Witness the Power of a Supermassive Black Hole in this Animation

Rosalie Chan

By definition, black holes are so horrendously dense that not even light can escape them. And this means we’ve never actually gotten a good look at a black hole — we have no idea what they really look like. Nevertheless, we know what their effects are on their surroundings — and this animation provides a better glimpse of how that works.

The UCLA Galactic Center Group and the W.M. Keck Observatory Laser Team created an animation using images from 1995 to 2013 tracking stars orbiting the supermassive black hole at the Milky Way’s center, called Sagittarius A*. These orbits provide some solid evidence of that black hole’s existence — they move around in ways that can only be explained by the presence of an object in the middle possessing an intense degree of gravitational power.

The European Southern Observatory also captured images of stars orbiting around the black hole over the course of 16 years. The time-lapse below might just look like faded white dots, but it’s actually the images of real stars accelerated by a factor of 32 million.

Nevertheless, we’re still stuck without any data that can give us a direct snapshot of what the supermassive black hole looks like. That might change soon thanks to the upcoming Event Horizon Telescope.

This isn’t like any normal telescope. It’s a global network of nine radio telescopes that together will form a telescope as large as the Earth, and it will produce the first image of the event horizon of the black hole in the center of the Milky Way. Scientists think the black hole might look like this:

Scientists have made steady progress on improving the capability of Very Long Baseline Interferometry (VLBI) at short wavelengths. In other words, they have linked together radio telescopes in different places to create a space telescope and gather data. The final telescopes of the Event Horizon Telescope are expected to come online this spring. We might get our first picture this year.

The black hole above weighs 4 million solar masses, or has the same mass as 4 million suns. And a VLBI detection has marked Sagittarius A*’s likely location. During this decade, scientists plan to probe this region for the black hole’s event horizon. So far, the Event Horizon Telescope has made the first ever measurements of magnetic fields just outside the black hole’s event horizon.

Black holes are still much of a mystery to us. They streak through space, suck up and stretch out stars, and hurl spitballs. Detecting gravitational waves took us one step closer, as they were the first-ever observation of a collision of two black holes. But the Event Horizon Telescope would help us better understand black holes and black hole physics and also advance the study of Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity. We’ll find out if Einstein was right after all.

Photos via TheUCLA Galactic Center Group and the W.M. Keck Observatory Laser Team

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Lights Out: Asteroid Triggered Freezing Darkness That Killed Dinos

Credit: solarseven | Shutterstock.com

When a giant asteroid careened into Earth about 66 million years ago, the enormous collision led to the formation of an airborne "curtain" of sulfate molecules that blocked the sun's light and led to years of freezing cold and darkness, a new study finds.

The finding shows how these droplets, or aerosols, of sulfuric acid formed high in the atmosphere, and likely contributed to the deaths of 75 percent of all animals on Earth, including nonavian dinosaurs such as Tyrannosaurus rex and long-necked sauropods, the researchers said.

Earlier studies suggested that the dino-killing asteroid kicked up dust and debris that hung in the air and blocked sunlight in the short term. But by using computer simulations, the researchers of the new study showed how droplets of sulfuric acid contributed to long-term cooling. [Wipe Out: History's Most Mysterious Extinctions]

Moreover, the sudden, drastic drop in temperature likely caused the surface of the oceans to cool, which would have massively disturbed the marine ecosystems, the researchers said.

"The big chill following the impact of the asteroid that formed the Chicxulub crater in Mexico is a turning point in Earth history," the study's lead researcher Julia Brugger, a climate scientist at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) in Germany, said in a statement. "We can now contribute new insights for understanding the much debated ultimate cause for the demise of the dinosaurs at the end of the Cretaceous era."

Brugger and her colleagues employed a type of computer simulation typically used for climate modeling. The model showed that gases containing sulfur evaporated during the violent impact. These sulfuric molecules were the main ingredients that blocked the sun's light on Earth and led to plummeting temperatures, they said.

For instance, before the asteroid hit, the tropics were an average temperature of 81 degrees Fahrenheit (27 degrees Celsius). But after the massive impact, the average temperature was 41 F (5 C), the researchers said.

Hans Sues, a scientist at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, excavates a dinosaur fossil at Dzharakuduk in the Kyzylkum Desert of  Uzbekistan, September 2006.

 HANS SUES, SMITHSONIAN

"It became cold, I mean, really cold," Brugger said. Globally, temperatures fell at least 47 F (26 C). For at least three years following the asteroid's crash, the average annual temperature fell below freezing, and the polar ice caps grew in size.

"The long-term cooling caused by the sulfate aerosols was much more important for the mass extinction than the dust that stays in the atmosphere for only a relatively short time," study co-researcher Georg Feulner, a climate scientist at PIK, said in the statement. "It was also more important than local events like the extreme heat close to the impact, wildfires or tsunamis."

In all, it took 30 years for Earth's climate to recover, the researchers said.

As the air cooled, so did the ocean's surface waters. This cold water became denser and thus heavier, and sank into the depths of the ocean. Meanwhile, warmer water from the deeper ocean rose, bringing up nutrients that likely led to giant algal blooms, the researchers said.

It's possible these algal blooms produced toxic substances that affected life along the coasts, the researchers said. But regardless of whether they were toxic or not, the ocean's massive mixing would have disrupted the marine ecosystem, and likely contributed to the extinction of its species, including the ammonites and the reptilian sea beasts known as plesiosaurs.

The new research illustrates what might happen to Earth if another asteroid were to cross its path, the researchers said.

“It is fascinating to see how evolution is partly driven by an accident like an asteroid’s impact — mass extinctions show that life on Earth is vulnerable," Feulner said. "It also illustrates how important the climate is for all life-forms on our planet. Ironically today, the most immediate threat is not from natural cooling but from human-made global warming."

A team of American and European researchers have confirmed that the Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction — the event that wiped out roughly 75% of the planet’s species, including almost every dinosaur — was caused by an asteroid impact in Mexico 66 million years ago. The Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction was the last great extinction event to 

The study was published online Jan. 13 in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.

Original article on Live Science.

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Preserving Bodies in a Deep Freeze: 50 Years Later

Credit: U.S. Department of Agriculture via Flickr/CC BY-SA 2.0

(Inside Science) -- Early in the 1960s, a group of enthusiasts advanced the concept of freezing humans as soon as they die, in hopes of reviving them after the arrival of medical advances able to cure the conditions that killed them. The idea went into practice for the first time 50 years ago.

On Jan. 12, 1967, James Bedford, an emeritus professor of psychology at the University of California, became the first person to be "cyropreserved." A small team of doctors and other enthusiasts froze him a few hours after he died from liver cancer that had spread to his lungs.

A few days later the team placed the body into an insulated container packed with dry ice. Later still, Bedford was immersed in liquid nitrogen in a large Dewar container. Fifteen years on, after a series of moves from one cryopreservation facility to another, his body found a home at the Alcor Life Extension Foundation in Scottsdale, Arizona, where it still resides.

By current standards of cryonics, the procedure was remarkably untidy and disorganized. Nevertheless, a visual evaluation of Bedford's condition in 1991 found that his body had remained frozen and suffered no obvious deterioration.

"There's no date set for another examination," said R. Michael Perry, care services manager at Alcor.

But as promoters of cryopreservation celebrate the 50th anniversary of Bedford's death and freezing -- known to some as "Bedford Day" -- they emphasize improvements to the freezing and preservation procedures that Bedford's experiences advanced.

The community is also undergoing a significant change in its expectations for reviving frozen patients. Rather than planning for a Lazarus-like resuscitation of the entire body, some proponents of the technology focus more on saving individuals' stored memories, and perhaps incorporating them into robots.

A scan of a young woman’s brain after being frozen.

Aura of suspicion

Beyond the cryopreservation community, however, an aura of scientific suspicion that surrounded Bedford's freezing remains.

"Reanimation or simulation is an abjectly false hope that is beyond the promise of technology and is certainly impossible with the frozen, dead tissue offered by the 'cryonics' industry," neuroscientist Michael Hendricks of McGill University in Montreal, Canada, wrote in Technology Review.

Scientists aren't the industry's only critics.

Families of individuals designated for freezing -- including Bedford's own family -- have gone to court to protest or defend loved ones' decisions to undergo freezing.

In a more recent case, in 2011, a Colorado probate judge upheld a contract that Mary Robbins had signed with Alcor over objections from Robbins' children. And last year the High Court of England upheld a mother's right to seek cryonic treatment of her terminally ill 14-year-old daughter after her death, despite the father's wishes.

Public reaction to the technology reached its nadir in New England in 2002, when court documents revealed that Boston Red Sox baseball icon Ted Williams was frozen in the Alcor facility, with his head severed from his body. Williams' son John Henry, who arranged the process, was himself frozen after he died of leukemia.

Politics has also impacted the technology's progress. In 2004, for example, Michigan's state government voted to license a facility called the Cryonics Institute, located in Clinton, as a cemetery. That move, reversed eight years later, prevented the institute from preparing bodies for cryopreservation on its own, because applying such procedures to a dead body required the services of a licensed funeral director.

The cryonics industry flatly disagrees with its critics.

Alcor asserts on its website that "[t]here are no known credible technical arguments that lead one to conclude that cryonics, carried out under good conditions today, would not work." The company adds: "Cryonics is a belief that no one is really dead until the information content of the brain is lost, and that low temperatures can prevent this loss."

Certainly the controversies have not discouraged candidates for cryopreservation.

Worldwide, more than 250 individuals are now housed in cryonic facilities, at a minimum per-person cost of about $28,000 in the U.S.

Russia's KrioRus company offers a cut-rate level starting at $12,000, with the condition that it stores several human bodies and assorted pets and other animals in communal Dewar containers. Individual contracts can specify the length of storage. At present, the U.S. and Russia are the only countries with facilities that offer human cryopreservation.

Difficult beginning

The first attempt at cryopreservation did not go particularly smoothly.

Bedford died before all preparations for his cryopreservation were complete. So instead of draining his blood and replacing it with a customized antifreeze solution to protect the body's tissues from freezing damage, the team simply injected the antifreeze into Bedford's arteries without removing the blood.

The team then surrounded the body in dry ice, and started it on a series of transfers from one container to another that ended up in a Dewar container in Alcor's facility.

Because of those difficulties, cryonics experts feared that the body had suffered serious damage. But the examination in 1991 quelled those concerns.

"We were really relieved that he was not discolored," Perry recalled. "And corners of the ice cubes [around him] were still sharp; he had stayed frozen all the time."

In recent years, cryonics promoters have borrowed from medical advances in such fields as cryobiology and nanobiology.

To prevent ice crystals from damaging cell walls in the frozen state, cryopreservationists replace the body's blood supply with mixtures of antifreeze compounds and organ preservatives -- a technique developed to preserve frozen eggs for fertility treatments.

Another emerging approach accounts for the separation of Ted Williams' head and body. Based on studies of roundworms, promoters of cryonics argue that freezing can preserve the contents of individuals' brains even if their bodies can't be revived. That opens the possibility of downloading cryopreserved personalities into a robotic future body.

Hendricks disagrees. "While it may be possible to preserve these features in dead tissue, that is certainly not happening now," he pointed out in Technology Review.

A distant dream

Scientists such as Barry Fuller, a professor of surgical science and low temperature medicine at England's University College, London, emphasize that even preserving body parts in such a way that they remain viable on thawing remains a distant dream.

"There is ongoing research into these scientific challenges, and a potential future demonstration of the ability to cryopreserve human organs for transplantation would be a major first step into proving the concept," he told The Guardian. "But at the moment we cannot achieve that."

Nevertheless, Perry expresses optimism about a timeline for the revival of frozen humans.

"We think in terms of decades," he said. "Sometimes we say fifty to a hundred years."

David Gorski, a surgeon at Wayne State University Medical Center in Michigan, takes a darker view.

"Fifty years from now," he said, "it's likely that all that will remain of my existence will be some scientific papers and a faint memory held by my nieces and nephews and maybe, if I'm lucky, a few of my youngest readers."

This article is provided by Inside Science News Service, which is supported by the American Institute of Physics.

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Military Mind Control? Psychic Army Division Revealed in CIA Files

Mind over matter? One government test of paranormal abilities tasked alleged psychic Uri Geller with replicating unseen drawings, such as a bunch of grapes. Geller's result (right) was produced in isolation from the target illustration.

Credit: PD-US

When the CIA recently shared millions of pages of declassified documents online, the agency included a collection of files for what was arguably one of the U.S. Army's strangest initiatives: investigating psychic abilities for use by military intelligence.

Known as Stargate, the program launched in 1978 and lasted for two decades, exploring reports of so-called psychic phenomena that originated behind the Iron Curtain and around the world, and conducting experiments testing "mind control" techniques. [The 10 Most Outrageous Military Experiments]

The Stargate files were recently made available online as part of the CIA Records Search Tool (CREST) database, which included a total of 930,000 declassified files containing more than 12 million pages, CIA officials explained in a statement.

One of the CREST documents, a mission statement for Stargate stamped "Not Releasable to Foreign Nationals," described the project's goal: "To establish a program using psychoenergetics for intelligence applications."

A search on the Merriam-Webster dictionary site yields a discouraging "Words fail us" result for the term "psychoenergetics." However, the William A. Tiller Institute for Psychoenergetic Science defines psychoenergetics as energy exchanges that can be influenced by consciousness.

To understand how these energy exchanges could work — and how they might be used to benefit military intelligence — the Stargate project documented numerous reports of people using their minds to manipulate objects or read others' thoughts. The documents include accounts of spiritual healers in Russia and Mexico, "firewalkers" in Greece, assorted tales of poltergeists and hauntings, and experiments testing metal bending through mind control.

Stargate also conducted tests to see if psychic abilities could be performed on command under controlled circumstances. The well-known performer and alleged psychic Uri Geller participated in a series of experiments over eight days in August 1973. During these tests, researchers asked Geller to duplicate drawings that were produced by another person, whom he could neither see nor hear.

In one notable example, the word "bunch" was selected at random, and the control subject drew a bunch of grapes. Meanwhile, Geller was expected to duplicate this drawing while isolated in a room nearby that was shielded electrically and acoustically and had no window openings, the summary of the experiment said.

Geller first mused about seeing "drops of water," then described "purple circles." He finally said he was "quite sure" he had the picture, and proceeded to draw a bunch of grapes that had 24 globes in the cluster, the same number as in the control drawing.

His performance in this and other experiments provided convincing evidence of his psychic abilities, CIA observers wrote in the study. But overall, the Stargate program failed to amass enough data to support or replicate psychoenergetics activities, and was finally dissolved in 1998.

Original article on Live Science.

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Permanent Structure Discovered on Venus – UFO Hunters Claim it’s Alien-Made

Why isn’t NASA all over this?

Underneath Venus’ acid clouds, UFO hunters claim, rests a permanent structure that seems to suggest the planet was not only visited in the distant past – it was deemed secure enough to house massive outposts!

Today, Venus is a hellhole. Although its size and composition has earned it the nickname of Earth’s Sister, the reality is you wouldn’t last 3 seconds on its surface. Calling Venus’ climate unpleasant would be a gross understatement.

With surface temperatures high enough to melt lead and an atmospheric pressure 90 times greater than what we have here, Venus would be near the bottom on your list of exotic vacation spots. Come for the thrills, stay for the sulphuric acid rains! Just to drive the point home, the longest a man-made probe’s ever survived on its surface was a little over two hours. The Soviet Venera 13 landed, took a few photos and measurements and then succumbed to the infernal conditions.

But, astronomers determined, Venus wasn’t always this way. Like Mars, it is almost certain at one point in the distant past, Venus had a much lighter atmosphere and oceans of liquid water on its surface. It got the way it is today because of global volcanic eruptions and a runaway greenhouse effect. As CO2 and other greenhouse gasses accumulated in the atmosphere, temperatures rose, water turned to steam and the planet’s habitability index dropped below the threshold.

Recently, alien hunters have spotted an enormous, apparently stationary structure underneath Venus’ thick layer of acid clouds. Responsible for the discovery is Tyler Glockner, self-entitled conveyor of the “exposure of the alien phenomenon.”

The video he uploaded to YouTube shows what looks like an enormous curving band that stretches along a portion of the planet’s circumference.

Scientists have yet to ever see something as massive as what is being depicted here on Venus.”

Glockner added: “Maybe this is something else all together. Some sort of massive structure hidden in the clouds. Or possibly a grouping of something. All coming together to form this giant band. […]”

“You always hear about Mars, Jupiter, Saturn and Pluto but you really don’t hear about Venus. Maybe there’s something about this planet they don’t want us to know.”

The scientific community was quick to dismiss Glockner’s hypothesis because caution saved the scientist’s career. If prominent figures suddenly started backing every outrageous claim involving aliens, their credibility would drop lower than Venus’ real estate value.

Their explanation for the unusual band on the planet is gravity waves. Not to be confused with gravitational waves (ripples in space-time), gravity waves form when there is a difference in the atmospheric pressure of two neighboring regions. Think of clouds going over a mountain and you’ve got a pretty good picture.

“Gravity waves are an atmospheric phenomenon we often see in mountainous parts of Earth’s surface. Crudely speaking, they form when air ripples over bumpy surfaces,” French astrophysicist and atmospheric climate expert Jean-Loup Bertaux told Fox News. “The waves propagate upwards and grow larger and larger until they break below the cloud top and forms a wave,” he added.

If there’s one thing Venus is known for, it has to be strange cloud formations. So while gravity waves could potentially account for the weird structure, there is no proof it was actually caused by a mountain.

The planet’s strange history parallels our present and its present might foretell ours. Mankind sent only a handful of probes to Venus’ surface and to be completely honest, our knowledge of our next door neighbor is superficial. Taking this into consideration, it would be unwise to claim there are no alien relics on Venus. Until we succeed in mapping its surface (and we might never get to), there is plenty of room for sensible speculation.

At the end of the day, Glockner remains convinced what he saw on Venus is proof of ancient (or even present) alien habitation. He says gravity waves only last for a few days before dissipating. On the other hand, the strange band has been there for a while and shows no signs of disappearing anytime soon.

What do you think – natural or artificial?

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This Giant Cube UFO Keeps Returning to our Sun. Why?

No one knows what this ginormous cube UFO is doing out there, but it keeps coming back to its position in front of our Sun.

No, we’re not sure it’s a Borg Cube, but that doesn’t mean its intentions are benign.

The enormous cube-shaped UFO was spotted near our Sun on December 22 by myunhauzen74 of YouTube, a conspiracy theorist known for his stance on NASA and the truth he believes they keep hidden.

In the photos released by NASA’s SOHO (Solar and Heliospheric Observatory), a cube the size of Earth can be seen hovering near the star that gives us warmth. While some speculate that the cuboid shape is the result of NASA censorship done to hide the actual craft, there are others who invoke pretty convincing arguments in favor of the cube UFO hypothesis.

According to UFO hunter Scott Waring, the object in the photos appears to reflect sunlight and therefore must be a solid object.

“Did you notice the light extending out from the sun and around the cube?” he asked on his blog. “The light is going out further than other places around the sun. This means the light is reflecting off the dark surface of the UFO and the UFO is getting hit by the Sun’s heat.”

If this object is indeed a physical UFO, it definitely has a vetted interest in our Sun. Many UFO experts believe aliens could harness the power of our star and transform it into energy they could use. Some even speculate that the Sun’s immense power output could be manipulated into tearing the space-time around it, opening up a wormhole for the aliens to use.

The precise geometric form of the enigmatic presence could be enough to suspect it has an artificial origin. But that origin could be more prosaic than you think. NASA maintains that it is an image artifact, the result of cameras recalibrating themselves.

This explanation fails to convince UFO hunters who are determined to get the truth out one way or another. They claim that this UFO was photographed dozens of times in the past few years, a testament to the persistent presence of advanced aliens in our Solar System.

What do you think, glitch, cube UFO or the cover-up of something much darker?

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Early Meteorite Bits Reveal Clues About Solar System's Evolution

More than 460 million years ago, a massive solar-system collision generated many of the meteorites still falling to Earth. Now, researchers are probing the meteors that came before that event.

Credit: Don Davis, Southwest Research Institute

Many meteorites found on Earth are remnants of one titanic solar-system collision that took place more than 460 million years ago. But for the first time, researchers have specifically targeted meteorites that fell to Earth just before that asteroid collision and found that the composition of those earlier space rocks is quite different than those today.

By sifting through the minuscule remnants of those ancient solar-system crashes, called micrometeorites, the researchers found that the most common types of meteorites today used to be quite rare — and the rarest ones used to be common. Understanding the makeup of asteroids provides insight into the history of solar-system collisions and the evolution of the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, scientists say.

"We spend lots of time studying the debris from the big asteroid destruction event 466 million years ago, but recently, we went a little bit further back in time," said Philipp Heck, a researcher at The Field Museum in Chicago and lead author of the new research paper. "We found it very different from what comes down today — that was our big surprise," Heck told Space.com. [The Strangest Asteriods in the Solar System]

Meteorites come from flying debris after a collision of two bodies in the solar system, and their makeup reflects the asteroid, comet, moon or planet that suffered through the crash. The rarest meteorites found on Earth today come from differentiated or partially differentiated bodies — big clusters of dust and debris that got hot enough to form (or partially form) a core, mantle and crust, as on Earth, Mars or the asteroid Vesta. It's much more common for meteorites today to come from undifferentiated bodies, which remained mixtures of rock, dust and metal.

But according to the new research, that type of meteorite, called an ordinary chondrite, used to be much less common than ones from differentiated bodies were. By avoiding the most recent meteorites, researchers can get a glimpse of more collisions in the solar system's past.

"This is not an event, what we're looking at — this is basically the background," Heck said. "You can say these are tails of different events; the results of different [collision] events in the solar system, in the asteroid belt, that generated fragments … and those fragments arrived to Earth."

A few events and asteroid populations seem to dominate that background, he added: 34 percent of the micrometeorites came from partially differentiated bodies, which had partially melted and begun to separate out, whereas only 0.45 percent of meteorites today are that type. This indicates that many more of those bodies were experiencing collisions in the past, Heck said. The researchers also found micrometeorites that originated from a collision at Vesta, the brightest asteroid visible from Earth, billions of years ago, as well as meteorites that the researchers think came from the formation of the Flora asteroid family, also about a billion years ago. Both reside in the asteroid belt.

Notably, there were very few ordinary chondrites — most were generated later, by the 466-million-year-old collision or by an even later event, which generated another type of ordinary chondrite, Heck said.

A false-color image taken by an electron microscope of a polished cross-section of chrome spinel. The mineral was taken from a fossil micrometeorite that likely came from the asteroid 4 Vesta.

Credit: Philipp Heck/The Field Museum

"Using relict minerals in the rock record to determine the previous asteroid flux is incredibly inventive," Tasha Dunn, a planetary geologist at Colby College who was not involved in the research, told Space.com by email. "I was quite surprised by the results."

Dunn noted that the proportions of meteorite types that rain down today don't match the populations of asteroids found in the belt — a disparity that has puzzled meteorite researchers. "Trying to understand why the proportion of asteroids in the asteroid belt doesn't match what we see in the meteorite collection has been one of the biggest questions in meteorics for some time," she said.

Dunn said she was particularly interested in seeing the large proportion of meteorites from the Flora family back then, because researchers have wondered why there weren't many of them coming down despite the Floras' good position. Maybe, she said, much of the material was expelled during the initial breakup of the family. [The Asteroid Belt Explained (Infographic)]

"Needle in a haystack"

Understandably, meteorites that fell more than 466 million years ago are difficult to find. Heck's Russian and Swedish colleagues turned to micrometeorites less than 2 millimeters (0.08 inches) across. By sifting through samples of rock from a river valley in Russia that used to be seafloor, they managed to separate some. They chose a location that would have had a slow buildup of sediment, leading to a greater proportion of the desired micrometeorites.

The researchers took advantage of a lucky fact: chromites and chrome spinels, the key grains necessary to determine the age and makeup of a micrometeorite, are resistant to acid. So to find the meteorite compounds, they treated the material with hydrochloric or hydrofluoric acid to eat away the Earthly sediments, leaving the meteorite markers behind.

"The approach is essentially a needle-in-a-haystack problem, and we use the crude method of burning down the haystack to find the needle," Heck said.

Heck's group analyzed samples dating back from the target era, zeroing in on the chromites and chrome spinels whose makeup can help scientists classify the type of object they came from.

"Even almost 500 million years in the sediment didn't change them," Heck said. "They still preserve the original composition, which makes it a really, really good and robust mineral to study meteorites that arrived in the past."

They also measured the oxygen isotopes — that is, oxygen with different numbers of neutrons — whose proportions likely represent how far from the sun the body formed, Heck said.

Going forward, Heck said, researchers should look at different time windows to try to understand those earlier solar system collisions, like the one that blasted fragments off of Vesta.

"We can do that for the different types of fragments from different parent bodies, parent asteroids, and get a better picture of what collisions happened and what were the effects on planets in the inner solar system," he said. One could also track meteorite fragments on places like the moon and Mars for a more complete view. All results can be fitted into models of the events, increasing their accuracy and our understanding of the solar system's evolution — and, potentially, those titanic crashes' impact on Earth's life and climate.

"It's really a multidisciplinary collaboration with different fields — geology, cosmochemistry, planetary science, chemistry — all working together to try to tackle that problem," Heck said.

The new research was detailed today (Jan. 23) in the journal Nature Astronomy.

Email Sarah Lewin at slewin@space.com or follow her @SarahExplains. Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook and Google+. Original article on Space.com.

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The Peak on Saturn's 'Death Star' Moon Mimas

Saturn's icy moon Mimas highlights with shadows the vast size of Herschel Crater and its centerpiece Herschel peak. The image was captured by Cassini's narrow-angle camera on October 22, 2016 using several of its spectral filters.

Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute

Saturn's moon Mimas glows a shining white in this photo from NASA's Cassini spacecraft. Dominating the image is Mimas' defining feature Herschel Crater, named after the astronomer William Herschel who first discovered the moon, where shadows offer a clue into how large the cavity actually is. 

The crater is 88 miles (140 kilometers) wide -- close to one-third the diameter of Mimas itself. Herschel peak, the central mountain feature common in large impact craters, stands a similar height to Earth's Mount Everest on Earth. The distinctive Herschel Crater gives Mimas more than a passing resemblance to the fictional Death Star from the "Star Wars" science fiction universe. You can see more photos of Mimas in our gallery here.

The Cassini spacecraft imaged the icy moon's hemisphere opposite Saturn with north being up and roughly 21 degrees left. Cassini's narrow-angle camera utilized a combination of its special filters to capture the image on Oct. 22, 2016, though NASA only released the image this month. Cassini was almost 115,000 miles (185,000 kilometers) from the moon.  

Cassini, a cooperative project of NASA, ESA (the European Space Agency) and the Italian Space Agency and managed by Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, has been on its mission to gather data about the outer planets for nearly 20 years. In late 2016, the craft began the first portion of its Grand Finale where it will orbit Saturn more than 20 times gathering data about the planet, its moons and its rings before diving into the planet in late 2017.

Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook and Google+. Original story on Space.com.

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STEVE QUAYLE: 'SOMETHING CRITICAL IS HAPPENING IN ANTARCTICA'

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ALIEN ABDUCTION CAUGHT IN A SERIES OF SATELLITE IMAGES

A UFO enthusiast named John Mooner was left ‘speechless’ when he found images of himself attempting to punch an alien in the face on Google Earth. He is convinced that the pictures are incontrovertible proof that he was abducted by an alien species. However, he has absolutely no memory of the bizarre encounter. 

 

MAN DISCOVERS GOOGLE MAPS IMAGES OF HIMSELF BEING ABDUCTED BY ALIENS 

 

Mooner stumbled across the extraordinary images when he was experiencing technical problems with the Google Earth app that was installed on his computer. He went online to look for an alternative where he discovered Google satellite maps. As a test, he decided to look up an area where he had witnessed a UFO in the preceding year. “I was left speechless by what I saw, ” he said. 

 

Mooner discovered that the satellite camera had captured footage of an alien abduction in process. As if that were not shocking enough, he found that he was the victim of the abduction. He said that the satellite image quite clearly shows him grappling and resisting the attack of a grey alien. One of the images actually depicts Mooner trying to fight off the alien by punching it in the face. "Looking at the image it appears that the alien has blocked my punch and has grabbed my fist and must have been able to subdue me, ” said Mooner. 

 

"The strangest thing about this captured incident is that I do not remember this taking place at all, ” said Mooner. However, he said that he did have sporadic episodes throughout 2016 where he had a distinct impression that he was ‘missing time’.

 

 Speaking of the UFO sighting that preceded this presumed abduction, Mooner describes three identical UFOs flying in formation at different altitudes. He said that the UFO at the highest level of altitude was emitting a green light and leaving a red glowing contrail. By contrast, the other two UFOs were glowing with some kind of white energy. He noted that this was very interesting to him at the time as they were very similar to the UFOs that had been filmed hovering over the Nellis air force base in Nevada. 

 

 

 

 

http://www.disclose.tv/

{ http://7tales.net/ }

MOEDERSCHIP DUIKT DOOR DE WOLKEN IN MEXICO ( VIDEO )

{ http://niburu.co/ }

MOEDERSCHIP DUIKT DOOR DE WOLKEN IN MEXICO ( VIDEO )

{ http://niburu.co/ }

UFOs Surround Colima Volcano Before Eruption, Jan 2017, Video, UFO Sighting News.

Date of sighting: January 23, 2017
Location of sighting: Colima Volcano, Mexico
Live cam: http://www.webcamsdemexico.com/webcam-volcan-de-colima

These UFOs were over Colima Volcano around the same time that the volcano erupted on live cam. Colima has been the site of thousands of UFO sightings, and most of those are still stored on Youtube today. Sometimes when its a larger UFO, the camera will actually go white screen, probably a deliberate method of aliens to stop themselves from being seen entering the volcano mouth. 
Scott C. Waring

Streetcap1 states:
Best view this in 1080p as they are very far away. White ufos first then one dark ufo. Then 20 seconds later Colima Volcano Erupts. Streetcap1.

{ http://www.ufosightingsdaily.com/ }

Glowing UFO Orb Over Marlborough, New Zealand On Jan 2017, Video, UFO Sighting News.

Date of sighting: January 19, 2017
Location of sighting: Marlborough, New Zealand 
News source: 

http://www.stuff.co.nz/national/88570923/marlborough-teenager-believes-he-may-have-seen-a-ufo

This was in the news in New Zealand this morning and is causing a lot of excitement. The boy saw a UFO appear from nowhere, because it decloaked in front of him. It wanted to be seen by him. So was the boys watching the UFO or was the UFO watching the boy?
Scott C. Waring

News states:
A Blenheim teenager has captured a mysterious glowing object in the night sky on camera - and thinks he may have spotted a UFO. Josh Marshall, 16, took a video on his phone of the spinning, disc-like object on Wednesday night. It "sort of just appeared" in the sky when Josh was at his friend's house about 9.20pm."I'm not sure what it is but it's not a plane, it's not a star, and not a satellite," Josh said. "I've got no idea what else it could be," the Marlborough Boys' College student said. Josh watched it along with his friend's family until about 10pm, when clouds came over and covered it. "It was quite cool to watch." The object did not really move, but the stars seemed to move around it, Josh said. The object appears to get smaller and brighter before the video ends. It was interesting there was a lightning storm the same night, after he spotted the UFO, and he wondered if the two were connected. Marshall said he spotted the UFO northwest of his friend's house in Blenheim, and thought it was out over the Springlands suburb. (More at source).

{ http://www.ufosightingsdaily.com/ }

Stargate of the Gods: Ancient Technology of a Highly Advanced Prehistoric Civilization (Video)

(Before It's News)

Thousands of years ago, advanced technology from an ancient civilization on Earth was lost. The keepers of this technology were regarded as gods. In this video, you will see how the pieces of this puzzle, together with Sumerian, Egyptian and Mayan artwork and symbolism, reveal a shared vision held by these diverse cultures — a vision of the “Stargate of the Gods,” which was considered to be a Stairway to Heaven according to their shared beliefs.

Analyzes a number of worldwide predictions, symbols, and scientific discoveries to drive a conclusion that there is a beam of some “atomic particles” is about to arrive from the center of Milky Way into our solar system. One must have at least some basic knowledge in ancient mythology, religious philosophy, and NASA discoveries prior to watching this workshop.

Check out more contributions by Jeffery Pritchett ranging from UFO to Bigfoot to Paranormal to Prophecy

 { http://beforeitsnews.com/ }

The Night of the Shape Shifting Humanoids (Part 1)

 Red Pill Junkie

Sooner or later… it happens.

If you develop a passion for the UFO phenomenon for as long as I have, sooner or later you wake up to notice them saucers are not as sexy as they used to be. Aerial sightings, photos of disk-shaped or triangular objects, they all start to feel irrelevant. Even the landing cases, with their trace evidence on the ground, eventually lose their allure.

Perhaps UFOs, like any other dependency, cause the user to slowly grow a certain ‘resistance’, forcing you to ‘increase the dosage’ in order to get that thrilling buzz…

Thus, the seasoned saucer addict ends up getting his kicks from the hardcore stuff: The close encounters of the 3rd kind, in which witnesses end up in hair-raising, hand-trembling proximity with the enigmatic entities in (apparent) control of the phenomenon. And make no mistake, my fellow junkies! When it comes to this old Fortean fiend, the weirder and more nonsensical the case, the sah-weeter!

And so it is, my dear Coppertops, that I present to you a prime-time, vintage humanoid encounter so head-scratchingly bizarre, you’ll probably end up with a mean case of the munchies: The Conil case.

The Location

The Spanish province of Cádiz, part of the autonomous community of Andalusia, has always had its fair share of exotic visitors. Its capital of the same name was originally founded by the Phoenicians, and was subsequently occupied by the Carthaginians, Romans and Arabs, until the latter were expelled by the Catholic kingdom of Castilla. Because of its enviable geographical position, Cádiz has always been a crossroads of civilizations, and its future will probably remain closely tied to the sea just as it has always been for thousands of years; although instead of Phoenician traders, Roman conquerors or Ottoman invaders, the local economy now depends on attracting tourists with dollars or euros to spend.

The Light

Aerial view of ‘Playa de los Bateles’ at Conil de la Frontera. Cabo Roche can be seen in the distance.

Our story takes place in the coastal town of Conil de la Frontera –Conil for short– on the night of September 29th, 1989. Although to be precise, our story began weeks earlier, with 2 couples of local youngsters: Loli Bermúdez and Pedro Sánchez, Isabel Sánchez and Pedro González (relationship between the members is not entirely clear) who were taking a placid stroll along the ‘playa de los Bateles’ or ‘Bateles beach’ (“Batel” is a traditional local term for a small, oar-propelled boat). The age of the kids varied between 17 and 23 years old, and just when they were enjoying the cool breeze from the sea and each other’s company, at around 8:30 or 9:00 pm, they suddenly noticed something odd: A glowing, round, reddish-orange object, as big as the full moon, which appeared to be standing still, some 200 meters directly above the Roche cape, approximately 5 kilometers away from their viewing position.

The amazed group contemplated the ‘light’ for around half an hour, until it silently moved toward the horizon and was out of sight. Driven by curiosity, the young witnesses decided to return the next night at the same hour, equipped with a pair of 7×50 binoculars, to see if by any chance the object would return; sure enough, the ‘red moon’ was punctual to the meeting, and performed exactly the same as the night before. The binoculars allowed the adolescents to discern 4 white dots in a square formation at the center of the glowing circle, like the flamboyant button missing from a god’s jacket.

The ‘button‘ would emit a random flash from time to time, and then it was lost out of sight towards the western horizon, after completing it’s indecipherable ‘mission’. The same bizarre operation was repeated for 14 or 15 consecutive nights, always leaving around 9:30; the kids would always remain up until 10, in hope the light would make a second come-back; it never did.

The Encounter

By that time, the witnesses’ families and others in their inner circle were aware of what the youngsters had been witnessing for a whole fortnight –whether they all gave credence to their testimony or not is clear. What we do know is that on the night of September 29th, a 5th member had joined the group of intrepid UFO hunters: Lázaro, the brother of Isabel, and the youngest member of the party.

As it was by now their routine, they all sat on the beach at 8:30, directly in front of the Los Corales bar. The sea was calm and the coast was practically empty, with no boat in sight (we’ll get back to this on part 2). Their approximate distance from their position to the bar was around 300 meters. And they waited.

They didn’t have to wait long. Aside from their old friend, the “red moon,” which had faithfully appeared in its accustomed position, for the first time the witnesses also saw a new development: What looked like a bright white ‘semicircle’ coming from the sea; with the help of their binoculars they could observe, at the center of it, a group of ‘red lights’ forming a sort of triangle. This new UFO silently flew past above their heads, moving toward the town, leaving the group amazed, and excitedly commenting the impressions of the event among themselves.

But then a third, blaring light appeared right over them, seemingly so high or bright they couldn’t discern any sort of shape. The witnesses noticed that when the UFO above them made three consecutive flashes, the red UFO at Roche cape would respond with two, and so on and so forth. A sort of ‘communication’ between these two objects seemed to be taking place, which lasted for around half an hour.

While they were fascinatingly observing this luminous ‘exchange’, something else caught the attention of our young witnesses: At around 9 pm, they noticed two strange figures standing by the beach’s shoreline; their presence raised the alarms of the UFO hunters, not only because of the literally ‘alien’ appearance of the entities –identical in appearance, almost 7 feet tall, covered with white flowing ‘cloaks’ whose ends reached all the way down to the water, and with round, featureless white heads with no hair– but because their arrival had not been detected by the youngsters; almost as if they had suddenly appeared out of nowhere.

Sketch of the ‘cloaked’ figures observed by the witnesses

One of the girls of the group, understandably unnerved by this observation, proposed to the rest of them to leave. Pedro González urged his companions to remain calm, suggesting the two ‘cloaked’ individuals could be some ‘pranksters’; perhaps two of their town neighbors had decided to play a joke on them by –rather lamely– dressing themselves as ‘ghosts’ with white sheets? The idea, however improbable –if nothing else because the tunics of the two beings were so bright they almost looked as if glowing– momentarily swayed the fears of the witnesses, who decided to stay.

But suddenly, the two entities started to move out of the water, towards them. Their gait was awkward and laborious, as if they were unable to bend their knees, and while they walked they kept their arms firmly on each side of their torso. Their long clothes covered their feet, as well as their hands.

The approaching figures finally managed to trigger the fight-or-flight response in all the members of the group. Panicked, they started to run away –in all honesty, could ANYONE blame them?

The group broke down their escape, though, once they realized the beings were not in pursuit of them. Instead, they had stopped and turned on their axis to face the sea, apparently looking in the direction of the ‘red moon’, which had faithfully remained on its fixed position the whole time. The group of witnesses miraculously controlled their nerves, and decided to remain observing the amazing sight from a cautionary distance (approximately some 30 meters or 100 feet away from the figures).

The unfolding of otherworldly events on this fateful night were far from over…

The Transformation

While the two cloaked visitors kept their attention toward the glowing red object in the distance, the young UFO hunters observed something akin to a ‘shooting star’ on the night sky: a small, white-blue light the size of a tennis ball falling toward the beach, yet vanishing or ‘turning off’ just 2 feet or so before crashing over the heads of the entities. As if on cue by the disappearance of the orb, the two humanoids proceeded to seat on the beach, with their backs kept stiffly straight, while at the same time swiftly digging into the sand to build a sort of u-shaped wall surrounding them; once completed, they presently lied on their backs of this makeshift fortress.

In-situ reconstruction of the ‘trench’ built by the beings, in which they laid down

If the purpose of the sand ‘trench’ was to obstruct the sight of the humanoids from uninvited interlopers, it was only partially successful; let’s not forget our original witnesses were still at the scene and quite capable to observe the prostate figures, although with more difficulty. Pedro González was once again forced to calm the nerves of the more jitterish among them, while the rest kept passing on the binoculars to better watch the bizarre spectacle, which proceeded to yet another unexpected act.

Soon after the beings lied down on their backs, they proceeded to pass around them a bright, small sphere of a cyan-blue color –perhaps, we could speculate, the same orb which had fallen down moments before– although this time it seemed as small as a ping-pong ball in the eyes of our young witnesses, who observed this strange ‘ball game’ performed among the humanoids around a half-dozen times or so, until Pedro González –the one who had bravely convinced the rest of the friends to stick around– without any warning tossed the binoculars to the ground and started to flee the scene. The other Pedro (Sánchez) quickly intercepted him to know what was going on, and that’s when the terrified young man informed his friend he had observed a third figure at the scene, at the foot of the other two entities. This new humanoid was considerably taller (around ten foot, according to their testimony), clad on a dark, tight-fitting suit and displaying an enormous pear-shaped head. The two young men decided not to tell the rest about the ‘giant’ and returned to their friends, but when Pedro González took the binoculars, he could not longer find the enormous humanoid near the two others, who still remained lying on their backs and passing the little blue sphere back and forth between each other.

The strangest act in this alien stage play the young men and women had been observing, was about to commence.

Suddenly the little blue light disappeared, and a few seconds later the two beings got up from the sand. To the amazement of our witnesses, though, they no longer retained their original appearance: The white, cloaked figures had somehow changed into what looked like a human couple! The male was tall (around 7 feet, which was the original height of the white beings) had long blond hair and was wearing dark jeans and a checkered shirt; the woman was slightly shorter than the man, her hair was also long but dark in color, and wore a thin blouse and long skirt.

Without saying any word, they turned and started walking toward the town, one in front of the other, without even bothering to ever once look at the startled group of youngsters who had bore witness to their entire transformation; a transformation, it should be pointed out, that for some reason wasn’t 100% perfect: The witnesses later revealed to the researchers who went to Conil to investigate the case, that although the features of the ‘female changeling’ were very beautiful and perfectly ordinary, the forehead of his male companion on the other hand was abnormally prominent. How could someone looking like an extra in a cheesy sci-fi flick could go around unnoticed in a tourist town??

Exeter, the extraterrestrial leader in the B-movie This Island Earth (1955). Did the Conil male ‘infiltrator’ look like this?

The Giant

Just when they were about to reach one of the Conil’s dark alleys, the witnesses’ attention was shifted once again toward the beach, where they could see above the water a small, white cloud coming from the coast toward them at great speed. When the compact ‘cloud’ reached the shore it stopped and rapidly evaporated, and at that moment is when Loli –who was using the binoculars– alerted her friends about the presence of a dark figure near the water. Pedro González snatched the field glasses out of the girl’s hand, and confirmed it was indeed the same enormous being he had seen before.

The black giant with the pear-shaped head stood motionless in front of the young, baffled witnesses, until it quickly moved rapidly away toward the west. As if this wasn’t already strange enough, the humanoid –according to the witnesses– wasn’t even ‘touching’ the ground! Rather, its feet hovered some 8 inches above the sand, and as it floated away its arms were kept firmly on each side of its torso.

The being’s departure elicited a strange response among the members of the UFO party: The oldest and the youngest in the group –Pedro G. and Lázaro– suddenly started to run in pursuit of the giant. Asked later why they reacted in such a way, they couldn’t give a proper explanation; their chase turned out fruitless though, since no matter how hard they ran, the giant moved (or ‘floated’) even faster. When the two were about 50 or 60 meters away from the being, they finally heeded the desperate shouts of their companions pleading them to stop, which they did.

Sketch of the black-suited ‘giant’ observed by the witnesses

It was at that moment when the giant also stopped moving and turned its head toward Pedro and Lázaro. Its black eyes, huge as hen eggs, robbed the two of whatever courage they still possessed, and even though the being’s attitude was not menacing, it somehow gave the impression to the young men that it was warning them not to follow any further. At last they returned to their frantic friends and let the giant lose itself in the night.

With the couple nowhere to be seen, and the giant gone –was its purpose just to deviate the witnesses’ attention and prevent them not to chase the other beings?– the incredible events of the night were apparently over… or so they seemed.

The Aftermath

Graphic explaining the location of the sand trench in relation to the witnesses’ viewing position. It also shows the distance between the beach shore and the town

As the group of young men and women remained at the beach, excitedly commenting among themselves on what had just transpired at that humble location of the Cádiz province, they were able to witness one last unknown phenomenon around 10 pm: By the coast and heading from west to east, a small white light followed a silent, zigzagging trajectory, like a bouncing ball in one of those old sing-along children TV shows. A rather unimpressive finale, judging by the sort of spectacle preceding it.

Shortly after, an additional witness appeared on the beach and joined the group. Juan Bermúdez was an adult town resident –possibly related to Loli, one of the girls– correspondent for a local radio station as well as a painter; he had heard of his young neighbors’ nightly escapades at the Bateles beach, and as he had done on previous occasions decided to go there and see if anything interesting occurred –in a later interrogation with UFO investigator Bruno Cardeñosa, Bermúdez confessed he himself had actually had the chance to observe the giant humanoid on 3 previous separate occasions, during the first hour of dawn; if true, that would mean the Bateles beach had been the scene of extreme high strangeness even before the night of September 29th.

When the boys and girls told him what had happened, Bermúdez helped them investigate the area where the two cloaked humanoids had accomplished their incredible transformation. The group noticed the ‘trench’ the beings had built –which was approximately 2 meters wide by 1 meter long– showed discernible ‘scratch marks’ on the sand, as if it had been done by long and slender fingers.

Reconstruction of the footprints left by the couple, compared with the size of an ordinary foot

But was even more interesting were the ‘footprints’ the beings had left on the beach as they made their escape toward the town. They were enormous: 18 inches long and 6 inches in their widest part, with a very prominent arc as well as a huge toe impression that seemed to go deeper than the rest of the foot. Which raises the question: When the young witnesses saw the ‘transmogrified’ alien couple walk out of the beach, why didn’t they notice such abnormal feet?

…Unless the image of the human couple wearing ordinary clothes was just an elaborate illusion, one that was nevertheless unable to conceal their actual imprints left in the sand? This might serve to explain why both set of footprints had exactly the same size, despite the fact the female walk-in was not as tall as her 7-foot companion.

Adding to the confusion was the fact the group also found many more footprints than they expected. Aside from the ones going from the ‘sand trench’ to the Conil, an action observed by the witnesses, 20 paces away from the trench there were imprints of the same size and characteristics, but going in several different directions and covering an area of approximately 10 feet in diameter. What’s confusing about this is the fact the 4 boys and girls NEVER observed the couple deviate from their straight line toward the town alley, so they couldn’t had the time to leave all those additional prints.

But if they didn’t do it, then who did?

Local newspaper running an article about the Conil encounter (October 5th, 1989)

The fantastic Conil encounter with what seemed to be shape-shifting humanoids took little time to garner attention from the local media. First through the radio station Juan Bermúdez worked for, and then via an article published by El Diario de Cádiz on October the 5th. On the second part on my retelling of this wonderful episode, we will explore what else transpired after debunkers attempted to shoot down the case. But far more interestingly, we will discover what happened after the enigmatic couple of alien infiltrators returned to the ‘scene of the crime’.

To be continued…

____________________________________________________________________________

Main References:

• Juan José Benítez, La Quinta Columna (1990)
• Bruno Cardeñosa, “Infiltrados.” Año Cero magazine (12-96)

 TAGS: giant, Spain, The Humanoids, UFOs

{ http://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }

‘Google Earth has evidence of ALIENS ABDUCTING me’ Shock claims over satellite images

GOOGLE Earth images appear to show the exact moment a bloke was plucked off the Earth by aliens, according to shocking claims.

“The satellite image clearly shows me trying to fight off the grey alien by punching it in the face”

John Mooner

"The satellite has captured a real alien abduction taking place. The shocking thing about this was that it's me being abducted by a grey alien and the satellite image clearly shows me trying to fight off the grey alien by punching it in the face,” he told the Torquay Herald.

Mr Mooner continued: "Looking at the image it appears that the alien has blocked my punch and has grabbed my fist and must have been able to subdue me.

"The strangest thing about this captured incident is that I do not remember this taking place at all. I do however remember sporadic episodes of missing time throughout the year of 2016 and going back through the previous years.

“I do remember wearing a black baseball cap and shirt. This is definitely me on the satellite image.”

He added that further “proof” is in his account of spotting three UFOs flying in formation that he believes were sent to collect him and the alien.

Mr Mooner is one of a number of people recently to make outlandish abduction claims.

Just this month, a bloke wrote about his “abduction” where he was told the “secrets of the universe”.

• EUROPE'S HOLY WAR: Continent to be 'DESTROYED by merciless RELIGIOUS conflict'
• 'Trump injured by gunfire' Shock BBC tweet reports shooting of US President
• Huge ALIEN BREAKTHROUGH as mysterious WOLF 1061c planet investigated

{ http://www.dailystar.co.uk/ }

Massive UFO spotted hovering over Mexico by stunned locals

A HUGE unidentified flying object has been spotted lurking in the skies over Mexico – with shocked locals taking photos of the incredible sight.

But there could also be a scientific explanation for it.

The natural phenomenon called Altocumulus Lenticularis explains saucer-shaped clouds that are totally still and formed at high altitudes away from other clouds.

AccuWeather explains they "are formed when air moves over mountains, cooling sufficiently for condensation to take place."

It adds: “Lenticular clouds are different from other clouds because they don’t move.”

Alien-hunters regularly have their hopes dashed when they think they’ve captured the extraterrestrial invasion on film.

Just weeks ago, a lenticular cloud was photographed over the US state of Arizona, with locals initially thinking it was a spaceship.

• Take a trip to Pluto with stunning video of strange alien landscape
• ‘Google Earth has evidence of ALIENS ABDUCTING me’ Shock claims over satellite images
• Conclusive proof Bigfoot EXISTS? Footage claims to show 'severed Sasquatch foot'

{ http://www.dailystar.co.uk/ }

Beyond Fermi's Paradox--Where Did All the Aliens Go?" --Today's "Galaxy" Stream (VIDEO)

{ http://www.dailygalaxy.com/ }

UFO spotted again and governments are still not revealing

A CNN poll taken in 1997 showed 72 percent of the American public believes the U.S. government knows more about aliens and UFOs than they are telling us. 

Conspiracy theorists have claimed for decades that the U.S. government has been hiding evidence that extraterrestrials (E.T.s) and their vehicles have been visiting Earth and partaking in other dubious acts. However, many Presidents themselves may have been believers in E.T.s and believers that there is more to the unidentified flying object (UFO) phenomenon than just cases of mistaken identity.

Former President Bill Clinton has openly spoken out about extraterrestrial life and UFOs and has been very forthcoming about his belief that E.T.s exist.

The following video was captured by the public recently  and that went viral over the internet. Is this a hoax or we are not alone? Leave us your feedback and comments.

{ http://www.ntd.tv/ }

The Disclosure We Received

We had hoped for a crisp informative presidential news conference with a big extraterrestrial reveal. It just didn’t happen that way; a website was the disclosure we got.

I guess some conservative heads reigned. So instead of an ice bucket splash of information about UFOs and the extraterrestrial presence, we were given disclosure in the form of a well-curated website with declassified CIA material of about 930,000 documents.

Yes, there were many pages of UFO-related material spanning decades. It is a website with documents from the 1940s through the 1990s. This material clearly illustrated the fact that UFO reports from foreign countries were being seriously tracked by the CIA for decades.

In one sense this is very validating for those of us in the UFO research community. Why? We in the civilian community have toiled away at data gathering and researching for years and were ridiculed for our efforts. We’ve been labeled UFO buffs, true believers, conspiracy theorists and the ever popular, crackpot. Now we find out on the front page of the New York Times that our government has been doing very much the same thing on a much larger scale and very clandestinely.

Researcher Nick Pope pointed out that many of the documents have been known about, but only those who had physical access to the national archives in College Park, Maryland, could do serious research. Now this information is freely available to all citizens with internet connectivity.

As well I must compliment the library staff who created the website. It is well organized and professionally presented. Hail to the librarians!

Perhaps having our president come out to the national press corps and say that extraterrestrials are here and that our government has contact with various species from across the galaxy would be an exercise in having the public drinking from an information fire hose. In that context this modest disclosure effort has been the proverbial 32 ounce drink for most people.

I am personally impressed that the newspaper of record for breaking the story was the New York Times. In 70 years they have been less than friendly to the UFO topic matter and the UFO research community. My compliments to the New York Times.

Hopefully we, as a free people, will get regular installments of disclosure information as time goes on.

Here is a couple of links to the disclosure website:

• UFOs: Fact or Fiction
• A Sneak Peek at the CIA X-files

{ http://www.syracusenewtimes.com/ }

14 Q&As w/ Alien Abduction researcher Professor David Jacobs #AlienAbductions

{ https://www.youtube.com/ }

100% Proof NASA is Lying About Pluto : Animation Reproduced #NASA

"Breakthrough?" --Magnetic Fields May Reveal Evidence of Dark Matter

{ http://www.dailygalaxy.com/ }

NASA Spotted 70 Mile Long Crack Splitting Antarctica – Edgar Cayce Predictions Coming True?

A massive crack in the Antarctic ice shelf could be the first sign that the predictions of Edgar Cayce are starting to come true.

You can’t deny climate change unless you’re a fan of ignoring the thawing elephant in the room holding a ticking time bomb in its trunk. For decades, scientists have known about what’s coming, their voices silenced and drowned out by money and the true rulers of this world. But if we’re to give credence to the predictions of Edgar Cayce, the signs might have come even earlier.

At the beginning of the last century, American mystic Edgar Cayce began using his clairvoyant powers to uncover details about our planet’s hidden past. But the controversial personality also claimed to be able to peer int the future and what he saw did not bode well for mankind. He claimed that in a relatively short period of time, our world will change, ultimately ending up as a place beyond recognition. He wrote:

“The earth will be broken up in many places. The early portion will see a change in the physical aspect of the west coast of America. There will appear open waters in the northern portions of Greenland.

There will be seen new lands of the Caribbean Sea. South America will be shaken from the uppermost portion to the end; and in the Antarctic off Tierra del Fuego there will be land, and a strait with rushing waters.”

Is this giant crack proof of the predictions of Edgar Cayce? Are they finally coming true?

Recently, NASA spotted a crack in the frozen continent.

The fracture was photographed on November 10 as part of Operation IceBridge, an airborne survey of Antarctic ice. The survey has been tracking the change in the South Pole due to the devastating effects of global warming.

Related: Stunning! Mysterious Pyramid Discovered In Antarctica Could Rewrite History As We Know It!

Located in the Larsen C region, the crevasse now measures 70 miles in length and is slowly extending. The fragmentation of the Antarctic is obvious in satellite imagery and data shows large chunks of ice constantly breaking up and drifting away. If this new crack will reach the ocean and separate Larsen C from the rest of the ice shelf, a new iceberg with a surface area of over 6,500 square miles will have formed. When this melts, global ocean levels could see a raise of 0.8 to 2 meters (2.6-6.5 feet).

When there is first the breaking up of some conditions in the South Sea and those as apparent as the sinking or rising of that which is almost opposite it, or in the Mediterranean, and the Aetna area, then we may know it has begun.

– Edgar Cayce

This is yet another sign that the antarctic ice is melting and sea levels will undoubtedly rise, wreaking havoc on coastal regions. Weather patterns are going to get more unpredictable and freaky. Considering the current state our world is in, just imagine what global hurricanes and severe storms would do…

WATCH THE VIDEO BELLOW:

Watch: Russians Found Proof of Anunnaki Civilization In Antarctica. Get Ready For Disclosure!

Originally published on UFOholic

{  http://simplecapacity.com/ }

Eerie UFO Puzzles Residents of Segovia, Columbia

Source: RCN Radio (Colombia) and Planeta UFO
Date: 01.20.2017

Colombia: Mysterious Phenomenon in the Skies Northeast of Antioquía

Residents of Segovia and Remedios were bewildered around 9 o'clock in the evening by a phenomenon looking like a static red fireball in the middle of the dark sky.

This region of Northeastern Antioquía is rich not only in gold, but also in stories of witchcraft and sorcerers, so local residents would find nothing odd in having a "supernatural" force making itself visible.

Yen Milea Bran, who took photos and made cellphone recordings like many others, said that her family and neighbors took to the streets - in the La Cruzada district in Remedios - to see a sort of "very bright star" that hung in the heavens for some three minutes before disappearing,.

"It looked like a very large, shining star, lighting everything around it. But when recorded with the cellphone, it wasn't captured the way one's eyes perceived it. It looked like a fireball and in some images it displayed hypnotic circles," added the young woman.

Many hypotheses have been put forth about the phenomenon, which had never been seen in the skies of northeastern Antioquía.

"Many say it could be a UFO. Others say it could be a portal to another world. Others say it is surely a sign that the end is near and that we should repent, and others say that it has something to do with astronomy, that a star had surely exploded into a fireball," Yen Milenia explained.

The images have already been inspected in the Planetarium of Antioquía’s capital city, and have yet to ascertain its true nature. Angela Perez, the astronomical coordinator, noted that the possibilities range from unidentified flying objects, to an optic phenomenon with the lens or a fire balloon.

"Objects that cannot be identified are UFOs. However, the term is generally associated with spaceships and other things, but this cannot be said to be the answer until any other possibility has been discarded. Let's say that given the image's brightness, it could be one of those little balloons that get sent aloft with a candle inside," Pérez explained.

The fact of the matter is that some residents intend to be vigilant these days to see if the mysterious phenomenon stages a return.

[Translation (c) 2017 S. Corrales, IHU with thanks to Guillermo Giménez, Planeta UFO]

{ http://inexplicata.blogspot.be/ }

Drone Tests New Tech to Help FAA Track Commercial Spacecraft

Near Space Corp.'s High Altitude Shuttle System (HASS), a drone that carries new technologies to high altitudes for testing, was used to simulate the return of a spacecraft through controlled airspace.

Credit: Near Space Corp.

A drone that drops into flight from a high-altitude balloon is helping the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to test new technologies for surveillance of commercial spacecraft in national airspace.

Near Space Corporation (NSC), a private spaceflight company that operates at the Tillamook Naval Air Station in Oregon, sent its High Altitude Shuttle System (HASS) into flight using a stratospheric balloon on Oct. 3. The unmanned drone, which regularly carries new technologies for in-flight testing, brought along a payload of equipment designed to help the FAA detect and track commercial spacecraft.

The stratospheric balloon lifted HASS to an altitude of 70,000 feet (21,336 meters) before releasing it for a semiautonomous glide flight that simulated how a winged spacecraft would enter Class A-controlled airspace, which includes altitudes over 18,000 feet (5,486 m) and up to 60,000 feet (18,288 m).

Near Space Corp. launched this high-altitude balloon carrying a drone with a special payload of new FAA technologies from an FAA test site in Tillamook, Oregon.

Credit: Near Space Corp.

It took about 30 minutes for the drone to return to its launch site. During that time, the FAA tracked the drone to test its new surveillance technology. Although the results of this flight test are still being analyzed, plans for similar experiment are underway.

This flight test made NSC the first commercial suborbital space company to fly under the FAA's new Unmanned Aircraft System (UAS) rules that went into effect in August. Regulations now require drone pilots to have a special Certificate of Authorization (COA) for flying at high altitudes.

"It was great to get this first flight with the new COA under our belt," Near Space CEO Tim Lachenmeier said in a statement. "It took a long time, and a lot of dedicated support from the FAA to get this accomplished.  NSC is very excited about the opportunities this high-altitude UAS COA provides, and the unprecedented ability to support testing of technologies for the commercial space industry." 

NASA funded the balloon-aided drone flight through its Flight Opportunities Program, which supports the use of commercial suborbital vehicles to test new technologies.

"Flight testing and advancing technologies needed by the FAA to allow detection and surveillance of future spacecraft while entering the national airspace is crucial for the Flight Opportunities program," Paul De Leon, NASA'S Flight Opportunities campaign manager, said in the statement. "The program is continuing to grow by adding new commercial suborbital launch vehicles as they become viable, which can increase opportunities for maturing technologies much needed for future space exploration."

Email Hanneke Weitering at hweitering@space.com or follow her @hannekescience. Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebookand Google+. Original article on Space.com.

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Did a UFO give Uri Geller magical powers when he was three years old? It sounds crazy but in fact, an air force captain saw it all - and confirmed every detail

By Jonathan Margolis For The Daily Mail

On Saturday, in our exclusive serialisation of Uri Geller's biography, we told how the CIA's bid to turn him into a psychic weapon backfired because he was such a show-off. Today, in the final part, we reveal how a UFO unlocked his talents...

When freelance CIA investigator Dr Andrija Puharich met Uri Geller in 1971, the young Israeli psychic had one driving ambition.

And it had nothing to do with spies or science.

‘I want to be famous,’ insisted Uri, who had grown up in poverty in the backstreets of Tel Aviv. 

‘I want to be successful. If you want to work with me, you will have to deal with my need for fame and fortune.’

Contacts in the Israeli military told Puharich that this ‘unabashed egomaniac’ was not worth his trouble. 

Uri Geller, pictured, had a 'need for fame and fortune' which ended any real chance of working for the CIA, a biography has revealed

Geller, pictured as a child, centre, with his mother Manzy, left, and dog Joker, right, in Nicosia, Cyrpus

Uri had been a celebrity in his home country, after prime minister Golda Meir joked on the radio about his talent for predicting the future.

But his fame was already on the wane and he was reduced to bending spoons and reading minds on stage in tawdry nightclubs.

‘You know, we have a word for a kid like Uri — putz, a punk,’ one friend told Puharich. ‘He really is insufferable.’

But early tests left Puharich convinced there was far more to the young man than his outrageous ego.

At the sixth-floor apartment that the eccentric Serbian-American scientist had rented, close to the Mediterranean coast north of Tel Aviv, he conducted basic paranormal exercises. The results stunned him.

Uri could accurately pick up three-digit numbers from Puharich’s mind when the men were in different rooms. And he could deflect a compass needle by thought.

For some reason, they discovered, this effect was strongest when Uri wrapped a rubber band tightly around his wrist as a tourniquet.

One result that fascinated Puharich was Uri’s ability to bend a thin stream of water from a tap, by holding his hand a few centimetres away. 

This is easily done with an electrically charged piece of plastic, such as a comb, but with just a finger it was unprecedented.

They noted this effect failed when his finger was wet.

Another test Puharich devised was to see if Uri could direct a beam of energy narrowly or if he produced a random, scattergun effect.

He laid out five matchsticks in a row on a glass plate monitored by a film camera. 

Using psychokinesis —purely mindpower, without physical contact — Uri was able to move whichever matchstick he chose by up to an inch and a quarter. But after a few weeks of this, Uri was getting bored.

In his early days Geller, pictured, was described as arrogant

One night after dinner at a restaurant, and despite Puharich’s protests, he gave a reckless display of driving blindfolded — three miles on hilly roads, at speeds of 50 mph.

At one point, behind the wheel and apparently unable to see anything, Uri announced that a red Peugeot was approaching on the other side of the road. 

Moments later, from around a sharp bend, a red Peugeot appeared.

Perplexed and shaken, Puharich tried to persuade Uri to demonstrate his powers in less flamboyant, self-destructive ways. 

He urged the arrogant young psychic to go under hypnotism and try talking about his gifts and how they worked.

It was Uri’s turn to be sceptical. He was immune to hypnotism, he said. But on November 30, 1971, after a late-night cabaret performance at a tatty club called Zorba’s, he agreed to lie down on Puharich’s living-room sofa and close his eyes, while the scientist counted backwards from 25.

By the time the count reached 18, Uri was in a deep trance. He began to talk of fragmented childhood memories. 

And what he described was stranger than any Hollywood movie.

Uri Geller was born in a Tel Aviv hospital on December 20, 1946. His mother Margaret had already been pregnant eight times and on each occasion had an abortion.

Her husband Tibor, a soldier, was adamant that he did not want children. He was from Hungarian Jewish and gypsy stock, Margaret from the well-to-do Freud family of Vienna: the psychiatrist Sigmund Freud was a distant cousin.

Defying her husband, Margaret kept their ninth child, though her decision nearly broke up the marriage. 

Tibor was a philanderer and often left his wife and son for long periods to fend for themselves.

Devastatingly handsome and impeccably uniformed, Tibor paraded with a series of girlfriends while his wife worked long hours as a seamstress to pay the bills.

As a baby, Uri was almost killed by stray bullets during the street fighting in Tel Aviv that preceded Israeli independence in 1948.

Though he was only a few months old, in his pram next to the living room window of his parents’ flat, Uri recalled it vividly: ‘I remember the glass falling almost in slow motion.

Geller, pictured during his early career, claims to have been hit by a 'beam of light' when he was growing up in Israel aged three

‘My mother had put a little teddy bear next to me in the pram, and somehow it rolled over my face and saved me.’

As a toddler, he spent most of each day outside on the street without any supervision. 

When he was barely three, on Christmas Day 1949, he had an extraordinary encounter that he would remember vividly for the rest of his life.

Opposite the Geller flat there was an old Arabic house on the corner of Yehuda Halevi Boulevard. 

It was surrounded by a rusty iron fence and, attracted by the sound of kittens mewing, the young Uri slipped inside. The tall grass towered over him.

Telling the story to friends over the years, his account never varied: ‘I felt something above me and looked up. I saw a ball of light.

‘It wasn’t the sun — it was something more massive, something that you could touch.

‘It was really weird, like a sphere, just hanging there, shining and strobing, and then it gently and silently drifted down towards the ground.

‘Then something struck me. It was like a beam or ray of light. It really hit my forehead and knocked me back into the grass.’ 

Picking himself up, he ran home and tried to tell his mother what had happened. She refused to believe him.

But when he recounted the adventure under hypnosis on Andrija Puharich’s couch in 1971, an incredible new detail emerged.

This time, he described the light as a large, shining bowl from which a figure appeared — faceless, but exuding what Uri said was a ‘general radiance’.

The figure raised its arms above its head so it appeared to be holding the sun and then became so bright that Uri passed out.

When he came out of his hypnotic trance, Uri listened to the recording of his session with Puharich.

The entertainer said the moment he was struck by the beam of light was 'the moment his powers were activated'

He claimed not to remember anything he had said — and when his voice on the tape began to describe the events in the Arabic garden, he became frightened and agitated.

Ejecting the cassette, he rushed out of the apartment. It was half an hour before Puharich found him, dazed and motionless ‘like a standing mummy’. 

To Uri Geller, the moment he was struck by the beam of light was the moment his powers were activated.

Whether the phenomenon was purely physical (ball lightning, for example) or something paranormal and even extraterrestrial, it changed his life forever.

But bizarre and unique as it was, the story was unverified. Even the account he gave under hypnosis proved nothing.

That was to change more than 35 years later when a credible witness came forward, out of the blue, to say he had witnessed what happened.

In 2007, having seen a TV documentary about the star that talked about his strange childhood experience, retired Israeli reserve air force captain Ya’akov Avrahami contacted Uri to tell him he had been walking to the bus stop on Yehuda Halevi Boulevard on Christmas Day 1949.

‘Suddenly, I saw a powerful light, a sphere-shaped light, a metre in diameter, bright and dazzling,’ he said.

‘At the same moment, I noticed from the building on the left a small child coming out, dressed in a white shirt and black trousers. 

'The light halted again and, as if it had senses, it suddenly turned around and approached the child. The light embraced him.’

Then, he said, the boy ran to an apartment building, with the light following him.

When he went through the door, the light apparently exploded on the side of the building, leaving a black residue.

‘After being told all these years that it was my imagination or that I was hallucinating, for this man to come forward was a very emotional thing for me,’ says Uri.

‘The way he described me as a little boy, with the white shirt and black trousers, which is how my mother always dressed me — that convinced me he was not lying.’

A few days after the strange encounter with sphere of light in the Arabic garden, Uri and his mother were eating soup at their kitchen table when the stem of his spoon suddenly drooped and deposited a splash of hot liquid in his lap. Margaret inspected the spoon.

‘It must be loose,’ she decided. Even at the age of three, Uri thought that was odd — spoons don’t get ‘loose’.

Geller, pictured, joined up with the Israeli Army paratroopers but was wounded in action during the Six Day War of 1967

After he started school, his father gave him a watch. Bored in class, he would stare at the hands. One day, he saw them leap forward, whirling round on their own.

He shouted out ‘Look at this watch!’ and learned his first hard lesson about sceptics — his classmates refused to believe him and laughed at his claim.

Angry and embarrassed, young Uri decided he must have a ‘weird watch’ and refused to wear it.

Saving her pennies from her work as a needlewoman, his mother bought him another watch, a better one. 

This time when he stared at it, the hands bent upwards and hit the glass cover.

His father was angry, but Margaret was not: she had seen metal bend in the presence of her son and decided to regard it as a special talent, not a curse. 

The marriage was disintegrating, and aged ten, Uri was sent to live on a kibbutz near Ashdod, which specialised in children from broken homes.

Friends from those days remember his eerie ability to foretell the future.

One day he announced in class that ‘something terrible’ was going to happen in the wheat fields. 

The next day, a military jet missed the runway of the neighbouring airbase and crash-landed in the corn.

When Margaret remarried, to a former concert pianist called Ladislas, she reclaimed her son from the kibbutz and they moved to Cyprus to run a motel in Nicosia.

The Pension Ritz catered to actors and nightclub performers, and Uri was attracted to their lifestyle. 

He discovered that by bending spoons and moving the hands of watches, he could win their applause.

But within a year his stepfather died and, with civil war on the island, Uri was sent to a school in the hills run by monks. 

At this Christian establishment, he was known as George Geller.

Teachers started to notice his abilities. He never seemed to work hard, but he got consistently high marks in exams, even in subjects that he didn’t appear to understand. 

Oddly, his exam papers often mirrored those of the top students — even mimicking their mistakes.

Accused of copying, Uri denied cheating, but admitted that he could look at the back of a classmate’s head and see what they were writing.

He didn’t mean to do it, he said — the words appeared, as if on a TV screen in his mind. 

He also revealed a talent on the basketball court. When he threw the ball, it would swerve in mid air and the hoop seemed almost to lean towards it.

Teacher Joy Philipou said: ‘He could shoot from almost anywhere. He never missed the basket.

'I thought it must be my imagination, but several people began to talk about it. In truth, it was scary.’

By the time he was 18, Uri was eager for army service and was desperate to make his soldier father proud. 

Volunteering for the paratroops, he began basic training and dreamed that one day, if he became an officer, he could join the secret services and use his telepathic gifts as a spy.

The Six Day War put an end to his fantasies. In June 1967, 18 months after he joined up, his unit was ordered into action to cut off enemy supply lines to Jerusalem.

Caught in an ambush by Jordanian tanks, he and his comrades took shelter in a graveyard, and Uri was hit in the left elbow by a bullet.

He staunched the blood with bandages. Minutes later, he saw his best friend Avram killed by a tank shell. 

After predicting the death of the Egyptian president in 1970, Geller, left in 1974 and right in 2008, became an overnight star who would go on to achieve fame for decades

Pinned down by fire from a pillbox above them, Uri led a party to knock it out. As they worked their way up, a Jordanian soldier leapt out from behind a rock and fired twice, missing from just a few yards away.

With his gun at waist level, Uri returned fire. He said he was looking the soldier in the face as he killed him. A few moments later, he was hit himself — either by a ricochet or by a stray bullet.

Wounded in the head and right arm, he passed out.

Weeks later, he was discharged from hospital — badly scarred on both arms and unable to fully straighten his left elbow, but alive.

With his hopes of a military career wrecked, but still a serving soldier, he was given an assignment where he could recuperate, and sent to organise a government summer camp for children.

Tasked with entertaining them, Uri showed the youngsters his abilities to read minds and bend metal. 

Word got around and before long he was invited on national TV. At that point, the security services started taking an interest.

Prime minister Golda Meir invited him to a party and quizzed him on his vision of Israel’s future. 

Defence minister Moshe Dayan, a war hero famous for his black eyepatch, took a less esoteric interest — he wanted to know if Uri could locate buried archaeological treasures.

The turning point came in September 1970, when Uri was performing at the Tzavta theatre in Tel Aviv. 

He suddenly stopped in mid-act, looked ill, sat down and asked if there was a doctor in the house. Then he started to ramble — he said an enormous event with a massive significance for Israel was about to occur.

Suddenly, he became specific. President Gamal Abdel Nasser, Egypt’s hardline dictator, was dead, he announced. He was certain of it.

The show was halted and the audience filed out. One journalist in the auditorium rushed to a phone, called the newsdesk to check and reported http://www.dailymail.co.uk/back that there were no rumours that Nasser was dead or even ill.

It was not until the next day that the news became public: the Egyptian leader had died of a heart attack, the night that Uri broke the news from the stage.

That striking incident made him a national celebrity. Prime minister Meir joked on the radio: ‘They say there’s a young man who can foresee exactly what will happen. I can’t!’

And across the Atlantic, the CIA began to take an interest. Fame and fortune...Uri Geller was about to get his heart’s desire.

• Adapted from The Secret Life Of Uri Geller by Jonathan Margolis (Watkins, £8.99). To order a copy for £6.74 (25 per cent discount), visitmailbookshop.co.uk or call 0844 571 0640. P&P free on orders over £15. Offer valid until January 30, 2017.

{  http://www.dailymail.co.uk/ }

Mystery deepens over world's biggest explosion 110 years ago in Russia as experts 'debunk proof' that blast the size of 185 Hiroshima bombs felt in the UK and US was caused by a meteorite

• Blast over Siberia flattened 80 million trees and left charred reindeer carcases
• Explosion on June 20, 1908 was felt in Britain and lit up sky in Europe and the US
• Italian scientists initially thought Lake Cheko filled a 'missing' meteorite crater
• But Russian experts say it is 'not young enough' to be a crater lake caused by the explosion

By Will Stewart In Moscow for MailOnline

The world's biggest explosion - a blast in Russia the size of 185 Hiroshima bombs that was felt as far away as Britain and the US - remains a mystery after experts debunked 'proof' it was a meteorite.

A large fireball was seen crossing the Siberian sky on June 20, 1908 before an eruption six miles above ground flattened 80 million trees and left charred reindeer carcases.

Italian scientists spent 21 years researching the so-called Tunguska event, claiming the blue-water Lake Cheko filled a 'missing' impact crater - giving rise to the theory that the phenomenon was caused by a meteorite.

But a new study by Russian geologists suggests the idea is flawed, meaning the huge blast - which lit up the night sky in Europe and even America - is still a mystery, according to reports in Moscow. 

While they have not put forward an alternative explanation for the explosion, outlandish theories in the past have included a massive volcanic eruption, a comet mainly composed of ice not solid space rock, a black hole colliding with Earth and even aliens shooting down a meteor from a UFO in order to save Earth.

Local Evanki people believed it was a visitation by an angry god called Ogdy.

The world's biggest explosion in Russia in 1908 was initially thought to have been the result of a meteorite that created Lake Cheko (pictured) in Siberia

A large fireball was seen crossing the Siberian sky on June 20, 1908 before an eruption six miles above ground flattened 80 million trees and left charred reindeer carcases

A study by Russian geologists (pictured) suggests early theories about the explosion are flawed, meaning the huge blast - which lit up the night sky in Europe and even America - is still a mystery, according to reports in Moscow

 There were reports at the time that the blast was felt as far away as Britain while the explosion lit up the sky in the US

The biggest-ever documented explosion was the size of 185 Hiroshima nuclear bombs - yet there was no evidence of human fatalities.

'There was a bang in the sky and a mighty crash. The crash was followed by a noise like stones falling from the sky, or of guns firing. The earth trembled,' said a native Siberian some 40 miles from the epicentre.

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It appeared to be Armageddon. 'I became so hot I couldn't bear it, as if my shirt was on fire,' said another account.

'I wanted to tear off my shirt and throw it down, and then the sky slammed shut. A strong thump sounded and I was thrown a few yards.'

It caused shockwaves as far away as Britain and dust from the explosion lit up the night sky in its wake in Europe and even America.

From the first Soviet expeditions to this remote region of Siberia, the puzzling aspect was a lack of debris, for example craters caused by fragments of a meteorite, on the surface.

Italian scientist Luca Gasperini, from the University of Bologna, has long believed crater-shaped Lake Cheko (pictured), some five miles from the epicentre, to be the missing link in the Tunguska mystery

Italian scientist Luca Gasperini, from the University of Bologna, has long believed crater-shaped Lake Cheko, some five miles from the epicentre, to be the missing link in the Tunguska mystery.

It was not marked on tsarist-era maps of Siberia, and his team's seismic measurements of its bottom indicated sediment had been building for around a century.

They concluded that dense stony matter lies beneath the lake's floor and is the 'remnant' of the exploding meteorite.

The Italian theory based on the pattern of tree destruction is that two bodies entered the atmosphere. One exploded about five miles above ground, and the other hit the Earth forming Lake Cheko.

TUNGUSKA THEORIES: WHAT COULD HAVE 'SPLIT THE SKY IN TWO' IN 1908

More than 110 years ago, a massive explosion ripped through the sky over the Tunguska region of Siberia, flattening trees nearly 31 miles around.

The blast is thought to have been produced by a comet or asteroid hurtling through Earth's atmosphere at over 33,500 miles per hour, resulting in an explosion equal to 185 Hiroshima bombs as pressure and heat rapidly increased.

But, with no definitive impact crater and little evidence of such an object ever found, scientists remain perplexed as to what truly caused the event in which 'the sky was split in two'.

Numerous studies have attempted to make sense of what happened on June 30, 1908 at Tunguska.

The biggest-ever documented explosion was the size of 185 Hiroshima nuclear bombs - yet there was no evidence of human fatalities. Pictures show trees flattened by the blast

From UFO theories to speculation about the supernatural, the mysterious event has spurred explanations of all kinds, many of them lacking scientific basis.

Some scientists even suggested a black hole had collided with Earth – but other experts quickly shot down the idea.

In a review published in 2016 in the Annual Review of Earth and Planetary Sciences, Natalia Artemieva of the Planetary Science Institute in Tucson, Arizona explains that the event followed a clear course.

Whatever caused the event likely entered the atmosphere at 9-19 miles per second, and would have been extremely fragile, destroying itself roughly six miles above Earth.

The possibility of an asteroid explosion was first proposed in 1927 by Leonid Kulik, 20 years after the event.

Others suggested the space-object may instead have been a comet, made up of ice rather than rock, meaning it would have evaporated as it entered Earth's atmosphere.

But, some scientists warn that these findings do not definitively explain the bizarre explosion – with meteor showers being a frequent occurrence, these samples could be the remnants of a much smaller, unnoticed event.

To some degree, the Tunguska event still remains a mystery, which scientists are continually working to solve – but, whether it be from a comet or asteroid, most agree that the explosion was caused by a large cosmic body slamming into Earth's atmosphere.

The blast led to a host of theories on the cause apart from a meteorite: from a massive volcanic eruption, to comet mainly composed of ice not solid space rock, to a black hole colliding with Earth, to aliens shooting down a meteor from a UFO in order to save Earth. Fallen trees could still be found at the site in the 1990s (pictured)

Italian scientists  (pictured in 1999) spent 21 years researching the so-called Tunguska event, claiming the blue-water Lake Cheko filled a 'missing' impact crater - giving rise to the theory that the phenomenon was caused by a meteorite

The explosion - the force iof 185 Hiroshima bombs - was recorded over Siberia but was felt as far away as Britain

Now Russian researchers have examined the sediment from the deepest part of the lake, some 50 metres below the surface, and undertaken geochemical and biochemical analysis.

The study indicates that the deepest sample they obtained is about 280 years old, which means that the lake is probably even older, because the researchers did not manage to obtain samples from the very bottom of the sediment layer.

'Besides, there are other deep, practically round lakes in the Tunguska reserve, which look like Lake Cheko and probably have the same geological origin,' said a statement from the expedition centre of the Russian Geographical Society in the Siberian Federal District.

According to local reports, traces of the mysterious Tunguska event can be seen even now

An aerial photograph of the Lake Cheko was obtained by an earlier Italian survey of the area

Aerial images show the pattern of trees flattened after the 1908 explosion and the inferred epicentre

'Geologically the lake appears young. But not young enough to be a crater lake caused by Tunguska,' reported The Siberian Times, which also said the reason for its formation remains a mystery.

So the puzzle over Tunguska remains, but the answer could be that it was a meteorite and that it exploded in the air.

In 2013 rock samples of meteoric origin with traces of a carbon mineral called lonsdaleite were found in this part of Siberia.

These are known to form when meteorites crash to Earth but could have been from other unrelated meteor showers. 

{ http://www.dailymail.co.uk/ }

Another spaceship is spotted over Devon as ‘alien invasion looms’

Rob Waugh for Metro.co.uk

It’s one of the big, important questions facing mankind today – why are visitors from beyond the stars so interested in Devon?

This week, dedicated UFO spotter John Mooner saw yet another hi-tech spacecraft over the county.

Mooner – who has previously spotted several other aliens – says, ‘I was stargazing looking at different astronomical bodies and taking photographs of the moon when I just happened to notice a very bright star like object to the left of me. I knew that it could not be a star because it was moving.

‘I zoomed in on the bright object which then to my surprise started to move anticlockwise in a semi circle. The bright object then shot towards my direction and then just disappeared.

But UFO investigator Mooner says he saw eight UFOs in just three months – including a close-up encounter with aliens in a Newton Abbot car park, chronicled on his site World UFO Photos and News.

But he’s not the only one.

In recent months, triangular spacecraft, bright lights, and strange long-tongued creatures have shown up in Devon – leading to fears that a full-blown invasion force is on its way.

Either that, or it could be evidence that people from Devon are just really, really weird.

On 12 September, 2016, a man reported triangular spacecraft flying over the county – and others spotted them, too, according to the London Economic.

That very same month, a family saw strange bright lights over the area.

Nigel Watson, author of the UFO Investigations Manual, says, ‘Devon has had a long history of UFO visitations, that have ranged from sightings of lights in the sky to close encounters with UFO craft. Triangular UFOs seem to be in vogue at the moment, plus interest in looking to the skies of Devon has been encouraged by postings of UFO videos and picture that show unusual aerial activity over the county. For believersthis shows ‘they’ are on the verge of publicly revealing themselves, to sceptics it highlights the folly of internet rumours and human perception.’

{ http://metro.co.uk/news/ }

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RECENTLY RELEASED DECLASSIFIED CIA PAPERS REVEAL UFO AND ESP SECRETS

It has been believed for decades if not centuries now that there was such a thing as UFO's and that individuals did have ESP or psychic powers. Of course, there was never any documentation by any government sanctioned office that these phenomena exist. That is none that was made open to the public, that is until now. 

 

The CIA has now declassified million of documents that use to be top secret information. Some of these documents were stuff that many of us would expect to find, such as information about various war efforts over the years, But among these was also stuff that proved once and for all what so many of us already knew was true, the UFO sightings were real and there have been extensive study into ESP behavior. 

 

The documentation shows investigations into UFO's dating back to the mid-seventies. These go into the fact that around twenty percent of these sightings were that of a flying craft that couldn't easily be explained nor did it seem to be anything that was technology known to man. There was also information on the fact that the Air Force did research into whether or not these UFO's were a threat to the earth and whether or not we should prepare for an attack. 

 

According to one of the papers at least 20 percent of unidentified flying craft sightings could not be scientifically explained. 

 

• "The IAC has reviewed the current situation concerning unidentified flying objects, which have caused extensive speculation in the press and have been the subject of concern to Government organizations… Since 1947, approximately 1,500 official reports of sightings have been received and, of these about 20 percent are as yet unexplained," the document says. 

 

 

There was also documentation that in the early seventies the CIA was doing a study on ESP. This study included doing research on an illusionist from Israel by the name of Uri Gellar. Gellar over the years had displayed signs of having psychic abilities, and he was among those well-known figures the CIA wanted to study. 

 

But why was the CIA interested in those who displayed such abilities? Well, it would seem that US Military was initiating Project Stargate in 1978 which was about finding out about how psychic abilities were being used by military and other organizations in foreign countries or even at home. As for, Gellar's part of this research how did he pan out? 

 

It would depend on who did the research according to the documentation he did have ESP. However, a few nights before he did this study he appeared on Tonight Show then hosted by Johnny Carson and didn't fair up as well. Maybe it comes down to what some say psychic abilities isn't something someone can turn on like a light switch it just happens. In any case, as for this, research and even Project Stargate it ended in the mid-nineties and this information was declassified.

 

 Anyway, these documents prove what so many of us knew there were cover-ups going on. The truth was out there; it was just not being made known. That is until now, and it isn't anything knew that we didn't already suspect. 

 

http://www.disclose.tv/

{ http://7tales.net/ }

'Big Bang not true': This is what REALLY created universe, says man 'abducted by aliens'

THE Big Bang never started the universe, according to a man who bizarrely claims to have been abducted by aliens who put him straight on the scientific theory.

{ http://www.express.co.uk/ }

MAJOR BREAKTHROUGH: Nearby planet Wolf 1061c could be home to ALIEN LIFE, say researchers

ASTRONOMERS are studying a nearby exoplanet which they believe could be the key to finding alien life elsewhere in the universe.

Scientists use mathematical calculations to PROVE the existence of God

SCIENTISTS have ‘confirmed’ the existence of God after proving a mathematician’s theory which suggests that there is a higher power.

UFO Appears From Bottom OF Cloud Over Mexico, Jan 2017, Photos, UFO Sighting News.

Date of sighting: January 2017
Location of sighting: Michoacan, Mexico
News source: 

https://www.elsoldemexico.com.mx/doble-via/573894-un-ovni-conoce-al-fenomeno-que-sorprende-a-michoacan

Yesterday in Mexico a large cloud was forming when suddenly a round disk was seen appearing pushing through its bottom layer. The disk was of a different color than the cloud itself and looked smooth and rounded. Some people ask me, why would a UFO want to make a cloud to hide it? Because it can really rock the world of those people who are on the edge already or a little unstable or especially sensitive. They don't want to be the cause of someone getting hurt down here. They just want a close look and want you to think...they are not there, its just a coincidence that such a cloud exists. It keeps people calm. 

I remember a report from the W56 Friendship case at Rocca Pia Italy, where some people were becoming friends with the aliens in the base below the castle there. One of the aliens said that they could never harm another living thing. To do so would be against all they believe and stand for (this only represents views of W56, not all aliens). That they would rather self destruct than harm a single human being. Its odd, but we certainly can't judge multiple alien species based on our culture, also compounded by the fact that humans have a small IQ and aliens have an astronomically high IQ. Level of intelligence changes the perceptual field...the way each individual views the world around them.
Scott C. Waring

News states: 
HUETAMO.- At approximately 06:30 in the morning of this Saturday a strange meteorological phenomenon was visualized in several municipalities of the state of Michoacán, mainly in the hill of Tejerias, pertaining to the municipality of Huetamo. It is a spot with swirling figure and in the lower part a red light, which was appreciated in the sky, and was seen in several municipalities of Michoacan territory. People observed for more than an hour this phenomenon, which had never been seen.

{ http://www.ufosightingsdaily.com/ }

UFO Shoots Past Live Interview At Capital Hill, Jan 2017, Video, UFO Sighting News.

Date of sighting: January 22, 2017
Location of sighting: Washington DC, USA
News Source: http://www.ctvnews.ca/video?clipId=10

This is a great find by UFOvni of Youtube. Its a UFO shooting past a guy giving an interview at Capital Hill. The white craft moves quickly from the left to the right side of the screen.  This is similar to what we saw at the Obama inauguration long ago on live CNN, but back then, even the CNN announcers noticed it and were trying to figure it out, but couldn't. This looks very similar. 

Strangely enough, the source video was gone, possibly deleted by CTV News after the UFO was made public, or maybe its just my location here in Taiwan. Some videos don't work outside the US. Can anyone confirm in comments inside the US if the video source works please? Thanks,
Scott C. Waring

{ http://www.ufosightingsdaily.com/ }

Giant Glowing UFO Over Portugal Leaves Dark Trail. Jan 17, 2017, Video, UFO Sighting News.

Date of sighting: January 17, 2017
Location of sighting: Portugal
Source: MUFON

This just in from Andries Riphagen of Youtube. The video not only shows a bright UFO that appears and disappears, but it shows a dark trail behind the UFO. The object moves slightly to the right and then is gone. It wasn't falling to earth and it was very slow, so we know it was not a meteor. Its huge and yet disappears in a heart beat. Very odd, but very exciting to get a report from Portugal.
Scott C. Waring

Eyewitness states: 

Yesterday around 10 pm in the sky a bright, static light of white color was captured "increasing and decreasing the density of light. Enthusiast of the ovnology and collaborator of Ufo Portugal of the parish of Maceira, Leiria, has sighted and filmed in the same place hundreds of UFOs in the space of 4 years.

{ http://www.ufosightingsdaily.com/ }

{ Http://www.UFOsnw.com }

New Paradigm Of Alien Contact

If ETs are traveling the stars by means beyond our knowledge of physics, they are likely violating time and space to the point where they get from one-star system to the next within a span where intelligences at that level can interact. I think that it’s the wrong point of view not only to go by the SETI model of contacting ET, but Propulsion traveling mentality is even worse.

As long as our scientific orthodoxy evaluate highly intelligent ET beings based on our limited knowledge of physics, we will assume that they cannot get here because we’re still stuck on very physical means of space exploration based on propulsion based science. It is almost as though we keep thinking that riding horses is the only way to cross wide expanses. What’s boggling my mind is that the conservative scientific status quo refuses to imagine outside the box and project reality as such. If we accept the idea that there are thousands of civilizations in our galaxy that’s at least five hundred thousand years more advanced than us, then we must entertain the idea that some have figured out how to manipulate space-time and roam the stars.

Life on Earth began as chemical reactions between proteins and enzymes which are highly abundant in the universe that formed the first DNA and cells. Meteorites have been recovered containing some of these chemicals. Life on Earth is also dependent on carbon and composed mainly of hydrogen and oxygen (water H2O), some of the most abundant reactive elements in the universe. This suggests a possibility that DNA-based life on aquatic-terrestrial planets could be more abundant than commonly thought.

Early life on Earth came in all kinds of whacky shapes and forms. Weird worm things with no apparent back or front, animals with no symmetry etc. These forms mostly gave away and aside from the cnidarians (jellyfish and hydras) and the echinoderms (sponges and starfish) most animal genera possess certain common traits, such as bilateral symmetry (mouth and anus on opposite ends, an equal number of limbs on each side of the body if limbs present). These traits have won out, particularly among land-dwelling animals, because they possess certain evolutionary benefits. Having the food receptacle placed as far away as possible from the waste disposal is good for reducing the danger of infection. Having equal numbers of limbs reduces necessary brain power devoted to balance and coordination. Also, having the sensory organs located as close as possible to the brain reduces reaction times and increases reflexes as signals have less distance travel, thus leading to the evolution of heads. These are a few examples, I’m sure evolutionary biologists would have more.

This is not to say that aliens are likely to look like humans with prosthetics stuck on their noses but I think it’s entirely implausible that there would be worm-like aliens or reptile-like aliens or mammal-like aliens out in the universe. We will see unique expressions of life, not ones we are familiar with. The biggest most obvious difference might be size (scale). Slightly larger terrestrial planets with higher gravity would favor smaller organisms to reduce the energy and structural requirements of resisting gravity. Vice versa on smaller worlds. Planets with more oxygen-rich atmospheres would also favor larger animals that respire via gas exchange, so animals with exoskeletons could grow larger, like how arthropods on Earth used to be much larger when there was more atmospheric oxygen then shrank when it reduced.

Of course, there could also be aliens whose evolution and biology is nothing like ours and whose entire consciousness, if they even have one, is totally alien to ours. In this case, in my opinion, sci-fi writers are perfectly reasonable in creating any kinds of aliens they want and having them be equally plausible as long as they obey the laws of physics and chemistry.

We have all heard that we inhabit an average planet, orbiting an average star, in an average place in an average galaxy … nope.

Most galaxies are either “red” or “blue.” A “blue” galaxy is actively forming stars. This means it is forming a lot of really big stars. These stars outshine the great majority of smaller, dimmer stars, and since their characteristic colors tend toward the blue end of the spectrum they are called “blue” galaxies. What seems to drive star formation in these galaxies is that they have active giant black holes in their centers, that emit jets of material and radiation that roil the tenuous gas within the galaxy into concentrated areas that then produce stars.

A “blue” galaxy has a lot of heavy elements because these big stars become supernovas that “seed” the galaxy with heavy elements. But all these supernovas mean these galaxies are awash with radiation; which will effectively keep complex life from developing.

A “red” galaxy has stopped star formation because its central supermassive black hole is quiet. It’s “blue” stars have exploded, and all that is left are red dwarfs (which last for hundreds of billions of years). These galaxies do not have enough heavy elements to form much in the way of rocky planets. No significant planets, no significant life.

There are a few “green” galaxies. These are galaxies where the supermassive black hole at the center periodically turns “on” and “off.” There are enough supernovas to “seed” heavy elements, but not so many that they sterilize all the higher life.

The Milky Way is one of those very few “green” galaxies.

Only a really massive galaxy can form supernovas densely enough to have enough heavy elements to create large rocky planets. The Milky Way is the most massive galaxy in our Local Group of galaxies. (The Andromeda Galaxy is half again larger, but has slightly less mass.) There are galaxies far larger than the Milky Way or Andromeda, but they are rare; the Milky Way is one of the largest, most massive galaxies in the known universe.

The central core of a galaxy has too much radiation; too far out and there are not enough heavy elements. We are in the Milky Way’s “Goldilocks” zone, about 2/3 of the way toward the rim.

The bigger a star, the bigger its zone where liquid water can exist. But a star that is too big will die before intelligent life can evolve. Our sun is unusually large (95th percentile), but still small enough to last long enough.

Most solar systems are binary or trinary; planets can form around such stars but usually, the orbits are unstable. Even with a stable orbit the extreme variations in heating make most such worlds uninhabitable. But our solar system has only one star.

Most single-star systems have a gas giant that migrates into a position very close to its star. On its way, it usually expels other planets (or at least puts them into wildly elliptical orbits). Jupiter was on its way to doing that but ended up in a resonance orbit with Saturn that stabilized it. Thus Earth, Mars, and Theia were spared.

Earth and Theia were too close to the sun for life to develop; too much ultraviolet radiation for the precursor molecules to stick together. But Mars was far enough away that life could develop. It was also smaller, so it cooled faster, allowing simple life to develop while Earth was still molten.

Theia crashed into Earth in such a way that most of the material of Theia was absorbed by (molten) earth, but some of Theia ended up in orbit and ultimately coalesced into our very unusual moon. It was very close to Earth and raised huge tides. Tidal forces sent the moon spiraling out while slowing Earth’s day from 6 to the current 24 hours.

Meteor impacts on Mars ejected Mars rocks, some with primitive life “aboard.” Freeze-dried in space, a very few of these unintentional space travelers reached Earth. A subset unfroze and was viable; thus seeding Earth with life. (Meanwhile, Mars cooled and froze.)

The high tides caused by our (relatively) huge moon resulted in tidepools, which accelerated early evolution.

Most rocky planets are bigger than Earth, and if they are in the right place and have the right conditions they no doubt have complex life. However, being large they are still in their prime. Earth’s prime was the age of dinosaurs; not a time when intelligent life is going to evolve. Earth has passed its prime and is dying. (On a galactic time scale.) This led to conditions where intelligence was a survival characteristic since it allowed for instant adaptation in the face of rapidly changing conditions. (Again, “rapidly” in galactic timescales.) Ultimately the Pleistocene with its ice ages produced … us.

The point of all of the above is that the preconditions for intelligent life are quite rare. It is hard and slow to make an intelligent life form

Getting to other galaxies will be a challenge but not impossible. Especially if a usable “faster-than-light” drive works out. The point of all this is, if there were aliens, they would already be here. Intelligent life by nature inhibits the development of other intelligent life. So if there were aliens, they would already be here, and they would be us. So while some of us are, unfortunately, we’re not collectively ready for this new paradigm of Alien contact. If they are here and have nearly always been here we can infer a few interesting things. For something to be allegedly so pervasive and be still subject to debate after all this time it has to be elusive and invisible.

Life forms may be so advanced that we can not perceive them. Our senses may not be up to the task of perceiving them in their true nature.

Bacteria are entirely incapable of comprehending us.  In fact, they are not capable of being aware of us at all.  They inhabit the same space we do, even living inside our bodies as symbionts, but they are entirely incapable of being aware of us.  Consider ants, which are far more complex than bacteria and are separated from us by only 500 million years of evolutionary development.  They too inhabit the same space.  They can be affected by our actions.  They can see us, eat the food we drop on the ground, crawl all over our picnic tables, but they aren’t really aware of us.  They are entirely incapable of understanding any message we might try to send to them.  We have come to understand the chemical signals ants use to communicate with each other, and we can lay down trails for them to follow etc., so basically we humans are able to speak an ant’s language, but still we cannot convey to them any concept of what we are because ants lack the brains to comprehend what we are.

So, assuming the pace of evolutionary development is roughly constant, aliens out there would likely be so much more advanced that we would be incapable of comprehending them even if we were living right in front of them on their picnic table.  They could even learn to speak our language, as we have with ants, and it wouldn’t do much good.  That in itself could explain why it seems that no alien intelligence has contacted is.  But really, the difference is even more extreme than the rate biological evolutionary development would suggest.

With the advent of technology, the rate of development has increased enormously, such that the complexity gap will be even bigger over the coming few billion years

About 40,000 years ago, humans began to develop Technology.  Unlike evolutionary development, which advances by a process of random mutation, technological development advances through directed and systematic procedures.  As a result, the pace of development has accelerated enormously.

Most people are probably familiar with cargo cults.  For those who are not: cargo cults exist on some remote islands in the pacific.  During WW2, the American and Japanese militaries established bases on some remote islands that had little to no previous contact with developed civilizations.  When the war ended, the bases were abandoned.  The natives on the islands had seen technologies that they did not understand.  The lights and flying machines appeared to them as magic.  Now, some of the people on these islands have adopted rituals that mimic the movements of air traffic controllers and radio operators, hoping that they can call down cargo from the sky.

These people are separated from us by only 8,000 years of development (the time it took from the establishment of the first agricultural civilizations until the present day) and yet they couldn’t understand what they saw, and they worship our technology in a religious manner.

8,000 years is far less than an eye-blink on the billions-of-years timescale of the head start that some planets had on ours.  It took 8,000 years for us to appear as gods to other humans – how much longer would it take before we would recede from their ability to understand altogether?  Maybe 100x that amount of time?  But consider also that the rate at which technology is developing is increasing exponentially.  Most of the developments that separate us from hunter-gatherers were made in the last 200 years.

So, with technological development beginning 3.4 billion years ahead of ours, the gap between us and an alien race would not be just the gap between bacteria and us, but conceivably exponentially greater.

Now consider again the ants.  They can’t conceive of what we are.  All they know are that there are lots of crumbs that tend to show up in a certain area near their anthill.  For the ants, this is just a fact of life–“there are lots of crumbs over there usually” is just part of the nature of reality as they perceive it.  Similarly, the evidence of alien life is probably all around us, but they are so much more advanced than we are, that the evidence of their existence appears to simply be woven into the nature of reality as we perceive it.

We must somehow prepare ourselves for alien contact of such obfuscation and occultation that makes our brains boil. Such an event to our monkey brain physiology is going to be traumatic. Perceptual filters will paradox. Extruded through the looking glass. Curiouser and curiouser. You knew who you were when you got up in the morning, but, you think it has been changed several times since then.  You’re not the same as you were before.  You are much more… muchier… you’ve lost your muchness. Everything’s got a moral, if only you can find it. Can we find the moral, the meaning from such an advanced creature as is hypothesized here?

No matter what happens perspective must be preserved. The perspective is that what we think it might mean is almost assuredly wrong and incomplete. We will be nothing but spectators in this exchange. Frantically grappling at meaning from the mix of infinity. Maybe just knowing they exist in its own way is enough? Just a flicker of comprehension. Proof of concept. More questions than answers.

The slice of extraterrestrial life is not going to be like anything envisioned in any entertainment media. It will be stranger than imagined, it will be stranger than we can imagine.

{ http://www.theangryufologist.us/ }

Universe Is Too Big For Extraterrestrial Life To Get Here… Wrong!

At the blackboard

In our daily mundane lives, we are oblivious to much of the Universes grand weirdnesses. Our neurology has evolved to react to and manipulate its environment. To survive. Our minds and our intellect are forever separate and silent witness to the Universe. Many of science’s grandest and profound discoveries go against all those billions of years of evolutionary programming.  On the surface, they do not make colloquial sense. Our sense which is a product of a long line of evolutionary winners, the ones that managed to survive to breeding age. Each and every one of us is the product of a very long unbroken line of winners.

The Universe has no obligation to make sense. The advanced science of the last century began to shed light on some of the more intriguing and profoundly bizarre physical characteristics of the Cosmos. It is one of these counter-intuitive bizarre physical characteristics that can if not destroy the old argument that the “Universe is too big for extraterrestrials to get here” it will put a huge kink in it.

We all have heard about light speed. It is an old staple in TV and Movies. The true implications of Special Relativity on what happens at light speed is not usually discussed with any actual substance on TV shows or documentaries. For some people, my explanation and supposition will be a new interpretation.

We must consider several aspects of Albert Einstein’s magnum opus “Special Relativity”.

Note: The following is an import part to understand to follow my suppositions later on.

One of the bizarre characteristics is what is called “Time Dilation”. A good example that some people have heard of is called the “Twin Paradox”. Embracing the twin paradox is an important first step as you dip your toe into the nonintuitive world of special relativity. If you dig a little deeper into the links given here (and show a little determination), hopefully, you’ll begin to be more comfortable that Einstein really was right.

One must be very careful. The “relativity” in the theory’s name comes from the absolute core premise of Einstein’s idea, which is that nothing is absolute. If you are standing on a train platform and a train whizzes by, you would say that a person on the train is moving. On the other hand, a person sitting on the train would say that he is stationary and that you are moving. Relativity says that both of you are right. Who is moving and who is stationary is just a matter of perspective, and the laws of physics must work equally well for both people.

But this raises a conundrum when applied to the question of moving clocks. How can moving clocks tick more slowly than stationary ones if the question of who is moving is a matter of opinion? If I can say you are moving and your clock is slow, and if you can say I am moving and my clock is slow, something is inconsistent.

This longstanding question about special relativity is called the twin paradox. Suppose one in a set of twins sets off in a spaceship, travels to a distant star and then returns. On both legs of the trip, he accelerates to high velocity and then coasts for most of the journey. According to the “moving clocks tick slower” premise, the twin who stays on Earth will have experienced one duration, while the traveling twin will have experienced another, slower duration. The spacefaring twin will return to Earth younger than his homebody brother.

“But wait,” says the traveling twin, “according to my definition, I was just sitting there on my stationary spaceship while the Earth zoomed away from me and then zoomed back. By all rights, Earth twin should be younger!”

The solution to this seeming paradox has to do with the idea of a reference frame, which is central to special relativity. “Reference frame” is just a fancy term that means “the world according to me,” putting each person at the center of his or her universe. All “inertial” observers — those who don’t experience any acceleration — will agree that the homebody never changed his reference frame. He just sat there. Similarly, all observers will agree that the traveler lived in two reference frames, one moving away from Earth and one returning. Any third observer coasting through space will see that the homebody’s velocity doesn’t change while the traveler’s velocity does.

The law of relativity takes the traveler’s two reference frames into account. Thus the so-called paradox isn’t really a paradox. While the question of who is moving is a matter of opinion, the question of who has experienced two reference frames is not.

This is not just unfounded claims, it has been proven way back in 1971. In 1971, American physicists Joseph Hafele and Richard Keating verified time dilation at low relative velocities by flying extremely accurate atomic clocks around the Earth on commercial aircraft. They measured elapsed time to an accuracy of a few nanoseconds and compared it with the time measured by clocks left behind. Hafele and Keating’s results were within experimental uncertainties of the predictions of relativity.

If in the “Twins Paradox” one twin zooms off in a rocket at 90% of the speed of light. Time on the spaceship would be running 44% as fast as his twins on Earth. If the spaceship kicked it into overdrive and traveled at 99.9% of light, the brother’s clock on the spaceship would be running at 4.5% as fast as the Earthbound one now. What this means is if the twin (from his reference frame) went on a trip for 5 years at 99.9% speed of light, he would age 5 years. But his brother would have aged 110 years on Earth.  This is a fact.

That is interesting but not my point. Using the laws that we know to be true. It is what happens when 100% light speed is achieved. Only one thing that I am aware of travels at light speed and that is a photon. If time slows down as we approach the speed of light the equations tell us that at the speed of light time stops. That means that if you were a photon time does not pass for it at all. That has some freaky consequences and is the crux of my assertion.

What this means is that at the instant that a photon is emitted anywhere in the Universe, typically they come out of atoms or get sent out by a star.  The instant it gets emitted it gets absorbed at its destination. If you are the photon. For the rest of us, we observe it trundle through the Universe at light speed. But, for the photon time does not elapse. Hundreds of millions or billions of years of our time are zero time for the photon. From its unique point of view, the Universe goes by in an instant. From the point of view of the photon distance as we know it does not matter. It can traverse a googolplex squared in zero time. It can be everywhere, from its reference frame. For the rest of us, we bask in the time it takes to get to its destination. If time is the fire in which we burn, we burn incredibly slow. With this built-in transit ability in our Universe, is it so unfathomable that someone has figured out how to utilize it? The power of infinity is a strong pull.

Think about that for awhile…

Now hypothesize about a highly advanced alien civilization that has solved the light speed barrier and can traverse space at the speed of light. They have mastered an ocean of unimaginable technology. Not the least of which is Mass cancellation.

What they would have to have figured out is how to cancel Mass. We do not have any clue at all at this time in our scientific pursuits how to do that. But who knows if an intelligence that is a million or a billion of years advanced has not figured this stumbling block out.  If they can make their ships or crafts massless they could be everywhere and I mean everywhere at will at any time. Shades of Douglas Adams “Infinite Improbability Drive”. It is only us primitives that think distance is an issue, a showstopper for alien visitations.  But that is not the case.

This alien race could act like the photon. Instantaneous Universal transport. Zero time for them to cross from one side of the Universe to the other.  As soon as they turn on the light drive they are already at their destination. This, of course, would require some amazingly high and unfathomable abilities in which we have no human analog. The reason that mass is an important factor in this hypothesis is that it is integral to the properties of light speed. Nothing with mass can travel at the speed of light.

No need for such human contrived nonsense such as warp drive. No need for such things if they could cancel the physical property of Mass (there are other issues as well to consider which are beyond this article). As soon as the turn on the light drive they are already at their destination no matter where it is in the Universe. This, of course, would require some amazingly high and unfathomable abilities in which we have not discovered so far.

The aliens that were left at home would age as we do but their emissaries on the craft are timeless. For a civilization such as this, I would hypothesize that they bring their entire culture with them on civilization ships. Otherwise, the forces of relativity would disjoint the two factions of the civilization severely.  Makes sense to bring them all with you to keep the temporal differential to an absolute minimum.

It must be noted that us primitive humans have already begun the quest towards Mass cancellation.  It is startling to ponder that we newcomers to the pantheon of galactic intelligence’s have already had an inkling, a beginning success,  a baby step, a beachhead in our sciences. Our cutting edge scientific frontiers have identified and have been able to quantitatively gather information on what is referred to as the “Higgs Boson”. This tiny elusive subatomic particle is believed to a high degree of certainty to be the harbinger of all Mass in the Universe. It and it’s corresponding “Higgs Field” is the reason and method the Universe uses to create the phenomena of Mass. We can see it using billions of dollars of technology in infinitesimally small slices of time. We are nowhere anywhere near being hands on with it at all. But if we hairy primates even can fathom it, it must not be that difficult in the grand scheme of things.

I get tired of the same old rhetoric that spouts such unfounded certainty in UFOlogy. We must open our minds to unconventional thoughts. No one knows what is possible in the Universe. Our knowledge is woefully incomplete. I do not know of course if any of this supposition is true or not. We must have this type of intelligent dialog or UFOlogy will fall stagnant and be taken over by the UFO lunatic fringe. I wish that part of the human condition that is in each and every one of us contained the drive towards logical truths. It has manifested in many, many of us but not nearly enough. The real and verifiable Universe is more fascinating, wondrous, and awe-inspiring than we can handle. No need to play make believe with UFOlogy.

“The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of true art and true science. Whoever does not know it and can no longer wonder, no longer marvel, is as good as dead, and his eyes are dimmed.”

~ Albert Einstein (The World As I See It, 1930)

Science is the language of the Universe… Learn how to play.

{ http://www.theangryufologist.us/ }