APOLLO 15 ASTRONAUT SAYS HUMANS ARE DESCENDANTS OF ANCIENT ALIENS

Are the stories about the Anunnaki true?

Al Worden, former astronaut and the first person to take a space walk, gave an interview today to describe his view of the history of mankind. He believes that the people are descended from an extra-Iridic race related to ancient Su}erians.

{ http://www.disclose.tv/ }

Dr. Steven Greer interviewed by the Health Ranger on alien attack FALSE FLAG (The Disclosure Project)

 by: Mike Adams

(Natural News) An upcoming interview to be published next week on Natural News features Dr. Steven Greer in a face-to-face interview with Mike Adams (the Health Ranger). Dr. Greer is an emergency room physician who has spent decades researching UFO phenomena. His new film, “Unacknowledged,” is currently one of the most popular feature documentaries on Netflix (see link and trailer below). Mike Adams is the founder and lab science director of CWC Labs, a mass spec analytical laboratory specializing in heavy metals and chemical analysis of food and environmental samples.

What’s interesting about this interview is that both Dr. Greer and Mike Adams are trained in the sciences, yet both recognize the deep layers of deception used by powerful, covert groups to deceive and manipulate humankind. This rare interview delves into UFO myths vs. truths, social engineering and the “grand false flag” that may subject all of humanity to a faked alien invasion as a means of finalizing a totalitarian world government.

In effect, Dr. Greer is warning humanity about the most massive false flag operation in the history of the world. If he’s right, we are all about to be subjected to an unprecedented psychological warfare operation rooted in fear and deception in order to achieve world government and the outright elimination of individual liberties and national sovereignty.

The full interview, lasting about 45 minutes, is being published next week on NaturalNews.com.

See Dr. Greer’s site at SiriusDisclosure.com, then watch and share the trailer below:

Here’s the trailer for Unacknowledged:

{ https://www.naturalnews.com/ }

Have you seen a UFO streaking across the sky far faster than any normal jet is capable of? Heard mysterious booms that no one can explain and government officials refuse to acknowledge? Congratulations! You may be one of the first civilians to have witnessed or experienced the long-rumored SR-72 ‘Son of Blackbird’ spy plane which has been expected for years as the replacement for the legendary SR-71 Blackbird which spied on the Soviet Union, North Korea and North Vietnam and was feared and respected by MiG-25 pilots who could never outpace, out-climb or out-maneuver them.

Lockheed Martin

Aerospace Daily & Defense Report has confirmed sightings of an SR-72 demonstrator or prototype accompanied by two T-38 jets in late July landing at the U.S. Air Force’s Plant 42 in Palmdale, California, home of the infamous Skunk Works, Lockheed Martin’s Advanced Development Programs division. At the SAE International Aerotech Congress and Exhibition in Ft. Worth, Texas, this week, Orlando Carvalho, executive vice president of aeronautics at Lockheed Martin, would not discuss the SR-72 specifically, but had this to say about what its capabilities might be:

“Hypersonics is like stealth. It is a disruptive technology and will enable various platforms to operate at two to three times the speed of the Blackbird. Operational survivability and lethality is the ultimate deterrent. Security classification guidance will only allow us to say the speed is greater than Mach 5.”

That means at least Mach 6 or at least 3,800 mph (6,126 km/h) and probably faster for a very big reason … it’s designed to fly both piloted and unmanned. The manned X-15 reached Mach 6.72, setting the acknowledged speed record in 1959, but the Cold War and heightened security has likely kept the U.S. military from revealing the true speed of subsequent jets.

X-15

NASA’s unmanned X-43 scramjet reached Mach 9.6 (7,310 mph – 11,850 km/h) in 2004 but the program was suspended shortly afterwards. Boeing’s X-51 Waverider unmanned “research” scramjet hit Mach 5 in 2013.

“Simply put, I believe the United States is on the verge of a hypersonics revolution.”

Carvalho dropped this big hint that the SR-72 will (or has already) delivered more than its predecessors. Rob Weiss, executive vice president and general manager of Lockheed Martin’s Advanced Development Programs said in June that development of an SR-72 precursor flight research vehicle (FRV) was proceeding on schedule. Then in July, the SR-72 unmanned subscale prototype was seen landing at the Skunk Works. Aerospace Daily & Defense Report says Lockheed Martin has had no comment on that sighting.

Why not?

“Speed matters, especially when it comes to national security.”

Carvalho gives the obvious answer — national security. No air force or jet contractor has publicly acknowledged the successful development of a propulsion system that combines a jet turbine with a ramjet, allowing the aircraft to take off from a conventional runway rather than being dropped at high altitude from another plane. Is Lockheed covering up the possibility that the craft which landed at the Skunk Works is already there? Unfortunately, no one saw it take off (or is willing or brave enough to admit it).

Lockheed Martin

However, plenty of people in the U.S. and England are hearing mysterious and unexplained booms and seeing impossibly fast UFOs. Are they seeing an SR-72? Has another developer beat Lockheed to the hypersonic punch? Do you actually expect an answer?

Keep watching the skies and have your smartphone ready.

{ http://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }

Exploring The History Of How We Imagine Aliens

Assuming the universe has expanded at a constant rate, we can say with a fair amount of accuracy that the diameter of the observable universe is approximately 92 billion light-years in size. That’s enough space for at least 100 billion billion planets, conservatively. So, mathematically speaking, it’s a safe bet that at least one of those billions upon billions of planets is home to intelligent life.

That means that aliens exist — even if only on a distant planet, in a galaxy far, far away.

This isn’t new information. Before science had ever developed the means to measure the enormity of the universe, we humans looked to the stars with great wonder. “What’s out there?” is truly an age old question. No one knows the answer. So it goes in the realm of the mysterious. But without any confirmed — ahem, at least publicly — contact with legitimate extraterrestrials, we’re left to wonder: Where does our vision of aliens in pop culture come from?

“Entertainment and literature,” explains Josh Gates, host of Expedition Unknown: Hunt for Extraterrestrials (premieres Wednesday at 9/8c on Travel Channel). “We take our cues from brilliant minds like Isaac Asimov and Ray Bradbury…Scientists tell us that if extraterrestrial life is out there, it’s most likely in the form of microscopic bacteria. There may even be fossilized evidence of that in meteorites and long extinguished Martian geysers. But what do we picture? Facehuggers, Rastafarian Predators, and Jar Jar Binks.”

Don’t worry, there’s very little scientific evidence that suggests a creature like Jar Jar Binks actually exists (thank Q). While Gates is right about alien life most likely existing at a microscopic scale, popular culture has a long-standing tradition of envisioning aliens as something else entirely. That’s why he’s set out on a quest to search for the answer to the question: “Are we alone in the universe?”

“When we think of a stereotypical alien, we tend to picture a small, green or gray humanoid with big eyes and an oversized noggin,” Gates says of our long-held notions about intergalactic life. “Green has been associated with aliens since at least the 1940s. The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction credits the first usage to a story called “Mayaya’s Little Green Men” which appeared in Weird Tales in 1946.”

TRAVEL CHANNEL

Host Josh Gates on the set of Expedition Unknown: Hunt for Extraterrestrials (Wednesdays at 9/8c on Travel Channel)

Of course, “little green men” aren’t the only alien archetypes in culture. Their gray cousins are popular guest stars in a myriad of TV shows — ranging from The X-Files to South Park.

“Blame H.G. Wells for that,” Gates continues. “In 1893 he wrote an article titled Man of the Year Million, where he postulated that the human race might end up as gray-skinned creatures with black eyes and large heads. Many of the Roswell reports also mentioned gray-skinned creatures, which helped fuel the depiction in popular culture.”

This classic depiction has endured for decades. The design isn’t random, it should be noted. While we’re all used to this depiction, the physicality of these aliens actually speaks volumes on how we, as a culture, perceive interplanetary explorers.

“Personally, I think aliens are often pictured with oversized heads and small bodies as a nod to their advanced intelligence,” Gates says. “They live above the neck, flying around the universe with little use for their physical bodies.”

DAVID PEMBERTON FOR UPROXX

While the green (or gray) aliens with big, bulbous heads are arguably the most enduring vision of mysterious visitors in pop culture, they surely aren’t the most frightening.

“Alien stories were fertile ground for sci-fi writers to offer social commentary,” says Gates. “In the 1980’s the culture of greed and excess was in the crosshairs of John Carpenter’s cult classic They Live. Close Encounters of the Third Kind is as much about one man’s obsession with an alien encounter as it is about the madness of life in 1970’s suburban America. It’s also not a coincidence that some of the greatest science fiction ever written was penned during the Cold War. In films like Invasion of the Body Snatchers, or in television shows like The Twilight Zone, aliens often look just like us because they are us. In that era, humans were the scariest existential threat out there. “

To put it more simply: Aliens have been used as a narrative device within pop culture to act as a catharsis for our own fears and insecurities. Part of the reason why we love scary space adventures is that we all harbor an internal fear of the unknown. That’s why the truly horrifying depictions of aliens that have terrorized theaters for decades are among the most popular. But it raises the question: What is the scariest alien of all time?

“If I have to choose just one, it has to be the Xenomorph from Alien,” Gates says. “It’s based on the designs of Swiss artist H. R. Giger, the creature is the perfect combination of horrifying, graceful, strangely sexual, and utterly…other. Nearly 40 years after the release of the film, the chest-bursting Xenomorph is just as scary as ever and still commands the throne of alien villains.”

DAVID PEMBERTON FOR UPROXX

Perhaps the most interesting thing about how we imagine our various ETs is that we can easily draw a line between pop culture’s depiction of aliens and the cultural zeitgeist that was present when those depictions first materialized. As Gates so eloquently put it, alien stories were — and are — the perfect space for writers and creators to make a statement on current events without actually saying anything directly. So, if that was true then, is it true now? Will current events shape the way we depict aliens in the future?

“That’s a terrifying concept,” says Gates. “But, actually, I think technology and social media will be more influential to future alien designs than otherworldly politicians. Like many people, I’m nervous that our obsession with screens and followers is isolating us and dumbing us down.”

Though, it’s fair to argue that we’ve already seen modern influence affect alien stories. “The Matrix really started a new wave of aliens that tapped into this,” he continued. “It’s why shows like Black Mirror are so delightfully creepy. I think the convergence of machines, AI, and humanity is ripe for alien stories.”

But the question still lingers: How will our view of aliens evolve? What’s coming next? The answer — as cheesy as it may sound — is in the stars.

Expedition Unknown: Hunt for Extraterrestrials premieres Wednesday at 9/8c on Travel Channel. See below for a sneak peek from the show!

WE HAVE ALWAYS DREAMED OF OTHER WORLDS

GABRIELLE BELLOT ON LITERARY STARGAZING AND RECKONING WITH THE INFINITE

Just before the summer of 1835 could come to an end, The New York Sun announced that the astronomer John Herschel had found life on the moon. In the previous century, Herschel’s father William, another famed astronomer who had discovered Uranus and suggested the universe was inconceivably vast, had famously, if somewhat playfully, proposed not only that our lunar satellite might contain life, but that the sun, which he believed was hollow, contained beings inside it; now, the newspaper article proclaimed, the son had proved one of the father’s extraordinary theories by observing a veritable menagerie of wondrous creatures through an unprecedentedly powerful telescope in South Africa.

For days the paper increased its circulation and generated a mixture of hysteria and bemusement from the general public as it described the moon’s putative personages in increasingly explicit detail through a six-part series: blood-red poppies, blue unicorns, amphibious blobs that rolled precipitously across pebbly beaches, and, most shockingly, simians with batlike wings (“Vespertilio-homo, or man-bat”). The moon, it appeared, not only hosted life; its life was positively, bombastically thriving in an extraterrestrial Eden.

It was all an elaborate hoax. The story, which was published under Herschel’s name and intended to satirize absurdly specific claims about the universe (most notably those of Scottish reverend Thomas Dick), was ludic and lucrative science-fiction, and it would be just over a century before a piece of sci-fi caused such a mass uproar again, with Orson Welles’ notorious 1938 radio rendition of The War of the Worlds on Halloween night (which engendered both hysteria and heart failure in those listeners who thought it a real broadcast about Martian invasion.)

By the time it was revealed as a hoax, however, an American minister had already readied crates filled with Bibles to be shipped up to the moon to convert the extraterrestrial heathens, and a rankled Edgar Allan Poe claimed that the sensationalist newspaper had simply plagiarized one of his own short stories about a voyage to the moon, “Hans Phaall—A Tale,” published just before the Sun’s series. Herschel placidly dismissed the articles as “incoherent ravings,” but his wife Margaret was amused by the “clever” fraud. “It is only a pity that is not true,” she sighed to William Herschel’s sister, Caroline, herself renowned for discovering new nebulae and comets.

The idea that life might exist elsewhere in our universe has a long history, and from our discovery of the first exoplanet—a planet outside our solar system—in 1995 to today, that notion remains scientifically intriguing, if unresolved. But before scientists observed exoplanets, many writers and philosophers turned to our solar system’s own humble retinue for speculations—and, sometimes, explicit assertions—about life beyond Earth. These musings and, in the case of the mystic Emmanuel Swedenborg, entire spiritual travel guides to other planets, helped shape a particular literary genre: the “plurality of worlds” or “cosmic pluralism” debate, which was intimately connected to certain forms of what we would later call science-fiction. (Sci-fi has a lengthy history; these texts are both ancestors and oft-unacknowledged elders of the genre.) Those who believed in a plurality of worlds claimed that other planets, if not an infinity of undiscovered “worlds,” were inhabited. This little genre, ergo, had large aims: no less than to explain whether life on Earth was unique, the answer to which held profound theological and philosophical implications. Are we special? the debate asked. And can we really handle it, if we aren’t?

In 2017, near the anniversary of when the astronomer Shannon Lucid returned to Earth in 1996 and took the title of most hours in orbit for a woman (188 days, later exceeded in 2007 by Sunita Williams), it’s interesting, if unnerving, to reflect on this literature of other worlds in space, given that our own planet lies under the subtle yet lethiferous glare of a changing climate many politicians refuse to acknowledge is real. That we are aiding in the possible eradication of life (except, perhaps, for the cute, near-indestructible tardigrades) on the only planet known to harbor it tempers the charm and comedy of revisiting these writers’ projections. Yet for all their naïveté of imagining all our planets, moons, and even suns could support life, the genre still has something to teach us today. How we envision alien life, even in fiction, often reflects us in turn, often betrays our own limitations and assumptions. How we portray the Other is a sundial of the self.

We may not be able to tesser time, slipping through temporal wrinkles to a better elsewhere, but the assumptions in these plurality-of-worlds texts can teach us a little for present and future, all the same.

Cosmic pluralism dates back millennia. Some of the ancient Greeks, like Leucippus, Democritus, and Epicurus, proposed that our cosmos contained “infinite worlds” or aperoi kosmoi; from here emerged the now-quotidian idea of extraterrestrial life. An unknown author designated pseudo-Plutarch described the 5th-century B.C.E. Pythagorean belief that “the moon is terraneous, inhabited as our earth is, and contains animals of a larger size and plants of a rarer beauty than our globe affords.”

Still, the basic idea of other worlds was far from unique to ancient Greece. In various forms, such speculations appeared across time and place; it’s only natural, after all, to wonder what secrets the night, with its curious stars and stelliferous storms, may hold. Multiple tales in One Thousand and One Nights, for instance, feature trips across the cosmos and even discussions of inhabited planets beyond Earth. With the rise of Christian orthodoxy, texts that spoke explicitly about the “plurality of worlds” were suppressed in the Middle Ages. From the 17th century onwards, there emerged a particularly notable outburst of such texts with the development of improved telescopes; the literature of a plurality of worlds is largely a literature reflecting the science of its day. Some of their authors, however, faced draconian consequences for voicing their ideas, most notably Galileo and Giordano Bruno, the latter of whom, after suggesting a pantheistic cosmos in which infinite planets existed, was burnt at the stake for heresy in 1600.

These texts abounded. Pierre Borel, a physician and compatriot of Descartes, published in 1657 A New Discourse Proving the Plurality of Worlds, the title of which indicates both ongoing debate and firm conviction. Borel claimed that “many of the most subtle minds in France” believed in the plurality of worlds “but keep [their beliefs] secret for fear of being ridiculed by the vulgar ignorant.” A highly influential book appeared in Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds (1686) by Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle, which detailed a series of conversations between the narrator and a beautiful marquise, in which the narrator speculates, seriously and jocularly, on the existence of other inhabited planets. In his preface, Fontenelle claimed that “religion simply has nothing to do with this system, in which I fill an infinity of worlds with inhabitants…When I say to you that the Moon is inhabited, you picture to yourself men made like us, and then, if you’re a bit of a theologian, you’re instantly full of qualms.”

The moon was indeed a popular and controversial place to imagine other people in this genre, thanks largely to Galileo’s unprecedented descriptions of it as “not unlike the Earth” after observing it through his powerful lens (though literature on lunarians predated this, as Lucian of Samosata had satirically described a voyage to an inhabited moon in his True History, a progenitor of sci-fi, in the 2nd century). Galileo did not claim the moon harbored life. But his timid-yet-revolutionary descriptions in The Sidereal Messenger of earthlike mountains on the moon seemed to blasphemously suggest our planet was not special; if other cosmic bodies, too, could have mountains, couldn’t they also have civilizations, casting doubt on the Bible’s implication that we were unique? (Kepler, going beyond Galileo, argued that cavities on the moon were the “homes” of intelligent lunar beings.)

Before Galileo, Ludovico Ariosto had sent his character Astolfo to the moon on a hippogriff in his 1532 mock-epic, Orlando Furioso; the following century, the Anglican bishop Francis Godwin composed The Man in the Moone, in which a man rides geese up to the moon and encounters Protestant Christians named “the Lunars.” John Wilkins and Cyrano de Bergerac added to this genre, in 1638 and 1657 respectively, of literature about lunar civilizations. So infectious was the idea of an earthlike moon that the cartographer Michael van Langren produced an astonishing map of the moon in 1645—the world’s first recorded lunar map—in which he named mountains and craters after “great men” to secure his patronage. The moon, it seemed, was quite profitable for sublunary Earthlings.

After William Herschel discovered Uranus and began suggesting the cosmos was terrifyingly immense, Romantic writers—who, contrary to stereotype, often held some interest in science—began including such imagery in their work. The lone figure, like the iconic ancient mariner or the men standing alone against vast natural landscapes in Caspar David Friedrich’s paintings, animated Romantic work, and scientists sometimes became those solitary symbols: William Wordsworth described Newton in The Prelude as a Romantic mariner himself, “voyaging through strange seas of Thought, alone.” Percy Shelley was particularly intrigued by the seemingly blasphemous implications of a plurality of worlds, threading images of “those million worlds” with “inhabitants” in lines and footnotes through Prometheus Unbound and Queen Mab. In “Essay on the Devil and Devils,” he mused, with vulpine glee, whether or not hell might exist on fiery comets (or even in the sun) and whether “Earthlings or Jupetrians [sic] [are] more worthy of visitations by the Devil.” Influenced by revolutionary astronomical observations and before a figure like Jules Verne was even born, many a writer was imagining worlds twenty thousand fathoms—or more—from our own.

Perhaps the most extraordinary entry into the plurality-of-worlds literature came from Swedenborg. A controversial Christian mystic, Swedenborg alleged that the Lord had appointed him the religion’s savior, allowing him to travel freely, in “astral” form, between Heaven and Hell. Putting this handy ability to use, he published a remarkable book in 1758, The Earths in Our Solar System Which are called Planets and the Earths in the Starry Heaven, and Their Inhabitants; Also the Spirits and Angels There From Things Heard and Seen, detailing what he claimed were visits, in spirit, to Mercury, Jupiter, Mars, Saturn, Venus, and more—all of which, of course, were inhabited. Astonishingly, Swedenborg united anthropocentrism and Copernicanism: there are many inhabited earths, he alleged, but because “the Divine created the universe for no other end than that the human race may exist… wherever there is an earth, there are men.” Humanity, the angels conveniently revealed to the Swedish mystic, is central, everywhere.

Here is the crux of a deeper problem. Swedenborg’s “quest” to speak with “men” from other “earths” reveals a recurring issue with writers who imagined a plurality of worlds: that the very idea of “other earths” suggests how strongly they desired non-Earthlings to be, for all intents and purposes, human.

Many of these texts indeed proffered aliens who seemed curiously, conservatively like us. Sometimes, this was intentional, satirizing real-life figures; other times, it was not. The trend for some science fiction to imagine that alien life will resemble Earth’s inhabitants (human or otherwise) has long irked me: why should we think any other planet’s life would have eyes in the places we do, if they possess eyes at all? (The worst, to me, are aliens that wear human clothing, like t-shirts, yet possess anatomies that make such attire impractical at best, if not impossible for them to get on.) They also tended to be men, and male-dominated where women exist; imagining gender beyond a simple fixed binary, as in Ursula Le Guin’s masterful, much later novel, The Left Hand of Darkness, was rarer.

These are failures to imagine that which is truly, utterly alien. Yet there’s something human in this failure. It says much about us, after all, that we find it so much easier to imagine aliens resembling us, or organisms on our planet, than something definitively different. “Given the diversity of life on Earth,” the astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson wrote in NASA’s Astrobiology magazine in 2003, “one might expect a diversity of life exhibited among Hollywood aliens. But I am consistently amazed by the film industry’s lack of creativity. With a few notable exceptions,” he continues,

such as life forms in The Blob (1958) and in 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), Hollywood aliens look remarkably humanoid. No matter how ugly (or cute) they are, nearly all of them have two eyes, a nose, a mouth, two ears, a head, a neck, shoulders, arms, hands, fingers, a torso, two legs, two feet—and they can walk. From an anatomical view, these creatures are practically indistinguishable from humans, yet they are supposed to have come from another planet. If anything is certain, it is that life elsewhere in the universe, intelligent or otherwise, will look at least as exotic as some of Earth’s own life forms.

This trend makes me occasionally cringe at planet-hopping books and films I enjoy, from Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time to the Saga comics. Their non-Earthlings may vary from the outré to the orthodox, but even in their oddest permutations, they often seem, at core, like us. To get around this, writers like Fontenelle, and, later, William Herschel cautioned that their aliens were “not like men in any way,” yet their writing, like so many others, still makes extraterrestrial life seem positively, well, terrestrial.

I was guilty of this as a younger writer, too. I imagined worlds at once fantastical and hewing to earthly imagery. Mauve deserts, sprinkled with brittle crystal flowers small and smaragdine. Halloween-themed planets, peopled with grinning upside-down-teardrop ghosts and witches with wisteria hair. As a teen I feverishly wrote juvenile novels this world will (hopefully) never see, in which other universes, known, simplistically, as dimensions existed, and in which grand subway trains in a rocky hub deep in our Earth—Grand Central, perhaps, with stalactites and interdimensional post offices—rattle-roared through subterranean tunnels to purple portals that led to other worlds.

Caribbean reality, as Junot Diaz says, can be quite sci-fi, and I embraced this. A group of my Dominican friends who were all atheists would sometimes get together in Roseau for beers and I transformed them, later, in a story into a Borgesian secret society that studied inter-universal libraries, searching, as they descended down shelves on jetpacks—these were quite formidable libraries—for clues about the gods of other realms. For years a staggering drunk with the glower of a gargoyle lumbered up the precipice side of the mountain road to my village, narrowly being missed by rushing buses and cars who laughed at him as they passed by, and I later placed a version of the man—who had by then vanished, perhaps down the precipice—in another universe.

My fantastical images were not “real,” yet they were not that alien, ultimately. They were combinations of parts, recolors, reskins, refractions, through the prism of a muse, of motifs from books, videogames, anime, reality, my walks on lonely nights through the star-dusted orchard of the self. There’s nothing wrong with this. I loved writing these stories. But it reveals how difficult it is, even in art, to escape our humanness.

Yet there’s a darker side to this fixation, through history, with depicting the colossal cosmos as essentially human or alien worlds as similar to Earth. “Could we reach the moon, we should think of reducing it to a province of some European kingdom,” the gothic novelist Horace Walpole pooh-poohed the rise of hot-air ballooning in 1783. Walpole may have somewhat overestimated the aerial capabilities of balloons, but his larger point was accurate. We speak so often conceptually of “colonizing”—a telling word—the moon or Mars to save our species, and perhaps our fictional proliferation of humans across a plurality of worlds symbolizes, more broadly, our seeming inability to discard our worst aspects, our most fearful symmetries, even when we leave a planet.

*

Imagine, on a clear night, that every star is a planet exactly like our own, with people imagining just like us. It makes us seem quite infinitesimal. “In cosmic terms, we are subatomic particles in a grain of sand on an infinite beach,” Calvin tells Hobbes. It’s difficult to envision large numbers, so many of us don’t realize how vast the universe truly is, or how minuscule we are—enough that, in a map of the cosmos, we might as well not even exist.

Yet we do. For all our tininess, what we do matters.

Thomas Hardy understood it well for his time, as Two on a Tower, his underrated 1882 novel of astronomy and romance—love set against a terrifyingly, monstrously vast universe—indicates. Its universe is enormous and uncaring, yet even as subatomic specks on an endless beach, its characters’ star-crossed romance matters. Our love matters. We make our own meaning in a likely meaningless cosmos. We sail on, even if there is no port on our map, because of the sheer love that animates our sailing. When we stop creating our story, like Scheherazade, we may die. And sometimes we love the things that bring us closest to Death, love the songs that pull us into rocks flecked with foam and bone, love the books that take us to the cold smoking edge of the world.

Yet we are in danger of losing the seas we know, their salt-breath, the familiar ports we sail to on so many green nights. Things are falling apart—but slowly enough that we can tell ourselves all is well. Ninety-nine of life on our planet since its genesis is extinct, and it is only within the last few centuries that we have lost some of them—due either to wanton hunting, as with Steller’s sea cow or the iconically nonexistent dodo, or to the unexpectedly catastrophic results of mundane events, like the erasure of a rare flightless wren in New Zealand’s Stephen’s Island in the 1890s, which met its end at the paws of a lighthouse keeper’s cat (alongside copious, concupiscent feral cats that had escaped from their owners into the forest) that kept bringing its owner its avian corpses, until there were none left for the cat to display. Perhaps our familiar things won’t entirely vanish as the climate changes, but they will colossally, fatally transform—and with them, if we survive, so will our art. So will we. It all sounds alarmist, even silly. I wish it was.

Cosmic pluralism reads with a vespertine poignancy to me today. But even as a pessimist, I see something in the plurality-of-worlds genre, and sci-fi more broadly, that may save us yet: our curiosity. Cosmic pluralism bloomed out of wonder about the “big” questions, a wonder that won’t ever fully leave us—I hope—even if we think we’ve answered some of them. We’ve made it this far; perhaps that will save us, somehow, in the end.

It’s lovely to dream of other worlds, to listen to the music of a mapless place. That’s what fiction, in all forms, does. I cherish seeing the world from a rarer angle: the small-vastness of things before skydiving, the way scuba-diving at night feels like spacewalking on Earth, the way our own mundane-sublime planet may seem an alien landscape from the right angles. But we cannot forget this world when we wake from those dreams. If I have children, I want them, one day, to be able to enjoy the Earth as I did, its little and big wonders—as well as those of the vast cosmos. We need to harbor, if we do not, a caring, earthly, life-affirming perspective, even as we also require a more humbling cosmic one, lest we think ourselves the grand owners of the universe, with domain over its contents.

Perhaps we cannot tesser away to a less dire future, but we can try to better the future we do have, all the same.

{ http://lithub.com/ }

Mysterious red blob photographed in the Louisiana night sky

An OpenMinds.tv reader in Breaux Bridge, Louisiana spotted something odd in the night sky and was fortunately able to photograph it. The photos show a strange red blob in the sky he and his wife were able to see with the naked eye.

One of the four images provided by Malone.

(Credit: Patrick Malone)

Closeup of the object in the above image.

(Credit: Patrick Malone)

Patrick Malone says he and his wife were leaving the house when they noticed “a faint red blob” in the night sky above them. He decided to go inside and grab a camera. He then took several photographs with two different lenses using his Canon T2i DSLR camera. They watched the object for about 45 minutes. Malone says he was not looking at it, but his wife was, she was trying to get another picture, when it left. Via Facebook Messenger, Malone wrote that she said, “it did not fade it just disappeared.”

Via email, Malone gave me this account:

On the night of Wednesday September 13th, at about 10:00pm, my wife and I were about to leave our house in Breaux Bridge, Louisiana. Before getting in the truck I looked up in the sky and noticed a faint red blob directly above. I said to my wife, what in the heck is that? She looked up and saw it as well. We stared at it for about 10 minutes before I thought about attempting to take a picture of it with the dslr. The entire time it was in the sky it did not move or shift, it stayed directly above at about 90 degrees. It was at such a sharp angle all of the photos had to be taken free hand. I have included the best photos I have of this weirdism. All photos are directly off of the memory card and not edited, they were all taken with a cannon t2i. The pictures where the blob is zoomed out were taken with a Takumar 55mm lens and the blurry zoomed in photo is with a Vivatar 75-205mm. Both lenses are manual non-electric. All photos have about a ¾ second shutter speed so the blob is brighter in the photo than it was by the naked eye.

The pictures are fascinating. The object does look like some sort of celestial object, but it is awfully bright. Malone says a friend told him that a missile or spacecraft launch could look like this, but he was not able to find a records of such a launch on that evening.

Second of the four images provided by Malone.

(Credit: Patrick Malone)

Third of the four images provided by Malone.

(Credit: Patrick Malone)

Fourth of the four images provided by Malone.

(Credit: Patrick Malone)

Malone says he does not know what it is, but would like help figuring it out.

I checked the website Heavens-Above.com to find out if anything was in the sky at the time, and there was a part of a Russian rocket — space junk — that circled overhead at about 9:24 pm, but that would look like a point of light crossing the sky, not a red blob. So, for now, at least for the Malones and I, the mystery continues.

If you think you know what it is, let us know in the comments below.

If you would like to analyze the original photos, they can be downloaded here.

{ http://www.openminds.tv/ }

Moeten we buitenaards leven vrezen?

Caroline Kraaijvanger

Hawking is er bang voor. En hij is niet alleen. Maar is dat terecht? Waarschijnlijk niet, zo stelt Vincent Icke, hoogleraar theoretische sterrenkunde.

We hebben tot op heden nog geen buitenaards leven ontdekt. Maar toch lijken veel onderzoekers er bijna zeker van te zijn dat het bestaat. Zo ook Vincent Icke, hoogleraar theoretische sterrenkunde bij de Sterrewacht Leiden en auteur van het zojuist verschenen boek ‘Reisbureau Einstein‘. Volgens hem zijn er maar liefst drie sterke aanwijzingen dat het leven op aarde niet uniek is en dat buitenaards leven dus ergens op ontdekking wacht. “De eerste aanwijzing is het feit dat sterren zoals onze zon heel algemeen zijn,” zo vertelt hij aan Scientias.nl. “Alleen in onze Melkweg zijn naar schatting al zo’n 120 tot 150 miljard sterren te vinden, waarvan zeker 10 procent zonachtig is.” De tweede aanwijzing betreft onze planeet: de aarde. “We weten inmiddels dat sterren vrijwel altijd een planetenstelsel om zich heen hebben en veel van die planeten zijn aardachtig. Dat wil zeggen dat ze qua grootte vergelijkbaar zijn met de aarde en in de leefbare zone staan, oftewel vloeibaar water kunnen herbergen.” De derde aanwijzing draait om chemie. “Ons leven is gebaseerd op zes verschillende elementen: koolstof, fosfor, zwavel, waterstof, stikstof en zuurstof. En lang dachten we dat deze alleen onder heel bijzondere omstandigheden ontstaan. Maar dat is niet zo. Inmiddels weten we dat deze zes atomen de gewoonste elementen in ons universum zijn en dat tussen de sterren al veel ingewikkelde chemische constructies te vinden zijn. Hoe beter we kijken, hoe gewoner onze planeet, onze ster en onze chemie wordt. En als alles hier zo gewoon is, is er een grote kans dat het ergens anders ook heel gewoon is.”

Hier zie je de ultrakoele dwergster TRAPPIST-1. Recent kondigden onderzoekers aan dat rond deze dwergster – TRAPPIST-1 -maar liefst zeven planeten cirkelen die qua grootte vergelijkbaar zijn met de aarde. Zeker drie ervan zouden zich in de leefbare zone bevinden.

Afbeelding: NASA.

Aliens met geitenwollensokken aan?
Het klinkt heel aannemelijk. Maar waarom hebben we dat buitenaardse leven – of die exoburen, zoals Icke ze in zijn boek noemt – dan nog niet gevonden? “Een eenvoudig, maar ietwat teleurstellend antwoord zou kunnen zijn: ‘Ze zijn er niet’,” erkent Icke. “Dat moeten we mogelijk achten.” Maar zelf wil hij daar eigenlijk niet aan. Een alternatieve mogelijkheid is dat aliens net als mensen bijzonder onzorgvuldig met hun planeet omgaan en zichzelf kapot maken alvorens we ze ontdekken óf juist zo zuinig op hun planeet zijn dat deze ongerept lijkt. “Als exoburen naar ons kijken, zien ze een atmosfeer die verstoord is en moeten ze concluderen dat we de aarde aangetast hebben. We gaan immers als gekken met onze planeet en hulpbronnen om. Dat kan twee kanten opgaan: we maken onszelf kapot (en dan is er voor exoburen niets meer te zien). Of we leren om zorgvuldiger om te gaan met onze kosmische omgeving.” In het laatste scenario is de atmosfeer schoon “en zijn we dus veel moeilijker – eigenlijk alleen nog maar aan de hand van communicatie – te detecteren,” aldus Icke.

De Extremely Large Telescope. De telescoop moet in 2024 de ogen openen.

Afbeelding: ESO / L. Calçada.

Op dit moment wordt er naar buitenaards leven gezocht met behulp van radiotelescopen. Met die telescopen wordt geprobeerd om communicatiesignalen van exoburen op te sporen. Het is bijna onbegonnen werk. “Communicatie vindt altijd plaats op heel specifieke frequenties of kanalen. Als buitenaardse wezens dergelijke communicatiekanalen in gebruik hebben, dan moeten we die communicatie op aarde kunnen ontvangen. Maar dan moet je wel weten waar vandaan er ongeveer uitgezonden wordt.” En daar wringt de schoen. Want dat weten we niet. En dus speuren we al decennialang lukraak de hemel af. Vooralsnog zonder resultaat. Niet heel verwonderlijk als je je realiseert hoe immens groot het universum is…

Dat de zoektocht naar aliens nog tamelijk onsuccesvol is, is wellicht ook te wijten aan onze beperkte detectiemethoden. “Op dit moment is het eigenlijk niet mogelijk om in detail naar exoplaneten te kijken. Aardachtige planeten zijn minuscuul en dus heb je telescopen met enorme spiegels nodig om voldoende licht van zo’n planeet op te kunnen vangen.” Het goede nieuws is dat dergelijke telescopen in de maak zijn. Denk aan ruimtetelescoop James Webb of ESO’s Extremely Large Telescope (ELT). “Ik verwacht het meeste van ELT,” vertelt Icke. Met behulp van deze telescoop kunnen we de atmosferen van exoplaneten uitpluizen en zoeken naar elementen die het resultaat zijn van biologische activiteit. Je moet dan zeker niet direct denken aan zesarmige, intelligente aliens, zo benadrukt Icke. “Als we exoleven ontdekken, zal dat in eerste instantie groen slijm zijn. Het is namelijk onmogelijk om gericht naar gevorderd leven te zoeken (zie kader). De ontdekking daarvan zal dan ook een toevalstreffer zijn.”

Aliens op bezoek
Een andere mogelijkheid is natuurlijk dat onze exoburen op een dag óns ontdekken en opzoeken. Velen zien dat als een doemscenario. Maar Icke ziet dat anders. “Interstellair reizen vereist een stabiele, vredelievende exo-beschaving,” denkt hij. In zijn boek legt hij helder uit hoe hij tot die conclusie is gekomen: “Voor kolonisatie is meer nodig dan steeds verder gaan: daarvoor moet een samenhangende maatschappij worden opgebouwd. Dat kan alleen op een tijdschaal die overeenkomt met de maximale snelheid en de bijbehorende reistijden. Een interstellaire beschaving (dus niet een enkel zwervend ruimteschip) moet aan die tijden zijn aangepast. Daarom denk ik dat een exo-beschaving stabiel moet zijn op een tijdschaal van ruwweg honderdduizend jaar.” Dat is een flink tijdbestek en de geschiedenis leert ons dat een gewelddadige of overheersende maatschappij nooit zo’n lang leven beschoren is. “Neem de dictatuur,” vertelt Icke. “Dat type beschaving houdt op aarde nooit lang stand, misschien vijftig, honderd jaar? Dat is niks op kosmologische tijdschaal.” Kortom: een beschaving die de moeite neemt de aarde te bezoeken, is dus – met het oog aan het enorme tijdsbestek en de moeite die daaraan vooraf is gegaan – waarschijnlijk vredelievend. “De technologische ontwikkeling die zij moeten hebben doorgemaakt om interstellair te reizen zal hun hebben geleerd dat samenwerking snellere en betere resultaten oplevert dan strijd,” schrijft Icke.

“ONZE ANGST VOOR INTELLIGENTE BUITENAARDSE WEZENS IS NIET MEER DAN EEN PROJECTIE VAN ONS SLECHTE GEWETEN”

Exoburen die iets van ons nodig hebben
Het klinkt logisch. Maar wat als deze buitenaardse wezens – zoals je zo vaak in sciencefictionfilms ziet – iets van ons nodig hebben? Misschien wel grondstoffen? Of onze complete planeet? Ook dat ziet Icke niet gebeuren. Hij kan zich niet voorstellen dat exoburen nu net hun oog laten vallen op dat doodgewone planeetje van ons. “Als wij een dijk in het Markermeer willen leggen gaan we heus het daarvoor benodigde zand niet uit, ik noem maar wat, Australië roven,” zo schrijft hij. “Een civilisatie die de hele Melkweg kan bereizen heeft niets aan ons planeetje. Er zijn ongeveer 150 miljard sterren in de Melkweg. Als een miljoenste daarvan de door exoburen gewenste eigenschappen heeft, dan hebben ze de keus uit 150.000 planeten. Daarbij is het niet erg waarschijnlijk dat nu uitgerekend onze aarde van een soort is die ‘zij’ graag zouden willen ‘hebben’.” Dat het beeld van een bezettende, overheersende exobuur zovelen parten speelt, is waarschijnlijk wederom terug te leiden naar dat verouderde zelfbeeld van ons: de aanname dat wij, onze planeet en onze ster heel uniek zijn.

Ons slechte geweten
Moeten we onze angsten jegens eventuele exoburen dan echt laten varen? Icke denkt van wel. “Als je kijkt naar de sociologie van levende wezens dan is die angst onterecht, niet meer dan een projectie van ons slechte geweten,” vertelt hij. Klakkeloos gaan we er immers vanuit dat de aard van de exobuur vergelijkbaar is met die van ons. “We hebben daar een mooie spreekwoord voor: ‘Zo de waard is, vertrouwt hij zijn gasten’.” Dat ondertussen zelfs een genie als Hawking zijn angst voor een exo-invasie niet onder stoelen of banken steekt: daar is Icke niet van onder de indruk. “Hawking is heel slim, maar ook gewoon een mens. Persoonlijk denk ik dat hij hier niet lang genoeg over heeft nagedacht.”

Terwijl sommige onderzoekers vurig wensen dat de dag waarop we buitenaards leven op onze stoep aantreffen, nog ver weg is, ziet Icke er naar uit. “Ik denk dat dergelijke ontdekkingen wetenschappelijk gezien zeker iets zijn om naar uit te kijken.” Vaak wordt dan gezegd dat we in zo’n situatie – met name op het gebied van technologie – een hoop van onze exoburen kunnen leren. Maar dat weet Icke zo net nog niet. “Ze zijn ons waarschijnlijk al zo ver voorbij.” Toch moeten we de impact van zo’n ontmoeting ook weer niet onderschatten. “Erna kunnen alle claims die de mens ooit heeft gehad op bijzonderheid overboord.”

Reisbureau Einstein
In het boek Reisbureau Einstein vertelt Vincent Icke hoe planeten en sterren ontstaan en wat er dicht bij de Melkweg en verder weg allemaal te vinden is en hoe we daar dan precies kunnen komen. Ook verkent hij misschien wel één van de grootste vraagstukken die de mensheid al langdurig bezighoudt: zijn we alleen? En als we niet alleen zijn, hoe intelligent zijn die anderen dan? En wat kunnen wij van hen verwachten? Zo af en toe balancerend op het randje van wetenschap en speculatie heeft Icke met Reisbureau Einstein een prettig leesbaar, fascinerend en leerzaam boek geschreven. Een aanrader voor iedereen die wil weten waar wij vandaan komen, bereid is de gedachte dat we helemaal niet zo bijzonder zijn te omarmen en zo goed en zo kwaad als dat nu reeds mogelijk is zijn exoburen wil leren kennen.

Bronmateriaal:

Interview met Vincent Icke
Afbeelding bovenaan dit artikel: Couleur / Pixabay

{ https://www.scientias.nl/ }

Hubble maakt fantastische foto van een stellaire kraamkamer

Caroline Kraaijvanger

Hier worden – dankzij een heftige botsing tussen twee sterrenstelsels – talloze nieuwe sterren geboren.

Op de fantastische foto schittert het enorme sterrenstelsel NGC 4490. Het sterrenstelsel is in botsing gekomen met een kleinere buurman: NGC 4485. En door die kosmische botsing is in beide sterrenstelsels veel gas en stof met een hoge dichtheid te vinden. En daarmee zijn de omstandigheden zeer geschikt voor het ontstaan van nieuwe sterren.

Roze vlekken
Dat is op de foto ook goed te zien. Je ziet talloze roze vlekken oplichten. Het zijn dichte wolken, bestaande uit geïoniseerd waterstof, die gloeien door toedoen van het ultraviolette licht van nabijgelegen jonge, gloeiendhete sterren.

Op deze foto zie je NGC 4490. Het stelsel is letterlijk overhoop gehaald door een botsing met NGC 4485 (niet te zien op de foto). De botsing leidt niet alleen tot stervorming, maar tast tevens de vorm van dit sterrenstelsel – van oorsprong een spiraalstelsel – ernstig aan.

Afbeelding: ESA /Hubble & NASA / D. Calzetti (UMass) / LEGUS Team, J. Maund (University of Sheffield) & R. Chandar (University of Toledo).

Supernova’s
Maar in deze sterrenstelsels vinden niet alleen geboortes plaats. De dood waart er ook rond. Zo zijn er de afgelopen decennia al verschillende supernova’s gespot in NGC 4490.

De botsing tussen NGC 4490 en NGC 4485 is al miljoenen jaren in de maak. Beide sterrenstelsels trekken met hun zwaartekracht aan elkaar. En dat resulteerde uiteindelijk in een botsing. Het heftigste deel daarvan is inmiddels achter de rug: de twee sterrenstelsels zijn al door elkaar heen bewogen en uit de knoop. Op dit moment wordt de afstand tussen de sterrenstelsels weer groter. Maar ze blijven letterlijk aan elkaar trekken en over een paar miljard jaar wacht dan ook opnieuw een botsing.

Meer weten over interacties tussen sterrenstelsels en de gevolgen die deze interacties kunnen hebben? Klik dan hier en bekijk nog veel meer prachtige foto’s van ‘kosmisch vuurwerk’.

Bronmateriaal:

"Bursting with Starbirth" - Spacetelescope.org
Afbeelding bovenaan dit artikel: ESA /Hubble & NASA / D. Calzetti (UMass) / LEGUS Team, J. Maund (University of Sheffield) & R. Chandar (University of Toledo)

{ https://www.scientias.nl/ }

SpaceX's BFR: met een raket naar de andere kant van de wereld

Tim Kraaijvanger

In 39 minuten vliegen van New York naar Shanghai? Het is de toekomst van de ruimtevaart. Elon Musk presenteerde vannacht zijn nieuwe plannen.

Zo werkt SpaceX aan de ontwikkeling van de BFR, wat staat voor grote raket (Big Rocket). Waar de F voor staat, kun je waarschijnlijk zelf wel invullen. Deze raket wordt o.a. op aarde ingezet om van stad naar stad te reizen. Dit klinkt misschien gek, want waarom zou je een raket pakken als je ook met het vliegtuig kunt gaan? De belangrijkste reden is tijd. De raket heeft een maximumsnelheid van 27.000 kilometer per uur en dat is dus heel wat sneller dan een gemiddeld vliegtuig met een cruisesnelheid van 1.000 kilometer per uur.

Dat maakt de cirkel weer rond, want Musk innoveert de totale transportsector. De trein is ouderwets, want je gaat straks met de hyperloop naar Parijs of Londen. Traditionele automerken kijken met angst en beven naar Tesla. En nu lijkt het alsof vliegtuigmaatschappijen het straks zwaar krijgen als Musk passagiers sneller en (hopelijk) veiliger en goedkoper kan vervoeren. Daarnaast is het uitzicht tijdens zo’n ruimtereis spectaculair. Klinkt allemaal enorm ambitieus. Musk heeft in het verleden laten zien dat hij dingen voor elkaar krijgt (zoals de Dragon-capsule, Falcon 9, zeelandingen), dus dit blijft ongetwijfeld niet bij artistieke impressies. De vraag is alleen of hij zijn ambitieuze tijdlijn kan handhaven.

Wat is de BFR?
De BFR kan 150 ton vervoeren en is daarmee krachtiger dan andere raketten van NASA en SpaceX. Op termijn gaat de BFR de huidige Falcon 9 en Falcon 9 Heavy-raketten vervangen. De winst uit satellieten lanceren en voorraadvluchten naar het internationale ruimtestation door SpaceX geïnvesteerd in de ontwikkeling van de BFR.

De BFR wordt niet alleen ingezet voor internationale vluchten. De raket gaat ook naar de maan en Mars. Zo wil Musk eerst een maanbasis creëren om vervolgens een kolonie op Mars te starten. De bovenste trap van de raket heeft veertig cabines met plek voor vijf tot zes personen per cabine. De bedoeling is dat in 2024 vier BFR’s naar de rode planeet gaan, waarvan er twee zijn bemand. Dit betekent dat er zo’n 400 mensen naar Mars reizen.

De bovenste trap van de BFR in de ruimte.

Vijfjarenplan
“Over zes tot negen maanden beginnen we met de bouw van de eerste BFR”, liet Musk vannacht weten tijdens een conferentie in Australië. “Ik heb er alle vertrouwen in dat we een complete raket kunnen bouwen en lanceren in vijf jaar.”

Via sociale media heeft Musk artistieke impressies en video’s gedeeld van de BFR. De beelden spreken voor zich.

 Volgen

SpaceX 

✔@SpaceX

BFR is capable of transporting satellites to orbit, crew and cargo to the @Space_Station and completing missions to the Moon and Mars.

07:11 - 29 sep. 2017

•  424424 antwoorden
•  6.3856.385 retweets
•  17.15317.153 vind-ik-leuks

Informatie over Twitter Ads en privacy

Hieronder kun je de volledige presentatie terugkijken.

Denk jij dat Musk zal slagen of maakt hij zijn beloften niet waar? Deel jouw mening onder dit artikel!

Bronmateriaal:

SpaceX

{ https://www.scientias.nl/ }

Verrassing! ESA vindt nog een laatste close-upfoto van Rosetta's komeet

Caroline Kraaijvanger

De foto laat het landingsgebied van de kometenjager Rosetta zien.

Ruimtesonde Rosetta was maar liefst twaalf jaar onderweg en arriveerde eind 2014 bij komeet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. Na twee jaar rond de komeet te hebben gecirkeld, kwam de missie van de ruimtesonde in september 2016 met een zachte crash op het oppervlak van 67P/C-G ten einde.

Laatste foto
De laatste complete foto die Rosetta maakte (zie hieronder), werd in september 2016 door ESA vrijgegeven en laat het oppervlak van de komeet van heel dichtbij zien.

Afbeelding: ESA / Rosetta / MPS for OSIRIS Team MPS / UPD / LAM / IAA / SSO / INTA / UPM / DASP / IDA.

“De laatste complete foto die door Rosetta werd verstuurd was de laatste foto die we in één stuk op aarde zagen arriveren, enkele momenten voor Rosetta landde in Sais (de naam van het landingsgebied, red.),” vertelt onderzoeker Holger Sierks. “Later vonden we enkele pakketjes met telemetrische data op onze server en dachten: wauw, dat kan wel eens een andere foto zijn.”

In pakketjes
Wanneer Rosetta een foto maakte, werd deze namelijk aan boord van de kometenjager gesplitst in telemetrische pakketjes en vervolgens naar de aarde gestuurd. Zo werden de laatste beelden die Rosetta tijdens de afdaling naar 67P/C-G maakte, opgedeeld in zes pakketjes. Maar de verzending van de laatste foto werd onderbroken nadat drie van deze pakketjes – oftewel de helft van de complete foto – waren ontvangen. Hierdoor herkende de software die gebruikt wordt om de telemetrische gegevens te verwerken de foto niet en bleef deze onopgemerkt. Tot nu.

De laatste, gereconstrueerde foto van Rosetta. Afbeelding: ESA / Rosetta / MPS for OSIRIS Team MPS / UPD / LAM / IAA / SSO / INTA / UPM / DASP / IDA.

Hoewel Rosetta er nooit in geslaagd is om alle zes de pakketjes naar de aarde te versturen, hebben onderzoekers op basis van de eerste drie pakketjes toch een foto kunnen reconstrueren. Dat komt doordat de data niet pixel voor pixel, maar laag voor laag is verstuurd. Het betekent heel concreet dat elk pakketje de foto gedetailleerder maakt. Als drie van de zes pakketjes aankomen, heb je dus wel een complete, maar geen supergedetailleerde foto. Op de gereconstrueerde foto zien we een gebied dat in werkelijkheid ongeveer 1 meter breed is. Elke pixel laat een gebied zien dat 2 bij 2 millimeter meet.

Met de foto weet Rosetta ons – een jaar nadat deze een fatale landing op komeet 67P/C-G maakte – nog steeds te verrassen.

EX NASA ASTRONAUT & PRINCETON PHYSICS PROFESSOR SAYS HIS COLLEAGUE, CARL SAGAN, “FUDGED” EVIDENCE OF EXTRATERRESTRIAL BEINGS

It is a common occurrence for ‘UFO’s to be tracked on military radar, and more and more people are starting to believe that these objects are of extraterrestrial origin. One reason for this is the disclosure of evidence supporting such a hypothesis in recent years. If you want to see a fraction of that evidence, you can check out this article or the one pertaining to military radar linked above, or you can visit the exopolitics section of our website, here.  If you really want to go in depth and read some proper studies on this topic, you can check out Richard Dolan’s books. They are a great place to start, he is a brilliant academic and one of the world’s leading researchers on the topic of UFOs.

Sagan’s Close Colleague

Apart from the congressional hearings on this subject, and the fairly recent citizens hearing that took place, along with the release of official documentation, there has been a surge in people believing that ETs are real because of the work of scholars like Dr. Brian O’Leary.

Brian was a close colleague of Carl Sagan, who recruited him to teach at Cornell University in the late 1960’s, where he researched and lectured in the department of astronomy and physics. After Cornell, he taught physics, astronomy, and science policy assessment at various academic institutions, including the University of California Berkeley, Hampshire College, and finally at Princeton University from 1976 to 1981. After this he went on to Washington, where he would become an advisor to various political leaders, presidential candidates, and the United States Congress.

Before all of this, Dr. O’Leary was a NASA astronaut and a member of the sixth group of astronauts selected by NASA in August of 1967. One year after that, as mentioned above, Sagan recruited him to teach at Cornell. O’Leary was also a member of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, as well as secretary of the American Geophysical Union’s Planetology Section. Furthermore, he was the team leader of the Asteroidal Resources Group for NASA’s Ames Summer Study on Space Settlements. He was a founding board member of the International Association for New Science as well as founding president of the New Energy Movement.

“Carl Sagan called me from Cornell and asked me to join the faculty. I accepted the offer and spent many years at Cornell in the astronomy department, planetary science department. And I became very creative in research then, but still within the bounds of western science, but in the planetary exploration program. That was for a period of about a decade.” (source)(source)

As you can see, his resume is more than extensive, and O’Leary is just one out of hundreds of people with this type of distinguished background to blow the lid on the extraterrestrial phenomenon. I use his video below in a lot of my extraterrestrial/UFO related articles, and I apologize to our regular readers, but I feel it’s always useful to share with readers who have yet to come across it. The clip is taken from the Thrive documentary which, if you haven’t seen yet, I highly recommend.

You can read his entire biography — though I’ll warn you it is quite large — HERE. Above I’ve provided only the highlights of his impressive career.

Brian passed away shortly after this video was taken. Apparently it happened shortly after having a heart attack and a diagnosis of intestinal cancer.

***UPDATED ARTICLES ABOUT THE FACE ON MARS:

• Ex NASA Scientists Share Concealed Information About The Face & Pyramids Found on Mars
• Researchers Find Tetrahedral Geometry Reflections of Pythagoras Dirac In The Mounds of Cydonia, on Mars

What He Said Carl Sagan Did

He had some interesting things to say during a live interview with Kerry Cassidy of Project Camelot (view full live interview here, read transcript of video here). O’Leary and Sagan were close for a number of years, but had a little bit of a falling out when O’Leary decided to leave Cornell. In the interview, he remarked:

It was… One very cold snowy day in May, I landed in Syracuse, and there was a horizontal blizzard — in May — and I said: That’s it for upstate New York. And Carl thought that was very frivolous. Because, of course, he was kind of an empire-builder kind of guy; and he also had a huge ego.

After he left, O’Leary started to examine some of Carl’s work. He said that the famous “Face” in Cydonia on Mars — photographed by Viking in 1975, this enormous formation (about a mile across) resembled a human face and created a major buzz at the time — was tampered with by Sagan before being released to the public:

It was very, very disappointing to me, because not only was Carl wrong, he also fudged data. He published a picture of the “Face” in Parade Magazine, a popular article, saying that the “Face” was just a natural formation, but he doctored the picture to make it not look like a face.

At this time, Sagan and O’Leary were arguably the world’s two leading experts on Mars, and they entered into many disagreements over that face. This rift was made clear in O’Leary’s publication in 1998, “Carl Sagan & I: On Opposite Sides of Mars.” It can be found in The Case for the Face: Scientists Examine the Evidence for Alien Artifacts on Mars, eds. Stanley V. McDaniel and Monica Rix Paxson. Kempton, IL: Adventures Unlimited Press. 

In May of 1990, O’Leary released a paper titled “Analysis of Images of the Face on Mars and Possible Intelligent Origin” which only further demonstrated his skepticism. It was published in the Journal of the British Interplanetary Society, Vol.43 No.5.

O’Leary also went on the record and stated:

I began to realize, just directly from the scientific point of view, not only hearsay, that this man was colluding with NASA, that there might be more to this than before. . . . Carl was on a committee with a number of notable people. There was a report issued by the Brookings Institution in 1961 — and that’s about when I knew Carl, during those years; the ’60s mostly was when I worked closely with him — that he and this other group said: Well, if any ETs ever showed up on the Earth, it has to be covered up. That’s the only way we’re going to be able to manage this, because if we can’t, then it would be too much of a culture shock.

Quite a shocking statement from someone of Brian’s stature, isn’t it? In the interview, he goes on to say that Carl and his colleagues recocover-up remains today, but it’s plausible to assume that in the beginning, perhaps there was no I’ll intent.

“Behind the scenes, high ranking Air Force officers are soberly concerned about UFOs. But through official secrecy and ridicule, many citizens are ledmmended that the governments cover up the UFO phenomenon, and that he believes this provided justification for the ongoing cover-up

It’s important to note that this does not make Sagan a ‘bad guy.’ He was clearly the opposite of that, and his love for science and educating humanity was quite clear. If he was in favour of covering this up, if he did know about it, there is a very good chance it was done for what they perceived to be, good reasons. Sure, there might be some corporate reasons, and some other not so pleasant reasons the  to believe the unknown flying objects are nonsense.” Former head of CIA, Roscoe Hillenkoetter, 1960 (source)

Interesting Quotes About The UFO Phenomenon (A Few Out Of Many)

***Please keep in mind, the documentation regarding this phenomenon can be found from links that were mentioned in the very first paragraph of this article

” Everything is in a process of investigation both in the United States and in Spain, as well as the rest of the world. The nations of the world are currently working together in the investigation of the UFO phenomenon. There is an international exchange of data.”

– General Carlos Castro Cavero (1979). From “UFOs and the National Security State, Volume 2,″ written by Richard Dolan.

“There is a serious possibility that we are being visited and have been visited for many years by people from outer space, by other civilizations. Who they are, where they are from, and what they want should be the subject of rigorous scientific investigation and not be the subject of ‘rubishing’ by tabloid newspapers.” (source)

– Lord Admiral Hill-Norton, Former Chief of Defence Staff, 5 Star Admiral of the Royal Navy, Chairman of the NATO Military Committee

“There is another way whether it’s wormholes or warping space, there’s got to be a way to generate energy so that you can pull it out of the vacuum, and the fact that they’re here shows us that they found a way.” (source) 

– Jack Kasher, Ph.D, Professor Emeritus of physics, University of Nebraska.

“This thing has gotten so highly-classified… it is just impossible to get anything on it. I have no idea who controls the flow of need-to-know because, frankly, I was told in such an emphatic way that it was none of my business that I’ve never tried to make it to be my business since. I have been interested in this subject for a long time and I do know that whatever the Air Force has on the subject is going to remain highly classified.”

– Senator Barry Goldwater, Chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee (source)

Yes, it’s both. It’s both literally, physically happening to a degree; and it’s also some kind of psychological, spiritual experience occurring and originating perhaps in another dimension. And so the phenomenon stretches us, or it asks us to stretch to open to realities that are not simply the literal physical world, but to extend to the possibility that there are other unseen realities from which our consciousness, our, if you will, learning processes over the past several hundred years have closed us off.”

 – John Mack,Dr. John E. Mack, a Harvard University psychologist and Pulitzer prize winner (source)

“There is a serious possibility that we are being visited and have been visited for many years by people from outer space, from other civilizations. . . . [and] it behooves us, in case some of these people in the future or now should turn hostile, to find out who they are, where they come from, and what they want. This should be the subject of rigorous scientific investigation and not the subject of ‘rubbishing’ by tabloid newspapers.” 

— Lord Admiral Hill-Norton, Former Chief of Defence Staff, 5 Star Admiral of the Royal Navy, Chairman of the NATO Military Committee (source)

“An extraterrestrial influence is investigating our planet. Something is monitoring the planet and they are monitoring it very cautiously.”

- 2008 Presidential Candidate Mike Gravel (source)(source)

“Some of what people report as UFOs are extraterrestrial (ET) vehicles. Some of those extraterrestrial vehicles actually have ET crews, and some of those ET crews catch and release humans.”

— Dr. Don Donderi, a retired McGill University Professor of 40 years in the Department of Psychology (source)

“Intelligent beings from other star systems have been and are visiting our planet Earth. They are variously referred to as Visitors, Others, Star People, Et’s, etc…They are visiting Earth now; this is not a matter of conjecture or wistful thinking.

– Theodor C. Loder III, Phd, Professor Emeritus of Earth Sciences, University of New Hampshire (source)

“Decades ago, visitors from other plants warned us about where we were headed and offered to help.  But instead, we, or at least some of us, interpreted their visits as a threat, and decided to shoot first and ask questions after.” 

– Paul Hellyer, Former Canadian Defense Minister (source)

My people tell of Star People who came to us many generations ago. The Star people brought spiritual teachings and stories and maps of the cosmos and they offered these freely. They were kind, loving, and set a great example. When they left us, my people say there was a loneliness like no other.”

– Richard Wagamese, Ojibway Author (source)

I’m skeptical about many things, including the notion that government always knows best, and that the people can’t be trusted with the truth. The time to pull the curtain back on this subject is long overdue. We have statements from the most credible sources – those in a position to know – about a fascinating phenomenon, the nature of which is yet to be determined. 

John Podesta, for example — former White House Chief of Staff for Bill Clinton, Barack Obama’s right hand man (councillor), and the current head of Hilary Clinton’s presidential campaign,Taken from Leslie Kean’s 2010 New York Times bestseller, UFOs: Generals, Pilots, And Government Officials Go On The Record, in which Podesta wrote the forward

“Yes there have been crashed craft, and bodies recovered… We are not alone in the universe, they have been coming here for a long time…I happen to be privileged enough to be in on the fact that we have been visited on this planet, and the UFO phenomenon is real.” 

– Doctor Edgar Mitchell, 6th man to walk on the moon(source) (source)(source)

{http://www.collective-evolution.com/ }

CLEAR FOOTAGE OF MULTIPLE UFOS RECORDED & SEEN BY DOZENS OF PEOPLE IN FLORIDA (VIDEO)

Below is one video out of thousands floating around on the internet of supposed footage of unidentified flying objects. Keep in mind, many pictures and videos of these crafts have been published and analyzed thoroughly, so there is no shortage of verified footage and pictures. (More information on that can be found below the video.)

This one in particular comes from Dr. Steven Greer, founder of The Disclosure Project and the Center for the Study of Extraterrestrial Intelligence (CSETI). Known to some as the “Father of the Disclosure Movement,” he was instrumental in bringing forth hundreds of military whistleblowers of all ranks, with verified backgrounds, to share their experience and testify on the UFO/extraterrestrial phenomenon.

There is, admittedly, plenty of disinformation being spread within the UFOlogy field, and many people seeking to manipulate the evidence and public opinion, which makes it difficult to assess what information is legitimate and what is not. It unfortunately comes down to doing your own research and using your best judgement.

Greer has had meetings with high level people in the Pentagon, according to himself, Dr. Edgar Mitchell (Apollo 14, who accompanied him on some of these meetings), and many more.

Dr. Greer has been doing these types of outings for quite a while, and he’s not the only one. Last year, a couple of CE members made a trip out to a gathering of researchers, whistleblowers. and enthusiasts, and witnessed something similar.

When you get to that level, and hang around those types of people, your going to draw attention, and anybody who draws massive amounts of attention will be praised, as well as vilified. Within the UFO movement, there are those that disagree and don’t associate with each other, which is very weird and shouldn’t be happening.

Interesting footage.

I think it’s safe to say that UFOs are no longer a fringe topic, as their existence has been verified in the mainstream world, but beyond that, most people are still in the dark. It’s important to keep in mind that a decade ago you were considered a conspiracy theorist for even believing in the existence of UFOs. Things have changed since then, but believing that some of these craft are extraterrestrial in origin is still considered ‘out there.’

This is why so many scientists around the world have been urging the scientific study of UFOs for decades. The Sturrock Report, for example, an effort that gathered the world’s top minds, was put together in the form of a paper urging that, if “the analysis of physical evidence turns up very strong evidence that objects related with UFO reports were manufactured outside the solar system, then one must obviously consider very seriously that the phenomenon involves not only extraterrestrial vehicles, but probably also extraterrestrial beings.”

Their main objective was to examine any possible physical evidence, and have it carefully collected and analyzed. These objects have been commonly photographed, as well as tracked on air/ground radar.

One example used in the Sturrock report was a photo taken by two Royal Canadian Air Force pilots on August 27th, 1956, in McCleod, Alberta, Canada. (“Physical Evidence Related To UFO Reports” – The Sturrock Panel Report – Electromagnetic Effects) (source) (source)

The pilots were flying in a formation of four F86 Sabre jet aircraft. One of the pilots described the phenomenon as a “bright light which was sharply defined and disk-shaped,” that looked like “a shiny silver dollar sitting horizontal.” Another pilot managed to photograph the object, as you can see above.

An analysis of this case was also published in the Journal of Scientific Exploration (“Optical Power Output of an Unidentified High Altitude Light Source,” vol. 13, #2, 1999).

This is one of many examples to give you an idea. Many documents indicate electrical equipment failure when entering the vicinity of these UFOs, like this one from the National Security Agency (NSA).

Just as there was evidence for UFOs when they were still considered a conspiracy, most, if not all researchers who have studied this phenomenon, will tell you with absolute certainty that there is ample evidence to support what’s known as the “extraterrestrial hypothesis,” and so will high ranking whistleblowers with verified backgrounds, from various decades — from Herman Oberth, one of the founding fathers of modern rocketry, to Edgar Mitchell, the 6th man to walk on the moon.

It’s similiar to Snowden’s mass surveillance revelation, which also used to be considered a conspiracy theory. His story stands as a great example of just how hard it is for someone to blow the whistle on secret, unacknowledged Special Access Programs.

“There is a serious possibility that we are being visited and have been visited for many years by people from outer space, from other civilizations. This should be the subject of rigorous scientific investigation and not the subject of ‘rubbishing’ by tabloid newspapers.” 

— Lord Admiral Hill-Norton, Former Chief of Defence Staff, 5 Star Admiral of the Royal Navy, Chairman of the NATO Military Committee (source)

These objects perform maneuvers that defy our understanding of physics. What’s more, there have been strange reports of involvement with and of extraterrestrials within the secret space program.

If you want to listen to a great lecture and learn more about the secret space program, you can check out this article we published on it earlier in the year.

If you’d like to go through some of that evidence, please visit the exopolitics section of our website. 

Or you can check out these two articles (out of many) that explore the different types of possible races we could be dealing with here:

Is This What You Think They Would Look Like? Supposed Pictures of Real Extraterrestrials

The Most Commonly Reported Extraterrestrials By Contactees, Abductees & Experiencers. 

Strong Evidence of Extraterrestrial Surface Interventions Found on Mars, According To New Study

{http://www.collective-evolution.com/ }

DE DAG DAT DE AARDE GERAAKT ZAL WORDEN DOOR EEN ASTEROÏDE IS BEKEND

Vandaag zal een zogenaamde reuzen asteroïde langs de aarde scheren, maar gelukkig zal deze ons niet raken.

Wel zien we steeds meer onbekende objecten uit de ruimte op ons afkomen en het zal dan ook mogelijk niemand verbazen dat één van de brokstukken ons zal gaan raken.

Net zoals de afgelopen jaren de aardbevingen op aarde dramatisch zijn toegenomen, zo is het ook met waarnemingen van zogenaamde vuurbollen in de lucht.

Vuurbollen zijn meestal stukken ruimtepuin die richting aarde komen en vervolgens opbranden in onze atmosfeer. Soms zijn er grotere brokstukken die ook nog ergens terechtkomen en soms gaat dit gepaard met grote explosies zoals enkele jaren gelden gebeurde in Rusland.

Hoe meer vuurballen, hoe meer ruimtepuin richting aarde komt en hoe die vuurballen zijn toegenomen is te zien in het volgend plaatje.

Nu al staat de teller hoger dan in geheel 2012 en is er een goede kans dat het record van 2016 wordt verbroken.

Wat die toename veroorzaakt, weet eigenlijk niemand, behalve degenen die geloven dat zich een onbekende planeet Nibiru in ons zonnestelsel bevindt die ervoor verantwoordelijk is dat er veel meer asteroïden onze kant worden op geslingerd

Veel van de kleinere asteroïden in de ruimte worden niet opgemerkt door de mensheid. Een aantal grotere zijn wel bekend en één daarvan passeert vandaag de aarde.

Florence is de naam van de reuzenasteroïde die vrijdag langs onze planeet zal scheren. Het gaat om de grootste asteroïde die, zover bekend, ooit langs de aarde passeerde. Florence heeft een diameter van bijna vijf kilometer en mocht de asteroïde op aarde inslaan, zou dat het einde betekenen van het leven zoals we het kennen. Florence zal op 7 miljoen kilometer van onze planeet voorbijrazen, ongeveer 18 keer de afstand tussen de aarde en de maan.

Het is van 1890 geleden dat Florence ons zo dicht naderde en de volgende scheervlucht komt er pas in het jaar 2500. Wetenschappers krijgen vrijdag dus een unieke kans op de asteroïde van dichtbij te bestuderen met radars.

Volgens het Amerikaanse ruimteagentschap NASA is het de eerste keer dat een asteroïde van dergelijke omvang zo dicht bij de aarde komt sinds NASA asteroïden begon te observeren.

"Hoewel heel wat asteroïdes dichter bij de aarde zijn gepasseerd, waren die allemaal kleiner", zegt Paul Chodas, manager van het NASA-centrum voor de studie van asteroïden.

Echter, de dag dat één van de ons bekende asteroïden op aarde zal knallen, is al bekend.

In oktober 2013 wordt er in de wereldmedia melding gemaakt van het feit dat er een nieuwe asteroïde is ontdekt en dat de kans groot is dat deze in 2032 de aarde zal raken. 

Het volgende is onder andere wat wij schreven in 2013:

In de wereldwijde media verschijnen het volgende soort koppen:

Natuurlijk weet je dat wanneer iets dergelijks gebeurt NASA onmiddellijk zal ingrijpen en verklaren dat al die astronomen die dat hadden berekend het fout hadden en dat zij hebben gecalculeerd dat deze asteroïde niet of nauwelijks een gevaar zal opleveren.

Normaal gesproken is het dan een beetje einde verhaal, want NASA is voor de meeste mensen net de bijbel of de koran, wat zei zeggen, is waar.

Echter, er is nog een naar onze mening overtuigend argument om aan te nemen dat deze asteroïde wellicht de aarde wel degelijk zal raken in 2032.

En dat argument is afkomstig van een weblog dat in 2005 werd geschreven door een man die zei dat hij uit de toekomst kwam en op aarde was met een bepaalde missie en dat hij vanaf dat moment gerekend over enkele weken weer zou vertrekken naar waar hij vandaan kwam.

Het volgende is wat wij schreven over deze man in een eerder artikel:

Al enkele jaren lang schrijven wij over een tijdreiziger uit het jaar 2063 die naar onze aarde is gekomen in het jaar 2005 op een speciale missie. 

Die missie duurde niet zo gek lang en tijdens zijn verblijf in onze tijd schreef deze tijdreiziger onder de naam Scott op een blog waar hij diverse dingen onthulde betreffende onze toekomst. 

In september vorig jaar schreven wij het volgende: 

Mijn codenaam is Qronos1 en mijn werkelijke naam is Scott. De eenheid waartoe ik behoor bestaat uit vier mensen die hier nu in deze tijd zijn. Wij zijn hier op een geheime missie. Er zijn in deze periode ook andere tijdreizigers en ongetwijfeld zullen er meer volgen in de toekomst. De wereld die ik ongeveer een jaar geleden verliet is anders en toch hetzelfde. De vooruitgang in tijdreizen heeft het mogelijk gemaakt dat we nu precies daar naartoe reizen waar we willen. 

Er worden op dat blog berichten geplaatst in de periode van 10 september 2005 tot en met 21 september 2005. Daarna stopt het. 

Het eerste wat men dan al snel roept is: “Ja, maar dat blog is net gemaakt en ze hebben de data veranderd om het oud te doen lijken”. Dit is echter niet het geval. Want al in de jaren 2006, 2007 etc. werd er op diverse fora al over dit blog gediscussieerd. Voor een voorbeeld van een forum uit 2007 klik hier. Als er dus in die jaren al over werd geschreven, mogen we aannemen dat het blog daadwerkelijk in 2005 is geschreven. 

Als Scott geen tijdreiziger was dan wist hij toch heel nauwkeurig te voorspellen wat er de komende jaren zou gaan gebeuren. 

Zo voorspelde hij dat 2007 een heel slecht jaar zou worden, dat er in 2009 in de VS een president zou worden geïnstalleerd die niet van Amerikaanse oorsprong was en dat er in 2010 een grote olieramp zou plaatsvinden in de Golf van Mexico.

Echter, iets dat hij ook voorspelt, is het volgende:

“Yes WW3 took allot from us and the asteroid that hit the earth in 2032 also did some bad things, but we have come out off all that ok”. 

Het blog waarop dit geschreven is, stamt daadwerkelijk uit 2005, ver voordat asteroïde 2013 TV135 door astronomen werd ontdekt. Astronomen die hiervan schrikken en bekendmaken dat er een kans is dat deze asteroïde de aarde kan raken in 2032, hetzelfde jaar dat dit in 2005 door Scott de tijdreiziger wordt voorspeld.

In dit geval hopen we dat NASA een keer gelijk heeft, maar gezien de vele leugens die ze in de loop der jaren hebben rondgestrooid, houden we het er vooralsnog op dat onze tijdreiziger volkomen gelijk heeft.

{ http://niburu.co/ }

Strange Light Anomaly that looks like a hologram appears in the Sky

Reality may be just an illusion, what we see could be just one big projection of holographic anomalies.

It sounds crazy but in 1997 theoretical physicist Juan Maldacena already proposed that our Universe is not real and would be merely a hologram. while several other physicists back up Maldacena’s theory as they have worked out simulations which has provided some of the clearest evidence that indeed our Universe could be just one big projection.

If our entire existence is a program then who is running the simulations?

According to Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrum it is quite possible that an advanced civilization with enormous computing power has decided to run simulations and projecting holographic displays to create an illusion and we are all living in this illusion.

If that should be the case then what about the strange light anomaly in the sky filmed from an unknown location on September 28, 2017 that looks like some kind of projection which covers a part of the sky/clouds.

  

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

The farmer who saw and the Mountie who believed: Sask.'s most famous UFO sighting

MARK MELNYCHUK, REGINA LEADER-POST

There are no concrete answers for what happened on Edwin Fuhr’s farm 43 years ago.

Kneeling on his living-room floor, Edwin Fuhr reaches beneath a TV cabinet decorated with angel statues and family photos to insert a VHS tape into his video cassette recorder.

It shows Fuhr smoking a cigarette as he looks over a collection of photos scattered on a kitchen table. They’re intriguing images of strange circular patterns on a field — remnants of Fuhr’s sighting of what he believes were UFOs. Interviews with Fuhr are all over the Internet, but not this one, circa 1988.

A province away, at his Winnipeg home, retired Mountie Ron Morier also has a keepsake from the time when he and Fuhr and a small Saskatchewan town became an international sensation. “UFO Incident: Langenburg, Sask. Sept 1, 1974,” reads the cover of Morier’s black binder. 

Lifting that cover feels like opening a secret document that should be stamped “classified” in bold, red letters. It contains a police report, newspaper clippings, faded photographs and letters from scientists with the Canadian government.

Morier jokingly calls it his X-File, a fitting nod to the sci-fi TV show that often focused on aliens, UFOs and the paranormal. It’s a treasure trove any UFO aficionado would covet.

The cover of Ron Morier’s file containing his RCMP report and other memorabilia pertaining to Edwin Fuhr’s 1974 UFO sighting near Langenburg, Saskatchewan.

A business card in the binder bears the name Dr. J. Allen Hynek, hinting at just how seriously the “incident” was taken. One of the UFO field’s most famous researchers, Hynek worked as a scientific consultant for a U.S. government initiative called project Blue Book, investigating UFO phenomena. Hynek weighed in on the Langenburg event in the media, even reportedly sending a representative to study the site, about 230 kilometres northeast of Regina.

First told before the World Wide Web or even VHS tapes, Fuhr’s story today endures in corners of the Net dedicated to UFOs and extra-terrestrial life. A video interview with him on YouTube five years ago had a resurgence in popularity after taking off on the website Reddit. It’s had more than 20,000 views.

And yet, some of the story’s most interesting parts remain strictly analog, existing only in the possession of two men forever linked to the strange event.

There are no concrete answers for what happened on Fuhr’s farm 43 years ago. Just a tantalizing story told by a Saskatchewan farmer, and the RCMP officer who believed him.

A close encounter of the second kind

Seeing a UFO up close is an incredibly rare experience. Most people just see lights in the sky, but Fuhr got closer.

Around 10:30 a.m. on Sept. 1, 1974, the then 36-year-old was swathing his fields when he saw five saucer-shaped objects on the edge of a slough. 

Thinking they were duck blinds and that someone was playing a joke on him, Fuhr got off of his swather for a closer look, but still kept at least 15 feet back. He says the saucers were hovering a foot off the ground and rotating at a high rate of speed. Their surface looked like highly-polished steel.

Fuhr stopped, backed up and got on his swather. He sat there for the next 15 minutes watching them hover, too scared to move.

“They had me in a trance,” says Fuhr, now 79. “I didn’t even know what to do, cause I sat there and I thought, ‘Well gee whiz.’ ”

According to Fuhr, the objects then took off — emitting a grey vapour from underneath — and disappeared into the sky. They made no sound. The objects flew away so fast that they were gone “like that,” says Fuhr, clapping his hands.

He waited a few more minutes to make sure they were gone, then walked to the edge of the slough where he saw five ring patterns in the field. The grass in the centre of each circle was standing, while the grass surrounding that was flattened in a clockwise circle.

With no idea what he had just seen, Fuhr headed home home for lunch. His wife Karen and his parents could tell something was wrong.

“When he came in he just sat there,” remembers Karen. “All of the sudden we asked him, ‘Is there something wrong?’ And … well then he started telling us.”

The Langenburg incident came at the tail end of a golden age for UFO sightings, when reports of seeing physical craft had tapered off.

Even more tantalizing, the Langenburg UFOs — if that’s what they were — had left behind a physical trace, the circles. This classifies the sighting as a close encounter of the second kind.

Edwin Fuhr indicates where multiple flying saucers landed on his farm in Langenburg, Saskatchewan in September, 1974. (Photo by Don Healy, Regina Leader-Post) Don Healy /Regina Leader-Post

Edwin Fuhr, left, and his wife Karen at the site of his 1974 UFO encounter on July 26, 2017.TROY FLEECE / Regina Leader-Post

Investigating the landing site

Later that night, Ron Morier, then a 27-year-old RCMP constable, got a phone call at the Langenburg detachment.

Fuhr’s brother-in-law Carl Zorn asked if the police had fielded any UFO reports. Zorn had heard of Fuhr’s experience in a phone call. Although the cop and the in-law were skeptical, both men thought there was little reason to think Fuhr would make up such a tale.

“He’s the last guy in the world that would. I mean he was a teetotaller. He’s a churchgoer, a very quiet, shy man,” says Morier.

He decided to check it out. Being an RCMP officer in small-town Saskatchewan in the 1970s, he had time. Morier and his colleagues provided what he wistfully refers to as “gold-plated policing.” No job was too small.

“Back in those days, anytime anybody approached us about anything, we responded,” says Morier.

A photo that Ron Morier took of the crop circles in Edwin Fuhr’s farm near Langenburg in 1974.

The next day, he checked out the markings in Fuhr’s field. What caused them? Morier still doesn’t know to this day.

Five circles fit with the same five objects Fuhr saw. Morier’s report says the flattened portion of the circles was approximately 18 inches. The total diameter of two of the circles was 12 feet, while the other three were 10.5 feet. 

There was no physical evidence in the area that would indicate someone had driven in and made the circles. 

“Whatever made those impressions in his slough there came from the sky and left the same way,” says Morier.

Fuhr was the only person at the farm who saw the UFOs. Despite how fantastic the story was, Morier could not come up with a reason why this quiet farmer would make it up.

“He is a responsible person, and his information is considered reliable,” wrote Morier in his report.

He doesn’t think Fuhr was seeking fame, or even wanted his brother-in-law to tell police about it.

“Why would he want thousands of people coming to his little place there and trampling all over his yard and his fields and all of that?” asks Morier.

The fire in the field

Once the story got picked up by the media, thousands of people flocked to Fuhr’s farm. He says cars were lined up “bumper to bumper” along the road from his farm to Langenburg.

It couldn’t have come at a worse time.

It was harvest time, and people were literally getting in the way of the family’s work. Tourists, UFO enthusiasts and onlookers from all over were trying to get to the site and to Fuhr.

“They were chasing us down in the middle of the field,” he recalls, saying some drove right in front of his combine.

“My brother was getting upset and dad was getting upset,” says Fuhr. “I said, ‘What the heck am I supposed to do?’ ”

He says a plane carrying Australians who wanted to see the site even landed on a field adjacent to his farm.

Hoping to deter onlookers, Fuhr’s father finally set fire to the grass surrounding the slough where the circles were. It didn’t help though, as markings were still visible on the ground. Fuhr thinks they may have been made by legs stretching out from the UFOs.

The phone at the family’s home was also tied up with people from all over the world calling Fuhr.  He says one call came from the first man on the moon, Neil Armstrong. The two-hour conversation, Fuhr says, involved Armstrong telling Fuhr that astronauts saw UFOs when travelling through space, but were told not to divulge that to the public.

“He said ‘It’s real all right.’ ”

Asked about the possibility of people making crank calls, Fuhr says the conversation convinced him it was indeed Armstrong.

Fuhr never began turning people away, or refusing to pick up the phone. He shrugs, and says he accepted that people were interested.

“I couldn’t do nothing about it. You know how people are,” he says. “Once the public finds out there’s something out there, they’ll all come out and see.”

A farmer made famous

Fuhr and his wife now live a quiet life in a bungalow in Langenburg. He retired from farming in 1989 and runs a landscaping and snow blowing business. To keep his mind occupied, Fuhr does carpentry in his spare time.

And he also enjoys reading books about UFOs.

Some of those books even mention Fuhr’s story, one of North America’s most famous UFO encounters. It was even featured on a History Channel documentary about UFOs. A cheesy dramatization of the sighting was made, with an actor playing Fuhr sitting on what looked more like a backhoe than a swather.

The setting for the video is a poor backdrop for Saskatchewan, with hills and trees in the background rather than fields. When the actor playing Morier arrives on scene, he’s wearing the stereotypical red serge, dress uniform of the RCMP — definitely not what he wore for daily duties.

Fuhr still gets the odd phone call from people curious about his encounter. He’s taken no pains to make himself hard to find, and is happy to oblige anyone who calls and wants to hear the story he’s told countless times.

“To me, it don’t matter. I’ll talk to anybody. If they want the story, I’ll tell them the story.”

He’s friendly, funny, welcoming — and still in surprisingly good spirits about the attention.

The land where the sighting happened still gets its share of visitors. It’s now farmed by Fuhr’s nephew, who tells those searching for the famous site that he has no idea what they’re talking about.

“He doesn’t want nothing to do with it,” says Fuhr.

Edwin Fuhr, a retired farmer, recalls his a close encounter with several UFOs while swathing in his field in the 1970s. His story made international news and is one of the most documented UFO cases in history Canadian history. TROY FLEECE / Regina Leader-Post

The most he ever got for sharing his story was a complimentary breakfast from CTV when visiting the studio for an interview. And that’s all right with him. Asked about ever making money from his story, he tilts his head, ponders the prospect, but then shrugs it off.

“To me it don’t matter. It’s out, the story’s out long already.”

Fuhr doesn’t give much thought to his status as a UFO celebrity.  “If I had to think about all that I think I’d go bananas,” says Fuhr.

He is so humble about the experience, he doesn’t even like to take credit for it.  “It was not my doings. It’s somebody from outer space that’s doing it, not me,” says Fuhr. “I’m a spectator just as well as all the rest are.”

Saskatchewan’s own Fox Mulder

After the Langenburg incident, Morier took his share of ribbing from his colleagues, who sometimes called him Mulder, after the X-Files investigator.

But it never negatively affected his career in the RCMP, which was extensive.

Morier became a composite artist and also trained to reconstruct the facial features of unidentified deceased people using sculpting techniques. During the rise of the computer, he worked on the RCMP’s initiative to begin doing composite sketches digitally.

A photo of Ron Morier from circa 1974.

After retiring from the RCMP with 27 years of service, he travelled all over the U.S. while working as a consultant on the TV show America’s Most Wanted. His last job was teaching at the Northwest Law Enforcement Academy in Winnipeg for 14 years.

Morier occasionally grants interview requests from the media or UFO researchers. But he knows they will inevitably lead to more phone calls.

“I don’t know why I do it cause I know it’s going to come back and bite me in the ass again,” he says.

Years ago, Morier was contacted by an engineer from Japan who wanted to learn more about the sighting. While the subject is a hotbed for conspiracy theories, every person who reached out to him seemed legitimate.

“I didn’t talk to any kooks, I don’t think.”

Morier has never tried to hide from the event. If anything, he’s preserved it with his binder.

“I’m a bit of a collector that way. I’ve got lots of old reports and stuff,” says Morier.

One of the most precious items in the binder is a handwritten letter from the National Research Council to Fuhr. Dated Oct. 4, 1974, just over a month after Fuhr’s sighting, the letter explains how scientists have been unable to find any evidence that aliens landed in Fuhr’s farm, and asks for more samples.

The NRC says it no longer possesses any research on the Langenburg incident. Only one brief record acknowledging Fuhr’s sighting exists at the Library Archives of Canada.

Morier has no ill feelings about the Langenburg incident, or its persistence to keep popping up in his life. He still has fond memories of policing the small community.

“To be honest with you it was the best time of my life,” says Morier.

A page from Ron Morier’s RCMP report on Edwin Fuhr’s UFO sighting near Langenburg in 1974.

I want to believe 

Fuhr is convinced what he saw that day was extraterrestrial.

Over the years, he has taken an interest in the subject of UFOs, and is well read on the subject. He refers to government cover-ups, Roswell and popular theories that aliens may be concerned about global conflicts on Earth.

No scientific investigation has ever found evidence that alien craft landed at Fuhr’s farm. There were no other witness reports. The truth comes down to Fuhr.

Edwin Fuhr, a retired farmer, recalls his a close encounter with several UFOs while swathing in his field in the 1970s. His story made international news and is one of the most documented UFO cases in history Canadian history. Fuhr stands in a field near where the encounter was.

Whether his recent YouTube interview, or footage from the old VHS interview in 1988, most of the details are remarkably similar. The fact he has kept it so consistent over the years is one of things that makes it so compelling for Winnipeg-based science writer Chris Rutkowski.

“You’d think that after all these years he might want to embellish the story, but he tends to tell the same story over and over again. The story as of late hasn’t developed into glowing green goo and aliens with almond-shaped eyes and that type of thing,” says Rutkowski, who publishes an annual survey on UFO reports in Canada. “It’s a very straight story, so it’s compelling to think that this probably really did happen as he describes it.” 

But is it proof enough?

A more recent photo of Ron Morier, who now resides in Winnipeg, Man.

(Photo courtesy Ron Morier)

“I guess the assumption is if it’s not ours, whose is it? But on the other hand we just don’t have the proof to make that quantum jump to say this definitely was proof of alien visitation in Langenburg,” says Rutkowski.

The story was compelling enough to be taken seriously by the federal government. Grass and soil samples were sent to the upper atmosphere research branch of the National Research Council, but no conclusions could ever be drawn.

The scientists were intrigued by a black substance found as a precipitate, especially in a sample that was taken from one of the rings that appeared to be burned. The sample was sent to Simon Fraser University for x-ray fluorescence analysis, but no conclusions could be drawn. 

Fuhr doesn’t really care who believes or doesn’t. People have been telling him since the 1970s that it was all in his head.

“I had a guy from Quebec come out, and he figures I was smoking pot,” says Fuhr. 

But to this day, Morier still believes Fuhr is being honest about what he saw.

“Why would he just out of the blue make this up?’” says the former officer.

The media ran with Morier’s findings, and in some cases used them as confirmation that flying saucers had landed. A headline from a newspaper in Newfoundland read “RCMP officer convinced UFOs were real.”

While Morier believes Fuhr to be truthful, he doesn’t believe in UFOs or little green men. The uncertainty of the Langenburg incident frustrated Morier because as intriguing as it was, it didn’t yield any answers.

“It bugged me a little that it didn’t confirm or not confirm that they do exist,” he says. “I still don’t know.”

Morier notices Fuhr seems more outspoken in his interviews now than the quiet farmer he knew.  He commends him for sticking to his story.

“Good on him. He’ll never know and we’ll never know I guess,” says Morier.

“But boy that would’ve been quite an experience that day to see what he saw.”

mmelnychuk@postmedia.com

{ http://theprovince.com/ }

Elon Musk's Plans Include Passenger Rocket to Anywhere on Earth

From here to everywhere in an hour or less.

By Alasdair Wilkins

 

SpaceX founder Elon Musk revealed Friday that, his company’s name notwithstanding, his rockets can do more than just explore space. They could also be the future of travel here on Earth.

Building on an idea he first mused about at last year’s International Astronautical Congress, Musk presented a video at this year’s IAC in Adelaide, Australia, detailing how the company’s next-generation rocket could take passengers anywhere on Earth in less than an hour, with most places reachable in just 25 minutes to a half-hour.

“If you build a ship that’s capable of going to Mars, what if you take that same ship and go from one place to another on Earth?” Musk asked as he set up the video. The idea is an evolution of something Musk briefly considered during his 2016 IAC presentation in Guadalajara, Mexico, in which he suggested SpaceX’s rockets could be used for super-fast cargo delivery between cities.

Never one to go with the conservative option, Musk opted for a much grander proposal by including passengers. Based on the video, the idea is similar to what Musk outlined last year, in which the rockets launch from a floating ferry some miles offshore from the city itself. The rocket would reach a top speed of about 18,000 miles per hour.

“The great thing about going to space is there’s no friction, so once you’re out of the atmosphere it’s smooth as silk,” said Musk, promising no turbulence during the outer space portion of the flight.

How smooth the takeoff and landing would be, however — or indeed how much a 25-minute connection between New York and Shanghai would cost — were left unanswered. Musk did not indicate any timeline for the scheme, or indeed any reason to think a timeline exists at all in any serious sense.

Still, the simple fact the video exists suggests Musk is thinking seriously about what his rockets can do while only barely leaving Earth at all.

See also:

• Elon Musk Reveals SpaceX’s First Mars Mission, and When It Will Happen

• Elon Musk Named “Moon Base Alpha” After Grooviest Sci-Fi Show Ever

• Elon Musk on Going to Mars: “We Have Figured Out How to Pay for It”

{https://www.inverse.com/ }

Elon Musk Reveals SpaceX's First Mars Mission, and When It Will Happen

The plan is coming together, and quickly.

By Alasdair Wilkins

“That’s not a typo,” SpaceX founder Elon Musk said Friday at the International Astronautical Congress as the date for the company’s first Mars missions flashed up on the big screen. “Although it is aspirational.”

The date in question is 2022, just five short years from now. That’s the target Musk has set for himself and SpaceX to build the first two cargo ships to reach Mars. According to his presentation at this year’s IAC in Adelaide, Australia, the plan is to start building the first of these next-generation rockets in mid-2018.

“I feel fairly confident that we can complete the ship and prepare the ship for launch in about five years,” he said. “Five years feels like a long time to me.”

These two uncrewed cargo runs in 2022 would set up four more missions in 2024, two of which would be crewed. Musk revealed the specific purposes for these early Mars missions.

“The goal of these initial missions is to find the best source of water,” he said. “That’s the first mission. The second mission is to build the propellant plant.”

This plant would be a massive rocket refueling station, one in which Martian water, ice, and carbon dioxide can be recombined to create methane and liquid oxygen, the twin propellants needed for the rockets to return to Earth for their next use.

The early, uncrewed missions would deliver the raw materials needed to build the propellant plant, including all the solar panels needed to power it and the life support needed to keep the astronauts alive.

2022 and 2024 are important dates for SpaceX to hit because they would let the company make those years Earth-Mars rendezvous — points at which the planetsare close enough together in their respective orbits to facilitate an economical journey between the worlds.

From there, Musk indicated the plan would be to start gradually building Mars City and terraforming the planet, “making it really a nice place to be.”

See also:

• Elon Musk Named ‘Moon Base Alpha’ After Grooviest Sci-Fi Show Ever

• Elon Musk’s Plans Include Passenger Rocket to Anywhere on Earth

• Elon Musk on Going to Mars: ‘We Have Figured Out How to Pay for It’

You may want to rub your eyes both before AND after you watch this new ad from a Japanese milk company. It shows a UFO with an oddly familiar black-on-white paint job hovering over a field filled with children holding glasses. As they raise them skyward, the UFO’s bottom opens to reveal a giant cow’s nipple that squirts what is allegedly milk into the glasses to the delight of the kids. What bizarre future might this ad be preparing the Japanese — and possibly the world — for?

I knew you’d have to see it to believe it. Do you believe it?

According to Sora News 24, the company behind the ad is Rakunoh Mother’s, a Japanese milk producer, which in itself is an anomaly since Asians are more lactose intolerant than most other ethnic groups. Can an Uddered Flying Object convince them to ignore the revulsion and gulp gallons of milk like their American counterparts? Rakunoh Mother’s seems to think so, but comments on Japanese social media sites may indicate otherwise.

“This is madness!”
“Shouldn’t that be pixelated when it appears onscreen?”
“That’s one long nipple right there.”
“I never knew this sort of thing happened in Kumamoto.”
“My heart is pure so all I see is the fact that the milk is freshly squeezed.”

My heart is pure? What does that have to do with drinking alien milk? Or is it? Apparently the response to the first commercial was so confusing that Rakunoh Mother’s felt the need to make a second one showing how the ship acquired the milk.

Well, that was less creepy … not! Just when we’re starting to get used to the ideas of alien abductions, cattle mutilations and flying saucers stealing our water, fuel, precious metals and volcanic power, now we have to consider they’re absconding with our milk too? Can’t beings from the Taurus constellation find their own cows?

Is there a sinister motive behind these commercials or is this just the work of a really clever ad company? Perhaps an earlier commercial about how milk can build strong bones for even non-humans can answer this question.

That one isn’t as creepy but is it convincing? Is Japan covertly preparing its citizens for an announcement about alien contact? Or are ETs capitalists too and these commercials are their way to prepare us to buy back what they’re taking from us? Perhaps they’re more human than we think.

{ http://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }

UFO caught on tape over Saddle Brook, New Jersey 28-Sep-2017

This bright unidentified flying object was recorded over Saddle Brook, New Jersey on 28th September 2017.

Witness report: 

Bright light hovering near the moon, unblinking, stationary, then moved up until it disappeared. I was driving home when I noticed a stationary light in the sky. It was pretty bright, and unblinking. I wasn’t sure if it was a ufo but I decided to get it on camera anyway, because there was a dark object about 15 minutes earlier that could have been a lone cloud, maybe? But the clouds have been weird the past couple of days and I thought maybe it was a weird weather phenomenon, and I remembered seeing a random rainbow in the clouds yesterday that eventually disappeared…anyway, my suspicions about ufo activity was high so I decided to video this light. I had a hard time keeping my phone still (since I was driving and I know, I’m a bad girl), I tried zooming in and zooming out, showing its size relative to the moon, and all of a sudden I noticed it changed position in the sky and I watched (intermittenly) as it rose above the moon before disappearing entirely.

Author (source: MUFON)

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

UFO flying over El Salvador 28-Sep-2017

This UFO video of a bright object or orb flying across the night sky was filmed over El Salvador, the smallest and the most densely populated country in Central America. This happened on 28th September 2017.

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

Triangle formation in the sky above France 20-Sep-2017

This interesting footage of a triangular formation was filmed in the sky above France This happened on 20th September 2017.

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

Artificial Intelligence Is Our Future. But Will It Save Or Destroy Humanity?

by Patrick Caughill

 

Getty Images

Choosing Sides

If tech experts are to be believed, artificial intelligence (AI) has the potential to transform the world. But those same experts don’t agree on what kind of effect that transformation will have on the average person. Some believe that humans will be much better off in the hands of advanced AI systems, while others think it will lead to our inevitable downfall.

How could a single technology evoke such vastly different responses from people within the tech community?

Artificial intelligence is software built to learn or problem solve — processes typically performed in the human brain. Digital assistants like Amazon’s Alexa and Apple’s Siri , along with Tesla’s Autopilot, are all powered by AI. Some forms of AI can even create visual art or write songs.

There’s little question that AI has the potential to be revolutionary. Automation could transform the way we work by replacing humans with machines and software. Further developments in the area of self-driving cars are poised to make driving a thing of the past. Artificially intelligent shopping assistants could even change the way we shop. Humans have always controlled these aspects of our lives, so it makes sense to be a bit wary of letting an artificial system take over.

Image credit: Silver Blue/Flickr

The Lay Of The Land

AI is fast becoming a major economic force. According to a paper from the McKinsey Global Institute Study reported by Forbes, in 2016 alone, between $8 billion and $12 billion was invested in the development of AI worldwide. A report from analysts with Goldstein Research predicts that, by 2023, AI will be a $14 billion industry.

KR Sanjiv, chief technology officer at Wipro, believes that companies in fields as disparate as healthcare and finance are investing so much in AI so quickly because they fear being left behind. “So as with all things strange and new, the prevailing wisdom is that the risk of being left behind is far greater, and far grimmer, than the benefits of playing it safe,” he wrote in an op-ed published in Tech Crunch last year.

Games provide a useful window into the increasing sophistication of AI. Case in point, developers such as Google’s DeepMind and Elon Musk’s OpenAI have been using games to teach AI systems how to learn. So far, these systems have bested the world’s greatest players of the ancient strategy game Go, and even more complex games like Super Smash Bros and DOTA 2.

On the surface, these victories may sound incremental and minor — AI that can play Go can’t navigate a self-driving car, after all. But on a deeper level, these developments are indicative of the more sophisticated AI systems of the future. Through these games, AI become capable of complex decision-making that could one day translate into real-world tasks. Software that can play infinitely complex games like Starcraft, could, with a lot more research and development, autonomously perform surgeries or process multi-step voice commands.

When this happens, AI will become incredibly sophisticated. And this is where the worrying starts.

AI Anxiety

Wariness surrounding powerful technological advances is not novel. Various science fiction stories, from The Matrix to I, Robot, have exploited viewers’ anxiety around AI. Many such plots center around a concept called “the Singularity,” the moment in which AIs become more intelligent than their human creators. The scenarios differ, but they often end with the total eradication of the human race, or with machine overlords subjugating people.

Several world-renowned sciences and tech experts have been vocal about their fears of AI. Theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking famously worries that advanced AI will take over the world and end the human race. If robots become smarter than humans, his logic goes, the machines would be able to create unimaginable weapons and manipulate human leaders with ease. “It would take off on its own, and redesign itself at an ever-increasing rate,” he told the BBC in 2014. “Humans, who are limited by slow biological evolution, couldn’t compete, and would be superseded.”

Elon Musk, the futurist CEO of ventures such as Tesla and SpaceX, echoes those sentiments, calling AI “…a fundamental risk to the existence of human civilization,” at the 2017 National Governors Association Summer Meeting.

Neither Musk nor Hawking believe that developers should avoid the development of AI, but they agree that government regulation should ensure the tech does not go rogue. “Normally, the way regulations are set up is a whole bunch of bad things happen, there’s a public outcry, and after many years, a regulatory agency is set up to regulate that industry,” Musk said during the same NGA talk. “it takes forever. That, in the past, has been bad, but not something which represented a fundamental risk to the existence of civilization.”

Hawking believes that a global governing body needs to regulate the development of AI to prevent a particular nation from becoming superior. Russian President Vladimir Putin recently stoked this fear at a meeting with Russian students in early September, when he said, “The one who becomes the leader in this sphere will be the ruler of the world.” These comments further emboldened Musk’s position — he tweeted that the race for AI superiority is the “most likely cause of WW3.”

Musk has taken steps to combat this perceived threat. He, along with startup guru Sam Altman, co-founded the non-profit OpenAI in order to guide AI development towards innovations that benefit all of humanity. According to the company’s mission statement: “By being at the forefront of the field, we can influence the conditions under which AGI is created.” Musk also founded a company called Neuralink intended to create a brain-computer interface. Linking the brain to a computer would, in theory, augment the brain’s processing power to keep pace with AI systems.

Other predictions are less optimistic. Seth Shostak, the senior astronomer at SETI believes that AI will succeed humans as the most intelligent entities on the planet. “The first generation [of AI] is just going to do what you tell them; however, by the third generation, then they will have their own agenda,” Shostak said in an interview with Futurism.

However, Shostak doesn’t believe sophisticated AI will end up enslaving the human race — instead, he predicts, humans will simply become immaterial to these hyper-intelligent machines. Shostak thinks that these machines will exist on an intellectual plane so far above humans that, at worst, we will be nothing more than a tolerable nuisance.

Image source: Max Pixel

Fear Not

Not everyone believes the rise of AI will be detrimental to humans; some are convinced that the technology has the potential to make our lives better. “The so-called control problem that Elon is worried about isn’t something that people should feel is imminent. We shouldn’t panic about it,” Microsoft founder and philanthropist Bill Gates recently told the Wall Street Journal. Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg went even further during a Facebook Live broadcast back in July, saying that Musk’s comments were “pretty irresponsible.” Zuckerberg is optimistic about what AI will enable us to accomplish and thinks that these unsubstantiated doomsday scenarios are nothing more than fear-mongering.

Some experts predict that AI could enhance our humanity. In 2010, Swiss neuroscientist Pascal Kaufmann founded Starmind, a company that plans to use self-learning algorithms to create a “superorganism” made of thousands of experts’ brains. “A lot of AI alarmists do not actually work in AI. [Their] fear goes back to that incorrect correlation between how computers work and how the brain functions,” Kaufmann told Futurism.

Kaufmann believes that this basic lack of understanding leads to predictions that may make good movies, but do not say anything about our future reality. “When we start comparing how the brain works to how computers work, we immediately go off track in tackling the principles of the brain,” he said. “We must first understand the concepts of how the brain works and then we can apply that knowledge to AI development.” Better understanding of our own brains would not only lead to AI sophisticated enough to rival human intelligence, but also to better brain-computer interfaces to enable a dialogue between the two.

To Kaufmann, AI, like many technological advances that came before, isn’t without risk. “There are dangers which come with the creation of such powerful and omniscient technology, just as there are dangers with anything that is powerful. This does not mean we should assume the worst and make potentially detrimental decisions now based on that fear,” he said.

Experts expressed similar concerns about quantum computers, and about lasers and nuclear weapons—applications for that technology can be both harmful and helpful.

Definite Disrupter

Predicting the future is a delicate game. We can only rely on our predictions of what we already have, and yet it’s impossible to rule anything out.

We don’t yet know whether AI will usher in a golden age of human existence, or if it will all end in the destruction of everything humans cherish. What is clear, though, is that thanks to AI, the world of the future could bear little resemblance to the one we inhabit today.

References: 

• Forbes,
• Business Insider, 
• CNBC

{ https://futurism.com/ }

False encounters: Four of the most outrageous alien hoaxes ever – or were they REAL?

BARELY a week goes by without news of another UFO sighting or alien interaction spreading like wildfire across the internet.

By George Mills 

Often, the resulting videos and pictures are immediately discredited or easily explained – but on rare occasions, believers are treated to a genuine mystery.

{ http://www.dailystar.co.uk/ }

'My family were abducted by aliens and I can prove it!' Woman blasted as she makes bold claim on This Morning

Kathleen Marden believes her auntie and uncle encountered a UFO nearly 60 years ago

BY HAYLEY MINN  

Betty and Barney Hill were thrust into the spotlight after they reported they were abducted and experimented on by alien beings in 1961.

And now, their niece Kathleen Marden has spoken out about their extraterrestrial encounter, insisting they were telling the truth.

Speaking on This Morning , she claimed neither her auntie or uncle believed in aliens until their holiday in Montreal where they saw a UFO.

She told Holly Willoughby and Phillip Schofield: "They were driving through Hampshire in 1961, when they had a close encounter with a UFO.

"Barney got out of the car with binoculars and looked, and according to the airforce report, they observed a craft that was approximately 100ft above them.

READ MORE

• This Morning forced to cut to the break as Holly and Phil collapse into fit of laughter after couple claim they are having orgasm LIVE on air

"It was very large, as large as a dinner plate at arms length, and was observed by a dozen people as well as them.

"They said it was a bonafide sighting, not just a blip."

Kathleen went on to explain how her uncle described "figures standing behind the windows on the craft, dressed in shiny uniforms, and somehow not human."

She said: "Barney believed he saw a cap on some of the heads, when they turned sideways, something seemed to be protruding from the head area.

A red beam of light then came, and Barney ran to the car shouting, 'We need to get out of here!' There was then a loud sound, and then woke up and realised they'd lost two hours of time.

"Barney believed there was a plan for them, and they jumped in the car, raced down the highway from this craft, and moved over the vehicle.

"Betty looked up, expecting to see a light but looked up at darkness.

"The car was vibrating, and they woke up and then had very little memory of the interim, other than encountering a road block and a fiery orb."

READ MORE

• Holly Willoughby and Phillip Schofield in hysterics over cringey gaffe that leaves Alexander Armstrong red-faced on This Morning

Kathleen continued to claim the biggest evidence they'd been involved in an alien abduction came when they got home.

Betty's dress was torn in several places, but she put it in her wardrobe knowing she'd wash it and fix it at a later date.

However, when she went to take it out again, there was a "pink powder on all the areas she'd been touched".

Cynical This Morning viewers were quick to accuse Kathleen of lying about her family's alien abduction.

One said: "This woman is crazy. She's reading this!"

Another blasted: "This woman is nuts ...pink powder bulls**t!!"

A third, wondering why aliens never go anywhere but the States, quipped: "Seems aliens are a bit xenophobic and racist... they always visit USA."

*This Morning continues on ITV1 weekdays at 10.30am

{ http://www.mirror.co.uk/ }

Patient Seventeen Trailer Exposes the Truth Behind Alien Abductions

KEVIN BURWICK

Doctor Roger Lier is a polarizing figure in the world of UFO enthusiasts and the new mystery/documentary, Patient Seventeen, seeks to provide more information about Lier and his beliefs. Roger Leir claims to be a leading surgeon that removes nanotechnology from human beings that were placed in them by aliens from another world and Patient Seventeen looks to verify the authenticity of Leir's claims through the thought provoking documentary. The real-life Patient Seventeen is a man from Southern California in his forties and he claims that he was visited by aliens when he was a child. Leir recently put him under the knife to remove a metallic object from his calf, which he believes was put there by extraterrestrial beings. The official synopsis for the documentary reads.

"Meet a surgeon who claims to remove highly advanced implants, nanotechnology microchips imbedded by aliens, non-humans monitoring our earth. Discover the world of abductions, scalar wave transmissions, and a program to study or manipulate the human race. Armed with a patient, a scalpel, black lights and a stud finder; we seek to verify the authenticity of this alleged Off-World Implant Technology."

Filmmaker Jeremy Kenyon Locker Corbell aims to find the truth in Leir's work and interviews him and Patient Seventeen at length throughout the course of the unsettling movie that is sure to raise a few eyebrows. Patient Seventeen is the latest movie in a series that Corbell calls his "investigative film series" through his Extraordinary Beliefs productions.

A podiatrist by training, from the late 1980s Roger Leir became increasingly involved with his local branch of the Mutual UFO Network (MUFON). Attending one of its conferences in 1995, he was presented with several foot X-rays from a woman who believed that she had been abducted by aliens. Despite Leir's skepticism, the scans did indicate that there was something in her big toe, and to satisfy his curiosity he offered to operate on her, free of charge. On August 19th, 1995 he extracted two very small foreign objects from the patient, each one metallic in appearance. A second patient underwent surgery that same day for an object about the size of a watermelon seed, between his thumb and index finger.

By the late 1990s, Leir's findings had established him as a prominent, though controversial, spokesperson for the alien abduction and UFO communities. The Aliens and the Scalpel, detailing his experiences with "implant" surgery, was published in 1999, followed by Casebook: Alien Implants. He made appearances in various television documentaries, including the History Channel's UFO Hunters, and attended conferences in more than 40 countries. In 2003, he travelled to Varginha, Brazil, to conduct his own research into the alleged crash of an alien craft there seven years previously, an event dubbed "the Brazilian Roswell." The investigation formed the basis of his final book, UFO Crash in Brazil.

Doctor Roger Leir died in 2014 at the age of 79 and Patient Seventeen aims to dive into his studies that many believe to be completely fabricated. Discover the world of alien abductions in the new trailer from The Orchard's Patient Seventeen. Armed with a patient, a scalpel, black lights and a stud finder; director Jeremy Kenyon Lockyer Corbell seeks to verify the authenticity of alleged Off-World Implant Technology in this gripping documentary available to own October 10th, and On Demand October 31st. You can check out the trailer courtesy of The Orchard Movies YouTube channel below.

Topics: Patient Seventeen

{ http://movieweb.com/ }

Famous alien autopsy film confession reignites debate

The man responsible for making what has become one of the most famous alleged alien films in the world recently spoke the the UK’s Metro News, admitting that he had created the video. He says he made it as a joke, but he regrets that it has fooled so many people. One of the men who paid for the creation of the film told the Daily Express that although the film is fake, it was based off of real footage. However, there are many reasons to doubt this account.

What has come to be known as the “Alien Autopsy” in UFO circles was first made famous in a TV documentary in 1995.  The show was called Alien Autopsy – Fact or Fiction, produced by Robert Kiviat in 1995 and hosted by Star Trek’s Jonathan Frakes.

The film was purportedly of an alien that was recovered at the famous alleged crash of an extraterrestrial spacecraft outside of Roswell, New Mexico in 1947. However, it was quickly picked apart and was found to be fake. Still, the filmmakers purportedly made millions.

The movie was owned by Ray Santilli and Gary Shoefield. To defend their participation in the hoax, Santilli claimed that they really were given a piece of film of the alien autopsy by a mysterious cameraman who they say they confirmed was a US Air Force cameraman in 1947. They claim the film had deteriorated, so they hired people to make a recreation.

Spyros Melaris told Metro News he was the guy hired to make the film, but he says the whole thing came from his imagination, not any mysterious footage.

A recent article in Metro News reads, “Spyros Melaris reveals in a new one-man West End show that the film claiming to show an alien body being examined in 1947 was actually shot in a north London flat.”

From left: Gary Shoefield, Philip Mantle, Ray Santilli.

(Credit: Philip Mantle)

Melaris says he hired sculptor John Humphreys, a special effects expert, who among other shows, has worked on Dr. Who. Humphreys created the aliens, and for the innards, they obtained cow and lamb organs from a local butcher.

To further fool people, Melaris says they spliced their footage into real 1947 newsreel to look more authentic.

As for Humphreys, he has also come forward regarding his involvement. UK UFO researcher, and frequent contributor to OpenMinds.tv, Philip Mantle has been investigating the Alien Autopsy for years, and has corresponded with Humphreys.

Humphreys also, ironically, worked on a movie about Sheffield and Santilli’s creation of the hoaxed film. It generally followed Santilli’s claim that they had seen real footage and tried to create it. The movie started comedy team Anthony McPartlin and Declan Donnelly, known as Ant and Dec. At the end of the movie, after the two had been exposed as hoaxers, they receive the “real” footage, but it was too late.

John Humphreys creating the alien prop for the movie.

(Credit: Philip Mantle)

This “real” footage was grainy black and white film, and sure enough, rumors started that the footage used in the movie was the real footage Santilli had seen. This rumor was supposedly given credence by Santilli himself. When confronted, he told Mantle that he could not talk about it, adding to the mystery.

Alien Autopsy movie poster.

(Credit: Warner Bros.)

Humphreys was not so shy. He told Mantle that he had created the props for the entire movie, including the new black and white film at the end.

“For me this ends the debate,” writes Mantle. “Humphreys has no reason to take credit for something he did not do. The evasiveness of Santilli and [director Johnny] Campbell also speaks volumes. As far as I’m concerned the short black & white sequence at the end of the ‘Alien Autopsy’ feature movie is not the real deal and is simply a cinematic special effect made by the movie company and John Humphreys.”

But the story does not end there. As recently as today, the Daily Express released an exclusive interview with Santilli who stands by his claim that the real footage exists. In fact, he provided an image that allegedly shows a piece of the real film. However, he still will not reveal the name of the man who provided him the film.

“I refute Spyros Melaris’s version of his involvement in Alien Autopsy,” Santilli told the Daily Express. “If anything Spyros was part of a team. He felt there should been more acknowledgement for his work or the artistic side.”

Gareth Watson, an actor who played a doctor in the fake video, says he was also lead to believe there was real film footage and he saw it.

However, he says, “The original footage was of very poor quality to the point I could have been looking at the yeti.”

Alien Autopsy image recently provide to the Daily Express. This is supposedly part of the real footage provided to Santilli.

(Credit: Ray Santilli)

If Watson is right, and the footage is of such poor quality, how could they have recreated it?

At one point, years ago, our organization was offered the opportunity to examine a piece of the “real” film, but we were told we could not be proved a piece that had an image of the alien or anything else from the autopsy footage. But it was allegedly a piece from the reel. Without being able to prove that, it was not worth our time.

But let’s take a closer look at the image Santilli provided the Daily Express. Scott Brando runs ufoofinterest.org. He is also active on social media and carefully examines UFO and alien claims. He tweeted me something he noticed, which is that the image Santilli provided the Daily Express looks like a negative of a still from the hoaxed alien autopsy video. Of course it is also scuffed up to look old. He provided the image below, and it does look spot on.

Comparison made by Scott Brando/UFOofinterest.org

So this once again seems to be Santilli up to his old tricks. Why doesn’t he give up? Maybe he loves the attention and is still making money. He claims he may release the entire film at some point in the future, but I would guess it would need to involve a lot of money and that it will be inconclusive in the end.

“I would like to say now that there is a big part of me that feels remorse. I underestimated the response,” Maleris told Metro News. “The reality is that everybody in the UFO community took this film as the smoking gun, proof of UFOs and aliens.”

Well, not everyone. Most UFO researchers didn’t buy it, but many UFO enthusiasts have. Either way, many interested in the UFO phenomenon will find it hard to forgive Melaris as the search for the smoking gun continues. I’de be willing to wager that if a smoking gun is found, it is not Santilli who has it.

{ http://www.openminds.tv/ }

Lost city of Alexander the Great is found in Iraq using US spy footage of the area captured in the 1960s

• The Iraqi settlement, Qalatga Darband, was surveyed using drone footage 
• It is on the route Alexander the Great took to attack Darius III of Persia in 331 BC
• The city he founded was believed to be a meeting point between East and West
• Using drone footage, experts found buildings hidden beneath fields of crops
• The city has an abundance of terracotta roof tiles and Greek and Roman statues 

By Phoebe Weston For Mailonline

Alexander the Great's 'lost city' was a magical place where people drank wine and naked philosophers imparted wisdom, ancient accounts claim.

Now, nearly 2,000 years after the great warrior's death, archaeologists believe the city may have finally been discovered in Iraq.

Experts first noticed ancient remains in the Iraqi settlement, known as Qalatga Darband, after looking at declassified American spy footage from the 1960s.

The images were made public in 1996 but, due to political instability, archaeologists were unable to explore the site properly for years.

Now, using more recent drone footage and on-site work, researchers have established there was a city during the first and second centuries BC, which had strong Greek and Roman influences. 

They believe Alexander the Great founded it in 331 BC, and later settled in the city with 3,000 veterans of his campaigns.

Alexander the Great's 'lost city' was a magical place where people drank wine and naked philosophers imparted wisdom, ancient accounts claim.

Now, nearly 2,000 years after the great warrior's death, archaeologists believe the city may have finally been discovered in Iraq.

Experts first noticed ancient remains in the Iraqi settlement, known as Qalatga Darband, after looking at declassified American spy footage from the 1960s.

The images were made public in 1996 but, due to political instability, archaeologists were unable to explore the site properly for years.

Now, using more recent drone footage and on-site work, researchers have established there was a city during the first and second centuries BC, which had strong Greek and Roman influences. 

They believe Alexander the Great founded it in 331 BC, and later settled in the city with 3,000 veterans of his campaigns.

Scroll down for video

Nearly 2,000 years after Alexander the Great's death, archaeologists believe his 'lost city' has been found in Iraq's Qalatga Darband. Shown here is the Darband-i Rania pass from the northeast. The site of Qalatga Darband is the triangular land beyond the bridge on the right

WHO WAS ALEXANDER THE GREAT?

Alexander the Great is arguably one of history's most successful military commanders.

Undefeated in battle, he had carved out a vast empire stretching from Macedonia and Greece in Europe, to Persia, Egypt and even parts of northern India by the time of his death aged 32.

Only five barely intact accounts of his death at Babylon in 323 BCE survive to the present day.

None are from eyewitnesses and all conflict to varying degrees.

According to one account from the Roman era, Alexander died leaving his kingdom 'to the strongest' or 'most worthy' of his generals.

In another version, he died speechless in a coma, without making any plans for succession. 

Undefeated in battle, Alexander had carved out a vast empire stretching from Macedonia and Greece in Europe, to Persia, Egypt and even parts of northern India by the time of his death aged 32.

Researchers believe Qalatga Darband - which roughly translates from Kurdish as ‘castle of the mountain pass’ - is on the route Alexander of Macedon took to attack Darius III of Persia in 331 BC.

The city may have served as an important meeting point between East and West.

It is 6 miles (10km) south-east of Rania in Sulaimaniya province in Iraqi Kurdistan.

Researchers at the British Museum first explored the site using spy footage of the area from the 1960s.

An archaeological dig was not possible when Saddam Hussein controlled Iraq.

But more recently improved security has allowed the British Museum to explore the site as a way of training Iraqis to rescue areas damaged by Islamic State.

As well as on-site work, the Museum has also been able to capture its own drone footage of the area.

'We got coverage of all the site using the drone in the spring — analysing crop marks hasn't been done at all in Mesopotamian archaeology', lead archaeologist John MacGinnis told The Times.

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'It's early days, but we think it would have been a bustling city on a road from Iraq to Iran. 

'You can imagine people supplying wine to soldiers passing through', he said. 

'Where there are walls underground the wheat and barley don't grow so well, so there are colour differences in the crop growth'.

A graphic of what the 'lost city' would have looked like, with a temple, inner fort and wine press facilities. Farmers in the area had found remains of big buildings and a large fortified wall in the area

Researchers first noticed apparently ancient remains in the Iraqi settlement, known as Qalatga Darband (pictured) after looking at declassified American spy footage from the 1960s. However, an archaeological dig was not possible when Saddam Hussein controlled Iraq

From the excavation work, they discovered an abundance of terracotta roof tiles and Greek and Roman statues, suggesting the city's early residents were Alexander’s subjects.

Among the statues they found was a female figure believed to be Persephone, the Greek goddess of vegetation, and the other is believed to be Adonis, a symbol of fertility.

They also discovered a coin of Orodes II, who was king of the Parthian from 57 BC to 37 BC. 

On its western flank, the city was protected by a large fortification which ran from the river to the mountain.

It is situated on a large open site around 60 hectares (148 acres) large on a natural terrace.  

The 1960s Corona spy satellite footage showed a large square building, potentially believed to be a fort, according to aBritish Museum blog.   

More recently improved security has allowed the British Museum to explore the site as a way of training Iraqis to rescue areas damaged by Islamic State. The findings suggest, Qalatga Darband, may be on the route Alexander the Great took to attack Darius III of Persia in 331 BC

An abundance of terracotta roof tiles and Greek and Roman statues suggests the city, which now has a thriving wine trade, could have been created by Alexander. Statue of a nude male (left) which could possibly be Adonis and a Coin of Orodes II (right)

WHAT DID THEY DO?

There were rumours there was an ancient city at the site three years previously and farmers had found remains of big buildings and a large fortified wall.

Experts processed their drone footage and increased the colour contrasts to show rectangular buildings hidden beneath fields of crops.

An abundance of terracotta roof tiles and Greek and Roman statues also suggests the city, which now has a thriving wine trade, could have been created by Alexander.

They found two key statues - one a female figure believed to be Persephone, the Green goddess of vegetation, and the other is believed to be Adonis, a symbol of fertility. 

Farmers in the area had also found remains of big buildings and a large fortified wall.

There were a number of limestone blocks, believed to be wine or oil presses.

Meanwhile, excavation of a mound at the southern end of the site revealed a monument which could have been a temple for worship. 

Fieldwork started in the autumn of 2016 and is expected to last until 2020.

The project, which was part of the government-funded Iraq Emergency Heritage Management Training Programme, has been possible due to improved security in the country.

It is part of a £30 million ($40 million) government plan to help Iraq rebuild historical sites destroyed by Islamic State. 

This fund is designed to counter the destruction of heritage in cultural zones from Islamic State in Iraq and Syria.

The programme involves bringing groups of Iraqi archaeologists to London for eight weeks of training at the British Museum.

They are then sent to excavations in the field for six additional weeks where they learn how to do drone surveys and 3D scanning.  

Archaeologists at the British Museum have found a number of statues and coins and have established there was a city during the first and second centuries BC which had strong Greek and Roman influences

Archaeologists also found terracotta roof tiles, such as this antefix (pictured) - which suggested Greek and Roman influences 

Experts believe Qalatga Darband is on the route Alexander the Great (pictured) took to attack Darius III of Persia in 331 BC

Qalatga Darband is six miles (10km) south-east of Rania in Sulaimaniya province in Iraqi Kurdistan, just next to Dukan Lake. Using drone footage, experts have now established there was a city during the first and second centuries BC

CULTURAL PROTECTION FUND

The project, which was part of the government-funded Iraq Emergency Heritage Management Training Programme, has been possible due to improved security in the country.

It is part of a £30 million ($40 million) government plan to help Iraq rebuild historical sites destroyed by Islamic State. 

This fund is designed to counter the destruction of cultural heritage in cultural zones from Islamic State in Iraq and Syria.

The training programme involves bringing groups of Iraqi archaeologists to London for eight weeks of training at the British Museum.

They are then sent to excavations in the field for six additional weeks where thy will learn how to do drone surveys and 3D scanning.

The plan is to provide training for more than 50 Iraqis over a period of five years.

The team now want to find linguistic evidence to confirm their findings.

Earlier this year archaeologists believe they found the last will and testament of Alexander the Great - more than 2,000 years after his death.

A London-based expert David Grant claimed to have unearthed the Macedonian king's dying wishes in an ancient text that has been 'hiding in plain sight' for centuries.

The long-dismissed last will divulged Alexander's plans for the future of the Greek-Persian empire he ruled.

It also reveals his burial wishes and discloses the beneficiaries to his vast fortune and power.

Evidence for the lost will can be found in an ancient manuscript known as the 'Alexander Romance', a book of fables covering Alexander's mythical exploits.

Likely compiled during the century after Alexander's death, the fables contain invaluable historical fragments about Alexander's campaigns in the Persian Empire.

The project, which was part of the government-funded Iraq Emergency Heritage Management Training Programme, has been possible due to improved security in the country

{ http://www.dailymail.co.uk/ }

Flaming object streaking across the sky releases escape pod over Santiago, Chile?

The following footage of a strange moving flaming object was caught on camera by Francisco Garcia on September 25, 2017 19.30 local time over Santiago, Chile.

While the object streaking across the sky it suddenly releases something what looks like an escape pod sparking theories that it could be a UFO.

Others suggest that the flaming object is the effect of a large plane as it’s cuts through a cloud layer but I’m not sure if that is the case because it does move in a way that doesn’t suggest clouds.

So, the object is a UFO ejecting an escape pod or is it more likely that the object is something like a meteorite, space junk or a man-made reentry vehicle reentering the atmosphere and breaking up?

  

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

Laatste rustplaats van de eerste Europese maanorbiter ontdekt

Caroline Kraaijvanger

Elf jaar nadat deze op de maan insloeg, is de exacte locatie van de maanorbiter bekend.

De lichtflits die tijdens de inslag ontstond. Afbeelding: Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope Corporation.

Elf jaar geleden maakte de eerste maanorbiter van de Europese ruimtevaartorganisatie SMART-1 een geplande, maar allesbehalve zachte landing op onze natuurlijke satelliet. Met een snelheid van zo’n twee kilometer per seconde stuiterde deze over het maanoppervlak. “Er waren in die tijd geen andere ruimtevaartuigen in een baan rond de maan om close-upbeelden van de inslag te maken en het vinden van de exacte locatie was meer dan tien jaar een ‘cold case’,” vertelt SMART-1-projectonderzoeker Bernard Foing. Want hoewel de op aarde gevestigde Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope de lichtflits die tijdens de inslag ontstond, vastlegde, bleef de exacte locatie van de inslag in nevelen gehuld.

Gevonden!
Maar die cold case kan nu gesloten worden. Want Foing heeft de laatste rustplek van SMART-1 gevonden, zo vertelde hij tijdens het European Planetary Science Congress. “Voor deze Crash Scene Investigation gebruikten we alle mogelijke getuigen op aarde, observaties en computermodellen om de exacte plek te vinden en uiteindelijk vonden we de littekens.”

De littekens
Want de inslag is ook de maan niet in de koude kleren gaan zitten, zo blijkt. Op beelden van de inslagplek is een twintig meter lange en vier meter brede geul te zien die dwars door een oudere krater loopt. Aan het einde van de geul treffen we ejecta aan – maanmateriaal dat tijdens de inslag is weggeslingerd – dat richting het zuiden is uitgewaaierd. “De hoge resolutie-beelden van de Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiterlaten sneeuwwitte ejecta van het eerste contact (met de maan, red.) zien, vervolgens is door het ruimtevaartuig een kanaal dat van noord naar zuid loopt, uitgekerfd voor deze ging stuiteren.”

De laatste rustplaats van SMART-1.

Afbeelding: P Stooke / B Foing et al 2017 / NASA / GSFC / Arizona State University.

Als het aan Foing ligt, gaan we de littekens die SMART-1 heeft achterlaten nog eens van dichterbij bekijken. “De volgende stap is het sturen van een robotische onderzoeker die de resten van SMART-1 – het lichaam en de ‘vleugels’ bestaande uit zonnepanelen – gaat onderzoeken.”

Bronmateriaal:

"‘Crash Scene Investigation’ reveals resting place of SMART-1 impact" - European Planetary Science Congress
Afbeelding bovenaan dit artikel: P Stooke / B Foing et al 2017 / NASA / GSFC / Arizona State University

{ https://www.scientias.nl/ }

NASA Satellites Detect MASSIVE, 150-mile anomaly in Antarctica

A bizarre anomaly of around 250 km has been found in Antarctica thanks to satellite images provided by NASA.

A bizarre, new theory claims that a mysterious anomaly discovered beneath the ice in Antarctica may be a sort of secret base.

UFO hunters are convinced that not only did the Nazi’s built secret bases on the north and south pole but that there are several bases on Antarctica that were used not only by humans but by otherworldly visitors as well.

The massive Antarctica anomaly encompasses a distance of nearly 250 kilometers across and reaches a maximum depth of 850 meters below the surface.

The anomaly was discovered in an area known as Wilkes Land on Antarctica.

Speaking about the discovery, Secureteam10 says: ‘To this day, scientists have no idea or way to discover exactly what is buried deep under this thick ice shelf. This continent has been shrouded in a mystery of its own for years now.’

‘There is some evidence of this coming to light in recent years, with images purporting to show various entrances built into the side of mountains, with a saucer shape and at a very high altitude. This begs the question: how would you enter these entrances without something that could fly and was the same shape as the hole itself?’

You only need one such discovery, and a conspiracy is at hand.

Furthermore, it is believed that the US Navy led a mission to investigate such anomaly.

Operation Highjump was curiously terminated six months earlier than expected. An excerpt from February 19, 1947 describes Admiral Byrd’s arrival over the pole at 1000 hours:

We are crossing over the small mountain range and still proceeding northward as best as can be ascertained. Beyond the mountain range is what appears to be a valley with a small river or stream running through the center portion. There should be no green valley below! Something is definitely wrong and abnormal here! We should be over Ice and Snow! To the portside are great forests growing on the mountain slopes. Our navigation Instruments are still spinning, the gyroscope is oscillating back and forth!

The odd anomaly was first found by NASA satellites in 2006.

However, not everyone is willing to go with the conspiracy theory of secret bases located hundreds of meters below the Antarctican ice.

Others believe that the bizarre anomaly isn’t so bizarre after all, and that it is in fact the result of an asteroid impact twice the size of the one which exterminated the dinosaurs.

‘This Wilkes Land impact is much bigger than the impact that killed the dinosaurs, and probably would have caused catastrophic damage at the time,’ said Ralph von Frese, who was a professor of geological sciences at Ohio State University when he discovered the crater in 2006. All the environmental changes that would have resulted from the impact would have created a highly caustic environment that was really hard to endure. So it makes sense that a lot of life went extinct at that time.’

{ https://www.ancient-code.com/ }

SEARCHING FOR A CONNECTION AMONG NEVADA’S ALIEN LORE

{ https://lasvegasweekly.com/ }

Devils Tower encounters: UFO rendezvous brings enthusiasts

Lew Freedman 0

As part of the festivities at the recent UFO Rendezvous, James and Sally Neiman were some of the stars of the parade and costume contest.

• LEW FREEDMAN

Devils Tower, near Hulett, Wyoming, became the first national monument in 1906 and is also is the focal point of the UFO movie “Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

• LEW FREEDMAN

At the recent UFO Rendezvous in Hulett, Travis Walton told the story of his 1975 alien abduction.

• LEW FREEDMAN

Giraffe Girl, Lit Eimi, was an enthusiastic participant in the alien-themed parade at Hulett’s UFO Rendezvous near Devils Tower.

• LEW FREEDMAN

Jeanna Wiley, Chris Campbell, Sandra Mooney, and Kile Tarrant model their alien pants at the Devils Tower Visitors Center gift shop.

• LEW FREEDMAN

Jim Gruehl, operator of the Devils Tower Trading Post, offers 40 different alien items for sale.

• LEW FREEDMAN

Laurie Tucker, an organizer f the 1st Annual Devils Tower UFO Rendezvous, shows off her UFOs Wyoming license plate.

• LEW FREEDMAN

Christine Edwards was the winning entry in the mashed potato Devils Tower building contest.

LEW FREEDMAN

Just that morning as the first annual Devils Tower UFO Rendezvous revved up a few miles down the road, Jim Gruehl conducted inventory and counted 40 different alien items for sale at the Devils Tower Trading Post in Hulett.

Rubbery masks, socks, stickers, magnets, T-shirts, plush toys, feet-tall plastic green men, mugs, shot glasses and signs seemingly channelling messages from afar were in stock.

“Send More Tourists, The Last Ones Were Delicious,” read one sign. “Spaceship Parking Only,” was another

This may be the center of the universe for alien memorabilia. 

“It’s absolutely because of ‘Close Encounters,’” said store general manager Gruehl.

Devils Tower, the signature character in the movie “Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” owns the horizon in this eastern region of Wyoming, a unique monolith of symmetrical rock standing 5,112 feet above sea level .

It emanates the same magnetic attraction as it did 40 years ago when “Close Encounters” made its debut, and in 1906 when President Theodore Roosevelt designated it the first National Monument.

More than 500,000 accounted-for people visit each year along with an uncounted number of aliens.

Some of the gravitation was sparked by the Steven Spielberg movie released in 1977 and re-released for a 40th anniversary this month.

For a few days in mid-September, Planet Hulett, population 383, 

located in the shadow of Devils Tower, was transformed by true believers in unidentified flying objects, becoming the epicenter of  the ongoing search for intelligent life in the universe.

The Sept. 14-16 program was organized by Laurie Tucker and others and included lectures on “UFOs Are Real” and “Alien Abduction.”

Tucker, who owns vehicles with Wyoming license plates “C-UFO” and “UFOS,”  ensured the agenda featured a community parade with alien theme, a costume contest and a Devils Tower mashed potato sculpture contest. This was a tribute to a movie scene when a UFO-obsessed Richard Dryfuss shaped Devils Tower at the dinner table.

“I take it more seriously,” Tucker said of UFOs, “but I also have fun with it.”

Tucker said a tentative reach-out to Dreyfuss was aborted when she heard he commands $70,000 an appearance.

That’s a lot of mashed potatoes.

In another “Close Encounters” homage, the Main Street Civic Center played the 135-minute movie when the heavens did not cooperate and an outdoor show was rained out.

Frieda Dent, 93, ran the movie. She remembered filming in the 1970s and how some Hulett residents were extras in a panic scene as government officials cleared the Devils Tower area.

“Every time I see it, I see something different,” Dent said.

The locals’ attitude  seemed to be, “Hey, who are we to say there’s nobody else out there?”

Science or science

fiction

UFOs have long fascinated, perplexed, tweaked imaginations, been pshawed, or described as fabrications of the crazy.

The debut of American UFO consciousness, as well as Exhibit A of accusations of government conspiracy to hush up spaceships penetrating U.S. air space, basically dates to Roswell, N.M., in 1947.

A crashing flying saucer was reported in the July 8 edition of the Roswell Daily Record. The mysterious “flying disc” was taken into custody on a ranch by the U.S. military and soon after was identified as “a weather balloon.”

Seven decades later in Hulett, the weather balloon theory still didn’t fly. 

Scientists say the earth was formed 4.5 billion years ago. Since it presupposes a visiting alien culture would be more advanced technologically than humans, it was suggested aliens may have  checked out earth long ago with only mild interest and UFO sightings could be periodic reconnaissance follow-ups.

During a panel discussion it was noted many scientific ideas or inventions were dismissed as harebrained long before being proven.

When Columbus set off to sail the ocean blue in 1492, a large segment of the population still believed his ship was going to drop right off the edge of the flat earth.

How many people living in 1850 envisioned the jet plane, putting a man on the moon via rocket ship or the cell phone?

“I don’t think we can actually think of anything that’s impossible,” said astronomer Marc D’Antonio, whose presentation was titled, “The Real Science of E.T.”

Generally, in science fiction movies aliens are portrayed as looking quite different from the human race. They are either good guys who wish to make friends, such as in the 1982 “E.T-The Extraterrestrial,” or guys who want to annihilate everyone, such as in the 1996 “Independence Day.”

Speaker Richard Beckwith, former city attorney of Rock Springs, gave a talk titled “UFOs Are Real.”

“It’s not a belief system, it’s science,” Beckwith said. “If you can’t say what an object is, you can’t say what it is not. It’s a big universe.”

With such a massive universe, traveling across it for millions is an issue of relevance. In some films astronauts are placed in suspended animation for years as they hurtle towards destinations.

“Light speed is the speed limit of the universe,” D’Antonio said of the 186,000 miles-per-second measurement.

That could be an obstacle for reaching Sagittarius Dwarf Elliptical Galaxy – the nearest one – 662 trillion kilometers – from Earth.

D’Antonio said aliens may have, or humans might someday,  make “an end run around it.”

Have Americans been conditioned for that in “Star Trek” by “Beam me up, Scotty?”

“That’s exactly right,” D’Antonio said.

Speaking of movies, the new version of “Close Encounters” had been available for just a week, but when asked, about half of the 50 listeners said they had already seen it.

Many participants made pilgrimages to Devils Tower; one of them being Alejandro Rojos of Arizona, a first-time viewer who said, “It’s incredible.”

Rojas, a host for “Open Minds” radio, and a science and entertainment blogger for the Huffington Post, talked about “Close Encounters,” “E.T” and “Gremlins,” saying Spielberg was probably influenced by a highly publicized UFO incident in Kelly, Ky., in 1955.

Five adults and seven children in a farmhouse where no alcohol was drank attested they spent four hours employing gunfire to hold off little men from a spaceship that landed on the property.

The aliens were described as 2-to-4 feet tall with claw-like hands and later “little green men” was appended to the narrative. Subsequently, little green men became a somewhat standard look for aliens in the media.

Alien abduction

The movie “Fire In The Sky” differs considerably from Spielberg’s work.

Based on the book of the same name by Travis Walton, who was played in the 1993 film by D.B. Sweeney, it is purported to be the true story of a mind-bending alien abduction. Despite being a better-documented incident than others, Walton ever since has been derided as crazy.

“It never goes away,” said Walton as he began telling his spell-binding tale.

The Arizona logger, then 22, and six other crew members, were driving out of a national forest on Nov. 5, 1975. They halted when they saw a bright light through some trees and stopped to investigate. Walton, on the passenger side, jumped out of the truck.

“There was a clearly defined metallic disc outlined against the sky,” Walton said. “It was frightening and beautiful.”

Feeling entranced, Walton began walking toward the UFO as his co-workers yelled to get back in the vehicle.

A beam of light lasered Walton with “a stunning sort of force.” He was hurled 20 feet and knocked unconscious. Convinced Walton was dead, his friends fled to report to authorities.

Walton, weak and scared,  woke in a strange room surrounded by aliens. When left alone he made a run for it through the craft, but was re-captured. Eventually released, he staggered sobbing to a phone booth to call relatives.

Walton had been missing for five days and a widespread manhunt was conducted. Fellow loggers were interrogated and suspected of murder, though they passed polygraph, drug and sobriety exams. So did Walton.

Despite the passage of years, at times Walton teared up in his telling. No one has shaken his or the other loggers’ story, with multiple lie detector tests passed. But the incident is still called an elaborate hoax.

“I’m certain I’m not the only one,” Walton said of being abducted by aliens. “It’s very common for things we fear to become the butt of jokes.”

Walton was asked if he had emerged from merely being lost in the woods for five days having likewise lost 10 pounds from lack of food and water, whether he might not have been declared a hero for surviving.

 Walton paused. “It might have been completely different,” he said.

The Tower

Devils Tower is completely different. It cannot be mistaken for any other rock formation.

Square-like, with striations on its sides, its composition is molten rock. But its origins are as mysterious as UFOs.

Devils Tower is considered sacred in Cheyenne and Arapahoe oral traditions long predating “Close Encounters.” Visitors pause for reflection on benches at its base, necks craning upward, perhaps scanning for aliens still hovering from the movie.

A National Park Service ranger was asked how often she is quizzed about the movie laughed, and said, “Hundreds of times a day.”

Four female workers at the visitors center gift shop wore matching lycra alien-design pants and hobnobbed with a few-foot-tall alien modeling a Devils Tower zip-up sweatshirt. A new sticker reading, “Hello, my name is Lloyd” was slapped on his chest.

There were numerous Lloyd-lookalikes at the cold, but not rained-on Hulett parade. Jude Talaba of Boulder, Colo., like a ventriloquist held an alien in her arms, and said, “He was born just three days ago.” As in purchased.

Andy Bears drove a golf-cart disguised as a spaceship. Strapped in, he said, “I can’t get out.” Another alien abduction.

Ivy Flores manufactured a Devils Tower for her float consisting of a barrel covered in tinfoil and sprayed brown, with stones and foliage around the base, like the genuine article.

Smaller rocks and greens were  available when others shaped mashed potato Devils Towers like build-your-own sundaes.

Giraffe Girl, Lit Eimi, claimed to be an alien from “everywhere” who parachuted in. Her full giraffe outfit included a tail.

“I do like humans,” she said. “I love humans. All of them.”

Her age, Eimi said, is “Infinity. But they tell me I was born on July 18, 1991.”

James Neiman, 87, and wife Sally, 83, love to dress up and she ordered spiffy alien duds online. Yet the senior-citizen aliens lost out in the costume contest to a 9-year-old from the wrong movie.

In impeccable character imitation wearing a red, hooded sweatshirt, pushing a bicycle with an E.T. doll in a basket perched on the handlebars, Ben Harrison as Elliott won the crowd applause.

Devils Tower beckoned, but prepared to pedal skyward, Harrison could not gain l }ift-off because the chain busted on his bike during the parade.

{ http://www.codyenterprise.com/news/ }

Is this a REAL alien? Claims this is a 'genuine 1947 Roswell alien autopsy image'

EXCLUSIVE: This never before published image could show a real alien, according to the man behind the infamous "alien autopsy hoax".

By JON AUSTIN

Ray Santilli, 58, claims the grainy image is a still from "genuine original footage" he based the fake 1995 film on.

He says it is proof that the 1995 hoax film, which initially purported to show an autopsy being carried out on a dead alien recovered from the supposed Roswell UFO crash site in 1947, WAS based on REAL original footage which came to light.

Express.co.uk is publishing the image, which appears to show three slides from a real of film, for the first time after being sent it by Mr Santilli.

It is suggested the slides show a dead alien, recovered from the Roswell crash, on an operating table.

Speaking exclusively to Express.co.uk, Mr Santilli said the "alien autopsy" film he released in 1995 was not a hoax but a "restoration or recreation."

Mr Santilli, who is CEO of Orbital Media Group, said: "It was certainly not a hoax."

YouTube ALIEN AUTOPSY? Ray Santilli claims this is a still from a 1947 video of the "Roswell incident".

His 1995 release showed men in white coats apparently dissecting an alien, leaving UFO hunters convinced it was the smoking gun evidence they were looking for of the Roswell incident.

Truthers have been searching for proof since it was first claimed aliens crashed a flying saucer in the New Mexico desert near Roswell in July 1947 before the US Government covered up the evidence by storing the flying saucer and dead bodies in a secret military base.

It remains one of the world's biggest conspiracy theories, but to the disappointment of alien hunters the 1995 footage was later branded an elaborate hoax.

Asked if the image said to be from the original film depicted an alien, Mr Santilli initially said: "Of course it does."

YouTube

ALIEN AUTOPSY: A scene from the 1995 Ray Santilli film which was done using actors.

He then said: "Let me just be clear. I was not there in 1947, so I can't say for sure if it is an alien, but it is the original camera footage."

Mr Santilli said the original footage came to light in 1992 when he was asked by Polygram, now Universal, do do a comprehensive documentary about Elvis Presley.

He said: "We placed ads in local papers in the Eastern Seaboard of the US for anyone who had seen Elvis in 1954 who had still images or footage.

"We listed the hotels we would be in and said to meet us and we would look at it and buy for cash.

"We came away with the largest collection of Elvis assets brought together on one occasion, it was a remarkable achievement.

"During the trip a cameraman in Cleveland asked if we were interested in anything else.

"At the time we had no knowledge of Roswell or aliens, but he claimed he was the cameraman working for the army airforce and explained the whole alien autopsy story."

Mr Santilli said it tool two years of exchanges to reach an agreement to buy the footage.

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"By the time we got back it had deteriorated to a certain extent and we were not able to use it and recreated a fair section."

However, when the recreated footage was released, Mr Santilli and his team did not make it clear it was a remake of poor original footage, which there was no mention of.

He still maintains that was the right thing to do.

He said: "If you look at the great works of art - these works of art are over 200 or 300 years old and have been restored with people working on them many times.

"they have very little bearing on the original image.

"We did the same thing with the moving image of the alien autopsy."

He said that the recreated film was given to broadcasters "for free" who were told to "make a documentary and investigate the authenticity" of the footage.

Mr…reportedly made millions from the footage.

He did not confirm an amount, but said the money his team made was from "home video" rights to the documentaries that broadcasters then made.

He maintained it was the right way to go about it.

He said: "We were not there in 1947 so did not want to misrepresent the event. 

"It was not a hoax - Fox put up a million dollar reward for someone to come forward and say it was fabricated and it was 20 years before anyone spoke. 

"If it was a hoax someone would have come forward a lot sooner." 

Philip Mantle

Real alien? Ray Santilli in his office at the time he met with UFO researcher Philip Mantle.

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Let me just be clear. I was not there in 1947, so I can't say for sure if it is an alien, but it is the original camera footage.

Ray Santilli

So where is the original footage now?

He says he still has it, but some of the frames are missing.

He may release it in full at a later stage.

Mr Santilli also said full background checks were carried out on the cameraman, but he is not currently prepared to identify him, to kill off the doubters.

Mr Santilli contacted Express.co.uk after we reported on how Spyros Melaris, who was hired by Mr Santilli and film producer Gary Shoefield to make the black and white film, told the story of his involvement in a one-man West End show.

Mr Melaris revealed how the video was produced inside a north London flat, thousands of miles from the secret US base it was purporting to be in.

He explained how the "dead alien" in the 17-minute film, which has been viewed by millions of people across the globe, was created by a sculptor called John Humphreys, who was a special effects expert who had worked on the sets of Dr Who.

Mr Melaris said 1940s surgeons’ outfits and medical equipment were supplied from prop providers in the UK and USA.

The two pathologists were his brother and then girlfriend, he said.

Cow and lamb organs from a butcher were used to represent those of the extraterrestrial, and raspberry jelly was planned to be used for the brain, but it turned out to be "too dark".

The 16mm film was then spliced with an original Pathe newsreel of a 1947 college baseball match in Roswell to help convince experts from Kodak it could be real, he said.

Mr Santilli said: "I refute the Spyros Melaris's version of his involvement in Alien Autopsy. If anything Spyros was part of a team.

"He felt there should been more acknowledgement for his work or the artistic side.

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"We followed a plan, laid out by a sequence of events, they all did a remarkable job.

"There was original film, an original concept or story, and no one person was responsible for everything." 

Gareth Watson, who played the doctor observing the procedure in the fake footage, appears to confirm what Mr Santilli says about there being original footage that was recreated.

He took part in an email question and answer session with veteran UFO researcher Philip Mantle earlier this year.

Mr Watson said: "I was led to believe there was original footage of poor quality and this was 'a recreation', not a hoax.

"I was shown by Ray Santilli and Gary Shoefield a VHS copy of very grainy poor quality footage of an alleged alien autopsy.

"They decided it was not of commercial value in its current state hence the 'recreation'. 

"So I left with impression that what I saw was the original footage. I have no idea where that is now or what Ray Santilli did with it.

"The original footage was of very poor quality to the point I could have been looking at the yeti."

Mr Mantle does not believe any original footage existed, and it was all just a hoax.

He said: "There are however a few people who still believe that Ray Santilli is telling the truth and there was original authentic film. 

"One such gentleman in the UK is Colin Woolford. Colin and I disagree but we have remained on friendly terms."

Mr Woolford tours the country giving lectures at UFO conferences where he argues the original footage is likely to exist.

Related articles

•  Did 'secret team' of US officials really experiment on aliens?
•  Is alleged DIA leak that 'proves Roswell UFO crash' fact or fiction?
•  The shock sighting that sparked global UFO myth 70 years ago
•  Will truth about 'UFO crash' in Roswell desert 70 years ago ever come

{http://www.express.co.uk/ }

Unexplained lights moving together spotted hovering over volcano in country plagued by UFO activity

The video, taken in the foothills of San Miguel volcano in eastern El Salvador, show the lights seemingly moving together on their own

BY JOSEPH GOLDER

A series of unexplained lights have been filmed hovering over a volcano in Central America.

The video, taken in the foothills of San Miguel volcano in eastern El Salvador, show the lights seemingly moving together on their own.

Social media users first reported the sighting of the four large lights at the bottom of the famous volcano, which last erupted in 2013.

And some even believe it's proof that aliens exist after claiming they were UFOs .

There were reports that three of the lights disappeared all at once, after which the fourth appeared to enter the crater of the volcano.

The remaining light was said to move with a trajectory and ease 'unlike that of a helicopter or plane'.

READ MORE

• UFO fears after mysterious light formation of "flaming balls" seen flying through the night sky

But others have criticised these theroies.

John Jimenez dismissed the idea of the lights being UFOs and highlighted El Salvador’s high crime rate, saying: "People are delirious from so much crime."

The San Miguel volcano, also knowns as Volcan Chaparrastique, is 2,130 metres (6,990 feet) in height and last erupted on December 29, 2013.

READ MORE

• 'Hovering black blob' UFOs spotted hovering in the sky - leaving experts totally baffled

Last year, residents in El Salvador were baffled after they heard 'strange noises' in the sky that lasted three hours.

Reports of odd sounds in San Salvador, the capital, sparked a huge debate over whether it was the work of aliens.

A recent video also appeared to show an unidentified flying object near the active volcano of Popocatepetl in Mexico.

In 2015, a horse-shaped 'UFO' was apparently spotted next to an erupting volcano in Mexico.

In footage, a dark object, which appears to have two legs, is seen suddenly appearing out of nowhere as Volcano Colima spews out plumes of smoke.

Captured on webcam and then shared on Twitter, the unidentified flying object is pictured close to the volcano before suddenly disappearing.

{ http://www.mirror.co.uk/ }

An interview with the author of UFOs Today – 70 Years of Lies, Misinformation and Government Cover-Up

Posted by: Philip Mantle 

The UFO book that seems to be gathering interest and momentum at the moment is ‘UFOs TODAY – 70 Years of Lies, Misinformation and Government Cover-Up’ so I have taken this opportunity to interview the book’s author, Irena Scott PhD.  2017 will see the 70th anniversary of flying saucers and debate has raged on ever since and there seems no sign of it stopping anytime soon.

PM: Please tell us something about your background. Who is Irena Scott PhD?

I have a PhD, have had a professorship and have worked in scientific research for most of my life. My life began on an Ohio farm. We lived under quite primitive conditions, such as farming with horses. This background enables me to consider things from both a heartland farmer and a scientific viewpoint. Despite our lack of books and media, I became interested in astronomy at a very young age. I worked my way through college with an astronomy major, but found that I couldn’t be employed in that field because it was male-only in those days (which also enabled me to see scientists as less logical than normally presented). So, I went into one of the closest fields that females were allowed in, satellite photography. I worked at the Aerospace Center in St. Louis, Missouri, where they sent me to six months of cartography school, which was equal to a master’s degree. I later transferred to the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) in Washington D.C. in the field of photointerpretation and photogrammetry. Here I received some of the highest clearances in the government and learned not only about this field, but also government secrecy and cover-up, and now think the government has much more ability to cover-up than people expect.

Later I married and moved to Nevada, because my husband had a position there after a previous position that included working in Area 51. I began working for the University of Nevada, earned free tuition, and later transferred and received a PhD from the University of Missouri School of Veterinary Medicine in physiology (a combination of chemistry and biology). After doing post-doctoral research at Cornell University, I became an Assistant Professor at St. Bonaventure University. Other positions included research and teaching at The Ohio State University, the University of Missouri, and at Battelle Memorial Institute (Battelle). I have also been a volunteer astronomer at the former Ohio State University Radio Observatory, been stationed at Wright Patterson Air Force Base (WPAFB), and have taken flying lessons.

I have a variety of publications including books, research published in scientific journals, and in newspapers and magazines–such as having been a correspondent for Popular Mechanics magazine with byline articles and photographs in the science and technology sections. My listings as a scientist include: Who’s Who in the World, Who’s Who in the Midwest, and Who’s Who in Frontier Science and Technology. One of my recent books, Uncle: My Journey with John Purdue published by the Purdue University Press, is on a historical subject.

In the 1990s, I joined several UFO groups. I served on the MUFON Board of Directors (1993 to 2000), was a MUFON consultant in physiology and astronomy and a field investigator for both MUFON and the Center for UFO Studies. I co-edited eight MUFON symposium proceedings, have been a State Section Director for Ohio MUFON, was a founding member of the Mid-Ohio Research Associates (MORA) and its journal editor, and have published UFO material in books and magazines–including scientific journals. As an investigator, I conducted many studies and in these I met numerous fascinating people with amazing accounts.

PM: How and when did you first become interested in the UFO phenomenon?

I have always slightly paid attention to the subject because of a number of events that happened in my family from an early time. For one example, an aunt in West Virginia would write letters to my mother describing UFO events. Some events happened even before we had heard of UFOs–in one case, an aunt in West Virginia talked about small glowing objects that sometimes flew through their house. However my parents were conservative, Middle–American, farmers and did not allow us to even speak about the subject, thus, any interest was repressed. This made me a little sensitive to the idea of government cover-up, also.

I was also quite fortunate in the places I lived – such as Ohio, Nevada, and Washington DC – have been heavily involved in the UFO scene. For example, in Ohio are WPAFB and Battelle where the best-known studies took place. The DIA has been important in UFO study and some think that is the agency that began to investigate UFOs after Project Blue Book was closed.

PM: Have you ever had a personal UFO sighting at all?

Several events have drawn my attention. For one, I sometimes visited people who lived in the Davis Mountains in Texas that overlooked Marfa, which is known for the Marfa Lights. One night I saw and videotaped for about half an hour a large bright light over the town of Marfa that would turn on and off. Later I called the airport and they had nothing to report, but they would have been closed that late at night.

In another instance, while living in Missouri, my Mother in Ohio called to ask if I had just heard a strange sound. I thought this was quite odd and asked if my parents had just developed dementia. Later when I moved back to Ohio, I found information about this October 11, 1973 event. Not only had there been a strange noise, but a sudden wave of UFO reports happening at the same time. With the help of the State of Ohio seismologist Mike Hansen, I studied the noise. It was extremely widespread and much larger than a sonic boom or similar event. I was able to publish information about this sound in a peer-reviewed scientific journal (“Investigation of a Sound Heard over a Wide Area,” Ohio Journal Science 87(2), 1987: 11). I still don’t know what caused the sound. I also wondered why my parents had the strange mental reaction to it and wondered if others did.

PM: Has being an academic helped you in your research of the UFO phenomenon?

Yes, for example a Battelle co-worker and I were the first to show smoking gun evidence that UFO materials research may have taken place there. I also make some smoking gun discoveries while working in other places, for example at the DIA and at WPAFB. Being in the scientific field has made this possible. I worked in several of the institutions that were the most involved in UFO research, the DIA, Battelle, and WPAFB.

Being an academic has helped me in other ways. For example, I have been able to publish pieces about UFOs in scientific journals, and think this helps to establish the credibility of UFO study. I’ve spent much time interviewing not only witnesses, but people at random. In one case, after a sighting had been reported in the newspapers, I began to interview other people in that general location and published the results, “Survey of Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon Reports in Delaware County, Ohio.” Ohio Journal of Science 87.1 (1987): 24-26. One impressive result was that there appeared to be many more possible sightings than reports. Unfortunately, because of the difficulty of reporting these events, UFOlogy has been slow to advance and is still the subject of ridicule.

In addition, having training in statistics and experimental methods, I am able to evaluate the scientific experiments that have been done. It has helped me in interviewing witnesses, because I can ask questions that might be useful in scientific understanding. It makes me more aware of what might be called hard evidence and how to collect it, also.

PM: Could you explain how your new book UFOs TODAY first came about.

I joined several UFO groups in the 1990s and began to investigate sightings. I also became an editor of such publications as the MUFON symposium proceedings, and a local publication, the Ohio UFO Notebook. My field investigations gave me more of a perspective on UFOlogy than I would have from simply reading books. I discovered that the sightings that contained the most detail, often did not necessarily match the general idea of flying saucers as disc shaped craft. There were all kinds of unusual sightings, which along with my childhood exposure to the subject, made me think that the phenomena is much more complex than generally presented. I reported on many of these odd instances, thus, I already had them written up. Later the idea of writing a book struck me.

PM: Whilst compiling your research for your new book is there any one piece of evidence that for you really stands out?

Some of the most amazing to me have been ones that included interaction and ones such as lengthy events where authorities were notified, came, and even took part in the sightings. The authorities were often as mystified as the observers. For example, one sighting near Logan, Ohio, was of objects above a cornfield. These would blink on and off and move around. They were interactive with people. One followed a car. Authorities were notified, the event was reported on newscasts and TV, and police and other people came out to watch. Airplanes began to fly over in a grid pattern, although no one knew where they came from–the agency didn’t contact anyone. The objects remained interactive and one flew up to an airplane. A second sighting occurred the very night after another investigator and I had interviewed the witnesses.

Others have been abduction events, such as several that were linked with the October 11, 1973, sound that I investigated.

Dr. Irena Scott

(Credit: Irena Scott/Philip Mantle)

PM: What do you say to those that remain skeptical with regards to the UFO subject?

The term UFO carries considerable baggage. People generally link it with little green or gray men in space ships, or even the Loch Ness Monster. People ask each other whether they believe in it. This is because in general the idea is associated with alien visitation; people are asking whether they believe UFOs come from space. However the phenomena actually consists of many credible empirical observations such as of balls of light that can change to different forms; objects that appear and disappear, go through walls, merge and separate; and groups of lights that come together to form humanoid appearing entities. Others include objects of incredible size and speed, poltergeist-like activity, large and small UFOs, magnetic and radiation effects, abduction phenomena, thought control, and telepathy, for a few. Because of this, the phenomenon often doesn’t fit the profile of pilots and space ships, but of something vastly different from us. Such observations suggest that this data also might be investigated using different paradigms than our nuts and bolts ideas of space ships, such as by using quantum mechanical theories, or the idea that the phenomena might not be molecular as we are, or other ideas. I think new ways and different paradigms of science are needed to study it.

Another reason for the skepticism is that government has deliberately created it. Not only does it cover up, but it appears to use brainwashing techniques that produce skepticism rather than scientific examination. For example, there is some evidence that in even the very earliest reports some form of cover-up may have been active. The government has manipulated the results scientific studies, such as the one done by Battelle, to show that they found noting when in fact they did. In other cases it has set up panels that purported to scientifically examine the subject, but instead used them to debunk the phenomena, such as those of Robertson and Condon. It has actively set up debunking campaigns to plant outlandish UFO claims in the media to make UFO reports sound ridiculous. The Condon Report summary cautioned teachers to discourage any interest of pupils in UFOs, because such study would be harmful to their development. So if UFOs do not exist, how would an interest in them harm pupils and why should pupils be brainwashed? Why expend large amounts of money to lie and cover-up the phenomena, if it doesn’t exist. Such activities would certainly help the UFO phenomena by causing people to not take it seriously, thus helping it to hide its activities. In addition, UFO phenomena may be quite complex, thus one even wonders exactly what governments are covering up.

PM: In your opinion, how do we keep moving forward with UFO research?

I think numerous observations indicate this important phenomenon is much more complex that just space ships. I think it would be well to have statisticians go over the best UFO event data with the best developments in statistics to see what treads, or even significant results, can be found. I also think that as knowledge of people’s family trees and genetic studies are improving that one might search to see if there are any genetic similarities in people having sightings. Also people may not really understand what the phenomena is and that it might be much more complex that space ships from other worlds. Thus, I think that examining it for proof that we have visitors from space, or studying the propulsion systems and that sort of thing may not be as valuable as thought. For example, in both scientific experiments and in many reports there are mental aspects that are very difficult to understand. I think people need ways to study this element. I also think that people are interpreting the phenomena using Newtonian physics ideas, but need to study the possibility that the quantum theory elements may be involved in the phenomena. Other methods might be those of Dr. Harley Rutledge, who set up a study area with observing stations in an area of many sightings. His design may have resulted in the best scientific study ever done. He was even able to examine interactive behavior. Moreover, numerous reports have shown that the phenomenon is interactive, or even seems to put on a show, but witnesses in general are not directly contacted. This should also be studied.

END.

One of the most controversial aspects of this book has of course been the testimony of former US Deputy Sheriff Charles Forgus (deceased).  He claims that he was a witness to the UFO crash at Roswell in 1947. There is no way this can be verified of course and his testimony is simply being put into the public domain for further scrutiny. In my opinion the author is to be congratulated on treating such possibly controversial testimony in an open and honest way. Obviously efforts are continuing to try and obtain more information about Charles Forgus and his testimony with a variety of researchers involved and organizations on both sides of the Atlantic. It will be interesting to see what they uncover.

{ http://www.openminds.tv/ }

SCIENTISTS TO BEAM MESSAGES TO ALIENS

'We are emphasizing the essentials of math and physics'

galaxy

Perhaps they just came up woefully empty in their search here on Earth, but scientists are hunting for intelligent life in outer space – and they plan to begin sending messages to aliens in 2018.

While astronomers have long scanned the stars with radio telescopes, hoping to detect some life form in the great beyond, alien hunters in a network known as Messaging Extraterrestrial Intelligence, or METI, are ready to take the search to the next level.

By chatting with aliens, of course.

Douglas Vakoch, president of METI International, is leading a research group that’s determined to send messages to extraterrestrials.

Vakoch’s team has faced opposition from some in the Search For Extraterrestrial Intelligence, or SETI, community. In February 2015, 28 top SETI scientists published a letter warning of the dangers of reaching out to alien life forms.

“Intentionally signaling other civilizations in the Milky Way Galaxy raises concerns from all the people of Earth, about both the message and the consequences of contact,” the 28 scientists wrote. “A worldwide scientific, political and humanitarian discussion must occur before any message is sent.”

Specifically, the scientists are concerned that:

• An alien’s “reaction to a message from Earth cannot presently be known.” Earthlings know nothing about the space inhabitants, their intentions, their capabilities or whether they’re benign or hostile.
• Because Earthlings are so far behind when it comes to space communications, “it is likely that other communicative civilizations we encounter will be millions of years more advanced than us.”
• The scientists worry that Earthlings are still decades away from “creating a comprehensive search for radio signals similar to those produced by our own technology. They warn, “As a newly emerging technological species, it is prudent to listen before we shout.”
• They say nearby advanced space inhabitants may have already detected Earth’s radio transmissions, “such detections are far more difficult than detecting a focused radio or optical signal sent from a large telescope.”
• In fact, they argue, it’s not even necessary to send powerful electromagnetic signals into space to study interstellar communication or develop a plan to respond to alien messages sent to Earth.
• Finally, they warn, “Opponents of METI would vocally condemn METI transmissions, confusing the public about, and imperiling funding for, bona fide scientific endeavors related to extraterrestrial life.”

But Vakoch and his team of METI researchers aren’t too concerned with the warnings.

“One of the reasons people are so afraid of METI is that it seems riskier to do something than to do nothing,” Vakoch told CNet’s Daniel Oberhaus. “When we try to evaluate the risks and benefits of an unknown situation where we have little or no actual data, we fall back on the most vivid images that come to mind. But just because the first images of alien contact that come to mind are horrific, that doesn’t mean they’re realistic.”

Both the SETI and METI communities agree that any language transmitted to aliens should be rooted in math and science.

“Some of the most prominent messages of the past have tried to cover everything,” Vakoch told CNet. “We’re taking the opposite approach. Rather than trying to communicate everything [about math, science and life on Earth], we are focusing on saying a few things very clearly. For our first messages, we are emphasizing the essentials of math and physics.”

The METI International team will begin by blasting the messages to nearby stars, particularly ones that have planets in habitable zones.

Vakoch told the site his team is determined to learn how to communicate with aliens so Earthlings aren’t left in the dark once the space beings try to talk to us.

Sigourney Weaver in ‘Alien’

“Many of our most severe problems on Earth today are due to a focus on immediate gratification,” Vakoch said. “If future generations of SETI researchers are looking for replies to today’s transmissions, committed to a multigenerational scientific project, the very act of continuing to look will be a success in itself, whether or not they ever find life out there.”

The news of the scientists’ 2018 transmissions sparked dozens of online comments, including the following:

This will not end well for Earth.

Yeah, I’m thinking that is a bad idea. We are going to get our a–es handed to us if anyone comes.

This is akin to the Mayans or the Aztecs sending an invitational message to Spain.

Threat of nuclear war, religious terror, racial strife, arguments over climate change, globalism vs. nationalism … The message: We still need a few years to figure out our own s–t, K?

Yes, let’s send them messages right away. Give the death star something to home in on.

Bad idea. We should passively listen until we know what we are dealing with. If aliens are anything similar to humans, things may turn bad. Throughout history, what have humans done when new lands were discovered? We conquer and pillage the land from the indigenous (less advanced) people. Advertising our whereabouts is not smart in an unknown universe.

Lack of signs? Maybe there has been an old, old master race eradicating civilizations once they are discovered so it doesn’t have to share the cosmos. … Selfishians.

Unfortunately, the transmission will be received by the XzgyddllIax, a binary race, which will read only the null values in the transmission, and interpret it to read, “Eat Us! We’re chewy on outside with delectable crunchy center.”

Get the hottest, most important news stories on the Internet – delivered FREE to your inbox as soon as they break! Take just 30 seconds and sign up for WND’s Email News Alerts!

{ http://www.wnd.com/}

Viewers call for milk advert showing UFO with giant nipples squirting drink at children to be pixelated

The bizarre advert starts quite normally until a nipple pops out of the UFO and starts shooting milk into the children's glass tumblers

BY KELLY-ANN MILLS

UFO WITH NIPPLES SQUIRTS MILK FROM SKY IN THIS BIZARRE 

ADVERT

A Japanese TV advert selling milk has been blasted by viewers who think it should be banned - or at least have the giant nipple pixelated.

The bizarre advert starts quite normally with children happily running in the park.

The little ones then stop and hold up glasses with their outstretched arms waiting for them to be filled.

But then things turn a little strange.

A spaceship , coloured like a Friesian cow , suddenly opens its port and a giant cow's udder flops out, swinging high above the children's heads.

READ MORE

• 'Officer down, officer down': Murder suspect guns down cop before being taken down in a hail of bullets

As the shots pans out, white milk is then shot down from the craft to the children's glasses.

The advert by Rakunoh Mother’s milk company has caused controversy in the country with many users taking to social media to express their views on the bizarre milky downpour.

One said: "This is madness!", while another added: "Shouldn’t that be pixelated when it appears onscreen?"

READ MORE

• Careless driver rams pushchairs crushing one child and throwing another into air as mums push buggies across road

Another user wrote: "That’s one long nipple right there", while another netizen joked: "I never knew this sort of thing happened in Kumamoto."

{ http://www.mirror.co.uk/ }

ROSWELL SHOCK: Hoax alien autopsy film 'WAS recreation of REAL ET post mortem footage'

EXCLUSIVE: A "hoax alien autopsy" film that fooled the world in 1995 was a recreation of genuine footage of a post mortem on an extraterrestrial found at the Roswell UFO crash site, it has sensationally been claimed.

Alien hunters discover 'UFO highway' across America

Cassini's Last View of Saturn and Its Rings Will Make You Emotional

Goodnight, sweet prince.

By Rae Paoletta

It’s been almost two weeks since NASA’s Cassini spacecraft plunged itself into Saturn, becoming one with the longtime object of its fascination. While that chapter of Cassini’s mission has closed, the spacecraft left behind volumes of photos to inspire and evoke new questions, including a spellbinding final portrait of Saturn and its rings.

The image — featured Tuesday on NASA’s Astronomy Picture of the Day (APOD) — is actually a composite of 36 photos taken on September 12th, fastidiously rearranged by citizen scientist Mindaugas Macijauskas. The result shows Saturn in its most hauntingly beautiful form, as our Sun illuminates the planet’s northern hemisphere from outside the frame. According to NASA, this shadow position “cannot be imaged from Earth” and we won’t see it again until another spacecraft visits Saturn.

Feel free to drink it all in:

While NASA hasn’t released any formal plans for another trip to the gas giant, scientists — including Cassini project manager Earl Maize — are already itching to return. Some former Cassini team members want NASA’s next sojourn in the Saturnian system to be a dedicated hunt for alien life, which would seriously up the ante on an already incredible voyage.

“We left the world informed, but still wondering, and I couldn’t ask for more,” Maize said at a press conference on September 13, just before mission end. “We’ve got to go back — we know it.”

{ https://www.inverse.com/ }

Cassini Found Tons of 'Kittens" Hiding In Saturn's Rings

By Rae Paoletta

While Saturn might not be as thicc as its celestial neighbor Jupiter, the gas giant remains a cornucopia of unsolved mystery. We still don’t know how oldits famous rings are, or how long a day on the planet actually is. But perhaps the most often-overlooked Saturnian mystery is that it has been secretly harboring “kittens” in its F Ring, according to data from NASA’s Cassini.

Of course, these features aren’t actually baby cats — if they were, I would have jetted out of here long ago. These 60-some odd “kittens” are actually baby moons — or moonlets — which form after particles within the ring collide and clump together. These kittens — which were first spotted by researchers from NASA’s Cassini spacecraft back in 2007 — influence the shape of the F ring so that it’s constantly changing its structure.

For some reason, Saturn’s kittens remained under the radar for many years. A spokesperson from NASA tells Inverse that the kittens are suddenly back in the public consciousness after a reporter asked about naming Saturnian features after pets during a post-mission briefing on Sept. 15. According to NASA, the baby moons were named kittens — and even given individual cat names like “Mittens” and “fluffy” — because “they appear to come and go unexpectedly over time and have multiple lives.” Apparently, some dog people weren’t happy about the name change, but were ultimately overruled.

“This was an appropriate nomenclature for temporary features, and I favor using feline names in other applicable situations,” Larry Esposito, principal investigator of the Ultraviolet Imaging Spectrograph (UVIS) experiment on the Cassini, tells Inverse. Esposito — who is credited with discovering Saturn’s F Ring back in 1979 — was chiefly in charge of naming the kittens.

“These ‘kittens’ show us clumps now forming in Saturn’s F ring, a disk of material like the original protoplanetary disk around our Sun, like when the Earth and the other planets formed 4.5 billion years ago,” he said.

The great thing about these kittens — besides the obvious — is that they reveal how utterly mysterious Saturn still is, even after Cassini. To be fair, if any planet were secretly serving as a kitty utopia, it would almost certainly be Saturn.

“Saturn’s rings look so serene from a distance, but then when you get up close there is SO MUCH dynamic activity taking place,” Summer Ash, an astrophysicist at Columbia University, told Inverse. “From spiral waves to vertical structure to spokes, and now moonlets! It’s bananas. These moonlets are yet another aspect of Saturn’s rings that shows how little we understand about the system, even after a 13-year mission at the planet.”

Earth was not destroyed by Planet X last weekend, so we can now turn our attention back to more important things, like the three-fingered, potentially-alien Peruvian mummies. The last time we heard from the “researchers,” they had announced the finding of at least 20 mummies by a ‘guy named Mario’ and someone – possibly Mario – saw live creatures running away when the mummies were discovered in a Peruvian cave. One of the mummies appeared to be pregnant with eggs, leading to more speculation that the creatures are aliens and possibly reptilian. Meanwhile, the World Congress on Mummy Studies doubts all of the conclusions and is upset with the profiteering use of the Peruvian creatures – whatever species they may be — and the Peruvian government agrees. Seems like it’s time for a diversion, right? That came this week with the long-promised DNA tests of the mummies and the long-awaited announcement of the findings. The results of the tests are in, and the creatures were found to be …

Let’s pause here for a moment. What do you think the mummies are?

As in the past, the go-to source for all things on the 3-fingered Peruvian mummies is Express.co.uk, which claims to have viewed all of the videos from Gaia.com, the group allegedly in possession of the mummies, conducting the research and sending the samples to laboratories for further studies. It identified the lab which performed the test as the Paleo DNA laboratory at Lakehead University, Ontario, Canada, and said that the report on the mummies’ DNA was available online, but no links were provided and searches turned up no further details on the report. The Gaia.com website has a short preview of its latest video, which is available for a fee. There also appears to be no updates from journalists Steve Mera and Barry Fitzgerald, who are said to be conducting their own investigations on the mummies.

So-called baby mummy

(youtube/gaia.com)

That’s enough prefacing. The wait is over. The DNA test results are in on a 3-fingered hand and some brain matter and the mummies are … humans! Express.co.uk quotes the report:

“The evidence suggests the source of DNA from the biological material from the cranial brain and the bone extracted from the hand belongs to homo sapiens (humans).”

Specifically, a male homo sapien. Let the back-pedaling begin.

“Because we know that now we have three types of human like creatures. It is Neanderthals, Cro-Magnon like ourselves, and Denisovan. Now, at next level, they have to make much more detailed analysis, and much more complicated analysis, so they will create a library of genes, and then they will be able to compare it with database of human subjects. Then, we’ll see whether it is exactly human like, or it is little bit different.”

“Human like” says Dr. Konstantin Korotkov, who claims to have been working with Gaia.com since the discovery of the mummies, in a response video. He and others say more DNA testing is needed.

Is it time to wrap up these mummies and return them to the people of Peru?

{ http://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }

BOOK REVIEW: "Operation Trojan Horse" by John A. Keel

Anomalist Books

John A. Keel's "Operation Trojan Horse" was originally published in 1970.

ANDREW W. GRIFFIN |

BOOK REVIEW: Operation Trojan Horse by John A. Keel (Anomalist Books) 2013

“Our skies have been filled with ‘Trojan horses’ throughout history, and like the original Trojan horse, they seem to conceal hostile intent” – John A. Keel, 1969.

Over the many years that I have read about, researched and personally experienced the UFO mystery, my intuition has always ended up on the side of things pointing to these mysterious craft as not being of the “nuts-and-bolts” variety, but of a more elusive and, possibly, multi-dimensional source.

That position, while not shared by the majority of folks out there, was one held, more or less, by the late John A. Keel (1930-2009), the same guy who coined the terms “Men in Black” and “ultraterrestrials” and whose book The Mothman Prophecies would lead to a feature film in 2002 starring Richard Gere.

A writer, journalist and adventurer, Keel was drawn to the idea of “magic” at an early age, seeking it out in the mysterious “Far East” in the 1950’s, following a stint in the U.S. Army during the Korean War.

And that interest in magic led the ramblin’ writer to bounce around the wide-ranging region between Singapore and Egypt, where he befriended snake charmers, was “buried alive,” learned the secrets of the “Indian rope trick” and was “cursed by a mummy,” experiences captured in his first book, Jadoo, which was first published in 1957.

And between 1957 and 1970, Keel began to seriously immerse himself in the controversy surrounding flying saucers, also known as UFOs.

Like any good and objective journalist, Keel spent these years researching the subject, talking to UFO eyewitnesses and delving deep into the history of the confounding and puzzling topic and ultimately publishing Operation Trojan Horse, a 300-plus page book that focuses on the bizarre nature of the alleged “craft” and how we really don’t know who or what is behind their unexpected appearances around the world.

Keel’s findings seemed to parallel that of Dr. Meade Layne, an investigator of the “inter-dimensional/folklore school of thought” on the UFO phenomena (to quote a relative of Layne’s). That “paraphysical” and “parapsychological” position was not widely embraced by those who followed the more commonly trod path of extraterrestrials and spacecraft from distant stars.

In fact, Keel writes in his groundbreaking book, now 47-years old, that Kenneth Arnold, the private airplane pilot whose June 1947 sighting of strange craft flying near Mount Rainier in Washington state, kicked off the “modern flying saucer scare” and would later express his belief that “the objects were actually some form of living energy, and were not necessarily marvelous spaceships.”

Other researchers, Keel notes, would conclude that UFOs are closely linked with “mysticism and the metaphysical.” Clearly, the research was pointing to a more “occult” quality to the UFO phenomenon than the mainstream government, military and – in most cases – civilian researchers wanted to admit.

But Keel had already seen a lot of strange things by this time and was a seasoned journalist having traveled the world. It only made sense that he would report on the subject, wherever it took him.

And it took Keel to some pretty wild places!

No, there is a more “trickster”-ish quality to the experiences, things that don’t make sense, at least in a logical way. And then there is the issue of “visible light.” It would seem that UFOs may exist at “frequencies beyond visible light but that they can adjust their frequency and descend the electromagnetic spectrum – just as you can turn the dial of your radio and move a variable condenser up and down the scale of radio frequencies.”

Keel notes plenty of “patterns” in the phenomenon, how UFOs seem to stay within geographical boundaries, or appear in great “circle” patterns over large stretches of landscape. Many UFO sightings happen of Wednesdays, we learn.

We are taken back to the 19th century, when people like Joseph Smith are visited by “angelic beings” who point out the location of buried plates that will lead to the founding of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints – the Mormons.

Throughout history, Keel notes, these “beings” which are thought to be from “heaven,” may actually be “ultraterrestrials,” entities that are non-human and may be of natural or even supernatural origin and are indigenous to our planet. They are thought to be linked to the folkloric entities of days gone by – fairies, brownies and so forth.

Flying ships were reported with increasing frequency throughout the 19th century, leading up the 1896-97 airship “flap” (or major, continued series of sightings) that had thousands of people seeing strange things in the sky.

But what were they seeing? What about the people of the mid-20th century, when Keel was gathering his information? It’s never entirely clear.

For instance, in March 1966, Eddie Laxton, of Temple, Okla., was driving on U.S. Highway 70 in Cotton County, on his way to work at Sheppard AFB in Wichita Falls, Texas, when he had a dramatic UFO experience near the Red River, one that got the attention of his Air Force bosses.

Laxton said a human-like alien, who looked more like a mechanic in coveralls, was examining the underside of his “fish-like” spacecraft, with a “flashlight,” as if he were making repairs. But the alien got spooked pretty quickly, jumping in his UFO and taking off at a rapid rate.

Keel says this ruse of “pretending” to repair an ailing saucer has been used time and again by the “ultraterrestrials” of Operation Trojan Horse, or whatever it is they are doing. And yet no one really knows what their objective is.

And then there is the distortion of time, when it comes to many sightings. In one utterly shocking case, an Argentinian doctor and his wife got into their Peugeot 403 in a town near Buenos Aires, planning to travel 150 km south.

But the travelers did not make it to their destination. Keel tells us their family received a call from the Argentine consulate in Mexico City saying the couple “appeared” in Mexico’s capital city 48 hours later and nearly 5,000 miles from home. Except for a weird “fog” that enveloped their car that morning in May 1968, the doctor and his wife have no idea how they got to Mexico City.

Again, the occult angle cannot be emphasized enough. Keel says that “black magic” is often linked to the phenomenon, and some people have such frightening experiences dabbling in the topic, that they abandon it for good. In fact, Keel tells his adult readers who are parents to warn their children away from Ufology altogether.

“I have in my files hundreds of cases, some of which have now been investigated by qualified psychiatrists, in which young men and women obsessed with the UFO phenomenon have suffered frightening visits from these apparitions, been followed by mysterious black Cadillacs which appeared and disappeared suddenly, and have been terrified into giving up their pursuit of UFOs. Many contactees report similar experiences.”

“The phenomenon is reflective,” adds Keel. “the more frightened the victim becomes, the more the manifestations are escalated.”

While Keel does not solve the mystery, he was courageous enough to diligently investigate the topic with seriousness and open-mindedness.

{ http://www.reddirtreport.com/ }

Prince Philip’s UFO interests inspired biography

Prince Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh and husband to the queen of England, is a UFO aficionado. His UFO interests are not only included in a biography, author Philip Eade writes in his foreword that the idea for the biography came about when he was considering writing a book about prominent ufologists in the period after World War II. The biography is titled, Prince Philip: The Turbulent Early Life of the Man Who Married Queen Elizabeth II, and proves to be a great read.

In a story in The Daily Beast, they highlighted 12 of the most “juicy bits” of the biography. Regarding the UFO “bits,” they wrote:

During the course of that research, Eade discovered not only that Prince Philip was a subscriber to the magazine Flying Saucer Review, but that he once sent his equerry, Sir Peter Horsley, “to meet an extraterrestrial humanoid at a house in Ealing.” Eade writes, “A number of witnesses were invited to Buckingham Palace to discuss their experiences, as Horsley later explained, to ‘put them on the spot’ and to test their honesty in the presence of royalty, a method as effective as any truth serum.” Horsley was on the prince’s staff from 1952 to 1955 before climbing to great heights in the Royal Air Force. When Horsley published his memoirs in 1997, a senior official at the Ministry of Defence commented, “How unfortunate that the public will learn that the man who had his finger on the button of Strike Command was seeing little green men.”

The Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh on the balcony of Buckingham Palace, June 2012.

(Credit: Wikimedia Commons)

Although it may seem surprising that a member of the royal family would have an interest in UFOs, Prince Philip is not the first. In fact his uncle, Lord Mountbatten, had similar interests. In a biography by Philip Ziegler in 1985, he wrote that Mountbatten had admittedly “far-fetched” ideas about the origins of the mysterious phenomenon. Ziegler explained this idea in his book:

[We were] both convinced that they come from another planet but we mutually and independently came to the conclusion that they were not ‘aeroplanes’ with silly little almost human pilots but are themselves the actual inhabitants: Martians, Venusians, Jupiterians or what have you. Why should life in another planet with entirely different conditions in any way resemble life on our planet? Their inhabitants might be ‘gaseous’ or circular or very large. They certainly don’t breathe, they may not have to eat and I doubt if they have babies—bits of their great discs may break away and grow into a new creature. The fact that they can hover and accelerate away from the earth’s gravity again and even revolve round a V2 in America (as reported by their head scientist) shows that they are far ahead of us. If they really come over in a big way that may settle the capitalist-communist war. If the human race wishes to survive they may have to band together.

Lord Mountbatten (Credit: Allan Warren)

In 1955 Lord Mountbatten investigated a UFO incident in his own back yard, literally, that put his theory to the test. In Timothy Good’s book, Above Top Secret, there is a report written by Mountbatten on his investigation of a sighting on the grounds of his Broadlands Estates in Romsey, Hampshire. Frederick Briggs, a retired British Army Sergeant, was working as a bricklayer on the grounds, when he says he saw a large craft that looked like a child’s top hovering over a field. He says a column came down from the center of the craft, and there appeared to be a humanoid figure descending with the pillar.

Mountbatten states in his report that he personally interviewed Mr. Briggs. He reported that Briggs “did not give the impression of being the sort of man who would be subject to hallucinations, or would in any way invent such a story.”

In an interview with Nick Pope, a man who led official investigations into UFOs for Britain’s Ministry of Defence, I asked about the royal family’s interest in UFOs. Pope was reticent to speak on the subject, stating:

Um… yeah this is a kind of difficult area for me to enter. Of course, even though I have left the Ministry of Defence, I am still bound by the official secrets act, and it binds me for life. Yes, I know that some members of the royal family have an interest in UFOs, Crop Circles, and the unexplained generally, because of my security oath this isn’t an area that I can really discuss in any great detail I am afraid.

I told him that his answer was sort of fun, and he laughed and said, yes you can infer from that what you will. It begs the question, is the queen herself also a UFO buff, or does she shrug off her husband’s interests as spouses are prone to do?

A version of this story was first posted in the Huffington Post, but I discovered that I had neglected to post it here at OpenMinds.tv. I discovered that when I was looking for this story in relation to a recent talk I did that was featured in The Sun, a UK newspaper.

{ http://www.openminds.tv/ }