Artist’s rendition of the surface of Proxima b, our nearest neighboring exoplanet. Image: ESO/M. Kornmesser

Ever since astronomers announced the discovery of an Earth-sized exoplanet less than five light years down the cosmic street, the question on every good space cadet’s mind has been whether or not we can colonize it. We’re not going to know if Proxima b is habitable until we can point some very powerful telescopes at it, which won’t happen until next year. But until then, scientists are playing around with models—and one such modeling effort recently came to some promising conclusions.

If Proxima b has an Earth-like atmosphere, researchers found, it might just be a comfortable place to live. A (probably) rocky planet located a measly 25 trillion miles away, Proxima b lies squarely in the “habitable zone” of its star—a tempestuous red dwarf called Proxima Centauri—meaning it might be able to support liquid water, and even life. The latter is still a big question mark, but as we wait for more data, a UK-based team of scientists is trying to figure out whether Proxima b might have the stable climate and reasonable temperatures necessary for life.

So the researchers turned to the Met Office Unified Model, one of the foremost models for studying the climate here on Earth. The team modified this model for extraterrestrial forecasting by considering two potential atmospheres: an Earth-like one rich in nitrogen and oxygen, and a simple nitrogen atmosphere containing trace amounts of CO2. Then they ran their simulations considering a few hypothetical orbits for Proxima b, including one in which the planet is tidally locked, with a permanent dayside and a permanent nightside, and an orbit similar to that of Mercury. The researchers also considered differences in the star’s light output, which produces more infrared and less visible light than our Sun.

Overall, the findings published this week in Astronomy and Astrophysics were promising. In both tidally locked and Mercury-like orbits, the planet’s hypothetical climate featured stable surface temperatures conducive to liquid water, supporting and extending the results of previous studies. Although not all parts of Proxima b were habitable in all simulations (the night side in the tidally locked scenario hovered around a nice, balmy -200 degrees Fahrenheit), the models pointed to enough warmish regions to make our neighboring exoplanet a very acceptable interstellar vacation spot.

Caveats abound, however. First and foremost, these models assume Proxima bhas an atmosphere, which might not be the case at all. In fact, as another recent modeling study demonstrated, planets in tight orbits around red dwarf stars might be getting lashed by an insane number of high-energy solar flares, stripping their atmospheres faster than they can be replenished. No atmosphere, no rivers, lakes or oceans, no life as we know it.

The model has other limitations, too—for instance, it didn’t consider what the surface of Proxima b is like at all. As we know from studying Earth’s climate, the mixture of land, water, and ice coating a planet has an enormous impact on its temperature.

Avi Loeb, chair of Harvard’s astronomy department and an advisor for Breakthrough Starshot, an effort to send an interstellar probe to the Alpha Centauri system (which includes Proxima Centauri), called the study’s results “encouraging” but agreed that the results are “predicated on an atmosphere being present which remains to be seen.” The way forward, Loeb told Gizmodo, is to figure out whether Proxima b actually has an atmosphere by observing it, and if so, to figure out what it’s made of.

Both questions require more powerful telescopes than our current state of the art, but the technology is on its way. In the meantime, studies like this inject hope in the quest to find habitable worlds beyond Earth, serving to inspire scientists and motivate further investigations. Maybe we’ll even make that interstellar voyage to settle the matter once and for all.

[Astronomy and Astrophysics]

Let's escape this solar system already

{ http://gizmodo.com/ }

CNY UFO Researcher & Writer Crunches Data, has New Discoveries on (possible) Visits

Cover Art on UFO Sightings Desk Reference, a composite drawing by Susann Snyder based on reported UFO shapes seen by people who made reports. The new book by Cheryl Costa and Linda Miller Costa is drawing media and researcher attention

CREDIT SUSANN SNYDER

We’ve all gazed into the sky to look at the moon, maybe a shooting star, and possibly something we couldn’t quite explain.  Cheryl Costa has been following U-F-O sightings for years and writes a column for the New Times and a blog.  In 2015 She and her wife Linda Miller Costa cast an eye on actual reports

“We figured let’s crunch the data for New York and it suddenly started revealing patterns that none of the UFO researchers in New York had ever seen before.” 

And then they decided to check out the entire nation…using that big data approach.

“I started downloading the National UFO Reporting Center databases for all 50 states.”

Cheryl Costa adds more on what she sees as the value of the information they've collected.

You might notice she’s not trying to convince you.

(CLICK TO ENLARGE) -- Yearly data shows reports of UFO sightings increased over the past 15 years.

CREDIT COSTA AND COSTA "UFO SIGHTINGS DESK REFERENCE"

“We couldn’t set out to prove alien life exists.  But people have been telling us for a number of years, ‘UFO sightings, they’ve been on the decline since the 1980s.’  Well, we set out to prove that wrong.”

Her book, UFO Sightings Desk Reference 2001-2015, has break downs of the reported sightings from every state, down to the county level.  The information came from the national organizations that collect sighting reports, the Mutual UFO Network (MUFON) and the National UFO Reporting Center (NUFORC). 

What they found – 121-thousand reported sightings from 2000 to 2015 …5200-plus in New York, and on the increase. 

SIGHTINGS BY-THE-NUMBERS FOR NEW YORK STATE AND LOCAL COUNTIES

• 5141 - Total reported sightings in New York State 2001-2015
• 161 - Total reported sightings in Onondaga County 2001-2015
• 105 - Total reported sightings in Oneida County 2001-2015
• 31 - Total reported sightings in Onondaga County 2001-2015
• 554 - Total reported sightings in Suffolk County 2001-2015 (most in state)
• 657- Number of reports seeing a Circle Shape (highest shape frequency in state reports)

But Costa says the data revealed other findings…like clusters around the Saint Lawrence and Hudson rivers.

“Those two waterways alone, on a first appearance, it doesn’t look that way, but when you add them up, they are 51% of New York State’s sightings and people have always been saying these things hang out around water for some reason.”

Frequency of shapes people reported seeing in Onondaga County.

CREDIT COSTA AND COSTA "UFO SIGHTINGS DESK REFERENCE"

I talked with Cheryl up on Onondaga Hill, thinking less light pollution = more sightings.  But she said the bulk come from urban areas.

“It raises the question, ‘Are we seeing more UFOs in the city because there’s more people there to see them, or is it because there’s more people there and the UFOs are studying the people.”

Cheryl Costa shares more on her findings and how sightings are investigated.

Costa emphasizes her book UFO Sightings Desk Reference – mostly charts and graphs of data, state by state – down to county level – does not prove existence.  That’s a job, she says for scientists, academics, maybe government, even though the Air force stopped investigating reports in 1968.  The book does group sightings by form, a disc, cigar-shaped …and Costa says the truth is in the shapes and the 6-7 percent that can’t be explained away.

TAGS: 

UFOS

CHERYL COSTA

SCIENCE

Watch the Bright Dwarf Planet Ceres Spin in New Video

 

The dwarf planet Ceres shines and spins in a new video from NASA's Dawn spacecraft.

Ceres appears especially bright because Dawn captured the imagery while the dwarf planet was at "opposition" — that is, when the spacecraft was directly between Ceres and the sun.

"Based on data from ground-based telescopes and spacecraft that previously viewed planetary bodies at opposition, scientists correctly predicted that Ceres would appear brighter from this opposition configuration," NASA officials wrote in a description of the new video, which was released Tuesday (May 16). [More NASA photos of the dwarf planet Ceres]

"This increase in brightness, or 'surge,' relates the size of the grains of material on the surface, as well as the porosity of those materials," they added.

Dawn took the photos that make up the video on April 29, from a distance of about 12,000 miles (19,300 kilometers). Mission team members shifted the spacecraft into a special orbit to view the 56-mile-wide (90 km) Occator Crater from this opposition perspective, NASA officials said. 

Occator stands out clearly in the video: It harbors the brightest of Ceres' mysterious bright spots, which scientists think reveal the presence of some type of salt on the body's surface.

The dwarf planet Ceres spins in this series of photos captured by NASA's Dawn spacecraft on April 29, 2017, when the probe was between Ceres and the sun.

Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA/MPS/DLR/IDA

The $467 million Dawn mission launched in September 2007 to study Vesta and Ceres, the two largest objects in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. Dawn circled Vesta from July 2011 through September 2012 and reached Ceres in March 2015. In the process, it became the first spacecraft ever to orbit two different bodies beyond the Earth-moon system.

"Dawn's observations of Ceres during its more than two years there cover a broader range of illumination angles than almost any body in the solar system," NASA officials wrote in the same statement. "This provides scientists with an opportunity to gain new insights into the surface properties. They are currently analyzing the new data."

Last month, Dawn lost the third of its four orientation-maintaining reaction wheels. But the failure has not unduly affected the probe or its mission, NASA officials said; Dawn's handlers are used to orienting the spacecraft with its hydrazine thrusters and will continue to do so into the future.

Follow Mike Wall on Twitter @michaeldwall and Google+. Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook or Google+. Originally published on Space.com.

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{ http://www.space.com/ }

How Do Scientists Search for Extraterrestrial Life?

The James Webb Space Telescope, expected to launch in 2018, will offer views of distant galaxies in unprecedented detail, and could reveal undiscovered Earth-like planets.

Credit: Northrop Grumman

Human civilizations dating back thousands of years left behind structures and records documenting their studies of the stars as they sought to chart the seasons, help travelers find their way and interpret the world around them. Stargazers among the ancient Greeks, Maya, Egyptians, Middle Easterners and Asians likely also pondered if there were other planets like ours among those distant points of light — and if so, what might live there.

Over the last century, science-fiction storytellers have used books, movies, comics and television to speculate at great length about contact with creatures from other worlds — to our benefit and our detriment. These creatures have been imagined as sometimes benevolent and sometimes bloodthirsty, and they have come in a wide range of shapes and sizes — from inquisitive "little green men" to human-parasitizing, chest-bursting Xenomorphs in the "Alien" movie franchise.

Present-day astronomers have likewise been probing this question, using sophisticated equipment to listen farther and peer deeper into the universe than ever before, to find evidence of our cosmic neighbors. From detecting unexplained radio signals to investigating the atmospheres and liquid water on distant worlds — how are scientists searching for signs of extraterrestrial life? [Greetings, Earthlings! 8 Ways Aliens Could Contact Us]

For an alien-seeking scientist, "life" means any living form — including microbes, astronomer Mercedes López-Morales, at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts, told Live Science.

But even the smallest microbe living on a distant exoplanet — a planet orbiting a star other than our sun — could still broadcast a chemical signal that would be visible to sensitive telescopes, in the form of atmospheric gases that probably wouldn't be there in the absence of life, López-Morales explained.

"Life affects the atmosphere of a planet," she said. "You have gases that are only there because they are constantly being replenished by something — otherwise, they would react with other gases and disappear. For that gas or that molecule to be in the atmosphere of a planet, it must have some mechanism that is continuously producing it," López-Morales said.

One of the atmospheric gases astronomers are searching for in exoplanets is oxygen, which is plentiful in Earth's atmosphere because it is continuously being replaced by plants through photosynthesis.

However, the presence of unusual atmospheric gases doesn't necessarily mean that something living is generating them, López-Morales added.

"Sulfur molecules, for example, could come from active volcanoes," she explained. "For oxygen, there are at least two or three ways to produce it that involve irradiation in the ultraviolet light coming from stars. But we know that oxygen appeared on Earth because life appeared on Earth," she said.

An artist's concept imagines the surface of the exoplanet TRAPPIST-1f, located in the TRAPPIST-1 system in the constellation Aquarius, where liquid water could harbor extraterrestrial life.

Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/T-Pyle (IPAC)

Of course, even if these chemical signatures can be detected, there's no way to tell what forms of life are producing the signal, Sara Seager, an astrophysicist and planetary scientist at MIT, told Live Science in an email.

And what type of exoplanet is a good candidate for life? Our familiarity with our own world nudges efforts toward those that resemble Earth — "a rocky planet with a thin atmosphere with surface water," Seager said.

"Right now, we can tell — for some planets — if they are rocky, based on planet size and planet mass, which gives average density. But we can't yet tell if a planet has liquid water," she said. [A Field Guide to Alien Planets]

Location, location, location

What else makes an exoplanet a promising candidate? "Anything close by," López-Morales told Live Science. For an astronomer, that means less than 30 light-years away, which would enable humans to actually visit the world where life was detected, she said. (One light-year is about 5.9 trillion miles, or 9.5 trillion kilometers.)

"Eventually, I hope humans will have the technology to get that far, within a reasonable number of years. So for us, the holy grail is to find something within 30 light-years of Earth," she said.

Scientists are also investigating worlds within our own solar system — such as the Saturn moons Titan and Enceladus — which are close enough to be visited by probes that can collect samples and capture images. Several NASA missions are also looking closely at Mars, which once had abundant liquid water on its surface, and where brackish water still flows today, researchers announced in 2015.

This May 11, 2016, self-portrait of NASA's Curiosity Mars rover shows the vehicle at the "Okoruso" drilling site on lower Mount Sharp's "Naukluft Plateau." Scientists want to send Curiosity higher on Mount Sharp, to look for evidence of liquid water.

Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS

"Humans are creatures that want to know — where we came from, where we're going, how we appeared on Earth," López-Morales said. "Our research might start providing answers to that." [FAQ: Significance of Liquid Water on Mars]

Radio signals

But scientists aren't just looking for signs of extraterrestrial life — they're also listening for them.

For more than two decades, SETI, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence Institute, has conducted research to understand the origins of life in the universe, and to detect and analyze evidence of life emanating from places other than Earth. This effort includes investigations of microbial life within our solar system, such as on the surface of Mars or under the icy crust of Jupiter's moon Europa. SETI scientists are also monitoring the universe for signals in light or radio wavelengths that originate far away and could be signs of technologically advanced alien life, SETI explains on its website.

At SETI, astronomers use the Allen Telescope Array (ATA) of 42 radio antennas to "listen" for signals over a range of radio frequencies, tuned to "hear" the regions around 20,000 red dwarf stars (a broad term describing stars smaller than our sun and in a certain spectral range) that are closest to Earth, Seth Shostak, a senior astronomer at the SETI Institute, told Live Science.

The radio astronomy facility at Owens Valley Observatory in Owens Valley California, which has been used by the SETI program.

Credit: Harun Mehmedinovic and Gavin Heffernan

Investigating red dwarf stars for life-supporting worlds is a relatively recent development at SETI. In the past, stars that were more like our own sun — a yellow dwarf — were thought to be the most likely candidates to host planets harboring life. But over the last few decades, astronomers have determined that many red dwarf stars host planets that could be at the right distance from the star to be habitable, according to Shostak.

"That's something we didn't know when we started," he said.

And SETI radio-signal monitoring is accelerating, as telescopes become more sensitive and technological developments increase the number of radio channels and locations in the sky that can be studied at once, Shostak explained.

"Until now, the total number of star systems that have been looked at carefully over a wide range of the radio dial is measured in the thousands. In the next 20 years, with new technology, you could increase that number to maybe a million," he said. [4 Places Where Alien Life May Lurk in the Solar System]

An alien megastructure?

Shostak also reviews images of alleged alien spacecraft sent to him by hopeful photographers, he told Live Science. A photographer himself, Shostak said that he invariably identifies all the purported "UFO" sightings as tricks of the light or internal reflections in the camera lens — much to the dismay of the observers.

"That never makes them happy," he said.

But even among astronomers, unusual observations can sometimes turn the conversation toward the likelihood of alien technology.

In 2015, when scientists discovered the star KIC 8462852 — also known as Tabby's Star, located more than 1,400 light-years from Earth — they were puzzled by repeated and significant dips in its brightness that took place over several years. During the dips, the star dimmed by as much as 22 percent, far more than could be caused by an orbiting planet passing in front of the star, Shostak said.

In short, the star was "really weird," Tabetha Boyajian, lead author of a study about the star and a researcher at Yale University, told the Atlantic in October of that year.

One possible explanation suggested by some experts was an "alien megastructure," an enormous array orbiting KIC 8462852, built by a hypothetical alien civilization advanced enough to possess technology capable of drawing power from a star. Such a construct could — in theory — periodically block visible light and make the star appear dramatically dimmer when seen from Earth, Space.com reported in 2015.

However, there is no data to actively support this hypothesis. In fact, on all fronts, evidence of any extraterrestrial presence — within our own solar system or beyond its boundaries — remains elusive. But scientists seeking life on other worlds are undaunted by the ongoing challenge, Shostak told Live Science.

"The search should continue, simply because it's a very interesting question," he said.

"Is Earth special? Is it the only place around with intelligent life? That would be remarkable — but it's just as remarkable to find you're not the only kid on the block. That's something that would change our view of ourselves forever," he said.

Original article on Live Science.

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{http://www.livescience.com }

The Search for Life on Mars Is About to Get Weird

This recent self-portrait from NASA’s Curiosity rover shows the robot shortly after it retrieved a sample of dark sand from shifting dunes along the flank of a Martian hillside.

Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS

MESA, Arizona — Since the dawn of the space age NASA and other agencies have spent billions of dollars to reconnoiter Mars — assailing it with spacecraft flybys, photo-snapping orbiters and landers nose-diving onto its surface. The odds are good, many scientists say, for the Red Planet being an extraterrestrial address for alien life — good enough to sustain decades' worth of landing very expensive robots to ping it with radar, zap it with lasers, trundle across its terrain and scoop up its dirt. Yet against all odds (and researchers' hopes for a watershed discovery), Mars remains a poker-faced world that holds its cards tight. No convincing signs of life have emerged. But astrobiologists continue to, quite literally, chip away at finding the truth.

As the search becomes more heated (some would say more desperate), scientists are entertaining an ever-increasing number of possible explanations for Martian biology as a no-show. For example, could there be a "cover up" whereby the harsh Martian environment somehow obliterates all biosignatures—all signs of past or present life? Or perhaps life there is just so alien its biosignatures are simply unrecognizable to us, hidden in plain view.

Of course, the perplexing quest to find life on Mars may have a simple solution: It's not there, and never was. But as the proceedings of this year's Astrobiology Science Conference held here in April made clear, life-seeking scientists are not giving up yet. Instead, they are getting more creative, proposing new strategies and technologies to shape the next generation of Mars exploration.

A SLUMBERING BIOSPHERE?

Talk about looking for Martians and you inevitably talk about water, the almost-magical liquid that sustains all life on Earth and seems to have served as an indispensable kick-starter for biology in our planet's deepest past. "It all started out with ‘follow the water;' not necessarily ‘follow the life'…but ‘follow one of the basic requirements for living systems,'" says Arizona State University geologist Jack Farmer, referring to NASA's oft-repeated mantra for Martian exploration. "There are many indications of water on Mars in the past, perhaps reservoirs of water in the near subsurface as well," he says. "But what is the quality of that water? Is it really salty—too salty for life?"

Without liquid water, Farmer points out, one would naively think organisms cannot function. The reality may be more complex: on Earth, some resilient organisms such as tardigrades can enter a profound, almost indefinite state of hibernation when deprived of moisture, preserving their desiccated tissues but neither growing nor reproducing. It is possible, Farmer says, that Martian microbes could spend most of their time as inert spores "waiting for something good to happen," only springing to life given the right and very rare conditions. Certain varieties of Earthly "extremophiles"—microbes that live at extremes of temperature, pressure, salinity and so on—exhibit similar behavior.

Farmer says there is as yet no general consensus about the best way to go about life detection on the Red Planet. This is due in no small part to the runaway pace of progress in biotechnology, which has led to innovations such as chemistry labs shrunken down to fit on a computer chip. These technologies "have been revolutionizing the medical field, and have now started to enter into concepts for life detection on Mars," he explains. Things move so fast that today's best technology for finding Martian biology may be tomorrow's laughably obsolete dead-end.

But no matter how sophisticated a lab on a chip might be, it won't deliver results if it is not sent to the right place. Farmer suspects that seriously seeking traces of life requires deep drilling on Mars. "I basically think we're going to have to gain access to the subsurface and look for the fossil record," he explains. But discovering a clear, unambiguous fossil biosignature on Mars would also raise a red flag. "We probably would approach the future of Mars exploration—particularly accessing habitable zones of liquid water in the deep subsurface—more cautiously, because life could still be there. So planetary protection would be taken very seriously," he says. ("Planetary protection" is the term scientists commonly use for precautions to minimize the chance of biological contamination between worlds. Think of it not so much in terms of bug-eyed aliens running rampant on Earth but of billion-dollar robots finding "Martians" that prove to only be hardy bacterial hitchhikers imported from our own world).

THE MARTIAN UNDERGROUND

Like-minded about deep diving on Mars is Penelope Boston, director of the NASA Astrobiology Institute at the agency's Ames Research Center. "That's my bias," she says. "Given Mars' current state, with all the challenging surface manifestations of dryness, radiation and little atmosphere, the best hope for life still extant on Mars is subsurface." The subsurface, she says, might also offer better chances of preserving past life—that is, of fossils, even if only of single-celled organisms.

The planet's depths hold the potential for harboring liquid water under certain circumstances, Boston thinks. But how far down might that water be? "I suspect it's pretty far…and how we get to it, that's a whole other kettle of fish," she says. Over the years scientists have estimated the average depth of the planet's possible liquid reservoirs as anywhere between tens of meters to kilometers. Then again, recent observations from orbiters have revealed mysterious dark streaks that seasonally flow down the sunlit sides of some Martian hillsides and craters. These "recurring slope lineae" could conceivably be brines of liquid water fed by aquifers very close to the surface, some researchers say.

Such lingering uncertainties emerge from the indirect and scattered nature of our studies of Mars, and ensure that any argument for life there is based solely on circumstantial information, Boston notes. "Each individual piece of evidence is, on its own merits, weak," she says. Only by amassing a diverse suite of independent measurements can a well-built case for life on Mars be made, she says: "In my opinion, we can't make that strong case unless we push to do all of those measurements on exactly the same precise spot. We don't do that because it's very difficult, but it's something to aspire to." Despite decades of sending costly hardware to Mars, Boston believes that what is still missing is a sense of harmony between instruments, allowing them to work together to support a search for alien life. "I think that the precise requirements of a really robust claim of life at the microscopic scale require us to push on further," she notes.

Attendees at the astrobiology meeting in Arizona showcased an assortment of high-tech devices for next-generation exploration, ranging from microfluidic "life analyzers" and integrated nucleic acid extractors for studying "Martian metagenomics" to exquisitely sensitive, miniaturized organic chemistry labs for spotting tantalizing carbon compounds and minerals at microscopic scales. Missing from the mix, however, was any solid consensus on how these and other tools could all work together to provide a slam-dunk detection of life on Mars.

WHAT'S THE WEATHER?

Some scientists contend a new kind of focus is sorely needed. Perhaps the pathway to finding any Martians lurking in the planet's nooks and crannies is to learn where exactly on Mars those potentially life-nurturing niches exist, and how they change over the course of days, months and years rather than over eons of geologic time. That is, to find homes for extant life on Mars today, researchers should probably not just be studying the planet's long-term climate but also its day-to-day weather.

"Right now we're sort of shifting gears. Once you've found out that a planet is habitable, then the next question is, ‘Was there life?'—so it's a completely different ball game," says Nathalie Cabrol, director of the Carl Sagan Center at the SETI Institute. "On Mars you cannot look for life with the tools that have been looking for habitability of that planet," she argues. "We should be looking for habitats and not habitable environments. You are dealing on Mars with what I call extremophile extreme environments on steroids," she says, "and you don't look for microbial life with telescopes from Mars orbit."

Cabrol advocates making an unprecedentedly robust, high-resolution study of environmental variability on Mars by peppering its surface with weather stations. Sooner or later telltale signs of the possible whereabouts of extant life may emerge from the resulting torrents of data. "Today's environment on that planet is a reflection of something in the past," she says, and planting numbers of automated stations on Mars does not need to be expensive. "This is of interest not only to astrobiology but to human exploration. The first thing you want to know is what the weather is like," she says, adding, "Right now we're not equipped to do this and I'm not saying it's going to be easy to look for extant life. I'm not saying what we're doing now is wrong. Whatever we put on the ground we are learning. But there is variability on Mars. You go up or down one meter, things change. Habitats at a microscopic level can happen at the scale of a slope. It can happen at the scale of a rock!"

MIGHT WE BE MARTIANS?

"I think Mars offers us the highest chance of finding life" somewhere beyond Earth, says Dirk Schulze-Makuch, a planetary scientist at Technical University of Berlin in Germany. But, like Boston and others, he maintains confirmation of life will only come from multiple "layers of proof" that have to be consistent with one another. "We really need at least four different kinds of methods," he says. "My point is that there's no slam-dunk. We need several instruments. You have to build a case, and right now we can do better…unless the biosignature through a microscope is waving hello." The trouble, he adds, is that too-stringent planetary protection rules may preclude getting the evidence necessary for that proof. "We have the technology to go to places where there could be life," he says. "But we can't go to certain areas on Mars, like recurring slope lineae or…under patches of ice. It seems to be ridiculous."

Indeed, Schulze-Makuch speculates planetary protection may be a lost cause for Mars—or at least a misguided endeavor. It may even be that any Martian microbes are actually Earth's long-lost cousins. Or, conversely, Mars rather than Earth is really the sole site of biogenesis in our solar system. Both scenarios are possible, considering that single-celled organisms can likely survive world-shattering impacts and the subsequent interplanetary voyages if embedded in ejected shards of rock that could fall elsewhere as meteorites. Innumerable impacts of this scale battered the solar system billions of years ago, potentially blasting biological material between neighboring worlds. On balance, Schulze-Makuch says, "the chances are higher that we are Martians."

This article was first published at ScientificAmerican.com. © ScientificAmerican.com. All rights reserved.

Follow Scientific American on Twitter @SciAm and @SciamBlogs. Visit ScientificAmerican.com for the latest in science, health and technology news.

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What the Higgs Is Going on with Mass?

Simulation showing the production of the Higgs boson in the collision of two protons at the Large Hadron Collider. The Higgs boson quickly decays into four muons, which are a type of heavy electron that is not absorbed by the detector. The tracks of the muons are shown in yellow.

Credit: Lucas Taylor/CMS

Paul Sutter is an astrophysicist at The Ohio State Universityand the chief scientist at COSI Science Center. Sutter is also host of Ask aSpaceman, RealSpace and COSI Science Now. 

I'm sure by now we've all heard the refrain: "The Higgs boson creates mass." And if you haven't heard it, well, now you have. This simple statement seems to pack a wallop of a concept: that every pound and gram of your body, down at the submicroscopic scale, is due to this invisible Higgs goo that fills up the universe.

Hence the nickname "The God Particle," which has frustratingly entered the public consciousness. Without the Higgs, there wouldn't be mass. Without the Higgs, all the physics that we know and love would come screeching to a halt, particles flying off at the speed of light, hardly ever having the chance to interact. [What Is the 'God Particle'? Higgs Boson Explained (Video)]

Or not.

A massive problem

The Higgs boson does indeed play a role in mass, but it's much less significant than you might think. Zooming in on you, we find that your body is made of organs, which are made of tissues, which are made of cells, which are made of molecules, which are made of atoms. Atoms have a nucleus surrounded by a cloud of electrons, and those electrons are incredibly wimpy — so insignificant that for most mass calculations they can simply be ignored.

Digging into the atomic nucleus, we find protons and neutrons, the meat and potatoes of the atom. But they too are made of even-smaller components — the quarks. Each proton and neutron is composed of a triplet of quarks tightly bound together by gluons, the carriers of the strong nuclear force. 

And here's where it gets really weird. If you added up the masses of the three quarks that comprise each proton or neutron, you would only end up with around 1 percent of the total mass. 

That's right. The total mass of all the fundamental parts of you (electrons and quarks) is just a laughably tiny part of your weight. Instead, most of the blame for tipping the scales is the energy of the interactions between your parts. Those gluons holding the protons and neutrons together are massless, but the very fact that they're doing their job — that is, gluing — gives rise to a binding energy.

It costs energy to rip apart a proton or neutron, and since we live in a universe where E=mc², energy is mass (the c for the speed of light just tells us how much energy is in a bit of mass; the fundamental concept in that famous relation is that mass and energy are totally equivalent). 

Hence, most of your mass is really the binding energy of your protons and neutrons. And none of that has anything to do with the Higgs boson.

The missing mass

But the impressive-sounding statements about the fundamental connection between the Higgs and mass aren't all subatomic smoke and mirrors. The Higgs does play a (small) role here: It's the explanation for the mass of your parts, the electrons and quarks themselves. Even though they aren't very heavy, they're not entirely massless, and they can thank the Higgs for that.

And the nature of that mass-making interaction? Often, the Higgs field is likened to a rich and creamy soup, or maybe a dense and heavy fog, or even a vat of thick and goopy honey. Whatever the poor choice of metaphorical words, the analogy is clear: the Higgs field permeates the cosmos, impeding the free travel of carefree electrons and quarks.[Watch: The Mystery of Mass]

I'm not the biggest fan of these viscous comparisons. They make it seem like movement is the key to the relationship between the Higgs and particle mass. As if the only way that an electron can acquire mass is by traveling through the murkiness of the Higgs field around us.

To me, metaphors like this fall far short of describing the true nature of the relationship. Instead, when metaphors fail, it's best to retreat to the safety of the mathematics. After all, the game of physics is to use mathematics to describe the workings of the universe; it's in the math that relationships are described and discovered. Descriptions of those relationships using a natural language are always going to come up a little bit short.

When it comes to the Higgs and electrons, the mathematics is very clear. When we allow for the existence of a universe-filling Higgs field, that field has certain properties, based on the work that field has to do to split the weak nuclear force from its electromagnetic sibling. And we're free to ask: Given such-and-such field with such-and-such list of properties, does it interact with anything else?

And indeed it does: The Higgs field interacts with the electron field, the quark fields and all the other lepton fields. And it interacts with those other fields in a very specific place in the mathematical formulas that physicists use to describe their nature and evolution: The Higgs pops up in the exact spot where we usually put the mass of the particle.

So there it is. Let the math speak for itself for once in its life. The mass of an electron — or the mass of a quark or any other lepton — is its interaction with the Higgs field. No syrup, no sticky paper, no buzzing flies. No metaphors, analogies, or similes. Just a plain, bare, naked statement of dumbfounding fact.

What is the mass of an electron? It's the interaction between an electron and the Higgs field. And that's all there is to it.

Learn more by listening to the episode "Why is the Higgs boson important? (Part 2)" on the Ask a Spaceman podcast, available on iTunes and on the web at http://www.askaspaceman.com. Thanks to Jamie R., James S., @croftandi, Peter S., Lorraine C for the questions that led to this piece! Ask your own question on Twitter using #AskASpaceman or by following Paul @PaulMattSutter and facebook.com/PaulMattSutter.

Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook or Google+. Originally published on Space.com.

Editor's Recommendations

• Higgs-Boson Discovery All but Confirmed at LHC | Video
• 8 Baffling Astronomy Mysteries
• Beyond Higgs: 5 Elusive Particles That May Lurk in the Universe

{ http://www.livescience.com/ }

AMAZING! British Bus Driver In Exmouth Videotapes Triangular UFO

Three lights in triangular formation were reportedly spotted and recorded on video slowly crossing across the sky above Exmouth in East Devon, England. The British witness, who is a bus driver, noticed the strange lights at 9:41 p.m. on April 17, 2017, while on a break.

The unnamed witness was talking on the phone to his best man for the upcoming wedding while walking near the leisure center where their bus stopped. When he happened to look over in the river, the witness then saw the three lights forming a triangular formation while rotating on its axis and wobbling slightly.

He then felt that the triangular object was unusual. The witness told his mate that he would call back and started recording the lights using his phone. However, the witness was having a difficult time focusing on the formation due to the street lights. To get a better view, the witness decided to go closer to the river.

The witness managed to record almost a 3-minute video initially. He also took seven pictures and another 41-second video. He filed a report to MUFON along with the video of the incident and some pictures. MUFON filed the report as Case 832412 and can be accessed in their witness reporting database. The case is still under investigation led by British MUFON field investigator Karl Webb.

OP VERSCHILLENDE PLAATSEN KLASSIEKE RETRO UFO'S GESPOT

Iedereen is zo langzamerhand behoorlijk huiverig geworden voor Youtube filmpjes met daarop de meest fantastische UFO’s die dikwijls compleet nep blijken te zijn. 

Misschien is het daarom een idee om voor echt UFO onderzoek een beetje terug te gaan naar de basics en dan kom je ook de meest interessante dingen tegen. 

Vandaag een aantal interessante UFO waarnemingen van de afgelopen dagen waar voor de verandering eens geen gebruik wordt gemaakt van de steeds onbetrouwbaarder wordende Youtube video’s. 

De volgende waarneming gebeurde op 15 mei 2017 in Los Angeles, waarbij de getuige het volgende verklaart: 

“Ik liep naar buiten naar mijn garage en zag deze vreemde lichten aan de hemel. Ik holde naar binnen om mijn telefoon te pakken en toen ik terugkwam hadden de lichten niet bewogen. Ik nam een foto en stuurde deze door naar een vriend. 

Toen ik weer naar boven keek, waren de lichten weg. Ze verdwenen niet langzaam, maar waren van het ene op het andere moment verdwenen. Ik worstel nog steeds met een mogelijke verklaring hiervoor. Ik ben een wetenschappelijk denker en ik geloof dat er een logische verklaring voor is en dat het niets te maken heeft met buitenaardsen.

Interessante van bovenstaande waarneming is dat deze is gedaan met het blote oog, voordat er een foto werd genomen. Er kan dus geen sprake zijn van reflecties of mankementen aan de camera. Het zijn ook geen lichtstralen die afkomstig zijn van de aarde omdat in deze duisternis en bewolking je de straal zou moeten zien.

Wat deze lichten zijn is vooralsnog volkomen onduidelijk. De volgende opname is op 3 mei gemaakt in Indiana in Amerika en hier hebben we wel een geval van iemand die niets zag met het blote oog, maar wel toen hij later zijn foto’s bekeek. 

Op de volgende foto zie je aan de rechterkant duidelijk iets wat er eigenlijk niet hoort.

Wat uitvergroot lijkt het op een klassieke of retro UFO. Een solide object dat zelfs het zonlicht weerkaatst.

De volgende is ook een interessante en deze waarneming is op 16 mei gedaan in de plaats Bekode in India. 

Het verhaal is dat een Indiase jongeman samen met zijn neef boven op een heuvel klom waar ze verschillende foto’s namen met een Samsung Galaxy S3. 

Aangezien ze een foto van hen beiden wilden, zetten ze de Samsung tegen een stuk rots en stelden de timer in. 

Toen ze later door de foto’s keken, zagen ze op de opname die met een timer van hen beiden was genomen een object wat er niet op thuis hoorde.

Iets vergroot krijgen ontstaat dit beeld:

Verder uitvergroot, toont zich een klassieke retro UFO net als in de foto uit Indiana. 

Wat aan de bovenstaande waarneming bijzonder is, is dat de twee jongens gingen eten nadat ze het zelfportret hadden gemaakt en dat de Samsung opeens vanzelf foto’s begon te nemen. 

Zelf vermoeden ze nu dat dit komt door de elektro magnetische werking van de UFO. 

Hoe dan ook, bovenstaande beelden tonen aan dat alledaagse mensen de meest bijzondere opnames kunnen maken als ze een klein beetje geluk hebben en dat er veel meer boven onze hoofden gebeurt dan de meeste mensen vermoeden.

{ http://www.niburu.co/ }

SECRET SPACE PROGRAM UPDATE: TR-3B PATENT NOW IN PUBLIC DOMAIN

We just discovered a patent that shows the wicked triangular spacecraft known in the UFO realm as the TR-3B.

Research confirms that the inventor, John St. Clair, has also developed and patented a new type of propulsion system.

This new system is named as "rotating electrostatic propulsion system". Below are excerpts and the links to the patents of the TR-3B and the electrostatic propulsion system.

TRIANGULAR SPACECRAFT  

Triangular spacecraft

US 20060145019 A1

A spacecraft having a triangular hull with vertical electrostatic line charges on each corner that produce a horizontal electric field parallel to the sides of the hull. This field, interacting with a plane wave emitted by antennas on the side of the hull, generates a force per volume combining both lift and propulsion. 

https://www.google.com/patents/US20060145019?pageId=111028569981762970673

ROTATING ELECTROSTATIC PROPULSION SYSTEM

Rotating electrostatic propulsion system

US 20030209637

A1 This invention relates to a spacecraft propulsion system utilizing thrusters comprised of a motor-driven electrostatically charged cylinder rotating within an electrostatically charged annular ring for the purpose of creating a spacetime curvature stress-energy tension in the horizontal direction. The thrusters are augmented by magnetic vortex generators, either embedded in the cylinders or located above each thruster, for the purpose of increasing the permittivity of space by permeating each thruster with low density hyperspace energy generated by a wormhole created between our space and hyperspace. A combination of three thrusters mounted on the underside of the hull of the spacecraft provide thrust and yaw motion control.  

https://www.google.com/patents/US20030209637?dq=ininventor:%22John+St.+Clair%22&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwig04SQ3fLTAhWEwlQKHTwcAKQQ6

WHAT IS THE TR-3B?

The TR-3B is Code named Astra. The tactical reconnaissance TR-3B first operational flight was in the early 90s. The triangular shaped nuclear powered aerospace platform was developed under the Top Secret, Aurora Program with SDI and black budget monies. At least 3 of the billion dollar plus TR-3Bs were flying by 1994. The Aurora is the most classified aerospace development program in existence. The TR-3B is the most exotic vehicle created by the Aurora Program. It is funded and operationally tasked by the National Reconnaissance Office, the NSA, and the CIA. The TR-3B flying triangle is not fiction and was built with technology available in the mid 80s. Not every UFO spotted is one of theirs.

The TR-3B vehicles outer coating is reactive to electrical Radar stimulation and can change reflectiveness, radar absorptiveness, and color. This polymer skin, when used in conjunction with the TR-3Bs Electronic Counter Measures and, ECCM, can make the vehicle look like a small aircraft, or a flying cylinder–or even trick radar receivers into falsely detecting a variety of aircraft, no aircraft, or several aircraft at various locations. A circular, plasma filled accelerator ring called the Magnetic Field Disrupter, surrounds the rotatable crew compartment and is far ahead of any imaginable technology.

VIDEOS FOOTAGE OF THE TR-3B

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{ http://www.disclose.tv/ }

ZERO POINT ENERGY: THE POWER SOURCE BEHIND THE SECRET SPACE PROGRAM

Meet Mark McCandlish, a military aeronautical illustrator that has worked on many classified projects for the government. This all started ever since he was born, as his own father is a United Air Force veteran, working 25 years.

Mark himself is renowned in his field of conceptualization and illustration of military aeronautical machines, over his long career spanning 30 years.  

Working on projects such as these has allowed him to come across strange phenomena that have led him to discover the science behind the first UFO he spotted way back in the winter of 1966. Ever since then, he has also had a dozen more sightings, which has caused his firm belief that interstellar fight that does not violate the current laws of physic and gravity is definitely possible.

MARK MCCANDLISH, ILLUSTRATOR OF THE FUTURE

 Mr. McCandlish came under fire for conceptualizing and illustrating a project he was not supposed to know about. Since then, he has been an active activist that the government is harboring secrets, they very same ones, that he has always been looking for. He asked the question that has since lingered in the air of much conspiracists: Is there a secret space program?

Mr. McCandlish claims that something called the Zero Point Energy exists on our planet. It is the power source that is fueling the Secret Space Program and is the main purpose of the Breakaway Civilization.

This theory involves how back-engineering off-world technology has allowed powerful corporations to take control of governments, allowing them world dominion. This allowed these corporations to develop its own secret space program and develop a break-away civilization that has its very own different set of objectives.

THE SECRET SPACE PROGRAM

One will never know just how many secrets a government can be harboring. Are we truly in control? Nobody knows the real answer to that, only the puppet master does. In the meantime, one can hope that the truth about extraterrestrials with fully proven evidence can be discovered and released to the world.

RELATED ARTICLES

• Quantum Dots: Light Source Created Through Unique Source
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{ http://www.disclose.tv/ }

Russian UFO hunter claims satellite pictures show a 1,900ft alien spaceship crash landed in Antarctica 'millions of years ago'

• Valentin Degteryov from Nizhny Tagil claimed the object was a UFO wreckage
• Google Earth images show unusual shape in planet's most southerly continent
• He shared a video of his findings online, which has had more than 230,000 views
• Many comments are skeptical, saying it's just the rocky top of a barren mountain 

By Will Stewart In Russia For Mailonline

A Russian man claims to have found evidence of a giant alien spaceship that crash landed in Antarctica.

He posted images of the alleged UFO wreckage which he spotted while analysing Google Earth pictures of the planet's most southerly continent.

Valentin Degteryov from Nizhny Tagil claimed the unusual object is some 1,900 feet in length, and a video he posted has attracted hundreds of thousands of hits.

The object (circled) claimed by Valentin Degteryov from Nizhny Tagil to be an alien spaceship

The Google Earth images of what the UFO hunter believes proves the existence of alien life

Many people were skeptical about the images, saying the shape was the peak of a mountain

However, many of the comments are skeptical.

Many say plausibly that the images show a rocky outcrop on a barren mountain.

UFO hunter Degteryov claimed the supposed alien wreckage became visible due to melting ice in Antarctica.

A video he posted claimed: 'The huge spaceship in Antarctica.

'Millions years ago in Antarctica the huge spaceship has crashed.

'He has fallen to the big mountain. Its length is 600 meters. He became visible after ice has descended.'

{ http://www.dailymail.co.uk/ }

AMATEUR ASTRONOMERS JUST FOUND OBJECTS IN SPACE THAT COULD LEAD TO THE BIGGEST DISCOVERY OF OUR SOLAR SYSTEM IN OVER 150 YEARS

60,000 people recently got together to make history. Their goal? Observe planet nine for the first time. Planet Nine is a theoretical planet that is thought to exist beyond Pluto, but no one has seen it yet. Participants worked using data from Siding Spring’s SkyMapper telescope. Brad Tucker had has the leading role, by ANU Researcher, and team agreed with one of the four possibilities regardless of whether. The scientific value of the project was certainly verified.

Other researchers agree with the ANU team’s sentiment: astronomer Mike Brown of Caltech tweeted his support for the project.For one, it is probably 1,000 times fainter than Pluto. The task for researchers, then, is to sift through old data and make new observations. Learn more in the video below:

Source www.physics-astronomy.com

{ http://alien-ufo-sightings.com/ }

New Harvard theory: Aliens have star-powered spaceships

A couple of scientists from the well-respected Harvard-Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics recently wrote an astrophysics paper that is so awesome, it will make you want to read an astrophysics paper. The scientists have been puzzling over some weirdly strong radio wave bursts in space, and they’ve come up with an explanation: aliens.

“An artificial origin is worth contemplating and checking,” said Avi Loeb, an Israeli-American professor who worked on the study.

It all started when an astrophysicist was combing through the archives in Australia’s Parkes Observatory, and he noticed a mysterious spurt of radio activity. It was short but intense. Really intense. Like, 500 million times the power of the sun intense.

Space is full of weird light, so that’s no big deal, right? Wrong, apparently. Scientists have been trying to figure out what the burst could be for 10 years, and they still don’t know. Some think it’s a massive, particularly weird star that collapsed into its core. Or maybe it’s a solar flare that somehow managed to travel across the known universe. Or …

Yep. Aliens. At least, that’s what the Harvard-Smithsonian scientists are proposing. You can start freaking out now.

Here’s the theory: There’s a faraway alien civilization that uses artificial beams to power spaceships with light sails. They harness energy from a star and cool their beam machine with planet-sized buckets of water.

Cool, right? We’re not talking about boring, single-celled aliens here. We’re talking about an advanced civilization, way more advanced than, you know, us. Our sail-related ships are limited to the kind that stay in water.

“Deciding what’s likely ahead of time limits the possibilities,” said Loeb, an alumnus of Hebrew University in Jerusalem. “It’s worth putting ideas out there and letting the data be the judge.”

It’s still a theory, but we at From the Grapevine are definitely rooting for it. Discovering alien life would mean a total change in how we view reality. Plus, we could do so much cool stuff with aliens. Like discover new things about the universe and have alien romances.

{http://alien-ufo-sightings.com/ }

New Harvard theory: Aliens have star-powered spaceships

A couple of scientists from the well-respected Harvard-Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics recently wrote an astrophysics paper that is so awesome, it will make you want to read an astrophysics paper. The scientists have been puzzling over some weirdly strong radio wave bursts in space, and they’ve come up with an explanation: aliens.

“An artificial origin is worth contemplating and checking,” said Avi Loeb, an Israeli-American professor who worked on the study.

It all started when an astrophysicist was combing through the archives in Australia’s Parkes Observatory, and he noticed a mysterious spurt of radio activity. It was short but intense. Really intense. Like, 500 million times the power of the sun intense.

Space is full of weird light, so that’s no big deal, right? Wrong, apparently. Scientists have been trying to figure out what the burst could be for 10 years, and they still don’t know. Some think it’s a massive, particularly weird star that collapsed into its core. Or maybe it’s a solar flare that somehow managed to travel across the known universe. Or …

Yep. Aliens. At least, that’s what the Harvard-Smithsonian scientists are proposing. You can start freaking out now.

Here’s the theory: There’s a faraway alien civilization that uses artificial beams to power spaceships with light sails. They harness energy from a star and cool their beam machine with planet-sized buckets of water.

Cool, right? We’re not talking about boring, single-celled aliens here. We’re talking about an advanced civilization, way more advanced than, you know, us. Our sail-related ships are limited to the kind that stay in water.

“Deciding what’s likely ahead of time limits the possibilities,” said Loeb, an alumnus of Hebrew University in Jerusalem. “It’s worth putting ideas out there and letting the data be the judge.”

It’s still a theory, but we at From the Grapevine are definitely rooting for it. Discovering alien life would mean a total change in how we view reality. Plus, we could do so much cool stuff with aliens. Like discover new things about the universe and have alien romances.

{http://alien-ufo-sightings.com/ }

Scientists Claim To Have Found 234 Alien Civilizations

Aliens are like buses, you spend ages waiting for one and then 234 come along at once. Or at least, that’s what two astronomers from the Laval University in Quebec are suggesting.

Ermanno Borra and his graduate student Eric Trottier have analyzed over 2.5 million stars and galaxies for pulses of light emitted at regular intervals and discovered it in 234 stars similar in size to our Sun. The team believes that alien civilizations are behind those signals.

The researchers looked at the Fourier Transform (FT) of the light spectrum. The FT is a mathematical tool that allows us to work out where the components of a signal come from. If the light is a milkshake, by using the FT you get the recipe.

The FT analysis has found periodic modulated components which, according to the scientists, are caused by the super quick light pulses (less than a trillionth of a second) generated by Extraterrestrial Intelligence (ETI). In the paper, available from thePublications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific, they discard every other explanation such as instrumental effects, rotation of molecules, rapid stellar pulsations, and peculiar chemistry.

“We find that the detected signals have exactly the shape of an ETI signal predicted in the previous publication and are therefore in agreement with this hypothesis,” the researchers wrote in the paper.

“The fact that they are only found in a very small fraction of stars within a narrow spectral range centered near the spectral type of the Sun is also in agreement with the ETI hypothesis.”

These superfast pulses will have to be generated by incredibly powerful lasers, like the one at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Interestingly, in previous publications Borra has stated that this area of astronomy is the least explored, which raises the question on why these aliens would all decide to communicate in such a complicated and energy-consuming way.

The researchers admit that although they believe aliens is the most likely explanation, this is yet to be confirmed.

The Stephen Hawking-backed project Breakthrough Listen will conduct follow-up observations of these 234 stars, but the team at UC Berkeley, where the project’s science program is based, invite people to be skeptical.

“The one in 10,000 objects with unusual spectra seen by Borra and Trottier are certainly worthy of additional study. However, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. It is too early to unequivocally attribute these purported signals to the activities of extraterrestrial civilizations,” the Breakthrough Listen team said in a statement.

Source www.iflscience.com

{http://alien-ufo-sightings.com/}

Filer’s Files #20 – 2017 Underwater UFOs - PART I 

In special reports, this week’s files cover: Underwater UFOs, A Study to See If Someone Is Here From the Future, and MUFON Conference.

Unidentified Aerial Phenomena sightings were reported over Arizona, California, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Maine, Maryland, Michigan, New Jersey, North Carolina, Ohio, Oregon, Texas and Utah.

Unidentified Aerial Phenomena sightings were reported over Australia Belgium, Canada, Eire, France, Norway, Switzerland, and England in the United Kingdom.

The Filer Research Institute feels the scientific study of UFOs is for the benefit of humankind and is an important endeavor. The US Air Force investigated UFOs publicly for more than twenty years under Project Blue Book; and I continue this advanced research. I believe the God of the universe has spread life throughout the cosmos and UFO’s are visiting us in ever-increasing numbers.

George A. Filer III

New Jersey State Director

MUFON Eastern Region Director

Www.nationalUFOcenter.com. Now receiving 3 million hits a month

Forward these files to your friends and neighbors.

Special Projects

Under Sea UFOs

 Admiral Vladimir Chernavin The former head of the fleet of the Russian Navy Admiral Vladimir Chernavin describes declassified encounters with Russian sailors with three types of UFOs: discs, drums and cigar-shaped craft. The Admiral said, “The former Soviet Navy had gathered a large number of UFO sightings in those decades in various regions of the world.

Weekly meetings on encounters with ships from another world were held AND documented by the section chief former deputy director of exploring the Oceanographic Commission of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR. The Captain of the first rank Dr. Vladimir Azhazha launched a new career as a UFO investigator after his time in the Navy. All former senior naval officers noted that about half of UFO encounters occur at sea. Statistically, 60 percent occur in the Atlantic and the Pacific, 10 percent in the Mediterranean and the rest in other waters. But of all the meetings around the world, some of the most amazing – and disturbing – incidents have occurred in the Bermuda Triangle. Many men have seen [UFOs] and have not been confused.

 While conducting naval maneuvers in the Pacific, six Russian submarines found mysterious phenomena in their sonar echoes. None of the sonar technicians on any vessel could identify the signature of the echoes, nor were they able to determine what type of object their instruments were reading. Everyone agreed that the object was huge and traveling below their submarines at high speed. The submarines were under orders not to break formation or to surface, but all six Russian submarines surfaced when sonar operators confirmed the gigantic stranger was quickly approaching them. The Unidentified submarine object (USO) ascended quickly and came out of the ocean. The USO surfaced and flew into the air and disappeared quickly.

Secret race of ‘underwater alien UFOs’ roaming the depths is at war with Russia.

A hidden race of underwater aliens has been at war with Russia for decades, a UFO expert has claimed.

Russian submarine commanders have been encountering unexplained undersea phenomenon since the days of the Soviet Union. The files on the so called USOs – unidentified submersible objects – are still under lock and key in the Kremlin. But some of the sightings detailing encounters with undersea creatures and giant unexplained objects have leaked out revealing shocking claims about what goes on in the deep.

Alien experts Paul Stonehill and Philip Mantle revealed the secret conflict in their new book, “Russia’s USO Secrets“.

.

They claim the encounters range from meetings with underwater life forms, mysterious submersibles and UFOs dumping craft into the sea. Russian subs have encounters USOs, the experts claim Strange beings dubbed “The Swimmers” are one of the most extraordinary. The creatures are three-meters tall humanoids living at a depth of 50 meters in the icy cold waters around Siberia.

Stonehill and Mantle tell how a Russian commander of the Military Diver Service, Major General V .Demyanenko, warned his crews about the creatures after a number of strange encounters in 1982. Soviet Navy divers attempted to capture one of the creatures – clad in a silvery suit and wearing sphere helmets. The dive team of seven was then thrown to the surface by a mysterious force as they tried to grab the creature in a net, it is claimed. Admiral V.A. Domislovsky, chief of the Russian Pacific Fleet’s Intelligence Department, saw an object around 900 meters long hovering above the Pacific Ocean.

It spat out smaller objects which descended into the waters, before collecting them sometime later and flying away.

Rear Admiral and nuclear submarine commander Yury Beketov claims to have experienced USO activity in the Bermuda triangle – with objects on their radar screens moving at 250 mph below the surface. Mr. Stonehill and Mr. Mantle collect the encounters in their book “Russia’s USO Secrets“.

“Our knowledge of the depths of the seas and oceans and large lakes is very limited – it is said that we know more about the surface of the moon than the depths of the oceans.”

Captain Azhazha confirmed another declassified sighting stating:

“There is evidence that the sailors of the Pacific fleet in remote waters of the Pacific observed hovering cylinder UFOs. A small flying saucer departed the cylinder and dove into the water. It then flew back again into the master cylinder, and then both flew away.”

http://conspiraciones1040.blogspot.com/2012/07/ex-oficiales-navales-rusos-de-alto.html

Lord Rankeillour, Member of the British House of Lords:

“Many men have seen those [UFOs] and have not been mistaken. Who are we to doubt their word? …
Only a few weeks ago a Palermo policeman photographed one, and four Italian Navy officers saw a 300-foot long fiery craft rising from the sea and disappearing into the sky…

Why should these men of law enforcement and defense lie?”
[House of Lords, Debate on Unidentified Flying Objects, Hansard (Lords), Vol. 397, No. 23, January 18, 1979.] http://www.waterufo.net/menu.htm

What is not generally known is there has been close cooperation with the Soviet Union and the United States in tracking UFOs. I was in a Military exercise at Norfolk,

Virginia when Admiral Thomas Moorer cleared the Atlantic Command’s command post.

Apparently, a UFO was being tracked on radar over the Atlantic Ocean. After the sighting was over I talked to the audio visual technician who indicated after the Command Post had been cleared the Admiral asked, “If  the Soviets were helping us chase the UFO?. Apparently, F-4 fighter aircraft were launched from two carriers in the Atlantic Ocean to chase the UFO. Some were able to capture Gun camera film of the UFO that was sent to the Command Post for review by the Admiral.

Generally, only four star military officers and their designated subordinates had any knowledge of UFOs.

Gulf of Mexico UFO

 Brett Tingley reports, “The crew of an offshore supply vessel witnessed a massive UFO rise from the Gulf of Mexico near the southern tip of Louisiana and speed away according to testimony logged with MUFON and NUFORC, the National UFO Reporting Center. In the NUFORC report, the chief engineer aboard the unnamed craft claims that on March 21, 2017, he and four members of his crew witnessed a UFO rise silently from the ocean just before dusk.

The first book about UFOs that I read while in the Air Force was written by Ivan Sanderson. This book is a groundbreaking contribution to the study of the UFO enigma, originally published over 30 years ago. In this book, Sanderson, a renowned zoologist with a keen interest in the paranormal, puts forward the theory that “OINTS”-Other Intelligences who live under the Earth’s oceans. This underwater, parallel, civilization may be twice as old as Homo sapiens, he proposes, and may have “developed what we call space flight.”

Sanderson postulates that the OINTS are behind many UFO sightings as well as the mysterious disappearances of aircraft and ships in the Bermuda Triangle. What better place to have an impenetrable base than deep within the oceans of the planet? Yet, if UFOs, or at least some of them, are coming from beneath our oceans or lakes, does it mean that there is another civilization besides our own that is responsible? In fact, since WWII a number of underwater UFO bases have been discovered and certain Ocean Charts display warnings not to travel in certain areas.

There are numerous reports of UFOs emerging and submerging into the ocean from possible bases. We also had sightings a few years ago off the Palos Verdes peninsula in Southwestern Los Angeles County where UFOs were seen traveling under water.
Bill Hamilton writes “What secrets lurk in ocean depths? Are there alien forms of intelligent life that occupy the vast volumes of water that constitute our oceans, seas, and lakes?”The largest of our oceans, the Pacific, covers 64,000,000 square miles and reaches a depth of 36,198 feet, a depth that no ray of sunlight ever reaches. Could these depths hide alien submarine bases?

Underwater UFOs have been sighted on many occasions lifting out of their submerged depths and taking to the air. In an article entitled “UFOs – at 450 Fathoms,” UFO Reporter Ed Hyde told of the sighting made by Dr. R. J. Villela, a Brazilian scientist, who saw a UFO smash through an estimated 40 feet of ice at the South Pole and soar into the sky at amazing speed.

Using Google maps the researcher came across these very strange tracks on the sea bed off the coast of Canada.

43 766304 N44 905025 W It was author and researcher Dr. Ivan T. Sanderson who suggested that aliens could remain undetected by building their bases beneath the world’s oceans. Dr. Sanderson found that by actual count, over 50 percent of the UFO sightings had occurred over, coming from, or plunging into or coming out of water. This includes oceans, seas, lakes, and reservoirs. Of the oceanic UFOs (some term them USOs or Unidentified Submersible Objects), one was tracked by the U.S. Navy near Puerto Rico in 1963. Of course many of these objects have been tracked over Puerto Rico since that time. On a training maneuver, a sonar operator detected a sub aqueous object traveling at over 150 knots! The technicians tracked this object for four days and it maneuvered down to the incredible depth of 27,000 feet. Submarines of 1963 could not dive further than a fraction over a mile into the ocean deeps. What kind of submersible could withstand the tremendous ocean pressures? And how could it overcome the tremendous resistance of water moving at such incredible speeds?

(Note: We now know that may use a process called supercavitation)

Many witnesses have reported huge cigar-shaped vehicles emerging from the oceanic hydrospaces of earth to take to the sky. In 1965, such an event was logged in the records of the Norwegian ship T.T. Jawesta on the 6th of July and in the log of an Argentinean ship, the Naviero off the coast of Brazil on July 20, 1967. The officers and crew could see a shining object in the sea no more than 50 feet away from the Starboard side. It was cigar-shaped and about 110 feet in length and emitted a powerful blue and white glow. It ran silently and without wake through the water. There was no periscope or conning tower or any protruding parts to this mysterious submarine. It paced the Naviero for 15 minutes, then suddenly dived and passed beneath the ship and vanished rapidly into the great depths.

Carl Feindt has written an excellent book about UFOs called “UFOs and Water,” with exciting stories like the one below.

For years witnesses have seen many types of UFOs cruising off the Palos Verdes Peninsula in Southern California. UFOs have actually been seen to come out of the water in the San Pedro Channel. My friend Jim was on the boat returning from Santa Catalina Island to San Pedro Harbor when he spotted a low, flying disk cruise silently over the channel boat. The craft was so close he could make out every detail of its structure including the four hemispherical pods on its underside.

Strange blue-green lights have been seen in the water since 1989. Witnesses have seen as many as 20 events an hour. One large light appeared to be as much as 100 feet in diameter. This large light spawned babies no larger than 10 to 12 feet in length. These lights were seen to move swiftly under the ocean’s surface some 500 to 1,000 feet from the coastline in Abalone Cove. The hypothesis that these may be luminescent fish is discounted by a local marine biologist. These lights were too large and too swift to be fish. One of the lights was reported to have emerged from the water.

A sea kayaker viewed an amazing sight off the Palos Verdes Peninsula. He was four or five miles off the Peninsula when a waterspout suddenly formed some hundreds of yards ahead of his kayak. As he observed this spout, the forward motion of the funnel stopped, the curtain of light mist surrounding the waterspout disappeared and a rotating column of what seemed to be solid ice appeared. As the sun reflected off the rotating mass of ice crystals, it appeared to be a sight of extraordinary beauty. The height of the ice column was estimated at 100 to 150 feet. When the ice column collapsed back into the ocean, it created a whirlpool. After this amazing event, the kayaker paddled over to examine floating fragments of ice and found specimens of fish embedded in the frozen pieces.

The site of these phenomenal occurrences is near the old Marineland Park which closed in 1987. Snoopers believe that the Park is now a Naval Experimental Marine Biology Lab. Access to the Park is now restricted and many “no trespassing” signs are posted around fenced areas.” Thanks to Bill Hamilton, Paul Stonehill

A Study to See If Someone Is Here From the Future

Did you know that there was a study conducted to see if someone from the future was here present in our time? Yes, it’s true! Astrophysicists – Robert Nemiroff and Teresa Wilson at Michigan Tech University did just that as reported in 2014. They figured that if someone from the future traveled back to our time, there may be trace evidence. Someone may have done internet searches of future events. The search dates would have been prior to the events and would stand out that way. Enough of them traced to one user would reveal a pattern of advanced knowledge.

After exhausting their funds, the results of that study remained inconclusive. However, in response to a question posted on one website asking: “Do you believe communication through time would be possible?” I replied that “I believe it has already happened.” Only because I believe that our near future thinkers will be quantum computers with artificial intelligence. I believe that not only would they be able to figure it out, but man has figured it out already.

What? Yes, what we once believed to be impossible is already proven science fact. So although this is complicated, I’ll simplify what’s involved for you. Hopefully the science behind it will become easy to understand. Now I want you to keep in mind that it concerns faster than light communication called “superluminal” which Einstein dismissed as impossible. Although being one of the discoverers of this phenomenon he dismissed it because it violated his own speed limit of light. According to Einstein, nothing in the universe could travel faster. Communication through time however also violates another law called “causality.” The law of causality simply means that any event must have a cause and the cause must happen before the event.

As an example, I often use a glass of milk: I drop a glass of milk, it falls to the floor and breaks, spilling the milk. Then you see and hear it fall from the cause of me dropping it in the first place.

You could never see it break before I dropped it because time as we experience it occurs from past to future. This is called the arrow of time or “Eddington’s Arrow” named after Sir Arthur Eddington who coined the phrase in 1927. It drops, falls to the floor, it breaks and then you see it. All one straight line from the past to the future. But many paranormal phenomena like supernatural abilities which many throughout history have claimed to possess are based on violating these laws. ESP, telekinesis, precognition and many other psi abilities do just that. Many famous psychics like the late Edgar Cayce claimed to leave his body to retrieve information from the Akashic Record which goes by many other names. Some call it the Astral Planes, The Book of Life, universal consciousness, collective consciousness, etc… It is what some believe makes psychic abilities possible.

According to Akashic Records theory, information has no time or distance barrier. Non-local or universal information resides outside of the mind where it is always available and can be tuned into like a radio. With some people like psychics it’s a natural right brain activity and with the population being majority left brain it may be something that can be learned. Although mainstream scientists reject all of these claims as fake or pseudo-science. For people like Edgar Cayce, Nostradamus and others alternative explanations like trickery, fraud and coincidence are the usual suspects.

Now, a funny thing happened on the way to the witch and it’s been happening more frequently lately. It started with atoms and accidents and now it’s routinely done on purpose. Once again peering down into subatomic particles is bringing two worlds together. Believing the impossible but approaching it from different directions.

Scientists have long noticed strange things going on with atoms, electrons and even now with larger molecule experiments. What Einstein used to call “spooky action at a distance,” is now routine. If you follow me I won’t go into depth and it’s really very simple. Say you have a molecule that consists of two atoms and each has one electron. Well, these electrons are spinning. One is spinning upward so the other electron has to be spinning in the opposite direction or downward. That’s the way it works because they are from the same molecule. In quantum physics they call this “entangled” meaning they will always be connected. The “spooky action” comes in when you pull them apart.

We’ll pull them apart in our minds but there are many methods in the real world to do this. Now, by taking a measurement of one electron we will destroy it, but we will know which direction it spins. Knowing which way it spins instantly tells us the direction the other is spinning without measuring it because they are a pair or connected (entangled). What’s weird is that we can separate them and put one in another room or even across town and it will still work. This is called wave collapse because by measuring one the spin direction of the other collapses to the exact opposite.

So what if we separated them by a hundred miles? The truth is, we could separate them by a million miles or a light year and as soon as we measure one it collapses the wave and the other one becomes fixed. So, measure the one in front of you and the other one instantly spins in the opposite direction. See that’s the problem Einstein had with it. The electrons communicate faster than light. One light year away it should have taken at least a year to communicate with the other electron, right?

What does all this have to do with communication from the future? Well, it has to do with the beginnings of figuring it all out and they’ve done it! Through entanglement not only can you separate electrons by distance but by time. Then, you can perform the same experiment in a different way and the electron you measure in the future will communicate back in time. Measure the spin next year and the one you have separated in front of you will collapse today to the exact opposite spin before you’ve even taken the measurement.

Since this is supposed to be an easy article to understand, let me tell you of the implications rather than how it’s done. It’s easy to understand but the article would have to be twice as long. There are different techniques with some straight forward and others overly involved. Creating what they call qubits is one way which is short for quantum bits and is a little more involved but I only mention it for anyone who wants to investigate this further.

Up until recently it was believed that any of this was useless because it couldn’t be used to transfer information through time. However, it is now believed that by setting up a coding system, communicating through binary is theoretically possible. So in theory I could send you next year’s newspaper headline back through time as binary. This is all in the early stages, but the science is solid. Entangled particles like electrons communicate not only faster than light, they also break the time barrier. One current theory is that the electrons communicate bypassing our space time dimension completely.

This is HUGE – it opens up not only communication possibilities but quantum computing possibilities. Meaning computers from the future may already be communicating with one another back through the internet and back through time. So, the original study at Michigan Technology may have actually been ahead of its time or behind its time or something that we may figure out or already have and don’t know it yet or whatever. http://themindunleashed.com/2015/08/someone-conducted-a-study-to-see-if-someone-from-the-future-was-here-present-in-our-time-heres-what-they-found.html/

This article was written using concepts from the non-fiction book “c” available at Amazon written by the author Robert Torres. https://about.me/Towers3

“Sin Thesis” the first book from author Robert Torres is a non-fiction book based on the many paranormal events that he began experiencing after he claimed to have alien contact. It was later after a UFO encounter that he says he first started to notice that he was seeing the world differently than most others. It was these first alien experiences that he says “opened his mind.” But it was all the other extraordinary events that followed which led him to write this book. These events he describes as “life changing,” Note: Assuming the data is correct the possibility of time travel becomes a reality. An advanced civilization thousands of years older than those on Earth may have developed the technology, ET has claimed they travel between planets outside our Solar System to Earth in a few hours or days. I have interviewed abductees who have traveled hundreds of miles and arrived before they left. Although, this seems impossible multiple witnesses confirm the time anomalies happened. ET apparently can conduct time travel.

 

 

Contact in the Desert

http://contactinthedesert.com/schedule/

 {http://nationalufocenter.com/ }

Filer’s Files #20 – 2017 Underwater UFOs - PART II

Could Cryoconites Hold the Secrets to Extraterrestrial Life?

Posted by Sarah Kai Zhen Toh

In recent years, scientists have found other locations on planets, moons and exoplanets where life might exist. Different animals and organisms like tardigrades (eight-legged microscopic animals commonly known as water bears) have also been sent into space to explore the conditions for survival away from Earth. However, a recent paper published in the journal Contemporary Trends in Geoscience argues that we can look closer to home to understand survival strategies of extraterrestrial life.

More concretely, the authors propose we look to glacier cryoconites, which are granular or spherical mineral particles aggregated with microorganisms like cyanobacteria, algae, fungi, tardigrades and rotifera (another type of multicellular, microscopic animal). Glaciers are among the most extreme environments on Earth due to the high levels of ultraviolet (UV) radiation received and the permanently cold conditions. These factors make them analogous to icy planets or moons.

(Clockwise from top left) An ice sheet in Greenland, cryoconite holes, cryoconite granules, and cryconite granules in high resolution

(Source: Zawierucha et al., 2017).

The associations of cryoconites and microorganisms on glaciers are held together in biofilms by extracellular polymeric substances (natural polymers of high molecular weight) secreted by cyanobacteria. They exist as sediment or in cryoconite holes (water-filled reservoirs with cryoconite sediment on the floor) on glacier surfaces.

Cryoconites have been found on every glacier where researchers have looked for them. Cryoconite holes form due to the darkening of color (also termed a decrease in the albedo, or reflectivity of solar radiation) of cryoconite-covered surfaces. The darker color leads to greater absorption of radiation, with an associated warming and increasing melt rates.

“Today we think that simple life forms might have survived on Mars in glacial refugia or under the surface. They can and could have evolved on Saturn and Jupiter’s icy moons,” Krzysztof Zawierucha, the lead author from Adam Mickiewicz University in Poland, shared with GlacierHub. “Imagine a multicellular organism, even a microscopic one, which is able to live and reproduce on an icy moon… It is a biotechnological volcano.”

Earth’s glaciers could be analogous to environments like floating ice on Europa, one of Jupiter’s moons

(Source: NASA).

Organisms that live in glaciated regions are adapted to survive in extreme conditions and could provide insights into the survival strategies of extraterrestrial life. Some possess lipids (organic compounds that are not water-soluble), and produce proteins and extracellular polymeric substances that protect them from freezing and drying. Others are able to enter cryptobiotic states in which metabolic activity is reduced to an undetectable level, allowing them to survive extremely harsh conditions.

The microorganisms in cryoconites cooperate and compete, affecting each other’s survival responses. Therefore, previous astrobiological studies, which have only been conducted on single strains of microorganisms, may not reflect the true survival mechanisms of these microorganisms.

Tardigrades can undergo cryptobiosis and survive in the vacuum of space

(Source: UNC Chapel Hill/Creative Commons).

In addition, previous astrobiological studies involving some of these microorganisms used terrestrial or limno-terrestrial (moist terrestrial environments that go through periods of immersion and desiccation) taxa, such as moss cushions, which are less likely to be well-adapted to icy planets than their glacier-dwelling cousins.

Tardigrades found in cryoconite have black pigmentation, which probably protects them from high UV radiation. Along with tardigrades, glacier-dwelling rotifera, specifically Bdelloidea, also possess a great ability to repair DNA damage, which confers high resistance to UV radiation. Both may also be better adapted to surviving in constantly near-freezing conditions than terrestrial forms.

“So far, a number of processes analogous to those on Mars and other planets or moons have been found in the McMurdo Dry Valley as well as other dry valleys or brines in sea ice, both of which were considered to be extraterrestrial ecosystem analoguos. There is a great body of evidence that some bacteria and microscopic animals like tardigrades may survive under Martian conditions,” Zawierucha explained.

“Of course, to survive does not mean to be active and to reproduce. Undoubtedly, however, it triggers consideration regarding life beyond Earth, especially in close proximity or connection with permafrost or ice,” he added.

As such, further research about cryoconites could provide insight to mechanisms that enable organisms to survive such extreme conditions. At the same time, cryoconites could also be used in future astrobiological studies to understand how life on other planets functions.

{  http://glacierhub.org/ }

Has the mystery behind Croydon's 'UFOs' spotted two nights in a row been solved?

The mysterious lights which have been confusing people in Croydon

The mystery surrounding a set of light circling in the sky above Croydon may have been solved.

{  http://www.croydonadvertiser.co.uk/ }

Underground Catacomb Filled with Mummies Discovered in Egypt

NASA Notices Unexpected Flashes of Light Reflecting Off Earth

Monica Hunter-Hart

Scientists have identified strange light flashes emanating from Earth. First noticed in images taken by the Galileo spacecraft in 1993, but overlooked since then, these glints were recently rediscovered in photos taken by NASA’s Earth Polychromatic Imaging Camera (EPIC) since its 2015 launch. Researchers have now figured out that the flashes are sunlight bouncing off of ice crystals high in the air, and that they might even be able to help us find other habitable planets.

EPIC photographed hundreds of the flashes over the course of a year. After studying the images, researchers realized that the glints only appeared when the camera was at the same angle to Earth as the sun was to Earth. That meant that they had to be reflections of sunlight (as opposed to a light source originating from Earth, like lightning); but off of what were they reflecting?

At first, scientists suspected that the light was reflecting off ground water sources, like lakes. But ultimately EPIC data showed that the flashes were coming from a high altitude, around cirrus clouds, so researchers decided that the culprit had to be ice particles.

“It’s definitely ice, and most likely solar reflection off of horizontally oriented particles,” Alexander Marshak of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center said in a press statement.

One of the flashes coming from East Africa, seemingly Tanzania.

Beyond the satisfaction of finally figuring out what the heck these light flashes are, this new information yields assets for future space research. If spacecraft can detect lights like these coming from exoplanets, that may indicate that ice particles exist in their atmospheres, too, and maybe even that the planets could be habitable for humans.

Researchers plan to look more into this phenomenon to figure out whether it has a perceptible effect on the amount of sunlight that can enter Earth’s atmosphere; in that case, they would also affect the process by which our planet gets most of its heat.

NASA released a short video describing these findings. Check it out below.

Photos via NASA and the American Geophysical Union, YouTube / user NASA Goddard

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{ https://www.inverse.com/ }

{  http://www.michaelleehill.net/  }

Solar Warden: The Secret Space Program Built with Alien Technology

We now have the technology to take ET home.” –

Ben Rich, CEO of Lockheed Skunk Works, 1993

The story behind this quote is an interesting one. At a lecture held in 1993 at the UCLA alumni center, Ben Rich, the former CEO of Lockheed Martin Skunk Works held a speech about the advancements in space engineering during the previous 40 years. He concluded with the quote about taking ET home while the final image in his slide presentation showed a “black disk zipping out into outer space.”

Was this merely a joke or was he hinting at something?

Over the years, the Skunk Works division of Lockheed has designed and built a number of high-tech aircraft such as the U-2, the SR-71 Blackbird, the F-22 Raptor and the F-117 Nighthawk. Taking this into account, some have drawn the conclusion that Rich alluded to advanced technology being secretly developed and it might be responsible for some of the flying disks we see today.

Seems too far-fetched? We’re on the same page but wait, it gets better.

In 2001, British systems administrator Gary McKinnon hacked his way into 97 U.S. military and NASA computers. He intended to find top-secret files regarding free energy but stumbled upon something bigger. McKinnon claimed to have uncovered a spreadsheet containing names and information about “non-terrestrial officers” and transfers between fleets. He cross referenced these names with a database of all U.S. Navy and military personnel but was unable to find any of the officers. McKinnon therefore concluded they were not of this world and labeled them as “Space Marines”.

In an interview with the BBC, he said he had been motivated by The Disclosure Project because “they are some very credible, relied-upon people, all saying yes, there is UFO technology, there’s anti-gravity, there’s free energy, and it’s extraterrestrial in origin and they’ve captured spacecraft and reverse engineered them.”

McKinnon was discovered just as he was examining the image of a UFO stored in a NASA computer in Johnson Space Center’s Building 8. Caught in 2002, he was facing up to 70 years in prison and several million dollars in fines. However, the U.K. never extradited him to the U.S. and McKinnon managed to avoid prison. Some say that he was able to do so because he had amassed sensitive information that he used as leverage.

He maintains his claim that extraterrestrial spacecraft have been captured and reverse-engineered and now the alien technology is being used by entities in our own figurative backyard.

This brings us to Solar Warden. According to conspiracy theorists, Solar Warden is an ultra-secret project that maintains a fleet (or several fleets) of spaceships that are operating within our solar system. Some say they’re defending us against alien threats. Others say they’re involved in the covert colonization of space.

Such a fleet would require technology way ahead of what we’ve currently got. In order to send manned missions into the far reaches of our solar system we’d need exotic materials and propulsion systems. But there are some who claim we already do.

I suspect that in the last 60 years or so, that there has been some back-engineering and the creation of this type of equipment, that is not nearly as sophisticated yet as what the apparent visitors have.” -

Dr. Edgar Mitchell, the sixth astronaut to walk on the Moon

Even so, who would have the coin required to fund such a venture?

The United States’ black budget for 2014 amounted to some $52.6 billion and they plan on spending around $58.7 B this year. But even this astronomical sum isn’t enough to fund or maintain a secret space fleet. And that’s when conspiracy voices start mentioning the deep black budgets. Whether these programs are myth or reality is hard to tell.

As it turns out, there might be UFOs that were built on Earth, based on technology that originated elsewhere in the universe. And we might have a space fleet without knowing it. Leave a comment telling us what you think about this idea.

{http://locklip.com/category/news/ }

NIEUWE BEELDEN MONSTER VAN LOCH NESS, SCHOTLAND ( VIDEO )

Eens in de zoveel tijd is het weer raak en duiken er weer nieuwe beelden op van wat misschien wel het meeste beroemde meer ter wereld is, Loch Ness. 

Al in de 7e eeuw verschenen de eerste verhalen over een monster in Loch Ness en anno 2017 is er niet veel veranderd. 

Het is een tijdje stil geweest rond Loch Ness, waar eigenlijk ieder jaar wel een aantal vreemde dingen worden waargenomen. 

De laatste waarneming dateert inmiddels alweer van acht maanden geleden, maar daar is ongeveer een week geleden verandering in gekomen. 

Op zondag 7 mei 2017 maakte de 35-jarige Rob Jones uit Wales filmopnames van het meer. Rob reed in zijn bestelauto langs de weg boven het meer, toen hij in het water iets vreemds ontdekte. 

Het object bewoog in de richting van een boot en Rob stopte de auto en begon te filmen. Ook een groep toeristen die langs de weg liep, kreeg belangstelling en begon ook met het maken van foto’s. 

Het vreemde was dat de boot gewoon verder voer en niets bijzonders scheen op te merken, maar duidelijk is dat het object wel degelijk bewoog in het water. 

Het zag er van een afstand zo uit.

En wat uitvergroot, zie je dit:

Rob zegt dat hij eigenlijk niet in het verhaal van het monster gelooft, maar dat hij toch wel heel erg nieuwsgierig is naar wat hij nu eigenlijk heeft gefilmd. 

Gary Campbell die het officiële register van waarnemingen van het monster van Loch Ness bijhoudt, is blij, want hij begon zich na acht maanden toch wel wat zorgen te maken over het monster. 

Vorig jaar was een record met 18 waarnemingen, het beste jaar sinds 2000, maar de laatste dateert alweer van augustus vorig jaar. 

 

De door Rob Jones gemaakte opname lijkt veel op die werd gemaakt in 1934 waar wij in een eerder artikel het volgende over schreven:

De meest bekende foto van het monster is waarschijnlijk onderstaande foto. Hij is genomen in1934 door een gynaecoloog uit Londen, Robert Kenneth Wilson. Deze foto werd gepubliceerd in de Daily Mail van 21 april 1934. Op de foto zie je het monster met een lange nek en het hoofd boven water. 

Echter… het was een grap. De foto was niets meer dan een speelgoed onderzeeër, gekocht bij een warenhuis. Daarbovenop was een hoofd en nek gemaakt van hout door ene Marmaduke Wetherell. Deze was zwaar gepikeerd omdat hij belachelijk gemaakt werd door de kranten in verband met zijn zoektocht naar het monster en besloot op deze manier wraak te nemen.

De oudste verhalen van een monster in Loch Ness dateren van de 7e eeuw. St. Columba, een Ierse monnik, stuurde één van zijn volgelingen het water in om te bewijzen dat er geen monster was. 

Maar, helaas, het monster was er wel, kwam uit het water en beet in de hielen van de man. Gelukkig was er St. Columba. Deze bleef onverschrokken staan en verjoeg het verschrikte monster door het teken van het kruis te maken en te commanderen: “Kom niet verder. Raak die man niet aan. Ga onmiddellijk terug”. 

Tja, en daar had het monster natuurlijk niet van terug, zodat hij tot de dag van vandaag waarschijnlijk maar besloten heeft om onder water te blijven.

{ http://www.niburu.co/ }

CONTROVERSIAL BOSNIAN PYRAMIDS

The natural geological formations with at least strange shapes or perhaps the oldest pyramid on Earth posed by human hands, the complex of pyramids in Bosnia and Herzegovina have for years numerous discussions in the contradictory. The dispute continues to this day, though, of which they have researchers investigated, most claim they are nothing more than relief forms polished natural erosion factors. The story behind them, however, is an especially interesting, with scandals, extreme nationalism, tourism at any cost and countless studies whose results not irreconcilable. 

Semir Osmanagić was dubbed the Indiana Jones of those in the Balkans, because of its passion for archeology, prehistory and the mysteries surrounding the extinct archaic civilizations. Semir Osmanagić was able to shatter the scientific world in early 2006, when he announced that he had discovered the oldest pyramids in the old Continent, somewhere in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Self-confessed researcher, technician in steel construction, Osmanagić turned the world's attention towards the Visočica Hill, a pyramid-shaped clear formation, located near the town of Visoko, 30 kilometers Northwest of the capital Sarajevo. Visoko, itself, is the former capital of the Medieval Kingdom of Bosnia and holds, among other things, numerous and varied historical vestiges, from the ruins of the Illyrian settlements, Roman forts, plus many artifacts from the Neolithic period.

For more details, you can watch the video or read the article from the following link:

http://matrixdisclosure.com/ancient-pyramids-of-bosnia/ 

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{  http://www.disclose.tv/ }

STEPHEN HAWKING: WE WILL LIVE IN CITIES ON THE MOON IN 50 YEARS

Stephen Hawking is one of the most well-known scientists in this day and age. The British astrophysicist was recently featured in a movie a few years back which was highly acclaimed and allowed his name to appear and raise awareness about his theories among the general population, and not just the scientific community. 

The movie features highlights of his life, especially highlighting the part where he was diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, an extremely rare degenerative neural disease that causes one to lose control of their own body. The 72-year-old scientist now moves around in a wheelchair and speaks to others through a keyboard and voice synthesizer. His extraordinary feat of achieving success even with this disease hindering him has inspired many around the world.

However, Stephen Hawking's personal trials and tribulations are not the only things that got people to notice him. He is famed in the scientific community for his theory on black holes, and "Brief History of Time", his bestseller book that has caused him to be famous worldwide. Recently, Dr. Hawking was featured on Channel 4's "Live from Space: Lap of the Planet", a documentary and live series that shows real-time broadcasts from astronauts living on the International Space Station (ISS). On the live broadcast, Dr. Hawking claimed that in order to prevent the extinction of the human species, humankind has to colonize other planets. This is because Mother Earth is an "old world" with a finite number of resources that is being depleted too quickly because of overpopulation. 

He suggests humankind venture out into the never-ending cosmos, being the true generation that carries the name of "Space Age". He further added that this would be achieved when humankind will be able to live on the Moon, and then moving on to colonize Mars in the next 50 years.

LIFE ON THE MOON? 

This really sounds like something from a sci-fi movie, but what Dr. Hawking claims about our Earth not being able to sustain us is true. Fossil fuels are running out, our forests are being destroyed more and more, and our ozone layer is being depleted. Perhaps his solution is the one that will truly save us all at the very end, and is sustainable for thousands of years, ensuring the survival of our kind.

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{  http://www.disclose.tv/ }

FATHER AND SON FILMED STRANGE UFO OVER VICTORIA, AUSTRALIA

Well now..what the hell was that? If this is fake? It's a really good one. At 1:55 there appear to be some strobing lights under the main orb light. The combination of all the lights makes it seem like it has the classic saucer shape.

{ http://www.disclose.tv }

NASA DETECTS HUNDREDS OF UNEXPLAINABLE FLASHES REFLECTING OFF PLANET EARTH

NASA has filmed hundreds of huge flashes reflecting off Earth and in doing so they have helped to put an end to a mystery that had Carl Sagan and others mystified more than two decades ago.

The mysterious flashes are so big that they could be seen from space and originally they had been thought to have been caused by the sun reflecting off the ocean’s surface. However, NASA then captured them on land and no-one seemed to know where they had come from and what caused them. 

Alexander Marshak said that they saw bright flashes over land and at first they assumed that there was a lake or large body of water and the sun had reflected off it. However, the glint was too big for that to have been behind it.

SAGAN SAW HUGE FLASHES IN 1993 ON IMAGES TAKEN BY GALILEO SPACECRAFT

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• They Call THIS Place 'The Center Of The Universe' Because Of One Unexplainable Phenomenon! 

Astronomer Carl Sagan also saw huge flashes in 1993 on photographs that had been taken by the Galileo spacecraft of Earth. The probe had been launched four years prior so that they could study Jupiter and the moons, however, Sagan used it when it was making a flyby past Earth to look for signs of life on Earth. He said that if he could find signatures of life from up in space, extraterrestrial neighbors would be able to do the same and they would realize that Earth was inhabited.

In the photographs large glints of light, light reflections on mirrors were seen, however, they were only seen in areas that were covered by water. The team said that the large expanse of ocean and coastlines had been present and when looking at them closely the photographs revealed a region of mirror-like reflection in the ocean but it wasn’t seen on land.

TWENTY-FOUR YEARS LATER MORE STRANGE GLINTS APPEAR OVER LAND

Twenty-four years later NASA found 866 light bursts between June 2015 and August 2016 and strangely all of them happened to be coming from the land, not the ocean. The footage was captured by the Earth Polychromatic Imaging Camera that was on-board NOAA Deep Space Climate Observatory.

The team from NASA then got the photos from the Galileo and compared them and then realized that Sagan had forgotten about one thing, a detail that was, in fact, crucial, the reflections had occurred on land too in that survey years ago. Marshak along with his team then had to explain the phenomenon and they set about cataloging all flashes seen over land from the EPIC and Galileo images and then mapped their locations. They suggested that if the glints had been caused due to the sunlight being reflected then only some parts of the globe would have them. They found a pattern and this led to the elimination lightning. The team still thought that water was behind it, but water in the atmosphere instead of on the surface.

GLINTS FROM ICE CRYSTALS HANGING HORIZONTALLY

They used the EPIC data and mapped out exactly where the huge glints were coming from and found in was a source 3 to 5 miles above the surface where there were cirrus clouds that were full of ice crystals hanging. They modeled the sunlight direction reflecting of the hypothetical ice crystals floating on a horizontal angle and the numbers matched with the images from the Galileo and EPIC photographs.

Marshak said that the source of the glints was not on the ground and that it was due to ice, more than likely solar reflections off particles that were horizontally oriented. Their research has not been reviewed by peer just yet; this means that some aspects of their findings may change when it has been verified independently.

Researchers are looking into how common ice crystals that hang horizontally are and whether they have any impact that is significant on how much of the sunlight is reflected through the atmosphere. One thing that is known is that the flashes of light are not the signs of extra-terrestrial life that Carl Sagan had been looking for. 

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The movie Arrival illustrated the difficulties of communicating with an alien intelligence, but even that may have been an oversimplification of the real challenges. (credit: Paramount Pictures)

Stranger danger: Extraterrestrial first contact as a political problem

by John Hickman and Koby Boatright

The 2016 film Arrival is simultaneously smart science fiction and wildly optimistic about the outcome of first contact with intelligent extraterrestrials. Smart because the extraterrestrials appear credible as the products of an extraterrestrial evolutionary process; wildly optimistic both because the extraterrestrials are benign in the way humans have always wanted their gods to manifest themselves and because humans are ultimately able to decode their language.¹ Arrival’s heptapods sudden appear on Earth aboard interstellar spacecraft but then wait for humans to pass a difficult but not impossible language examination. Testing humans to determine their worth is a common trope in mythology and religion, and its presence in the film betrays an appeal to magical thinking.

The 2017 film Life is even smarter science fiction because it doesn’t require interstellar travel, benign extraterrestrials, or communication between species with symbolic language. Instead, it is brutally pessimistic about the outcome of human encounters contact with extraterrestrials, intelligent or otherwise. The test portrayed in Life—biological survival—is far more fundamental and far more plausible. Viewed in succession, Arrival and Life evoke the better angels of our nature and then challenge the reasonableness of our expectations. What follows is a thought experiment, an effort to “game” the test in the most probable presentation of a first contact with an intelligent extraterrestrial entity, hereinafter referred to simply as First Contact.

If there is a consensus scholarum on the most probable scenario for First Contact, it would begin with human detection of a radio signal with sufficient structure to suggest symbolic language that had been broadcast from an exoplanet. Such an event would present the most formidable of language problems and confront national decision-makers with extraordinarily important choices, which would be made under extraordinary uncertainty.² Deciding to respond to such a radio signal would be tempting. Lacking all but the most basic information about the transmitting extraterrestrial entity, buffeted by intense public excitement about the discovery of an intelligent extraterrestrials, and fearing that rival national decision-makers might preempt their decision by being the first to respond, national decision-makers might feel compelled to act based on assumptions that are revealed as incorrect only after the momentous encounter has begun. Getting it wrong because decision-making was freighted with unreasonable expectations might result in consequences that range from the merely amusing to the deeply frustrating to the existentially threatening. So this thought experiment is justified under the cautionary principle.

We proceed by first assessing possible risks and benefits of First Contact. The daunting language problem serves as the linchpin between possible risks and benefits. We then examine the underlying political problem before offering some conclusions about optimal public policy making.

Possible risks

For First Contact pessimists, the Fermi Paradox captures a crucial observation: a universe that ought to be noisy with the radio evidence of extraterrestrial civilizations is instead utterly silent. Searches have yet to detect radio signals operating as distant beacons announcing “we’re here.”³ Silence can be given an optimistic interpretation: Douglas Vakoch suggests that reflects a norm of respect for the wishes of other creatures that requires a species to announce its desire to communicate by broadcasting their wish to do so and proposes broadcasting such an invitation. “Maybe it takes an audacious young civilization like ours to do that.”⁴

What worries pessimists is the possibility that silence is motivated by rational existential fear. A preference for survival as a species and extraordinary uncertainty about possible risks attending contact between different intelligent technological species may have persuaded most species to avoid alerting others to their own existence.⁵ Thus, David Brin rejects the idea of broadcasting an invitation as, “seeing my children’s destiny gambled with.”⁶ Clearly, that proposition must be qualified with “most” because humans have been violating the proposed norm for decades with radio and television broadcasts. Perhaps we have been fortunate that Earth’s atmosphere bounces back most radio transmissions and that mass communication is increasingly transmitted by means other than broadcasting.

When Stephen Hawking warned against alerting any extraterrestrial civilization to our existence he offered as a familiar cautionary example the discovery of the Americas by Christopher Columbus.⁷The resulting series of first contacts resulted in population collapse of up to 90 percent of native populations across the Western Hemisphere, followed by brutal conquest and colonization by Europeans. The results of first contacts between Europeans and other peoples across the insular South Pacific were similarly tragic. Kathryn Denning critiques this and other historical analogies as a poor model for first contact with an intelligent extraterrestrial entity and notes that the historical encounters of the early modern era may be perceived less negatively over the longer term because they resulted in vibrant hybrid societies of value in their own right.⁸ That there are no Guanches, Tasmanians, or members of many other extinct indigenous peoples available to dispute Denning’s blithe reassurance ought to give one pause before accepting it.⁹

Given that First Contact would occur between our species and another, as yet unknown, entity, there are analogies that merit consideration. For example, the fate of large animal species after the irruption of humans in virgin soil environments can be seen as tragic. Paleoindians exterminated most of the megafauna in the Americas, including mastodons, dire wolves, giant sloths, giant armadillos, giant beavers, and glyptodonts, soon after their arrival.¹⁰ The moose and bison alone survived. Polynesian ancestors of the Maori exterminated all 13 species of the Moa, giant flightless birds, soon after their arrival in New Zealand. The remorseless encounters between native and invasive non-human species competing for the same ecological niches is similarly tragic, at least from the perspective of those of us who prefer a biosphere with more species diversity. Pathogen transfer due to contact between previously isolated wild and commercial populations of the same non-human species has resulted in population crashes.

Examples of the resulting negative outcomes are displayed in Table 1.

Table 1. Tragic Encounters

That all of those encounters ended badly for one party, frequently involving population crashes and extinction, should not be ignored by policy makers. We note, however, that the analytic value of these analogies is constrained by three considerations. First, there are no data for the cell in the upper-right-hand corner of encounters between populations of intelligent but unrelated species, which would encompass First Contact. Second, all of the analogies involve encounters between terrestrial fauna. First Contact might be with a species that evolved amid much less aggressive life forms than those found on Earth. Indeed, First Contact might be with an entity that emerged in an entirely non-competitive environment. Third, all of the analogies involved physical contact between different populations. None were limited solely to long distance communication as is expected in First Contact.¹⁸

What matters here is that terrestrial analogies to encounters between populations offer the only empirical information for assessing the risks of First Contact. It follows that silence is thus a plausible strategy for a risk-averse species because the result for any other species that might be listening is indistinguishable from a universe empty of species with technological civilizations. Even if every intelligent entity would be benevolent towards other intelligent entity given the opportunity to interact, an implicit silence norm might be self-reinforcing as species choose to interpret the uncertainty inherent in the result as possible evidence of the rational behavior by other species. If you do not hear anyone else speaking, then either there is no one to talk to or they may know to be quiet for a very good reason.

Language

Before surveying possible benefits of First Contact, it is important to examine what is likely to be the most daunting aspect of the encounter. Will humans be able to do more than simply recognize that a radio signal is from an intelligent extraterrestrial entity and actually establish mutually intelligible communications?

When we conceive of extraterrestrial minds, they often inhabit entities with radically different body plans: planet-wide unitary organisms or populations of machine successors to biological organisms. Contrawise, similar body plans are expected to produce similar minds. Optimistic assessments of the possibility of communicating abstract ideas other than perhaps mathematics are typically premised on convergent evolution, as in Don Lincoln’s 2013 Alien Universe.¹⁹ John C. Baird’s 1987 The Inner Limits of Outer Space compared the problem of communicating with an intelligent extraterrestrial species with translating ancient hieroglyphics without benefit of a Rosetta Stone.²⁰

Even that may be much too optimistic. Egyptian hieroglyphics were the work of human minds, merely separated in time by five millennia.²¹ The problem is that even if intelligent extraterrestrials resemble humans, their minds may be radically different. Our current understanding is that humans possess an innate capacity for learning and using a language and associated culture.²² Although language and mind are inextricably linked in humans, they might not be so for an intelligent extraterrestrial entity, no matter how similar in appearance. Their minds may resemble the plastic Standard Social Science Model that dominated social science thinking during the last century and that continues to influence thinking about language among proponents of SETI.²³ Alternatively their minds might be organized with comparable but different innate capacities, perhaps even greater rigidity than our own.

The language problem is daunting in part because although linguists are reliable sources for questions about human language, the film Arrival notwithstanding, they are likely to have little to offer in translating messages from extraterrestrials. Experts in foreign tongues are likely to be flummoxed by efforts to communicate with entities without tongues. First Contact would present multiple “firsts,” at least in the annals of humanity. That newness means nothing should be taken for granted, and certainly not the intent to communicate simply because an extraterrestrial radio signal has been detected.

If extraterrestrials communicate via something similar to human language, it would be necessary to determine which, if either, of the two types of intentional, signification-based communication that we employ: ‘”natural language” like English, Italian, or Proto-Indo-European; or “code” like C++, syntax for expressing an architecture such as Zermelo-Fraenkel, or binary. There are several differences between a code and a natural language, but their similarities are often a source of confusion. An exacting description of these relationships is beyond the scope of this paper, so we will merely point to a few that shed light for the present strategic darkness.

First, a natural language is the product of unintentional evolutionary processes, much the same as the species that makes use of it. It is for this reason that most natural languages have irregularities in structure or spelling which have seemingly no rational basis—sometimes to the great frustration of those attempting to use such a language. A code, by contrast, is formed somewhat deliberately. This usually encourages uniformity in how it is presented and restricts its ad-libbed modification.

Second, natural language has ambiguities that codes do not. Sentence structure, tone, pitch, and a hundred other things all come together to provide variation in significance. Often, we have to simply say that it’s a matter of circumstance. These matters of circumstance cut down on the time it takes to communicate immensely. Codes are, by contrast and by design, unambiguous. A message is to be interpreted only one way, and the very grammar of the code is usually tailored in such a way that it can be deciphered purely mechanically—and let us not miss the importance of the term “decipher” here. This means that every relevant detail has to be spelled out, so if there are a lot of details, a message can quickly become enormous.

Third, along similar lines, natural language is multi-contextual. This means that it is conveyed in situations where more than one medium gives relevant information as to how the communication is to be interpreted. The ability to detect a tone of sarcasm or earnestness is immensely helpful to truly understanding each other, and it is in these areas of subtext that artificial intelligence interactions with humans find their great challenges. Codes, by contrast, contain everything in the letter. The form of the communication itself is expected to be sufficient to extract everything of relevance. This is necessary to program computers, or write out proofs of mathematical concepts that can be carried out by brute logical operation.

To sum up these differences, code operates in highly restricted circumstances on barebones prior information, making it unambiguous but not usually efficient. Natural language operates in situations where multiple external details can be taken into account to clarify, and whole separate channels of information are available, like gesturing or intoning. Humans are so accustomed to dealing with natural language situations that it is easy to mistake any communication with conscious beings for being just that simple. But with so much between us as whole star systems, and little more than a glorified two-way radio, this may be far from the case.

“To imagine a language is to imagine a form of life.” This statement by the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein illustrates partially why the cryptanalyst will likely be more useful to understanding far-flung communication than the linguist. There is little that can be said about the aliens’ “form of life” that isn’t assumption, and though they may have language, this will not be the artifact we pick up when our radios start squawking. We shall merely have a code.

Once we have our code, we may think that the problem is merely decryption. However, there is cause to think that the limitations we’ve just discussed not only render the situation more difficult, they may well put sharp boundaries on just what sort of information can be transmitted, and hence on what can be inferred for questions of strategy. The two problems, intertwined, are whether there is sufficient information for deciphering and whether worthwhile information can be transmitted.

The first problem doesn’t seem too difficult, because the message can be expected to provide clues to its interpretation by its form alone. Binary messages, either based on a dot-dash system or an on-off system, allows the transmission of sequences of numbers. Variation of tone around a baseline could simplify this into something like a hexadecimal system. Sequences of numbers that illustrate geometric ratios of importance could thus be a relatively simple matter to transmit and receive. Repeated series like so, replacing an element with a blank or nonsense value, might serve to indicate the variables and operations in equations.

The door of mathematics, it seems, is open to us, though interpreting even this enough to get at “interesting” information could take an incredibly long time. Such messages would not only be very long sequences as the operations became more advanced, but would take a long time to respond to indicating understanding. Further, the messages would likely have to be repeated more than once, and any part of the message that didn’t get through could seriously hamper the decryption process. Messages intended to be reinterpreted through another medium, such as pictures described dot by dot through binary, would both be immense, and a gamble, presuming that the far-flung interlocutor has a means of processing visual information.

Here is where the second difficulty comes in. Mathematical truths can be transmitted in this way because the form of the message itself bears some kind of direct relationship to the matters being conveyed, in the way that the structure of a code-message bears similarity to the structure of the “meaning.” The only comparative measurements that are needed are provided internally, and little reference to external standards, except perhaps the rules of logic, is needed. This is where the univocal nature of radio communication may put a damper on things.

Natural language requires context and the available context is likely to be very thin. Advances in astronomical observation might provide information about the gravity and composition of the atmosphere if a planet is the source of the radio signal. Beyond recognition that mathematics and the natural sciences are shared, radio signals might contain sufficient information to assemble images from binary code. Such communications, if they are to convey much detail, would also have to be quite large, potentially suffering the same difficulties as regards interference as the above-mentioned mathematical operations. After that, however, interpretation is likely to be slow going and perhaps prove impossible.

Those who are pessimistic about the possibility of establishing communication will find philosophic support in the work of the mature Ludwig Wittgenstein as it was articulated in his Philosophical Investigations. His general argument is that the meaning of words is derived from linguistic conventions that permit no external justification and are unconcerned with empirically verifiable reference points. What a word means is determined by what everyone who speaks the same language knows it to mean. Moreover, because our access to reality, facilitated by language, is overwhelmingly social in nature, the common sense meanings of words offer as firm a reflection of reality—what Richard Rorty called a “Mirror of Nature”—as is possible. If the view of the mature Wittgenstein is correct, we may be faced with an impassible barrier for translation between human and extraterrestrial languages because they simply cannot belong to the same type of society and therefore there exists no way to construct commonsense meanings.

Comparing Chinese with German, Christian Helmut Wenzel notes how the tendencies of (human) languages derived from their cultural evolution create habits of thought.²⁴ For example, Chinese language requires Chinese speakers to be more context sensitive than German language requires of German speakers, both in text and in speech. In another example, Chinese speakers use vertical spatial metaphors to reference time—for example the future is described as “down”—while German speakers use horizontal spatial metaphors to reference time.²⁵ The differences in such largely unconscious habits of thought between humans and any intelligent extraterrestrial entity are likely to have more causes deeper than culture. Physical sense-organs are likely to differ. One of the authors of this article is visually impaired and thus aware of the frequency with which visual metaphors are used to reference processes of cognition: “Do you now see what we mean?” The degree to which an intelligent extraterrestrial entity is social might differ. Human sociality lies midway on a spectrum between that typical of arachnids at one extreme and that typical of hymenoptera at the other extreme. The sociality of an intelligent extraterrestrial entity might lie elsewhere along that same spectrum. Thus their capacity for some affect that is equivalent to trust may be less or more than our own.

As Table 2 shows, successful communication and Babelian confusion are not the only possibilities for attempted communication in First Contact. A great deal must be achieved by both parties to this encounter for successful communication to be achieved without frustration and suspicion by one or both of the two parties. The everyday human experience is that all that is necessary for communication between speakers of different languages to be moderately successful. Limited shared language may be sufficient to carry out important exchanges of information. That would not be true of communication between humans and an extraterrestrial entity. Instead, such exchanges would more closely resemble the negotiations between political or business decision-makers, who struggle to define their terminology in both languages so as to maximize value by avoiding future confusion or betrayal. Neither an intelligent extraterrestrial entity capable of calculated deception nor humans would be able to trust that they had properly understood the meaning of messages if they were unable to translate back from the language of the other. The inability to understand the language of the other would likely engender frustration and suspicion.

Table 2. Possible communications outcomes

Some consequences of unsuccessful communication in First Contact are foreseeable. Humans tend to interpret the “known unknown” with imagined forces and creatures, often elaborated from familiar myths.²⁶ Fantastic beliefs and desperate action based on those beliefs is a possible result. The urge to project theories of mind appropriate to humans onto non-human animals or natural phenomena is well known. That humans do so with the creatures that we know best—dogs—is telling. Across cultures, humans will attempt to reason with dogs using symbolic logic and dogs will mimic understanding because they are rewarded for doing so. This exchange is noteworthy because it may have begun between 15,000 and 150,000 years ago and might represent a form of co-evolution. What matters here is that incomplete understanding between two utterly familiar terrestrial species endures despite its significance for humans as the best possible opportunity to cultivate an ethical practice with “significant otherness.”²⁷ Given such failure, is it altogether reasonable to expect the successful exchange of information with an intelligent extraterrestrial entity that presents absolute otherness?

What does this mean for the possibility of successful communication between humans and an intelligent extraterrestrial entity? The human mind is designed for communicating with fellow humans. There is no guarantee that we would ever achieve more than the most rudimentary communication with creatures even very similar to ourselves. Perhaps we might succeed in checking our math but the possibility of exchanging much beyond that is limited. Moreover that might be fortunate if the intelligent extraterrestrial entity possesses ideas that might be released among our species as destructive memes.

Benefits

Carl Sagan, icon of the First Contact optimists, prophesied that humans might benefit immensely from access to the “scientific, logical, cultural and ethical knowledge to be gained from tuning into galactic transmissions.”²⁸ Sagan was confident that the consequent cultural shock would be relatively small and that the decoding of signals would be possible though perhaps requiring decades or centuries.²⁹ Albert A. Harrison anticipates encountering peaceful and cooperative intelligent extraterrestrial species flourishing in the interstellar equivalent to the Kantian Peace.³⁰ He pictures a Galactic Club of such species operating on broad principles with experience at enrolling new member species such as our own. Alas, several decades of searching now suggests that intelligent extraterrestrial entities broadcasting invitations to communicate by radio must be exceedingly rare or occur at distances so great from Earth as to be functionally non-existent.

What benefits might be derived from communicating with an extraterrestrial entity? We already know that intelligence has arisen multiple times on Earth but have yet to converse with any of the terrestrial species exhibiting intelligence about anything other than naming food, identifying predator threats, claiming territory, and expressing affection.³¹ To that extent humans already know they are not alone in the universe. Alas, we are unable to compare notes with any terrestrial intelligent species about more abstract matters. That is what we might achieve if we are able to translate messages from an intelligent extraterrestrial entity.

Proponents of attempting to communicate with intelligent extraterrestrial entities typically assume that our mathematics reflects something universal and would thus serve as the basis for the development of a common terminology. They might be mistaken. The mathematics we know might simply reflect the thinking of our species, centered on performing the sort of operation that is useful to us. Even ostensibly “pure” mathematics may simply be applied mathematics applied to itself, rendering the divide a case of degrees of removal rather than a difference in substance. An important benefit of First Contact would be to determine whether we know what we think we know about mathematics, both in content and scope. Discovering that mathematics is not shared might however foreclose use of the most promising means for achieving translation of messages. Not recognizing this, if it is so, may mean we toil in vain at an impossible task for a very long time.

Another benefit would be that we could “avoid re-inventing the wheel” by adopting much of the scientific and engineering advances made by other species. However we cannot assume that the science and engineering of an extraterrestrial entity would be of any practical use.³² Humans might also benefit from exposure to new examples and benefit by recognizing value in what we already possess. Thus we might be in a situation analogous to the pre-contact Inca, who were aware of the wheel but did not put it to use in transportation. An extraterrestrial entity might possess philosophic or spiritual insights as yet unimagined by our species.

Even if the extraterrestrial entity has nothing to offer that we do not already possess, would there be any benefit to communication? Donna Haraway argues that the relationships we develop with domesticated animals, creatures with different minds, is crucial to human moral development.³³Steven Pinker argues that mass communications, which has resulted in greater exposure to the minds of humans and other animals unlike ourselves, is in part responsible for our increasingly peaceful behavior.³⁴ So simply being exposed to different and radically alien minds might have a pacifying effect on our behavior by permitting further moral development. That effect is of course dependent on actually communicating in something close to natural language.

What do political decision-makers know about the benefits attending First Contact? The answer is that they know very little. Indeed, the claimed benefits appear to reflect wishful thinking.

The political problem

The search for radio signals from extraterrestrial entities has been ongoing for decades despite the absence of an unambiguous public policy consensus about the wisdom of doing so. Instead, enthusiasm about the possibility of detecting intelligent extraterrestrial life has been assiduously cultivated in popular culture. It sometimes seems as a means of inoculating the public against xenophobia about human Others.³⁵ Belief in the benign character of any extraterrestrial entity is sufficiently common among members of the attentive public that The Planetary Society uses it to raise money. Thus an August 15, 2014, fundraising e-mail message ends with the following promise: “If an alien civilization broadcasts our way, it would be a major discovery in human history. And you’d like to be part of it. Please help keep the search alive.” The appeal for contributions makes no mention of the risks attending detection or response to such a message. Nor is there a mass membership lobby comparable to The Planetary Society opposing the effort. There is dissent from this but it fails to resonate strongly in public opinion.³⁶

Scientific experts are divided about the advisability of responding to any detected entity and of unprompted signaling of our species’ existence as an intelligent technological entity.³⁷ Unfortunately, much of the public, which might be in opposition, ignores expert opinion in favor of more entertaining conspiracist narratives of the sort offered up by The Discovery Channel.

What do political decision-makers know about the risks attending First Contact? The answer is woefully little, and what they do know is decidedly woeful. The tragic encounters detailed in Table 1 do not bode well even for encounters confined to radio transmissions. Memes, in the original sense that Richard Dawkins coined the term, could be demoralizing and disruptive in the same manner as pandemics.³⁸ As we are discovering in the 21st century, information itself may be weaponized.

Given the worrisome “cat-killing” curiosity common to our species, some may be tempted to respond to a radio signal before it is deciphered and before it is determined whether humans are the intended audience. Mounting popular and scientific enthusiasm driven by curiosity might be difficult for political decision-makers to resist. Frustration at the inability to derive a message from the radio broadcast is likely to feed conspiracist suspicion that decision-makers are concealing information that they do not possess. The temptation to respond will probably be strengthened by what are, in human perception, very long time periods between sending and receiving radio messages. The time horizons for decision makers are typically much shorter. Long-term consequences of even the most momentous policy making may be discounted in favor of near-term advantages that can be reckoned in public opinion polls and election outcomes.

Decision-makers are no less prone than anyone else to errors of misperception that are the product of a human proclivity to tell one another stories in which missing information is replaced with supposition. Several of the hypothesized misperceptions involved in nuclear deterrence identified by Robert Jervis are relevant here: the tendency to accept or reject new information based on existing beliefs or theory, the tendency to successfully assimilate new information only if it is received piecemeal, the tendency to believe that messages received are in response to messages sent, the tendency to overestimate the clarity of messages sent, and the tendency to believe that message recipients share common interests and perspectives.³⁹ These tendencies to misperception may be reinforced by both the “groupthink” syndrome identified by Irving Janis⁴⁰ and the competition between bureaucratic organizations even during existential crises identified by Graham Allison and Philip Zelikow.⁴¹

In his discussion of conceptualization in international relations, Robert Jervis notes that the most basic perceptual thresholds are also the most difficult to correct: whether or not decision-makers possess a concept for a category of thought.⁴² Thus the inaccurate image of the West employed by Chinese decision-makers in the mid-19th century delayed their learning about their challengers and rendered their response to those challenges inadequate. They thought they were interacting with a power comparable to 16th century Portugal when in reality they were dealing with 19th century Britain. One hundred years of violence and humiliation were the consequence.

The political problem is initially one of choosing between non response and delayed response. As displayed in Table 3, any response to the message should be delayed at least until the message has been deciphered and the intended recipient identified. Potential existential threats warrant decision making patience born of extreme caution.

Table 3: Optimal near-term decision-making

Non-response will require official messaging to dampen both public and scientific enthusiasm. As the experience of nuclear deterrence during the Cold War reveals, news audiences can be persuaded to accept the strategic logic of preparation coupled with inaction. What that is likely to require are periodic official reports on progress in deciphering the message together with a narrative emphasizing the possible existential threat. Although it rubs against the grain of thinking since the beginning of the Modern Era, humans are proficient at living in a state of fear. Indeed, traditional societies are characterized by hostility to strangers, finding in that antipathy a source of social unity.

The longer-term political problem involves decision making with respect to messages that have been sufficiently deciphered. The choices are displayed in Table 4.

Table 4: Optimal long-term decision-making assuming intended transmission

Unless the message can be determined to have been intentionally transmitted and that humanity is its intended recipient rather than some other extraterrestrial entity, then not responding remains the optimally rational decision. The value of not responding would be reduced, though not entirely eliminated, if it is determined that humanity is the intended recipient because that would indicate knowledge of our location in space and perhaps other information. Not responding to a message would deny the extraterrestrial entity additional information that might render humanity even more vulnerable. If the message evidenced some malign intent in the form of a threat or weaponized meme, then not responding remains the optimally rational decision.

There are possible advantages to listening in on communications between extraterrestrial entities without their knowledge. Given prophylactic measures to avoid releasing a weaponized meme, the intelligence collected through covert monitoring could be used in deciding whether and how best to respond to a message. Indeed, such monitoring might provide the benefits of First Contact without incurring the risks.

Conclusion

The relatively high probability of the existence of extraterrestrial intelligence has led to conversation about the possibility of prolonged communication with such distant intelligences. A number of logistical details beset and make problematic any attempt to engage in the communication between Earth and whatever lies in the great beyond that might speak back to us. That engaging in such communication will be advantageous is by no means a foregone conclusion. Indeed, there are good reasons to suspect that the encounter will be either non-advantageous or disadvantageous, and very possibly extraordinarily dangerous.

What a national political decision-maker is likely to seek upon encountering an extraterrestrial radio signal will depend on both their relative risk acceptance and on their willingness to act in concert with other national political decision-makers who are in possession of the same information. At present, the bureaucratic scientific apparatus for detecting such is still limited to a handful of countries, but as that number grows a coordinated response becomes more difficult, not the least because of the temptation to defect from a policy of restraint by seeking an advantage in establishing communication.

Endnotes

1. Marissa Martinelli. “All Your Questions About the Mindbending Plot of Arrival, Answered.”Slate. November 18, 2016.
2. Michael A.G. Michaud. “Ten Decisions That Could Shake the World.” Space Policy. (2003) 19, 2: 131-136.
3. Bruce Jakosky. The Search for Life on Other Planets (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998) pp. 289–290.
4. Stephen Battersby. “We’re From Earth. Hi There!” New Scientist (2010) 205, 2744: 29.
5. Stephen Webb. Where is Everybody: Fifty Solutions to the Fermi Paradox and the Problem of Extraterrestrial Life (New York: Copernicus Books, 2002) pp. 108–115; Richard A. Posner.Catastrophe: Risk and Response (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004) pp. 40–41.
6. Stephen Battersby. “We’re From Earth. Hi There!” New Scientist. 205, 2744: 28–31; BBC News. “Hawking Warns Over Beings.” April 25, 2010.
7. BBC News. “Stephen Hawking warns over making contact with aliens.”
8. Kathryn Denning, Kathryn. “Impossible Predictions of the Unprecedented: Analogy, History, and the Work of Prognostication” in Douglas Vakoch, ed., Astrobiology, History and Society: Advances in Astrobiology and Biogeographics (Berlin: Springer-Verlag, 2013) pp. 301–312.
9. Alfred W. Crosby. Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900–1900. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996) pp. 71–94; Jared Diamond. The Third Chimpanzee: The Evolution and Future of the Human Animal (New York: Harper Perennial, 1992) pp. 278–283.
10. Shepard Kech III. The Ecological Indian: Myth and History. (New York: W.W. Norton, 1999) pp. 33–34.
11. Henry F. Dobyns. “Disease Transfer at Contact.” Annual Review of Anthropology (1993) 22: 273–291.
12. Diamond, The Third Chimpanzee, pp. 51–52.
13. Paul Marchesi, et al., “Census and Distribution of Chimpanzees in Côte D’Ivoire.” Primates (1995) 36, 4: 591–604.
14. Krech, The Ecological Indian, pp. 29–43.
15. Sheila R. Colla, et al., “Plight of the Bumble Bee: Pathogen Spillover From Commercial to Wild Populations.” Biological Conservation (2006) 129, pp. 461–462; X.J. Meng, et al., “Wild Boars As Sources for Infectious Diseases in Livestock and Humans.” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society (2009) 364, 2697–2698.
16. Franck Courchamp, et al., “Mammal Invaders in Islands: Impact, Control and Control Impact.”Biological Review (2002) 78, p. 356.
17. Ibid.
18. John Hickman. “Problems of Interplanetary and Interstellar Trade.” Astropolitics (2008) 6:95–104.
19. Don Lincoln. Alien Universe: Extraterrestrial Life in Our Minds and in the Cosmos. (Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press, 2013).
20. John C. Baird. The Inner Limits of Outer Space. (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1987), pp. 190–191.
21. Ancient Babylonian could be read for the first time in the modern era not only because of the discovery of inscriptions in three languages on a cliff face in Bisitun, Iran but also because the creatures who wrote it and who read it were both human.
22. Pinker, Steven. The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language. New York: Perennial Classics, 2000) pp. 419–448.
23. Ibid, pp. 421-422.
24. Christian Helmut Wenzel. “Chinese Language, Chinese Mind?” From ontos verlag: Publications of the Austrian Ludwig Wittgenstein Society, New Series (2013) 1–18, 3.
25. Ibid.
26. David Gordon White. Myths of the Dog-Men. (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1991).
27. Donna Haraway. The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness. (Chicago: Prickly Paragon Press, 2003).
28. Carl Sagan and Jerome Agel. The Cosmic Connection: An Extraterrestrial Perspective. (New York: Anchor Press, 1973) p. 218.
29. Ibid, pp. 218–219.
30. Albert A. Harrison. After Contact: The Human Response to Extraterrestrial Life. (New York: Plenum, 1997) pp. 194–195.
31. Angela Dassow and Michael Coen. “Join the Conversation.” New Scientist (2015) 225, 3003: 1–5.
32. Nicholas Rescher. “Extraterrestrial Science,” in Edward Regis, ed., Extraterrestrials: Science and Alien Intelligence. Cambridge; Cambridge University Press, 1985) pp. 83–116.
33. Haraway, The Companion Species Manifesto.
34. Steven Pinker. The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined. (New York: Penguin Books, 2011) pp. 588–592, 641–642.
35. Erich Goode. The Paranormal: Who Believes, Why They Believe and Why It Matters (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2012) pp. 242–245.
36. Popular culture is instead rife with risible pseudo-scientific “ancient astronaut” conspiracy theories that are easily dismissed by national political decision-makers. The problem with conspiracy theories is that they are not theories at all but collections of “questions, suspicions and allegations” that counter “conventionally available narratives.” See Jody Dean. How Technoculture Capitalizes on Democracy. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002) p. 51.
37. Dan Falk. March 29, 2015. “Is This Thing On?” Slate.
38. Christian Enemark. Biosecurity Dilemmas: Dreaded Diseases, Ethical Responses, and the Health of Nations. (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2017) pp. 97–98.
39. Robert Jervis. “Hypotheses on Misperception.” World Politics (1968) 20, 3: 454–479.
40. Irving Janis. Victims of Groupthink. (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1972).
41. Graham Allison and Philip Zelikow. Essence of Decision: Explaining the Cuban Missile Crisis, 2nd Ed. (New York: Longman, 1999).
42. Jervis, pp. 466–467.

John Hickman (jhickman@berry.edu) is Professor of Political Science in the Berry College Department of Government and International Studies in Rome Georgia.

Koby Boatright (forallxthereexists@gmail.com) is an independent philosophy scholar living in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

{ http://www.thespacereview.com/index.html }

Looking Back at the Varginha UFO Incident In Brazil

The Varginha town of Minas Gerais in Brazil is not particularly known for tourist attractions. It could be normal to expect the small town could very well cross history without ever being noticed by the rest of people in Brazil and the world. However, that situation suddenly changed on January 20, 1996, when the town became the center of attention as it staged one of the most famous Brazilian UFO incidents.

Three teenagers claimed they observed a strange, short creature with V-shaped feet, red eyes, and horns. They were certain that it was not a man or an animal as it was something different. All of the sudden the three young women put Varginha on the center stage.

Reports of strange creatures, UFOs, strange coincidences, military operations and even mysterious deaths followed the incident. In fact, many questions are still unanswered.

The UFO incident in Varginha started with two sisters and a friend seeing a strange being. The encounter had been followed by a series of events and hysteria as Brazilian media picked up mysterious happenings in the area. Even the Brazilian Army jumped into the case doing a costly operation to investigate it.

The Army operation did not help as more reports on UFOs were spreading. A couple of farmers claimed they spotted something like a gray spaceship flying above their cattle. One farmer said that the cows were running from the silent and no light UFO, which was surrounded by fog.

Furthermore, there were reports about the presence of a strange creature next to the city’s zoo. Mysteriously, the animals in that zoo started to die without explainable reason.

Brazilian ufologist Marco Petit said that the government cover-up operation has made all these incidents to remain unproven. Petit said that the case is more important and bigger than most people think.

There were reports that then the leading forensic expert in Brazil Doctor Badan Palhares examined the bodies of extraterrestrials that were recovered from the spaceship found by the military. However, Palhares has always denied the rumor, calling it utter nonsense.

While all the claims remain unproven, the event made the small town the focus of public attention.  Varginha is now described as the hot spot in the intergalactic search for the intelligent alien.

{ http://www.latest-ufo-sightings.net }

Fast UFO fleet over Peru 8-May-2017

Here’s one new video of a UFO fleet that was filmed with infra-red technology over Peru in South America. This happened on 8th May 2017.

{ http://www.latest-ufo-sightings.net }

U.S. Military Reveals Instructions On How To Photograph UFOs

The manual on how to snap UFOs was recently declassified in the U.S. Department of Defense files. The document “DoD Instruction 5040.6, Life-Cycle Management of DoD Visual Information (VI)” contains 27 pages, including data from 2002.

In Section 21 of Chapter 5, the document shows a table concerning imagery that records unidentified flying objects and other aerial phenomena not clearly identifiable as missiles or conventional aircraft. The table also shows a list of priority assigned to each category of imagery along with appropriate handling instructions. It instructs the military to make digital copies of the media and send them to the Defence Visual Information Center.

UFO researcher and blogger Paul Dean uncovered the document through the Freedom of Information Act. Dean said that the table of what to photograph and not to photograph lays out entirely both UFOs and aerial phenomena with descriptors.

The document proves that the U.S. did not stop documenting and researching UFOs after the 1960s, contrary to what is widely believe.

Dean notes that the files in the document don’t link UFOs to aliens. However, he adds that the government obviously keep a straight face on the UFO issue when they clearly state it in plain English for the military to digest.

{ http://www.latest-ufo-sightings.net }

Mysterious flashes of light above Earth captured by NASA satellite and ISS live feed camera

Parked in space a million miles from Earth, the Earth Polychromatic Imaging Camera (EPIC) onboard the Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVR) captured hundreds of flashes of light in Earth’s upper atmosphere.

Flashed of light captured by the Deep Space Climate Observatory.

In the 1990s astronomer Carl Sagan already reported this bizarre phenomenon which he noticed in images from the Galileo spacecraft.

These flashes of light not only appeared over oceans but over land as well and while scientists at first suggested that the lights seen over the ocean may be the reflection of sunlight off a part of the ocean the same couldn’t be said for the flashes seen over land.

After studying this phenomenon the scientists concluded that the source of the flashes is not on Earth’s surface but cirrus clouds up to five to eight kilometers high in the atmosphere where these flashes were seen whereby the cause of the flashes of light are most likely solar reflection off of horizontally ice particles, reports dailymail.

These kind of flashes of light are not only captured by the Deep Space Climate Observatory, parked in space a million miles from Earth but it seems the camera onboard the International Space Station which orbit the Earth at an altitude of between 330 and 435 km apparently also has the ability to capture the strange flashes of light above Earth.

Flashes of light captured by ISS live feed camera.

Streetcap1, who caught similar flashes of light on the ISS live feed on May 10, 2017, said: “What are these weird light ripple effect above Earth.”

Solar reflection off of horizontally ice particles again or is it a phenomenon that cannot be explained?  

{ http://ufosightingshotspot.blogspot.be/ }

UFO hunters spot a strange 'flying disc' speed past the International Space Station on a Nasa live feed

• Live footage from Nasa shows 'flying disc-like shaped UFO' near the ISS
• The object suddenly appears before getting closer and then fading away
• UFO hunters claim the disc is proof of the existence of extra terrestrials
• But one expert says the shape is more likely light playing on the camera lens

By Harry Pettit For Mailonline

A mysterious 'flying disc-like shaped UFO' has been captured on a live feed taken from the International Space Station, conspiracy theorists claim.

The creepy footage seems to show the disc hover by one of the ISS's large solar panels before quickly shooting off.

Alien hunters claim that the bizarre footage is proof that extra terrestrials exist, but one UFO expert says the shape is simply light playing on the camera lens.

Scroll down for video

A mysterious 'flying disc-like shaped UFO' has been captured on a live feed taken from the International Space Station, conspiracy theorists claim. The creepy footage seems to show the disc hover by one of the ISS's large solar panels before quickly shooting off

A video discussing the disc was uploaded to YouTube this week by UFO Hunters Secure Team 10.

Tyler Glockner from the Secure Team channel, which has almost a million subscribers, said: 'It can only be described as some sort of flying disc-like shaped UFO, that was spotted hovering in the distance behind the international space station before darting away at a very high rate of speed.

'This is one of the most commonly seen and spoken about craft by hundreds and thousands of people over Earth, in space and above the moon. 

'This thing moves as if it knew the camera was watching it and it was in the frame before it picks up speed before finally shrinking due to the law of perspective before blasting backwards.' 

But not everyone is convinced that the strange shape is an extra terrestrial craft.

Nigel Watson, UFO expert and author of the UFO Investigations Manual, told MailOnline: 'This looks like the reflection of a light source inside the camera lens rather than an extraterrestrial spaceship zipping past the ISS.

'Adding music and a bit of editing is used by Secure Team 10 to add a bit of mystery to it, but there is no supporting information or evidence to say it is an alien spacecraft.'

 One UFO expert says the shape is simply a reflection of a light source inside the camera lens

This isn't the first time an ISS live stream has caused a stir among conspiracy theorists.

Last month a strange object floating past the ISS had UFO hunters claiming visitors from other worlds have developed cloaking technology.

The footage appeared to show the object suddenly appearing near the space station, before starting to approach it. 

UFO hunters discover 'flying disk' on NASA space station

This is not the first time that evidence of aliens has been spotted near the International Space Station (pictured). Some believe Nasa is actively covering up evidence of alien life

CLOAKING DEVICES 

According to the Institute of Physics, metamaterials which can bend electromagnetic radiation such as light around an object to give the appearance that it isn't there.

To date some researchers have used such properties of metamaterials to create devices that can bend certain forms of radiation, such as near-infrared radiation.

So far, however, producing the same effect with visible light has proved more of a challenge.

Part of the cylinder is then seen to disappear, which the UFO spotter who shared the footage believed was evidence of a cloaking device.

Speaking on his blog UFO Sightings Daily, astro-biologist Scott C Waring said: 'I noticed a UFO in the distance that was coming closer and closer to the space station.

'The UFO was partially cloaked, which made it look transparent.

'In the deep blackness of spaces, blending into the environment means you will be safer from other alien species that may not be so friendly.  

A live feed taken from the International Space Station last month appeared to show a strange cylindrical UFO approaching the station, before fading away. The UFO spotter who shared the footage believed it was evidence of cloaking technology 

Strange object spotted flying past the International Space Station

DO YOU BELIEVE IN CONSPIRACY THEORIES?

People who doubt the moon landings are more likely to be selfish and attention-seeking, according to a study earlier this year.

Over the course of three online-based studies, researchers at the University of Kent showed strong links between the belief in conspiracy theories and negative psychological traits.

Writing in the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science, the team explained: 'Previous research linked the endorsement of conspiracy theories to low self-esteem.'

In the first study, a total of 202 participants completed questionnaires on conspiracy beliefs, asking how strongly they agreed with specific statements, such as whether governments carried out acts of terrorism on their own soil.

Alongside this, they were asked to complete a narcissist scale and a self-esteem assessment.

The results showed that those people who rated highly on the narcissism scale and who had low self-esteem were more likely to be conspiracy believers. 

{ http://www.dailymail.co.uk/ }

UFO hunters spot a strange 'flying disc' speed past the International Space Station on a Nasa live feed

• Live footage from Nasa shows 'flying disc-like shaped UFO' near the ISS
• The object suddenly appears before getting closer and then fading away
• UFO hunters claim the disc is proof of the existence of extra terrestrials
• But one expert says the shape is more likely light playing on the camera lens

By Harry Pettit For Mailonline

A mysterious 'flying disc-like shaped UFO' has been captured on a live feed taken from the International Space Station, conspiracy theorists claim.

The creepy footage seems to show the disc hover by one of the ISS's large solar panels before quickly shooting off.

Alien hunters claim that the bizarre footage is proof that extra terrestrials exist, but one UFO expert says the shape is simply light playing on the camera lens.

Scroll down for video

A mysterious 'flying disc-like shaped UFO' has been captured on a live feed taken from the International Space Station, conspiracy theorists claim. The creepy footage seems to show the disc hover by one of the ISS's large solar panels before quickly shooting off

A video discussing the disc was uploaded to YouTube this week by UFO Hunters Secure Team 10.

Tyler Glockner from the Secure Team channel, which has almost a million subscribers, said: 'It can only be described as some sort of flying disc-like shaped UFO, that was spotted hovering in the distance behind the international space station before darting away at a very high rate of speed.

'This is one of the most commonly seen and spoken about craft by hundreds and thousands of people over Earth, in space and above the moon. 

'This thing moves as if it knew the camera was watching it and it was in the frame before it picks up speed before finally shrinking due to the law of perspective before blasting backwards.' 

But not everyone is convinced that the strange shape is an extra terrestrial craft.

Nigel Watson, UFO expert and author of the UFO Investigations Manual, told MailOnline: 'This looks like the reflection of a light source inside the camera lens rather than an extraterrestrial spaceship zipping past the ISS.

'Adding music and a bit of editing is used by Secure Team 10 to add a bit of mystery to it, but there is no supporting information or evidence to say it is an alien spacecraft.'

 One UFO expert says the shape is simply a reflection of a light source inside the camera lens

This isn't the first time an ISS live stream has caused a stir among conspiracy theorists.

Last month a strange object floating past the ISS had UFO hunters claiming visitors from other worlds have developed cloaking technology.

The footage appeared to show the object suddenly appearing near the space station, before starting to approach it. 

{

MARIA ORSIC, THE VRIL & UFOS - NAZI GERMANY SECRETS

{ https://www.gaia.com/ }

Ga mee op een reis door de toekomst: zo zullen aarde en mensheid de komende miljard jaar evolueren - HLN.be

Bron: RealLifeLore

© Screenshot YouTube RealLifeLore.

VIDEO Hoe zien de wereld en de mensheid er over één miljard jaar uit? Het YouTubekanaal 'RealLifeLore' (RLL) wil een antwoord vinden op die vraag en probeert een realistische toekomstvoorspelling te doen. En wat leert ons dat? Er komt een tijd aan waar vmeer zal zijn. En talen zoals we ze nu kennen, zullen niet meer bestaan. Ga mee op een reian rassen geen sprake s door de toekomst.

Over 10.000 jaar voorspelt RLL een nieuwe milleniumbug, met computers die problemen hebben met de overgang naar een jaartal met vijf cijfers. Daarnaast zal de mensheid zo genetisch gemixt zijn, dat we geen specifieke rassen meer zullen kennen, zo voorspelt de video. Over 20.000 jaar zijn de talen die we nu kennen zo sterk geëvolueerd, dat er nog slechts één procent van de huidige woorden overblijft. De huidige talen worden dus volledig onherkenbaar. 

Wat het effect van de opwarming van de aarde ook wordt, over 50.000 jaar zou er een nieuwe ijstijd komen, volgens de makers van het filmpje. Ook verdwijnen heel wat meren in Canada, net als de bekende Niagara Falls. Bovendien zullen we elk jaar een schrikkelseconde bij onze jaartelling moeten toevoegen. Over 100.000 jaar zal het sterrenstelsel er volledig anders uitzien dan vandaag. En zal de mensheid van planeet Mars een bewoonbare planeet hebben gemaakt. 

Over 500.000 jaar is het erg waarschijnlijk dat de aarde geraakt is door een asteroïde van een kilometer diameter, tenzij de mensheid de impact van de asteroïde kan stoppen. Daar tegenover staat dat de meteorietkrater in het Amerikaanse Arizona over 950.000 jaar volledig geërodeerd en verdwenen is. En wie dacht dat we met vulkaan Eyjafjallajokull al wat gezien hadden, wacht beter nog een miljoen jaar. Want tegen die tijd is de kans groot dat de aarde een supervulkaanuitbarsting heeft ervaren, met een uitstoot van 3.200 kubieke meter assen (lees verder onder de afbeelding).

Lees ook

• "Was meteoriet 30 seconden later ingeslagen, hadden dinosaurussen nu misschien nog geleefd"
• NASA ontdekt nabij planetenstelsel dat lijkt op ons zonnestelsel

Over twee miljoen jaar zal de bekende Grand Canyon tot een grote, weidse vallei geërodeerd zijn. Nog tegen dan zal de mensheid verschillende planeten gekoloniseerd hebben. Op die verschillende planeten zullen zich nieuwe mensachtige soorten ontwikkelen, die zich hebben aangepast aan de omstandigheden op die planeten. 

Op onze aarde zal over zo'n 10 miljoen jaar een deel van het continent Afrika loskomen van de rest van het continent. Nog even later, over 50 miljoen jaar, zal de rest van Afrika opgeschoven zijn en de Middellandse Zee volledig overbrugd hebben. De botsing tussen Afrika en het Euro-Aziatische continent zal een nieuwe bergketen doen ontstaan, met mogelijk hogere bergen dan de Mount Everest (lees verder onder de afbeelding).

Hawaï zal over 80 miljoen jaar volledig onder water verdwenen zijn, voorspellen de makers van het filmpje nog. En over 100 miljoen jaar zal de aarde vermoedelijk geraakt zijn door een asteroïde zo groot als die verantwoordelijk was voor de uitroeiing van de dinosaurussen (lees verder onder de afbeelding).

Over 250 miljoen jaar zullen alle continenten op aarde opnieuw tegen elkaar aan liggen en één supercontinent vormen, zoals Pangea. Over 500 tot 600 miljoen jaar zal de aarde bedreigd worden door een uitbarsting van Gamma-stralen die de ozonlaag sterk zullen beschadigen, een grote bedreiging voor het leven op aarde. Nog verder in de toekomst, over zo'n 800 miljoen jaar, zal fotosynthese niet langer mogelijk zijn op aarde door het gebrek aan CO² (lees verder onder de afbeelding).

Over één miljard jaar tenslotte zal de temperatuur op aarde zo fel zijn toegenomen tot een constante van zo'n 47 graden Celsius, waarna de oceanen op aarde langzaamaan zullen verdampen en leven helemaal onmogelijk wordt. Alleen in de buurt van de polen zal nog water te vinden zijn. Dat worden dan ook de twee laatste plaatsen met leven op aarde, zo eindigt de voorspelling.

Bekijk hier de volledige video van RealLifeLore:

UK’s Latest Triangle UFO Sighting Caught on Video

 Brett Tingley

Something is afoot in southern England. Scores of reports of UFOs, black helicopters, and other anomalous aerial phenomena have poured in over the last year. Many of these sightings have had multiple witnesses and/or photographic evidence. Interestingly, many of these sightings involve slow-moving triangle-shaped aircraft or triangular groupings of lights. There is a joint USAF/RAF base in the area, making military testing of secretive spy aircraft a likely explanation. However, there could also be a social or psychological element to the spate of sightings; as more individuals report sightings and receive publicity, more and more residents might be watching the skies with cameras ready to film any odd sights.

Zoomed image taken from the footage.

Whatever the cause of the rash of sightings is, a new video of strange lights in the sky shot in Exmouth, England appears eerily similar to other recent sightings of triangular aircraft. The footage was shot on the evening of April 17, 2017 by an on-duty bus driver and shows a trio of lights hovering slowly in the distance.

According to the report filed by MUFON, the bus driver spotted the lights while planning his wedding on the phone with his best man, a call he quickly ended to film the event:

I was just kind of walking about near the leisure center, where my bus stops, when I looked randomly over in the direction of the river, which is when I saw the three lights in a triangle pattern rotating on its axis and wobbling slightly. I have been interested in the subject of UFOs since I was about 10. I told my mate I’d ring him back and started filming the lights with my phone. Due to the street lights my camera was having a hard time focusing on the formation. so I moved closer to the river to get a better view. It’s at this point I really had to go back to the bus stop to get my bus.

Hmm… prior interest in UFOs, out-of-focus camera – all the trappings of a dubious sighting. However, given the relatively clear footage and the high number of similar sightings in southern England, the sighting is a bit conspicuous.

The lights in the footage hover far in the distance beyond the capabilities of the witness’s camera. Naturally.

Similar triangle UFOs have been a regular sight in the skies over England for decades. Our own Nick Redfern recently wrote a summary of the UK and U.S. militaries’ acknowledgment of the flying triangle (FT) phenomenon in which Redfern cites former UK Ministry of Defence UFO investigator Nick Pope. According to Pope, both the American and British governments initially suspected that the other side might be responsible, but discovered that neither nation’s military could explain the sightings:

[T]here was an interesting little hint that the Americans, too, were seeing these Flying Triangles over their territory. As we were making our inquiries, they turned the question around and wanted to know if our Royal Air Force had a triangular-shaped, hypersonic prototype aircraft of some sort. So, presumably, the Americans were having Flying Triangle sightings, too.

Triangle UFOs aren’t just an English phenomenon, however. Flying triangles have been spotted around the world with increasing frequency lately. Recently declassified documents show that even the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission has documented sightings of similar triangle UFOs which appeared to monitor American nuclear facilities. While many of us would love for these two be proof of visitors from another world, most theories suggest that these flying triangles are likely a form of undisclosed aircraft.

Dozens of witnesses across Belgium reported sightings of the same triangle-shaped craft throughout 1989 and 1990.

Whatever they are, one thing is for sure: the triangle is the new saucer.

 TAGS: 

Flying Triangle, Flying Triangles, mufon, Mutual UFO Network, mysterious lights, Triangle UFO, UFO footage, ufo sightings, UFOs

{ http://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }

What is this Enormous Hexagon in the Australian Desert?

{  https://www.youtube.com/ }