fig1.jpg, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=63330708
The region between the two faults is called a graben, a depressed portion of the crust. Sirenum Fossae was formed as Mars’ Tharsis region, a vast volcanic plateau that’s home to Olympus Mons and Tharsis Montes, rose up and put enormous pressure on the crust.
This is a perspective view of one of the Sirenum Fossae fault lines. Image Credit: ESA/DLR/FU CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO
These images all come from the ESA’s Mars Express Orbiter. It has been orbiting Mars since 2004, mapping its surface and minerals and studying the planet’s interior, subsurface, and atmosphere. It has been in orbit for more than 20 years. The ESA has extended its mission until at least the end of 2026 and has given it a provisional extension until 2028.
Are Andromeda and the Milky Way Doomed to Collide? Maybe Not
Scientists discovered the Andromeda galaxy, known as M31, hundreds of years ago, and around a century ago, we realized that it had negative radial velocity toward the Milky Way. In other words, eventually, the two galaxies would merge spectacularly. That has been common knowledge for astronomers since then, but is it really true? A new paper from researchers at the University of Helsinki looks at several confounding factors, including the gravitational influence of other galaxies in our local group, and finds only a 50% chance that the Milky Way will merge with the Andromeda galaxy in the next 10 billion years.
That seems like a pretty big thing to get the physics wrong on. So, how did the authors come to that conclusion? They accounted for a problem that has been popularized in media as of late – the three-body – or in this case, four-body – problem. And with that problem comes a lot of uncertainty, which is why there’s still a 50% chance that this huge event might still happen.
Thinking of Andromeda and the Milky Way in isolation doesn’t account for the other galaxies in what we know as the “Local Group.” This comprises approximately 100 smaller galaxies at various orientations, distances, and speeds. The largest of the remaining galaxies is the Triangulum galaxy, M33, which is about 2.7 million light-years away and consists of upwards of a mere 40 billion stars. That’s about 40% of the approximately 100 billion stars in the Milky Way but a mere 4% of the nearly 1 trillion stars estimated to exist in Andromeda. Still, they would have their own gravitational pull, contorting the simplistic dynamic between Andromeda and the Milky Way.
Fraser explains some of the orbital mechanics around Andromeda’s motion.
Further confounding that dynamic is the Large Magellanic Cloud, which is either the second or third closest galaxy to our own at a distance of only 163,000 light years. This is slightly larger than the Milky Way’s diameter, at 105,700. It also houses around 20 billion stars, so while it’s even less massive than M33, it still exerts a hefty gravitational pull.
The authors accounted for the gravitational pull of both of those other galaxies in their calculations of the paths of the Milky Way and Andromeda over the next few billion years. They found that the complicated dance of astronomical giants could potentially result in a scenario where the two galaxies don’t merge. However, there was another significant factor in their calculations: uncertainty.
Scientists never like uncertainty. In fact, much of their research tries to place bounds on certain parameters, like the rotational speed of galaxies or the distances between them. Unfortunately, despite their proximity, there are many uncertainties surrounding the four galaxies used in the study, and those uncertainties make precise calculations of the effects of their gravitational and rotational pull difficult.
Fraser discusses what stars, if any, we can see in Andromeda.
Developing estimates rather than concrete numbers is one-way scientists often deal with uncertainty, and in this case, that estimate fell right at the 50% mark in terms of whether or not the wo galaxies would collide. However, there is still a lot of uncertainty in that estimate, and plenty more confounding factors, including the other galaxies in the local group, will influence the final outcome. Ultimately, time will help solve the mystery, but that is a very long time on the scale of galaxy mergers. If it happens at all, a merger between the Milky Way and Andromeda will happen long after our own Sun has burnt out, and humans will either die out with it or find a way to expand to new stars. And if, at that point, we get easy access to an additional galaxy’s worth of resources, it would be all the better for us.
This illustration shows a stage in the predicted merger between our Milky Way galaxy and the neighboring Andromeda galaxy, as it will unfold over the next several billion years. In this image, representing Earth’s night sky in 3.75 billion years, Andromeda (left) fills the field of view and begins to distort the Milky Way with tidal pull. Credit: NASA; ESA; Z. Levay and R. van der Marel, STScI; T. Hallas; and A. Mellinger
The Next Solar Cycle Has Started… But the Current One Hasn’t Finished Yet
We may be already seeing the makings of next solar cycle, peeking out through the current one.
It’s been a wild ride. Thus far, Solar Cycle Number 25 has been one of the strongest cycles in recent memory, producing several massive sunspot groups. The current large region turned Earthward (Active Region 3780) is now easily visible with eclipse glasses… no magnification needed. Cycle 25 started back in 2019.
Massive sunspot rotates into view. Credit: NASA/SDO
A Stormy Year
To be sure, the latest solar cycle will be one for the history books, as it heads towards an active maximum in 2025. But even though Cycle 25 will run out through the remainder of the current decade, there are already signs that Cycle 26 could be beginning, just under the roiling solar surface. A study out of the University of Birmingham recently presented at the Royal Astronomical Society’s National Astronomical Meeting in Hull (United Kingdom) shows that key indicators for the start of the next cycle may already be in place.
Numbering the solar cycle under current the convention goes all the way back to the start of Cycle 1 in 1755. The pattern for numbering cycles was started in 1852 by astronomer Rudolf Wolf.
We know that a new solar cycle has formally started when sunspots appear at higher solar latitudes. These also typically have a reversed polarity, versus the previous cycle. These then push down near the solar equator as the cycle progresses. Spot from two cycles can also mix as the transition gets underway.
A large sunspot group from May 2024. Credit: NASA/SDO
Laying out spots from successive cycles versus latitude creates a butterfly diagram that demonstrates this effect, in what’s known as Spörer’s Law.
A butterfly graph (top) showing sunspots versus latitude over time. Credit: NASA/MSFC
Peering Inside the Sun
But there’s more to the Sun than meets the eye. As a large ball of hydrogen and helium gas, the Sun does not rotate as a single solid mass. Instead, it rotates faster at the equator (25 days) versus near the poles (34 days). Scientists can probe the solar interior via a method known as solarhelioseismology, which looks at waves crossing the solar photosphere in an effort to model the interior.
These internal sound waves form bands in a phenomenon known as solar torsional oscillation. Faster-rotation belts appear as a harbinger of the next cycle. These move along with visible sunspots towards the solar equator as the cycle progresses.
“The indication of Cycle 26 that we see is that the solar rotation has been speeding up at around 50 degrees latitude and now appears to be leveling off,” Rachel Howe (University of Birmingham) told Universe Today. “This forms part of a pattern called the torsional oscillation, where bands of slightly faster and slower rotation emerge at mid-latitudes before the cycle officially starts and move down to lower latitudes, alongside the sunspot activity, as the cycle develops. In earlier cycles we have seen that the faster-rotating band associated with the cycle can be traced back to around the maximum of the previous cycle, and we think we’re seeing the beginning of the pattern again. It will still be several years before we can expect to see sunspots belonging to the new cycle, though!”
A solar cycle map, showing speed and torsional oscillations over time versus latitude for the last three solar cycles… and the start of Solar Cycle 26 (upper right). Credit: Rachel Howe.
Monitoring the Sun Around the Clock
The Global Oscillation Network Group (GONG) makes the science of helioseismology possible. This is a worldwide network that monitors the Sun continuously. In space, the Helioseismic Magnetic Imager aboard the joint ESA/NASA Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) compliments this effort. The Michelson Doppler Imager (MDI) on NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) also plays a key role in this campaign. This effort goes back to 1995, spanning the last three solar cycles.
Big Bear Lake and Solar Observatory, part of the GONG network monitoring the Sun.
This gives researchers a look at the start of the last two solar cycles. It also hints at what might be in store for the start of Solar Cycle 26. “If we can understand how this flow pattern relates to the sunspot cycle, we may be able to do better at predicting how strong the next solar maximum will be and when it will occur,” says Howe.
Sunspots from July 31st, 2024. Credit: Eliot Herman.
Solar Cycle 25 has thus far been extremely active, far beyond expectations. This follows the historic lull that preceded it between Cycles 24 and 25. Observers saw few sunspots during this profound minimum. Still, this fell in line with many predictions made by astronomers who study the Sun, suggesting a stronger than usual cycle on rebound.
Looking Ahead to Cycle 26
“The Sun is always surprising,” says Howe. “Some of the most exciting discoveries recently have come from the spacecraft—Solar Orbiter and Parker Solar Probe—that are flying closer to the Sun than ever before, helping scientists to unravel the connections between what we see on the Sun’s surface and the ‘space weather’ events that affect us on Earth. We’re looking at the surface of the Sun in more detail than ever before, but there’s also a place for long-term studies (which this work is a part of) that follow the large-scale patterns inside the Sun over decades.”
A magnetic view of the Sun, courtesy of SDO. Credit: NASA/SDO
The May 10th solar storm was thus far the most impressive one of the cycle. This storm sent aurora to latitudes far south as Spain and Mexico, areas where aurorae are rarely seen. We were treated to a persistent red glow watching from central Germany, an unforgettable sight.
Solar Cycles and More
Historically, the Wolf Sunspot Number defines the level of solar activity. Astronomers refer to this as the Relative or Zürich Sunspot Number. One 2013 study suggested that the orientation and strength of the heliospheric current sheet is a better indicator of the health of the current solar cycle, rather than the sunspot number.
We usually say it’s an 11-year solar cycle from one minima/maxima to the next… but it’s actually double that length. The Sun’s magnetic field flips every 11-years, returning to the same relative orientation every 22 years.
We see ‘starspot cycles’ on other suns as well. It is also unclear why an 11-year cycle is ‘baked in’ to our Sun. We’re also unsure if this has always been the case throughout its 4.6-billion year life span.
This research provides a great model to test the next solar cycle, as we struggle to understand and live with our tempestuous star.
Astonishing footage has emerged of a possible UFO sighting after flickering coloured lights were spotted in the sky north of Adelaide.
A woman posted the video, which was filmed in Robertstown in South Australia's mid north region at 8.45pm on Saturday, to an Adelaide UFO sightingsFacebook page.
'We were watching two lights move up down left right,' the woman's friend commented on the post.
'(The lights) shine very bright then just disappear, only to reappear again.
'This was happening just left of and below the moon.'
The video captured a series of coloured lights flickering in the sky.
'We're not too sure what it could be,' a woman can be heard in the background.
'It's just really bizarre.'
The flickering lights (pictured bottom) were seen below the moon with a woman's voice on the video calling the sighting 'bizarre'
Aussies were stunned by the pair's experience and their footage.
'Freaky AF,' one wrote.
Others claimed they spotted similar sightings in other parts of South Australia.
'I saw similar at Semaphore Beach,' another said.
Another wrote: 'I saw something today. It wasn't lights it was during early arvo just an object hovering way to high to be a drone it was moving a bit then stopping kept fading in and out.'
A third commented: 'I saw a similar thing about six months ago in the hills. Three coloured lights in a line moving steadily downwards. Didn't have my phone on me.'
But not all Aussies were convinced the footage showed a UFO and believed there was a simple explanation.
'Drones usually have that coloured lighting,' one wrote.
Another added: 'I feel pretty definite that they are drones with those coloured flickering lights.'
A third wrote: 'Someone playing with drones maybe!'
But a drone pilot pointed out that drones are rarely up that high.
The possible UFO sighting was filmed in Robertstown, South Australia (pictured) at 8.45pm on Saturday night
'I'm a high altitude drone pilot, (hobby only ) it just amazes me with all these pretty lights I never catch anything when I'm up,' one wrote.
'And about at 5km looking around, I can assure there is bugger all - in fact NO other drones around any part of the day or night, NOTAM can confirm this.'
The footage comes after a spate of UFO sightings in South Australia over the last decade.
South Australia's Astronomical Society's Paul Curnow previously told ABC News that UFO sightings are fairly common.
'The average city person doesn't look at the sky very often and sometimes when they do look up and see something strange, they can't really explain it,' he said.
De nachtelijke hemel lijkt onbeweeglijk en onveranderlijk, de sterrenbeelden lijken vast en zonder bijzondere veranderingen. Toch zal de hemel binnenkort een gebeurtenis bevatten waar astronomen al jaren op wachten: een enorme explosie op duizenden lichtjaren van de aarde vandaan. En ja, die zal met het blote oog te zien zijn.
Een nova-explosie die binnenkort met het blote oog te zien is
T Coronae Borealis is een binair systeem dat zich op ongeveer 3000 lichtjaar van de aarde bevindt en bestaat uit een witte dwerg en een rode reus. Velen zijn bekend met de term “rode reus”, dat wil zeggen een ster van een bepaalde grootte in de laatste fase van zijn leven: de zon zal over vijf miljard jaar ook een rode reus worden. Het geval van witte dwergen is anders, niet meer bestaande sterren die een massa hebben die vergelijkbaar is met die van de zon, maar gecomprimeerd tot de grootte van de aarde, of zelfs kleiner.
Kortom, het is een zeer dichte ster met een bijzonder sterke zwaartekracht. Precies om deze reden trekt de witte dwerg die aanwezig is in het T Coronae Borealis-systeem waterstof aan van de rode reus en hoopt dit op aan zijn oppervlak. Op een gegeven moment zullen de gasdruk en de hitte een kritiek niveau bereiken, met verwoestende gevolgen: er ontstaat een thermonucleaire explosie die het opgehoopte materiaal de ruimte in werpt. Het proces herhaalt zich gemiddeld elke 80 jaar, en zal binnenkort opnieuw plaatsvinden.
A red giant star and white dwarf orbit each other in this animation of a nova similar to T Coronae Borealis. The red giant is a large sphere in shades of red, orange, and white, with the side facing the white dwarf the lightest shades. The white dwarf is hidden in a bright glow of white and yellows, which represent an accretion disk around the star. A stream of material, shown as a diffuse cloud of red, flows from the red giant to the white dwarf. When the red giant moves behind the white dwarf, a nova explosion on the white dwarf ignites, creating a ball of ejected nova material shown in pale orange. After the fog of material clears, a small white spot remains, indicating that the white dwarf has survived the explosion.
NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center
Hoe de explosie van T Coronae Borealis te herkennen
Het cyclische karakter van de T Coronae Borealis nova is op zijn eigen manier al enige tijd bekend: de eerste geregistreerde waarneming dateert uit de herfst van 1217, toen de explosie werd opgemerkt door een abt in Duitsland. Volgens NASA zal de explosie met het blote oog zichtbaar zijn en niet zo moeilijk te herkennen: trek gewoon een rechte lijn tussen Arcturus en Vega, twee van de helderste sterren op het noordelijk halfrond. Het sterrenbeeld Corona Borealis, waar T Coronae Borealis deel van uitmaakt, heeft de vorm van een hoefijzer en bevindt zich ten westen van het sterrenbeeld Hercules. Dit zijn de woorden van Rebekah Hounsell van NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center:
Dit evenement wordt een unieke ervaring die een nieuwe generatie astronomen kan inspireren. Het zal jongeren in staat stellen een kosmische gebeurtenis te observeren, vragen te stellen en gegevens te verzamelen.
En in feite zullen we, vergeleken met de vorige nova in 1946, een verzameling instrumenten hebben die toen gewoon ondenkbaar was. De Fermi Gamma-ray ruimtetelescoop, de James Webb ruimtetelescoop en NuSTAR en natuurlijk miljarden mensen zullen de gebeurtenis observeren.
Een buitengewone kans voor de astronomie
We weten natuurlijk dat de verwachte explosie al zo'n 3000 jaar geleden plaatsvond, en dat het licht ervan richting de aarde reist. De gebeurtenis zal echter van relatief korte duur zijn en de nova zal minder dan een week zichtbaar blijven aan de nachtelijke hemel. Dit is een buitengewone kans om de structuur en dynamiek van terugkerende stellaire explosies te bestuderen.
Maar is het zeker dat de dreigende explosie zal plaatsvinden? Ja en nee. Zoals we al zeiden, komen novae van T Coronae Borealis gemiddeld elke 80 jaar voor, en het is redelijk om aan te nemen dat de nieuwe explosie op komst is. Toch blijven deze hemelse verschijnselen zeer onstabiel en onvoorspelbaar. Er zullen ongetwijfeld veel ogen naar de hemel gericht zijn, op zoek naar een gloed in een nachtelijke hemel die vaak te stil en onveranderlijk is.
A conceptual image of how to find Hercules and the “Northern Crown” in the night sky, created using planetarium software. Look up after sunset during summer months to find Hercules, then scan between Vega and Arcturus, where the distinct pattern of Corona Borealis may be identified.
NASA
A coordinated scientific approach
Watch V407 Cyg go nova! In this animation, gamma rays (magenta) arise when accelerated particles in the explosion's shock wave crash into the red giant's stellar wind.
NASA/Conceptual Image Lab/Goddard Space Flight Center
The “Tic Tac” UFO: Unraveling the Mysterious Encounter Over San Diego
The “Tic Tac” UFO: Unraveling the Mysterious Encounter Over San Diego
In November 2004, an extraordinary event occurred off the coast of San Diego that continues to intrigue and mystify both the public and the military. During routine training exercises conducted by a group of U.S. warships, an unidentified flying object (UFO), later described as resembling a “Tic Tac,” was detected. This incident, now famously known as the “Tic Tac” UFO encounter, has sparked widespread interest and debate about the nature of the object and the possibility of advanced, unidentified technologies operating in our skies.
The Encounter: A Routine Exercise Turns Unusual
The event began when the warships, including the USS Princeton, detected multiple unidentified objects on their radar systems near Catalina Island, about 100 miles off the coast of San Diego. Initially, these radar contacts were dismissed as glitches in the newly implemented radar system. However, after rebooting the system, the objects reappeared, leading the Navy to deploy F-18 fighter jets to investigate further.
As the Navy pilots approached the location, they observed a white, oval-shaped object hovering above the water. The object had no visible wings or propulsion system, making its sudden and rapid movements all the more perplexing. At one point, the UFO reportedly descended from an altitude of 80,000 feet to just above the water’s surface in less than a second—a feat that defies the capabilities of known human technology.
Eyewitness Accounts: Confusion and Alarm
Naval Officer Ryan Weigelt, who was stationed on the USS Princeton, recalled being summoned to the ship’s bridge, where he witnessed the chaotic scene as crew members attempted to make sense of what they were seeing. Weigelt observed the object on video monitors and radar screens, noting that the extreme speeds and maneuvers of the “Tic Tac” UFO would generate G-forces far beyond what any human-made aircraft could withstand.
Pilots involved in the encounter, including Commander David Fravor and Lieutenant Commander Alex Dietrich, described the object as engaging with something below the water’s surface. This underwater presence was estimated to be about the size of a Boeing 737, and it seemed to be interacting with the “Tic Tac” in a manner that suggested intelligence or coordination. Moments later, the airborne object performed a series of evasive maneuvers before accelerating away at an incredible speed, leaving the Navy jets unable to track it.
The Implications: Technology Beyond Our Understanding?
The “Tic Tac” incident has raised significant questions about the nature of the technology involved. The extreme capabilities displayed by the object—such as rapid acceleration, sudden directional changes, and the ability to hover without any visible means of propulsion—are far beyond the known technology of any nation on Earth. This has led to speculation that the object could be of extraterrestrial origin or that some unknown party possesses highly advanced technology.
What makes this incident even more compelling is the fact that it is not an isolated event. Over a decade later, in July 2019, Navy aircraft recorded video of another unidentified object disappearing into the ocean in the same general area off the coast of Southern California. The recurrence of such encounters in a concentrated geographical area suggests that these events may be connected and that something unusual is happening in this region.
Conclusion: The Ongoing Mystery of the “Tic Tac” UFO
The “Tic Tac” UFO encounter remains one of the most compelling UFO sightings in recent history. Despite extensive investigations, the origin and nature of the object remain unexplained. The incident has fueled ongoing discussions about unidentified aerial phenomena (UAPs) and the possibility of advanced technologies operating in our skies and oceans that are beyond our current understanding.
As the U.S. Navy continues to detect and document similar incidents, the “Tic Tac” UFO remains a subject of intense interest for both the military and the general public. Whether these objects are the result of secretive human technology, natural phenomena, or something more otherworldly, they continue to challenge our understanding of the world and our place in the universe.
China’s Robotaxi Dreams Spark Economic Anxiety Over AI’s Threat
China’s Robotaxi Dreams Spark Economic Anxiety Over AI’s Threat
ByBloomberg News
Residents are complaining that Baidus robotaxis, deployed under the Apollo Go brand, are causing traffic jams by driving too cautiously. Photographer: Qilai Shen/Bloomberg (Qilai Shen/Photographer: Qilai Shen/Bloombe)
(Bloomberg) -- On a recent summer night in central China, a couple on a motorcycle swerved in front of a driverless cab, forcing the vehicle to brake rapidly. At an intersection, it hesitantly performed a three-point turn, careful to avoid a man with a bike gawking at the new technology from the roadside.
Welcome to Wuhan, the city of 14 million people that’s shaking off its Covid-19 stigma to position itself at the vanguard of smart-car technology — and the difficult questions it raises about the impact artificial intelligence could have on jobs in China and around the world.
More than 500 electric robotaxis built by Baidu Inc. currently ply the city’s streets, with plans for an additional 1,000 to be deployed by year-end. The expansion positions Baidu and other Chinese firms as competitors with Alphabet Inc.’s Waymo and out in front of Tesla Inc., which has delayed its highly anticipated unveiling of robotaxi prototypes by about two months to October.
Moving fast to develop driverless taxis fits into President Xi Jinping’s playbook to bolster the economy by making high-tech industries the centerpiece of China’s economic future, transitioning away from a dependence on property and lower-value exports. The nation is already home to the world’s two biggest electric-vehicle battery manufacturers and dominates the EV supply chain, a result of state subsidies and cutthroat competition that’s made constant innovation a must.
Yet, as Wuhan is discovering, running ahead of the curve can also have its drawbacks.
Already, residents are complaining that Baidu’s robotaxis, deployed under the Apollo Go brand in English, are causing traffic jams, partly because they’re seen as driving too cautiously. Riffing off a phrase that sounds similar to the taxi’s name in Chinese, Wuhan residents have christened the cabs “silly radishes” because they move at slower speeds and don’t always respond to situations on the road the same way a human would.
And even though Wuhan’s robotaxi fleet represents just a fraction of the total cab population — which employs an estimated 24,000 drivers, according to Shanghai-based outlet The Paper — there’s growing anxiety over the economic implications of the city embracing driverless technology. That’s especially true in the ride-hailing industry, where some drivers are already reluctant gig workers who lost their jobs in other sectors.
“The government needs to balance jobs and tech,” said one Wuhan resident, who asked that he be identified by his family name, Wang. “It shouldn’t only focus on wanting Wuhan to be a technologically developed city but also take care of the people who are still drivers.”
Economists echo those concerns.
“It is exciting to witness robotaxis become reality, yet it’s not clear how taxi drivers will face the challenge, and how the government will strike a balance between technological breakthroughs and weak labor market conditions,” Zhiwei Zhang, chief economist of Pinpoint Asset Management Ltd. in Hong Kong, wrote in a recent note.
Baidu is encouraging people to try its service by heavily discounting fares. A recent 30-minute daytime journey covering almost 10 kilometers (6 miles) cost about 14 yuan ($1.93) after a company discount of almost 26 yuan. That’s roughly one-third the cost of a comparable ride in a premium-class, human-driven taxi with the ride-hailing service Didi.
That pricing gap has frustrated some taxi companies, who say the experiment already has gone too far.
“The original intent of technology is to make human life better, but the reality is that it makes the lower class hungry,” according to a statement signed by Wuhan Jianshe Automotive Passenger Transportation Co., which called for more restrictions on where the driverless cabs are allowed to operate.
The pricing scheme also makes the current strategy commercially unviable, JPMorgan Chase & Co. analysts including Alex Yao wrote in a report last month, citing “discouragingly deep loss-making financials.”
Wuhan government officials didn’t respond to repeated requests for comment about the risk to jobs that robotaxis pose or expansion plans for driverless car services in the city. Representatives for Baidu’s Apollo Go business declined to comment on the potential impact on jobs from robotaxis.
Wuhan became China’s biggest proving ground for Baidu’s taxis partly because authorities there have taken a more relaxed regulatory approach relative to other regions and cities. There are also some practical advantages.
The city’s geographic layout — it’s composed of three distinct areas separated by rivers spanned by suspension bridges — and a driving culture known for not following the rules of the road make it a complex and demanding testing ground.
Bloomberg News put the Baidu service to the test last month, hailing one of the taxis via an app. Entering the vehicle, we found a transparent divider separating the passenger area from the unoccupied driver’s seat. At one point, the car accelerated to a top speed of 50 kilometers per hour, though it was more typically traversing the busy streets at around 20 kph.
The sight of a steering wheel moving on its own was a little unsettling. The in-car entertainment system was reminiscent of those available on a long-haul business-class flight, though the music selection was eclectic. At one point, our little robotaxi was cruising along the streets of Wuhan to the thumping electro house sounds of “Fast Cars and Superstars” by Cristian Marchi.
Eric Hu, a 43-year-old insurance industry worker based in Shanghai, took advantage of a recent work trip to Wuhan to test out a robotaxi. Although similar services are available in Shanghai, he said they tend to be located in distant suburbs and are less useful to people working downtown.
Hu deemed his experience in Wuhan “good” and said that he’d become a regular user of driverless cars — if fares remain low. He also expressed concern about the social impact of the technology.
“If all taxi drivers lose their jobs, then that’s something that governments have to be worried about,” he said.
Baidu founder Robin Li said during the company’s first-quarter earnings call that, as of April 19, its driverless services had provided over 6 million rides across the country. The proportion of “fully unmanned driving” trips — the company also offers cars where a human sits in the driver’s seat but doesn’t touch the steering wheel unless needed — exceeded 55% and is expected to reach 100% over the next few quarters, he said.
China didn’t get the first jump on driverless cars. Companies including Waymo and General Motors Co.’s Cruise have been honing driverless-vehicle technology for years in San Francisco and other US cities.
But scaling robotaxi services has proven challenging. Cruise was halted last year when one of its cars hit and dragged a pedestrian who had already been hit by a separate vehicle. Companies in the space have also faced public backlash, including acts of vandalism.
The US hasn’t set hard rules or qualifications for companies deploying automated-driving technology, electing instead to publish voluntary guidelines. Washington’s approach contrasts with China’s in that Beijing has made driverless-car development a strategic priority.
Still, the US’s early start means China has some catching up to do, according to Kevin Xu, a US-based technology investor and founder of Interconnected Capital.
“Top Chinese self-driving companies like Baidu and Pony are making great progress, but by no means are they leading their US counterparts,” Xu said, referring to Pony.ai, a startup that’s partnered with Japan’s Toyota Motor Corp. “That being said, China does have a somewhat more friendly or receptive regulatory environment toward self-driving cars.”
In one of the latest indications of China’s welcoming approach, authorities in Hengqin, an island in the south, ruled this week that autonomous vehicles can now be tested on any public road, allowing self-driving cars to interact with a much wider range of traffic conditions.
Tesla is one potential competitor that, in theory, could have an advantage over Chinese firms. But so far, it appears to be on the back foot.
The company’s stock climbed early this year on optimism about Elon Musk’s planned robotaxi unveiling, seeing it as a potential sign that the company will make good on his years of predictions about self-driving Teslas. But the August event was pushed to October, and some analysts have warned that investors’ high expectations could be misplaced.
Separately, Musk reached a deal earlier this year with Baidu for the Chinese company to provide high-precision mapping and navigation services to support Tesla deploying its advanced driver-assistance system in China.
So far, the Baidu service in Wuhan remains very much in a testing phase. It isn’t even available citywide — in May, the company said its operations covered some 3,000 square kilometers (1,160 square miles) of the greater Wuhan area. And while the service is billed as operating around the clock, Bloomberg noted restrictions on using the app in at least two distinct parts of the city.
An Apollo Go spokesperson said the company adjusts where its Wuhan fleet travels “in response to rider demand and a range of other relevant factors.”
That limited reach may be helping contain public alarm.
“The recent hype on social media has given robocars more exposure to potential consumers, but it is still too early to say how the industry will evolve,” said Jing Yang, director of China corporate research at Fitch Ratings.
Some Wuhan drivers who spoke with Bloomberg signaled they aren’t worried about the driverless taxis, at least not at their current levels of deployment. Others speculate that beyond short-distance trips, passengers might not be ready to ride at higher speeds without seeing someone able to take control of the steering wheel in an emergency.
“It’s still a robot,” said Feng Zhengming, a 42-year-old driver at rival taxi company Didi. “It’s not as flexible as human beings.”
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China’s robot with light-driven system can be used like bullet, transform ballistics
China’s robot with light-driven system can be used like bullet, transform ballistics
Story by Prabhat Ranjan Mishra
China’s robot with light-driven system can be used like bullet, transform ballistics
Ateam of researchers led by a Chinese scientists has developed a light-driven launch system for tiny robots. The new development is expected to transform ballistics and aerospace industry.
The light-driven hydrogel launcher is inspired by squirting cucumber plants.
Claimed to release energy in only 0.3 milliseconds, the launcher can take off from any kind of surface.
Researchers claimed that the engineered accumulated strain energy-fracture power-amplification method is inspired by the pressurized fluidic squirting mechanism of Ecballium elaterium (squirting cucumber plants).
Photothermal response
Published in journal Nature, researchers realized a light-driven hydrogel launcher that harnesses fast liquid vapourization triggered by the photothermal response of an embedded graphene suspension.
“This vapourization leads to appreciable elastic energy storage within the surrounding hydrogel network, followed by rapid elastic energy release within 0.3 ms. These soft hydrogel robots achieve controlled launching at high velocity with a predictable trajectory,” said researchers.
The study claimed that robotic tasks that require robust propulsion abilities, such as jumping, ejecting, or catapulting, require power-amplification strategies where kinetic energy is generated from pre-stored energy. To solve this issue, researchers introduced their game-changing method.
Related video:
China`s drivers anxious as Robotaxis gain ground (WION)
The launcher can travel a distance 643 times its own body height and could even have the potential to be used like a soft bullet. It also has potential to be used like smart-seeding agriculture robot or medicinal robots for deep tissue sampling, according to reports.
Disk-shaped launcher tested on still and moving surfaces
The small, disk-shaped launcher has a diameter of just 7mm (0.27 inches) and a thickness of 3mm, but it is able to travel more than 1.93 (6.33 feet) metres vertically. The adaptable launch system, which the team tested on still and moving surfaces, including leaves, bark, and viscous liquids, could be used to develop untethered medical robots that require a high force output to enter deep tissue, reported SCMP.
Using accumulated strain energy-fracture method, researchers created the artificial squirting cucumber that disperses artificial seeds over metres, which can further achieve smart seeding through an integrated radio-frequency identification chip.
Power-amplification strategy provides a basis for propulsive motion
This power-amplification strategy provides a basis for propulsive motion to advance the capabilities of miniaturized soft robotic systems, according to research.
Researchers also claimed that the system could be used in ballistic weapons. However, they have not conducted any special test in this area.
The team demonstrated the use of the launcher in a smart seed robot by attaching a seed and radio-frequency identification (RFID) to the hydrogel matrix. When launched into a smart seed bed, the RFID is read by sensors to identify the seed type and broadcast care instructions, reported SCMP.
There’s a special kitchen at the bottom of the sea. Scientists are now closer to reconstructing how it whipped up early life, thanks to a massive 1.2-kilometer core that a ship drilled out from a Mount-Rainier-sized underwater mountain in the Atlantic Ocean.
Johan Lissenberg, igneous petrologist at Cardiff University, and his colleagues are fascinated with the extreme temperatures of melted rock. Earth churns out molten rock, and seawater cools it down. It is intrinsic to the planet itself, and likely created life. The undersea mountain, called the Atlantis Massif, is home to a hot spring environment known as the Lost City hydrothermal field. Eons ago, a place like this may have been the cradle of unique microbes and the creatures that consumed them.
In a new study published Thursday in the journal Science, Lissenberg and a team of scientists analyzed the mantle rock the JOIDES Resolution research ship drilled out of Atlantis Massif last year. The trip was led by the International Ocean Discovery Program.
The remotely operated vehicle (ROV) Hercules approaches a ghostly, white, carbonate spire about 2,500 feet below the surface of the Atlantic Ocean, in the Lost City hydrothermal field of Atlantis Massif.
Atlantis Massif is one of the rare places on Earth where geochemists can get their hands on material from the largest part of our planet: the upper mantle.
“Say three to four billion years ago, the continental crust was formed from magma that was sourced in the mantle," Lissenberg tells Inverse.
“But the oceanic crust is always forming. Every day, basically,” he adds. As subaquatic tectonic plates spread apart, the melted rock that makes up Earth's mantle rises up. The material that reaches the surface forms new crust. So, the drill core is a snapshot of processes happening deep below the oceanic floor otherwise inaccessible to researchers.
“The rocks that were present on early Earth bear a closer resemblance to those we retrieved during this expedition than the more common rocks that make up our continents today,” Susan Lang, an associate scientist in Geology and Geophysics at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and co-chief scientist on the expedition, said in a study announcement.
Enigmatic reactions
The ship’s sample is mantle rock, the residue of partial melting underneath Earth’s crust. Embedded within it are minerals that may have been key to understanding early life, like serpentine. This mineral gets its name from a resemblance to snake skin. It’s usually grayish, white or green in color. It occurs when the primary mineral in mantle rock, called olivine, reacts with seawater.
This process releases hydrogen. “Hydrogen can then make compounds such as methane, which can then underpin microbial communities,” Lissenberg says.
Going forward, Lissenberg really wants to understand those reactions. The new study is a start. As the team logged the details of the core centimeter by centimeter, they were surprised. Instead of being rather homogenous, they saw a variability in the mineral composition.
This matters when scientists reconstruct the “chemical kitchen,” Lissenberg says, that led to reactions supporting life. Ultimately, Lissenberg wants to understand all the “flavors” of the upper mantle.
Het bewijst dat het door NASA geramde maantje Dimorphos zeker niet de enige is die rond een ruimtesteen cirkelt.
We weten dat planeten manen kunnen herbergen. Onze aarde heeft er bijvoorbeeld één, terwijl Saturnus met 146 erkende manen de grootste verzameling in ons zonnestelsel heeft. Maar ook ruimtestenen kunnen maantjes hebben. Denk maar aan het maantje Dimorphos, dat de plantoïde Didymos omcirkelt en door NASA’s Dart-missie van koers werd veranderd. Maar hoe uniek is het eigenlijk dat ruimtestenen maantjes hebben?
Binaire planetoïden Het is mogelijk een stuk minder bijzonder dan we dachten. Ruimtetelescoop Gaia heeft namelijk mogelijke maantjes ontdekt rond meer dan 350 planetoïden waarvan niet eerder bekend was dat ze een metgezel hadden. Als deze ontdekking wordt bevestigd, komen er 352 nieuwe binaire planetoïden bij, wat het aantal bekende ruimtestenen met manen bijna verdubbelt.
Moeilijk te vinden Dat er tot nu toe nog niet veel maantjes rond ruimtestenen zijn gevonden, is niet zo verwonderlijk. “Binaire planetoïden zijn lastig te vinden omdat ze vaak klein en ver weg zijn,” legt onderzoeksleider van de nieuwe studie Luana Liberato uit. “We verwachten dat iets minder dan een zesde van de planetoïden een metgezel heeft. Tot nu toe hebben we slechts 500 van de naar schatting één miljard planetoïden in binaire systemen ontdekt. Onze studie suggereert dat er nog veel manen zijn die op ontdekking wachten.”
Gaia Door zijn speciale vermogen om de hele hemel in de gaten te houden, heeft Gaia sinds de lancering in 2013 al verschillende belangrijke ontdekkingen op het gebied van planetoïden op zijn naam staan. In de derde gegevensrelease heeft Gaia de posities en bewegingen van meer dan 150.000 planetoïden met grote precisie bepaald (zie ook de afbeelding hieronder).
Gaia heeft meer dan 150.000 banen van planetoïden in kaart gebracht. Op deze afbeelding zie je verschillende kleurrijke banen die rond de zon cirkelen, waarbij elke kleur een andere planetoïde vertegenwoordigt. In het midden van de afbeelding, waar een gebied binnen de baan van Jupiter wordt afgebeeld, zijn de banen van de planetoïden bijzonder dicht op elkaar gepakt. Afbeelding: ESA/Gaia/DPAC
Deze precisie maakte het mogelijk voor wetenschappers om verder te zoeken naar planetoïden die het typische ‘wiebelen’ vertonen, veroorzaakt door de aantrekkingskracht van een omcirkelende maan (zoals bij een binaire ster). En op deze manier kwamen onderzoekers dus honderden planetoïden met een natuurlijke satelliet op het spoor.
Meer over Gaia ESA’s Gaia-satelliet (afkorting van Global Astrometric Interferometer for Astrophysics) werd eind 2013 gelanceerd en had een duidelijk doel voor ogen: de positie, afstand en bewegingen van miljarden sterren vastleggen, met een betere nauwkeurigheid dan ooit tevoren. De ruimtetelescoop opereert in een baan om het zogenoemde tweede Lagrangepunt, op een slordige 1,5 miljoen kilometer van de aarde. Op dit tweede Lagrangepunt zijn de zwaartekrachten tussen de aarde en de zon in evenwicht, waardoor de telescoop in een stabiele positie blijft en op lange termijn vrijwel onbelemmerd zicht heeft op de nachtelijke hemel. En de metingen zijn heel nauwkeurig; Gaia is zo gevoelig dat de telescoop zelfs de groei van een mensenhaar op de maan zou kunnen meten!
Waarom astronomen zo geïnteresseerd zijn in (de maantjes van) planetoïden? Dat komt omdat deze ruimtestenen waardevolle inzichten verschaffen in de vorming en evolutie van ons zonnestelsel. Binaire systemen zijn nog interessanter omdat ze ons de kans bieden te onderzoeken hoe verschillende hemellichamen ontstaan, botsen en met elkaar interageren in de ruimte.
Nieuwe gegegevengrelease Ondertussen heeft Gaia al meerdere datasets vrijgegeven. In 2016 kwamen onderzoekers met de eerste dataset op de proppen. Deze bevatte de afstanden en bewegingen van twee miljoen sterren. In 2018 volgde de tweede dataset, waarin de 3D-posities, 2D-bewegingen, de helderheid en kleur van meer dan 1,3 miljard sterren werd onthuld. In 2020 volgde de derde gegevensrelease. De meer dan 150.000 ontdekte planetoïde banen werden vervolgens verfijnd als onderdeel van de Focused Product Release van dat jaar. En hier blijft het niet bij. We kunnen namelijk nóg meer planetoïde banen verwachten in de volgende gegevensrelease 4 van Gaia, die voor midden 2026 wordt verwacht.
Geheimen Dankzij de ruimtetelescoop vergroten we dus steeds meer onze kennis over ons zonnestelsel. “Gaia heeft bewezen een geweldige ontdekkingsreiziger van planetoïden te zijn,” zegt Timo Prusti van ESA. “De telescoop werkt hard om de geheimen van het universum, zowel binnen als buiten ons zonnestelsel, te onthullen. Deze nieuwste ontdekking benadrukt hoe elke gegevensrelease van Gaia een grote verbetering in datakwaliteit betekent en laat zien welke opwindende nieuwe wetenschappelijke inzichten door de missie mogelijk worden gemaakt.”
Dat ESA zich blijft richten op het bestuderen van planetoïden blijkt ook wel uit de aanstaande lancering van de Hera-missie, later dit jaar. Hera bouwt voort op NASA’s DART-missie, die in 2022 Dimorphos ramde, om te testen of we planetoïden kunnen afbuigen. Hera zal Dimorphos na de impact onderzoeken. Het is bovendien de eerste missie die een binaire planetoïde op een bezoekje trakteert. En met aankomende missies zoals Hera in het vooruitzicht, kunnen we verwachten dat we nog veel meer zullen leren over planetoïden en hun manen, wat ons begrip van de kosmos verder zal uitbreiden.
These include nuclear tests taking place in the area, unstable gravitational field lines or powerful radars being tested around Kingman to combat foreign aircraft.
At the research center at the Mohave Museum of History and Arts right off Route 66, there's a section dedicated to the UFO crash. Some redacted government documents allegedly detail the crash from those who were there.
Fritz Werner is a name that kept coming up, who Dennett now knowns him to be Arthur Stansel. Werner was a pseudonym Stansel reportedly used when he talked about what happened in Kingman.
The reports claim they saw a UFO measuring 14 feet high and 30 feet in diameter upon arrival. It was made out of an unfamiliar metal that was plunged about 20 inches into the ground but was not damaged from the impact.
The workers conducted their studies on the aircraft. When they piled back on the bus, the document claims an Air Force Colonel who was heading up the operation made them take an oath to keep the mission a secret.
Around two decades later, Stansel signed an affidavit reportedly confirming what he saw. Fifty years after that, claims began circulating that investigators didn't just investigate the crash but took it.
Microscopic wormholesmay be driving the accelerated expansion of the universe, scientists say. These tiny wormholes are constantly being born from the vacuum of space due to subtle quantum effects.
If confirmed through experiments and observations, the wormholes could become a valuable source of information on quantum gravity — a theoretical unification of the fundamental forces of the universe, often considered to be the Holy Grail of theoretical physics.
To reconcile the observations of universe expansion with this theory, scientists have proposed that space is filled with an enigmatic entity that can't be detected in ground or space-based experiments.
This mysterious substance, called dark energy, interacts very weakly with other types of matter and fields, so, there is currently no reliable information about its structure or origin.
In a recent study published April 5 in the journal Physical Review D, researchers proposed a bold new candidate for dark energy: subatomic-size wormholes — or tiny tunnels connecting disparate points in space.
According to the authors, these wormholes are constantly being born and destroyed in the vacuum of space due to quantum effects. This is similar to how particles are produced near the event horizons of black holes, leading to Hawking radiation; or how electron-positron pairs are generated by a strong electric field — a phenomenon known as the Schwinger effect.
However, the creation of these wormholes is somewhat different from those other phenomena because their mathematical description requires quantum effects in gravity to be accounted for — a task that's much more complicated and poorly understood.
These difficulties in calculating quantum gravitational phenomena prevented the authors from accurately deriving the wormhole birth rate. However, using an approach known as Euclidean quantum gravity, they showed that if about 10 billion wormholes are spontaneously created per cubic centimeter per second, the energy they generate would be sufficient to explain the currently observed rate of the universe's expansion.
"Although our result was derived on the grounds of Euclidean quantum gravity… it is likely that our modification may hold for other quantum gravity theories as well," study co-author Stylianos Tsilioukas, a doctoral student at the University of Thessaly and National Observatory of Athens, told Live Science via email.
Moreover, the team's analysis showed that their model of dark energy is even better observationally than the most widely accepted theory, known as the Standard Cosmological Model, which posits that dark energy has a time-independent energy density.
"According to our proposal dark energy can change as time flows," Tsilioukas said. "This is a major advantage because recent observations suggest that the rate of expansion of the universe is different in recent times than it was in the early universe."
However, no matter how successful the researchers' model is at explaining the general properties of dark energy, the validity of any physical theory must be tested with experimental data. And for now, the theory remains untestable.
In the future, the ever-increasing accuracy of space experiments and observations should enable astronomers to deduce the universe expansion rate in more detail, as well as to measure other observable manifestations of dark energy. This could enable researchers to test whether this newly proposed model of dark energy is correct.
In the meantime, the authors plan to further improve their theoretical analysis. "We are working right now on a model which calculates the rate of wormhole formation. " Tsilioukas said. "The research seems promising and we hope to publish the results very soon."
A US Department of Defense contractor's tantalizing encounter with a giant, glowing UFO has sparked 10 years of research and two patents inspired by his encounter.
Three witnesses, including that Pentagon engineer, report that they captured electronic evidence of a 'barbell' UFO, half the length of a football field, that glowed an eerie 'indigo' blue.
The craft, they said, flew silently over an old logging road in southwestern Ontario, Canada, on August 28, 2013, near where the trio had camped for a hunting trip.
DailyMail.com spoke with the case's first investigators, who shared electronic data from the contractor's attempt to film the object — showing 'white noise' pulses in the video that recur in one-second loops identical to strobing light from the UFO itself.
Three witnesses, including a Pentagon engineering contractor, report capturing electronic evidence of a 170-ft long 'barbell' UFO that glowed an eerie 'indigo' blue. Above a Computer-Aided Design (CAD) 3D render of the UFO, made by the Pentagon contractor witness himself
'The captured data of the event,' the witness reported, 'may be the first real physical proof of not just a craft flying, but that it flies by virtue of an incredibly complex and [...] powerful spinning electromagnetic propulsion system.'
'Is there another 'barbell' case we've investigated like this?' that engineer, UFO investigator Robert Powell, told DailyMail.com of this rare case. 'No, it's the only one.'
Powell told DailyMail.com that UFO cases with this shape are so rare that only about '50 to 60 cases' exist 'throughout history.'
Powell, whose new book on UFOs has garnered praise from former Defense Department intelligence official Chris Mellon, personally visited the contractor's lab and worked with him on analyzing the eerie interference on his UFO video.
'He gave me a tour of the defense facility,' Powell said, who vetted the source's identity and biographical claims.
'There was a heavy duty commercial 3D printer in the lab and there were offices with three or four engineers that worked there beside him in that his building,' he noted.
The August 28, 2013 'barbell' UFO encounter itself, these witnesses said, began at around 9:40pm as they were returning to civilization from a black bear hunting expedition, a practice that is legal when done in season in Canada.
The defense contractor witness was seated in the back of Dodge 4x4 truck, with the two other witnesses in the front seat, as reported to Powell and his co-investigator, retired former police detective Phil Leech.
'We were roughly four-and-a-half or five miles from the main road, when I noted something over my shoulder,' continued the defense contractor, who wishes to remain anonymous to preserve his Defense Department business contacts.
'The very first thing that was intense was just how bright this thing was,' he noted.
'It was spectacular. Having been involved with optical systems in the past, we're talking about a vehicle that looked like a stadium lighting scenario — it was brilliant.'
The witness described 'an indigo plasma that covered most of the craft,' which was bone-shaped or barbell-shaped and extended about 170-feet long, 60-feet wide and 20-feet tall, as it flew slowly just over the tree-line above this old logging road.
The case was investigated by UFO researcher Robert Powell (above) - the same nanotech engineer whose analysis of a mass UFO sighting witnessed by over 300 people in Texas became a centerpiece to Netflix's Steven Spielberg-produced UFO docuseries 'Encounters'
'The craft rotated slowly around its center while emitting an electrical-spark-like shower, always opposite of the direction of travel,' the defense contractor stated, 'but without a specific origin point.'
The witness said he first attempted to film the UFO with two devices that he had on him, a Motorola cellphone and a Sony HD camera.
But both devices behaved has if they were caught in 'a boot sequence,' failing to stay on while the craft was nearby, about 400 feet, leaving the witness to view the UFO more closely through the scope of his rifle.
Up close, he told investigators, 'The lights that it emitted were not incoherent light,' meaning not the diffuse 'soft light' like that from a light bulb, but more like laser light.
The lay person's terms, he described the light as like 'tens of thousands of small lit particles, best described as those that occur during a fountain-type firework.'
But, more technically, the contractor described it as 'coherent' light: 'It was salty to my eyes. It was just as if I was looking into a laser that had been passed through a diffraction grating or something of that nature.'
Witnesses described 'an indigo plasma that covered most of the craft,' which was barbell-shaped and extended about 170-ft long, 60-ft wide and 20-ft tall, as it flew slowly over the tree-line Above a CAD 3D render of the UFO showing the UFO on the logging road in Ontario
About the logging road in southwestern Ontario where the 'barbell' UFO was spotted in 2013
'Both the other witnesses were extremely worked up about this,' the defense contractor said in a video taped interview. 'In fact, one of them said [...] "Just shoot it!" like he wanted me to actually shoot a rifle round into this thing.'
The UFO moved in its slow rotating motion for approximately six or seven minutes, eventually allowing the defense contractor witness to film the event with his Sony HD camera, which yielded only static despite working before and after the event.
The sighting ended with 'a similar lit craft' emerging on the horizon and both UFOs zipping off a 'at incredible speed.'
The moment left just visual static and the witnesses' astonished voices on their tape.
'I flew up to meet the guy,' Powell told the DailyMail.com, 'because it was just such an unusual case. I wanted to verify the reality of it. It was more of a personal thing.'
When Powell toured the defense contractor's engineering business, he worked with him to test his Sony footage via an oscilloscope — a device that tracks changes in electrical voltages, frequency, and other specs to troubleshoot electronics.
'The time I spent with him on the oscilloscope was probably 20 or 30 minutes,' Powell said.
'The first thing we looked at were the black bears that they had shot, mostly because we wanted to see a baseline on the oscilloscope, what the camera looks like just under normal operation,' he noted.
'Then we looked at it when it was all basically noise in terms of video,' Powell said, 'here's some signals on the oscilloscope that repeat.'
Powell toured the defense contractor witness's engineering business and worked with him to test his Sony footage via an oscilloscope - a device that tracks changes in voltages, frequency, distortion and other electrical behavior (picture from that test above)
As provisionally concluded in Powell and Leech's report on the UFO case, produced in 2015 and 2016 for the civilian group the Mutual UFO Network (MUFON), the oscilloscope 'post process of the video' matched the rhythm of the UFOs light show (testing shown above)
This oscilloscope processing of the video revealed that the 'interference' matched the rhythm of the UFO's light show, according to Powell and Leech's report on the UFO case, conducted for the civilian group the Mutual UFO Network (MUFON),
What looked just like 'white noise' on the video tape actually showed 'a perfect pulsation function,' according to their report.
This hidden 'perfect' pulse revealed by the scope was 'timed to the revolution of the lights' on the UFO and repeated at the same speed 'roughly 1-second intervals.'
According to the defense contractor witness, the pattern was what would be expected if the 'indigo' plasma outside the UFO was behaving like a very large version of an normal alternating current (A/C) motor.
Such a giant A/C motor would produce a magnetic field around it that could disrupt nearby electronics in a similar way.
'I believe this to be a poly phasing of two immense high frequency A/C fields polarized differently,' as the defense contractor put it.
'A white noise screen with a perfect pulsation function,' according to their report's appendix, 'is timed to the revolution of the lights from the [UFO's two] disks at roughly 1-second intervals.' Above, 11 cycles of the repeating one-second pulse as pulled from the video noise
Above, a close up on one of the repeating pulses, showing harmonic resonance. The researchers hope that this 'harmonic hash' will provide more clues on the UFOs propulsion system in the near future
'A more in-depth report is being generated for continued studies of this apparent "electronic signature,"' the defense contractor witness noted.
But Powell and Leech added that interesting progress has already been made: 'The witness has two patents that resulted from information derived from the event.'
Based on the defense contractor's own experience producing plasmas at a much smaller scale than the indigo plasma that he said enveloped the giant craft, he was able to calculate a ballpark figure for the energy required to produce this field — which he suspects is the UFO's propulsion system.
Calculated that the the craft had an approximate surface area of 3.1 million square inches, as he wrote to Powell and Leech, 'a minimum of 160MW (160 million watts)' of power would be needed to surround the craft in plasma.
'This amount of power is 33 percent of the 478 million-watt nuclear power plant in Fort Calhoun, Nebraska,' he said, but packed into an object a fraction of that size.
'Unquestionably this craft was the highest power density vehicle I have ever even imagined,' at least according to the defense contractor witness.
Powell is sympathetic to view of skeptics who have noted that that while the case is 'a great story [...] without proof it's still anecdotal.'
The UFO investigator told DailyMail.com that he is still is in contact with the witness and 'prodding him every once a while about getting a raw copy of the video.'
You may have heard of the Tic Tac UFO encounter or the Gimbal and Go Fast videos.
But years before these now-world-famous craft sightings went mainstream, a little-known research group was analyzing them over and over again.
MUFON - the Mutual UFO Network - has 700 investigators in the U.S. and has been collecting evidence of strange encounters since the 1960s.
One of its top analysts, Bob Spearing, told DailyMail.com 'Our slogan is, 'Doing the Air Force's job since 1969'.' MUFON now has 137,000 reports of UFO encounters in its files.
Searing is today revealing the strangest cases which he believes could be the catalyst for further government investigations and congressional hearings.
Flying squids
The idea of 'Jellyfish' UFOs rocketed into the public consciousness thanks to a video on an Iraqi military base, released by journalist Jeremy Corbell.
MUFON debunked that video, which Spearing describes as having 'so many flaws' - but looked in its archive to find others.
'What we found was startling,' said Spearing - there were dozens of similar cases, both of larger squid-like craft - and smaller floating squid, some of which seemed to 'suck the life-force' from victims.
This floating squid was pictured in Denmark in 1975(MUFON)
This 'squid' was spotted in Rhode Island in 2023 (MUFON)
'We found a lot of drawings and photographs starting from Denmark in the 70s of these giant cloud-like mushrooms, and it goes right up until today - but then we also discovered that there's also a phenomenon of indoor jellyfish.
One strange encounter in Singapore found sleeping women attacked by floating objects with bioluminescent tentacles.
This squid was spotted in Russia in 1977 (MUFON)
Spearing said: 'They noticed that in the corner of the room there were these squid-like objects with bio luminescent tentacles.
'In one case, the creature, whatever it was, had attached itself to the back of the woman, and she felt pain, and that's what woke her up.
'The thing was sentient because it jumped away. She could hear it actually feel disturbed in English, like she could hear it telepathically.'
The squid attached itself to her like it was sucking the life force out of her.
Other squid encounters included one in Vancouver in 2016, and one in 2024 - as well as two further encounters in Iran.
MUFON's record of one of the Iranian encounter reads: 'The witness is a 45 year old woman, married with two sons.
'Few nights ago on October 24th the witness heard a sound again. She knew something was coming for her again. She woke up feeling a pressure against her chest. She said out-loud what is going on?'
A witness sketched what they saw for MUFON (MUFON)
The Iranian woman woke up with scars on her abdomen (MUFON)
'That's when she saw what looked like a Boxed Jelly fish with lots of short legs, Half blue and half red on her stomach. It looked like a sea creature. It was right on top of her and then it got up and sat on the floor.
'Then disappeared after a few minutes. The next day she saw a scar few inches long on her abdomen. It has been itching and burning from inside out. Witness is very worried.'
The octagon spacecraft
Back in 2023, MUFON's interest was piqued after the U.S. military shot down three alleged Chinese spy balloons - one of which was octagonal in shape.
The search for the octagonal object was called off by Canadian mounted police after it was shot down with a Sidewinder missile.
'They could find the Titan submersible in 12,000 feet of water, but they couldn't find something in 142 feet of water?' says Spearing.
MUFON accessed its database of 137,00 cases, and found many reports of octagonal objects - some of which were startlingly similar.
Spearing said, 'It's mostly drawings. It's all drawings by witnesses, but there were a tremendous amount of cases, and the objects all look the same.
'They were between 30 and 60 feet somewhere, octagons. They all had patterns of yellow, orange and white lights on the bottom.'
A map of octagon-shaped UFO sightings across the USA (MUFON)
One witness drew an image of what they saw (MUFON)
Many had been spotted near strategic military base - and one was in the Upper Michigan peninsula on Lake Huron, where the USAF shot down the first Octagon.
One California sighting in 2014 was described in a MUFON UFO report: '… I… thought it might be a helicopter, or a new aircraft, but ..it was neither one of these,.. no propellers or wings.
'There was NO sound at all…..Marsh Air Force base is several miles away, and I also took that into consideration. I counted the points of the shape, which was eight.
'It was dark out, but there were lights surrounding the craft in white, yellow red and orange.'
Cases stretched back to 1976, and were found in countries in Europe and beyond - often around military bases and other high-security installations.
In August 2023, a witness saw an Octagon over Fort Knox at 4.23 in the morning - and it sparked a reaction from a UFO-sensing device known as a MADAR detector built to detect changes in pressure and magnetism.
A UFO-sensing device known as a MADAR detector built to detect changes in pressure and magnetism (MUFON)
The MADAR devices are built to detect changes in pressure (MUFON)
Spearing said: 'These are all over the country. Volunteers have these hooked up all over the country.'
The witness wrote: 'The entire object and lights appeared to be under shallow water changing the shape very slightly yet still very visible. I've been totally freaked out ever since my sighting and was totally frozen as the object past over me and my home.'
The sighting was described and sketched in detail by a witness (MUFON)
The octagon sighting coincided with a change in pressure which Spearing believes is related to a craft entering or leaving Earth's atmosphere.
The Delaware encounter
One of the most disturbing encounters in MUFON's archives involved a cylindrical craft which seemed to 'suck' a coyote up into the sky - and then turned its attention to human prey.
Spearing said: 'We have one drawing, basically a girl was on vacation in Delaware, near the Atlantic Ocean, a summer community, and behind her, about 100 yards out, is a forest of pine trees.
'She saw a silver-ish cylinder come down with purple lights on it. It comes down almost to maybe three feet above the ground. It was four feet long.
The 1980 encounter saw a coyote 'sucked up into the sky' (MUFON)
'And she sees it drop something out of the bottom of the cylinder. And it turns out, it seems to be a chunk of meat.
'The coyote comes up to the meat sucked up into the cylinder. It vibrates again, incredibly loud, and about three minutes later, she hears what sounds like bones crunching them, plop. The coyote gets dropped out, and the thing takes off.'
The girl ran back into the house to grab a camera and came out to take a picture, Spearing said.
Spearing said, 'So she goes back in the house, and her mother says, Where have you been?
'She goes, I just went outside to take a picture of something. She goes, you've been gone for four hours. It's one o'clock in the afternoon, so the girl had four hours missing time.'
Spearing says that it may be that the girl was abducted and investigated - but she may have been 'very, very lucky'.
A Texascity which has seen a huge spike in UFO sightings is hoping a new app can help identify the phenomena.
The skies of Austin are increasingly lit up by unexplained sightings, partly thanks to Elon Musk's Starlink.
The network of 6,000 satellites were launched by his SpaceX company to try and bring internet to remote areas.
As a result there has been a rise in the number of suspected UFO sightings, although experts acknowledge not all can be explained by billionaire's project.
'With Starlink and other phenomenon up there in the night sky, you see more and more stuff that that you can't explain right away,' Michael Endl, a professor of astronomy and physics at Austin Community College told KXAN.
A Texas city which has seen a huge spike in UFO sightings is hoping a new app can help identify the phenomena
Now the Enigma Labs app is attempting to try and gather more data on UFO sightings in order to classify them better.
The app asks users to upload photo of the object, description and location data which is then sent to the government.
The company examines the reports and rules out objects which have a clear explanation such as Starlink.
'One of the things that we've heard from the Pentagon and from NASA is that a lot of the issue with this topic is there's not enough data. So that's exactly what we're trying to do is gather more data,' Alejandro Rojas, a UFO researcher with the app said.
'Once you can't rule things out, that's when you have something anomalous that either deserves more research, or can point you in a direction.'
Among the unexplained phenomena submitted through the app was a 'small, cylindrical' UFO seen 'zig-zagging' above the Austin skies on July 28, 2023.
The skies of Austin are increasingly lit up by unexplained sightings, partly thanks to Elon Musk 's Starlink
The Enigma Labs app is attempting to try and gather more data on UFO sightings in order to classify them better
Another stargazer gave an account of a strange object spotted in December.
'I can't remember who saw it first, but we noticed this object directly above us. It felt distinctly weightless, spherical, and kind of amorphous,' the account reads.
'The texture was almost like a static TV, kind of gaseous, and grayish black except for a BRIGHT red glow that would flash along one edge, then another, then emanate from the bottom of the object.
.'Tt was definitely at or above cloud level and was visible until it was way off in the distance, never changing its speed to my perception. We have no idea what this was - not balloons because it was too far and cutting against the wind, definitely not a plane, definitely not a consumer drone.'
One curious incident during the solar eclipse saw a black object float past the sun during the cosmic event.
'We were on a boat waiting for the solar eclipse to happen,' the poster explained.
The app asks users to upload photo of the object, description and location data which is then sent to the government
Starlink is a network of 6,000 satellites were launched by SpaceX to try and bring internet to remote areas
'Ten minutes before totality I see this object through my camera fly by on the screen, didn't think much of it at the moment until I reviewed the footage a few days later.'
But UFO-skeptic Robert Shaeffer has his doubts about the usefulness of the app.
'Since we know that the vast majority of reported UFO sightings are readily explained, and hence of no scientific value, this app encourages the reporting and sharing of low-quality UFO sightings, thus muddying the waters,' he said.
'It promotes the idea that seeing a UFO is something that the average person can expect to experience, but even if you don't see anything, send us a photo of the sky, anyway!'
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...
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Over mijzelf
Ik ben Pieter, en gebruik soms ook wel de schuilnaam Peter2011.
Ik ben een man en woon in Linter (België) en mijn beroep is Ik ben op rust..
Ik ben geboren op 18/10/1950 en ben nu dus 73 jaar jong.
Mijn hobby's zijn: Ufologie en andere esoterische onderwerpen.
Op deze blog vind je onder artikels, werk van mezelf. Mijn dank gaat ook naar André, Ingrid, Oliver, Paul, Vincent, Georges Filer en MUFON voor de bijdragen voor de verschillende categorieën...
Veel leesplezier en geef je mening over deze blog.
'One of the things that we've heard from the Pentagon and from NASA is that a lot of the issue with this topic is there's not enough data. So that's exactly what we're trying to do is gather more data,' Alejandro Rojas, a UFO researcher with the app said.
'Once you can't rule things out, that's when you have something anomalous that either deserves more research, or can point you in a direction.'
Among the unexplained phenomena submitted through the app was a 'small, cylindrical' UFO seen 'zig-zagging' above the Austin skies on July 28, 2023.
The skies of Austin are increasingly lit up by unexplained sightings, partly thanks to Elon Musk 's Starlink
The Enigma Labs app is attempting to try and gather more data on UFO sightings in order to classify them better
Another stargazer gave an account of a strange object spotted in December.
'I can't remember who saw it first, but we noticed this object directly above us. It felt distinctly weightless, spherical, and kind of amorphous,' the account reads.
'The texture was almost like a static TV, kind of gaseous, and grayish black except for a BRIGHT red glow that would flash along one edge, then another, then emanate from the bottom of the object.
.'Tt was definitely at or above cloud level and was visible until it was way off in the distance, never changing its speed to my perception. We have no idea what this was - not balloons because it was too far and cutting against the wind, definitely not a plane, definitely not a consumer drone.'
One curious incident during the solar eclipse saw a black object float past the sun during the cosmic event.
'We were on a boat waiting for the solar eclipse to happen,' the poster explained.
The app asks users to upload photo of the object, description and location data which is then sent to the government
Starlink is a network of 6,000 satellites were launched by SpaceX to try and bring internet to remote areas
'Ten minutes before totality I see this object through my camera fly by on the screen, didn't think much of it at the moment until I reviewed the footage a few days later.'
But UFO-skeptic Robert Shaeffer has his doubts about the usefulness of the app.
'Since we know that the vast majority of reported UFO sightings are readily explained, and hence of no scientific value, this app encourages the reporting and sharing of low-quality UFO sightings, thus muddying the waters,' he said.
'It promotes the idea that seeing a UFO is something that the average person can expect to experience, but even if you don't see anything, send us a photo of the sky, anyway!'