Blackout: Strange Phenomena That Occurs During Solar Eclipses

 Micah Hanks

This August 21, 2017, a rare total eclipse of the sun will be visible across much of the United States. Already being dubbed as “The Great American Total Solar Eclipse,” it is expected to be seen across the country in a line crossing roughly between Oregon and South Carolina, as the sun disappears behind the moon, resulting in a sudden drop in temperature and the temporary onset of twilight.

Throughout history, a variety of mythological interpretations existed about what caused solar eclipses. For instance, in ancient China, it was often professed that a massive dragon had eaten the sun; hence why the ancient Chinese word for eclipse– chih–also means “to eat.”

Eclipse photographed by the crew of Apollo 12.

Apart from traditional beliefs about eclipses, there are a number of different unusual phenomena that have been observed during eclipses as well. For instance, the so-called “eclipse shadow-band anomalies” that occur as the sun passes behind the moon have been recorded by astronomers over the years. Researcher J.L. Codona described them thusly in a 1991 article in Sky and Telescope:

“[The bands resemble] mysterious gray ripples are sometimes seen flitting over the ground within a minute or two of totality. The bands are initially faint and jumbled; but as totality approaches, they become more organized, their spacing decreases to a few centimeters, and their visibility improves. After totality ends the bands can reappear and become progressively fainter and more disorganized until they disappear. Shadow bands seem to move perpendicularly to their length, but this is only an illusion. It stems from a lack of features that allow the eye to track motion along the length of the bands.” 

It was suggested by Codona that this particular anomaly may likely result from a “twinkling effect” resulting from the appearance of the solar crescent that appears very thinly just prior to, and immediately after, the total coverage of the sun by the passing moon. Codona said the focal source of the light anomaly was likely atmospheric “turbulence” as little as a few hundred feet above ground.

Another unique phenomenon associated with eclipses is the “Allais effect“, in which minor changes in the behavior of a Foucault pendulum occur as the sun passes behind the moon. In 1954, economist Maurice Allais was experimenting with pendulums over the course of a 30-day period, during which he observed and recorded their movements.

Allais at work with his pendulums.

During this time, an eclipse of the sun occurred, under which conditions Allais noticed that the movement of the pendulum appeared to quicken; although the effect was very minor, it was nonetheless noticeable, and has allegedly been reproduced several times over the years, despite there being controversy over what, precisely, causes the so-called Allais effect.

Going back to ancient times, on at least one occasion in history an eclipse was even believed to have brought an end to a war. In his Histories, Herodotus wrote of a prediction made by Greek philosopher Thales, who lived between 624-547 BCE, that a solar eclipse would occur on the date of May 28, 585 BC.

According to Herodotus, “day was all of sudden changed into night. This event had been foretold by Thales, the Milesian, who forewarned the Ionians of it, fixing for it the very year in which it took place. The Medes and the Lydians when they observed the change, ceased fighting, and were alike anxious to have terms of peace agreed on.”

Though the celestial event brought an end to the conflict between the Lydians and the Medes, it is well known that the ancient Greeks studied solar eclipses and other celestial phenomenon, and were adept at predicting them.

Obviously, while people in the ancient world were fascinated–and often frightened–by solar solar eclipses, these rare celestial phenomena are still very intriguing to us today, and even manage to boast a few unanswered questions. For more information about the upcoming 2017 solar eclipse, and where it can be seen, check out Space.com’s full rundown about it here.

 TAGS: Allais Effect, Herodotus, solar eclipse

{ http://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }

{ http://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }

Ingrediënt van leven ontdekt rond jonge zonachtige sterren

Tim Kraaijvanger

{ https://www.scientias.nl/ }

How Social Media Users Decoded a Simulated Message from Extraterrestrials

Humanity won’t share a language with an alien civilization, so how can we decode a message from ET if we receive one? One astrophysicist says: crowdsource it.

by Emerging Technology from the arXiv

In 1961, a small group of scientists met at the Green Bank radio astronomy observatory in West Virginia to discuss the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. One of the organizers was Frank Drake, who used the conference to present his now famous Drake equation describing the likelihood of intelligent life elsewhere in the universe.  But Drake also used the occasion to carry out a less-well-known experiment.

The question he addressed was the following. If humanity received a message from the stars, how could we decode it given that it we have no language in common? Similarly, if we want to send a message, how should we compose it?

To explore this issue, Drake created a message of his own and challenged the participants at the conference to decode it. He received a single reply written in the same code, clearly indicating that the message had been understood. Afterward, an amateur electronics magazine published the message, and about a year later, Drake received a letter with the correct solution from a reader of this magazine.

That points to an interesting idea. If we ever receive a message from the stars, one option would be to release it via social media and exploit the world’s combined brain power to decode it.

Last year, one researcher tested this idea by doing exactly that. Rene Heller from the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research in Germany created a simulated message from an alien civilization and released it on Twitter and Facebook for the world to decode. “On Tuesday, 26 April 2016, I submitted a fake SETI message to the social media Twitter and Facebook and called it the SETI Decrypt Challenge,” say Heller.

Today, he publishes the results of this experiment, showing how people joined forces to crack the seemingly alien code.

The challenge that Heller set is to imagine that Earth has received a message in the form of series of radio pulses from a fixed, unresolved source about 50 light years from Earth. These pulses have been received in a narrow band around an electromagnetic frequency of 452.13 MHz, a frequency that is pi times the emission frequency of neutral hydrogen atoms.

Heller has placed an audio version of the message here. And the question he asks: what does this message say?

Heller constructed the message using some techniques that have already been used in messaging extraterrestrial intelligences. The message consists of a number of pictures that can be constructed by arranging the data in an array of particular dimensions.

These dimensions are 359 by 757 pixels (both prime numbers) and are defined at the beginning of the message by sequences 757 0s and 359 1s. This encodes the first page of the message, which is otherwise blank.  In total, the message contains seven pages (another prime number).

The next page is a list of numbers from 0 to 756 which uses a standard system of data encoding called little endian which defines things like the data being written from left to right and so on.

The third page lists the first 757 prime numbers in the same way. “Pages two (simple counting) and three (prime numbers) were meant to establish that we are talking binary and that we use numbers to describe and interpret the images,” says Heller.

The fourth page starts by defining two more numbers. The first is the wavelength used to transmit the message in units of the modified Planck Length. This number is 1.6368 x 10³⁴ and acts as a kind of spatial yardstick.

The second number is 1.1677 x 10⁵². This is a temporal yardstick that, with some careful thought and simple mathematics, leads to the number 50—the distance of the transmitting civilization in light years. “As we know that the message comes from a star 50 light years away, our alien friends are telling us that they know their distance to us as well,” says Heller.

The rest of page four displays a sine wave, or more precisely the function—sin(x).

The first two lines of page five encode the numbers 6.048 × 10³⁴ and 4.2038 × 10⁵². These represent the distance 2.45 meters in units of the modified Planck constant and a time of 180 years in units of the temporal yardstick. The rest of this page displays an image of an alien specimen with the clear implication that it is 2.45 meters tall with a life span of 180 years.

The sixth page shows an image of the device used to send the transmission; actually a picture of an Earthbound radio telescope called the Square Kilometer Array.

The final page encodes two numbers equivalent to a distance about 100 times larger than the Earth-moon distance and six billion years. It also displays an image of four astronomical objects, one of which is next to an image of an alien. The implication here is that this depicts ET’s home planet, which is a billion years older than ours.

Heller released this message on social media on April 26, 2016, and it didn’t take long for the world to respond. Heller received the first correct solution by e-mail the following day, and the number of responses increased as news of the challenge spread.

On May 6, Heller received the largest number responses after the Daily Mail and the Huffington Post reported the challenge. At this, a group on Reddit posted the answer, which probably distorted the result Heller got after this. In total he received, 66 correct solutions, two of which were from high school students.

That’s interesting work that has clear implications for the way humanity should deal with a message from the stars. The astronomical community is already committed to publicly releasing any message it receives from extraterrestrials.

But Heller’s work shows that this is not just lip service to the people who pay for astronomy. It shows that the global community is capable of decoding such a message and should be given the chance. “Distribution in the social media would not only offer an efficient means of decryption but also offer an unprecedented opportunity to unite humans all over the globe in a common scientific and cultural effort,” he concludes.

The participants of the first SETI meeting at Green Bank in 1961 would surely agree.

Ref: arxiv.org/abs/1706.00653: Decryption of Messages from Extraterrestrial Intelligence Using the Power of Social Media—The SETI Decrypt Challenge

{ https://www.technologyreview.com/ }

LOCKHEED MARTIN'S 'KILL VEHICLE' (1999) - I CAN ONLY IMAGINE WHAT THEY ARE TESTING NOW

Wow! I have never seen this before. That is crazy.

One of the most fascinating things in the world for me is hidden technologies. It's just overwhelming to think about the kind of things they probably have now. I literally think that they had star wars technology when the first movie came out.

{  http://www.disclose.tv/ }

DID THE US GOVERNMENT FORGED A PACT WITH AN ALIEN CIVILIZATION?

During the history of the United States of America, multiple events provide proof of an pact forged between the US Government and an alien civilisation? What is the ultimate goal of this pact and why should we care? Is disclosure a part of the deal?

{  http://www.disclose.tv/ }

Aliens, Comets or Crap? What’s Going On With The Wow! Signal?

By John Wenz 

Ohio State University’s Big Ear Observatory caught one of the most promising SETI signals ever back in 1977. Astronomers are still debating if it came from aliens, or something closer to home.

(Credit: NRAO/AUI/NSF)

In 1977, Ohio State University math professor Jerry Ehman walked into the Big Ear Observatory and looked over the past few nights’ observations. At the time, the radio telescope was the only observatory exclusively devoted to the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI).

It also was underfunded and had no full-time staff. That means no one was listening for aliens the night SETI had its closest call with the big one. On the night of Aug. 15, 1977, a 72-second signal arrived from deep space just at the right frequency astronomers believe aliens would use. Since no staff members were around, no one could alert other telescopes to listen in.

Without tying the radio signal to an object in the night sky, they couldn’t tell how far away it originated, Ehman told me last fall.

All Ehman could do was scribble “Wow!” on the data printout and hope the signal from Sagittarius would repeat.

It never did. But Antonio Paris, an astronomy professor at St. Petersburg College in Florida, thinks he has the solution. Two comets passed by that region of the sky in 1977, according to his hypothesis. And this year, those comets passed by again. That created a chance to test his theory. His research was accepted for publication in the Journal of the Washington Academy of Sciences. (A preprint is available on Paris’ site.)

The comet 266/P Christensen is the one in question. Its orbit roughly aligns with Jupiter at its farthest distance and Mars at its closest to the Sun. According to Paris’ research, the comet “transmitted” at the 1420.25 MHz radio band. That’s near where the Wow! signal came from.

“We did everything we could to try to debunk our results but we kept getting a signal from the comet,” Paris told Discover. “That was when we said, ‘Eureka!’ ”

Paris, who along with his teaching duties runs the Center for Planetary Science and the UFO-hunting Aerial Phenomena Institute, proposed the hypothesis last year. Ehman scrutinized that original proposal, and didn’t believe it was likely to be comets.

“I received a copy of their article from the Journal of the Washington Academy of Sciences and I studied it carefully,” Ehman said in an interview at the time. “I have concluded that neither of the two comets could explain the Wow! signal, and colleagues of mine at the observatory have also concluded the same thing.”

Indeed, peer reviewers on Paris’ paper remarked on the need to coordinate with Ohio State and others on the research, seeing that as one of the flaws in the paper.

“The only response from the peer review that we were concerned about was that no one, including Ohio State University, had previous research on detecting a signal from a comet,” Paris says. “We had to explain to the peer reviewers that we were the first to do so … thus no previous data was available.”

Chris Lintott, a professor of astrophysics at Oxford University, isn’t buying any of the explanation.

“If real, this comet is detectable in the radio,” Lintott says. “But the signal isn’t bright enough or rapid enough to be a good fit to the Wow! signal.”

The methodology itself is flawed, according to Lintott. While staring at this region of the sky, he says there should have been about five minutes’ worth of signals if it were comets, but it only comes in intermittent bursts. And if it were comets, Lintott says we could expect to see Wow! signals all the time, rather than once in 1977 and once in 2017. Then there’s the choice of journal — in his words, “it’s not somewhere astronomers publish.”

Lintott has another problem with Paris’ research: He crowdfunded it.

“Bad papers get written and published all the time,” he says. “But this author asked people for money to fund his research, and if you do that you should hold yourself to the highest standards.”

Lintott isn’t sure what it is. But comets it ain’t.

“I don’t know what the Wow! signal was — it’s very hard to study something you’ve only seen once,” he says. Lintott suggests the study authors submit their research to one of the larger astronomy journals so they can get constructive feedback.

“This is just science by press release, and it’s depressing it’s picked up (by the press),” Lintott says.

Paris is aware of the criticism he’s receiving and believes his paper still stands up to scrutiny.

“I see one or two astronomers are skeptical. They emailed me, too,” he says. “But they can’t answer my question: Show me the evidence to refute my data. They might need to do some soul searching.”

For his part, Ehman remains (relatively) agnostic on the original signal, while wanting to believe the extraterrestrial cause. He acknowledges that limited equipment of the time led to a sort of dead end to the mystery.

“It’s an intriguing possibility that it’s a signal from extraterrestrial intelligence, but it’s also one that I’ve had to declare that I can’t prove that it is, or prove that it isn’t,” Ehman says.

So I guess that makes two things now that some people think are aliens and others think are comets. There’s now a possibly plausible explanation for the Wow! signal, but that won’t stop SETI researchers from continuing to look for something just like it, hoping for that needle in the haystack that proves we’re not alone.

{ http://discovermagazine.com/ }

NASA's Mars Rover concept looks like the ultimate extraterrestrial golf cart

Mike Wehner @MikeWehner

Thus far, NASA has landed a total of four rovers on Mars, and while the conversation surrounding sending humans to the red planet is a hot topic, there are no concrete plans to actually make the journey happen. When it does happen, however, the brave folks who make the trip are going to need something to drive on the planet’s surface if they hope to actually do any exploring. With that in mind, NASA has revealed a concept vehicle that has no business being sent to Mars, but the agency is pretty excited about it anyway.

{ http://bgr.com/ }

Strange UFO recorded from a plane over California

Check out this interesting footage of a bright lights that were filmed from a plane over California. This was filmed on 1st October 2016 and it was just submitted to MUFON.

Witness report: 

bright lights visable from 30,000 feet up – midflight . approx 3 hours into the flight from BALT to LA I noticed 3 very bright lights hovering and I cap it with iphone camera , I was overwheled with and very excited to see such an amazing event.

Author (source: MUFON)

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

Mysterious Lights Appear In The Sky During A Massive Blackout In Northern Uruguay

Several residents in Northern Uruguay had experienced a massive outage, including Salto, Constitución, Belén and some parts of Bella Unión as well as Paysandú. However, they were disrupted not just because of the inconvenience of the blackout but also to the presence of several lights in the skies.

Strange lights were seen forming a triangle formation and holding their position longer than an aircraft or a helicopter would do. Adding to the mystery, the lights were dazzling and separated from each other by a vast distance, according to eyewitness’ accounts.

The Uruguayan Air Force (FAU) created a UFO research commission 32 years ago, the first in Latin America. Confirming a UFO needs several factors to be discounted.

The FAU formed an office devoted to investigating UFO phenomenon called the Comisión Receptora e Investigadora de Denuncias de Objetos Voladores No Identificados (CRIDOVNI). The Air Force decided to form such commission after a series of UFO sighting reports during the 1970s.

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

Inzoomen op de ringen van Saturnus

-Tim Kraaijvanger

Wat krijg je te zien als je inzoomt op de ringen van Saturnus? Nog meer kleinere ringen!

Ontelbaar veel ringen in beeld. Ze lijken te golven.

De bovenstaande foto is gemaakt op 4 juni door de Cassini-ruimtesonde. NASA deelde de foto onlangs via Twitter. Het is een onbewerkte foto. Hierdoor is er nog wat ruis zichtbaar.

Helaas is er verder geen informatie bekend over deze foto. Zo is de afstand tot de ringen onbekend. Deze vraag hebben we neergelegd bij NASA, dus hopelijk krijgen we snel antwoord. Aangezien NASA deze onbewerkte foto heeft gedeeld via Twitter, zal er over enkele dagen ongetwijfeld een bewerkte versie verschijnen met meer details over de getoonde ringen.

Eerder dit jaar maakte Cassini een foto van propellers. Propellers zijn verstoringen die ontstaan door piepkleine maantjes. Alleen in de A-ring van Saturnus bevinden zich naar schatting duizenden propellers.

Cassini’s einde
De brandstof van Cassini is bijna op. Om te voorkomen dat de sonde straks zonder brandstof rond gaat dolen en op één van de potentieel leefbare manen van Saturnus neerstort en eventuele aardse microben die nog op de sonde huizen aldaar afzet, is besloten de sonde te vernietigen. Dat doet NASA door deze in september opdracht te geven zich in de atmosfeer van Saturnus te boren. Daarmee komt er een eind aan een spraakmakende en baanbrekende missie.

Bronmateriaal:

"Raw image of #Saturn’s rings from June 4. Includes camera artifacts, such as a circular out-of-focus dust grain" - Twitter

{ https://www.scientias.nl/ }

Inzoomen op de ringen van Saturnus

-Tim Kraaijvanger

Wat krijg je te zien als je inzoomt op de ringen van Saturnus? Nog meer kleinere ringen!

Ontelbaar veel ringen in beeld. Ze lijken te golven.

De bovenstaande foto is gemaakt op 4 juni door de Cassini-ruimtesonde. NASA deelde de foto onlangs via Twitter. Het is een onbewerkte foto. Hierdoor is er nog wat ruis zichtbaar.

Helaas is er verder geen informatie bekend over deze foto. Zo is de afstand tot de ringen onbekend. Deze vraag hebben we neergelegd bij NASA, dus hopelijk krijgen we snel antwoord. Aangezien NASA deze onbewerkte foto heeft gedeeld via Twitter, zal er over enkele dagen ongetwijfeld een bewerkte versie verschijnen met meer details over de getoonde ringen.

Eerder dit jaar maakte Cassini een foto van propellers. Propellers zijn verstoringen die ontstaan door piepkleine maantjes. Alleen in de A-ring van Saturnus bevinden zich naar schatting duizenden propellers.

Cassini’s einde
De brandstof van Cassini is bijna op. Om te voorkomen dat de sonde straks zonder brandstof rond gaat dolen en op één van de potentieel leefbare manen van Saturnus neerstort en eventuele aardse microben die nog op de sonde huizen aldaar afzet, is besloten de sonde te vernietigen. Dat doet NASA door deze in september opdracht te geven zich in de atmosfeer van Saturnus te boren. Daarmee komt er een eind aan een spraakmakende en baanbrekende missie.

Bronmateriaal:

"Raw image of #Saturn’s rings from June 4. Includes camera artifacts, such as a circular out-of-focus dust grain" - Twitter

{ https://www.scientias.nl/ }

Twee nieuwe maantjes bij Jupiter gevonden

Tim Kraaijvanger

Om Jupiter draaien niet alleen grote, maar ook tientallen piepkleine maantjes. Astronomen hebben er weer twee ontdekt.

De ontdekking van S2016 J1.

Met de twee nieuwe manen S/2016 J1 en S/2017 J1 komt het totaal aantal joviaanse manen op 69. “We zijn momenteel op zoek naar objecten in het buitengebied van het zonnestelsel, zoals planeet X, en toevallig kwam Jupiter ook voorbij”, vertelt astronoom Scott Sheppard. Hierdoor zijn de twee nieuwe maantjes gespot.

S/2016 J1 en S/2017 J1 zijn slechts een tot twee kilometer breed. Het zijn dus echt minimaantjes, die maar net te zien zijn door de beste telescopen ter wereld. Zo is S/2016 J1 op 8 maart 2016 ontdekt met de 6,5 meter telescoop van het Las Campanas observatorium in Chili. De maan is 20,6 miljoen kilometer van de grootste planeet van het zonnestelsel verwijderd en doet 1,65 jaar over een rondje om de planeet. De maan is voor het eerst gespot door Sheppard.

De ontdekking van S2017 J1.

S/2016 J1 is op 23 maart 2017 gevonden met de Chileense Victor Blanco reflector. Deze maan is nog verder verwijderd van Jupiter, namelijk 23,5 miljoen kilometer. De maan heeft net iets meer dan twee jaar nodig om rond Jupiter te draaien.

Beide objecten hebben een retrograde baan, wat betekent dat ze in de tegengestelde richting om Jupiter draaien. Dit vertelt iets over de ontstaansgeschiedenis van de twee maantjes. Waarschijnlijk zijn ze ergens anders in het zonnestelsel ontstaan en pas op latere leeftijd door Jupiter gevangen.

Bronmateriaal:

"Two New Satellites for Jupiter" - Sky & Telescope (via Astronieuws)

{ https://www.scientias.nl/ }

"Mars was ooit vijf keer zo nat als de hedendaagse aarde"

Tim Kraaijvanger

Wetenschappers hebben berekend hoeveel water er nodig was om de valleien op Mars te vormen. In een nieuw paper melden zij dat de rode planeet natter was dan gedacht.

Zo blauw zag Mars er vier miljard jaar geleden mogelijk uit.

Onderzoeker Wei Luo en zijn collega’s beweren in een paper in het wetenschappelijke vakblad Nature Communications dat Mars een warm klimaat had en dat er sprake was van een actieve hydrologische cyclus. Zij geloven dus dat water uit de oceanen verdampte en dat het ooit regende op de rode planeet. De wetenschappers hebben computeralgoritmes ontwikkeld om de hoeveelheid water op Mars te berekenen. Ze keken daarbij naar de diepten van alle Martiaanse valleien.

“Onze meest voorzichtige schattingen laten zien dat er tien keer meer water nodig was om de valleien te eroderen dan voorheen gedacht”, aldus Luo. In het paper spreken de auteurs over een minimale watermassa van 6.860.000.000.000.000.000 kubieke meter, oftewel 6,86 triljoen m3. Dat betekent dat Mars waterrijker was dan de hedendaagse aarde. Op aarde ligt momenteel namelijk zo’n 1,4 triljoen kubieke meter water, volgens het USGS.

“Water werd gerecycled op Mars en stroomde regelmatig door de valleien”, vervolgt Luo. “Omdat de rode planeet een grote oceaan had, was er een waterkringloop mogelijk.”

Toch zijn er nog steeds vragen. Als Mars veel vloeibaar water op zijn oppervlak had, dan was de kleine planeet lekker warm. “Maar Mars is verder verwijderd van de zon dan de aarde”, zegt Luo. “Toen de zon jonger was, was de ster minder fel. Kortom, er is meer bewijs nodig om onze theorie te ondersteunen.”

Een ander onderzoeksteam beweerde in januari dat Mars vier miljard jaar geleden warm werd gehouden door een uit de hand gelopen broeikaseffect. Interacties tussen methaan, koolstofdioxide en waterstof zorgden voor warmere perioden, waardoor het water vloeibaar op het Martiaanse oppervlak bleef liggen. Hoewel Mars in relatief korte tijd afkoelde en opdroogde, stroomde er zeer recent nog vloeibaar water op Mars. In 2014 vonden wetenschappers sporen in een krater, die erop wijzen dat hier 200.000 jaar geleden water stroomde.

Bronmateriaal:

"New Martian valley network volume estimate consistent with ancient ocean and warm and wet climate" - Nature Communications

{ https://www.scientias.nl/ }

Twee precies dezelfde exoplaneten hebben toch andere atmosferen

Tim Kraaijvanger

{ https://www.scientias.nl/ }

Russian Submarines & USOs

V. V. Krapiva, a researcher and writer who resides in Odessa, Ukraine, years ago had attended numerous lectures presented by veteran officers of Soviet nuclear powered submarines. They had served in the Soviet North, aboard secret naval installations and bases. The lectures sometimes veered off from the planned presentations, and many spellbinding tales were told as a result. For instance, episodes when Soviet sonar operators were hearing strange targets present at great depths. Soviet Navy submarines were actually being chased by other submarines.

The pursuers changed their speed at will, speeds that were much greater than any other similar vessel in the world could produce at that time. Lieutenant Commander Oleg Sokolov confidentially informed the students that while on duty during his submarine’s navigation, he had observed through a periscope an ascent of some strange object in the water. He was not able to identify it, because he viewed it through the optical system of the periscope. This underwater takeoff took place in the early 1960s.

An interesting observation of a UFO was recorded by a crew of a Soviet nuclear submarine in 1965. This case is on file in the Colonel Kolchin archives. All those who had observed the UFO were ordered to report the details and provide drawings to the Special Department. The submarine was to rendezvous with a ship in the Atlantic Ocean. They arrived at the meeting place an hour and a half before the time of the rendezvous, and the captain allowed the crew to come to the outside deck. No ships were in the area, and the sky was starry and cloudless. Then the watchman observed a cigar shaped object moving noiselessly through the sky. Although the submarine was in international waters at the time, the Soviets assumed the unidentified object was American, and decided to dive immediately. But their onboard radar did not record anything, and the captain decided to stay put, above water. Suddenly three rays shot out from the UFO, and the Soviet submariners noticed something very unusual about the object.

The UFO had no gondolas, and no horizontal or vertical rudders. The object was about 750' long, and Soviet submariners were not familiar with such dirigibles, for those used by American Air Force were much smaller. Then something strange took place, the UFO slowly descended to the surface of the ocean, its searchlights still on, about half a mile from the submarine, and dove underwater. The submarine’s sonar had registered a strange and very intensive hissing sound, as the UFO submerged, but the sound was of a very short duration.

A well known Soviet UFO researcher and author A.S. Kuzovkin had been engaged in UFO research ever since he observed one such object in 1964. He was a physicist and researched ecology of anomalous phenomena for Vokrug Sveta, a very popular Soviet magazine. Kuzovkin mentioned in his writings that while visiting Sevastopol, a port city in Ukraine, he met with local marine scientists who had descended into the depths of the Black Sea in deep water bathyscaphes. They observed, among other things, an object that resembled a wheel as large as a ten story building, standing vertically underwater. The scientists saw and later described to Kuzovkin the wheel that would remain immobile for a while, and then move into a horizontal position, rotate, and depart.

Another well known Russian researcher of the paranormal, author Aleksandr Petukhov, mentioned an incident from 1951. It took place in the territorial waters of the USSR. A Soviet submarine encountered a strange underwater object of gigantic size. It did not react to the submarine communication to identify itself, and continued an unhurried movement towards the nation’s shores. The captain of the submarine ordered depth bombs to be dropped into the site where USO was located. The unidentified object did not react to the attack, and continued its course, at the same speed. After a while it unexpectedly and abruptly ascended to the surface of the sea. At the depth of 160', it stopped its ascent, changed the course, and departed.

In July of 1978, there was a UFO sighting in the Mediterranean. The captain of the Soviet motor ship Yargora immediately sent a radiogram about it to the Soviet Academy of Sciences. The coordinates of the sighting were 37° northern latitude and 3° degrees 40' of eastern longitude. The time was between 7:30 a.m. and 8:40 a.m.. The object observed by Soviet seamen was shaped like a flattened out sphere, its color that of a white pearl. There were three protruding constructions in the bottom portion of the UFO which resembled antennae. The object moved from east to west. No reply to the radiogram ever came from the Academy. This sighting was mentioned in the 2001 article written by Valentin Psalomschikov, and published in NLO magazine. An unnamed Russian source mentioned that Yargora’s Captain Cherepanov sent a telegram from the ship to Moscow, Soviet Academy of Sciences, regarding the sighting.

On December 26, 2002, the Russian newspaper Zhizn published an article about Soviet observations of UFOs. The chairman of the Anomalous Phenomena Commission of the Russian Geographical Society in Saint Petersburg made a presentation at the society’s monthly meeting. The society, founded in 1980, had studied tens of thousands of cases UFO sightings, and had reached the conclusion that UFOs are real. America should follow suit. The chairman at the time, Yevgeny Litvinov, recalled that his experience with the UFOs had begun when he was a Soviet Navy officer and did not take seriously any published UFO related information. Then came the winter of 1979-80, and several incidents had rocked the Northern Fleet, forcing the Soviet general staff to take UFOs seriously. UFOs had visited a Soviet submarine base at the Western Dvina every week during a six month period.

The craft were shaped like disks, and hovered over the armaments preparation sites. The UFOs also flew above the top secret Soviet military town. While the military personnel below freely observed the flying saucers, the anti-aircraft radars did not register anything. Captain Beregovoy, head of the Naval Intelligence for the Northern Fleet, ordered that photographs of the UFOs be taken, but to no avail, the film turned out to be accidentally exposed each time.

The Soviets were busy trying to find out the nature of UFOs flying over their heads. Initially they suspected NATO, but then it was explained to them that potential adversaries do not possess such technology. To prevent panic, those in command told their military personnel that the UFOs above were actually Soviet-made craft, and that tests were underway. Of course, high-ranking officers knew better, and felt terrified by the uncertainty.

Rather serious incidents took place during that winter. The crew of a Soviet Project 671 submarine, Victor class sub, per NATO classification) encountered a UFO. The sub’s commander was Aleksey Korzhev. The sub was coming to the base, sometimes it surfaced, sometimes it would descend to 650'. They wanted to be undetected by spy satellites. Then they received a report that up and straight ahead was an airplane. The commander was surprised, for the weather was absolutely not conducive for aircraft flights. But fifty meters from the sub a silvery disc was hovering, slowly moving with the sub, staying a bit ahead of it. The crew looked at it, feeling mesmerized. Then the UFO emitted a ray of light, and this pillar of bright white light did not immediately reach the surface of the water, but contrary to the laws of physics, it slowly descended. Korzhev immediately ordered a change of the ship’s course. The disc slowly ascended and disappeared in the clouds. Litvinov said that the Soviets speculated that the UFO wanted to scan the submarine that actually happened to carry new weapons aboard.

Mikhail Soroka, a paranormal phenomena researcher from Kiyiv, Ukraine, also described the same incident in more detail in an interview he gave to FAKTY newspaper (December 2007). Soroka mentioned fascinating details of the USO encounter when a nuclear submarine was accompanying a surface vessel. The submarine surfaced, and a large object appeared in the sky. Its shape was that of mushroom with its cap turned down. Its bottom part shone white light, the part above shone yellow light, the next part shone reddish light, and the uppermost part shone bright red light. The object not only approached the ships, but also directed toward one of them a ray from its searchlight. Then the object unexpectedly disappeared. He also mentioned that Soviet Navy’s intelligence believed that UFOs generally appeared over military vessels and coastal installations.

Later, when Litvinov was with the special commission of the Soviet Navy’s main staff, he was able to read dozens of UFO reports that came from the intelligence channels. One report described a UFO landing in Motovsky Bay in the Barents Sea. Years later, a leakage of liquid radioactive waste from a spent fuel storage facility took place in the Motovsky Bay and Litsa Fjord.

Zapadnaya Litsa is the largest and most important Russian naval base for nuclear powered submarines. The base is located on the Litsa Fjord at the westernmost point of the Kola Peninsula, about 50 miles from the Norwegian border. The Litsa Fjord heads into the Kola Peninsula interior from the Motovsky Fjord, just across from the southeastern coast of the Rybachky Peninsula. Few people in the West know exactly what was going on there during the Soviet rule. No radar station in the vicinity registered the UFOs. Soviet experts assumed that an ionized cloud enveloped the UFOs.

Another incident, mentioned by Litvinov to Zhizn, comes from the archives of the Russia’s Geographic Society. It took place in the Mediterranean, in November 1976. Soviet diesel submarine Project 641 Foxtrot, per NATO classification, navigated through the Gibraltar, and surfaced. It was at 2:00 a.m., and the sea was absolutely still. The captain, the watch officer, and signalman came to the submarine deck to verify the vessel’s coordinates. They noticed a radiant silvery sphere to the left, over the horizon. The sphere ascended rapidly, and they saw right in front of the sub, on the water, a radiant map of the Mediterranean. It appeared at precisely the moment when the navigator was to determine the sub’s location measuring the position of stars. The impression was that someone aboard the sphere read the Russia navigator’s thoughts. Moreover, the radiant map also indicated the sub’s position. The sphere flew away, and the map disappeared.

Yevgeny Litvinov revealed in the interview that he is convinced that UFOs exist. But he puts aside his convictions when he is asked to determine the veracity of reports. He has developed a complex method for systematic selection, as is done by intelligence officers. His scale of credible authenticity is based on 350 criteria.

Litvinov has concluded that out of all data, about 70% result from technogenic reasons, natural phenomena, or mystification. But the other 30% are real observations of UFOs. There are too many of them to simply wave them away. His database contains 10,000 observations and incidents. Litvinov stated that most often UFOs are observed over military installations, areas of ecological disasters, and geological faults.

In the 1970s, reports issued by Admiral V.A. Domislovsky, chief of the Pacific Fleet’s intelligence department, described an unknown, gigantic cylindrical object sighted by Soviet Navy in faraway regions of Pacific Ocean. The object was 2800' long. When it hovered over the ocean, smaller objects exited from one of its ends, like bees from a beehive, and descended into the waters. Some time later they reentered the gigantic UFO. After the smaller objects entered, the UFO would fly away and disappear over the horizon. This information was revealed in Vladimir Ajaja’s interviews to Russian media.

According to MosNews.com (July 16, 2009), former Rear Admiral and nuclear submarine commander Yury Beketov was quoted describing events that occurred in the Bermuda Triangle. We repeatedly observed that the instruments detected the movements of material objects at unimaginable speed, around 250 mph.

It’s hard to reach that speed on the surface, only in the air is it readily possible. The beings that created those material objects significantly exceed us in development.

Russian Naval intelligence expert and Captain First Rank Igor Barklay noted that the unidentified objects were most often spotted in deep water near where military forces are concentrated off the Bahamas, Bermuda, Puerto Rico, and the east coast of the United States. The February issue of the remarkable Belarus newspaper Sekretniye Issledovaniya, contained an article written by Valeriya Peresilkina. Titled Zagadki glubin, Secrets of the depths, it lists cases of USOs observed by the Russian Navy in various seas of our planet. The author mentions Captain First Rank, retired, Yuri Vinogradov who had served in the Soviet Navy from 1975 to 2000. A top expert in his field, he had been involved in a number of submarine search and recovery operations, a veteran of high risk units, and a participant in four long range missions. He had been to the Devil’s Sea, also know as the Dragon Triangle it is located between Japan, Guam, and northern Philippines. Some call this area the Pacific Bermuda Triangle. In the 1980s, Vinogradov had participated in the search and rescue operations of the Soviet Pacific Fleet, submarines and surface vessels had been involved. Twice he and other officers had observed, on the sonar screen, a USO that had moved at great speed, and disappeared in the depths.

{ http://thenightsky.org/ }

The art of alien worlds: NASA reveals how it creates its incredible exoplanet artist's impressions

By CHEYENNE MACDONALD FOR DAILYMAIL.COM

If you close your eyes and imagine a planet far from our own, chances are there’s already a well-formed picture waiting in your mind – is it barren, with cracks cutting through the surface, or is it covered in sprawling oceans?

In many ways, our visions of alien worlds are shaped by the artists who breathe life into troves of scientific data, piecing together the most plausible depiction of their landscapes.

A pair of artists known for their breathtaking concept images of exoplanets, including the recently discovered Trappist-1 system, have revealed a bit of insight on the extensive process of creating visualizations that both captivate the public and satisfy scientists’ stipulations. 

As the experts explain, the job comes with ‘a lot of responsibility’ as they transform numbers and ‘squiggles on charts’ into believable representations of real planets.

Visualization scientist Robert Hurt of Caltech’s IPAC center, and multimedia producer Tim Pyle have together created some of NASA’s most memorable images based on data from the Spitzer Space Telescope and other observatories.

‘Our artist’s concepts are going to be the public face for some of these objects,’ Pyle explained in a recent video from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, acknowledging at the significance of the task.  

The images can’t just be pretty – they also have to show the planet’s environmental conditions as accurately as possible.

Take Trappist-1, for example.

‘The properties that we come away with from this kind of observation include the diameters of the planet, its orbital period,’ Hurt explained.

‘Whether it’s likely to be tidally locked,’ Pyle added, ‘which will say something about what the planet probably looks like.’

‘If it’s less dense than the Earth, it might have more volatiles, like water on it, which is why two of the Trappist planets were shown as water worlds,’ Hurt said.

‘If it has a higher density than Earth, then it’s probably a little more rocky.’

In the case of Trappist-1d, for example, the artists explain their depiction was initially turned down for its inaccurate portrayal of liquid water on the ‘dayside’ of the planet.

According to the scientists, the water is more likely to be found on the dark side instead.

Situations such as this often lead to compromise, Hurt explained.

In the end, they created an image that better represented the data, but also included more water on the scientists would expect.

Not only do artist concept images help the public get a better understanding of what the conditions could be like on faraway worlds, but the experts say they also act as a ‘visual history’ of the evolution of science.

‘If you go back and you look at the whole history of space art and science based illustration, reaching back many, many decades, you have a visual history, a visual record of our evolving understanding,’ Hurt said.

‘The art is as much a historical record of our changing understanding of the universe as the textbook that we write.’ 

Source: NASA

Credit: NASA Ames/JPL-Caltech/T. Pyle

For those who have followed the story since the discovery of the nearby Trappist-1 system, which is known to contain seven Earth-sized planets, and three which even fall within the habitable zone, the handful of concept photos have become embedded in our minds when imagining what they might look like.

One, in particular, shows a breathtaking look at the jagged protrusions and liquid water that could exist at the surface of Trappist-1f. 

The artists work with scientists to ensure that their concept images are headed in the right direction.

And, if something isn’t right, scientists will reject that version. 

Imagine standing on the surface of the exoplanet TRAPPIST-1f. This artist's concept is one interpretation of what it could look like

Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope has revealed a new exoplanet discovery: the first known system of seven Earth-size planets around a single star. Three of these planets are firmly located in the habitable zone, the area around the parent star where a rocky planet is most likely to have liquid water.

The discovery sets a new record for greatest number of habitable-zone planets found around a single star outside our solar system. All of these seven planets could have liquid water–key to life as we know it–under the right atmospheric conditions, but the chances are highest with the three in the habitable zone.

“This discovery could be a significant piece in the puzzle of finding habitable environments, places that are conducive to life,” said Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator of the agency’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington. “Answering the question ‘are we alone’ is a top science priority and finding so many planets like these for the first time in the habitable zone is a remarkable step forward toward that goal.”

At about 40 light-years (235 trillion miles) from Earth, the system of planets is relatively close to us, in the constellation Aquarius. Because they are located outside of our solar system, these planets are scientifically known as exoplanets.

This artist's concept shows what the TRAPPIST-1 planetary system may look like, based on available data about the planets’ diameters, masses and distances from the host star.

Credit: NASA-JPL/Caltech

This exoplanet system is called TRAPPIST-1, named for The Transiting Planets and Planetesimals Small Telescope (TRAPPIST) in Chile. In May 2016, researchers using TRAPPIST announced they had discovered three planets in the system. Assisted by several ground-based telescopes, including the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope, Spitzer confirmed the existence of two of these planets and discovered five additional ones, increasing the number of known planets in the system to seven.

The new results were published Wednesday in the journal Nature, and announced at a news briefing at NASA Headquarters in Washington.

Using Spitzer data, the team precisely measured the sizes of the seven planets and developed first estimates of the masses of six of them, allowing their density to be estimated.

Based on their densities, all of the TRAPPIST-1 planets are likely to be rocky. Further observations will not only help determine whether they are rich in water, but also possibly reveal whether any could have liquid water on their surfaces. The mass of the seventh and farthest exoplanet has not yet been estimated–scientists believe it could be an icy, "snowball-like" world, but further observations are needed.

"The seven wonders of TRAPPIST-1 are the first Earth-size planets that have been found orbiting this kind of star," said Michael Gillon, lead author of the paper and the principal investigator of the TRAPPIST exoplanet survey at the University of Liege, Belgium. "It is also the best target yet for studying the atmospheres of potentially habitable, Earth-size worlds."

In contrast to our sun, the TRAPPIST-1 star–classified as an ultra-cool dwarf–is so cool that liquid water could survive on planets orbiting very close to it, closer than is possible on planets in our solar system. All seven of the TRAPPIST-1 planetary orbits are closer to their host star than Mercury is to our sun. The planets also are very close to each other. If a person were standing on one of the planet’s surface, they could gaze up and potentially see geological features or clouds of neighboring worlds, which would sometimes appear larger than the moon in Earth's sky.

The planets may also be tidally locked to their star, which means the same side of the planet is always facing the star, therefore each side is either perpetual day or night. This could mean they have weather patterns totally unlike those on Earth, such as strong winds blowing from the day side to the night side, and extreme temperature changes.

Spitzer, an infrared telescope that trails Earth as it orbits the sun, was well-suited for studying TRAPPIST-1 because the star glows brightest in infrared light, whose wavelengths are longer than the eye can see. In the fall of 2016, Spitzer observed TRAPPIST-1 nearly continuously for 500 hours. Spitzer is uniquely positioned in its orbit to observe enough crossing–transits–of the planets in front of the host star to reveal the complex architecture of the system. Engineers optimized Spitzer’s ability to observe transiting planets during Spitzer’s “warm mission,” which began after the spacecraft’s coolant ran out as planned after the first five years of operations. 

"This is the most exciting result I have seen in the 14 years of Spitzer operations," said Sean Carey, manager of NASA's Spitzer Science Center at Caltech/IPAC in Pasadena, California. "Spitzer will follow up in the fall to further refine our understanding of these planets so that the James Webb Space Telescope can follow up. More observations of the system are sure to reveal more secrets.”

Following up on the Spitzer discovery, NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has initiated the screening of four of the planets, including the three inside the habitable zone. These observations aim at assessing the presence of puffy, hydrogen-dominated atmospheres, typical for gaseous worlds like Neptune, around these planets.

In May 2016, the Hubble team observed the two innermost planets, and found no evidence for such puffy atmospheres. This strengthened the case that the planets closest to the star are rocky in nature.

"The TRAPPIST-1 system provides one of the best opportunities in the next decade to study the atmospheres around Earth-size planets," said Nikole Lewis, co-leader of the Hubble study and astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore. NASA's planet-hunting Kepler space telescope also is studying the TRAPPIST-1 system, making measurements of the star's minuscule changes in brightness due to transiting planets. Operating as the K2 mission, the spacecraft's observations will allow astronomers to refine the properties of the known planets, as well as search for additional planets in the system. The K2 observations conclude in early March and will be made available on the public archive.

Spitzer, Hubble, and Kepler will help astronomers plan for follow-up studies using NASA's upcoming James Webb Space Telescope, launching in 2018. With much greater sensitivity, Webb will be able to detect the chemical fingerprints of water, methane, oxygen, ozone, and other components of a planet's atmosphere. Webb also will analyze planets' temperatures and surface pressures–key factors in assessing their habitability.

NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, manages the Spitzer Space Telescope mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate. Science operations are conducted at the Spitzer Science Center, at Caltech, Pasadena, California. Spacecraft operations are based at Lockheed Martin Space Systems Company, Littleton, Colorado. Data are archived at the Infrared Science Archive housed at Caltech/IPAC. Caltech manages JPL for NASA.

For more information about Spitzer, visit:

http://www.spitzer.caltech.edu/​

The images are not intended to imply that what’s shown is exactly what those planets are like, Pyle explained.

But, they do aim to ‘illustrate almost the whole breadth of what would be plausible.’

‘For the public, the value of this is not just giving them a picture of something somebody made up,’ said Douglas Hudgins, a program scientist for the Exoplanet Exploration program at NASA Headquarters in Washington.

‘These are real, educated guesses of how something might look to human beings.

‘An image is worth a thousand words.’

{ http://www.nasa.gov/ }

An alien invasion. Pixababy.

Scientists have all kinds of reasons why aliens won’t try to fly to Earth and enslave humanity. Even so, the US Military has a backup plan, just in case. Two Air Force teams, the 26th Space Aggressor Squadron (26th SAS) and the 527th Space Aggressor Squadron (527th SAS), are tasked with protecting assets in space, developing strategies to secure US space-based interests, and plans that involve deflecting extraterrestrial invaders. Both are based in Colorado.

The hostile invasion scenario may not be their topmost concern. Space is big, after all. We’ll probably see any shifty aliens coming from far off, and have time to prepare for their arrival. Instead, protecting our satellite infrastructure is their utmost priority. The US, more than any other country, has come to rely on a system of satellites. Consider driving somewhere you’ve never been before without GPS. Scary, I know.

The GPS system contains a network of 31 satellites, which are owned by the US government and run by the US Air Force. Take one out and navigation goes bye-bye. It isn’t just civilians who rely on it, but the US military itself. Without GPS, US forces lose their battlefield advantage, having to revert to older forms of communication and navigation.

GPS Satellite Constellation. National Air and Space Museum, The Smithsonian Institute.

It isn’t just that but civilian life is set back decades. Bank transactions, stock prices, weather reports, air traffic control, and in some cases, even traffic lights are reliant on satellite infrastructure. Executive director of the Office of Space Commerce, Ed Morris, recently authored a disturbing report, outlining the repercussions of an attack on our satellite system. He wrote, “If you think it is hard to get work done when your internet connection goes out at the office, imagine losing that plus your cell phone, TV, radio, ATM access, credit cards, and possibly even your electricity.”

Because of this, Defense Department advisor, Peter Singer, contends that the next war will begin in space. North Korea or a non-state actor getting their hands on a rocket is one scenario. However, the immediate threats are Russia and China. Tensions with these countries have ramped up lately.

Both have assets that can take out US satellites. China has the "Shiyan.” Using its robotic arm, it can grab a satellite, and fling it out of orbit. The Middle Kingdom is also developing lasers, electro-magnetic rail guns, and high-powered microwaves to disrupt satellite systems. Russia meanwhile has the "Kosmos 2499." This device can approach a satellite and disable or destroy it. In light of these developments, US officials are beginning to take space-based warfare seriously.

In 1982 the US Air Force Space Command was created. Today, it has 134 locations globally, employs 38,000, and has an annual operating budget of nearly $8.9 billion. The Pentagon’s space budget in total is $22 billion. Those in the 50th space wing, a group of over 8,000 men and women, are in charge of monitoring the skies. They have no actionable capabilities, for now.

Tech. Sgt. Steven St. John, 527th Space Aggressor Squadron. U.S. Air Force.

In 2015, Deputy Defense Secretary Robert Work recognized the growing threat to the country’s assets in orbit. He said that the US had to become "ready to do space operations in a conflict that extends into space." The aggressor force was born.

Captain Christopher Barnes is the chief of training for 26th SAS. He told Seeker, “We study threats to the space realm, either coming from space or based on land. If we can’t directly replicate them with hardware, then we figure out if there’s a software solution or some way we can train people to the point where they can fight through them, if they have to, in a conflict.”

One tactic they’re trained in is “brute force jamming.” Here, satellite networks send signals that make transmitted messages garbled to those who may be listening in. SAS also runs simulations on how to respond to land-based and space-based threats. Right now, their weapons systems are in the conceptual stage. Plans are being made to allow for defensive and even offensive capabilities.

These include utilizing the US Navy’s Laser Weapons System (LAWs). One is already aboard the USS Ponce, stationed in the Persian Gulf. LAWs can shoot down projectiles, light aircraft, and drones, as well as jam enemy communications and monitoring systems.

Another possible candidate is the X-37b—a secretive space drone. Some military watchers consider it capable of espionage, and it’s possibly equipped with defensive or even offensive capabilities. In addition to these efforts, the US is also collaborating with allies, through the Multinational Space Collaboration effort, to build up mutual defense systems.

To learn more about the US Air Force’s Space Command, click here: 

{ http://bigthink.com/ }

Satellite dish view at night with milky way in the sky.

(Shutterstock.com/sdecoret)

After 40 Years Of Study, Scientists Know Origin Of A Mysterious Space Signal

ANDREW FOLLETT

Energy and Science Reporter

A scientist claims to have debunked what’s considered the best evidence of intelligent alien life, presenting findings that an undiscovered comet produced a 1977 deep space radio signal.

An April study published by Dr. Antonio Paris from St. Petersburg College in Florida found that the mysterious signal likely came from a hydrogen cloud surrounding a comet.

Dr. Jerry Ehman first detected the 72-second “WOW!” signal through a radio telescope in August 1977. The signal was so bizarre and potentially alien that Ehman circled the signal on a readout and scribbled “Wow!” next to it because it matched no known celestial object.

Paris noted that the two comets “P/2008 Y2(Gibbs)” and “266P Christensen” had been in the same part of the sky as the “WOW!” signal. Paris discovered a similar radio signal when the comets reappeared in the night sky from November 2016 through February 2017.

The comets’ movements likely explains why scientists were unable to detect the “WOW!” signal in previous years. Paris points out the comets had only been discovered in 2006, and therefore were not accounted for during most searches for the “WOW!” signal.

Scientists previously thought the “WOW!” signal was some of the strongest evidence of a technologically-advanced alien civilization.

The signal was transmitted at a frequency that happens to be the same frequency as hydrogen. Scientists with the Search For Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) long suspected an alien civilization would use that frequency to transmit its location since hydrogen is the most common element in the universe.

Scientists often speculate that mysterious signals from deep space could be from aliens, but the source is often found to be some unknown stellar phenomenon.

In 1967, for example, a graduate student in astronomy found an usual pulsing radio signal predictable enough to be a sign of intelligent life. Astronomers nicknamed the signal LGM-1, for “little green men.”

Some believed that they had detected a signal from an extraterrestrial civilization, but it turned out to be the first pulsar.

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Tags: Florida, Search For Extraterrestrial Intelligence

{ http://dailycaller.com/ }

UFO sightings without rational explanation in and around Cley Hill near Frome

The sightings have been outlined in a new book called Haunted Skies Wiltshire

BY JAMES WOOD

There have been several UFO sightings over Cley Hill without a rational explanation, an expert has said.

Steve Wills, a UFO researcher and investigator from Warminster, has seen anomalies in the skies around Cley Hill that he cannot explain.

Mr Wills contacted Somerset Live after watching a video we obtained, purporting to show a strange streak of light circling over the National Trust owned hill.

The light has since been revealed to have been created by a stunt plane belonging to nearby acrobatics group AeroSparx.

Speaking about the video, he said: “I think there is an explanation for this. It’s a local stunt pilot called Tim Dews who flies over the Longleat area and other parts of Warminster using pyrotechnics while doing loop the loops and barrel rolls.

“It looks very odd to the uninitiated. The truth is out there just not this time.”

Although he can explain this particular video, Mr Wills believes there have been numerous sightings over Cley Hill and even in Frome that he thinks cannot be rationally explained.

He said: “I have investigated UFO sightings previously within that area and have uncovered a number of cases and sightings that don’t have a rational explanation."

READ MORE

• UFO spotted over Cley Hill near Frome was not aliens

Mr Wills is a contributor to the recently released book Haunted Skies Wiltshire which covers a large number of sightings in and around Cley Hill including Frome.

He shared some of these sightings with Somerset Live. The following is credited to Haunted Skies Wiltshire.

1887: Red ‘disc’ seen over Frome

On March 17, 1977 at Frome (five miles north-west of Warminster) a large red ‘disc’ was seen in the sky, at 9.57pm. The same phenomena was also reported from Tetbury and Gunnersbury.

1965: UFO seen over Norridge Wood

At 6.35pm on October 30, schoolboy Alan Ward from Manor Gardens told of having seen an object in the sky, between Norridge Wood and Cley Hill.

“It turned and flew back again through the sky. It was like a fried egg – a white disc with a golden dome.”

1972: Orange light seen in the sky

On June 17, during the evening a large orange light was observed in the sky above Cley Hill, which was seen to drop down and rise upwards three times, creating an impression it was going to land.

Haunted Skies Wiltshire is out now 

(Photo: Haunted Skies Wiltshire)

1975: UFO over Cley Hill

Gary Lanham – a UFO researcher from Birmingham, with a wealth of information decided to visit Cley Hill, Warminster in 1975. He went with a group of friends, hoping to see something himself, rather than relying on what had been published in the press.

“By about 10.30pm the temperature had dropped, so we prepared some soup while looking out over the Wiltshire landscape, towards Frome, still partially illuminated by the rays of the setting sun.

"As darkness settled, I watched the occasional aircraft moving overhead and in the distance the eerie intermittent light flashes from a distant train. On an impulse I turned around, facing east, and saw a large blue coloured light that appeared to ‘blink on’ just hanging in the sky.

"I shouted out to the others and we watched as it shot off across the sky, disappearing from our view behind a hill. Within seconds or so, the same or identical light ‘blinked on’ again, exactly in the same area of sky where we had first seen it.

"This sequence of actions was repeated at five second intervals, before it performed an amazing manoeuvre.”

READ MORE

• UFO sightings in Somerset

1976: UFO display over Warminster

David Kingston, a former RAF serviceman – whom we spoke to over the years – told seeing something highly unusual, while ‘sky watching’ for UFOs on Cley Hill, Warminster, during the summer of 1976.

“I saw three separate orbs (approximately six feet in diameter) of coloured light, weaving around and above us for some three hours, on the top of Cley Hill. On occasion, they would merge into a single globe and then separate again.”

Suddenly one of the orbs descended to some thirty feet above us, and then flew down into a field at the base of Cley Hill.

This crop circle was spotted near Cley Hill recently

1980: UFO over Frome

At 10.35pm Steven Dayman-Johns and his wife, Julie, were travelling back home to Frome in a 1973 Datsun Cherry car, along Ridgway Lane when Julie brought her husband’s attention to a white object that she saw moving through one quarter of the car’s windscreen, before coming to a halt in the sky.

Steven stopped the car and, after switching off the headlights, stood on the sill of the car and sighted the object in the sky – which had no definite outline but appeared to have a darker ring running around its top.

After a few minutes, he got back into the car and continued his journey, keeping the object under observation – until it suddenly moved away at phenomenal speed, towards Wanstrow, emitting a faint light from its front and rear.

READ MORE

• GBBO winner Nadiya Hussain and TV chef James Martin cook up a storm at Longleat

Steve decided to make his way to higher ground, and drove to the end of Ridgway Lane to the T-junction, being overtaken by a motorcycle, who sounded his horn several times at them. They turned left at the junction and pulled into a lay-by, about 150 yards from the junction.

After getting out they looked across the sky but couldn’t see the object, although they noticed a whitish glow on the horizon in the shape of an upturned letter ‘U’.

Their curiosity now aroused even further, they got back into the car and drove to where they had originally seen the object – along Ridgway Lane.

More detail on this account can be found in Haunted Skies Wiltshire.

2015: UFO sighted over Frome – Was it under escort or attack?

We (Haunted Skies Wiltshire) were contacted by Mr Duncan McDine – owner of a shop situated in Trowbridge. He told us of an incident while on the way home with his brother, one early evening, near Frome.

They found the road blocked by police and, looking upwards, saw an object resembling a full moon, but ten times larger, with something apparently hanging from it. At this point an army helicopter was seen moving through the sky with its sides open and soldiers carrying machine guns.

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“One of the most memorable things for me was the way that it moved. It seemed to play tricks on your eyes. It is quite hard to explain. I don’t think I have ever seen anything like it before. It then headed away towards the direction of Warminster.”

Following the sighting, Duncan made some enquiries with the media but nothing had been reported.

Have you ever seen UFOs in Somerset or Wiltshire? Get in touch using james.wood@westgaz.co.uk

{ http://www.somersetlive.co.uk/ }

Roswell’s Legendary “Memory Metal”

 Nick Redfern

When it comes to the Roswell affair of July 1947, there are numerous issues, theories and ideas for what happened. Or, for what didn’t happen. One of the issues that very often surfaces – in relation to the nature of the recovered debris – is that which concerns the so-called “memory metal” reportedly found at the site. Those who are of the opinion that aliens met their deaths on the Foster Ranch, Lincoln County, New Mexico on that fateful and fatal day suggest that the memory metal can only have been extraterrestrial in nature. But, is that really the truth? Well, it very much depends on who you ask and who you believe.

Major Jesse Marcel, who everyone – believers and doubters – acknowledges was at the crash site, said decades later: “I saw a lot of wreckage but no complete machine. It had disintegrated before it hit the ground. The wreckage was scattered over an area about three quarters of a mile long and several hundred feet wide. I was pretty well acquainted with most everything that was in the air at that time, both ours and foreign. I was also acquainted with virtually every type of weather-balloon or radar-tracking device being used by either the civilians or the military. What it was we didn’t know. We just picked up the fragments…it certainly wasn’t anything built by us.” You can find Marcel’s statement in the Bill Moore-Charles Berlitz book of 1980, The Roswell Incident.

1960s-era polyethylene hot air balloon

Mack Brazel was the rancher who found the wreckage. Some say he found far more than that. Maybe a body or two. Possibly several. Brazel’s son, Bill, would later say that the debris found on the Foster Ranch was “…something on the order of tinfoil except that [it] wouldn’t tear…You could wrinkle it and lay it back down and it immediately resumed its original shape. Quite pliable, but you couldn’t crease or bend it like ordinary metal. Almost like a plastic, but definitely metallic in nature.” It’s a quote that appears in Bill Moore’s 1981 report, The Roswell Investigation: New Evidence, New Conclusions, which was published in the July-August 1981 edition of Frontiers of Science. For many, it is statements like those of Major Marcel and Bill Brazel that are among the most important of all – and particularly so when it comes to the issue of what really came down on the ranch. But, there are other possibilities.

The U.S. Air Force has offered the following words on the matter of the memory metal: “As early as May 1948, polythene balloons coated or laminated with aluminum were flown from Holloman AFB and the surrounding area. Beginning in August 1955, large numbers of these balloons were flown as targets in the development of radar guided air-to-air missiles. Various accounts of the ‘Roswell Incident’ often described thin, metal-like materials that when wadded into a ball, returned to their original shape. These accounts are consistent with the properties of polythene balloons laminated with aluminum. These balloons were typically launched from points west of the White Sands Proving Ground, floated over the range as targets, and descended in the areas northeast of White Sands Proving Ground where the ‘strange’ materials were allegedly found.”

Mylar

Of course, if there had been secret, pre-1948 flights (maybe one in the summer of 1947, in New Mexico…) then that might well have led people who were unacquainted with the new polythene balloons coated or laminated with aluminum to assume they were seeing something extraordinary. On a similar path, back in 2004, a well-respected Australian researcher, Keith Basterfield, was given a fascinating account which suggested that what came down on the Foster Ranch was a device of the military and not the product of aliens. Keith revealed that, according to his source, “…gigantic balloons were being flown in the stratosphere to drop craft fitted with retrorockets and a drogue chute.”

Keith added that when just such a craft came down on the ranch, “The authorities were very concerned that the rancher had hidden souvenirs from the wreckage. The balloons were of chrome plated cellophane to reflect the heat. The experiments were conducted at night so balloons would not explode in the daylight.” Not only that, according to Keith’s informant, the experiment in question had people on-board. Guinea-pigs would be an accurate term – which echoes the theories presented in my books Body Snatchers in the Desert and the newly-published The Roswell UFO Conspiracy.

Of course, none of this proves that aliens didn’t crash outside of Roswell in forty-seven. On the other hand, however, the idea that the memory metal was extraterrestrial needs further evidence before such a claim can be considered fact.

 TAGS: history, Memory Metal, Roswell, ufo

{ http://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }

Giant hole on Mars could be work of aliens, researchers say

Credit: Securyteam 10, Youtube

A giant hole on Mars has scientists baffled and some UFO researchers are theorizing it could be the work of extraterrestrials.

In a video obtained by conspiracy theorist Youtube channel SecureTeam 10, a deep depression in the surface of Mars has astronomers questioning what it is.

Tyler Glockner, who runs SecureTeam 10, said the hole is estimated to be hundreds of feet across. The rocky terrain of Mars -- which like Earth, has polar ice caps -- does not account for what the depression is, Glockner added.

The images come courtesy of NASA's Mars reconassiance orbiter, which has been exploring the planet.

Below is the video in its entirety:

NASA has given several possibilities of what could have caused the hole, including meteorites, lava tubes, ancient floods and volcanoes. But conspiracy theorists have other ideas.

'ALIEN TANK' FOUND ON THE MOON, UFO HUNTERS SAY

Glockner said the hole shows artificial characteristics, noting that it looks as if it has been hollowed out. Glockner added that the hole could also be an entrance of an underground civilization.

SecureTeam 10, which has nearly 900,000 YouTube subscribers, often runs conspiracy theory-based videos. The organization describes itself as the "source for reporting the best in new UFO sighting news, info on the space cover-up, and the strange activity happening on and off of our planet."

{ http://www.foxnews.com/ }

Na meer dan 40 jaar: Chinees ruimteschip zal opnieuw stalen van de Maan naar Aarde brengen - HLN.be

Bron: Belga

De Chinese Maanlander Chang'e-3. 

© ap.

Een Chinese sonde wordt het eerste ruimtetuig in meer dan veertig jaar dat stalen van de Maan naar onze planeet zal brengen, zo heeft het officiële persbureau Xinhua gemeld van op een conferentie in Peking.

Nog dit jaar moet de onbemande Chang'e-5 landen op de natuurlijke satelliet van de Aarde. Dat zal gebeuren in het gebied van de Mons Rumker, genoemd naar de Duitse astronoom Karl Rumker, aldus Liu Jizhong, een directeur van het Chinese ruimtevaartbureau. De lancering is voorlopig voor november gepland. Het ruimteschip moet met monsters van de Maan naar onze planeet terugkeren, een primeur voor de Chinese ruimtevaart.

Apollo
De Sovjetrussische Loena-24 was in 1976 het laatste ruimtetuig dat Maanstalen naar de Aarde bracht. Er is toen slechts 170 gram ingezameld. Het bemande Amerikaanse Apollo-programma leverde tussen 1969 en 1972 meer dan 360 kilo aan Maanstenen op.

Achterkant
Volgend jaar zal China ook proberen om als eerste ooit een sonde te laten landen op de achterzijde van de Maan. Dat zal het werk zijn van de Chang'e-4. Die was reserve voor de Chang'e-3 die in 2013 de eerste Chinese - onbemande - Maanlanding heeft uitgevoerd.

Peking plant ook een bemande Maanlanding, binnen vijftien tot twintig jaar. Volgens de eerste Chinese astronaut en vicedirecteur van het bemande ruimtevaartprogramma Yang Liwei zal het "niet lang duren" eer daarvoor toestemming en financiering is.

Lees ook

• NASA geeft uitleg over haar spectaculaire nieuwe missie naar de zon
• Mysterieuze planeet TRAPPIST-1 onthult wat van zijn geheimen
• Uitstel voor eerste vlucht van ruimtecapsule die ooit mensen naar Mars moet vervoeren

{ http://www.hln.be/ }

HUGE UFO COMING OUT OF AWESOME LIGHTNING STORM

Just Breathtaking uploaded to his Facebook account a footage taken from an unknown location, which shows awesome lightning strikes in a thunder storm. Could it be debris? Maybe, but while other objects flying in and around the clouds… the black object moves along a straight path while leaving the cloud formation.  

Although the possibility of alien life is restricted to planets a light-years away from Earth, the huge frequency of witnesses involving sightings of unidentified flying objects (UFOs / UFOs) around the world raises two Hypotheses: or et's are already here, or millions of videos, photos and reports of the phenomenon are deceptions practiced by mentally disturbed individuals.

If the second option is true, then it stands to reason that more than half of the 7 billion human beings are totally crazy, influential or liars.

However, based on the notion that aliens are watching us, as is believed by influential individuals in the space and technology industry, such as the owner of Space X, Elon Musk, or astronaut Buzz Aldrin, the second man to step on the moon, it is reasonable to accept certain photos And films of the phenomenon as true.  

Original video:

https://www.facebook.com/220681291781494/videos/220822561767367/

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{ http://www.disclose.tv/ }

A COMPLETELY NEW TYPE OF UFO HAS BEEN CAPTURED IN THE BERMUDA TRIANGLE

A type of UFO that has never been seen before has been found and captured on film numerous times in Puerto Rico. Joshua P. Warren, the lead researcher said that he believes it to be a living organism and he has given it the name of Organic UFO or OUFO.

UNKNOWN FLYING OBJECT CAPTURED FLYING AROUND AIRPORT AT 120MPH

Homeland Security footage has been leaked online after it was filmed in 2013 and it shows what seem to be flying objects that are very strange and are slightly saucer shaped. The objects were seen around the Rafael Hernandez Airport, where they were flying at speeds of around 120mph. 

The object was seen for around three minutes and it dipped down into the Atlantic Ocean and was seen traveling just under the surface of the water at a speed of about 95mph. Mainstream scientists have analysed the video and deemed it authentic. The forage along with the results has been published on the internet in an independent and very detailed 162 page report.

OBJECT SEEMS TO APPEAR WHEN REQUESTED

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Warren said that he thinks they are living organisms as they are not too well structured like a machine would be and they seem to interact with human beings in a new way and they seem to appear when requested to do so.

Part of the detailed report says that on 25 April 2013 around 9.20pm local time an object that was unknown flew across the runway of the airport in Puerto Rico at low altitude and this caused the delay of a commercial aircraft. It was said that there was no transponder signal alerting the tower and no communication had been made with the tower. It was only picked up on an infrared video by the US Customs and Border Protection aircraft. The thermal video has since been verified to be authentic.

The analysis from the video revealed an object that was not like any natural or man-made object and careful evaluation was made of it. The movement, properties and even the possibility of a hoax were ruled out.

REPORT CONCLUDES OBJECT IS OF UNKNOWN ORIGIN

The object was said to be around three to five feet in length and it traveled between 40mph and 120mph with a median speed said to be around 80mph. One of the characteristics that were found to be significant was the fact that the object was able to travel at fast speed through the water and that speed did not vary when it impacted the water. On average it traveled at 82.8mph under the surface but did reach up to 95mph. After entering the ocean it did split into two separate parts for a brief time and then re-emerged, both of the parts kept the same speed when moving in water and air. The conclusion of the report was that the object is of unknown origin and no explanation can be given for there being an object that is capable of traveling at 90mph under the surface of the water with minimal impact on entering the water, be capable of separating into two objects and then merge or of flying without navigational lights in a residential area. The full PDF report of the unknown flying object can be found below and it does make interesting reading for ufologis

http://media.wix.com/ugd/299316_9a12b53f67554a008c32d48eff9be5cd.pdf

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{ http://www.disclose.tv/ }

Return of Warminster Thing? Bizarre sighting near UK 'UFO capital' causes alien frenzy

INCREDIBLE footage of a bizarre UFO near Britain's 'alien capital' of Warminster has sent ET chasers into a frenzy.

Alien mystery solved: It was just gas

Here's a UFO that hung out near Brainerd, Minnesota for a while [VIDEO]

 by Mike Mullen in News

Aliens came to planet earth and decided to visit Brainerd, maybe.

Highways 210 and 371 come together in Brainerd, a north-central Minnesota town, population roughly 13,000.

For those who haven't visited -- do; it's nice! -- Brainerd is perhaps best known recently as the setting for some of the major events in the movie Fargo. And boy oh boy, chief Maggie Gunderson would've had herself a heckova time gettin' her head around this video that showed up on Youtube last week.

The five-minute clip was uploaded by SuspectSky, which claims to feature "the best sightings, analysis, and thought-provoking research" on unidentified flying objects (UFOs). SuspectSky's bio adds it is "Always critical, always vigilant," so, pretty much like your mom.

This particular video is said to have been shot at the Highway 210/371 junction, and cars zoom right on through the shot continuously. That leads to lots of ambient noise, though not enough to drown out the eerie music SuspectSky has piped in to give our UFO video the full effect.

"This single bright object soon becomes several," reads a white script that shows up on the screen. In fact, it does: Two lights, then three, then four. When our videographer/driver's car system announces, "GPS signal lost," the caption reads, "GPS Signal Lost." This is some of that "best analysis" they'd promised.

That GPS signal is one of several plot twists in this UFO sighting. Note when SuspectSky says the triangle shaped pattern in the sky "appears to try to make a diamond." As if the attempt failed. As in, aliens traveled through light years of space to reach earth -- Brainerd, Minnesota, specifically -- and then couldn't figure out how to turn on their headlights. 

Do not skip the comments under this video. "they are here...just watching us...����������," reads one. "They always have been," reads another. "They are doing more than just watching us - I assure you," reads a third. "To me it looks like military flares as when one disappears then another one will appear at a higher level and come down"-- hey, who let that guy in here? That is clearly not the "best" analysis we demand on real UFO videos. Like this one.

{ http://www.citypages.com/ }

A RARE GLIMPSE INTO NIKOLA TESLA’S COMMUNICATION WITH EXTRATERRESTRIALS

Few people know that in 1899, while working at his Colorado Springs laboratory, he announced that he had received extraterrestrial radio signals. The scientific community thought he was nuts, and in fact, cosmic radio signals didn’t even exist at the time. One can easily imagine how alone and misunderstood Tesla must have felt.

The Black Knight Satellite

It’s known as the “Black Knight Satellite,” and although it wasn’t confirmed by scientists until 1932, Tesla discovered it in 1899 while in his Colorado Springs laboratory, hearing strange rhythmic sounds on his radio receiver. The confirmation in 1932 gave birth to the field of radio astronomy, which is now used to decode and detect messages from distant stars and other mysterious celestial sources. Tesla writes:

I can never forget the first sensations I experienced when it dawned upon me that I had observed something possibly of incalculable consequences to mankind. I felt as though I were present at the birth of a new knowledge or the revelation of a great truth. Even now, at times, I can vividly recall the incident, and see my apparatus as though it were actually before me. My first observations positively terrified me, as there was present in them something mysterious, not to say supernatural, and I was alone in my laboratory at night; but at that time the idea of these disturbances being intelligently controlled signals did not yet present itself to me.

The changes I noted were taking place periodically, and with such a clear suggestion of number and order that they were not traceable to any cause then known to me. I was familiar, of course, with such electrical disturbances as are produced by the sun, Aurora Borealis and earth currents, and I was as sure as I could be of any fact that these variations were due to none of these causes. The nature of my experiments precluded the possibility of the changes being produced by atmospheric disturbances, as has been rashly asserted by some. It was some time afterward when the thought flashed upon my mind that the disturbances I had observed might be due to an intelligent control. Although I could not decipher their meaning, it was impossible for me to think of them as having been entirely accidental. The feeling is constantly growing on me that I had been the first to hear the greeting of one planet to another. . . . I was not merely beholding a vision, but had caught sight of a great and profound truth. (source)(source)

Tesla believed that the signals he was picking up on were from Mars.  Here’s another statement he gave on what he found:

Others may scoff at this suggestion…[of] communicat[ing] with one of our heavenly neighbors, as Mars…or treat it as a practical joke, but I have been in deep earnest about it every since I made my first observations in Colorado Springs… At the time, there existed no wireless plant other than mine that could produce a disturbance perceptible in a radius of more than a few miles. Furthermore, the conditions under which I operated were ideal, and I was well trained for the work. The character of the disturbances recorded precluded the possibility of their being of terrestrial origin, and I also eliminated the influence of the sun, moon, and Venus. As I then announced, the signals consisted in a regular repetition of numbers, and subsequent study convinced me that they must have emanated from Mars, the planet having just then been close to the earth. (source)

According to the American Physical Society Physics, Tesla concluded that these signals, or this strange unnatural object they originate from, was indeed extraterrestrial, or an effort to “communicate with Earth by alien beings.”

This was one of multiple incidents in which Telsa intercepted what he thought were intelligent signals from space. He states that even the simplest form of communication (such as the interchange of numbers) could represent a form of intelligible transmission from extraterrestrials.

When I came across that information, I instantly thought about this NSA document, which is one example of strange messages that come from space, as elaborated on below.

Today, we know for sure that these signals are of extraterrestrial origin, but it’s assumed that they are radio waves from planets, comets, stars, or galaxies — not ‘ET.’

More than 30 years after the confirmation in 1932, a graduate student by the name of Jocelyn Bell noticed some strange data coming from her telescope at the Mullard Radio Astronomy Observatory (MRAO). After a few weeks, she noticed that the signal being produced could not have originated from any known natural source, and she (and her team) ruled out every conceivable explanation, such as multiple sources of human interference, other radio astronomers, radar reflected off the moon, orbiting satellites, television signals, and more. Nothing could explain these strange signals.

She eventually published a paper in the scientific journal Nature, despite the fact that the source of the sound, though they knew it to be artificial, had not been determined.

These announcements caused quite a commotion at the time, and today it is common for strange signals, determined to be coming from ‘non-natural’ sources, to be detected. But who knows what they are?

Just last year, strange radio wave flashes from far outside of our Milky Way galaxy (or in it) had scientists completely confused; you can read more about that here.

I just want to make it clear that this type of stuff is always going on.

{ http://alien-ufo-sightings.com/ }

NEXT STORY IS THIS EXTRATERRESTRIAL? EARTH RECEIVES STRANGE “RADIO BURSTS” FROM SPACE

Strange radio wave flashes from far outside of our Milky Way galaxy (or in it) have scientists completely confused. Since 2001, telescopes have been picking up on what are referred to as fast radio bursts (FRBs). Only a total of ten have ever been detected, with the most recent one occurring just a few months ago. The bursts last just a few milliseconds and then explode with just as much energy as our Sun releases in a month, which is extremely huge, and again, very confusing and mysterious.

The burst of 2014 was the first one in history that was caught in action by the Parkes Telescope in New South Wales, Australia. The others were found by examining data after the bursts had already arrived on Earth. Again, these bursts have astronomers very confused, as no one knows what causes them. What scientists do know is that their source most likely has to be small, because they occur in such a short span of time. They are also only approximately a few hundred kilometers across, so that rules out any stars as being the culprit.

It’s not only the fact that astronomers are completely clueless, but as a new scientist points out:

“The weird part is that they all fit a pattern that doesn’t match what we know about cosmic physics.”

Michael Hippke at the Institute for Data Analysis In Neukrichen-Vluyn, Germany, and John Learned at the Univeristy of Hawaii in Manoa, have not ruled out the possibility that these bursts come from somewhere within our galaxy. They determined this by calculating how far the bursts have travelled, a technique known as “the dispersion measure.”

“Each burst covers a range of radio frequencies, as if the whole FM band were playing the same song. But electrons in space scatter and delay the radiation, so that higher frequency waves make it across space faster than lower frequency waves. The more space the signal crosses, the bigger the difference, or dispersion measure, between the arrival time of high and low frequencies – and the further the signal has travelled.” (source)

(You can view the paper that was published on the most recent burst, in the list of sources at the end of the article)

As a result of their calculations, they believe that the source is much closer to home, from a group of objects within our Milky Way galaxy that are emitting shorter-frequency radio waves after higher-frequency radio waves.

It’s also interesting to note that all 10 of the detected bursts since 2001 have dispersion measures that are multiples of 187.5. This is both fascinating and unexplainable, and they are suggesting that this line-up of the dispersion implies five sources for the bursts that are all at regularly spaced distances from Earth.

According to their research, there is a 5 in 10,000 probability that this type of line-up is a coincidence, and that it is “very, very hard to explain.”

What could the sources of these signals heading towards Earth be? Are they some unidentified cosmic objects? Is it human, manmade technology? Or is the question not what, but who? If the natural explanations don’t seem to fit, the researchers have concluded in their paper that “an artificial source (human or non-human) must be considered.”

“These have been intriguing as an engineered signal, or evidence of extraterrestrial technology, since the first was discovered,” -Jill Tarter, former director of the SETI Institute in California. “I’m intrigued. Stay tuned.”

The search for extraterrestrial life continues to be a very hot topic, and the questions concerning “ET” are continuing to grow with the discovery of microbial life in space, as well as water – don’t forget about  the discovery of many potential Earth-like planets. On top of that, we have a lot of evidence supporting the idea that intelligent extraterrestrial life has been visiting our planet for a very long time. 

{ http://alien-ufo-sightings.com/ }

Calvin Parker tells his story of Pascagoula's famous UFO incident 40 years later

Charles Hickson of Gautier, Miss., famous for a claimed UFO abduction in 1973, has died in Ocean Springs at the age of 80. In this file photograph, Hickson is seen posing with a drawing depicting a UFO.

(Pat Sullivan)

PASCAGOULA, Mississippi -- Charles Hickson never regretted the notoriety that came his way after he told authorities he encountered an unidentified flying object and its occupants 40 years ago on the banks of the Pascagoula River. Until his death in 2011, Hickson told his story to anyone who would listen.

But Calvin Parker Jr., the other man present for one of the most high-profile UFO cases in American history, has never come to terms with what he still says was a visit with gray, crab-clawed creatures from somewhere else. He says the encounter on Oct. 11, 1973, turned his life upside down.

"This is something I really didn't want to happen," Parker told The Associated Press as the 40th anniversary of the encounter approached.

Parker was unnerved by initial crush of unwelcome attention, with newsmen and UFO enthusiasts overrunning Walker Shipyard, where he and Hickson worked. He tried to dodge the spotlight for decades, moving frequently before returning to Mississippi's Gulf Coast in recent years.

The incident made headlines, sparked a wave of UFO sightings nationwide and became one of the most widely examined cases on record. Skeptics ranged from the deputies who first interviewed the men to an author who sought to poke holes in the story, and Parker himself has had conflicting thoughts about whether he was visited by aliens or demons.

See the Mississippi Press' 1973 coverage of the incident: 

Mississippi Press 1973 coverage Part 1.pdf

Mississippi Press 1973 coverage part 2.pdf

Parker, now 58, was 18 when he went fishing with Hickson on a tranquil Thursday night after work.

As they dangled their lines without much luck, the two said a UFO with blue lights swooped down. They told of a zipping noise made by the object.

Hickson, then 42, said three creatures with leathery gray skin and crab-like claws -- he thought they were robots -- took them by the forearms and levitated them aboard the craft. He said something that looked like a large floating eye appeared to examine him.

Parker says he was conscious but paralyzed.

"They gave a thorough, I mean a thorough, examination to me just like any doctor would," he said.

And then they were back on the shore, where it all began. The UFO was gone and Parker said they tried to collect themselves. Hickson needed three shots of liquor from a bottle in his car to calm his nerves before deciding to report what happened.

At the Jackson County Sheriff's Department, deputies initially suspected both men were drunk. Then-Capt. Glenn Ryder, who still works for the sheriff's office, said he laughed at the report, but met with the men. Parker and Hickson stuck to their story.

After the formal interview, deputies left Hickson and Parker together in a room with a hidden tape recorder, hoping to catch them in a lie.

"Me and the other investigator got up and left to let them talk, to see if they were going to say, 'Well, we got them fooled,' but they didn't," Ryder said. "They were really concerned."

On the tape, Hickson tells Parker, "It scared me to death too, son. You can't get over it in a lifetime. Jesus Christ have mercy."

"I don't know what happened to them," Ryder said. "I wasn't there with them, but I know you don't fake fear, and they were fearful. They were fearful."

The next afternoon, the story was splashed across the front pages of newspapers in Pascagoula and Gulfport. Overnight, Pascagoula became a magnet for news reporters and UFO investigators.

Widespread interest in UFOs began in the 1940s with an incident at Roswell N.M., in which UFO enthusiasts believe the government got its hands on a crashed UFO and alien bodies. The government spent decades denying it.

In the 1960s, interest flared anew with a series of reports, including the purported alien abduction of New Hampshire couple Betty and Barney Hill in 1961. The widespread attention to the Pascagoula encounter set off a new round of reports.

In south Mississippi, hundreds of reports overwhelmed authorities in the two weeks after the Hickson-Parker encounter.

There were hoaxes and humor too. A Long Beach, Miss., taxi driver told police a being with pincers tapped on his window, a story he admitted days later was fake.

A Mobile, Ala., television station said it would record a UFO appearance predicted by a psychic between Mobile and nearby Pascagoula. Roughly 1,000 cars converged on the spot, where nothing happened.

An Ocean Springs alderman proposed an ordinance making it illegal to operate a UFO at more than twice the speed of light on U.S. 90, the coast's main drag. Mayor Tom Stennis voted against the ordinance, joking he didn't want to discourage tourism.

UFO skeptic Philip Klass believed Hickson and Parker's report was a hoax. In his book "UFOs Explained," he noted Hickson changed some details of his story and claimed a polygraph operator whose test Hickson passed wasn't up to the task. Parker later passed a lie detector test himself.

Hickson would go on to appear on talk shows, give lectures and interviews, and self-publish a book in 1983 titled "UFO Contact at Pascagoula." He reported three more encounters in 1974, and said the aliens communicated to him that they were peaceful.

"The only thing he wanted to do was let everybody know we were not alone," said Eddie Hickson, his son. "He didn't care if you believed him or not. If you wanted to listen, by gum, he'd tell you."

"He could never understand why he was chosen," the younger Hickson added. "But he never once told me that he wished it had never happened. Never."

Parker said the intrusions by curiosity seekers have become less frequent over the years, but have never really let up. "You don't never have no privacy," he said.

Parker married later in 1973 and eventually took oil industry and out-of-state construction jobs to escape the attention.

"By the time you get somewhere and they figure out who you were, I'd just go," he said. "I'd just go find another job somewhere."

Parker attended some UFO conventions, and was once hypnotized by Budd Hopkins, a noted UFO investigator. He briefly tried to capitalize on his story in 1993 by starting a Louisiana company called UFO Investigations where he and partners would produce television segments on the subject.

Parker moved to Moss Point in 2006 and in 2010 suffered a stroke that limited him physically. He's on disability aid now, but sometimes boats by the site of the encounter when he goes fishing. He said that just recently he met a woman at a gas station who already knew who he was.

"I'm always recognized," he said.

There's no historical marker on the river bank noting the encounter, and stores don't sell UFO souvenirs. But local people remember -- though often with skepticism and jokes.

For his part, Parker said he's had conflicting thoughts over the years about that night in 1973. At one point, he wasn't even sure the creatures were aliens. They might have been demons, he said.

"I'm a firm believer in God and where there's good, there's bad," Parker said.

In this Wednesday, Oct. 9, 2013 photo, Calvin Parker, Jr., stands in the area where he and fellow Mississippian Charles Hickson were allegedly abducted by aliens on Oct. 11,1973, on the banks of the Pascagoula River in Pascagoula Miss. The incident made headlines, sparked UFO sightings nationwide and became one of the most widely examined cases on record. (AP Photo/Gerald Herbert)

In this Oct. 11, 1998 file photograph, Charles Hickson, of Pascagoula, Miss., stands where he and fellow Mississippian Calvin Parker, Jr. were allegedly abducted by aliens on Oct. 11,1973, on the banks of the Pascagoula River in Pascagoula Miss. The incident made headlines, sparked UFO sightings nationwide and became one of the most widely examined cases on record. Hickson co-wrote a book about the experience and spoke openly to reporters about the abduction, while Parker kept a low profile over the years. (AP Photo/Mississippi Press, William Colgin, File)

In this 1973 file photograph, Charles Hickson of Pascagoula, Miss., stands on the west bank of the Pascagoula River, close to the site where he claims he and Calvin Parker Jr. were abducted by aliens. (AP Photo/Mississippi Press, File)

FILE - In this Oct. 11, 2001, file photo, Charles Hickson reads a page from a book he co-wrote about UFOs in Gautier, Miss. When Hickson and Calvin Parker told the world in 1973 they were abducted by aliens while fishing on the Pascagoula River, few people believed them. Hickson, 80, died in Sept. 2011. (AP Photo/The Mississippi Press, 

FILE - In this Oct. 18, 1973 file photograph taken in Gautier, Miss., Charles Hickson, left, and Calvin Parker Jr., of Pascagoula, Miss., recount the experience of their alleged abduction by aliens from the banks of the Pascagoula River where they were fishing. (AP Photo/Mississippi Press, Gary Holland, File)

In this Wednesday, Oct. 9, 2013 photo, Calvin Parker, Jr., poses for a photograph at his home in Moss Point, Miss. Parker and fellow Mississippian Charles Hickson were allegedly abducted by aliens on Oct. 11,1973, on the banks of the Pascagoula River in Pascagoula Miss. The incident made headlines, sparked UFO sightings nationwide and became one of the most widely examined cases on record. (AP Photo/Gerald Herbert)

Calvin Parker, Jr., stands in the area where he allegedly was abducted by a UFO along with fellow Mississippian Charles Hickson, on the banks of the Pascagoula River Oct. 11,1973, making international headlines, in Pascagoula Miss., Wednesday, Oct. 9, 2013. (AP Photo/Gerald Herbert)

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MAYBE THE ALIENS AREN’T HIDING, THEY’RE SLEEPING, WAITING FOR THE UNIVERSE TO GET BETTER

  

by Matt Williams

When you consider that age of the Universe – 13.8 billion years by our most recent counts –  and that which is “observable” to us measures about 27.6 billion light years in diameter, you begin to wonder why we haven’t found signs of extra-terrestrial intelligence (ETI) beyond our Solar System. To paraphrase Enrico Fermi, the 20th century physicists who advanced the famous Fermi Paradox – “where the heck are all the aliens?”

Naturally, Fermi’s Paradox has attracted a lot of theoretical explanations over the years – which include ETI being very rare, humanity being early to the Universe, and the aliens being extinct! But a new study by a team of scientists from the Future of Humanity Institute (FHI) offers a different take on this age-old paradox. According to their study, the key to answering this question is to consider the possibility that the aliens are engaged in “aestivation”.

Essentially, aestivation is a prolonged state of torpor that organisms enter into during a particularly hot or dry period. Similar to what hibernating animals do during the winter, this state is designed to keep creatures alive until more favorable conditions emerge. And when applied to the cosmos, this concept could explain why one of the key things astronomers have been looking for – i.e. activity – has been lacking.

The study was led by Anders Sandberg, a research associate to the Oxford Uehiro Center for Practical Ethics, the Oxford Center for Neuroethics, and the James Martin Research Fellow at FHI. Cryptically titled, “That is Not Dead Which Can Eternal Lie: the Aestivation Hypothesis for Resolving Fermi’s Paradox“, their study considers the possibility that advanced alien civilizations might be difficult to find because they are sleeping right now.

This is not the first time Sandberg has addressed questions arising out of the Fermi Paradox. In a previous study, he and Stuart Armstrong (also a research associate with the EHI and one of the co-authors on this study) extended the Fermi Paradox to look beyond our own galaxy, addressing how more advanced civilizations would feasibly be able to launch colonization projects with relative ease (and even travel between galaxies without difficulty).

In the end, they concluded that civilizations from millions of galaxies should have been able to reach us by now, which only serves to bring the Fermi Paradox into greater focus. If these early civilizations are around, why are they not visible to us? The reason for this, they claim in this new study, has to do with the thermodynamics of computation.

According to this basic rule, the cost of a certain amount of computation is proportional to the temperature it generates. For some time, astronomers and cosmologists have been aware that the Universe is steadily cooling down over the time. Not only is star formation in galaxies slowly dying out over the course of billions of years, but even the cosmic background radiation is becoming colder.

Artist’s conception of city lights on an alien planet. Credit: David A. Aguilar (CfA)

As such, it makes sense that ancient and advanced civilizations would want to wait for cooler conditions to prevail. Sandberg explained to Universe Today via email:

“The core idea is that if advanced civilizations mainly or solely care about computation, then it is rational for them to wait until the Universe is much older than now. The reason is that the energy cost (which will eventually limit how much computation you can do) is proportional to temperature, and this means that the far future is vastly more hospitable than the hot present. If this were true, we have a nice explanation for the apparent absence of big old civilizations. It would also lead to observable consequences: a reduction in processes that waste resources they would want in the late eras.”

Timing is a key feature to this hypothesis. Much like the theory that humanity may have arrived early to the Universe, this theory states that the lack of detection has to do with species being in different places in their biological/technological evolution. In this case, the aestivation period of early civilizations has coincided with the subsequent rise of humanity as an space-faring and technologically-adept species.

Herein lies another reason why ancient civilizations might want to take a cosmic nap. Given how long life needs in order to emerge – humanity took roughly 4.5 billion years to get to where it is today – then it stands to reason that ancient civilizations might want to skip ahead a few eons in order to let new races emerge.

Ever since it was first announced in 2015, there has been speculation as to what could account for the dimming of KIC 8462852.

Credit: SentientDevelopments.com

“There is an entropy cost to irreversible logical operations, including error correction,” said Sanders. “So unless there is some magical energy source or entropy sink, if you want to do as much computation as possible you should wait until the cosmic background radiation levels off. In addition, civilizations may want to go to the future if they want to meet other, independently evolved civilizations. If intelligence is rare in time and space but aestivates to the far future, then it will meet there.”

Of course, the aestiation hypothesis (much like the Drake Equation and the Fermi Paradox) is based on a few assumptions about what ETI would be capable of. These include:

1. There are civilizations that mature much earlier than humanity.
2. These civilizations can expand over sizeable volumes, gaining power over their contents.
3. These civilizations have solved their coordination problems.
4. A civilization can retain control over its volume against other civilizations.
5. The fraction of mature civilizations that aestivate is non-zero
6. Aestivation is largely invisible.

In other words, the hypothesis assumes the existence of civilizations that are more advanced than humanity which is based on the notion that they have had billions of years to develop elsewhere in the Universe. These civilizations would be higher on the Kardashev Scale (between Level II and III) by now, meaning that they had evolved to the point where they could harness the energy of entire star systems and perhaps even galaxies.

Also, it assumes that these civilizations would have become space-faring races that had expanded to occupy parts of the cosmos that lie well beyond their own star systems. Ultimately, those civilizations that have chosen to become dormant would therefore be invisible to us since they are not currently traveling between stars and galaxies, smashing up planets to create megastructures, or consuming entire stars for fuel.

You know, the kind of stuff we think mega-civilizations would do. Which naturally raises the question, how might we be able to detect such civilizations at rest? To this, Sandberg has a few possible suggestions, ones which ETI-hunters may want to heed:

“Look for galaxies that either move out of the way of galaxy collisions or towards big clusters by ejecting mass or energy in one direction, or have an unusually low number of heavy blue-white stars, or otherwise avoid losing gas to interstellar space. Or, try launching a self-replicating space probe to pave the universe and see if somebody stops you.”

As with all things having to do with aliens and ETI, a measure of guess-work is required here. And some would naturally argue that it is also possible that advanced civilizations are not subject to the same limitations we humans are, which would limit our ability to speculate here. In the end, we humans are required to theorize about what we don’t know based on what we do – aka. the “low-hanging fruit” approach.

The findings reported in the study were also the subject of a talk that took place at the second annual meeting of the UK SETI Research Network (UKSRN), which took place on September 11th and 12th, 2014, at Birkbeck College in London.

Further Reading: arXiv

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Chinese Scientist May Have an Explanation for Ball Lightning

 Paul Seaburn

Ball lightning has been blamed for more UFO sightings than weather balloons and for more ghost sightings than reflections. Part of the problem is that, like UFOs and ghosts, no one can really explain ball lightning either. That may change with a new theory from a Chinese scientist that could explain how these sometimes tiny luminous balls form and how they can seemingly pass through walls to float inside houses and even airplanes.

While called “lightning” because it generally appears during thunderstorms, ball lightning doesn’t act like conventional lightning. It’s spherical, often small and is visible longer than a lightning bolt. Photographs of it are rare, attempts to recreate it in a lab are futile and stories about sightings can border on the unbelievable.

An ‘amazing’ recreation of ball lightning appearing in a room

Enter H.C. Wu, a researcher at the Institute for Fusion Theory and Simulation (IFTS) and Department of Physics at China’s Zhejiang University. In his paper published recently in Scientific Reports, he claims to successfully explain many of the reported but unsubstantiated characteristics of ball lightning.

Wu’s theorizes that ball lightning begins when a bolt of conventional lightning hits the ground or an object and accelerates electrons, causing them to release microwave radiation. This radiation then charges the air around it, forming a “spherical plasma bubble” that envelops and traps the radiation. That spherical plasma bubble is ball lightning.

Ball lightning or UFO?

This may explain outdoor ball lighting, but what about the luminescent floating orbs reportedly seen indoors and in airplane cabins? Wu claims that the electrons are moving at nearly the speed of light, which allows them to pass through walls and the metal skin of planes. Really?

He also postulates that the microwave radiation produces chemicals that cause ball lightning’s reportedly foul smell (plausible) and they give it the explosive powers often reported just prior to the smell (like an egg in a microwave?).

Ball lightning, orb or something else?

Wu’s study proposes a number of ways ball lightning might be created in a lab but – in case any kids with access to electricity and microwaves read Scientific Reports – warns that ball lightning is “an alarm signal of the existence of ultrastrong microwaves and abundantly hazardous electrons near the ground or aircraft.”

Is this a sufficient explanation for ball lightning? Does it clear up any UFO, glowing orb or ghost sightings for you?

That’s what I thought.

 TAGS: ball lightning, glowing orb, Lightning, natural world, orb, orbs, Science, storm, ufo

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Another Astronaut Reveals Belief in Space Aliens

 Paul Seaburn 

If there was one group of people who you’d think would have a good idea if space aliens existed or not, it would be astronauts. You’d probably think that most of them believe in aliens and you’d probably be right, even if they don’t admit it publicly. The list of out-of-the-NASA-closet alien believers just grew by one after former astronaut Leroy Chiao spoke this week to students at the University of Wollongong in New South Wales, Australia, and had this to say:

I think there’s all kinds of life out there, including intelligent life, but the reason we haven’t found each other is because of vast distances.

Dr. Leroy Chiao on the ISS

Dr. Chiao has a Ph.D. in chemical engineering and became an astronaut in July 1991. He’s spent a total of 230 days in space on four separate missions, including his last one in 2004-5 as commander of Expedition 10 on the International Space Station. While he believes there’s life on planets other than Earth, he showed where his heart is on that mission by becoming the first person to vote in a US presidential election while in space. What political party do you think an astronaut who believes in ETs belongs to?

I don’t think anyone flies into space without some form of fundamental introspection about what life is about. For me, I was surprised how much more beautiful it is than what the pictures show. It looks very peaceful and nice, and intellectually I knew there was war, famine and conflict down there and that dichotomy was hard to reconcile. It makes you stop and think, and it gave me that perspective of what’s important in life.

That didn’t help much. This comment may be a little more revealing:

I believe that at some point, life on Earth will die out, either from natural causes, or from our own doing.

Those who follow ufology know that the late astronaut Edgar Mitchell, the sixth person on the moon, believed not only in UFOs and aliens but in government cover-ups of information about them. Gordon Cooper, an original Mercury astronaut, claimed he witnessed UFOs in 1951 over Germany and saw flying saucers at a secret air base. Deke Slayton, an astronaut and director of flight crew operations, says he also saw a “saucer” UFO in 1951 and Alan Bean, another of the 12 moonwalkers, believes aliens are out there but we haven’t been contacted yet due to the great travel distances required.

Deke Slayton

With all of those high-level supporters in the astronaut field of the existence of alien life somewhere in the universe, does this exclusive group have any non-believers? Chris Hadfield, the first Canadian to walk in space and a commander of the ISS like Dr. Chiao, ansered that question in an interview:

I don’t know of any astronauts who think we’re alone in the universe.

Well, that settles it. Now, who do you think Dr. Chiao voted for in the 2004 presidential election?

 TAGS: alien, alien life, life on other planets, nasa, ufo

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The $100 Million Hunt for Alien Life

A Russian billionaire and his renegade scientists are launching the most advanced search for extraterrestrials in history

By Mark Adams

If its first quarter is anything to go by, 2016 may be shaping up historically as the 1491 of space discovery. The month preceding Valentine's Day alone provided what would once have been a year's worth of cosmic news. Blue Origin, the aerospace company owned by Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, took one giant leap toward a new Age of Discovery by relaunching and landing a rocket that had already made a round-trip journey through the stratosphere – a revolutionary moment in private space exploration. A pair of researchers kicked off a frenzied planet hunt by demonstrating that a massive, heretofore undetected planet could be lurking on the outer edge of our solar system. Cosmologist Stephen Hawking suggested that unforeseen effects of rapid scientific progress might, paradoxically, cause the extinction of life on Earth in the next thousand years or so, adding, "By that time, we should have spread out into space, and to other stars, so a disaster on Earth would not mean the end of the human race." And scientists announced they'd detected gravitational waves, evidence of a billion-year-old collision between black holes, thus confirming the final and most obscure principle of Einstein's theory of relativity – and opening a window that may soon offer a glimpse of the universe's very creation.

Meanwhile, in a restricted swath of Appalachia where cell service and Wi-Fi are prohibited to minimize radio interference, a team of astrophysicists and programmers from UC-Berkeley inaugurated a new interstellar exploration at the Robert C. Byrd telescope in Green Bank, West Virginia. Titled Breakthrough Listen, this 10-year, $100 million project will comprise what Andrew Siemion, director of Berkeley's SETI Research Center, called "the most sensitive, comprehensive and advanced search for advanced intelligent life on other worlds ever performed." (SETI stands for the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence.) The goal is to detect some evidence of distant technology, such as radio communication or a concentrated burst of energy. If it succeeds, Breakthrough Listen will answer an existential and philosophical question that humankind has pondered for millennia: Are we alone in the universe?

Self-deprecation is an essential job requirement for those who work in a field of scientific inquiry frequently associated with flying saucers and requests to be taken to one's leader; SETI folks tend to use the terms "E.T." and "little green men" to describe the hypothetical advanced life-forms that might be capable of sending an identifiable signal through space. "I get into a lot of conversations at parties about Ancient Aliens and the pyramids," Siemion says with resignation. He is 35, young for a SETI field that previously peaked in the era between Carl Sagan's Cosmos and the mothballing of NASA's own SETI program due to budget cuts in 1993. Arriving for lunch at a meticulously rustic Berkeley locavore restaurant in a full-zip fleece with a backpack over one shoulder, Siemion could pass for an undergraduate on the nearby campus were it not for his clean-shaven head.

What separates the quest to find extraterrestrial intelligence from X-Files conspiracy theories is statistics, specifically the law of large numbers. Scientists now estimate that there are at least 200 billion stars in the Milky Way galaxy, and perhaps 100 billion galaxies in the universe. Fifty billion planets in our galaxy alone may be situated in what astrophysicists call the "Goldilocks zone," a region neither too hot nor too cold to host life, and thus potentially habitable. Last year, astronomers found evidence of briny water on Mars and located a distant exoplanet – dubbed Kepler 452b – so similar to Earth that some say the two could be cousins. "The latest estimates are that roughly one in 10 stars has a planet on which biology could survive," says Seth Shostak, senior astronomer at the nonprofit SETI Institute. "Even if only one in a million worlds is good enough to develop intelligent life, there are a trillion planets in the galaxy. Which would mean a million worlds with intelligent life."

Breakthrough Listen is funded by soft-spoken Russian venture capitalist Yuri Milner (named after Yuri Gagarin, the first man in space). Like many SETI fanatics, Milner read Sagan's Intelligent Life in the Universe as a boy. After pursuing a Ph.D. in physics, Milner later made a fortune investing in companies such as Facebook. As middle-aged rich guys tend to do, Milner, 54, is considering his legacy; along with fellow Silicon Valley entrepreneurs including Mark Zuckerberg and Sergey Brin, he founded the Breakthrough Prizes, which bestow seven-figure awards on leading scientists and mathematicians. Breakthrough Listen is a quest to achieve what Milner has called a "low-probability but high-impact event." A scientific unicorn.

"Either way, the answer is interesting," says Dan Werthimer, who as Berkeley SETI's chief scientist complements Siemion's youthful confidence with an optimism undimmed by 40 years of fruitless alien-hunting. (A third member of the Berkeley SETI team, noted exoplanet hunter Geoffrey Marcy, resigned from the university and Breakthrough Listen in October following a sexual-harassment scandal. Breakthrough Prize chairman Pete Worden says they are now "in touch and getting his scientific opinions.") "If we find E.T. it means the universe is teeming with life," Werthimer says. "But if we find we're alone, then we'd really better take care of the precious life on this planet."

The 450-foot-tall Robert C. Byrd telescope in West Virginia listens for radio signals from other life-forms.NRAO/AUI/NSF

The new Space Race is being driven largely by billionaires like Milner who grew up staring at the stars before building terrestrial-tech fortunes. Cost-efficient travel to the stratosphere and beyond, which just a generation ago was the failed dream of the $200 billion Space Shuttle program, is now a reality thanks to fierce competition among companies like Blue Origin and Elon Musk's SpaceX. (SpaceX, which builds rockets much more powerful than its rival's, stuck the landing of a reusable vehicle in December.) Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic and its less-flashy rival XCOR are taking reservations on their first suborbital tourism flights. Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen – who prior to Milner was SETI's best-known benefactor – hopes to build the world's largest airplane, a mothership designed to launch rockets from 30,000 feet.

Every space nerd's dream destination, of course, is Mars. NASA hopes to get a team there in the 2030s. Musk, a vocal Mars obsessive whose SpaceX has partnered with NASA on various projects, has vowed not to take his company public until it lands a craft on the Red Planet. The controversial Mars One project, headquartered in the Netherlands, has claimed that more than 200,000 hopefuls applied for its permanent, one-way trip, with touchdown projected for 2027.

"Governments tend not to do speculative stuff, and long-term space commitments are expensive," says Worden, former head of NASA's Ames Research Center, who announced he was stepping down last February, saying he wanted "to pursue some long-held dreams in the private sector." Shortly thereafter, Milner introduced him as the new chairman of the Breakthrough Prize Foundation, which oversees Breakthrough Listen. Shaking the ice in his plastic cup at the Tee Minus One Bar & Grill on the Moffett Field air base near Mountain View, California, dressed in an old blue NASA work shirt, Worden explains why he thinks venture capitalists will lead future exploration in space. "People always ask why Silicon Valley is different," he says. "The best answer I've heard is that this is a place where it's all right to fail. Not only is it right, it's expected."

Worden is both a former astronomy professor and a retired Air Force general. He says there are two sides to the question of life in the universe, one academic and one strategic. First, what else is out there? "What is life, how did it originate, where else is it and what's its future?" he asks. "What's the origin and structure of the universe? How did it begin? These have been the fundamental questions since the Scientific Revolution began 500, 600 years ago."

The less-philosophical side of the question is when Earthlings will launch their offensive into space. "Whether it's going to happen in 2030 or 2050 or 2080, I don't know," Worden says. "But this is the century when humanity moves into the galaxy."

That exodus may end up recalling old issues of Omni magazine more than it does the original Apollo missions. NASA's current estimate is that the voyage to Mars could take up to a year, each way, requiring many times the food, water and fuel used for three-day trips to the moon. Twenty-five years ago, the tab for a Mars mission was estimated at $400 billion. If the payloads can be drastically reduced, however, costs will also shrink.

One technology Worden sees as having the potential to take us to the stars – "'us' being what we become," he says – is artificial intelligence. "You send some sort of essence of yourself, like an avatar," he says. "It would be settling the solar system and beyond with machines." Another popular scenario among futurists imagines the creation of von Neumann probes: self-replicating machines that travel to distant worlds, locate the ingredients needed to create more advanced copies of themselves, and repeat the process as they continue deeper into space. Worden sees promise in synthetic biology, transforming the raw materials of distant worlds into physical necessities that would otherwise need to be transported to support a crew, such as food and shelter. "Then all I need to transmit between worlds is information, and information travels at the speed of light," he says.

Like deep-space travel, SETI work has until now been largely speculative; one certainty is that no one has ever found any concrete evidence of extraterrestrial life. Like the universe itself, the list of potential glitches is infinite. Assuming that distant civilizations exist, they could have a head start of millions of years, in which case an interstellar missive may have gone undetected by Neanderthals. E.T. might already be here, operating under a Prime Directive, as the crew of the Enterprise did, observing us but forbidden to interfere. Whistle-blower Edward Snowden has suggested that aliens could even be using advanced encryption that disguises their signals, rendering them "indistinguishable to us from cosmic microwave background radiation."

Echoing Hawking's warning, Musk sees a potential dark side in this cosmic silence. "If you look at our own current technology level, something strange has to happen to civilizations, and I mean strange in a bad way," Musk said in a recent interview with Aeon. There may be a troubling reason why in the 13.8 billion years since the Big Bang, no aliens have contacted us: The same technological leaps that will allow human beings to explore the galaxy, such as self-upgrading AI, are the genie that betrays its master once released from the bottle. "It could be there are a lot of dead, one-planet civilizations," Musk added.

Worden has a more optimistic explanation. "The most likely answer is that we haven't looked very hard," he says.

Milner's Breakthrough Listen money will be spent on three things: leasing dedicated observation time at radio telescopes in West Virginia and Australia, as well as at an optical telescope at the University of California's Lick Observatory; hiring the sorts of smart young scientists who until very recently would have been scared off from SETI because the field's lack of funding equaled academic career suicide; and, perhaps most important, on building new technology to process the tsunami of new data that will be rolling in.

Yuri Milner and Stephan Hawking in London last year. Tom Jamieson/The New York Times/Redux

That responsibility will fall largely to Berkeley's Werthimer. At 61, he is the sort of academic whom eager incoming freshmen expect to find on campus but rarely do: neatly bearded, wildly enthusiastic, respected in his field, gifted at explaining complicated ideas. He proudly wears his sci-fi nerdiness not only on his sleeve but also under it; the hands of his live long and prosper wristwatch rotate around the face of Mr. Spock. His role in the SETI world, transposed to the James Bond canon, would be roughly one part M and three parts Q. "I try to figure out if there's some interesting problem in astronomy that I can solve by building some new gadget, because I know how to build gadgets," Werthimer says. His team's workshop inside Campbell Hall, Berkeley's astronomy building, looks like the repair shop of a high-end home-theater retailer; wood shelves are lined with stacks of memory boards and other electronic components.

For years, Werthimer has run the SETI@home project, a peer-to-peer network that dates back to the Napster era. Raw observational data collected in the background during other astronomers' stargazing is sent to the home computers of millions of volunteers, where it is processed when those machines go into sleep mode, and then sent back to Berkeley. The trade-off for hitchhiking a free ride during others' searches is that Werthimer and his team rarely had a say in deciding where to point the telescope. Breakthrough Listen puts them in the driver's seat with 10 years' worth of gas money.

About 60 years ago, scientists realized that since the laws of physics seemed to apply throughout the universe, the varieties of concentrated electromagnetic radiation that humans have found to be excellent modes of communication – such as waves used for AM/FM transmission – would also work to send messages across the galaxy. Any intelligent life-form would, presumably, learn to take advantage of the many practical uses of this radiation. Powerful radio telescopes might be able to eavesdrop on what physicists call "leakage," a distant civilization's technological artifacts, akin to our radar and broadcast-TV waves that have escaped into space. "Earth sends off all these radio signals omnidirectionally, by accident," Werthimer says. By now, "I Love Lucy has gone past thousands of stars."

A more tantalizing possibility is that some faraway entity has sent a deliberate signal to initiate contact with Earth. "We've had [breathable] oxygen in our atmosphere for 500 million years," Werthimer says. "Maybe they've seen that and figured there might be life on this planet." Some in the SETI field believe that the closest any researcher has come to discovering such a transmission was a powerful 72-second signal, detected at an Ohio State observatory in 1977, that appeared to be coming from the constellation Sagittarius. Despite numerous attempts, no one has been able to observe it again. An intergalactic "friend request" beamed through the cosmos could still be out there, just waiting to be accepted.

Breakthrough listen will be gathering as much SETI data in a day as was previously possible to collect in a year, using its expanded telescope access to scan at least five times more of the radio spectrum a hundred times faster than before and sucking in the equivalent of 75 Blu-ray movies per second.

"What we do with radio SETI is a little like those shows about panning for gold on the Discovery Channel," Siemion says. "We build this gigantic thing that sucks in data, and we sift it and sift it and sift it." The optical telescope at Lick Observatory works in a similar manner, breaking down the light it collects from afar to search for evidence of an artificial compressed energy source such as a laser. If E.T. had illuminated a 100-watt bulb on a planet orbiting Alpha Centauri, 25 trillion miles away, the optical telescope is capable of spotting it and funneling that information into Breakthrough Listen's giant Big Data sieve.

Should an interesting nugget turn up from far away, a blip on a screen or a spike in a curve will trigger an alert on someone's computer in Berkeley – hey, take a look at this. Any such phenomenon will be examined "very, very, very closely," Siemion says – and then rechecked, Werthimer adds, to make sure there isn't a bug in the software or a grad student pulling a prank. (When astronomer Jocelyn Bell Burnell discovered the metronomic spinning stars now known as pulsars in 1967, the first signal was briefly nicknamed LGM-1, in case its source was a Little Green Man.) Astronomers at other telescopes will be asked to train their equipment on the coordinates to determine that the anomaly cannot be explained as a natural phenomenon. By the end of 2016, that group might include the Chinese, who are currently completing a telescope that will dwarf anything now in use by Breakthrough Listen.

As Werthimer fired up the system in West Virginia for the first time, in January, they even had a suspect to investigate. Last year, researchers noticed that the light from a distant star, KIC 8462852, seemed to be dimming according to an irregular pattern. The source is probably something natural – a comet is one likely possibility – but there's a slim chance it could be evidence of far-off technology. Some have hypothesized the randomness is caused by a massive framework built by aliens to harness solar power. says Breakthrough's observations of the abnormality thus far have been inconclusive. "But if I had to guess," he says, "I'd say it was a swarm of dust clouds."

Dan Werthimer is the chief scientist at Berkeley SETI. "If we find E.T., then it means the universe is teeming with life," he says. Freddie Claire

When Christopher Columbus sailed for India in 1492, he brought along an interpreter whose skills were a poor match for the Taino natives they unexpectedly encountered in the Caribbean. The Breakthrough Listen scientists like to compare themselves to the Columbus expedition and its implied outcome – a well-financed team of explorers sets off on a journey that rewrites history – but they plan to be better prepared. In tandem with Breakthrough Listen, Milner has set aside $1 million in prize money to formulate digital messages that might be sent to a newly discovered civilization.

The problem of communicating may be largely academic, due to the distances involved; a transmission beamed to KIC 8462852, for example, would take almost 1,500 years to arrive. A more hopeful scenario is that Breakthrough Listen discovers a signal targeted at Earth that shows potential to be deciphered. Since the sender may not possess any of the five senses humans use to perceive the world – may not even be carbon-based, as all life on Earth is – the decryption process would almost certainly require some conceptual thinking.

Douglas Vakoch, a clinical psychologist who is president of METI International (the M stands for "messaging"), says that, ideally, any signal we receive would contain information that might be universal across civilizations, such as basic mathematics. (A string of prime numbers is the Golden Fleece of hypothetical alien transmissions.) From there, we might gain an understanding of "their scientific description of the world" and even perhaps their culture. Somewhat less exciting would be an experience familiar to archaeologists, who by compiling fragmentary evidence "are able to piece some things together but aren't able to reconstruct the full world of this civilization," Vakoch says. Most likely, we'll have to settle for "some vague understanding of what some part of their message refers to."

Even such a vague understanding is a long shot. Just before announcing the project amid several eminences of astrophysics – including Hawking – in London last summer, Milner polled his team. Their educated guess was that Breakthrough Listen had a one percent chance of success. Facing such odds, wouldn't it make more sense to wait until humans have built telescopes on Mars and are sending cyborg probes into the far depths of the Milky Way?

"You could've told Christopher Columbus, 'You'll probably make it to India, just wait 500 years for airplanes,'" Werthimer says, fiddling with his Star Trek wristwatch. "We're never going to answer these questions with paper and pencil. The only way to figure it out is to look.

Topics: outer space Long Reads

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40-year-old alien mystery may have finally been solved as astronomer reveals source of the 'Wow!' signal

Conspiracy theorists have long believed the 1977 'Wow! transmission' was proof of alien life

BY JEFF PARSONS

It's NOT life Jim: Alien believers may be disappointed by an investigation into the Wow signal

 (Photo: Getty)

One of the mysteries of space has been perplexing scientists for the last 40 years .

Back in 1977, astronomer Jerry Ehman received such a strong radio signal coming in from the heavens, he wrote the word "wow!" next to his results.

The burst of activity lasted 72 seconds and - although it came from the Sagittarius constellation - it matched no known celestial object.

It's gone on to become a conspiracy theory favourite as proof of advanced alien life trying to communicate with us.

READ MORE

• Mystery of 'alien transmission' solved? Astronomer claims he's discovered origin of 'WOW signal'

But now Professor Antonio Paris from the St Petersburg College in Florida believes he's solved the mystery.

"I have always been fascinated with astronomy, space and - more importantly - whether there is life in the universe," he told the Sunday Times .

"After 40 years, the Wow signal was a cold case I wanted to reopen.

"Here we have a crime scene with a date and time, and a little description of the subject."

READ MORE

• Are ALIENS living in a massive base near the 'most mysterious star in the galaxy'?

According to Professor Paris, the signal came from the hydrogen cloud created by two comets as they passed by Earth.

Using celestial records, he found that these two comets were passing by our planet on August 15, 1977 - the day the "Wow!" signal was recorded. Of course, at the time, there was no knowledge that these comets even existed.

To make absolutely sure, Professor Paris waited until the comets were due to pass again then pointed some radio telescopes in their direction. He recorded the same results as Ehman did and has had his research accepted into the Journal of the Washington Academy of Sciences.

It'll now be up to other astronomers to disprove his theory.

And Professor Paris is almost hoping they do so.

"There's still a bit inside of me that hopes it was aliens," he said.

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Ex CIA Agent Turned Alien Hunter, Says He Has Proof

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Glowing UFO Spotted Near the British UFO Capital

A strange-shaped light hovering over a hill in Somerset is the latest bizarre sighting that sparked UFO theories.

The strange event took place near Britain’s UFO capital that has been the popular area on UFO sightings for more than 40 years. The streak of light adds to the list of shimmering sightings and crop circles that residents have seen over the past few decades.

A resident from Frome recorded the video showing streaks of light above nearby Cley Hill, which is just 2 miles from UFO town Warminster. A strange light appears to move in circular motions in the night sky. The resident who took the video did not discount the possibility that it was a drone with a unique flame effect tail or something. The witness also revealed that the mysterious light had been spotted a few times locally.

The nearby town of Warminster has been described as Britain’s UFO capital after strange phenomena first encountered in the mid-1960s. A detonation noise rocked houses on August 17, 1965, followed by a large orange flame crackling and hissing in the sky.

Strange noises were heard in the town, and the strange shimmering light was seen in the vicinity. The phenomena were eventually called the Warminster Thing, which later followed by reports of inexplicable things in the sky decades later.

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Alien Hunter In Houston Claims To Have Physical Evidence Of Aliens In The Universe

Houston is nicknamed the Space City as NASA is right in their backyard. However, a man in the town seemingly wants to bring the moniker to another level. Darrell Sims calls himself the Alien Hunter as he showed some amazing stuff that he claimed from the outer space.

Private investigator Sims said he was once a G-Man and used the skills to understand profoundly alien abductions. He claimed to have come from an intelligence background with the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in secret operations.

Sims revealed that he has proof of the existence of aliens in the Cosmos.

He claimed that they have 1950 cases worldwide. He pointed out one instance wherein a lady came back with an implant that fell out of her eye at her desk in front of her boss. The boss of the woman made sure that Sims got the implant, which he has with him today, according to Sims.

Sims stated that he got into alien research after an alien visited him as a child and continued until he was seventeen years old. However, he admitted that most recollections of alien and UFO sightings are theoretical. For this reason, he collects and examines physical evidence from people who claim to have had a genuine alien encounter.

He noted that if aliens were taking these people physically, then ET physical traces could be found on those people using infrared technology. He detects temperature level on the skin and a residue that comes from the other planets.

Sims said that alien entity sometimes left scars, bumps, lumps, cuts on abducted people. He further explained that their recovered physical evidence suggests that aliens may be biological and have a metallic level in their biology.

Sims showed a set of spheres that he claimed from a young girl who sneezed them out after an alien visited her room and sprayed something in her nose. Whether it is a space fact or fiction, Sims does not care as for him, the only thing that matters is the one they can prove.

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Ex-NASA commander of International Space Station says intelligent aliens ARE out there

A FORMER NASA astronaut, who once commanded the International Space Station (ISS) says intelligent aliens are out there.

Solved: Mysterious 'Wow! signal' in 1977 was not a message from aliens but triggered by gas from passing COMETS

• The Wow! signal was detected by a radio telescope in Ohio in 1977 
• Conspiracy theorists have long believed it was radio contact from alien life 
• But an astronomer has traced two comets to the same region of the sky
• He then measured those comets as they passed by Earth earlier this year 
• The astronomer found that the two comets produced similar radio bursts to those seen in 1977 

By Harry Pettit For Mailonline

In 1977, an astronomer looking for alien life in the nigh sky above Ohio spotted a powerful radio signal so strong that he excitedly wrote 'Wow!' next to his data.

The 72-second blast, spotted by Dr Jerry Ehman through a radio telescope, came from Sagittarius but matched no known celestial object.

Conspiracy theorists have since claimed that the 'Wow! signal', which was 30 times stronger than background radiation, was a message from intelligent extraterrestrials.

But a researcher has now found that the signal, which has perplexed scientists for 40 years, was in fact just the trace of two comets as they shot past Earth.

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The Wow! signal was detected by a radio telescope in Ohio in 1977 as a 72 second-long burst of powerful radio waves during a project searching for alien signals. It earned its name after astronomer Dr Jerry Ehman circled the signal data and wrote' Wow!' in the margin (pictured)

Professor Antonio Paris, an astronomer at St Petersburg College in Florida, has spent the past year investigating the bizarre signal.

Using celestial records he found that two comets, unknown to scientists at the time, were passing by Earth on August 15, 1977 - the night the Wow! signal was detected.

Those comets were discovered in 2006, and last year Professor Paris suggested that a cloud of hydrogen gas in the wake of the celestial objects triggered the signal.

But the scientist had to wait until this year, when the comets flew past Earth again as part of their synonymous six-year orbits around the sun, to prove his theory.

In a paper published in the Journal of the Washington Academy of Sciences, he has now proven once and for all that the signals were not caused by aliens.

When the comets passed by this year, the signal they produced was exactly the same as that seen in 1977.

Speaking about the theory before its confirmation, Professor Paris admitted that he had wanted to be wrong.

'There's still a bit inside of me that hopes it was aliens,' he said.

When he first published the theory last year, Professor Paris said the comets produced a cloud of hydrogen gas in their wake which released radiation.

The frequency of the signal spotted by Dr Ehman in 1977 matches the emissions produced by hydrogen atoms, he said.

The clouds of hydrogen that surrounds them as sunlight breaks up the frozen water on their surface extends millions of miles around the comets, meaning they could produce a powerful signal.

Previous research has found that two comets were in the right region of the sky at the time the signal was received. A study of the comets as they passed Earth this year has revealed that the comets gave similar radio signals to those detected in 1977 (stock image)

'Several investigations into the "Wow!" signal have ruled out the source as terrestrial in origin or other objects such as satellites, planets and asteroids,' Professor Paris said at the time.

'From 1977 July 27 to 1977 August 15, comets 266P/Christensen and P/2008 Y2 (Gibbs) were transiting in the neighborhood of the Chi Sagittarii star group.

'Ephemerides for both comets during this orbital period placed them at the vicinity of the "Wow!" signal.

'These two comets were not detected until after 2006, therefore, the comets and their hydrogen clouds were not accounted for during the signal emission.'

The Wow! signal was detected on 15 August 1977 with a radio telescope known as Big Ears at the Ohio State University Radio Observatory in Delaware.

The Wow! signal was detected as coming from a region of space close to the M55 galaxy cluster close to the constellation Sagittarius (illustrated), but new research suggests the signal may have been produced by two comets, undiscovered at the time

Dr Ehman, who had been working on a project for the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) Institute, noticed the surprisingly strong signal in a column of alphanumerical data.

With a red pen he scrawled the word 'Wow!' in the margin and circled the sequence.

Astronomers ruled out that the signal came from Earth and could find nothing in our solar system to have produced it.

It is thought to have come from a region of space to the northwest of the globular galaxy cluster M55 in the constellation Sagittarius.

Although Dr Ehman himself has remained sceptical, the signal has led to claims that it may have been a radio beacon or broadcast coming from far beyond our own solar system. 

By training radio telescopes (Very Large Array pictured) onto the part of the sky where the signal was detected, the comet theory was confirmed as the two celestial objects passed by Earth in January 2017

Some have taken it as evidence of alien life as the frequency is widely thought to be one that could be used by extraterrestrials to communicate.

The mystery surrounding the signal has only been compounded by the inability to pick up the signal again, despite repeated attempts by increasingly more powerful radio telescopes.

However, at the time, researchers did not know of the existence of comets of 266P/Christensen and P/2008 Y2 (Gibbs). The pair was only discovered after 2006.

Comet 266P/Christensen orbits the sun every seven and a half years and is more than 125 million miles from Earth. 

Read more:

• Famous Wow! signal might have been from comets, not aliens | New Scientist
• Hydrogen Clouds from Comets 266/P Christensen and P/2008 Y2 (Gibbs) are Candidates for the Source of the 1977 ¿WOW¿ Signal | The Center for Planetary Science

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