Ontdek de Fascinerende Wereld van UFO's en UAP's: Jouw Bron voor Onthullende Informatie!
Ben jij ook gefascineerd door het onbekende? Wil je meer weten over UFO's en UAP's, niet alleen in België, maar over de hele wereld? Dan ben je op de juiste plek!
België: Het Kloppend Hart van UFO-onderzoek
In België is BUFON (Belgisch UFO-Netwerk) dé autoriteit op het gebied van UFO-onderzoek. Voor betrouwbare en objectieve informatie over deze intrigerende fenomenen, bezoek je zeker onze Facebook-pagina en deze blog. Maar dat is nog niet alles! Ontdek ook het Belgisch UFO-meldpunt en Caelestia, twee organisaties die diepgaand onderzoek verrichten, al zijn ze soms kritisch of sceptisch.
Nederland: Een Schat aan Informatie
Voor onze Nederlandse buren is er de schitterende website www.ufowijzer.nl, beheerd door Paul Harmans. Deze site biedt een schat aan informatie en artikelen die je niet wilt missen!
Internationaal: MUFON - De Wereldwijde Autoriteit
Neem ook een kijkje bij MUFON (Mutual UFO Network Inc.), een gerenommeerde Amerikaanse UFO-vereniging met afdelingen in de VS en wereldwijd. MUFON is toegewijd aan de wetenschappelijke en analytische studie van het UFO-fenomeen, en hun maandelijkse tijdschrift, The MUFON UFO-Journal, is een must-read voor elke UFO-enthousiasteling. Bezoek hun website op www.mufon.com voor meer informatie.
Samenwerking en Toekomstvisie
Sinds 1 februari 2020 is Pieter niet alleen ex-president van BUFON, maar ook de voormalige nationale directeur van MUFON in Vlaanderen en Nederland. Dit creëert een sterke samenwerking met de Franse MUFON Reseau MUFON/EUROP, wat ons in staat stelt om nog meer waardevolle inzichten te delen.
Let op: Nepprofielen en Nieuwe Groeperingen
Pas op voor een nieuwe groepering die zich ook BUFON noemt, maar geen enkele connectie heeft met onze gevestigde organisatie. Hoewel zij de naam geregistreerd hebben, kunnen ze het rijke verleden en de expertise van onze groep niet evenaren. We wensen hen veel succes, maar we blijven de autoriteit in UFO-onderzoek!
Blijf Op De Hoogte!
Wil jij de laatste nieuwtjes over UFO's, ruimtevaart, archeologie, en meer? Volg ons dan en duik samen met ons in de fascinerende wereld van het onbekende! Sluit je aan bij de gemeenschap van nieuwsgierige geesten die net als jij verlangen naar antwoorden en avonturen in de sterren!
Heb je vragen of wil je meer weten? Aarzel dan niet om contact met ons op te nemen! Samen ontrafelen we het mysterie van de lucht en daarbuiten.
Halfway up a near-vertical ravine in the Andes, someone carved an inverted V-shaped entrance into the mountainside. Then they sliced the bedrock with great precision to create a shallow door that goes nowhere; the same design appears in ancient Persia and Egypt. Then for good measure, they carved an additional altar with three alcoves into an outcrop of bluestone.
This sacred site is named Naupa Iglesia, or more accurately, Naupa Huaca.
Windows into Paradise
It’s not by accident such 'doors' are referred to as spirit doors or windows into paradise: a naupa is an inhabitant of the spirit world, and as it happens, the false door of Naupa Huaca marks the passage of the earth’s electromagnetic currents, the very forces that are known to generate out-of-body states.
It takes a hard heart to stand here and not feel the palpable energy of place. It is transfixing as much as it is bewitching. And perhaps that is the foremost reason why this site was carved in such a remote and inaccessible location in Peru.
The very nature of its location makes any astronomical relationship unlikely, so we are open to entertain the idea that this temple was used for a restricted shamanic ritual . Temples of a similar nature in other parts of the world typically require a difficult access, followed by a sensory deprived environment which generates conditions for the candidate to access other levels of reality.
Musical Measurements
The measurements of the main portal of Naupa Huaca are not random, they conform to musical notation . The length to height ratio is 3:1, making a perfect fifth in the second octave; the ratio of the alcove is 5:6, a minor third.
The 5:6 ratio is both unusual and filled with specialist information. It perfectly describes the movement of the Earth, whose pole completes one full rotation of its axis every 25,920 years, while the plane of the equator tilts four degrees every 21,000 years — a ratio of 5:6. This accurate calculation of the motion of the planet is also encoded in another unusual temple, the Bent Pyramid of Egypt, whose slope angles encode the same ratio.
Dominating the unique environment of Naupa Huaca is the cave ceiling. It has been expertly sliced like butter (bear in mind this we are at an altitude of 9800 feet (2987.04 meters) on the side of a ravine) and smoothed with laser-like precision to create two different yet specific angles: 60 degrees and 52 degrees. There is only one other place on earth where these two numbers appear side by side: the slope angles of the two major pyramids at Giza .
Stone angles on the sheer faces of ravine at Naupa Iglesia.
The violent earthquakes that regularly lay this region of the Andes to waste have exacted a fair share of damage at this site, preventing further exploration into this man-made cave beyond a latter-day low wall of stacked stone that prevents rubble from a partly collapsed ceiling to rain down onto the curious and the intrepid who venture up the mountainside trail.
Still, there’s another anomaly to be examined in this temple: its creator picked the exact spot on the side of the mountain where exists a single outcrop of bluestone. Appearing in stark contrast with the surrounding sandstone, bluestone contains a type of crystal that was used in early radio receivers for its excellent piezoelectric qualities. The rock is also magnetic, another useful feature for shamanic journeying.
Bluestone was also specifically chosen to build the oldest part of Stonehenge, leading its architects to source this sonorous granite 150 miles (241.40 km) away in Wales.
Stones at Carn Menyn, Wales, as an example of bluestone.These dolerite slabs, split by frost action, seem to be stacked, and ready for the taking.
The outcrop has been expertly shaved into three niches, and although partly dynamited by religious fanatics, the delicate workmanship is still evident. Its central niche is similarly cut to musical notation, the ratio 3:2, a perfect fifth.
The three-step design defines the Andean view of the Universe: the creative underworld, the physical middleworld, and the ethereal otherworld. The concept is idealized in the chakana, commonly known as the Andean Cross. Chakana literally means 'to bridge or cross,' and it describes how the three levels of existence are connected to each other by a hollow reed — a culturally shared concept in ancient Persia, Egypt, the southwestern United States, and the Celtic world. The oldest iteration of the design is carved on a monolith at Tiwanaku, the world's oldest temple complex, and it differs from the later version in that it is based not a square but a rectangle with a ratio of 5:6.
A carved altar with three alcoves into an outcrop of bluestone.
It seems that Naupa Huaca was designed by a cosmic mason for anyone wishing to access another level of reality and communicate with gods which, back in the day, were either forces of nature, or elevated people who personified or understood how to control such forces.
Who Created Naupa Huaca?
As to the identity of the architect, certainly the Inca can be dismissed. Inca stonework pales by comparison in both scale and quality, they merely inherited and maintained a culture that was, by their time in the 14th century, already long-vanished; even the ancient Aymara claimed such temples were made long before the Inca.
The style of stonework at Naupa Huaca is consistent with that found in Cuzco, Ollantaytambo, and Puma Punku , and what these sites hare in common is the myth of a traveling builder god named Viracocha who, together with seven Shining Ones, appeared at Tiwanaku after a catastrophic world flood, since dated to 9703 BC, to help rebuild humanity.
Freddy Silva is a best-selling author, and a leading researcher of alternative history, ancient knowledge, sacred sites, and the interaction between temples and consciousness. He is author of many books, including THE LOST ART OF RESURRECTION
Drawing With Drones Over the Salt Flats of Bolivia
Reuben Wu uses LED-equipped drones to illuminate mysterious shapes in one of the world’s strangest landscapes.
PHOTOGRAPH: REUBEN WU
In July, Reuben Wu and two companions took a week-long road trip through Bolivia, capturing some of the country's most stunning landscapes.
REUBEN WU HAS photographed some of the world’s most remote and extreme places: Chile’s Atacama Desert, the Bisti Badlands of New Mexico, the Arctic tundra of Norway, Peru’s Pastoruri glacier. But few locations compare to the site of his latest project, Bolivia’s Salar de Uyuni. Stretching across more than 4,000 square miles of South America’s Altiplano (high plain), Salar de Uyuni (literally, the salts of Uyuni, the nearest town) is the world’s largest salt flat, a nearly featureless white landscape left behind by the evaporation of prehistoric lakes.
During the rainy season, the flats are submerged in6 to 20 inches of perfectly still water, turning the shallow lake into the world’slargest mirror. In the dry season, whenWuvisited, the salt crystals dry into an intricate latticework of tile-like polygons stretching away to the horizon in every direction. “I was really taken by this composition of pure horizon,” Wu says. “It’s just the sky and the landscape.”
Shooting the salt flats was the culmination of a week-long Bolivian road trip Wu and two companions took last July. Between the freezing nighttime temperatures, high altitudes (the Altiplano averages 12,000 feet above sea level), and long drives, the team got little sleep. “We were cold, we were light-headed, and doing anything physical was very hard,” Wu recalls. “There were times when I really struggled.”
But the hardships paid off when the crew finally reached the salt flats. Because it was the dry season, most of the Salar de Uyuni looked like a geometrically patterned moonscape. Still, Wu was lucky enough to find a standing puddle large enough to capture the rainy-season mirror effect, too. In addition to more traditional landscape photography, Wu created several of his signature aeroglyphs—glowing geometric shapes that float mysteriously in the sky. Wu draws the aeroglyphs by piloting LED-equipped drones in precise patterns while keeping his shutter open to create a long exposure.
Over the course of the road trip Wu documented a variety of Bolivian landscapes ranging from sandy deserts to rocky palisades, but the Salar de Uyuni emerged as the highlight. “If it were in the US, it would be swarming with tourists,” he says. “Instead, we had the whole thing to ourselves except for the occasional farmer and a cow.” The salt flats are rich in deposits of lithium, a key element in smartphone and electric car batteries, but lithium mining operations are still in their infancy thanks to the region’s inaccessibility and the reluctance of recently ousted president Evo Morales to greenlight foreign investment.
Throughout the trip, Wu used a Phase One XT, a compact medium-format digital camera that allowed him to take ultrahigh-resolution images on the go. Back in his studio, he used software to tinker with the images until arriving at the final product. Wu thinks of photography as “painting with light” and doesn’t fetishize authenticity. “For me, everything’s a tool,” he says. “The camera’s a tool, the computer’s a tool. Just so long as the technology and the tools don’t overwhelm the vision.”
Fusion reactors are now contemplated as the heat source that could bring rocket propellant to extremely high temperature (and hence high-velocity exhaust) or expel ultra-hot plasma to provide thrust.
Credit: ITER
New Rocket Thruster Based on Solar Flares Could Get Us to Mars 10 Times Faster
I’m not a rocket scientist and I didn’t go to Princeton, but I’m interested in going to Mars if the trip was a lot shorter. That’s why the news of a Princeton physicist developing an engine based on the same principle as solar flares (which travel at the speed of light) that would shorten a trip to Mars by at least an order of magnitude, I was interested – even if I wasn’t able to understand how it worked. Fortunately, Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) physicist Fatima Ebrahimi is also good at putting things in simple terms.
“I’ve been cooking this concept for a while. I had the idea in 2017 while sitting on a deck and thinking about the similarities between a car’s exhaust and the high-velocity exhaust particles created by PPPL’s National Spherical Torus Experiment (NSTX). During its operation, this tokamak produces magnetic bubbles called plasmoids that move at around 20 kilometers per second, which seemed to me a lot like thrust.”
Conventional rocket engine
OK, I had to look up “tokamak” (a surface of revolution generated by revolving a circle in three-dimensional space about an axis that is coplanar with the circle – a donut or bagel shape) but the rest was relatable … especially the part about sitting on the deck and thinking about car exhaust (mine faces a neighbor’s garage). And 20 km/sec is about 44738 mph, which is definitely a lot of thrust when compared to current rockets which top out at about 17,000 mph. Ebrahimi ran computer simulations on PPPL computers and at the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, California, and it showed this new plasma thruster concept can generate exhaust with velocities 10 times faster than those of other plasma thrusters.
“By using more electromagnets and more magnetic fields, you can in effect turn a knob to fine-tune the velocity.”
Artist’s rendition of a future spacecraft that uses an impulse magnetoplasma engine.
Turning a knob to speed up? I could handle that on the trip to Mars. The Princeton press release on Ebrahimi’s study, published in the Journal of Plasma Physics, explains other ways that Ebrahimi’s thruster concept is better. It produces movement by ejecting both plasma particles and magnetic bubbles known as plasmoids, which no other thruster uses for additional power. Also, replacing electric fields (used in current plasma thrusters) with magnetic fields allows rocket developers to use any kind of gas they want for different kinds of thrust.
“This work was inspired by past fusion work and this is the first time that plasmoids and reconnection have been proposed for space propulsion. The next step is building a prototype!”
That exclamation point indicates not only that it’s feasible, but prototype development can begin immediately since it’s based on fusion work that has already been done.
The line starts here to buy your tickets to Mars on the plasma thruster rocket. Just remember – I get to turn the knob.
Elizabeth April: Clones, Reptilians, Walk-Ins, Angels, Implants
Elizabeth April: Clones, Reptilians, Walk-Ins, Angels, Implants
Searching for Truth, Love, Happiness, connection to Alien Disclosure, Quantum Physics, Angels and Spirit Guides? Well… you’ve come to the right place!! Elizabeth April loves to channel information about The Mandela Effect, Vibrational Frequency, The After Life, Spirit Guides, Aliens, The Galactic Federation of Light, Dimensions, Crystals… and so much more! Open your Third Eye & Expand with Elizabeth April!
Two bright UFOs filmed over Franco da Rocha, Brazil 25-Jan-2021
This new UFO video was filmed in Franco da Rocha, a municipality in the state of São Paulo on 25th January 2021. Two huge bright unidentified flying objects were flying above the city and then they slowly disappeared.
Giant Face of Ucanha: Huge Sculpted Mayan Mask Found in Mexico
In the southeastern Mexican state of Yucatán on the Yucatán Peninsula, an archaeological team digging at a lightly explored site near the tiny, picturesque village of Ucanha uncovered something highly unusual. It was a giant human-looking face, as tall as a person and sculpted in stucco. Its features clearly identified it as a Mayan mask of the ancient Maya civilization , which enjoyed total hegemony in this part of the world more than one thousand years ago.
Mayan Mask Discovered in the Yucatán Peninsula
The Maya stucco relief was first discovered in 2017. Researchers from the National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH) in Mexico spent three years carefully restoring the sculpture, between periods when it was temporarily reburied to prevent its rapid deterioration from exposure to the elements. They were able to positively date the Mayan mask to the Late Pre-Classical era of the ancient Maya civilization, meaning it was created sometime between 300 BC and 250 AD.
View of the giant stucco face, or Mayan mask, in situ. The face was discovered in the Yucatán Peninsula near the village of Ucanha.
In their statement announcing the finding , INAH stated that sculptures like these “represent the faces of individuals with particular features that can be associated with deities or with characters of prominent social status.” It was a common practice in Maya civilization to decorate buildings with large-scale, embedded decorative sculptures, which often featured the faces of rulers or gods.
Relics like this are a rare find, however, since so many of the sculptures that once existed have been irrevocably damaged, or destroyed, or remain deeply buried in undiscovered locations. Nevertheless, similar sculpted stucco reliefs have been found in the villages of Acanceh and Izamal. But those are the only other giant faces discovered on the Yucatán Peninsula.
Recognizing the delicate nature of their discovery, the archaeologists have now reburied the fully-restored sculpture, thereby guaranteeing its preservation. However, tourists interested in getting a closer look at ancient Maya stucco reliefs can do so by traveling to Acanceh . There, several sculptures honoring Maya deities have been put on display to the public, in the town’s “Palace of the Stuccos.”
Detail of the stucco Mayan mask discovered near the village of Ucanha in Mexico.
The giant stucco Mayan mask represents outstanding examples of ancient Maya art . Maya gods and rulers were routinely honored in sculpted form, and in addition to stucco, Maya artists also sculpted in stone, wood, bone, shells, and fired clay. The Maya interest in creating human-like sculpted faces dates back to the first millennium BC. Their artistic endeavors in this area were clearly influenced by their contacts with the Olmecs, the so-called “ Mother Culture of Mesoamerica ” that occupied the expansive land regions to the west of the Yucatán Peninsula until around 400 BC, when their societies vanished for reasons undetermined.
Little is known about the nature of the contacts between the Olmecs and the Maya. But Olmec influence on Maya culture was profound. The Olmecs affected the Maya people’s spiritual beliefs, practices and even their recreational activities, as well as their preferences in artistic style and architecture.
The Olmecs are best known today for their colossal carved stone head statues , which weigh several tons each and are believed to represent the visages of revered Olmec rulers. The carved faces in these gigantic chunks of rock are reminiscent of the Mayan masks and giant faces created by Maya sculptors, who would have been commissioned to make these works of art by rulers in the various small kingdoms that comprised the greater Maya civilization.
In the late Pre-Classical era, when the giant face at Ucanha was sculpted, the Maya were living in still small but increasingly populated agricultural villages. These rapidly expanding settlements formed the seeds of the great Maya cities that arose to dominate the region in the Classical era, which ran from 250 AD to 900 AD.
Larger-than-life artistic creations like the giant face of Ucanha are reflections of a society that was becoming increasingly confident and ambitious. At the height of their power, the Maya exercised political, cultural, and social control over a wide swath of southern Mexico and Central America. They were able to maintain that control for several centuries, before internal decay followed by Spanish conquest brought about the demise of their kingdoms.
Recognizing the sensitive nature of their discovery, the archaeologists have now reburied the fully-restored sculpture, thereby guaranteeing its preservation. (INAH)
Exploring History Through Artifacts Left Behind: The Mayan Mask
While the Maya people are still around in significant numbers, the great cultures built by their distant ancestors exist only in the form of the artifacts, relics, and architectural masterpieces they left behind. Amazing discoveries like the giant face at Ucanha don’t reveal many details about the culture or artists that created them. But they do act as markers of the ongoing cultural evolution that was changing Maya society , taking them away from their modest agrarian roots and transforming them into a diversified, ambitious, and highly successful urban culture, one which was ultimately doomed to extinction, as all great civilizations and empires seem to be.
Of course, what the Maya experienced during the transition from the Pre-Classical to the Classical era is the same type of evolutionary transformation that has been experienced in Europe, the United States, and elsewhere across the planet over the past two centuries. When archaeologists from the far future are digging through the rubble left behind following our final collapse, they will likely be just as curious about the long-lost civilization that created the giant carved heads at Mount Rushmore as we are about the long-lost civilization that created the giant sculpted faces on the Yucatán Peninsula.
Top image: Mayan mask made of stucco which was discovered in the Yucatán Peninsula in Mexico.
Back in the 4th century, a Maya community created a large stucco mask at the now-archaeological site of Ucanha which is located in the municipality of Cansahcab in the state of Yucatán, Mexico.
The mask, which is about as tall as a human, depicts a face of an unknown individual – possibly a deity or a very important person. In a statement, Mexico’s National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH) reiterated this by saying that this type of mask would “represent the faces of individuals with particular features that can be associated with deities or with characters of prominent social status.” It was made with stucco (a fine plaster often used to coat walls and ceilings) and dates back to the Late Preclassic Period (approximately 300 BC to 250 AD).
An example of stucco.
While this is the first of its kind to be discovered in Ucanha, these types of stucco masks have been found at other archaeological sites in Acanceh and Izamal.
It was discovered by a graduate student from Yale University named Jacob Welch who was part of a team of Mexican and American researchers, student and laborers. Archaeologists from the INAH stated that while it was discovered in 2017, it remained unreported until recently so that it could be protected against possible looters. They added that the excavation work only began in 2019.
Another way that the team protected the mask was that they reburied it after it was found until experts could analyze and preserve it. It was dug up again in 2018 for restoration work as samples from the mask showed that it had deteriorated a bit. They also restored weak parts and relocated sections that had moved over time back to their original spots in addition to cleaning the mask’s surface so that its colors and patterns were more visible. After finishing their work in 2019, the mask was again reburied in order to preserve it.
The team was actually very lucky to have found the mask as many of them had not survived throughout the years because of roots, soil, erosion, and/or looters. Hopefully the restoration work and reburying it will help keep it in the best possible condition for many years to come. Pictures of the excavation site can be seen here.
The archaeological discovery was made in 2017 by Yale graduate student Jacob Welch.
Photo: INAH
Archaeologists and workers protect the now excavated mask from the elements using tarps and a tent.
When it comes to UFOs, most people accept the eyewitness accounts of astronauts, military and professional pilots over sightings by the general public. That may explain why a sighting by a Pakistan International Airlines (PIA) pilot and crew on a domestic flight over Pakistani airspace is getting intense scrutiny worldwide. It helps that someone in the cockpit captured the UFO on video and the sighting was in bright daylight against a clear blue sky. With that many witnesses, including reports from the ground, Pakistan International Airlines felt obligated to issue a statement. What did all of these people see? What did the airline think?
“The video was shot over Multan-Sialkot region by Captain Faisal Qureshi and his First Officer Captain Talha while piloting the Karachi-Lahore flight at an altitude of 35,000 feet.”
The Express Tribune reports that the UFO was spotted by the crew of domestic flight PIA flight PK304 from Karachi to Lahore. At about 4 pm on January 23 near Rahim Yar Khan, the pilot saw the UFO about 1,000 feet above the Airbus A-320. According to the records, Captain Qureshi immediately reported the sighting back to the control room. After landing in Karachi, the pilot shared the video with officials of Pakistan International Airlines. They were sufficiently concerned that a spokesperson made a statement to the public:
“It is too early to say what that object was. In fact, we might not be able to tell what the object was at all. However, something was spotted and it was reported in accordance with the required protocol.”
Better call the tower on this one.
Somehow, as usual, the 41-second video appeared on social media. (Watch it here.)
Speaking in English, the pilot can be heard saying “It’s not a balloon, it’s not an aircraft.” Some of the video was censored due to language, but reports say the pilot was also heard commenting “The UFO was extremely bright despite the presence of sunlight” and speculating that it was not a planet but could be a “space station” or an “artificial planet.” One report also stated the pilot saw what looked like a metal ring surrounding the UFO and a brilliant light coming from its center.
Despite the pilot’s expert opinion that the object was not a balloon, that was the prevailing comment on media posts. The Express Tribune contacted Pakistan Meteorological Department spokesman Khalid Malik, who explained they have some balloons that fly at an altitude of 6,000 to 7,000 feet, and Radiosondes balloons which can reach 70,000 feet. However, private weather station operator Jawad Memon pointed out that Radiosondes, which he claims the Meteorological Department no longer uses, are non-reflective rubber while the UFO was obviously very shiny. Some commenters and media sites referred to the UFO as an alien Foo fighter, but that term – first used during WWII – has been explained to be either electrical discharge from the wings of a plane or reflective ice crystals – both of which follow the plane and are close to it, unlike the Pakistan UFO. And, since it was recorded on video, it’s not a hallucination due to fatigue or stress.
Foo fighter?
“A similar incident was also reported in January 2019 by PIA pilots in Karachi. A UFO was spotted by the flight crew flying 105 feet above the aircraft, while the plane was flying at an altitude of 2,500feet. The flight captain suspected it could be a drone. The incident was immediately reported to the Air Traffic Control (ATC) in Karachi.”
Was this one a drone too? The altitude rules out commercially available drones, but it could be a military drone, although the pilots didn’t make that connection. That puts this object solidly in the “unidentified” category with a slight lean towards “balloon” but a contrary pull towards UFO because of the inability of the pilots to identify it.
Which way do YOU lean?
ALL RELATED VIDEOS, selected and posted by peter2011
Art Bell: The Reptilian Overlords... 20 Years of Alien Encounters via Jim Sparks
Art Bell: The Reptilian Overlords… 20 Years of Alien Encounters via Jim Sparks
COAST TO COAST AM INSIDER Archived Show – Abductee and author Jim Sparks returned to share more details of his encounters with aliens, which have persisted for almost two decades. His main experiences are with the ETs known as the Grays, though he’s also had contact with Reptilians, whom he believes are directing the Grays. Sparks told of the time the aliens gave him a “gift,” which came in a square black box.
After receiving telepathic instructions on how to open it, he found a black, tarry substance 2-3 inches thick that contained a horrible smell. The aliens informed him that it had been extracted from his lungs.
Magnetic Pole Shift Update, Life, Nova, Quake Watch | S0 News Jan.30.2021
Magnetic Pole Shift Update, Life, Nova, Quake Watch | S0 News Jan.30.2021
Pole Shift (magnetic): A shift in “magnetic” poles is one of the more common and accepted theories across the world, however, this is not to be confused with those that speak of a “geographic” pole shift. Even though these events can occur at the same time, they actually have quite different affects on Earth.
Linda Moulton Howe: Self Activating Extraterrestrial Machines... Probes From Another Dimension
Researcher, Journalist and Author Linda Moulton Howe presents a fascinating lecture about her recent research which has led her to a concept which is at the same time logical and mind blowing: alien self-activating machines. What are these strange unearthly devices, seemingly covered in strange unknown texts?
This is an archived show. All content on this channel is licensed, and or produced by Zohar Entertainment Group/Awakening Expo/Phenomena Magazine
30 Meter UFO Enters Volcano Popocatépetl In Mexico, 1-22-2021 UFO Sighting News.
Date of sighting: January 21, 2021
Location of sighting: Near Mexico City, Mexico
Source: Popocatepetl live cam
While watching the live cam for volcano Popocatepetl, I noticed this strange disk like object entering the mouth of the volcano. The object actually overlaps (half way covers) the volcano cloud...which is all the proof needed to confirm this object did enter the mouth of the volcano. You see if it went behind the clouds, it would mean its a plane. However I quickly rolled this out because this object is huge, and a plane would stay at least 5 km away from an active volcano...so if this was a plane, it would be close to 150 meters across! Thats impossible, and the fact that the volcano is erupting right at this moment prevents planes from flying over or near it.
Its absolutely mind boggling to see this UFO 30% in front of the clouds from the mouth of the volcano. This is 100% proof that an alien base is 5-7km below this volcano and has been there for thousands of years.
Bright UFO Over St. Peters, Missouri On Jan 28, 2021, Photos, UFO Sighting News.
Date of sighting: January 28, 2021
Location of sighting: St Peters, Missouri, USA
Source: MUFON #113445
Here is an interesting UFO report just in today. A UFO was spotted near a road in St. Peters, Missouri when a passenger in a car saw the bright floating object near a power line and took a quick photo. Soon after the UFO disappeared and wan not seen again. UFOs are often seen near power lines and its been my belief that aliens could tap into our power and communication networks in order to download information about humanity faster and sort through it latter. Much like the American NSA does. This is absolute proof aliens are trying to learn about us, but the world governments are trying to prevent this from happening to keep the public from panicking.
Scott C. Waring - Taiwan
Eyewitness states:
While being a passenger in a car, I noticed a very bright stationary light in the sky Northwest direction about 45° and somewhere from about a mile or further distance from me guesstimated. The object illuminated brightly, I took a picture of it, and it disappeared within 30 seconds. No other objects we're witnessed in that direction during that time.
Sharjah Observatory captured a series of rare impacts on the lunar surface (Video)
The Sharjah Lunar Impacts Observatory Telescope (SLIO). in United Arab Emirates has detected a series of impacts on the moon, but what is distinguishing is that this series of impacts, occurred within one minute and they were of greater brightness than usual.
Also, their flash periods were relatively long, as periods of up to a quarter of a second were recorded in each impact and this is considered a long time for such events.
It is noticeable that these impacts spread in the middle of the dark eastern side of the Moon at the time of observation and spread over a distance of 1,000km on its surface.
Image left: Sharjah observatory.
According to Prof. Hamid M.K. Al Naimiy, Chancellor of the University of Sharjah, General Director of SAASST, and President of the Arab Union for Astronomy and Space Sciences, the team has analyzed the time of impacts and their relative positions and based on this, they have concluded that the series of impacts are caused by meteorite impacts, reports khaleejtimes.
What do you think hit the moon, meteorites, or something else crashed onto the lunar surface?
Oval-shaped UFO over Piriapolis, Uruguay 9-Jan-2021
This possible footage of a flying saucer was filmed in the sky above Piriapolis in Uruguay on 9th January 2021.
Witness report:
Oval shape or arrangement of the lights. I received a message by Messenger on January 12, 2021, from Mr. Martín Chacón, a resident of the La Falda neighborhood, Piriápolis, Maldonado, Uruguay. I contacted him on WhatsApp and he sent me a video of strange lights perched on Cerro del Toro, near his home, recorded with his cell phone on January 9 at approximately 23 hours and 30 minutes. I did analysis using Vegas software and then contacted him by phone to ask about the details of his observation.
In addition, he gave me another video recorded by a friend who was with him that night. The friend’s name is Gustavo Ledesma. They first observed an oval shape or arrangement of the lights, and before disappearing it changed to a V shape. The lights were intense and flashing. The estimated size was more than 20 meters long. Both witnesses noted that he was not fully supported on the ground, but remained leaning with a part in the air. It did not emit any kind of sound.
Moments before starting the observation, the witnesses noticed that all the dogs in the area began to howl. The entire sighting lasted about 5 minutes. I accompany the report with both videos and photos of the site.
UFO experiment could create 'ultimate space weapon' worse than Hydrogen bomb
China and the United States are both reportedly working on UFO designs that could lead to the creation of a Spacetime Modification Weapon that would make the deadly Hydrogen bomb seem like a "firecracker"
A series of tests on a UFO design theorised a space weapon so large that it could make the Hydrogen bomb seem like a "firecracker."
The United States Navy’s aerospace research enterprise confirmed the Air Warfare Division conduced experiments on UFO blueprints.
Research focused on exploring the work of Dr. Salvatore Cezar Pais - an aerospace engineer who works for the U.S. Navy.
Dr Pais focus is on a theoretical concept dubbed the ‘Pais Effect,” which enables controlled "motion of electrically charged matter (from solid to plasma) via accelerated spin."
The electrically charged matter then produces "powerful electromagnetic energy fields" that could re-engineer "the fabric of reality."
The Spacetime Modification Weapon" would make the deadly Hydrogen bomb seem like a "firecracker"(Image: Getty Images/Stocktrek Images)
It is understood the energy produced by the Pais Effect could lead to the creation of an ultra-powerful " Space time Modification Weapon."
According to documents seen by the Warzone, a military website, the weapon could make "the Hydrogen bomb seem more like a firecracker, in comparison."
"'Extremely high energy levels can be achieved with this invention, under pulsed ultrahigh current (I) / ultrahigh magnetic flux density (B) conditions (Z-pinch with a Fusion twist)," the documents reportedly read.
Dr. Salvatore Cezar Pais - an aerospace engineer who works for the U.S. Navy(Image: IEEE)
Authorities told War Zone the Navy plans to file a series of patents after it emerged China is also working on similar technological advancements.
Testing for the super weapon was reportedly done as recently as Sept. 2019, with 1,600 hours of work logged between 2018 and 2019.
The Navy reportedly spent $466,810 conducting experiments for the project between 2017 and 2019.
The Navy reportedly spent $466,810 was spent conducting experiments for the project(Image: DON Via FOIA)
Hydrogen bombs are currently the most dangerous bombs on the planet, and can devastate whole cities in one explosion.
The bombs are also called H-bombs and rely on thermonuclear energy to detonate.
According to a report issued by an American think tank, only the US, UK, China, France, Russia, India, North Korea and Israel have hydrogen bombs.
Hydrogen bombs are a more sophisticated version of the first-generation of atomic bombs, the nuclear bomb, which was detonated over the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on August 6 and 9, 1945.
SMERSH counterintelligence service was built by the Red Army at the end of 1942 or perhaps even earlier, but officially founded on April 14, 1943. This SMERSH invented Josef Stalin. January 13, 1947 was given a small book containing a description of extraterrestrials top SMERSH agents. This book described eight kinds of aliens and contained drawings and illustrations beings and UFOs.
Over the years, the book has been replenished, were added to the UFO photographs, as well as photographs and witnesses abducted (especially children), but also statistics. And much more! In the 80s he was found a copy of this book in the field in Buryatia (East Siberia). This copy of the book ended up in the hands of the KGB agent who had friends in the media. After the collapse of the USSR, only one (!) Of information and drawings of it leaked.
This book still exists, it is used and is supplemented by so-called Russian. “Special services”. The book is Secret documentation on UFO.
« Nous avons la preuve qu’il existe des civilisations extraterrestres » assure l'astrophysicien Avi Loeb
Nathalie Mayer - Journaliste
[EN VIDÉO] Que sait-on vraiment d’Oumuamua ? - EC - YouTubeLe 19 octobre 2017, un observatoire à Hawaï (États-Unis) rapporte l’observation, au cœur de notre Système solaire, d’un objet mystérieux : ‘Oumuamua. Depuis les astronomes cherchent à percer les secrets de cet objet interstellaire qui ne ressemble à aucun autre. Certains en viennent même à envisager l’inimaginable : ‘Oumuamua pourrait avoir été construit par une intelligence extraterrestre.
Sommes-nous seuls ? C'est probablement la question la plus profonde qui se pose aujourd'hui encore à l'humanité. Et si la réponse à cette question était non ? Serions-nous prêts à l'accepter ? Pour Avi Loeb, astrophysicien à l'université de Harvard (États-Unis), une technologie extraterrestre a récemment traversé notre Système solaire. Il nous explique comment il est arrivé à cette conclusion.
Octobre 2017. Un observatoire à Hawaï (États-Unis) rapporte l'observation d'unobjet mystérieuxqui traverse notreSystème solaireà unevitesseenviron quatre fois supérieure à celle de la plupart desastéroïdes. L'objet suit une trajectoire hyperbolique qui indique auxastronomesqu'il vient d'ailleurs. Il est baptisé 1I/2017 U1. Et rapidement surnommé 'Oumuamua, comprenez « l'invité », « le messager ». Il éveille toutes les curiosités. « 'Oumuamua éblouit les scientifiques », titre alors laNasa. Parce qu'il est le tout premierobjet interstellaireobservé aussi près de la Terre. Mais aussi parce qu'il présente un certain nombre de caractéristiques pour le moins surprenantes.
Comète, astéroïde, fragment de corps céleste. Au fil des mois, toutes les hypothèses concernant sa nature ont été mises sur la table. Y compris la plus folle de toutes : celle du vaisseau extraterrestre ! Une hypothèse soutenue -- envers et contre presque tous -- par Abraham Loeb, président du département d'astronomie à l'université de Harvard (États-Unis). « Laméthode scientifiqueencourage à la prudence. Nous formulons une hypothèse, recueillons des preuves et testons cette hypothèse. Puis nous affinons l'hypothèse ou rassemblons plus de preuves. Mais les modes peuvent décourager la prise en compte de certaines hypothèses et le carriérisme peut diriger l'attention et les ressources vers certains sujets et les éloigner d'autres », explique-t-il.
Le saviez-vous ?
En 2015, Ellen Stofan, alors scientifique en chef à la Nasa déclarait à l’occasion d’un événement public, s’attendre à ce que « des preuves de l’existence d’une vie au-delà de la Terre » soient trouvées dans les deux à trois décennies. Un point de vue alors partagé par Jeffrey Newmark, astrophysicien à la Nasa : « Je ne me demande pas si nous trouverons de telles preuves, mais quand. »
S’ils pensaient vraisemblablement plus à des formes de vie microscopiques, Avi Loeb, astrophysicien à l’université de Harvard (États-Unis), lui, pense que la preuve en question est passée par le Système solaire en 2017. Il détaille sa théorie dans un livre, traduit par Charles Frankel, qui vient de paraître aux éditions du Seuil : Le premier signe d’une vie intelligente extraterrestre
« Personnellement, je suis convaincu que 'Oumuamua est la preuve qu'il existe ou qu'il a existé des civilisations sensibles autres que la nôtre, ailleurs dans l'Univers. Et j'aimerais que la communauté accepte d'accorder autant de crédit à ma théorie qu'elle en accorde à l'hypothèse de la supersymétrie ou du multivers. Mais je crois aussi que l'humanité n'est pas prête à accepter que nous ne soyons pas uniques. »
Une vue d’artiste de l’objet que les astronomes ont officiellement baptisé 1I/2017 U1 et rapidement surnommé ‘Oumuamua. Jamais un objet de cette forme n’a été observé dans notre Système solaire auparavant.
‘Oumuamua, un objet interstellaire à la forme étrange
Mais sur quoi Avi Loeb appuie-t-il son hypothèse ? Sur quelques singularités relevées par les chercheurs qui ont étudié l'objet interstellaire. Sa forme d'abord. « Nous n'avons aucune image bien nette de l'objet. Seulement les données de onze jours d'observations -- avant que l'objet s'éloigne trop de la Terre -- par plusieurs télescopes, précise Avi Loeb. Elles montrent que la luminosité de ‘Oumuamua varie d'un facteur dix toutes les huit heures. » De quoi conclure que l'objet est bien plus long que large. Certains ont d'abord parlé de forme de cigare. Puis les données ont orienté, de manière statistiquement bien plus probable, vers une forme de disque.
Quoi qu'il en soit, nous n'avons jamais observé dans la nature, d'objet aussi plat et/ou allongé, nous assure Avi Loeb. Et c'est sans parler du fait que 'Oumuamua était aussi au moins dix fois plus brillant que n'importe quel astéroïde oucomètede taille similaire. » Un certain nombre d'explications ont été avancées.
Cette animation montre le parcours de l’objet interstellaire 1I/2017 U1, alias ‘Oumuamua à travers notre Système solaire. Suivant une trajectoire qui a surpris les astronomes.
« S'il n'y avait eu que cela, je serais passé à autre chose », nous confie Avi Loeb. Mais il y avait aussi l'anomalie de trajectoire qui apparait dans les données recueillies par les astronomes. Selon le chercheur de l'université de Harvard, celle-ci est « époustouflante ». « Les lois de la physique nous permettent de prédire la trajectoire d'un objet soumis à l'influence gravitationnelle du Soleil. Mais 'Oumuamua ne s'est pas comporté comme prévu. » À distance de notre étoile, il s'est vu comme poussé par une force mystérieuse. « Cela arrive aux comètes aussi. Une sorte d'effet de « moteur-fusée » qu'elles doivent à leur longue queue de glace qui s'évapore. »
Pour que cet effet fusée explique la déviation de trajectoire de 'Oumuamua, il aurait fallu que l'objet perde un dixième de sa masse. Pourtant, en scrutant l'espace environnant, les astronomes n'ont trouvé aucune trace d'eau, de gaz ou de poussière.
D'autres hypothèses ont été avancées. Celle d'une collision avec un autre objet, d'abord. Mais les données ne correspondaient pas. Puis celle que la glace portée par l'objet interstellaire ait été exclusivement composée d'hydrogène. Mais l'idée n'a pas tenu bien longtemps. Celle de l'action de la pression de rayonnement du Soleil a également été investiguée. Mais elle impliquerait une densité massique incroyablement faible. 1 % seulement de celle de l'air à la surface de la Terre. De quoi faire de 'Oumuamua l'objet le plus poreux jamais observé dans notre Système solaire.
Selon Avi Loeb, astrophysicien à l’université de Harvard (États-Unis), les caractéristiques d’’Oumuamua peuvent s’expliquer par l’hypothèse qu'il s'agit d’un engin extraterrestre.
« Pour moi, 'Oumuamua ne ressemble tellement à rien d'autre de ce que nous connaissons dans l'Univers qu'il doit avoir été conçu, construit et lancé par une intelligence extraterrestre. Peut-être un voile flottant dans l'espace. Une bouée de communication. Ou un débris abandonné par une civilisation autre que la nôtre, avance Avi Loeb. J'ai conscience que c'est une hypothèse exotique. Mais les autres hypothèses avancées pour expliquer ces caractéristiques particulières ne le sont pas moins. Aucune ne parvient à réellement expliquer la trajectoire de 'Oumuamua. Et pourtant, l'objet a dévié », n'hésite pas à lancer le chercheur en clin d'œil à Galilée.
« Soyons clairs. Je ne suis pas de ceux qui cherchent la lumière des projecteurs. Je ne suis pas "l'enfant terrible de l'astrophysique". Je me pose seulement des questions. En essayant de ne pas me laisser déborder par des préjugés. »
De sensoren op en rond de Mid-Atlantische Rug waarmee de gegevens voor de nieuwe studie verzameld werden.
University of Southampton
Pas ontdekt geologisch fenomeen duwt Amerika's en Afrika en Europa uit elkaar
Materiaal dat van diep onder de aardkorst naar boven opwelt, duwt mogelijk de continenten Noord- en Zuid-Amerika verder weg van Europa en Afrika en maakt zo de Atlantische Oceaan breder. Dat blijkt uit een nieuwe studie. Tot nu toe werd gedacht dat de aardplaten met de continenten uit elkaar bewegen in de Atlantische Oceaan door andere oorzaken en dat materie van dicht onder de aardkorst enkel de ruimte opvult die zo vrijkomt.
Luc De Roy
De tektonische platen waarop Noord- en Zuid-Amerika liggen en de platen die vastzitten aan Europa en Afrika, wijken uit elkaar met zo'n 4 centimeter per jaar. Tussen de continenten ligt de Mid-Atlantische Rug, een plaats waar nieuwe platen gevormd worden en die de scheidingslijn vormt tussen platen die naar het westen bewegen en platen die naar het oosten wegschuiven. Onder de rug komt er materie naar boven die de plaats opvult die ontstaan is doordat de platen uit elkaar gaan.
De conventionele visie is dat het uit elkaar wijken van de platen wordt aangedreven door gravitationele krachten - zwaartekracht - vanop een verre afstand, doordat de zwaardere delen van de platen ver weg opnieuw wegzinken in de aarde. De zwaardere delen die wegzinken aan de randen van de platen, trekken als het ware de platen uit elkaar waar ze elkaar raken in het midden van de oceaan.
Het probleem is dat de Atlantische Oceaan niet omringd wordt door dergelijke zware, wegzinkende delen van platen en dus is het een raadsel wat de platen uit elkaar drijft in het midden van de oceaan.
Nu heeft een team van seismologen onder leiding van de University of Southampton bewijzen gevonden voor een opwelling in de aardmantel - het materiaal tussen de aardkorst en de kern van de aarde - vanop diepten van meer dan 600 kilometer onder de Mid-Atlantische Rug. Die opwelling kan de platen van onderuit wegduwen en zo maken dat de continenten verder uit elkaar gaan.
Normaal gezien denkt men dat de opwellingen onder ruggen afkomstig zijn van veel kleinere diepten, van zo'n 60 kilometer.
De belangrijkste tektonische platen op aarde. De Mid-Atlantische Rug is aangeduid in het geel.
Wikimedia Commons
39 seismometers
Het team achter de studie stelde 39 seismometers op in het midden van de bodem van de Atlantische Oceaan in het kader van het PI-LAB (Passive Imaging of the Lithosphere-Asthenosphere Boundary) experiment en van EURO-LAB (Experiment to Unearth the Rheological Oceanic Lithosphere-Asthenosphere Boundary). De seismometers stonden verspreid over zo'n 1.000 kilometer en ze bleven een jaar lang werken om aardbevingen van over de hele wereld te registreren.
De seismometers legden vast hoe de seismische golven van de aardbevingen zich door de verschillende zones van de aardmantel bewogen.
De gegevens van de seismometers stelden de onderzoekers in staat om voor het eerst op grote schaal een beeld in hoge resolutie op te stellen van de aardmantel onder de Mid-Atlantische Rug.
Het experiment is een van de weinige die ooit op deze schaal zijn uitgevoerd in de oceanen en het liet het team toe variaties in de structuur van de aardmantel in beeld te brengen op diepten tussen 410 en 660 kilometer. Tussen die diepten ligt de zogenoemde manteltransitiezone, een overgangszone tussen de bovenmantel en de ondermantel van de aarde, die gekenmerkt wordt door abrupte faseovergangen in de mineralen van de mantel. Die mineralen nemen dichtere kristalstructuren aan naarmate de diepte en de druk groter worden.
Het signaal dat de seismologen zagen, wees op een onverwachte, trage, diepe opwelling van materiaal vanuit de diepere aardmantel.
De onderzoekers brachten in totaal tien weken op twee onderzoeksschepen in de Atlantische Oceaan door om de seismometers op te stellen en na een jaar opnieuw binnen te halen.University of Southampton
"Ongelooflijke resultaten"
"Dit was een gedenkwaardige missie die ons in totaal 10 weken naar het midden van de Atlantische Oceaan bracht", zei hoofdauteur Matthew Agius. "De ongelooflijke resultaten werpen nieuw licht op onze kennis van hoe het binnenste van de aarde verbonden is met platentektoniek, en we hebben waarnemingen opgetekend die nooit eerder gezien zijn."
Agius was een postdoctoraal onderzoeker aan de University of Southampton die nu aan de Università degli studie Rome Tre werkt. Platentektoniek is de wetenschappelijke theorie over hoe de bovenste laag van de aarde verdeeld is in platen die zich onafhankelijk van elkaar bewegen.
"Dit was volkomen onverwacht", zei doctor Kate Reichert, een van de leiders van het onderzoek. "Het heeft belangrijke gevolgen voor onze kennis over de evolutie van de aarde en haar bewoonbaarheid. Het toont ook aan hoe belangrijk het is nieuwe data te verzamelen uit de oceanen. Er is nog zo veel te onderzoeken."
"Dit werk is opwindend en het ontkracht aannames die al lang geloofd worden over het feit dat de mid-oceanische ruggen enkel een passieve rol spelen in de platentektoniek", zei professor Mike Kendall van de University of Oxford, een andere leider van het onderzoek. "Het suggereert dat in plaatsen zoals het midden van de Atlantische Oceaan krachten rond de rug een belangrijke rol spelen bij het uit elkaar drijven van nieuw gevormde platen."
De onderzoekers zeggen dat de bevindingen van de studie een beter inzicht bieden in de platentektoniek, die veel natuurrampen veroorzaakt, onder meer aardbevingen, tsunami's en vulkaanuitbarstingen. Ze kunnen wetenschappers helpen betere modellen en waarschuwingssystemen te ontwikkelen voor natuurrampen. De platentektoniek heeft ook een impact op het zeeniveau en heeft zodoende ook een invloed op de schattingen in verband met de klimaatverandering op een geologische - erg lange - tijdschaal.
Een video (Engels) van de universiteit van Southampton met uitleg over het experiment en de studie.
De seismometers van PI-LAB tekenden gedurende een jaar de effecten van aardbevingen overal ter wereld op en aan de hand van hoe de seismische golven zich door de aardlagen bewogen, konden de onderzoekers zich een beeld vormen van wat er zich in de aardlagen afspeelde, vooral in de manteltransitiezone, tussen 410 en 660 kilometers, die de overgang vormt tussen de bovenmantel en de ondermantel van de aarde.University of Southampton
Unraveling The UFO Mystery: France Is Working On It
Thousands of UFO sightings are reported every year but not many countries are willing to spend money investigating them – there is just one dedicated state-run team left in Europe. Is France onto something?, asks BBC.
You don’t need a time machine when you visit the French Space Centre headquarters in Toulouse – it’s already a throwback to the 1970s. Green lawns sweep on to wide boulevards with stout long rectangular office blocks on either side.
It’s almost Soviet-style in the heart of southern France. There are few signs of life even though 1,500 people, most of them civil servants, work in boxy offices along narrow unappealing corridors.
France has the biggest space agency in Europe – the result of the 1960s space race and President Charles de Gaulle’s grand determination to keep France independent of the US by building its own satellites, rocket launchers and providing elite space research.
An offshoot of all that – France is the only country in Europe to maintain a full-time state-run UFO (unidentified flying objects) department. There used to be one in the UK and another in Denmark but they closed down years ago due to budget cuts.
France’s UFO unit consists of four staff, and about a dozen volunteers who get their expenses paid to go on site and look into reports of strange sightings in the skies.
The team is called Geipan. That’s a French acronym for Study Group and Information on Non-Identified Aerospace Phenomenon.
Its boss is Xavier Passot. Surrounded by dozens of books on UFOs, and stacks of documents, he tells me his mission is to be as transparent as possible about strange sightings and to follow up on each one that his team receives.
A drawing from the files at the French UFO department (Image credit: BBC)
They publish their results on their website which gets 30,000 hits a month. The team receives, on average, two UFO sightings a day. The department insists an 11-page form is filled out for each one. The idea is to provide details including photographs where possible but also weed out jokers and time-wasters.
If someone claims to have seen strange lights in the skies, the UFO team might go online to see whether the observation took place on a flight path – it can trace commercial air traffic going back more than a week.
The team also has access to military flight paths and is in touch with the air force and air traffic controllers.
Sometimes if its staff are really intrigued by photos they have seen or if there have been several witnesses to the same sighting, they will call the local police to ask whether they can be considered credible.
They might even check with neighbours to see whether they were out drinking that night or perhaps smoking something other than cigarettes.
Passot says many of the people who get in touch are smokers, puffing away outside bars or their own homes at night, gazing at the stars.
One of the boxy offices houses yellowing archives going back to the 1950s. The papers I look at contain eerie accounts of strange things encountered in the skies by fighter pilots on routine reconnaissance missions.
For what it’s worth and for those who suspect there’s conspiracy afoot, Passot tells me he has never covered up a UFO sighting.
I take a look at some amazing photos of strange lights and circular forms caught on camera. One, taken by a motorist, of a white ring shape above Marseille is particularly grabbing.
UFO in Marseille
But the team figured that one out – it wasn’t invaders from Mars, just the reflection of a small interior overhead light in the car.
In fact, the department can explain away nearly all these phenomena and, believe it or not, the most common culprits are Chinese lanterns sent up at night during parties. The investigators often telephone the local town hall to ask if, perhaps, there had been a wedding going on at the time.
Balloons and kites floating in the skies also get mistaken for alien craft, and space debris and falling meteorites giving off strange lights are more common than one might think.
But there are around 400 UFO sightings going back to the 1970s that the French team cannot explain. One, an alleged flying saucer landing near Aix-en-Provence in 1981, they take very seriously – there were landing marks and multiple witnesses.
So are there really little green men? Well, the jury’s out on the colour but there are many working here, as well as others around the world, who are convinced there is some life out there.
And does the use of French taxpayers’ money on UFO research make sense, particularly in these times of budgetary constraint? That probably depends on whether you just saw an alien and, in the words of those Ghostbusters, who you gonna call?
How Bob Lazar Spoke The Truth About Flying Saucers 30 Years Ago
By George Knapp
A buzz was building inside the Kulturhuset, a community center built on Islands Brygge, the historic property on the waterfront of Copenhagen’s harbor.
Inside the hall, an audience of more than 120 Danes, Norwegians, Germans and Brits were waiting to hear about a mystery that first surfaced on Las Vegas television 30 years ago. What’s the latest about Area 51, they wanted me to tell them — and whatever happened to that flying-saucer guy Bob Lazar?
Bob Lazar
Few people know better than I do how outlandish the Lazar story sounded when his tale of a secret Nevada base housing UFOs exploded onto the scene back in November 1989.
To this day, it is still a bit befuddling to me that educated professionals, artists, musicians and retirees from all around Europe would gather to hear the latest scuttlebutt about the flying saucers supposedly housed in a secretive facility in the Nevada desert.
The Exopolitics Denmark conference, a two-day gathering in October, wasn’t the first to focus on the subject, and it won’t be the last. Area 51 is known around the world.
Every day I receive letters, emails or phone calls from curious people in Ecuador, Iceland, Hong Kong, Russia or other far-flung places asking about Area 51 or the bookish whistleblower who put it on the map.
And that’s exactly what Lazar did. Today, Area 51 is an oxymoron of the highest order — the world’s best-known secret base. It has been mentioned in such blockbusters as The Da Vinci Code, National Treasure, an Indiana Jones sequel and Independence Day, in which Earthlings used the base to fight off an alien invasion.
It’s been featured in “X-Files” episodes, inspired dozens of books, hundreds of magazine articles, songs, cartoons, poems and business enterprises.
Earlier this year, former President Clinton talked about his interest in aliens and Area 51 on the Jimmy Kimmel show. President Obama became the first sitting president to mention the name of the base — during a ceremony honoring Shirley MacLaine.
Heck, even the Kardashians visited the outskirts of the base for their reality show.
There are several businesses named after Area 51 — a rock ’n’ roll band, a couple of bars, a video game, a fireworks company, jerky stores, inflatable love dolls, a dance troupe, art exhibits and the Las Vegas triple A-baseball team.
After my first televised interview with Lazar, the most prominent business in Rachel, Nev., wisely changed its name from the Rachel Bar and Grill to the Little A’Le’Inn, selling T-shirts, posters, wine and Bob Lazar Christmas tree ornaments, along with “Beam Me Up, Scotty” drinks at the bar and Alien Burgers in the kitchen.
The story as told by Lazar has not only persisted but has blossomed, despite overtly hostile treatment by major media outlets and some of the best-known honchos of Ufology. Many of my journalism colleagues have worked their ink-stained panties into pretzel-thick bunches by fretting about the story.
Nonetheless, since the saucer stuff burst into the public consciousness, every major media organization, program and paper in the world has, sometimes reluctantly, beaten a path to Area 51’s once-obscure door. The attention has irritated some of my fellow reporters to the breaking point.
The nonexistent military base
“Sometimes I really do regret it.” On the media screen inside the Denmark hall, attendees are intently watching an edited clip of an interview with Lazar. “I almost feel like apologizing to them, saying, ‘I’m sorry. Can I have my job back?’”
It’s far too late for that — assuming he ever had a job out there in the first place. Whatever anonymity Area 51 enjoyed evaporated forever the moment Lazar spoke into a TV camera.
That first interview was broadcast in May 1989. Lazar’s face was hidden and he used a pseudonym, Dennis. He claimed he worked intermittently at a location called S-4, south of Groom Lake, the main facility of Area 51.
He said nine aircraft hangars had been built into the side of a mountain, adjacent to Papoose dry lake, disguised to look like the desert floor. Inside were nine flying saucers of alien origin.
“Dennis” said the program was controlled by the U.S. Navy and that he and other scientists were taking the saucers apart to figure out how they worked — “reverse engineering,” he called it.
Eight months later, on Nov. 10, KLAS-TV identified Lazar by name and showed his face as part of a series called “UFOs: The Best Evidence.” To this day, it ranks as the highest rated, most-watched local news program ever produced here. Within days, Lazar’s claims had spread to Europe and Japan.
TV crews and tabloid outfits flocked to Nevada. Tour buses filled with UFO enthusiasts staked out the deserts of the Tikaboo Valley. The guards, nicknamed “camo dudes,” who patrol the perimeter of Area 51 were overwhelmed by all the attention, and ticked off, too.
Before that first broadcast, the only people familiar with the name of the base were folks who worked there or at the Nevada Test Site, or who lived in one of the remote communities of central Nevada. A few journalists had written bits and pieces about the base in the ’60s and ’70s.
Aviation magazines speculated about spy planes that might be flying out of Groom Lake: the sleek SR-71 Blackbird, the gangly and magnificent U-2 and a strange craft rumored to be nearly invisible to radar.
Among the handful of Nevada journalists with an interest in the base were two Las Vegas muckrakers, Bob Stoldal and Ned Day, who years later would become my bosses.
Acting on a tip from a former CIA pilot and Area 51 watcher named John Lear, Day and Stoldal broke a big story about the existence of the stealth fighter, which, they reported, had been developed and tested at Area 51. Federal lawmen hauled Day in for questioning about the source of his information.
Stoldal was nabbed by military security on the outskirts of the base. In the early ’80s, when they hired me to work at KLAS-TV, they told me intriguing stories about the ominous military base known by many names — The Ranch, The Box, The Watertown Strip and, best of all, Dreamland.
By then the base had vanished from maps of the Test Site. The government began to pretend it didn’t exist, even though it had been acknowledged by the military as early as 1955 and had been photographed by Russian satellites. It became readily apparent that intelligence agencies and the military were flat out lying to the public, and, as lies go, it wasn’t very convincing.
‘There is no delusion’
In Copenhagen, I told the audience that it no longer matters to me whether anyone believes Lazar’s wild tale. (That’s almost true.) For years after the story broke, it was a burning priority for me to try to convince the public — and my skeptical colleagues — that the story was legitimate and true. Not anymore.
These days, I focus on explaining why we took the story seriously in the first place, why we put our credibility on the line and how the tale subsequently took on a life that no one could have imagined. Like it or not, the Lazar meme is alive and well.
“Look, I’m not out there giving UFO lectures or producing tapes. I’m not in the UFO business,” Lazar told me in an interview recorded this year at my home.
“I’m trying to run a scientific business, and if I’m The UFO Guy it makes it really difficult for me. It is to my benefit that people don’t believe the story. So when somebody says that they don’t believe my story, I say, ‘Great. Pass it around. I don’t want you to believe it because it makes life difficult for me.’”
These days, he owns a scientific supply company in Michigan. He doesn’t grant interviews and has done his best to put the whole episode behind him. He makes an occasional exception for me, mostly because of the strange road we have traveled together and the wars that have been fought in the odd little universe of Ufology.
“Look, I know what happened is true,” Lazar says. “There is no doubt. Period. There is no delusion.”
“Bob wouldn’t go to the trouble to make up a story to lie to people and then perpetuate that lie,” adds his close friend Gene Huff, a Las Vegas real-estate appraiser.
“I mean, he lives in his own world and doesn’t care what people think. Bob has no idea who won the Super Bowl last year, or the World Series. He’s busy doing scientific stuff in Bob Lazar World and would not waste his time perpetuating a lie about UFOs.”
When KLAS decided to pursue Lazar’s claims, we spent eight months looking into his background and the larger story about UFOs at Area 51. On the surface, Lazar seemed an unlikely person to bring into such a sensitive program, assuming such a program exists.
He likes machine guns and hookers, builds jet-powered cars, operated an outlaw fireworks spectacular and flies a skull-and-crossbones flag over his house. Hardly the profile of a stuffy government scientist. What’s more, the claims he made about places he worked and the school he attended could not be verified.
But instead of scaring us away from the story, the lack of records is what hooked us. Lazar said that prior to S-4, he had worked as a physicist on classified projects at Los Alamos National Lab in New Mexico.
The lab told me it had no record whatsoever of Lazar. After I found a lab phone book listing his name, and a front-page Los Alamos newspaper article that named him as a lab physicist, Los Alamos still denied having any records.
A headhunting company confirmed to me that it had hired Lazar to work at the lab and would send me copies of his records — but then clammed up, refusing to return phone calls or respond to letters, later denying it ever told me that it had the records.
I interviewed four people who had personal knowledge of Lazar working at Los Alamos on classified projects, and I even took a tour of the lab with Lazar as my guide.
Something was clearly wrong with this picture. Later, after Lazar got into legal hot water, I asked Nevada Rep. Jim Bilbray for help tracking down Lazar’s employment records. The congressman’s office said it was stonewalled by several agencies and had never seen anything like it.
The second thing that hooked us was Lazar’s knowledge of how things worked at Groom Lake. He says he spent very little time at Groom itself, but he knew, for instance, that a company called EG&G handled hiring. (Lazar claimed he had been sent to EG&G on a recommendation from physicist Edward Teller, whom he had met at Los Alamos.)
Lazar knew that employees were flown to the base in unmarked planes or driven to Groom on buses with blacked-out windows — all true. He told us he had been interviewed by a guy who might have worked for the FBI as part of a background check for his security clearance.
The agent’s name was Mike Thigpen. As it turned out, Thigpen was a real person, but he worked for something called the Office of Federal Investigation, which conducts background checks on people hired to work at the former Test Site. That part of Lazar’s story turned out to be true.
We also confirmed the existence of a location called S-4 on the Nellis range. There had been no references anywhere to such a place, but the public affairs office at Nellis confirmed to me that S-4 was a location at which the Air Force “tested certain equipment.” (If you ask them today, they will tell you they are “unable to find any such designation on any maps” of the range.) How did Lazar know it existed?
The most important information Lazar had was the location and time of test flights of the saucerlike craft. Three weeks in a row, he escorted a group of people out to the desert east of the Papoose range, and they witnessed a glowing saucer-shaped object rise above the mountains and perform dramatic maneuvers.
One of the sightings was captured on videotape. I interviewed each of the people who went along, and they told me the same story. Again, how did Lazar know? There had been no reports of aerial activity at Papoose.
To this day, the official story is that the government has never had a facility at that location (even though satellite maps show a road leading from Groom Lake to the spot where Lazar says the hangars were located). As an aside, earlier this year, a UFO researcher found images on Google Earth that appear to show the outline of what could be nine hangar doors on the side of Papoose dry lake.
After an inconclusive result on one polygraph test — the examiner thought Lazar was too frightened — he easily passed a second test, administered an ex-cop named Terry Tavernetti, who quizzed him about his core claims. No attempt at deception was detected. Not long after we reported Tavernetti’s findings, his office was burglarized and the charts from Lazar’s test were stolen.
Yet another reason we gave Lazar the benefit of the doubt is that we found witnesses to back up at least parts of his story. I’ve interviewed more than two dozen people who worked at Groom Lake at various times from the 1950s through the ’80s who have told me they saw saucerlike craft being tested or stored or taken apart in the vicinity of Area 51.
Most telling of all are those witnesses who were subsequently visited and threatened by various Men In Black types. Six people who offered to tell me their stories say they were visited immediately afterward and ordered to keep their mouths shut. If it had happened only once, I wouldn’t think much about it.
But these six people were solid citizens, not UFO nuts. One woman says she her life was threatened. Another man says he was warned about imprisonment if he talked.
What this told me was that someone was listening to my phone calls. In the days before Edward Snowden’s revelations, before we took for granted that the government is listening to every call and reading every email, this knowledge really pissed us off.
Years after the story broke, I spoke to two former spooks who admitted that their job was to follow me, Lazar, Lear and Huff to see who we met or spoke to, at our workplaces, homes or bars. If Lazar’s tale was baloney, why were we being followed?
Nonetheless, my approach to the Lazar material changed in the mid-’90s, for a couple of reasons. One is that I was concerned that I had crossed into advocacy instead of merely reporting on it. The fact is, it became personal. So many weird things happened during those first few years, things that are hard to explain if you weren’t there.
Second, I reluctantly came to realize that I would never be able to prove Lazar’s claims, no matter how many witnesses came forward to verify parts of his story.
The folks who run Area 51 are simply better at this stuff than I am, and were always able to deflect stories about what goes on there. So I changed my focus to merely explaining how the story played out and why I remained interested over the years.
Amazing and ridiculous
In the years since the stories broke, I’ve read the most amazing and ridiculous things about Area 51 and the saucer stories in local and national publications. Quite a few articles have poked fun at the story or at me. I’ve been the subject of at least three terrifically funny editorial cartoons in the Review Journal — all three now hang on my bathroom wall.
The RJ media critic speculated that people were “rushing home at night to see my UFO reports” because they wanted to see the moment when I finally went “bull-goose loony on the air.” One columnist bestowed on me the title of “grand mullah in the church of cosmic proctology.”
Some of this stuff was pretty funny, but it bothered me that so many journalists had made up their minds about the Area 51 stories without ever doing a bit of work on it or without interviewing any witnesses. They seemed to know ahead of time, perhaps through psychic visions, that the story was bunk. To my mind, that isn’t how journalism is supposed to work.
The most troubling failures by my colleagues has been their willingness to accept whatever stories are promulgated by the Air Force or CIA, as long as the end result is to poke fun at crazy UFO buffs.
In the years since the Lazar story broke, I’ve met scores of men who worked at Groom Lake on classified projects who have told me they never saw any saucers, and I believe them. But those same men have told me they would see co-workers in the chow line every day and never know what they were working on because they couldn’t talk about it. They were reportedly ordered to lie about their work to their own spouses.
The other explanation that has been swallowed by those who don’t want the story to be true is that maybe the tale told by Lazar is part of a disinformation plot, devised by the CIA or Air Force, as a way to distract attention away from something else flying around out there.
If that was the plan, it was a miserable failure.
As a result of the saucer tales, tens of thousands of people have made the trek out into the desert to watch the skies. Media crews are out there every week. Congressional investigators have asked tough questions. No one at Groom Lake ever wanted this much attention, regardless of what they are doing these days.
Critics of the story, or of Lazar, are welcome to laugh at it all they want. But the fact is, the debate is effectively over. Area 51 is now permanently carved into the public consciousness. Area 51 is now the yin to Roswell’s yang, and the UFO stories are never going to be divorced from the base itself. The UFO crazies won the battle. Long live Area 51.
By George Knapp (George Knapp is a Nevada journalist who has been honored with the highest awards in broadcast journalism–the Peabody Award (twice), the Dupont Award from Columbia University, the Edward R. Murrow Award, and 27 regional Emmy awards for investigative reporting, environmental reporting, and news writing.)
Nine young hikers came to a mysterious end in the winter of 1959 on a frigid remote pass in the Ural mountains, launching Dyatlov Pass into the world lexicon and kicking off a search for the reasons how they died and why their bodies were found scattered around the area, some with horrific and baffling injuries, others with none, some in various stages of undress, all frozen to death. When conventional causes proved inconclusive, the strange and bizarre quickly emerged – UFOs, aliens, Yeti, radiation from a secret rocket test, secret heat ray weapon, poisoned alcohol, KGB killing, a vacuum bomb and more. None of those has been confirmed either, so a group of scientists went back to one of the conventional causes and revealed this week the most plausible scientific explanation for the Dyatov Pass incident.
--“Here we show how a combination of irregular topography, a cut made in the slope to install the tent and the subsequent deposition of snow induced by strong katabatic winds contributed after a suitable time to the slab release, which caused severe non-fatal injuries, in agreement with the autopsy results.”
If you missed the clues (irregular topography, cut, snow, slab release), the authors of the study, published in the journal Communications, Earth & Environment, concluded that the Dyatlov Pass hikers were run over by a small avalanche which them the injuries and scattered them and their belongings, forcing their deaths by hypothermia.
Arguments against the avalanche theory, please.
A snow avalanche is not a new probable cause – in fact, it was one of the first proposed and first rejected. For one thing, there was no sign of an avalanche when rescuers finally arrived. Second, the slope was less than the minimum angle for an avalanche. Third, the hikers fled their tents in the middle of the night – not a typical avalanche time. Finally, not all of the injuries appeared to be of the type normally seen in avalanche victims.
Arguments for the slab avalanche, please.
Johan Gaume, head of the Snow and Avalanche Simulation Laboratory at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne, and Alexander Puzrin, a researcher at the Institute for Geotechnical Engineering in Zurich, studied records from the time of the incident and then ran them through a digital avalanche model. A slab avalanche addressed the main “it’s not an avalanche” objections. The angle of the slope was steeper than reported and subsequent snowfalls reduced the pitch and also smoothed over the signs of an avalanche. While the cut in the slope was made during the day, extreme winds blew as much as a foot of snow above the highest tent, weighing it down enough to cause a break and a slab avalanche. Finally, because the hikers were asleep in a vertical position, the injuries they suffered would not have looked the same as those of people upright while hiking, skiing or running away. (Excellent drawings of the above can be seen in the study.)
“In conclusion, our work shows the plausibility of a rather rare type of snow slab instabilities that could possibly explain the Dyatlov Pass incident. Yet, we do not explain nor address other controversial elements surrounding the investigation such as traces of radioactivity found on the victims’ garments, the behavior of the hikers after leaving the tent, locations and states of bodies, etc. While possible explanations are given in multiple published sources as well as by both the Investigative Committee and the Prosecutor General of the Russian Federation, we believe that this will always remain an intrinsic part of the Dyatlov Pass Mystery.”
Gaume and Puzrin hedge their bets by using the word “plausibility” in their conclusion. Still, it seems to be the best argument for a slab avalanche cause for the Dyatlov Pass incident. Will it convince those hoping for aliens, Yeti or one of the other unconventional explanations? No drum roll needed here.
The mid-1980s were a tense time in the world, with the Cold War in full swing and two heavily armed nuclear powers, the United States and the Soviet Union, at odds with each other. It was a time of proxy wars being fought and the two powers constantly saber rattling, an era of frequent brinksmanship, with nuclear missiles aimed at each other and the very existence of the world hanging in the balance, watching with fear what these two massive countries would do. In many ways it was akin to a standoff between two gunslingers, each staring the other one down, hand at the holster, waiting for the other to make a move, the slightest movement likely to cause the other to fire. Both countries had massive nuclear arsenals, which had been growing all of the time in a seemingly never-ending cycle of one-upmanship, and this was one of the reasons for Geneva Summit of 1985, held in the neutral territory of Geneva, Switzerland. Among the topics they would discuss were controlling the arms race, improving relationships, and whether or not they would team up if aliens ever invaded Earth. Wait, what?
The meeting was originally meant to discuss options for cutting down the number of nukes and smooth over diplomatic relations related to the ongoing arms race, but it was turning out to mostly serve as a venue for both powers to flex and posture on the stage of public opinion. The Geneva Summit had been tense going even during the planning stages, as the two nations had difficulty seeing eye to eye on anything or establishing a dialogue at all, really, not helped by the fact that the U.S. chose the months ahead of the meeting to unveil their plans to test the Strategic Defense Initiative. Also known popularly as Star Wars, it was a space based proposed missile defense system designed to protect the United States from attack by ballistic strategic nuclear weapons, both launched from land or submarines, and it really stirred the hornets’ nest as far as the Soviets were concerned, making things that much more abrasive and antagonistic when talks at the summit actually began.
When they met in Geneva, both superpowers engaged in a dance of demands and proposals met with rebuffs and counter demands, with both seeming to have different agendas. For instance, the Soviets wanted to halve the number of nuclear weapons, while the U.S. seemed more interested in making sure that both sides did not gain a first-strike advantage. The Soviets wanted the Star Wars system halted, whereas the U.S. was very interested in protecting their right to have defensive systems. The Soviets suggested a unilateral moratorium on underground nuclear tests, but the U.S. refused to join it. It seemed to be going nowhere, as it was very apparent that neither one of the superpowers trusted the other at all.
Among all of this, one of the main attractions of the Geneva Summit was that it was the first time for then American president Ronald Reagan to meet Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev face to face. As all eyes around the world watched, the two Cold War leaders met at the picturesque chateau Maison de Saussure, and it was just about as awkward as one might expect. One the first day of the two-day meeting, Reagan told Gorbachev that the U.S. desired peace above all else, to which Gorbachev retorted that the U.S. government was intentionally keeping its citizens tense and distrustful of the Soviets. Indeed, Gorbachev complained that one of their main problems was this distrust and paranoia. And around and around it went, going a half an hour over schedule. Reagan accused the Soviets of being overly aggressive, and Gorbachev retorted that the Americans were fear-mongers and overreacting. They also clashed about the arms race, the Strategic Defense Initiative and various other issues, with Reagan later saying that Gorbachev was belligerent and Gorbachev describing Reagan as “unyielding.” Just about the only thing they could agree on was that they should meet again and continue the talks. Yet there was apparently something else they agreed on as well.
At one point during the negotiations, Reagan and Gorbachev stopped the meeting to take a break and have a walk together. It was frustrating for reporters and everyone watching from home, because it turned out to be a very private walk, with only their interpreters allowed to follow, and with not even Reagan’s Secretary of State George Shultz allowed to go with them. They went for their walk, came back, and for years there was much debate and discussion about what the two had talked about during that time. It was not until 2009 when both Schultz and Gorbachev participated in an interview with Charlie Rose and the subject came up. Shultz described how the two had suddenly taken a break to go to “some cabin on Lake Geneva where there was a fire in a fireplace and you sat down there.” At that point Gorbachev excitedly jumped in to tell of what they had talked about, and that was apparently what the two countries would do if they were attacked by aliens. Gorbachev said:
From the fireside house, President Reagan suddenly said to me, ‘What would you do if the United States were suddenly attacked by someone from outer space? Would you help us?’ I said, ‘No doubt about it.’ He said, ‘We too.’ So that’s interesting. I’m sorry for having interrupted you, but it was an interesting moment.
At the time there was a lot of laughter in the studio, and one might have even gotten the impression that Gorbachev had just made it up on the spot as a joke, if it weren’t for the fact that Reagan would later corroborate it and confirm that it was true. He even related it at a speech to the United Nations a few years later. It is unclear just how serious Reagan was when he asked this, whether it was an honest question or merely he, being a total science fiction geek, desperately trying to find some footing with the Soviet leader during tense exchanges by approaching it through a pop culture lens. Yet there has been much debate that perhaps Reagan was not only being sincere, but that it suggests he had inside knowledge that an alien attack was an actual possible threat. Writer Alex Hollings, at the site SOFREP has said of this:
It seems reasonable to assume that Reagan was using the concept of an alien invasion to point out how even the enemy nations had a mutual desire to see the world survive — a concern that seems appropriate when working to avert a nuclear war. However, in the minds of some, that private stroll in 1985 remains as among the best evidence to date that the United States government was aware of a potential threat posed by the presence of UFOs or alien life. Whether or not Reagan was secretly aware of the presence of UFOs, or if he was simply using popular culture to find common ground with other world leaders, will remain the subject of debate among those with interests in either explanation, but regardless of any potentially hidden intent, it’s nice to know that even the United States and Soviet Union could have put their tensions on hold long enough to fight for the sake of the planet.
There has also been a lot of talk that the two leaders delved into this much more than they let on, or that they actually put plans into place. This little meeting has managed to attract a great deal of attention, despite the fact that it was a seemingly tiny little exchange that likely meant nothing. Yet, we are left to wonder. Why did Reagan bring this up? What did it mean, if anything? Did he know anything, or was this just banter coming from a science fiction aficionado trying to break the ice with a formidable rival? We will probably never know for sure, but it is certainly an odd little exchange from a turbulent time in history.
The Charlotte Observerreports that multiple witnesses to a string of strange lights in the sky near Charlotte, North Carolina Saturday night took to Facebook to report their sightings. Photos documenting a formation of lights floating over the Indian Trail community in Union County, just southeast of Charlotte, were shared in the private Facebook group “What’s Up Indian Trail?”.
Witness Alisa Homewood described her sighting as soundless. The lights “flickered like lanterns, but followed the same exact path up until they disappeared which was odd.” Homewood later told The Charlotte Observer the lights “resembled how a flame would look, flickering in the dark.”
Although Homewood’s description seems typical of so-called Chinese lanterns or sky lanterns, which in complete darkness resemble a series of candle flames or floating fires drifting through the sky, the photos she captured of a trio of those lights show them to be bluish in color. If the lights were sky lanterns, they would most likely be reddish or orangish in hue.
In clarification Homewood said:
“In the sky it did not look blue, it looked like a group of bright lights. I thought it was odd though, that a few people have seen and photographed that same blue-ish grouping of lights.”
Hundreds of commenters on Facebook passionately opined on the lights, speculating that they were flares, drones, or even a SpaceX rocket launch. Others suspected it might be a Starlink train, a line of low-orbiting satellites deployed by SpaceX, intended to one day offer broadband Internet connectivity everywhere on Earth. Videos of these Starlink trains resemble an alien invasion and should be widely distributed to quell any future War of the Worlds-level-hysteria. If you’d like to see one of these formations in action, you can track Starlink and get recommendations of dates and times that offer the best visibility in your area.
A Starlink train was my favorite explanation. That is, until I got in touch with Alisa Homewood, and was able to ask some follow-up questions.
I’m writing an article on the NC lights. Have you received a satisfactory explanation of what they were?
AH: I haven’t received any explanations and don’t anticipate I will. There are several speculations from the community but nothing with evidence.
What color would you say the lights were? White? Yellow? Orange? Red?
AH: They were orange first then looked bright white, then when they were right overhead they were orange like fire.
How many other witnesses posted about the sighting Saturday?
AH: I only saw one other person in the parking lot with me (other than my family), but she hasn’t come forward and I don’t know who she was. Otherwise there are over 100 comments on the Facebook post, and I believe maybe 5-10 mentioned seeing something similar, and I believe only a few (3 or so) said they saw what I saw the same night, but no one has produced photos to confirm we saw the same thing.
What time of night was your sighting?
AH: 9:30-9:40 p.m. Another lady saw them at 5 a.m. a different day.
I presented Alisa Homewood with a video that I took of known sky lanterns, which initially look very mysterious, especially if you’ve never seen them before. When I first saw these flickering flames in the sky, I was compelled to follow them in my car until I got to the bottom of it. Then I made a video about it.
Did what you saw resemble the sky lanterns in this video?
AH: Yes, only there were several. The lights looked like individual flames, they were flickering just like that video you just shared. That was my thought . . . Chinese lanterns. They formed into almost a line and went very high then disappeared. No one in the area has confirmed they sent them up, I was hoping someone would say “Oh, that was our group.” To be fair, I was honestly just curious what they were. I have no notion to believe they are or aren’t lanterns, I was just curious. But yes, my exact words when I saw them were “They resembled lanterns.”
For me, pending new information, the case is closed. The string of strange lights spotted by Alisa Homewood this Saturday in North Carolina were most like sky lanterns. One mystery solved. Onto the next!
A Harvard professor named Avi Loeb has made some pretty interesting claims over the years. You may remember his name as he claimed not long after ‘Oumuamua was discovered back in October of 2017 that it was an alien spacecraft instead of an interstellar object passing through our Solar System.
As for the alien spacecraft theory, Loeb came to this theory not only because it came from another star system, but also because of its unusual cigar shape. He claimed that it was an ancient type of spacecraft that ended up being covered with debris over the years from traveling through space. He added that the object was much more reflective than a normal space rock.
He has again made headlines claiming that there are possibly a quadrillion alien spacecrafts traveling just in our Solar System alone. In fact, he went as far to say that alien spacecrafts may outnumber humans by more than 140,000 to one. While that’s pretty hard to believe, he is very committed to this new theory.
In a recent interview with New Statesman, he claimed that there are countless more alien spacecrafts like ‘Oumuamua and that experts may find many more of them in the future. He described his theory by saying in part, “There should be one in every volume roughly the size of the orbit of the Earth around the sun… it’s pretty small. So it means that there are plenty of them, a quadrillion of them, inside the Oort cloud. Inside the solar system. There are lots of them.”
Going back to the hydrogen ice theory, Greg Laughlin, who is a professor of astronomy at Yale University, stated back in June of last year, “This is a new type of object, but it looks like there may be many more of them showing up going forward.” Numerous more hydrogen ice objects sounds a lot more plausible than a quadrillion alien spacecrafts. But you never know as anything is possible. I just hope they don’t all decide to visit Earth at the same time…
Which one of those has been uttered about the Nazca Lines – those mysterious geoglyphs in Peru’s Nazca Desert that are only visible from the air, where the shapes clearly depict birds (the winner!), animals, plants and some non-discernable drawings. While some speculate they could have been created by aliens as landing strips (half-points issued if those are the reasons you picked ‘plane’ or ‘Superman’), the real purpose of the Nazca lines has eluded discovery. Now, yet another team of archeologists have studied the lines and will be presenting their full conclusion of their purpose at an online conference in February. Fortunately for those of us unable to attend, they recently issued a press release.
“Not only have we unveiled the mystery with numerous and conclusive proofs, but we have also discovered a system that can save millions of lives around the world.”
Salvar Nazca is an international multidisciplinary team or archeologists and engineers led by Carlos E. Hermida who, with Peruvian researcher Luis Cabrejo, tourismologist and doctor in History of Art Ana Mafé García and engineer of Roads, Channels and Ports, Xosé Manuel Carreira Rodriguez, believe they’ve determined the likely purpose of the Nazca Lines. What could it be that caused Hermida to describe it as ‘lifesaving’?
“The disclosure of this study will lead us to understand from now on the famous Nazca Lines as a complex system of water management for the irrigation of vast extensions of the desert, which had the objective of controlling it and taking advantage of it in the different seasons of the year in the face of such changing humidity conditions in that region.”
That’s right – Salvar Nazca has determined that the Nazca Lines were a giant irrigation system created by people living in Peru between 500 BCE and 500 CE. Hmm. While it’s true that the Nazca Lines are in a desert whose dry conditions helped to preserve the lines for 2,000 years, why are they shaped like birds and animals rather than the familiar grid patterns or concentric circles of modern irrigation systems? The team is most likely referring to the crisscrossing lines and the spiral that are more prevalent but less popular than the biological shapes. How did those fit into the irrigation system? That appears to be another mystery that we’ll have to wait until the conference for an answer to.
And why does the study tout this ‘discovery’ as lifesaving? Salvar Nazca used satellite images of 2500 square km of the lines and took eight years to study them, comparing their shapes and locations to modern cartography of the area. Do they see this as a way for modern Peruvians to irrigate and farm the dry desert again? That didn’t seem to work for the Nazca culture which created them before falling around 800 CE due to climate change and destruction of plant life while dealing with the floods that instead caused erosion.
The paper, titled “Archaeological Tourism in Peru: the Nazca Lines as an immense irrigation system for harvesting water-intensive crops,” will be presented at the VII International Scientific Professional Congress of Cultural Tourism broadcast on February 17-19 from Cordoba, Spain. That’s when we may hear the authors say:
It’s a bird! It’s a plain! It’s an irrigation system! It’s all of the above!
Linda Moulton Howe: UFO Disclosure Bombshells! John Greenewald & CIA UFO files
Interview with John Greenewald, Jr, from The Black Vault – https://www.theblackvault.com – CIA has 40+ years of documents – John has shared 2,800+ pages from a DVD shared with him by the CIA
ALL RELATED VIDEOS, selected and posted by peter2011
60+ Schoolchildren Witness A UFO Land & Extraterrestrial Beings Emerge: The “Ariel” Phenomenon
IN BRIEF
The Facts:
In 1994, more than 60 school children in Ruwa, Zimbabwe witnessed the landing of a spacecraft by their schoolyard. Multiple beings came out of the craft and were apparently seen by the children.
Reflect On:
All of these children told the same story, drew the same pictures and received the same telepathic messages. Many are still speaking about the incident today. It impacted and changed their lives forever.
What Happened:
One of the most interesting UFO witness cases that exists within the lore of the phenomenon comes from Ruwa, Zimbabwe in September of 1994. The encounter took place at Ariel Primary School and involved more than 60 school children who were out playing at recess. All of the children, who were in elementary school at the time, describe seeing multiple hovering objects that one would describe as “spaceships” or “UFOs” as well as multiple beings exiting the craft.
What’s fascinating about this story is that all of the children, who were interviewed by many, including Harvard psychiatrist Dr. John Mack, told the exact same story. They did so in such a precise manner and appeared to be completely sincere about their experience, something that’s not hard for children to do. Another remarkable fact about this case is that the children’s drawings of the objets and the beings were extremely consistent with one another. They were, according to Mack, clearly telling a story as if it had actually happened, they believed what they were saying and there was no evidence of psychosis or delusion among the children.
Below are some remarks from the teachers, taken from some interesting and old footage that’s been uploaded to Youtube. You can also see a few interviews with the children with John Mack and others at that time as well. What’s interesting is that many of these children are still speaking about the incident today. There’s an example of that at the end of the article.
I was able to find a few videos with the children from 1994 on Youtube ... ( videos adapted by peter2011)
They came running up here in such a panic, and even if we staged it they could have not all run together like that. They came up here like a living snake, we were in a staff meeting and we just heard them screaming and screaming…A child cannot make that up. – Teacher (From Youtube videos linked above)
I was very skeptical in the beginning as well, I believed that they had seen something, but I wasn’t prepared to accept that it was anything supernatural, but I think the consistency of what’s been going on indicates that it was more than I was prepared to admit at the beginning.” – Teacher (From Youtube videos linked above)
Some of the children were asked what they got from the experience. One of them answered that they were here to tell us that “we don’t look after the planet properly.” This is interesting, having been a researcher in the field more than 15 years I can tell you that this type of theme and communication among those who have claimed to have had contact with beings from other worlds is quite common. The children were quite shaken and left with some horrible feelings and visions that our planet may be destroyed because of our actions. One of the children in the videos linked above stated that “all the trees would go down and nobody would be able to breath.”
As mentioned above, many of the children still speak about the incident today, many of them will be featured in an upcoming documentary currently in the works, but it has yet to be released. The film is supposed to cover the story of everyone involved — the students, teachers, investigators, BBC Bureau Chief Tim Leach, Pulitzer Prize-winning Harvard psychiatrist Dr. John Mack — and includes never-before-seen interviews of the children shortly after the encounter, as well as interviews with them more than two decades later.
Below is a brief video of one of the children, Emily Trim years later speaking about the encounter. Here’s’ a video with Salma Siddick in 2018, another one of the children (at the time) from the 1994 encounter.
You can find a few more clips with some of the students as they’ve aged, here.
We will have to wait for the documentary to release for more.
The Takeaway: Extraterrestrial contact experiences among children, adults, and people from all walks of life and various professions is and has been a common theme for a very long time. For years this has been attributed to some type of “psychosis”, which is interesting because even if one of these experiences is true it has tremendous implications. We’ve come a long way since 1994, and now the existence of UFOs has been verified and confirmed, with many people with “credible” backgrounds alluding to the idea that some of these objects are most likely extraterrestrial in origin. The topic is receiving mainstream attention from establishment media mouthpieces like CNN and the New York Times.
All of this mainstream media disclosure seems to be quite rapid and it comes after many decades of what seems to have been a ridicule campaign that tossed this topic in the “conspiracy theory” bucket. I am concerned about mainstream media and “official” government disclosure of this phenomenon. This topic is quite large and vast and has tremendous implications, what we will receive from governments and mainstream media will most likely be a heavily sanitized version of disclosure as well as an attempt to control the masses perception of the phenomenon.
In my opinion, you are better off doing some independent research, and investigating cases like this one among the thousands of others. If you do, you will find astonishing corroboration and consistency among those who have claimed to have some sort of experience with beings from other worlds.
This topic has the potential to expand human consciousness and initiate a major paradigm shift for humanity. That being said, we have a lot of things we need to do here on planet Earth so we can change the human experience and make it a better one for all life that resides here, and mother Earth herself.
We’ve been writing about this topic in depth for more than 10 years. If you want to sift through our articles on the subject, you can do so here.
Alien Craft Close Encounter And Landing In Tully Australia
Pictured: It’s definitely aliens.
JANUARY 19, 1966 - TULLY AUSTRALIA
At 9:00 am on January 19, 1966, a calm sunny day, a 28 year old banana farmer named George Pedley was driving a tractor near Horseshoe Lagoon on the property of Albert Pennisi, near Tully, in tropical far north Queensland, Australia. When he was about 25 yards from the lagoon, he heard a loud hissing sound above the noise of the tractor.
Suddenly,an object rose out of the swamp. When I glanced at it, it was already 30 feet above the ground, and at about tree-top level. It was a large, grey, saucer-shaped object, convex on the top and bottom and measured some 25 feet across and 9 feet high.
While I watched, it rose another 30 feet, spinning very fast, then it made a shallow dive and took off with tremendous speed. Climbing at an angle of 45 degrees it disappeared within seconds in a south-westerly direction…
Another surprise came when Pedley rounded the bend of the road and came to the spot from which the object had risen. There in the lagoon was a large circular area that was clear of reeds and in which the water was rotating slowly. It had not been like that three hours earlier when he had passed the lagoon. After looking around, he got back on the tractor and left.
A few hours later, at about noon, Pedley returned to the lagoon for a second look. The scene had changed, because now the circular area was covered by a floating mass of green reeds that were distributed in a clockwise radial pattern.The circular mass of reeds was about 30 feet in diameter.
Pedley was by now excited enough about what he was seeing to go and tell Albert Pennisi, the owner of the sugar cane farm land on which the lagoon was located, and another friend. Pennesi recalled that his dog had acted strangely that morning, barking madly and heading off toward the lagoon at about 5:30 am.
Pennisi and the other man were amazed by the circular mass of reeds. Wading out to the mass, they found that they could swim under the mass of reeds and that the lagoon floor beneath it was smooth and showed no traces of roots.
Oddly, the outside edges of the mass of reeds angled down, similar to the shape of a saucer placed face down. Pennisi went and got his camera and took photographs of the mass of reeds, which was now beginning to turn brown on its top surface. George Pedley reported his experience to the Tully police that evening, and they in turn reported it to the RAAF after making a trip to the site the next day, January 20.
Within days, the media had picked up the event and the area was filled with investigators, many of whom were trying to prove theories as to the cause of the “nest” such as helicopters, big birds, crocodiles, reed-eating grubs, and whirlwinds of one sort or another. Pedley’s UFO sighting was all but overlooked in the flurry of explanations.
During the course of the investigations, as many as five other “nests”, all smaller than the original, were discovered. In some of these, the reeds were rotated in a counter-clockwise direction and a couple of them showed signs of burning in the center of the nest. Samples of the original nest were sent to Brisbane for analysis, but nothing unusual was detected. Other than being part of the “nest”, the only unusual thing about the reeds was that they turned brown in about 8 hours, whereas reeds uprooted by hand in the lagoon took three days to turn brown.
In another unusual twist, Albert Pennisi told a reporter from the Sydney, Australia newspaper The Sun that he had been dreaming about a UFO landing on his property for a week:
I’d get them almost every night. And they were beginning to worry me. I couldn’t understand them. It was always the same. This thing like a giant dish would come out of nowhere and land nearby.
And I would watch it in my dream and get real afraid before it went away. Then on Wednesday morning about 5 o’clock my dog suddenly seemed to go out of its mind. It was howling like a mad thing and raced off towards the lagoon.
What happened at Horseshoe Lagoon? There was never any evidence that there were any helicopters in the area nor any demonstrated reason for one to be over the lagoon. There was no evidence that crocodiles made the nest and analysis of the reeds from the nest showed no trace of “reed-eating grubs.” There was no known bird that would or could make such a nest in three hours.
The best explanation that the RAAF could offer was that the nest was created by a willy willy, a type of small whirlwind known to occur in the area.
Although a conclusive determination could not be made, the most probable explatation was that the sighting was of a “willy willy” or circular wind phenomenon which flattened the reeds and sucked up debris to a height of about 30 feet, thus forming what appeared to be a “flying saucer”, before moving off and dissipating.
Hissing noises are known to be associated with “willy willies” and the theory is also substantiated by the clockwise configuration of the depression.
However, such whirlwinds, except when they occur in the desert as dust devils, normally accompany thunderstorms, and although the Tully event occurred during the rainy season, January 19 was a sunny day with little or no wind. Pedley described what he saw as a blue-grey object shaped like two saucers face to face.
This description doesn’t sound like a whirling mass of swamp debris, and there was no fallen debris in the area where the dissipation would have occurred. Finally, how does the whirlwind explanation account for the fact that the water was clear when Pedley looked the first time, yet was covered by the mass of reeds when he looked again three hours later?
KENS NOTE:
Of course the RAAF would try to debunk the encounter with an alien craft. That was their job, in the sixties, just like the american military. The goverment did not want the public to know the truth because it would cause panic and make the goverment’s look inadequate.
Thanks in so small part to movies like Close Encounters and Signs, the imagery of UFO encounters and alien abductions is deeply tied to the American mid-west. Aliens rustle amongst fields of corn. Strange sounds emanate from big red barns. People in plaid shirts recount grabbing the shotguns out of their pickups because they saw some strange lights up in the sky and wish to respond the only way they know how. But the American heartland doesn’t have a monopoly on UFO sightings — hell, neither does the entire contiguous United States. People believing that aliens are real transcends all borders; possible UFO sightings crop up all over the world constantly, even in our tiny, huge corner of the world.
The Westall UFO Incident
Arguably the biggest incident in the Australian UFO mythos is the Westall UFO encounter. According to a combined 200 students and teachers, on April 6, 1966, a UFO was spotted hanging around over two different schools (Westall High School and Westall State School) for about 20 minutes, before landing in a nearby paddock and eventually flying off again.
The object was described as being a silvery disc with a purple hue, roughly the size of about two cars. One of the explanations put forth is that they saw a weather balloon but, 50 years later, we still have no concrete idea what all these people saw.
Studio 10 spoke to a bunch of the witnesses for a special 50th-anniversary show and a bunch of them are still pretty adamant about what they saw:
The man described seeing a blue-grey disc around 25 feet in diameter rise out of a nearby lagoon before flying off. Upon inspection, a section of the lagoon the size and shape of the saucer appeared to have formed a whirlpool ‘devoid of all plant life’. Afterwards, dead reeds started to float to the surface, forming the ‘nest’ from which the incident takes its name. According to Pedley, when he told the owner of the sugarcane farm on which the incident happened, the owner said that, a few hours before Pedley saw the saucer, his dog had been acting strangely, barking in an agitated fashion and running in the direction of the lagoon from which the saucer supposedly emerged.
Pictured: It’s definitely aliens.
Albert Pennisi, the owner of the neighbouring sugarcane farm, reportedly told a journalist from Sydney that he had been dreaming of UFOs all week before the event. Hell yeah, dude.
Nullarbor Car Jacking
Next, we cast our beady eyes on South Australia in the year 1988, when a family driving through the Nullarbor claimed to have their entire car lifted off the ground by — you guessed it — bloody aliens.
According to a wonderfully detailed dive into the story by the ABC, the Knowles family was making the long drive from Perth to Melbourne when they were ‘tormented’ by a large glowing sphere of light for 90 minutes. The glowing ball chased them before landing on the roof and lifting them clear off the ground, as described by a police spokesperson at the time:
It apparently picked the car up off the road, shook it quite violently and forced the car back down on the road with such pressure that one of the tyres was blown.
One of the family members in the car reported hearing their voices distort as if time was slowing down, either a symptom of shock or just the coolest UFO thing in the world. If that’s not creepy enough, here’s what the mum told reporters happened after it picked them up:
I wound down the window and I felt this thing on the roof… all of this smoke stuff started coming into the car, the car was covered in black stuff. It was a small light and all of a sudden it became big like this, like a big ball.
I think we can all agree: what the hell.
The Cahill Abduction
Five years later, we had the Cahill Abduction, in which a woman driving back to Melbourne from the Dandenong Ranges claimed to have been abducted by aliens in Narre Warren North. Kelly Cahill (not her actual name) and her husband Andrew reported seeing what looked like a blimp with a ‘ring of orange headlights’.
Cahill said that, as they got closer, she became blinded by the light coming from the object and then woke up later, noticing that she had lost an hour of time. It doesn’t end there though: she claimed to notice a new, triangular shaped mark on her stomach and, after a few weeks, began to recall more and more details of the abduction.
Cahill described seeing ‘skinny black figures with bulging red eyes’, in addition to seeing people in two other cars who also witnessed the abduction — although none of these people have spoken to the media outside of UFO researchers.
Pictured: Cahill’s depiction of the aliens, which are REAL.
The Disappearance Of Frederick Valentich
Keen-eyed UFO enthusiasts may have spotted a rather prominent omission from this list, which is, of course, the disappearance of Frederick Valentich in 1978. Valentich and his Mi-619-386.png (available on Cessna 182L disappeared after he reported being followed by a flying object that he described as “not an aircraft“.
I didn’t get into this one because someone else has already done the hard work for me, in the form of our Australian mysteries podcast, the All Aussie Mystery Hour (available on iTunes and Spotify). Mel and Jose get way, way deep on this one back in episode two and it is well worth your time if you reckon aliens are either a) real or b) fake but super cool.
Ball of Light, Touchet, Washington, USA 1-27-2021, UFO Sighting News.
Date of sighting: Jan 27, 2021 Location of sighting: Touchet, Washington, USA Source: MUFON #113398
This eyewitness caught about 30 seconds of a glowing ball of light moving across the tree tops in his back yard in Washington state. The ball is almost pulsating and seems to be moving slowly on purpose to watch the humans reactions on the ground. As curious as we are about different alien species...they also feel the same about us. Knowledge is the one constant in the universe...the universal gold standard valued above all else. Aliens wish to learn about us so they can report their discoveries to others and teach others what they learned. Wow, 100% proof that aliens are right in our back yards, if we just keep an eye out for them.
Bright UFO caught on tape over Touchet, Washington 27-Jan-2021
This huge bright UFO was filmed over Touchet, Washington on 27th January 2021.
Witness report:
Bright random light of four; hovering; quick ascent. I was raised within hours of area 51 in California, and have never witnessed a UFO until now. At the dusk of day, just off my back porch, I noticed some brightness of lights flashing, looking closer it was evident the object was stationary and hovering. Grabbing binoculars, I could make out a dome shape with four pulsating lights along it’s bottom edge. It was disappointing and unfortunate this detail was not captured in my video. After a duration of 3 minutes or so, the object ascended backwards like a shooting star, and disappeared from my sight.
In November, a new mini-moon began orbiting Earth. NASA later confirmed it’s a lost-and-found 60s-era rocket from the Surveyor 2 moon mission, launched more than 50 years ago. Now the object – SO 2020 – is coming close again for one last time. Here’s how to see it!
Strange space object 2020 SO was discovered on September 17, 2020, on approach to Earth. On November 8, it slowly drifted into Earth’s sphere of gravitational dominance, to become a new mini-moon. It’ll escape back into a new orbit around the sun in March 2021. During that time, it’ll make 2 large loops around our planet. In this image, Earth is the blue dot. The moon’s orbit is the yellow circle. 2020 SO’s trajectory is the looping pink line.
Astronomers first noticed the object now known as 2020 SO last September. Orbit models quickly showed that both the low speed and trajectory of the approaching object were unusual. The models showed that Earth would capture this object – temporarily – as a new mini-moon. And that’s what happened. 2020 SO has been orbiting Earth since November 8. Following further analysis of its motion – and a very close approach of the object (just 30,000 miles, 50,000 km or 0.13 lunar-distances) on December 1 – NASA was able to confirmthat the object is a relic of the early Space Age, a Centaur upper-stage rocket booster, once called America’s workhorse in space. Now 2020 SO is about to make one more close approach to Earth on February 2, 2021. It’ll pass farther away this time, but still within 0.58 lunar-distances (140,000 miles, or 220,000 km). Afterwards, in March 2021, Earth’s gravity will relinquish its hold on the object.
It’ll no longer be a mini-moon for Earth. Instead, it’ll be orbiting the sun.
You have a chance to see 2020 SO online. The Virtual Telescope Project in Rome will be showing the object online on the night of February 1. Italian astronomer Gianluca Masi wrote:
We will say it goodbye, live: join us from the comfort of your home!
The live feed is scheduled for the night of February 1, 2021, starting at 22:00 UTC (that’s February 1 at 4 p.m. Central, 5 p.m. Eastern, 2 p.m. Pacific in North America; translate UTC to your time). That’s when, Gianluca said, 2020 SO will be at its best above the Virtual Telescope’s robotic telescopes in central Italy. See the poster below for details and read more about this event via Virtual Telescope.
Astronomers first sighted the object on September 17 using the 71-inch (1.8-meter) Pan-STARRS1 telescope at Haleakala, Hawaii. They gave it its designation – 2020 SO – and added it as an Apollo-type asteroid in the JPL Small-Body Database.
However, 2020 SO was quickly seen to have some features that set it apart from ordinary asteroids. According to NASA/JPL calculations, the object sped past Earth’s moon at a speed of 1,880 miles per hour (3,025 km/h) or 0.84 km per second (.5 mi/sec). That is an extremely slow speed for an asteroid.
These calculations also show the apparent “slow asteroid” orbiting the sun every 1.06 years (387 days). The low relative velocity, along with the Earth-like orbit, both suggest it as an artificial object launched from our planet. Radar images showed that 2020 SO had an elongated shape estimated to be between 20 and 45 feet (6 to 14 meters), a match for the dimensions of an Atlas LV-3C Centaur-D (approximately 41 feet or 12 meters).
The confirmation that SO 2020 was indeed a lost-and-found rocket booster came from data collected at NASA’s Infrared Telescope Facility on Maunakea, Hawaii, and from orbit analyses conducted at the the Center for Near-Earth Object Studies (CNEOS) at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. This particular rocket launched the ill-fated Surveyor 2 spacecraft toward the moon in 1966.
Paul Chodas, manager of NASA’s Near Earth Object center at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California, first suggested the object might be Surveyor 2’s lost rocket booster. Surveyor 2 was a robotic spacecraft that was launched to the moon on September 20, 1966. It was meant to be the second lunar lander in the uncrewed American Surveyor program to explore the moon. The spacecraft blasted into space atop an Atlas LV-3C Centaur-D rocket from Cape Kennedy, Florida.
A mid-course correction failure caused ground controllers to lose contact with the craft three days later, after a thruster failed to ignite. The failure caused the spacecraft to tumble and ultimately to crash near the moon’s Copernicus crater.
Unlike some rocket boosters today (which return to Earth and land on ships at sea), Surveyor 2’s rocket booster remains in space and was lost. It appears to have been pushed from its original trajectory by a small but continuous pressure from sunlight.
As it turns out, the defunct booster – now known as 2020 SO – had passed Earth unnoticed several times in the past, including a close approach in 1966, not long after it launched.
This 1964 photograph shows a Centaur upper-stage rocket before being mated to an Atlas booster. A similar Centaur was used during the launch of Surveyor 2 two years later and is currently known as 2020 SO … a new temporary mini-moon for Earth.
How could we have lost an entire 41-foot-long rocket? Space archaeologist Alice Gorman of Flinders University in Australia told ScienceAlert that – before our modern era of reuseable rockets – the rockets that launched craft into space were surprisingly easy to lose. She said:
There are so many factors in the space environment, like gravitational factors and other things that affect movement, that it can sometimes be quite unpredictable.
You have to keep tracking these things, or you can just sort of lose sight of them really easily. And if they do something a little bit unpredictable, and you look the wrong way, then you don’t know where it’s gone. It is quite astonishing, the number of things that have gone missing.
NASA explained that pressure from the sun’s radiation caused the object to change its trajectory:
The pressure exerted by sunlight is small but continuous, and it has a greater effect on a hollow object than a solid one. A spent rocket is essentially an empty tube and therefore is a low-density object with a large surface area. So it will be pushed around by solar radiation pressure more than a solid, high-density clump of rock, much like an empty soda can will be pushed by the wind more than a small stone.
This animation shows the orbit of 2020 SO as it was captured by Earth’s gravity on November 8, 2020. It will escape in March 2021. Its motion has been speeded up a million times faster than real time.
This isn’t the first time Earth has captured a mini-moon.
As you might have realized by now, space is chock-full of small asteroids. Once in a while, one of these space rocks is captured, temporarily, by our planet’s gravity, before being cast out back into the solar system at large. Two confirmed mini-moons are 2006 RH120 (in Earth orbit between 2006 and 2007), and 2020 CD3 (in our orbit between 2018 and 2020).
It’s also not the first time we’ve mistaken space junk for an asteroid.
Another small object that was initially thought to be an asteroid was WT1190F, detected in October 2015 on approach to Earth. Its trajectory suggested it was about to penetrate Earth’s atmosphere near Sri Lanka, in the Indian Ocean, an event that happens with ordinary asteroids several times every year.
As WT1190F was disintegrating in our atmosphere on November 13, 2015, scientists analyzed its light via spectroscopy.
This analysis suggested the object might be a spacecraft component or part of a spent rocket, another wandering piece of space junk returning home.
In the case of 2020 SO, its return home won’t last long. After March, the spent rocket body will be on its way again, back into a larger solar orbit. Who knows how long we’ll keep track of it this time?
2020 SO isn’t the first object thought to be an asteroid, and later realized to be human-made space junk. Here’s an object tagged as WT1190F entering Earth’s atmosphere south of Sri Lanka on November 13, 2015.
Bottom line: An “asteroid” spotted in September 2020 became a new mini-moon for Earth in November. In early December, NASA confirmed the object is a lost rocket from the Surveyor 2 mission, originally launched from Earth more than 50 years ago. Now 2020 SO is about to make a final close approach to Earth. That’ll happen on February 2. The night before, February 1, you can join an online viewing of this object.
Photos And Videos: The Ancients Had Knowledge That Surpass Ours?
Many preserved buildings and artefacts points out that the ancients had advanced control technology. A number of ancient buildings and paintings of deities shows all too similar to the existing people – with aircraft, missiles and space suit. The oldest working model “glider” comes from the excavations of ancient Egypt 3000 years ago before Christ.
Based on some of the advancements in artificial intelligence that have been unveiled in recent years, it seems like there are way too many people out there who’ve watched an episode of Black Mirror and thought, “Hey, that’s a great idea,” as you’re kind of missing the point if you use a show that’s devoted to highlighting the potential pitfalls of our crippling reliance on technology as a good source of inspiration.
I’m sure most of the people who’ve devoted their lives to figuring out how to harness the power of artificial intelligence have good intentions, but the same could be said for the researchers who brought Jurassic Park to life (and we all know how well that worked out for them). There’s no denying that it’s wild to live in a world where we can “talk” with people after they’ve died and even have a computer predict when you’re going to die, but as the aforementioned movie taught us, it’s easy to get so preoccupied with whether or not you can do something to take a second to ask yourself if you should.
Natural and artificial intelligence
DEPOSITPHOTOS ENHANCED BY COGWORLD
Whenever Boston Dynamics releases a video showcasing a new skill one of its robots has learned, there’s always an avalanche of people who respond by joking about the “robot overlords” that will eventually bring humanity to its knees. However, there’s plenty of evidence that suggests that outcome isn’t a laughing matter, as some people who more know about A.I. than I ever will believe that dystopian future is a very real possibility.
Now, we have even more proof courtesy of researchers at the Max-Planck Institute for Humans and Machines, who recently published a paper in The Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research with a fun little title containing the words “Superintelligence Cannot Be Contained,” which is totally, definitely not a cause for concern whatsoever.
The authors of the paper took a closer look at the “Three Laws of Robotics” author Isaac Asimov famously said could prevent an I, Robot scenario from unfolding, which appear to be about as foolproof in the real world as they were in that work of fiction.
Shutterstock
While some experts have posited you can control A.I. by limiting its access to the internet or writing algorithms in an attempt to control its behavior, the chance of those strategies actually working becomes increasingly unlikely as humans willingly push the limits of what artificial intelligence can do, with researcher Iyad Rahwan saying:
“The ability of modern computers to adapt using sophisticated machine learning algorithms makes it even more difficult to make assumptions about the eventual behavior of a superintelligent AI.”
The Dragon’s Triangle, an area of Japan that is said to be similar to the Bermuda Triangle―and it has been a thousand years since the Japanese have been aware of this deadly dangerous zone. From the beginning, they call it “Ma-no Umi” means the “Devil’s Sea.”
For several centuries sailors have reported countless numbers of fishing boats disappearing within the Devil’s Sea limits. Legend has it that dragons rise to the surface of the water to drag boats and their crew members into the deep seabed!
Charles Berlitz, the man who first put forth the idea of the Bermuda Triangle, wanted to repeat the blow for the Devil’s Sea in Japan. He called it the “Dragon’s Triangle” in his book, “The Dragon’s Triangle” on the subject published in 1989. According to Berlitz, between 1952 and 1954, five Japanese military ships and 700 crewmen disappeared in this mysterious triangle.
The Devil’s Sea Zone – The Dragon’s Triangle:
The Devil’s Sea Map – The Dragon’s Triangle, Philippines Sea, Japan. Adjacent to Dragon’s Triangle, the Mariana Trench is located in the Pacific Ocean, just east of the 14 Mariana Islands. As you probably already know, it is the deepest part of the earth’s oceans, and the deepest location of the earth itself. It was created by ocean-to-ocean subduction, a phenomenon in which a plate topped by oceanic crust is subducted beneath another plate topped by oceanic crust.
The Devil’s Sea is actually a part of the Philippines Sea which follows an imaginary line that goes from western Japan, north of Tokyo, to the tip of the Pacific and returns east through the Ogasawara Islands and Guam to Japan again. Like Bermuda, it also forms a similar type of the triangular-shaped zone. Starting from western Japan, north of Tokyo, it follows a line to a point in the Pacific which is about 145 degrees east latitude. Both are located in 35 degrees west latitude, respectively. But the similarities do not end here, the two zones are in the eastern end of the mainland and stretched to the deep part of waters where the sea is driven by strong currents over active underwater volcanic areas.
The Special Characteristics Of The Devil’s Sea Zone:
The Dragon’s Triangle is an area of great seismic activity, with a seabed in which the transformation continues and some parts of the land emerge to 12,000 meters deep. Those islets and masses of land had emerged and disappeared before they could be drawn on maps. There are navigational letters and documents that included a few of those vanished lands in which many experienced sailors used to land in ancient times.
A Historic Japanese Legend Of The Devil’s Sea:
The invincible Mongol Emperor, Kublai Khan planned to invade Japan in 1281 through the Devil’s Sea route but two mysterious storms supposedly protected Japan from being conquered by Mongol hordes.
The Japanese legend conveys that “kamikaze,” or “divine winds” were called upon by the emperor of Japan. These winds turned into two dreadful storms over the Devil’s Sea that sank a fleet of 900 Mongol ships carrying 40,000 soldiers. Then the devastated fleet had left from mainland China, and it was supposed to meet a southern fleet of 100,000 troops to overwhelm Japanese defenders.
Instead, Kublai Khan’s forces fought to a stalemate after 50 days, and the Japanese repelled the invaders when Khan’s forces retreated and many soldiers deserted.
Utsuro-Bune – Another Japanese Legend Conveying A Strange Story:
The famous Japanese legend of “Utsuro-bune,” which literally means ‘hollow ship’ in the Japanese, refers to an unknown object that allegedly washed ashore in 1803 in Hitachi province on the eastern coast of Japan (close to Tokyo and the Dragon’s Triangle).
Accounts of Utsuro-bune, also known as Utsuro-fune and Urobune appear in three Japanese texts: Toen shōsetsu (1825), Hyōryū kishū (1835) and Ume-no-chiri (1844).
According to legend, an attractive young woman aged 18-20 years old, arrived on a local beach aboard the “hollow ship” on February 22, 1803. Fishermen brought her inland to investigate further, but the woman was unable to communicate in Japanese. She was very different than anyone there.
Ink drawing of the Utsuro-bune by Nagahashi Matajirou (1844).
The woman had red hair and eyebrows, the hair elongated by artificial white extensions. The extensions could have been made of white fur or thin, white-powdered textile streaks. This hairstyle cannot be found in any literature. The skin of the lady was a very pale pink colour. She wore precious, long and smooth clothes of unknown fabrics.
Although the mysterious woman appeared friendly and courteous, she acted oddly, for she always clutched a quadratic box made of pale material and around 24 inches in size. The woman did not allow anyone to touch the box, no matter how kindly or pressingly the witnesses asked. The fishermen then returned her and her vessel to the sea, where it drifted away.
Now, many believe that she was an intelligent extraterrestrial being who had accidentally come to earth from another world through her space ship (Utsuro-bune).
However, the credibility of these books has been questioned by many historians, but it has been verified that these books were written before 1844, well before the modern era of UFO.
For thousands of years, the inhabitants of the area have described the Dragon’s Triangle as an extremely dangerous place because there have been occurred several strange disappearances and bizarre events that are still unexplained. A long list of fishing boats, large warships and aircraft of all kinds just disappeared with all their crew in the evil triangle.
Every time the last radio communications to which they are unanswered, one would think that it is spatiotemporal distensions and deviations of crew members’ consciousness that prevent communication. It has been verified that the magnetic activity of the zone is also similar to the Bermuda triangle, which is greater than any other place on earth. However, no one has still been able to explain that this unusual magnetic activity is the actual cause of the disappearances or not.
On the other hand, old folklore speaks of the dragons that appear from the depths to swallow a whole ship or even an island and that return to the bottom of the sea without leaving a trace.
According to another Japanese legend, the Dragon’s Triangle boasts the “Sea Devil” in its deepest part, where it has an ancient city frozen in time forever. People also claim to have witnessed phantom ships suddenly appear as if they ascend from the depths to disappear after a while.
The Devil’s Sea – An Intense Interest Of The World’s Intellectuals And An Unforgettable Tragedy:
The Dragon’s Triangle became the centre of world research and naval interests when warships, fishing boats and aircraft were all revoked from their regular route through the Devil’s Sea zone.
In 1955, the Japanese government financed a research ship, the “Kaiyo Maru 5,” to study the Devil’s Sea. But the boat disappeared with all the scientists who were integrating the expedition, which forced the Japanese government to “officially” label the area as a dangerous zone.
Besides all the unnatural deaths and disappearances, there are reports of UFO sightings and the mystical thick fog that looms large this area of the Pacific, appearing and disappearing mysteriously. Just like the Bermuda Triangle, the activities of extraterrestrial vessels can be experienced there frequently.
The Possible Explanations For The Dragon Triangle Mystery:
For the past few decades, people from all around the world are trying there best to explain the strange phenomena that have been taken place for millennia. However, there are really some fascinating facts and theories about the Dragon’s Triangle that you should know about.
1. The Magnetic Poles Connection:
One theory tends to a strange connection between the magnetic poles of the two triangles, the Bermuda and the Dragon Triangle, that creates a spatiotemporal duplicate of each other. Mystery lovers claim that the Bermuda and Dragon’s triangles are at the opposite side of each other, and that a straight line could be easily drawn between them through the centre of the Earth. Even if it was true, it would not explain the dangers inherent in any of the zones.
However, the reality is that there are mainly these two areas on earth where huge ships and aircraft inexplicably disappear with all its crew without leaving a trace or signs of life.
Nowadays, many even believe that there is an underwater extraterrestrial base at the bottom of the Devil’s Sea, and that the infamous dragons of the triangle are actually UUO―Unidentified Underwater Objects.
There are mainly five types of unidentified objects in Ufology:
UFO signifies the Unidentified Flying Object
AFO signifies the Amphibious Flying Object
UAO signifies the Unidentified Aquatic Object
UNO signifies the Unidentified Nautical Object
UUO signifies the Unidentified Underwater Object
According to the believers, the advanced base is located in the extreme depths of the Devil’s Sea, which is about 12,000 meters deep in the ocean, and that they would cause the magnetic anomalies and abductions of ships, but for what purpose?!
3. Geomagnetic Disturbances:
Scientists specializing in different subjects: geologists, meteorologists, physicists, astronomers, etc. have dragged another explanation for the Dragon’s Triangle mysteries. According to them, there are twelve zones of great geomagnetic disturbances on the planet. Two of them are the North and South Poles and five of the rest ten are closely linked to the Dragon Triangle zone―that’s how the place shows such unusual geomagnetic disturbances. These disturbances distract aircraft and ships.
4. Parallel Universe And A Huge Vortex:
Another truly engrossing cutting edge explanation comes from the existence of the parallel universe. According to this theory:
There is indeed a huge Vortex in Dragon’s Triangle (or such any other spots) that opens on another world, a parallel world consists of anti-matter and that absorbs people, masses or even light and time.
At the origin of the universe, the matter was not alone to appear, anti-matter accompanied it in equal quantities. Thus matter and anti-matter separately formed two distinct Universe: a universe of matter and a universe of anti-matter.
These two universes coexist within the same “space,” but not within the same “time.” Time separates them. It is this temporal difference that forms a “barrier” between them and prevents them from mixing. If this were not the case, matter and anti-matter would totally destroy themselves in contact with each other. This separation is therefore essential.
These universes have evolved at the same pace, in the same stages, and have both populated the same galaxies composed of stars and planets, but these galaxies are distributed differently in space from one universe to another. In other words, galaxies and anti-galaxies occupy different places in space.
Each star and planet in each matter universe galaxy has a twin in another anti-matter universe galaxy. Our world is no exception. The Earth has a twin Earth of anti-matter called the “Dark Twin”, an anti-Earth that vibrates at a frequency higher than that of the Earth, because it is more evolved than it.
Each star and planet in the universe of matter are connected to their anti-matter twin by an “energy bridge,” a magnetic Vortex.
Among the various hypotheses put forward, the most plausible is the Atlantean hypothesis. Indeed, the destruction of Poseidia, the largest and the last of the seven islands that formed Atlantis, left at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean a giant Crystal emitting powerful electromagnetic radiation that fed the Atlanteans with energy.
It would be this huge Crystal, always active, that would disturb the magnetic Vortex connecting the Earth to its twin anti-matter. Its hyper-powerful radiation would cross the Earth from side to side and connect the “Bermuda Triangle” to the “Dragon’s Triangle” in a huge energy loop whose random fluctuations would occasionally open a Vortex, the spatiotemporal “door” to the Earth’s “Dark Twin.”
In 1986, while looking for a suitable place to observe the sharks, Kihachiro Aratake, a director of the Yonaguni-Cho Tourism Association, noticed some singular seabed formations resembling architectural structures. The strange structures are now widely known as the “Yonaguni Monument,” or the “Yonaguni Submarine Ruins.”
Yonaguni Monument, Japan
It is a submerged rock formation off the coast of Yonaguni Island, the southernmost of the Ryukyu Islands, in Japan. It lies approximately a hundred kilometres east of Taiwan. To make things even stranger, the Yonaguni Monument is situated within the Devil’s Sea triangle that has led many to believe that the underwater structures are remains of the lost city Atlantis.
Conclusion:
It is true that, with this one single page article, we can’t draw a proper conclusion to all those strange things that have been occurring in the Devil’s Sea since more than a thousand years ago. The truth is that it’s still unknown what really happens in the Devil’s Sea. But scientists have concluded all these oddities saying that the disappearances are due to the fact that this place has intense magnetic alterations, which cause aircraft and ships to become disoriented when entering the triangle. However, what really happens there is still an unsolved mystery.
For some time, people have debated whether or not human beings could spontaneously combust, or burst into flames, without an external heat source. However, over the past 300 years, there have been more than 200 reports of such incidents occurring. This phenomenon is called spontaneous human combustion (or SHC) and it occurs when a person supposedly burns to death by a fire believed to have started from within the body of that person. Of the hundreds of accounts on record, there seems to be a similar pattern.
A solitary victim is often consumed by flame, usually inside his or her home. However, the extremities, such as the hands, feet, or parts of the leg, often remaining intact. The torso and head are charred beyond recognition and, in rare cases, the internal organs of a victim remain unscathed.
The room the victim was in usually shows little to no signs of fire, aside from a greasy residue left on furniture and walls. Often there is a sweet, smoky smell in the room where the incident has occurred.
Historic Cases of Spontaneous Human Combustion
The history of SHC can be traced back to medieval literature and some even believe there are several passages in the Bible making reference to it.
In 1641, the Danish physician, Thomas Bartholin (1616-1680), described the death of Polonus Vorstius in his book Historiarum Anatomicarum Rariorum , a collection of strange medical phenomena.
Vorstius was an Italian knight, who, while at his home in Milan, Italy in 1470, drank some strong wine and started vomiting flames before bursting into fire. This is considered to be the first recorded account of spontaneous combustion in human history.
In 1673, French author Jonas Dupont, published a book entitled De Incendiis Corporis Humani Spontaneis, which is a collection of cases and studies on the subject of spontaneous human combustion.
One famous incident from France dates back to 1725, when a Parisian innkeeper was awoken by the smell of smoke and discovered that his wife, Nicole Millet, had been reduced to ashes while lying on a straw pallet, which itself had been untouched by the flames.
All that remained of Madame Millet, a chronic alcoholic, was her skull, a few bones from her back, and lower legs. Wooden items found around her were undamaged. Her husband was charged with murder and initially found guilty.
On appeal, however, the judges agreed with his defense of “spontaneous human combustion,” thanks in part to the testimony of a surgeon named Dr. Claude-Nicolas Le Cat. Le Cat was at the inn when the smell of smoke awoke the house and Nicole’s body was discovered. Her death was later declared to be the consequence of “a visitation of God.”
Spontaneous human combustion became popularized in the 19th century after famous English author Charles Dickens used it to kill off one of his characters in the novel Bleak House . When critics accused Dickens of trying to validate something that didn’t exist, he simply pointed to existing research showing 30 historical cases at the time.
Illustration of the spontaneous human combustion case in Bleak House by Charles Dickens
Common Characteristics of Spontaneous Human Combustion Victims
The topic of SHC received coverage in the British Medical Journal in 1938 when an article by L.A. Parry cited a book published in 1823 called Medical Jurisprudence . It stated that cases of spontaneous human combustion shared several common themes including:
the victims were chronic alcoholics;
they were usually elderly females;
the body had burned spontaneously, but some lighted substance had also come into contact with it;
the hands and feet usually fell off;
the fire had caused very little damage to many other combustible things in contact with the body;
the combustion of the body has left a residue of greasy and fetid ashes, very offensive in odor.
Alcoholism seems to have played a heavy role in early references to SHC, partially because some Victorian era physicians and writers believed spontaneous human combustion was caused by it.
The Wick Effect: A Scientific Explanation for SHC
There are several theories as to what causes SHC apart from the above-mentioned alcoholism. These include: flammable body fat, acetone buildup, static electricity, methane, bacteria, stress, and even divine intervention.
The theory explaining SHC which is most approved by science is called the “wick effect.” It likens the body of an SHC victim to a candle. A candle is composed of a wick on the inside surrounded by a wax made of flammable fatty acids. Fire ignites the wick and the fatty wax keeps it burning.
In the human body, the body fat acts as the flammable substance, while the victim's clothing or hair is the wick. A cigarette might set fire to a person’s clothing then split their skin, releasing subcutaneous fat, which in turn is absorbed into the burned clothing. As the fat melts from the heat, it soaks into the clothing, acting as a “wax-like substance” to keep the "wick" burning. The burning continues for as long as there is fuel available. Proponents of this theory say it explains why victims' bodies are destroyed yet their surroundings are barely burned.
Author and biology professor Brian J Ford offers another explanation for SHC. He says that an acetone build-up is likely at the root of this bizarre phenomenon:
“When a person is ill they sometimes naturally produce traces of acetone in the body, and acetone is highly inflammable. I experimented with scale model humans using pig flesh that had been marinated in acetone; they burn like incendiary bombs. Alcoholism can cause people to produce acetone, as can many diseases. My conclusion is that an unwell individual produces high levels of acetone which accumulates in the fatty tissues and can be ignited, perhaps by a static spark or a cigarette.”
Something that should be taken into consideration is the fact that cases of SHC almost always occur indoors, to lone humans, and often near sources of heat. For example, there are almost no known instances of spontaneous human combustion happening in the middle of the street.
Another point to consider is that the phenomenon only seems to happen to humans, there are no known reported cases of animals suddenly catching fire.
Also, the "wick effect" doesn’t seem to fully explain why the victims remain motionless during the episode of combustion and burning, nor does it provide enough explanation why surrounding furniture is so often unaffected by the fire.
Furthermore, believers in SHC point to the fact that the human body has to reach a temperature of roughly 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit (1,648 degrees Celsius) in order to be reduced to complete ashes, which has been the case with many of the victims found. By comparison, cremating a human body is carried out at a temperature between 1400 and 1800 degrees Fahrenheit (982 degrees Celsius).
Modern Spontaneous Human Combustion Cases
Cases of SHC aren’t simply the stuff of old wives tales or confined strictly to books of antiquity. For instance, a more modern example took place in Ireland in 2010.
The burned body of an elderly man was found lying with his head near the fireplace of his apartment in a room that had virtually no fire damage. There were no burn marks on the floor, on the ceiling directly above him, or anywhere else in the room. An Irish coroner would later rule that spontaneous combustion was the cause of the death of 76-year-old Michael Faherty.
Another modern case of possible SHC occurred in 2017. The Independent reported that a 70-year-old man suddenly burst into flames “in unexplained circumstances in a London street.” The Fire Brigade’s investigation “found no evidence of an “accelerant” that would have spread the flames” and the man’s death was treated as “unexplained.” Could this be another case of spontaneous human combustion?
Many people believe that there is much about the human body which makes it unique among earthly beings and there are aspects of humans that are still unknown to us. One such feature is the phenomenon of spontaneous human combustion, which remains an unsolved mystery .
Spontaneous human combustion remains an unsolved mystery.
Most people are familiar with the story of Atlantis, the legendary sunken city as described by the ancient Greek philosopher Plato. Till this day, opinion is still divided as to whether this story should be understood literally or taken merely as a morality tale. Further east in the subcontinent of India is a similar tale, though it probably is less well known compared to that of Atlantis. This is the ‘lost continent’ of Lemuria, frequently connected to the legend of Kumari Kandam by speakers of the Tamil language.
The term Lemuria has its origins in the latter part of the 19 th century. The English geologist Philip Sclater was puzzled by the presence of lemur fossils in Madagascar and India but not in mainland Africa and the Middle East. Thus, in his 1864 article entitled ‘The Mammals of Madagascar’, Sclater proposed that Madagascar and India were once part of a larger continent, and named this missing landmass ‘Lemuria’. Sclater’s theory was accepted by the scientific community of that period as the explanation of the way lemurs could have migrated from Madagascar to India or vice versa in ancient times. With the emergence of the modern concepts of continental drift and plate tectonics, however, Sclater’s proposition of a submerged continent was no longer tenable. Yet, the idea of a lost continent refused to die, and some still believe that Lemuria was an actual continent that existed in the past.
One such group is the Tamil nationalists. The term Kumari Kandam first appeared in the 15 th century Kanda Puranam, the Tamil version of the Skanda Puranam. Yet, stories about an ancient land submerged by the Indian Ocean have been recorded in many earlier Tamil literary works. According to the stories, there was a portion of land that was once ruled by the Pandiyan kings and was swallowed by the sea. When narratives about Lemuria arrived in colonial India, the country was going through a period when folklore was beginning to permeate historic knowledge as facts. As a result, Lemuria was quickly equated with Kumari Kandam.
The story of Kumari Kandam is not regarded as just a story, but seems to be laden with nationalistic sentiments. It has been claimed that the Pandiyan kings of Kumari Kandam were the rulers of the whole Indian continent, and that Tamil civilisation is the oldest civilisation in the world. When Kumari Kandam was submerged, its people spread across the world and founded various civilisations, hence the claim that the lost continent was also the cradle of human civilisation.
So, how much truth is there in the story of Kumari Kandam? According to researchers at India’s National Institute of Oceanography, the sea level was lower by 100 m about 14,500 years ago and by 60 m about 10,000 years ago. Hence, it is entirely possible that there was once a land bridge connecting the island of Sri Lanka to mainland India. As the rate of global warming increased between 12,000 and 10,000 years ago, the rising sea levels resulted in periodic flooding. This would have submerged prehistoric settlements that were located around the low-lying coastal areas of India and Sri Lanka. Stories of these catastrophic events may have been transmitted orally from one generation to another and finally written down as the story of Kumari Kandam.
One piece of evidence used to support the existence of Kumari Kandam is Adam’s Bridge (also called Rama’s Bridge), a chain of limestone shoals made up of sand, silt and small pebbles located in the Palk Strait extending 18 miles from mainland India to Sri Lanka. This strip of land was once believed to be a natural formation, however, others argue that images taken by a NASA satellite depict this land formation to be a long broken bridge under the ocean's surface.
The location of Adam's Bridge between India and Sri Lanka
The existence of a bridge in this location is also supported by another ancient legend. The Ramayana tells the tale of Sita, Rama’s wife, being held captive on the island of Lanka. Rama commissions a massive building project to construct a bridge to transport his army of Vanara (ape men) across the ocean to Lanka.
As with most so-called myths, it seems likely that there is at least some truth to the ancient Tamil legends of Kumari Kandam, but just how much, is yet to be determined.
VIDEO: Secret Video Archive Of UFO Recordings Released.
Area 51 is the most secret and most protected area of the world by the US military. What is hidden in the bowels of an inaccessible base? North of Las Vegas, near the Nevada desert territory is the size of 15,000 km square. It is the most secret and most protected area of the world by the US military – Area 51. This is an area where the first conducted underground tests of nuclear weapons and where was the secret US military exercises. Later, there began research and training flights with the latest types of combat aircraft of the US Air Force. The base circulating different stories and myths, in particular regarding the existence of UFOs. It was built in 1957 as a military research center in drying lake.
Edwin Starr once asked the musical question: “War – what is it good for?” and provided the musical answer: “Absolutely nothing.” You could “say it again” about black holes. While all of their negative qualities are well known – sucking up everything within their gravitational pull, including light – no one seems to have figured out what they might be good for … until now. An astrophysicist at New York’s Columbia University claims their energy can be harvested and used to power anything that needs massive amounts of fuel – and that is the best way for us to discover black-hole-sucking extraterrestrials. If they can do that, do we really want to meet them?
“Black holes are commonly surrounded by a hot ‘soup’ of plasma particles that carry a magnetic field. Our theory shows that when magnetic field lines disconnect and reconnect, in just the right way, they can accelerate plasma particles to negative energies and large amounts of black hole energy can be extracted.”
Physicists Luca Comisso from Columbia University and partner Felipe Asenjo from Universidad Adolfo Ibáñez in Chile explain in a university press release the essence of their new paper, published in the journal Physical Review D. They theorize that this “hot soup of plasma” is generating energy just outside the event horizon of the black hole where it can be collected in a theoretical giant receptacle by a civilization intelligent enough to pull it off. Knowing we’re not that civilization, Comisso sticks with food to explain in simpler terms how this all works.
“It is like a person could lose weight by eating candy with negative calories. This might sound weird, but it can happen in a region called the ergosphere, where the spacetime continuum rotates so fast that every object spins in the same direction as the black hole.”
You heard what he said — negative calories!
It certainly does sound weird, but Asenjo further explains that it’s the high velocity between captured and escaping plasma particles that shoots out the stream of energy-charged – a process that beats the efficiency of any power plant on Earth.
“We calculated that the process of plasma energization can reach an efficiency of 150 percent, much higher than any power plant operating on Earth. Achieving an efficiency greater than 100 percent is possible because black holes leak energy, which is given away for free to the plasma escaping from the black hole.”
And it’s FREE! No wonder the smart aliens are pumping it into the galactic spaceships or fueling their death stars or whatever they might be using it for. We pitiful humans obviously can’t do this, even if we were less than 1,000 light years from the nearest black hole. However, we’re smart enough to figure out what this black hole energy extraction process might look like from far away, and that is what Comisso says will lead us to that superior alien civilization.
And maybe them to us?
We would LOVE to meet you pitiful humans.
Perhaps the words of Edwin Starr apply here too:
“What is it good for? Absolutely nothing. Say it again.”
Every once in a while there is a case in the field that really raises eyebrows. These are the cases in which even the most open-minded and willing to believe are sometimes left speechless and wondering what to think. Such stories have become almost legendary within the field, and one of these is certainly the time a supposed Venusian emissary was a guest at the Pentagon.
In the winter of 1967, Harley Andrew Byrd, nephew to the late Rear Admiral Richard R.E. Byrd of the United States Navy, who was a high ranking official at the Pentagon in Washington D.C. and a part of Project Blue Book, got a harried and panicked call from the Police Department in Alexandria, Virginia. According to him, two policemen reported that they had seen a UFO had landed in a field, and a that tall man dressed in white had emerged, claiming to be from “The High Council” and calling himself “Valiant Thor.” This being was then purportedly picked up and taken to the Pentagon, where he was introduced to the Under Secretary of Defense, as well as Secretary of Defense Neil H McElroy, and then given VIP status and hurried off to see the president of the United States himself, Dwight D. Eisenhower, as well as the vice-president at the time, Richard Nixon. According to Byrd, Valiant Thor was from Venus, and spent some amount of time at the Pentagon speaking to the president about the world’s problems, and Byrd would say:
Commander James was on duty at the Security Clearance and Review for the branch officer of the Project Blue Book. He oversaw the meeting through official channels and reported the landing and meeting of the “space emissary”, as he was labeled by the Department of Defense, to a governing group of high military officials including Secretary of Defense F.F. Forestall and other scientific men of which there were twelve. They in turn made recommendations to the President and Cabinet members, the CIA, FBI, NSA, and so on. The landing of Valiant Thor was perhaps the first documented landing of a human-type alien by military officials. He contacted an individual in the Pentagon who was an advocate of the UFO alien situation. “Nancy Warren” in turn contacted a minister, who was also a private investigator and theologian, a Dr. Frank E. Stranges, who then met with this individual. Dr. Stranges had been a guest speaker at the National Evangelistic Center for two weeks.
Val Thor landed in Alexandria and met with the President to discuss the world’s problems and offer advice and counsel on how to deal with and eliminate them. He indicated to Mr. Eisenhower that the world was in a precarious situation and that if the world continued to proceed on a war footing – it would cause an economic imbalance throughout the world. He indicated that his race of people lived and dwelled underground and that many of the planets throughout the universe sustain life in this same manner. He also mentioned the waves of aliens who would land around the world to help with the Earth’s seemingly insurmountable problems. He stated that a group from a distant planetary system would be coming to give aid and data to help the Earth’s progress.
Alleged photo of Valiant Thor
Richard Nixon was apparently fascinated by Val Thor, and allegedly said to him:
You have certainly caused a stir… for an out-of-Towner. Of course, we are not totally convinced of anything just yet. But suffice it to say we are checking and double checking everything you say and do. When Sergeant Young from Alexandria radioed in and stated that you had just landed in a flying saucer, we thought Sergeant Young had flipped. Say, were you in on that UFO flap over Washington? You certainly had us all in a dither, if you were.
Frank E. Stranges would have a personal meeting with the entity and give much information of these interactions between Valiant Thor and the government in his book on the matter, the 1967 Stranger at the Pentagon, and would also go into depth about the alien’s appearance and behaviors. Stranges said that Val Thor looked like a perfectly normal human being, except that he had six fingers on each hand and could live for 500 years, and it also turned out that he wasn’t alone, having actually arrived with three companions, called Donn, Jill, and Taniya. Val Thor supposedly told him that they had been watching humanity closely since the atomic bombs in World War II, and sought to “begin a new era in knowledge, wisdom and understanding on our planet.” Curiously, Stranges would also claim that Valiant Thor had a deep interest in Christianity, even going as far as to say that Jesus was in fact an alien from outer space, and had spread His word across the galaxy. This might not be so surprising since Stranges just happened to be a travelling Evangelical preacher, and he would say:
He told me that his purpose in coming was to help mankind return to the Lord. He spoke in positive terms…always with a smile on his face. He said that man was further away from God than ever before, but there was still a good chance if man looks in the right place.
Apparently, Valiant Thor stayed there in Washington D.C. for a full 3 years on his mysterious mission, before suddenly dematerializing in 1960 to return to his home planet. The story was published in Stranges’ book and went on to become firmly entrenched in UFO lore as one of the most completely bizarre accounts on record, going on to be much discussed and debated, and even appearing on TV shows and in the media. However, if you have been paying attention so far you may perhaps see why it has all drawn skeptics to it like moths to a flame. The list of gripes against this outlandish tale is long. For one, Venus is far from what one would consider a traditionally habitable planet, so why would it produce a race of beings nearly indistinguishable from humans? Also, where is all of the evidence? He was here for 3 years, yet the only evidence that has been offered are some photographs of a man in a suit said to be him and one of a group of some clean-cut young people who Stranges claims to be Val, Donn, Jill, and Tanyia, but who seriously could be anyone at all. it is all pretty flimsy at best.
Valiant Thor and his Venusian friends
Another is that the credentials of Stranges and others involved in this case have been seriously called into question. There is no independent verification that Stranges ever had top security clearance at the Pentagon, and his self-proclaimed credentials have also been challenged, such as his assertion that he has Ph.Ds. in psychology, philosophy, and criminology, as there is no evidence that he ever earned such diplomas. It is curious, as he often calls himself Dr. Stranges despite being unable to prove that this actually fits. Indeed, there is no real corroboration on any of the people involved in any way. There is no evidence that a Harley Andrew Byrd ever had such top clearance at the Pentagon, or even that he had any relation to Admiral Byrd at all. Brian Dunning at the site Skeptoid would say of him:
“Harley Andrew Byrd” is probably not who he says he is. Records on Ancestry.com can’t really confirm or disprove the possibility that Admiral Byrd had a nephew by this name, but his story requires that he would have held a senior role at Project Blue Book with top security clearance and over a year of training behind him, all by the age of 18. When he went on Art Bell’s Coast to Coast AM radio show in 1995 it went south very quickly. He told ridiculous stories of Admiral Byrd’s adventures, including that the admiral entrusted him as a young boy with secret diaries telling of his contacts with aliens and Nazis. One listener wrote:
“[Harley Byrd] talks nonsense, makes all manner of bizarre claims about greys, sasquatch, Aryans, and other alien types, and assiduously commercializes the whole for profit… Harley Byrd is actually a huckster [who] merely poses as Byrd’s grandson to sell these bogus diaries.”
It certainly is all pretty out-there, and is likely to be scoffed at by most in the general mainstream. There are plenty of inconsistencies and red flags in the story, and yet it has become a pretty indelible mainstay within the field. For some it is one of those persistent stories we like to brush under the carpet and pretend doesn’t exist. For others it is a point of debate and discussion. For others still it is enough to make one just shrug their shoulders and wonder. Was Stranges telling the truth or is this all complete woo woo nonsense? Whichever side you fall on, the story of Valiant Thor has become fairly legendary, and at the very least is another one of the many other truly bizarre cases that inevitably pop up from time to time.
Ireland is an ancient land, most often associated with the likes of tall tales, folklore, supernatural creatures and rolling green hills.
What doesn’t generally come to mind is UFO sightings. Saying that there has been quite the number of them over the years.
Ever wondered if there is life above? Well, check out these top five mysterious UFO sightings in Irish skies.
5. The Family Encounter, Dublin
This UFO sighting took place in Dublin in January 2014. Standing, staring at the night sky, a woman and her two daughters all experience an inexplicable sight: three alien bodies moving across the canopy of the stars.
“Myself and my two daughters seen what looked like stars moving across the sky a couple of weeks ago, fascinated by them we decided to have a look out for them tonight.
They are actually satellites but as we were looking at them my eldest daughter shouted out ‘Oh my god what the heck are they.’
She pointed them out to her sister who also seen them, my eye did not catch them for a few seconds but when I see them I was shocked.
What looked like to be 3 triangular shapes speed across the sky with no lights/noise then watched through my binoculars to see what looked like the 3 objects disappear into thin air.
I was very shocked and asked my daughters exactly what they had seen before me, they described the UFOs the way I did and said they were flying in the shape of a V just like the way some birds do.
But there was not a chance of them being birds they were too big, going to fast and there were no flapping wings.”
4.The Bright Light, Dundalk
This UFO encounter happened just a few years earlier in November 2008. Located in Dundalk, County Louth a local resident spotted a bright light from the conservatory in their home.
“Walked out of the sunroom at the back of the house facing south and glanced up at the night sky because it was so clear.
A bright white object (steady on, did not flicker), [the] same size as the north star but at low altitude (about a mile high maybe), edged in pale blue at times, was travelling at speed from left to right (east to west) in a ‘perfect horizontal line’.
It made no sound and I observed it move across the sky for three to four seconds before it disappeared (or turned off its lights) just before it would have escaped from my view anyway.
Definitely not a plane or helicopter, it moved far, far too quickly, but not as quick as a shooting star. My guess is it came in from the direction of the sea as seemed to be heading inland.”
3. The Pulsating Orb, Donegal
This personal account comes from December in 2005. When driving through Glenveigh National Park in County Donegal, two friends get a rare chance to truly observe a UFO sighting at leisure.
“I was driving with a friend from Letterkenny to Doochary through Glenveigh National Park and as we descended towards Lough Barra I could see a big blue circular light about a metre or more in diameter positioned on the rock face of Crockfadda at about 330 metres up the mountain.
As we drove closer to the lake (seen below) the blue light was directly above us to our right about 2/3rds of the way up the rock face.
The light grew more intense and was pulsating in colour from dark to electric blue but with little flare light or discernable pattern […]
The light was visible for the several minutes we sat there and I would gladly have sat on and watched it but my friend wanted to get back to the house and the light was still visible as we drove away to the south.”
2. An Encounter With Friends, Carlow
This encounter took place in November 2008 in Carlow Centre, County Carlow. Oftentimes UFO encounters are considered fake due to the lack of eyewitnesses; in this account, however, there are three individuals who witness the exact same thing.
“A clear evening in early November 2008 myself and my two friends were making our way home after a night at the movies.
When we reached a street close to my own my two friends had stopped to speak with someone as this was happening I was looking towards a friends house and over the house was a blue light shaped hovering object…My friends then noticed it and turned next to me to observe the strange light.
The three of us watched the object hover for a brief second and then flashed a light of great intensity…the object had disappeared in the middle of the flash.
We discussed as we walked home confused and perplexed, we thought that maybe it was lightning but no sound followed and then we thought of fireworks but again the lack of sound eliminated that possibility.
It was dead silent very eerie afterwards.”
1. The Lake Encounter, Mayo
This experience took place in June 2006 on Rooskey lake in the Ox Mountains in County Mayo. Again, more than one person witnessed this strange sighting.
“I was rowing a boat for a fly angler on Rooskey lake. I work there and we were fishing for trout in the late evening sedge hatch.
As the angle was fishing a movement in the sky caught my eye… Initially, it looked as if a bright star was moving about the sky erratically up, down and sideways while falling but coming towards us…
I asked the angler to look up. He said, my goodness what is that? Exactly I said… The object was getting bigger. It was very bright with [a] clean white light like a star only bigger…
It soon slowed down when it got close to us and then changed direction. It moved sideways at great speed. It moved erratically with sudden changes of direction and height.
There was no noise what so ever. Nothing could move as suddenly as that when it jumps I said, a plane doing that would disintegrate. The passengers would be out through the roof said the angler.
It moved along under cloud level under several clouds. It then moved away from us and gathered great speed. It rose in the sky as it moved away and covered a vast distance in a very short time and disappeared into infinity…
If you live in Ireland, you may want to look up towards the sky as the country has the most UFO sightings in all of Europe. According to data collected by Psychic World from the National UFO Reporting Center State Report Index, Ireland has the most UFO sightings, followed by France and then Spain.
A total of 105 recorded UFO sightings have occurred in Ireland with the encounters lasting an average of 13 minutes each. Most of the sightings in Ireland consist of mysterious bright lights. However, bright lights are the second most common form of sightings in all of Europe (the lights are usually red, blue, or white) while unidentified flying disks are the most common occurrences in the entire continent.
Northern Ireland reported a total of 6 UFO sightings last year in 2020 (two more than the previous year) which may have been partly because of the pandemic where so many people were staying home and spending time outside.
As for the Northern Ireland sightings in 2020, the first one was reported on March 13th of a UFO “with many flashing lights making no noise” in Dunmurry which lasted about half an hour. Six days later, a “flying object” that looked like solar panels in Bangor was reported. Then there was a “UFO going down the Springfield Road” on April 3rd.
The most interesting report came in on May 12th when a man claimed to have been dropped off at Bangor Marina by a UFO. The last two reports consisted of one sighting on August 22nd where three UFOs were witnessed flying over Belfast, and then on September 26th when a man in the Ballygomartin area claimed to have seen six UFOs flying over his house.
David Moore, who is the editor of Astronomy Ireland Magazine, stated that more people were stargazing during the lockdown. He went on to say, “About 90% of all reports end up having a straightforward explanation,” adding, “It’s the few that don’t that are really intriguing. But the guy claiming to be dropped off at Bangor Marina, that’s very difficult to explain.”
Chris McMurray, who is a chairperson of the Northern Ireland UFO Society, weighed in by stating that the majority of the increased sightings of “unknown aerial phenomena” have occurred around the Cavehill and Black Mountain area in addition to the Mourne region. “A common theme that we notice is that sightings of anomalous lights tend to be seen near certain geographical features, such as the granite mountains and other areas of a crystalline nature,” he noted, adding, “This could be because, as widely accepted by ufologists and paranormal investigators alike, these can help amplify the natural energies of the Earth.”
France came in second place with a total of 71 sightings, but their encounters only lasted an average of 6 minutes. Spain is a close third with 70 sightings lasting an average of 12 minutes, but their encounters consisted mostly of diamond-shaped objects in the sky.
As for the longest sightings in all of Europe, they occurred in Monaco where the estimated time lasted 45 minutes. And if you don’t want to see a UFO, your best bet is to move to San Marino where they hadn’t had any official encounters or Georgia where there were only two short sightings of mysterious fireballs that each lasted about 15 seconds.
In the entire continent of Europe, there were a total of 994 UFO sightings with an average duration of 12 minutes each.
Fast moving disc-shaped object filmed over Long Branch, New Jersey.
Several years ago, on 2017/08/23, a photographer walked out to see six suspicious small planes in the sky over Long Branch, New Jersey and started to record them when, in the blink of an eye, a fast-moving object flew by right in front of the camera's lens.
According to the terrified photographer he was ducking and flinching as it flew past and could not believe what he witnessed.
We can rule out that it would be an insect or bird that flies by just in front of the camera lens as the slow motion footage shows the object moving away from the photographer's location at a high speed until it disappears. Mufon.
What are the brightest objects in our solar system that you can see in your sky? The sunis the very brightest, of course, but you might be surprised by some of the other objects that make the list. You can see the first seven objects on this list using just your eyes, even from cities and suburbs. The last items on the list are fainter and therefore more challenging, and likely require a dark-sky site and some optical aid.
In astronomy, the brightness of objects is measured by what’s called magnitude. The lower the number, the brighter the object. So, 1st-magnitude objects indicate the brightest stars in our sky, 2nd-magnitude fainter ones, 3rd-magnitude fainter still, and so on. Note that some objects, some planets for example, are even brighter than 1st magnitude, peaking in negative numbers at their brightest.
Without optical aid, the human eye can see objects to around 6th magnitude, in optimum conditions and under dark skies. There are about a dozen natural solar system objects that are, in theory, visible to the unaided eye. In practice, the fainter ones are very difficult to see with the eye alone, but perhaps possible for those keen vision and true darkness.
Transient objects, such as very bright meteors or comets, aren’t included in this list. Extraordinary meteors can turn the night sky as bright as day, and some comets reach stunning brightnesses, too, such as Ikeya-Seki in 1965, which reached a whopping -10 magnitude and could be seen at noon. But because they’re only in the sky on a temporary basis, and not something that can regularly or consistently be observed, these objects aren’t included here. We also don’t include manmade objects, such as satellites and the International Space Station. Try the Heavens-Above website, if you’re interested in observing human-made Earth-orbiting objects.
Here are the top 12 brightest natural solar system objects, in order from brightest to dimmest:
1. The sun.
No surprise here. The sun shines at magnitude -26.7. Technically, the sun can’t even be looked at without special safety filters to protect your eyes. Gazing at the sun directly without special protective filters can cause blindness. That said, now would be a good time to equip yourself with filters for solar observing, and to begin a program of regular sun viewing. You might know that the sun increases and decreases in activity in a cycle lasting 11 years. The new cycle – Solar Cycle 25 – was officially announced in September 2020. At EarthSky Community Photos, we’re beginning to see more sunspots! And more are surely coming, increasing in number to a peak five or so years from now.
View at EarthSky Community Photos. | Victor C. Rogus wrote on January 20, 2021: “The sunspot formerly known as AR2797 has split in two: AR2797 and AR2798. Trailing sunspot AR2798 is crackling with C-class solar flares.” Thank you, Victor!
2. The moon.
The moon varies in brightness depending on what phase it’s in. At its full phase when it’s the brightest, it tops out at magnitude -12.7. On the other hand, the moon in its crescent phase shines at only about magnitude -6. If you’re a deep-sky observer, the moon is bright enough to ruin your night vision, meaning it’ll prevent you from getting the best view of distant, faint star clusters, nebulae and galaxies. If you’re using a telescope, the moon should be your last stop during a night of observing. To the eye alone, though, there’s nothing more beautiful than a bright moon shining in the night sky, casting its light and creating moon shadows in the landscape all around you. Visit EarthSky’s moon phases page to learn the dates of major moon phases throughout 2020.
View at EarthSky Community Photos. | Kannan A in Singapore captured this image on January 26, 2021, and wrote: “The waxing gibbous moon rising from behind the apartment block. The moon was 94.1% illuminated and distance from Earth was 391,375 km [243,000 miles] away from Earth when this photo was taken. It was still very much a day moon, as the skies were still bright at this time.” Thank you, Kannan A!
3. Venus.
The closest planet to Earth, one step inward in orbit around the sun, is also the brightest planet. It can shine as brightly as magnitude -4.7, bright enough to be seen in daylight if you know just where to look. The brightness of Venus is thanks in part to its proximity to Earth and also, largely, to its thick, reflective clouds. As with all the other solar system objects, Venus varies in brightness depending on a number of factors, including how close it is to Earth and what phase it’s in. Yes, as a planet orbiting inward from Earth, Venus shows phases! Venus was in our morning sky – in the east before sunrise – throughout late 2020. Soon, though, it’ll be gone from our skies for a few months, traveling behind the sun from Earth. Venus will return to our evening sky in May 2021. Find Venus’ location for each month in EarthSky’s planet guide.
View at EarthSky Community Photos. | Catherine Evans caught Venus near daybreak on January 17, 2021, from the Edna Valley in San Luis Obispo, California. She wrote: “Closer and closer to the sunrise, so it won’t be seen much longer.” So true, Catherine! Thank you. Even into early February 2021, if you have a clear sky to the eastern horizon, you might still be able to snag a last look at Venus. Look very low in the east before sunup. If you can’t see it, try sweeping with binoculars.
4. Mars.
The red planet is the second-closest planet to Earth after Venus, and it doesn’t often reach its maximum magnitude of -2.9. But when it does … wow! What a sight to behold. Just like other planets outside Earth’s orbit, when Mars is brightest around the time of its opposition, when it’s opposite the sun from Earth, rising in the east as the sun sets in the west. Mars’ oppositions come when our faster Earth moves between Mars and the sun. That happens about every two years. Some Mars oppositions are better than others. Mars was particularly bright in 2018, and its last opposition – around mid-October 2020 – was a good one, too. For about a month around the 2020 opposition, Mars was brighter than Jupiter. At other times (in fact, most of the time), Mars is relatively faint. Sometimes it’s very faint indeed, when it’s on the far side of the solar system from us, shining across its nearly-maximum distance from Earth (about 250 million miles, or 400 million km). After all, Mars is just a little planet, littler than Earth. So its brightness waxes and wanes dramatically as we and Mars move around the sun. Find Mars’ location for each month in EarthSky’s planet guide.
View at EarthSky Community Photos. | Niko Powe in Kiwonee, Illinois, captured Mars next to the Harvest Moon on October 2, 2020. Niko said: “There was a layer of clouds but these two’s appearance would not be denied.”
5. Jupiter.
Because Jupiter is the largest planet in the solar system, some mistakenly believe it’s the brightest planet. But not so. Jupiter’s greater distance from us lets Venus and Mars, our neighbors, shine more brightly. Jupiter is nearly always brighter than Mars, though (except when Mars is at its best). At its maximum, Jupiter shines at magnitude -2.8, nearly as bright as Mars’s peak of -2.9, and brighter than Sirius, the sky’s brightest star, which shines at magnitude -1.4. Jupiter was named for the ancient king of the gods. And it has a king-like aspect, always shining at the same dazzling brightness, not changing in brightness like Mars. Plus Jupiter moves in a stately way around the sky; it isn’t tied to the sunrise or sunset like Venus. Come to know Jupiter, and you’ll enjoy spotting in your sky for much of every year. Find Jupiter’s location for each month in EarthSky’s planet guide.
6. Mercury.
Surprise! The rarely-seen planet Mercury shines more brightly than Saturn at its best. Mercury can reach -1.9 magnitude. That’s brighter than Sirius, the sky’s brightest star. But – because Mercury is our solar system’s innermost planet – this world, more than any other in our solar system, is tied to the sun in our sky. It’s always seen shortly before sunrise, or shortly after sunset, and never gets very high in the night sky. Therefore its brightness is often offset by the fact that you’re viewing the planet in twilight and not in a nice dark sky. Still, Mercury’s brightness will surprise you!
7. Saturn.
The ringed planet Saturn is stunning in a telescope, and it’s also an easy catch without optical aid. With the eye alone, you won’t see its rings, but you will see Saturn’s golden color and steady light. At magnitude +0.7, Saturn outshines most stars and is on a par with most of the brightest stars. Plus – because it orbits our sun beyond Earth’s orbit – it’s seen more often than Mercury by casual observers. Saturn is often around deep into the night, when its brightness contrasts with the depths of a dark night sky.
View at EarthSky Community Photos. | Dan Wyman in Oceanside, California, captured Mercury, Jupiter, Saturn and a flock of birds on January 11, 2021. Thank you, Dan! Find Jupiter, Saturn and Mercury each month in EarthSky’s planet guide.
8. Ganymede.
If you’re a sky-watcher, you’ve probably seen all the objects mentioned so far without optical aid, knowingly or not. But have you seen Jupiter’s largest moon, Ganymede? Binoculars will let you spot Ganymede circling Jupiter when the satellite is at its brightest, approximately 4.6 magnitude. Ganymede takes about seven Earth-days to complete an orbit around Jupiter, and the other Galilean moons take varying amounts of time (Io nearly two days, Europa about four days, Callisto 17 days). So on any given night, you’ll find the moons in ever-shifting locations with respect to Jupiter. They look like little “stars” strung out in a line that bisects Jupiter. Thus you’ll want to use software, for example SkyandTelescope.com’s interactive Jupiter moon page, to let you know which dot circling Jupiter is Ganymede, from the location, date and time at which you’re looking. Which leads us to …
9. Io.
The next item on the solar system brightness list is Jupiter’s volcanic satellite, Io. At a little larger than our moon, Io is the innermost Galilean satellite and shines at magnitude 5.0 when it’s at its best. Can you see Io – or Ganymede – with the eye alone? In theory, you should be able to. But in practice they’re not that easy to see in the glare from Jupiter itself. Some observers with renowned vision (for example, Steven James O’Meara) have claimed to have seen Ganymede with the unaided eye. But such claims are rare. You’ll likely need binoculars for Ganymede or Io, or Europa (see below). Small telescopes show all four Galilean moons in their never-ending dance around Jupiter.
View at EarthSky Community Photos. | John Nelson was at Puget Sound, Washington, on September 24, 2020, when he captured this image. See Jupiter and its moons in the upper left? You might need to view this photo larger to see Jupiter’s moons. John wrote: “All four Galilean moons were visible. I brightened them up just a bit in Photoshop Elements so they would be easier to see in a photo that you can’t zoom in on. From left to right, the moons are Callisto, Ganymede, Europa and just to Jupiter’s right is Io.” Thank you, John.
10. Vesta.
The fourth asteroid to be discovered, Vesta, is the only asteroid to make our list of brightest solar system objects. Vesta is the second-largest asteroid, after Ceres. Vesta can reach magnitude 5.1 at its closest approach to Earth. Its opposition – a highlight of the year for asteroid observers – is coming up on March 4, 2021. This is when Earth will sweep more or less between Vesta and the sun, bringing the asteroid closest to us for this year. Because it doesn’t have a bright nearby locator, as Ganymede and Io have with Jupiter, it’s best to watch for Vesta for a couple of nights in a row to see which dim “star” in the area appears to move slowly in front of the fixed star background. Try TheSkyLive for charts and other information on how to observe Vesta.
11. Europa.
We bounce back out to Jupiter for the next item on the list, Europa, another of Jupiter’s four large Galilean moons. Europa is a great object to attempt to view and ruminate on, because it may harbor an ocean – and possibly life – beneath its icy crust. Europa just makes our list of the brightest objects in the solar system at magnitude 5.2. Again, we recommend using observing software, such as SkyandTelescope.com’s interactive Jupiter moon page, to know which Galilean moon is which.
12. Uranus,
finally. Many know that planet Uranus is theoretically visible to the unaided eye. The seventh planet from the sun appears at magnitude 5.6 at its best. Uranus is most easily picked up with the unaided eye after first pinning down its location with binoculars or a telescope. It has a disk instead of a pinpoint image through an optical device and may even appear faintly bluish green. It is particularly easy to find on the occasions that it pairs up closely with objects easier to locate, such as Mars.
View at EarthSky Community Photos. | Victor C. Rogus in Sedona, Arizona, captured this image of Uranus and Mars through his telescope on January 20, 2021. He wrote: “The sky this evening was fair at best, but I was able to capture this image of an over-exposed Mars and the planet Uranus through thin clouds. Light takes 2 hours, 43 minutes and 27 seconds to travel from Uranus and arrive to us.” Thank you, Victor!
Bottom line: Here are the top 12 brightest natural solar system objects, in order from brightest to dimmest. If you’ve seen every one of these objects, with or without optical aid, congrats!
Did you ever dare to dream of the day you’d see a helicopter in space? Well, rest easy, your watch has come to an end — NASA’s Ingenuity, the “Mars Helicopter”, is one month away from touching down on the red planet.
Members of the NASA Mars Helicopter team inspect the vehicle on Feb. 1, 2019.
Ingenuity is currently onboard NASA’s Perseverance rover, the US’ latest Mars-bound rover. It’s the first American mission to Mars since 2018’s InSight, but it was only one of three missions sent out to Mars in 2020 alongside the UAE’s Hope orbiter and China’s Tianwen-1 orbiter, lander, and rover.
While all of them are very exciting, Ingenuity will be the first helicopter to actually be sent to space, ever. NASA is expecting it to touch down on Mars on February 18.
Flying on new horizons
“NASA’s Ingenuity Mars Helicopter is the first aircraft humanity has sent to another planet to attempt powered, controlled flight,” NASA explains in a press kit. “If its experimental flight test program succeeds, the data returned could benefit future explorations of the Red Planet – including those by astronauts – by adding the aerial dimension, which is not available today.”
The helicopter is pretty small, similar to a medium-large commercial drone, and comes equipped with two carbon-fiber rotors. These will spin at around 2,400 rpm in different directions so as to stabilize the craft in flight. That speed of rotation is many times faster than those used by passenger helicopters on Earth, due to their smaller size and Mars‘ thinner atmosphere both. Since the air is thinner there, rotors have to put in a lot of extra work to generate the same lift they would produce on our planet.
If all goes well, Ingenuity could completely change how we explore Mars, and other planets with atmospheres. Up to now we’ve been using rovers, which have quite a few benefits (ground vehicles have great energy efficiency since they don’t need to stay aloft, and weight is much less of an issue, for example). However, they’re also much slower than any other vehicles in general, as they have to contend with terrain features. If Ingenuity manages to do its job, and do it well — and, especially, if it can withstand Mars’ harsh environment — space helicopters will definitely become much more common in the future.
But until then, Perseverance still needs to reach its target, and Ingenuity still needs to prove it can fly on Mars. Fingers crossed.
Although the intelligence communities, military and government agencies of numerous nations have undertaken countless official (and off-the-record, too) projects pertaining to both mind-control and mind-manipulation, without any doubt whatsoever, the most notorious of all was Project MKUltra: a clandestine operation that operated out of the CIA’s Office of Scientific Intelligence, and that had its beginnings in the Cold War era of the early 1950s. It was, I believe, MK-Ultra that created the fabricated “alien encounters” of 1950s-era “UFO Contactee” Orfeo Angelucci. The date of the project’s actual termination is a somewhat hazy one; however, it is known that it was definitely in operation as late as the latter part of the 1960s – and, not surprisingly and regretfully, has since been replaced by far more controversial and deeply hidden projects.
To demonstrate the level of secrecy that surrounded Project MKUltra, even though it had kicked off at the dawn of the fifties, its existence was largely unknown outside of the intelligence world until 1975 – when the Church Committee and the Rockefeller Commission began making their own investigations of the CIA’s mind-control-related activities – in part to determine if (a) the CIA had engaged in illegal activity, (b) the personal rights of citizens had been violated, and (c) if the projects at issue had resulted in fatalities – which they most assuredly and unfortunately did. Rather conveniently, and highly suspiciously, too, it was asserted at the height of the inquires in 1975 that two years earlier, in 1973, CIA Director, Richard Helms had ordered the destruction of the Agency’s MKUltra files. Fortunately, this did not stop the Church Committee or the Rockefeller Commission – both of whom had the courage and tenacity to forge ahead with their investigations, relying on sworn testimony from players in MKUltra, where documentation was no longer available for scrutiny, study and evaluation.
The story that unfolded was both dark and disturbing –in equal degrees. Indeed, the scope of the project – and allied operations, too – was spelled out in an August 1977 document titled The Senate MK-Ultra Hearings that was prepared by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and the Committee on Human Resources, as a result of its probing into the secret world of the CIA. As the document explained: “Research and development programs to find materials which could be used to alter human behavior were initiated in the late 1940s and early 1950s. These experimental programs originally included testing of drugs involving witting human subjects, and culminated in tests using unwitting, non-volunteer human subjects. These tests were designed to determine the potential effects of chemical or biological agents when used operationally against individuals unaware that they had received a drug.”
The Committee then turned its attention to the overwhelming secrecy that surrounded these early 1940s/1950s projects: “The testing programs were considered highly sensitive by the intelligence agencies administering them. Few people, even within the agencies, knew of the programs and there is no evidence that either the Executive Branch or Congress were ever informed of them. The highly compartmentalized nature of these programs may be explained in part by an observation made by the CIA Inspector General that, ‘the knowledge that the Agency is engaging in unethical and illicit activities would have serious repercussions in political and diplomatic circles and would be detrimental to the accomplishment of its missions.'”
The research and development programs, and particularly the covert testing programs, resulted in massive abridgments of the rights of American citizens, and sometimes with tragic consequences, too. As prime evidence of this, the Committee uncovered details on the deaths of two Americans that were firmly attributed to the programs at issue; while other participants in the testing programs were said to still be suffering from the residual effects of the tests as late as the mid-1970s. And as the Committee starkly noted: “While some controlled testing of these substances might be defended, the nature of the tests, their scale, and the fact that they were continued for years after the danger of surreptitious administration of LSD to unwitting individuals was known, demonstrate a fundamental disregard for the value of human life.”
Silicon Valley engineers are worshipping robots as gods.
Anthony Levandowski – the man who built Google's famous self-driving car – has established a religious nonprofit that appears to be something like a church devoted to the worship of artificial intelligence.
It isn't clear whether the robot God already exists, what exactly it consists of and why it is being developed. But what is clear is that Mr Levandowski appears to be building his own god, in the former of artificial intelligence, which he will then encourage people to worship so that the world can be improved.
Boston Dynamics
Boston Dynamics describes itself as 'building dynamic robots and software for human simulation'. It has created robots for DARPA, the US' military research company
Google's self-driving cars
Google has been using similar technology to build self-driving cars, and has been pushing for legislation to allow them on the roads
DARPA Urban Challenge
The DARPA Urban Challenge, set up by the US Department of Defense, challenges driverless cars to navigate a 60 mile course in an urban environment that simulates guerilla warfare
Deep Blue beats Kasparov
Deep Blue, a computer created by IBM, won a match against world champion Garry Kasparov in 1997. The computer could evaluate 200 million positions per second, and Kasparov accused it of cheating after the match was finished
Watson wins Jeopardy
Another computer created by IBM, Watson, beat two champions of US TV series Jeopardy at their own game in 2011
Apple's Siri
Apple's virtual assistant for iPhone, Siri, uses artificial intelligence technology to anticipate users' needs and give cheeky reactions
Kinect
Xbox's Kinect uses artificial intelligence to predict where players are likely to go, an track their movement more accurately
That's according to the founding documents of Way of the Future, a group intended to "develop and promote the realization of a Godhead based on artificial intelligence and through understanding and worship of the Godhead contribute to the betterment of society", according documents published by Wired. Mr Levandowski is the group's CEO and president, and it isn't clear how many members it has or what it is actually doing.
A range of scientific experts and technology billionaires, including Stephen Hawking and Elon Musk, have warned that our relaxed attitude towards artificial intelligence could mean we're at risk of being killed by it. Mr Musk has likened artificial intelligence to "summoning the demon", suggesting that while we might think we could control such a force we ultimately couldn't – and has founded an organisation called OpenAI focused specifically on stopping such a thing from happening.
Some theories – like the idea of Roko's Basilisk, a mostly derided but incredibly popular thought experiment that suggests we may be at risk from some all-powerful AI in the future – even speculate that our current actions could have some impact on how the artificially intelligent forces view us in the future.
The discovery comes as Mr Levandowski takes his part at the centre of a legal battle between Uber and Google, though it was actually founded two years ago and before all that began. The engineer left Uber last year amid claims by Google that he had stolen trade secrets and used them at his new company.
Wired, which revealed the strange new church as part of a long profile on Mr Levandowski, pointed out that his interest in self-driving cars and our robot god are far from separate from each other. The engineer is among the foremost experts on self-driving cars in the world – and those vehicles give artificial intelligence its most powerful embodiment, as well as being a look at how AI will change the world.
Meer van UFO'S of UAP'S, ASTRONOMIE, RUIMTEVAART, ARCHEOLOGIE, OUDHEIDKUNDE, SF-SNUFJES EN ANDERE ESOTERISCHE WETENSCHAPPEN - DE ALLERLAATSTE NIEUWTJES