Leaked WikiLeaks Cable Confirms Alien Life On Other Planets

A cable released by Wikileaks seems to have confirmed what millions of people around the globe believe for decades: we are not the only “intelligent” lifeforms in the universe.

WikiLeaks is an international non-profit media organization, which publishes anonymous reports and leaked documents with sensitive content of public interest on its website, preserving the anonymity of its sources.

The site was launched in December 2006, although its activity began in July 2007-2008.

Since then its database has grown steadily to accumulate 1.2 million documents.

Its creator is Julian Assange and is managed by The Sunshine Press.

The website itself is a treasure-trove of ‘secret’ or better said sensitive information, and unsurprisingly, among the 1.2 million leaked documents posted on Wikileaks, we find a couple for them that directly speak about extraterrestrial life.

A document titled: “MAYOR MEETS AMBASSADOR, CONFIRMS EXTRATERRESTRIAL LIFE” seems to confirm what many of us have known for decades, there is life on other planets in the universe.

The leaked document was posted in January of 2010 and was originally classified as ‘Confidential’ according to Wikileaks.

The document reads:

REASON: 1.4 (b), (d)

1. (C) Summary: In a platitude-ridden meeting, Dushanbe Mayor Mahmadsaid Ubaidulloev said upcoming elections would be free and fair, that contributions to the Roghun Dam were voluntary, and that the losses suffered by the United States in Afghanistan were felt by Tajiks as their own. Ubaidulloev asked for help in getting Tajik students admitted to Harvard University but effectively declined to help find a new location for an American Corner in Dushanbe. He asserted the existence of life on other planets, caveating this by noting that we should focus on solving our problems on Earth. End Summary.

AFGHANISTAN

2. (SBU) On January 13 Ambassador called on Dushanbe Mayor and Chairman of the upper house of Parliament Mahmadsaid Ubaidulloev at his parliamentary office. The Mayor began the meeting with a lengthy discourse on Afghanistan, thanking the United States for its contributions and sacrifices there, and saying that U.S. activities there were very important “as we enter the third millennium and the 21st century.” Ubaidulloev thought the main task there was to build a sense of national identity among ethnically disparate groups, and said the United States was an example for this. He noted that “war is very dangerous”, and said, “we know there is life on other planets, but we must make peace here first.”

Check out the originally leaked document here.

{  https://www.ancient-code.com/ }

For your next intergalactic voyage: a weather station by MB&F and L’Epée 183

MB&F L'Epee The Fifth Element horological weather station - Baselworld 2018

{ https://journal.hautehorlogerie.org/en }

Eerie moment ‘UFO speeds after passenger jet and overtakes it’ sending conspiracy theorists into a frenzy

A WITNESS says he was blown away by the sighting of a bizarre object following and then overtaking a passenger jet high in the sky.

Alys Bowen

BIZARRE footage apparently showing a UFO speeding after and overtaking a passenger jet has sent conspiracy theorists into a frenzy.

The eerie clip shows a saucer-shaped object following the plane in its vapour trails before passing it completely.

The person who filed the clip said they were reading at home in Lincoln, New Hampshire, when they noticed the strange object close to the aircraft.

They said: “I am told that military pilots train in the mountains around where I live and I’ve always enjoyed seeing them fly through.

“This happens all the time, jets and helicopters are a common sighting.

“So I naturally saw the jet and did a double take, because there was something following it.”

The shocked witness added: “I immediately thought I was witnessing some strange aircraft, possibly military but it was not a jet.”

An alleged UFO in apparent proximity to a passenger jet has caused a You Tube sensation.

Source:Supplied

“The UFO was gaining on a jet. No helicopter could do that. I was blown away and luckily got out my phone in time to take a video.”

The footage was captured in 2016 but it was recently shared on YouTube and has racked up over 27,000 views.

One user wrote: “I am actually baffled. This looks legit, as to why — who knows.”

Another had a different explanation: “It’s two planes travelling at different altitudes, one creating a vapour trail.”

But the witness is convinced the sighting was supernatural.

They said: “I was very excited and anxious.

“I felt I had witnessed something very hard to dismiss as a “weather balloon” or some obvious type of aircraft.

“Shortly after the jet and object left my range of sight I saw three more jets and 1 helicopter going the same direction (in my opinion chasing the UFO).”

{ http://www.news.com.au/ }

She also said she would look into sending a tast force Area 51 (pictured)

Area 51 may hold answers about aliens

There has been much speculation surrounding the 1947 crash of a flying object near Roswell, N.M.

{ http://www.readingeagle.com/ }

Why this Catholic astronomer is hoping we find extraterrestrial life

 Stephen Beale

How would we react to extraterrestrial life? 'Rather well,' ASU professor says

Phoenix Lights remains a big deal to UFO researchers worldwide even 20 years laterm as thousands have reported witnessing the phenomenon. Wochit

(Photo: BrieAnna J. Frank)

The possibility of life existing beyond Earth captivates many.

But how would humans react to the discovery of extraterrestrial life? 

Panic? Chaos? Reverence? 

More positively than some might expect, according to an Arizona State University study.

“If this kind of discovery were to take place, it would be one of the most important scientific events in our history.”

Michael Varnum, assistant professor of psychology at ASU

How humans might react has been the topic of a great deal of speculation in fiction, policy circles and academia, said Michael Varnum, assistant professor of psychology at ASU.

He has been interested in answering the question for years, Varnum said. Before the study, he said, there was not enough information that could lead to reasonable predictions of humans' reactions. 

"But until now, it was all speculation essentially. This set of studies for the first time tackles the question empirically and the resounding conclusion is that we will take the news rather well." 

Varnum is a lifelong science-fiction fan and a member of the university's Interplanetary Initiative, a pan-university effort aiming to "pave the way for the future of humans in space," according to the center's website.

Back when UFO was a new term

This isn't the first time scientists worked to answer the question. 

In 1953, the United States Air Force coined the term "UFO," or unidentified flying object. That same year, a panel of scientists was formed to study evidence of UFOs and the potential danger they posted to U.S. national security.

REPORT: If U.S. government is tracking UFO sightings, Arizona is fertile ground

The Robertson Panel, as it was known, "did find that continued emphasis on UFO reporting might threaten 'the orderly functioning' of the government by clogging the channels of communication with irrelevant reports and by inducing 'hysterical mass behavior' harmful to constituted authority," according to the Central Intelligence Agencyin a report. 

Air Guard unit dropped flares on night Valley saw the lights  The Arizona Republic

Skeptics seek solutions to UFOs  The Arizona Republic

Phoenix Lights still bright 1 year later  The Arizona Republic

Phoenix Lights, plus a year  The Arizona Republic

'Phoenix Lights' witnesses credible, hard to dismiss  The Arizona Republic

Seeking UFO Answers  The Arizona Republic

Small organisms, big impact?

Scientists believe humanity is much more likely to come into contact with microbial extraterrestrial life before intelligent life. 

Overall, the new ASU study focused on just that — humanity's reaction to the discovery of microbial life from other worlds.

“This set of studies for the first time tackles the question empirically and the resounding conclusion is that we will take the news rather well.”

Michael Varnum, assistant professor of psychology at ASU

The team performed a pilot study as well as two additional studies. In the additional studies, 500 different participants provided their reactions. 

"If this kind of discovery were to take place, it would be one of the most important scientific events in our history. It also might represent a major paradigm shift in terms of how we see our place in the cosmos," Varnum said.

MORE: Scottsdale UFO conference: 'We're not alone in the universe'

Overall in the studies, people had mostly positive reactions of possible extraterrestrial life. 

Participants looked at past media coverage on events suggesting extraterrestrial life and responded to claims of the discovery of microbial fossils. Articles focused on the possible fossilized Martian microbes, Tabby's Star, the "Dyson sphere," and Earth-like exoplanets. 

MORE: The satellites that lit up the sky weren't a UFO, but they were made in Phoenix

"In our second experiment with a general sample, we felt that rather than come up with bogus stories it would be better to present people with actual media coverage of discoveries as a way to increase the realism of the study," said Varnum. 

Also, Varnum's team used media coverage on Oumuamua to determine if participants believed the first-known interstellar asteroid was actually a spaceship. The asteroid was discovered in 2017. 

Varnum believes the studies are important to scientific research and could lead to change. 

"My work shows that at least in the short term, reactions to this kind of news will be positive, so that rather than worry about the potential for societal chaos, disruption, or negative mental health impacts, instead we can expect that people will be happy to learn we are not alone," Varnum said.

By David Wallace-Wells, James D. Walsh, Neel Patel, Clint Rainey,Katie Heaney, Eric Benson, and Tim Urban

In the good old days, the arrival of UFOs on the front page of America’s paper of record might have seemed like a loose-thread tear right through the fabric of reality — the closest that secular, space-race America could have gotten to a Second Coming. Two decades ago, or three, or six, we would’ve also felt we knew the script in advance, thanks to the endless variations pop culture had played for us already: civilizational conflicts to mirror the real-world ones Americans had been imagining in terror since the beginning of the Cold War.

But when, in December, the New York Times published an undisputed account of what might once have sounded like crackpot conspiracy theory — that the Pentagon had spent five years investigating“unexplained aerial phenomena” — the response among the paper’s mostly liberal readers, exhausted and beaten down by “recent events,” was markedly different from the one in those movies. The news that aliens might actually be visiting us, regularly and recently, didn’t provoke terror about a coming space-opera conflict but something much more like the Evangelical dream of the Rapture the same liberals might have mocked as kooky right-wing escapism in the George W. Bush years. “The truth is out there,” former senator Harry Reid tweeted, with a link to the story. Thank God, came the response through the Twitter vent. “Could extraterrestrials help us save the Earth?” went one typical reaction.

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Suddenly, aliens were an escapist fantasy — but also more credible (legitimized by the government!) than mere fantasy. That Pentagon report, which featured two gripping videos of aerial encounters, was just one beat in a recent search-for-extraterrestrial-intelligence (or SETI) drumroll: In October, an object passed through our solar system that looked an awful lot like a spaceship; astronomers spent much of 2016 arguing over whether the weird pulses of light coming from a distant star were actually evidence of an “alien megastructure.” An army of Silicon Valley billionaires are racing to make first contact, and our new superpowered telescopes are discovering more conceivably habitable planets every year.

Then, in March, a third video emerged, featuring a Navy encounter off the East Coast in 2015, with the group that released it hinting at an additional trove. “Why doesn’t the Pentagon care?” wondered a Washington Post op-ed — surely the first time the newspaper of Katharine Graham was raising a stink about aliens. The next week, President Trump seemed to announce he was creating an entirely new branch of the military: “We’ll call it the Space Force.” You could be forgiven for thinking you’d woken up in a science-fiction novel. At the very least, it is starting to seem non-crazy to believe. A recent study shows half the world already does.

Alien dreams have always been powered by the desire for human importance in a vast, forgetful cosmos: We want to be seen so we know we exist. What’s unusual about the alien fantasy is that, unlike religion, nationalism, or conspiracy theory, it doesn’t place humans at the center of a grand story. In fact, it displaces them: Humans become, briefly, major players in a drama of almost inconceivable scale, the lasting lesson of which is, unfortunately: We’re total nobodies. That’s the lesson, at least, of a visit from aliens, who got here long before we were able to get there, wherever there is; if humans are the ones making first contact, we’re the advanced ones and the aliens are probably more like productive pond scum, which may be one reason we fantasize about those kinds of encounters a lot less than visits to Earth. Of course, when the aliens are the explorers, we’re the pond scum.

But a lot of people in the modern world will take that bargain, which should probably not surprise us given how dizzying, secular, and, um, alienating that world objectively is. Most conspiracy theory is fueled by a desire to see the universe as ultimately intelligible — the bargain being that things can make sense, but only if you believe in pervasive totalitarian malice. Alien conspiracy theory keeps the malice (cover-ups at Roswell, the Men in Black). But rather than benzo comforts like order and intelligibility, it offers the psychedelic drama of total unintelligibility — awe, wonder, a knee-wobblingly deep, mystical experience of existential ignorance.

Floating Down (1990), by David Huggins, who makes oil paintings about his encounters with aliens. As featured in Love & Saucers, a 2017 documentary about the artist. Photo: David Huggins

Every extraterrestrial era has its own fantasy of consequentiality. Crop circles began as a phenomenon of the English countryside, then spread to the far corners of the onetime British Empire (Australia, Canada) after World War II, when the U.K. was falling unmistakably back in the ranks of nations and when its provincial subjects would have felt some understandable desire to demonstrate that, somehow, their lives really mattered. American encounters were invariably rural as well — typically farmers and ranchers, mostly in the country’s interior and the deserts and mountains of the West, in decades the country as a whole spent rapidly urbanizing and then industrializing its farmland so systematically it looked like Monsanto was trying to exterminate the American farmer along with the cotton bollworm.

These incidents, which never occurred in cities, where other witnesses could have verified them, were often reported as horror stories even as they may have expressed secret desires. But the pop culture of the same era introduced another mode: the suburban encounter, often still private and personal but more ooey-gooey New Age than abductions and anal probes. The two major authors were Steven Spielberg, who gave us broken-family theology in Close Encounters of the Third Kind and E.T., and Carl Sagan, who gave us Cosmos and Contact, which, when it was turned into a movie, featured an eerie seascape that was basically a secular heaven, maintained by offscreen aliens explicitly playing the role of gods. Stephen Hawking, who died in March, was also a godfather of a sort, not just a physicist but a sage and guru for a generation of squishy-lefty seekers curious about life beyond Earth; among his last acts was partnering with Yuri Milner, a Russian billionaire building a giant SETI laboratory at UC Berkeley. Americans used to regard the space race with not just national but something like collectivist pride — all those government engineers from the new middle class. Suddenly, it’s the rich kids with the cool toys and the keys to the rocket ship.

Which does mark a change. Beyond the mysticism, American stories of alien encounters have been (often anxious) meditations on the status of American power — meditations informed, surely, by both the memory of European settlers, for whom “first contact” was a story of triumphant genocide, and sympathy for those they trampled. Given the option, America will always prefer to play the cowboy, and through the post–Cold War 1990s, the dominant alien-encounter template was still the swaggering military strut of Independence Day. (The closest thing we got to a counterpoint was the cover-up paranoia of The X-Files, which just expressed a darker faith in the same American power.) By the time we got an alien epic for the War on Terror era, even Spielberg staged it as a story about armed conflict: The War of the Worlds. Of course, in that story, the winner was always going to be the humans — that is, the Americans. And then came the financial crisis, the recession, and Trump, and the new hope that E.T. may take pity on us.

Elsewhere in the world, where things are looking up, relatively speaking, you might expect a different perspective on aliens — and indeed, as The Atlantic’s Ross Andersen documented last fall, the Chinese have recently opened the world’s largest radar facility to listen for signs of aliens, wherever they are out there. But even our future Chinese overlords, projecting power for the first time into the ever-receding reaches of the universe, are a bit nervous about aliens; as Andersen points out, their popular science fiction bears the evidence. And why wouldn’t they be? They have their own memory of colonial contact — the Opium Wars, the end of that empire — to reckon with. And, besides, the unknown is just scary. Things have to get pretty bleak before you take a chance on the arrival of a total blank slate, just for the sake of change. —David Wallace-Wells

1. The Government Literally Just Admitted It’s Taking UFOs Seriously

And, according to researchers, it’s only pretended to end the program.

A 2004 encounter near San Diego between two Navy F/A-18F fighter jets and an “unknown object.”

In 1952, a CIA group called the Psychological Strategy Board concluded that, when it came to UFOs, the American public was dangerously gullible and prone to “hysterical mass behavior.” The group recommended “debunking” campaigns to tamper the public’s interest in unexplained phenomena. But the government seems to have been interested, too: In December, the Pentagon confirmed the existence of the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program. Created in 2007 by senators Ted Stevens (who reported being chased by a mysterious object), Daniel Inouye, and then–Majority Leader Harry Reid, and funded with $22 million of “black money” from the Department of Defense’s budget, the program investigated and evaluated reports of UFO sightings, many of which came from American service members.

So much of what the program uncovered remains classified, but what little we know is tantalizing. Based on data it collected, the program identified five observations that showed mysterious objects displaying some level of “advanced physics,” also known as “stuff humans can’t do yet”: The objects would accelerate with g-forces too strong for the human body to withstand, or reach hypersonic speed with no heat trail or sonic boom, or they seemed to resist the effects of Earth’s gravity without any aerodynamic structures to provide thrust or lift. “No one has been able to figure out what these are,” said Luis Elizondo, who ran the program until last October, in a recent interview.

Elizondo has also talked about “metamaterials” that may have been recovered from unidentified aerial phenomena and stored in buildings owned by a private aerospace contractor in Las Vegas; they apparently have material compositions that aren’t found naturally on Earth and would be exceptionally expensive to replicate. According to a 2009 Pentagon briefing summarized in the New York Times, “the United States was incapable of defending itself against some of the technologies discovered.” This was a briefing by people trying to get more funding — but still.

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Some of the accounts Elizondo and his team analyzed supposedly occurred near nuclear facilities like power plants or battleships. In November 2004, the USS Princeton, a Navy cruiser escorting the aircraft carrier USS Nimitz off the coast of San Diego, ordered two fighter jets to investigate mysterious aircraft the Navy had been tracking for weeks (meaning this was not just a trick of the eye or a momentary failure of perspective, the two things most often blamed for unexplained aerial phenomena). When the jets arrived at the location, one of the pilots, Commander David Fravor, saw a disturbance just below the ocean’s surface causing the water to roil around it. Then, suddenly, he saw a white, 40-foot Tic Tac–shaped craft moving like a Ping-Pong ball above the water. The vehicle began mirroring his plane’s movements, but when Fravor dove directly at the object, the Tic Tac zipped away.

The Pentagon has said funding for the program ran out in 2012 and wasn’t renewed. But Elizondo has claimed the project was alive and well when he resigned in October. —James D. Walsh

2. Harry Reid Says We’re Not Taking Them Seriously Enough

The former Senate majority leader is definitely a truther.

Eric Benson: I’m curious about just where your interest in this subject comes from.

Harry Reid: Bob Bigelow [the founder of Bigelow Aerospace and Budget Suites]. He’s a central figure in all this. When he was a young man, he heard a story from his grandparents about driving down from Mt. Charleston, near Las Vegas, where they saw a so-called flying saucer, for lack of a better description. Bob became a very wealthy man. He would pay for these conferences about UFOs, and he would bring in scientists, academics, and a few nutcases.

There were people trying to figure out what all this aerial phenomena was. Bob started sending me tons of stuff. Mainly what interested me is that so many people had seen these strange things in the air.

EB: So tell me how this program got started.

HR: I was in Washington in the Senate, and Bob called me and said, “I got the strangest letter here. Could I have a courier bring it to you?” I said sure. He didn’t want to send it to me over the lines, for obvious reasons.

The letter said, “I am a senior, longtime member of this security agency, and I have an interest in what you’ve been working on. I also want to go to your ranch in Utah.”

Bigelow had bought a great big ranch. All this crazy stuff goes on up there — you know, things in the air. Indians used to talk about it, part of their folklore.

So I called Bigelow back and said, “Hey, I’ll meet with the guy.” The program grew out of that, to study aerial phenomena.

We decided it would be [funded by] black money. I wanted to get something done. I didn’t want a debate where no one knew what the hell they were talking about on the Senate floor.

EB: I saw that you tweeted, “We don’t know the answers, but we have plenty of evidence to support asking the questions.” To you, what’s the most compelling evidence to support asking the questions?

HR: Read the reports. We have hundreds of — Eric, two, three weeks ago, maybe a month now, up in Montana, they had another strange deal at a missile base up there. It goes on all the time.

EB: Do you know things about this program that you can’t discuss publicly?

HR: Yeah.

3. Scientists Are Suddenly Much More Bullish About the Possibility of Life Out There

The universe is really big, people.

Just 20 years ago, we had not discovered a single planet outside our solar system. Now we know of more than 3,000 of them, and we know nearly every star in the night sky has at least one planet in its orbit. “Even people who are not terribly interested in science know that we’ve found that planets are as common as fire hydrants — they’re everywhere,” says Seth Shostak, the senior astronomer at the SETI Institute. “One in five or one in six might be a planet similar to the Earth.”

That doesn’t mean we’ll ever find an exact replica of Earth, but maybe we don’t have to. Our study of other planets and moons in the solar system shows us many worlds possess the ingredients necessary for life — an atmosphere, organic compounds, liquid water, and other necessities. (The moons orbiting Jupiter and Saturn, for example, feature whole subsurface oceans.)

And even though these places are extremely harsh environments, that doesn’t mean as much as we might once have thought it did; recent discoveries on Earth itself demonstrate that life is much tougher than we thought. We’ve found organisms in blisteringly hot geysers in Yellowstone National Park, in the darkest crevices under the most ungodly pressures in the deep ocean, in dry hellscapes like the Atacama Desert in Chile (an analogue for Mars). These “extremophiles” don’t need a warm and fuzzy paradise to call home — in fact, they have already evolved to live in environments as harsh as those on other planets. Some, like tardigrades, can even survive the bleak vacuum of space itself. If there’s life in most of those places, “it’s going to be pond scum,” says Shostak. “But it’s alien pond scum. It shows that biology is all over.”

And where there’s biology, there may well be intelligence, and our increasing understanding of evolution also tells us life can evolve faster than we ever anticipated. Millions of years is a long time for us, but it’s the blink of an eye on the cosmic scale. Blink too fast, and you’ll miss that pond scum turning into an intelligent civilization sending out messages every which way, looking for friends.

And we’re now at the point where we could one day find those messages and send a reply. New technology gives us a better chance to actually make contact with extraterrestrials. Our radio telescopes can scan more of the night sky for an intelligent message than ever before. Our optical telescopes and observatories can peer farther into space and look for new planets, moons, and perhaps even signs of something altogether artificial (see “Tabby’s Star”). Our ability to parse volumes of data in mere seconds means we could conceivably survey much of the galaxy in just a few decades. That’s why, in the past few years, Shostak has continually bet a cup of coffee with everyone he knows that humans will find aliens by around 2029. “We’d have to be dead above the neck if we weren’t interested in this,” says Penelope Boston, the director of the NASA Astrobiology Institute. —Neel Patel

4. They’re Especially Bullish About These Planets

Adventures in the “Goldilocks zone.”

Scientists now think every one in five or six planets might be habitable, based on two general criteria: They’re rocky, and they reside in a region of the star’s orbit called the “Goldilocks zone,” where it’s not too cold and not too hot, but just right to allow for liquid water to form on the surface. And where there’s water, there can be life. Extraterrestrial researchers and enthusiasts are most excited about these seven:

Proxima B: The closest exoplanet ever discovered is also a potentially habitable world in its own right, if the intense stellar winds don’t make it barren. It’s not totally inconceivable we might be able to actually send a probe and study it directly this century — even travel to it ourselves one day.

TRAPPIST-1 System: The red dwarf at the center of this possesses a whopping seven planets in its orbit — three of which reside in the Goldilocks zone, but all of which seem to possess some degree of potential habitability — and they’re so close to one another that life on one planet could quickly spread to another.

LHS 1140b: This wouldn’t be a planet we could colonize. It’s almost seven times the mass of the Earth and 40 percent larger, making it a “super-Earth.” But its mass means that it would retain a thicker atmosphere capable of keeping it warmer and more comfortable for life than most other places.

Ross 128 b: One of the best chances we have so far at finding life on another planet. It orbits an inactive red-dwarf star, meaning it’s likely not being bludgeoned by solar radiation. And we’ve detected strange signals emanating from the nearby host star — signals that perhaps have intelligent origins?

Mars: Mars has water, as we’ve known since 2015. Although the planet looks like a barren wasteland these days, there’s little reason to write off any chance we might find aliens residing in some cavern or crevice.

The Ocean Worlds (Europa, Enceladus, Titan): Many of Jupiter’s and Saturn’s moons show signs of possessing a liquid ocean underneath the surface.

GJ 1214b: Nicknamed “waterworld” by scientists; signs of potential clouds give us some hope the planet has an atmosphere.

—N.P.

5. And There Is “Documentation”

In 2012, the photographer Steven Hirsch asked UFO-convention attendees who claimed to have had personal contact with extraterrestrials to draw and describe their experiences. A sampling below.

Camille: A beam of solid blue light came through her ceiling and transported her onto a table where she was surrounded by beings in white robes with high collars. Photo: Courtesy of Steven Hirsch

Bruce: An alien woke him from his bed to show him the moons of Saturn. Photo: Courtesy of Steven Hirsch

Lisa: A gray alien knocked at her door and handed her two babies, leaving her with a hole in her head. Photo: Courtesy of Steven Hirsch

Steve: He saw a beeping, bright white light; it zapped his friend up. Photo: Courtesy of Steven Hirsch

Nancy: Her body responded to the “low hum” of the UFO spacecraft, a memory she accessed in regression therapy. Photo: Courtesy of Steven Hirsch

Rita: She has been visited by a golden reptilian alien throughout her life. Photo: Courtesy of Steven Hirsch

6. That “Asteroid” Looks an Awful Lot Like a Rocket Ship

For science-minded SETI freaks, the last decade has been a particularly exciting one.

‘Oumuamua.

We May Have Just Seen an Actual Flying Saucer
When ‘Oumuamua — the name means “first messenger” in Hawaiian — was discovered floating through the solar system in October, SETI nuts immediately started checking the boxes that suggested the rod-shaped object might be an alien spacecraft of some kind. After all, it’s the first interstellar object we’ve ever seen pass through the solar system. UFO enthusiasts point out that rods (along with flying saucers) are the two most common shapes cited by witnesses in UFO sightings, and the cigar shape would allow it to be slim enough to avoid collision with other objects as well as maximize aerodynamics for travel. Both the SETI Institute and the Breakthrough Listen initiative pointed their instruments toward the object but found no unusual signals emitting from it. Of course, maybe it’s an ancient relic from an interstellar civilization, or maybe the aliens just weren’t interested in making contact (that asteroid-ness could’ve just been camouflage). With the object on its way out of the solar system, we may never know.

And There Could Be an Alien Megastructure Much Farther Out
In the fall of 2015, Penn State astronomer Jason Wright posited that erratic shifts in brightness coming from a newly discovered star 1,280 light-years from Earth couldn’t be explained by exoplanets or other astrophysics that we understand. He theorized, instead, that the fluctuations may be the result of massive objects passing in front of the star, in a kind of orbit — a whole array of massive satellites or other kinds of structures, presumably produced by a civilization of advanced intelligence. Whoa.

Aliens Could Be Dancing to Earth Music Right Now
Last year, two planets were discovered orbiting a red dwarf 12.36 light-years from Earth. At least one of these planets is in the Goldilocks zone, so SETI International decided to beam some musical signals over to the planet. With a closer proximity to Earth than most potentially habitable exoplanets, it’d be an exciting planet to start an interstellar pen-pal relationship with — assuming there’s someone around to hear our notes and listen to them as a welcoming tune instead of a battle cry.

And We’re Getting Radio Signals From … Something
Fast radio bursts (FRBs) are one of the most mysterious phenomena ever observed by scientists. Though they last only a few milliseconds, these pulses, first detected in 2007, emit more energy in that time than the sun does in 24 hours. Three more were found this month, and we’re no closer to understanding their origin — except that they’re coming from outside the Milky Way. So naturally, many experts have begun to think perhaps they’re produced by an ultra-advanced civilization from afar, trying to speak to us through signals we can barely comprehend.

—N.P.

{ http://nymag.com/selectall } 

By David Wallace-Wells, James D. Walsh, Neel Patel, Clint Rainey,Katie Heaney, Eric Benson, and Tim Urban

7. These Masters of the Universe Are Obsessed (They Are Also All Men)

Which space-besotted billionaire will be the first to make contact?

Robert Bigelow 
As a child, Bigelow watched the government test atomic bombs from his bedroom window and he and his classmates could see the mushroom clouds bloom over the Mojave Desert from their school playground. To some, such memories are the stuff of dystopic Cold War hellscapes, but Bigelow remembers them as an epiphany. Even back then, Bigelow knew he wasn’t going to be a scientist (he was lousy at math), so he resolved himself to make as much money as possible in the hopes that he could one day fund his own space program. He went on to make at least $1 billion with Budget Suites of America, long-term motel rentals around the Southwest. He now runs Bigelow Aerospace, which holds contracts with NASA and was a primary contractor for the Department of Defense’s Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program.

Photo: Stephen Lam/Reuters

Elon Musk 
Musk is hell-bent on using his $21 billion to colonize Mars. His company SpaceX has been trying desperately to reduce the cost of space travel in the hopes of beginning a million-person colonization of Mars. “If [we’re not in] a simulation, then maybe we’re in a lab and there’s some advanced alien civilization that’s just watching how we develop, out of curiosity, like mold in a petri dish,” says Musk.

Photo: Paul Gallen/Twitter

Paul Allen 
When Congress cut off funding for NASA’s hunt for aliens in 1993, Allen gave millions to the SETI Institute; in 2009, the Allen Telescope Array started searching the cosmos. Allen has given an additional $30 million to the project, a sum that bought him a guarantee that if the array detects an extraterrestrial communiqué, Allen will be the first nonscientist to know.

Photo: Bryan Bedder/Getty Images for Breaktrough Prize Foundation

Yuri Milner 
Last year, Milner — named after a Russian cosmonaut — announced a plan to send spaceships to Saturn’s moon Enceladus in search of alien life. Milner is also funding Breakthrough Listen, a ten-year project to use a telescope in West Virginia to search for messages from intelligent life, and Breakthrough Starshot, in conjunction with Mark Zuckerberg and the late Stephen Hawking.

Jeff Bezos 
His company Blue Origin is competing with Elon Musk’s SpaceX to launch reusable rockets (and comically rich tourists) into space. While Musk played himself in a cameo in Iron Man 2, Bezos appeared as an alien Starfleet official in 2016’s Star Trek Beyond. (It was not a speaking role.)

“Why do I feel so much like Sigourney Weaver?” Bezos said last March as he piloted a giant manned robot at Amazon’s MARs conference.

Franklin Antonio 
Antonio cofounded Qualcomm, a mobile tech company, in the mid-’80s. He’s also the company’s chief scientist and has given millions to SETI research. Last year Antonio gave $30 million to the University of California San Diego’s school of engineering and followed that donation up with a contribution to Roy Moore’s failed senate campaign.

8. As Are Some Prominent Military and Government Folks

You see a lot more as a test pilot than as a farmer in Iowa.

Nick Pope
“Know that there are people who watch our skies to protect the sleeping masses,” Britain’s former chief UFO investigator warns in his memoir. “But also know that not all potential intruders into our airspace have two wings, a fuselage, and a tail, and not all show up on our radar.” Pope’s ominous counsel follows time he spent in the ’90s inspecting thousands of paranormal incidents from crop circles to purported bedside abductions. He took that job certain this kind of stuff “only happened to weirdos,” but unexplainable sightings soon convinced him that “there is a war going on” with aliens. Worse, the U.K. Defense Ministry cut his old UFO desk’s funding in 2009, so whatever’s out there “could attack at any time,” Pope believes. Earthlings’ diminished odds have gotten him more fatalistic lately, too: After scientists suggested ‘Oumuamua — a bizarre-shaped asteroid that’s the first interstellar object to pass through our solar system — might be an alien spaceship, he argued in December we “probably wouldn’t survive an alien invasion” anyway, because if they find us, it’s clear who has the upper hand.

Paul Hellyer 
Canada’s Defense minister during the Cold War, now 94, believes that at least 80 species of aliens have been visiting Earth for millennia. One group is called the Tall Whites (because they can reach basketball-goal height) or Nordic Blondes (because they look like they’re “from Denmark or somewhere”). Unfortunately, the others may include ecoterrorists: “We’re doing all sorts of things which are not what good stewards of their homes should be doing,” he told media in 2014. “They don’t like that, and they’ve made it very clear.” Hellyer adds that many technological “breakthroughs” were aped from these extraterrestrials. Microchips and fiber optics, for instance, were taken off crashed alien vehicles and reverse-engineered. The aliens have a special technology that would solve climate change as well, he claims, but the Illuminati are hiding it because it would devastate oil interests.

Philip Corso 
Corso’s military career was long and illustrious, from rebuilding Rome’s government after World War II as an Army Intelligence captain to having worked the Pentagon’s foreign-technology desk in the ’60s. He doesn’t appear to have said a word publicly about aliens until 1997, when Simon & Schuster published The Day After Roswell — with a foreword by Strom Thurmond — just 13 months before Corso died. It was his tell-all outlining a decades-long Roswell cover-up while plugging his own clandestine exploits, which he claimed involved reverse-engineering technology found on alien spacecrafts. This is how the world got lasers, particle beams, microchips, even Kevlar, Corso said. Skeptics argue that regular Earth people’s R&D behind technology like lasers is impossibly well documented.

Barry Goldwater 
Had he won election in 1964, one of his White House’s first acts might have been releasing top-secret UFO files. He harbored a lifelong fascination with the truth about extraterrestrial contact, much of it stemming from his desire to “find out what was in” the mysterious Hangar 18 at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, home to the Air Force’s Project Blue Book. In the ’80s, it surfaced he’d spent decades corresponding with UFO investigators and harassing the military for access to the hangar’s so-called Blue Room, where conspiracy theorists believe alien bodies from Roswell are preserved. (“Not only can’t you get into it,” his friend General Curtis LeMay supposedly snapped in 1975, “but don’t you ever mention it to me again.” Goldwater claims he didn’t.) After retiring in 1987, the senator toldLarry King the Earth is “one of several billion planets in this universe. I can’t believe that God or whoever is in charge would put thinking bodies on only one planet.”

Roscoe Hillenkoetter
After he’d served as the first CIA director (he’d been appointed by President Truman), Hillenkoetter retired from a distinguished Navy career in 1957 and took a gig at a brand-new private research group called the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena. Its chief purpose was pressuring the government to disclose what it knew about UFOs, via investigations like Project Blue Book. Hillenkoetter went after the intelligence community, writing angry open letters that said things like: “It is time for the truth to be brought out in open congressional hearings.” When he pointed out in 1960 that the Air Force had investigated 6,312 UFO reports to date, but was seemingly trying “to hide the facts,” the military reminded Americans that “no physical evidence, not even a minute fragment of a so-called flying saucer, has ever been found.”

Of course, another theory popped up in the ’80s — that Hillenkoetter had helped run a secret committee all along of politicians, military officers, and scientists called the Majestic 12. Ufologists claimed this cabal was formed in 1947, once Truman started panicking over what to do with all the alien spacecrafts the government kept finding. The group’s existence is based on government files that allegedly materialized in 1984. The FBI denied their authenticity entirely, but they and the Majestic 12 remain popular grist for conspiracy theories, having figured in Blink-182’s song “Aliens Exist” and even one of Twin Peaks’s side plots.

Dennis Kucinich 
Kucinich’s 2008 presidential campaign didn’t suffer from his admission, made during a live TV debate, that, back in 1982, he’d seen a UFO at friend Shirley MacLaine’s Washington State home. (He was polling around 4 percent at the time.) But the current candidate for Ohio governor got mocked plenty; one joke among Beltway insiders was he wanted the “little green vote.”

Staff were prepped to deny the encounter when reporters asked about the passage in MacLaine’s 2007 New Age self-help book, Sage-ing While Age-ing, that revealed Kucinich didn’t just see a UFO but had also felt “a connection in his heart and heard directions in his mind.” The other witnesses — a Juilliard-trained trumpeter working as MacLaine’s bodyguard and his model girlfriend — also report having seen a trio of triangle-shaped aircrafts flying in tight formation. Her house was 50 miles from Mt. Rainier, a “saucer magnet” for UFO buffs because of all the nearby sightings, including America’s very first “flying saucer” in 1947. Kucinich had the community’s full support, even if he spent years playing coy.

It helped that in Congress he did things like trying to ban space-based weapons. A 2001 bill he authored himself prohibited America from using “radiation, electromagnetic, psychotronic, sonic, laser, or other energies” for the purposes of “information war, mood management, or mind control of such populations.” It explicitly singled out “chemtrails,” a term for jet condensation trails when conspiracy theorists believe they’re being used for biological warfare. In 2008, however, he only confirmed he’d seen a UFO, then pointed out, accurately, to moderator Tim Russert that “more people in this country have seen UFOs than I think approve of George Bush’s presidency.”

John Podesta
When WikiLeaks published the Hillary Clinton emails, a weird number of Podesta’s mentioned aliens and involved contact with believers like Tom DeLonge and astronaut Edgar Mitchell. As Bill Clinton’s deputy chief of staff, he was known as an X-Files fanatic who’d “call the Air Force and ask them what’s going on in Area 51.” In 2014, he spent 13 months advising President Obama — and what was his “biggest failure”? According to him, failing to get government files declassified on the 1965 Kecksburg, Pennsylvania, UFO incident.
Then during Bush’s term, he began publicly crusading for NASA to release UFO documents to journalist Leslie Kean, the person ultimately behind the Times’ Pentagon exposé.

Podesta has kept his personal ET beliefs under wraps, but in Kean’s best seller UFOs: Generals, Pilots, and Government Officials Go on the Record, he gamely wrote a foreword that argues: “It’s time to find out what the truth really is … The American people — and people around the world — want to know, and they can handle the truth.”

Pavel and Marina Popovich
This husband-wife duo was one part world-renowned cosmonaut (Pavel) and one part the Soviet Union’s most celebrated female pilot (Marina). They held among their titles that of sixth human in orbit, first Soviet female to break the sound barrier, and holder of more than 100 aviation world records. Once their illustrious flying careers ended, both became ufologists. Pavel headed up Russia’s UFO association and claimed to have seen an unidentified aircraft zip past his airplane on a trip home from Washington, D.C., with a group of scientists. People onboard said it was triangular, brightly lit, and rocketed by at 1,000 miles per hour.

Marina one-upped him, though — she claimed to have seen multiple UFOs and a “Bigfoot creature” — and after they divorced, she became the acclaimed expert, not Pavel. She began preaching a UFO glasnost of sorts under Gorbachev, claiming the Soviet government had pieces of five spaceships in its possession and reports of 14,000 UFO sightings, yet for decades researchers were “either fired or put in psychiatric hospitals.” Her eventual book, simply called UFO Glasnost, spoke candidly about how Leonardo da Vinci, Jules Verne, and Ray Bradbury were alien mediums and Gorbachev had the markings of an extraterrestrial emissary because “he’s an epoch-making phenomenon.”

—Clint Rainey

9. (And This Genius Thinks He Can Talk to Them)

In January, Stephen Wolfram — a computer-scientist philosopher and the author of a “universal” programming language that informed the alien communication in the movie Arrival — wrote an exceedingly long blog post about how best to communicate with aliens.

Tim Urban: You created a language you think we might be able to use to communicate with aliens. So what exactly is it that we would want to say to the rest of the universe if we had the chance?

Stephen Wolfram: I think the main difficulty is the definitional one. You talk about alien life, you talk about intelligence; what are those things abstractly?

We know the specific example that we have historically been exposed to: life on Earth, human intelligence. The question is, when you generalize away from that, what do you get to? One of the things that I’m fond of quoting is the statement “The weather has a mind of its own.” What does this mean? What is the abstract kind of thing that’s like the mind? It’s the ability to do sophisticated computation. That’s something that exists in the weather, just as it exists in our brains, just as it exists in lots of living systems. And then, what’s different between the weather and its sort-of-mindlike thing and our human intelligence? The fundamental answer to that is our human intelligence has its particular cultural, civilizational history and the weather doesn’t.

TU: So is it that history that we’d want to communicate?

SW: Yes, I think the thing to realize is that we in our civilization have followed a particular path. There are an infinite number of possible paths that we could’ve followed. To any other intelligence, our path would be quite mysterious.

TU: Right, so we actually have unique information to communicate. You could have the most sophisticated species, and we can still tell them something they don’t know about our history.

SW: I’m particularly amused by Elon Musk’s car going into space. That is so extremely aligned with the notion of grave goods from ancient Egypt, where you’re taking things from your everyday life to be buried with you. It’s charming.

10. There Have Been Enough Well-Known Encounters to Fill Encyclopedias

Here, just a small sampling of the classics.

Barney and Betty Hill. Photo: Bettman Archive/Getty Images

Barney and Betty Hill’s Abduction
The Hills (above) claimed that in 1961 a bright light swooped over their car on a New Hampshire road and that they woke up a few hours later and the car had been “magnetized.” With regressive hypnosis, both were able to recall being abducted and probed by the little gray men, which soon became the de facto alien description. (The Hills’ captors were, interestingly, very similar to Selenites — the five-foot moon inhabitants H.G. Wells invented for The First Men in the Moon.) Betty astonished authorities when she began drawing a map of the constellation the creatures claimed to be from. Initially it looked like nonsense, until a few scientists noticed its resemblance to Zeta Reticuli, a system inside the constellation Reticulum largely unknown in that year. Their case generated widespread publicity, partly because they were a mixed-race couple in the ’60s, and turned into the flagship example of a “close encounter,” though not until years after the fact (skeptics argue the delayed report is a sign it’s a hoax). The hype ultimately culminated in The UFO Incident, a 1975 made-for-TV movie starring James Earl Jones and Estelle Parsons.

Antonio Villas-Boas’s Seduction
In 1957, small aliens with huge heads allegedly came for Villas-Boas, a young Brazilian farmer. Villas-Boas was forced inside their vessel, where the creatures took blood samples from, of all places, his chin, and rubbed in some sort of gel. Soon after, a blonde female with big, almond-shaped eyes joined him. She began rubbing his body, then initiated sex. After they were done, she left quickly, which gave Villas-Boas the impression that he was being used to better the aliens’ “stock.” He didn’t react well, as he suddenly felt exploited as “a good stallion” by these foreign chin-fetishists.

Weird as it was, Boas’s encounter, with its probing and forced sex, became the archetypal alien abduction. Reportedly skittish at first, he eventually told his story to João Martins, the writer behind popular magazine O Cruzeiro’s “Flying Saucers’ Terrible Mission” series. Doctors confirmed Boas had suffered radiation poisoning, but Martins ultimately soured on Boas’s story, for one because his spaceship sketch bore remarkable similarities to the Soviet Union’s Sputnik. He turned out all right, though: He got a law degree, had four kids, and died believing his children had a half-sibling living in space.

The “Wow!” Signal
In 1977, Ohio State’s Big Ear radio telescope intercepted a 72-second burst of sound that bore signs of having come from interstellar space, which could be a sign of extraterrestrial communication. The anomaly measured 1,420 megahertz, a frequency in the “water hole,” the term for a radio-emission range thought ideal for intergalactic messages because it’s unusually quiet. Jerry Ehman, the astronomer who spotted it, was so excited that he scribbled a giant “Wow!” on his printout. Astronomy’s explanations for the bizarre phenomenon include secret spy satellites and a passing comet nobody knew about in 1977. But many admit nothing explains it adequately, and even if the signal doesn’t prove aliens exist, it’s still a “tug on the cosmic fishing line.” To date, it remains the best evidence of alien communication ever obtained.

Foo Fighters
In the middle of World War II, things took a mysterious turn for Air Force pilots flying overnight missions. They reported seeing lights chasing their aircraft. The number varied (sometimes it was one; other times ten), and so did the colors (red, orange, and green). But the unidentified objects shared in common that they moved very fast, up to 200 miles per hour, yet could dart on a dime. These pilots — among the world’s best — admitted the objects generally flew circles around them. Their lore grew among the squadrons. In 1944, a crew flying along the Rhine in Germany described seeing “eight to ten bright orange lights” whiz by “at high speed.” Neither ground control nor their own planes caught anything on radar, and when one pilot turned toward the lights, they reportedly “disappeared.”

They called their mystery air companions “foo fighters,” an inside joke based on a phrase the comic-book character Smokey Stover used to declare (“Where there’s foo, there’s fire”). The term flying saucer hadn’t caught on yet, or else it would’ve sufficed. Some witnesses assumed they were tracer fire, reflections from ice crystals, or high-tech weaponry developed by the Nazis, while the government had a boring explanation as always: They were “electrostatic (similar to St. Elmo’s fire) or electromagnetic phenomena,” though which one and wherefrom were “never defined.”

Kecksburg UFO Crash
In 1965, an intense fireball streaked over southern Canada and Detroit and dropped debris over Ohio, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. Officially, it was declared a midsize meteor, but eyewitnesses in the small Pennsylvania town of Kecksburg claimed they’d found an acorn-shaped object about the size of a VW Beetle in the woods that was festooned with hieroglyphics. Newspaper reporters on the ground said the military conducted a “close inspection” of the crash site, and despite the official line being that the search yielded “absolutely nothing,” conspiracists maintain the object was packed onto an Army flatbed truck and that the whole thing was a Roswell-level cover-up. Leslie Kean’s Coalition for the Freedom of Information managed to secure some of the government’s files but reportedly not anything enlightening.

However, a second explanation surfaced in the early aughts: It was Die Glocke, purportedly a top-secret weapon Nazis developed that let them time-travel. By dumb Back to the Future–esque luck, it had come to rural Pennsylvania in the year 1965. These proponents argue Nazi SS officer Hans Kammler was navigating the device when it crash-landed in Kecksburg, allowing him to escape Allied troops in the days before VE Day and successfully integrate into postwar U.S. society.

Kenneth Arnold’s “Flying Saucer”
Kenneth Arnold, a respected pilot, claimed in 1947 he’d seen nine mostly flat objects whip past Mount Rainier at speeds he timed at 1,760 miles per hour. “They were shaped like saucers,” he reportedly explained, “and were so thin I could barely see them.” A neologism was born.

Arnold he demanded military personnel explain what the contraptions were, if they knew, since he’d dismissed any possibility of them being guided missiles or new types of jets. His best guess? “From another planet.” Dozens of others came forward with similar sightings, from as far away as Oklahoma and Arizona. But Arnold didn’t enjoy his newfound celebrity. He said people had started shrieking in cafés when they saw him and fleeing. He described the situation to reporters as “out of hand” and regretted having people “look at me as a combination of Einstein, Flash Gordon, and screwball.”

Phoenix Lights
On March 13, 1997, thousands of people in southern Arizona say they saw weird lights move across the night sky in a flying V. Most of their reports came in between 7 and 10:30 p.m. along a 300-mile stretch from Phoenix, through Tucson, and to the Mexico border. A majority of people spied the pattern passing overhead (it was supposedly several football fields long), but the Air Force also sent a team of A-10 Warthogs from nearby Barry Goldwater Range on a training exercise that same night, and, as luck would have it, those planes dropped some stationary flares just outside Phoenix, considerably complicating any UFO conspiracies with a second set of strange bright lights.

Witnesses claim to have watched the first set of lights — the low-altitude wedge formation — coast by with their binoculars; they say the lights were red, had a singular white one at the V’s tip, seemed engineless, and even banked southeast at one point. Actor Kurt Russell now claims he saw them while up in a private plane near the Phoenix airport, but air-traffic control told him the radar was clear. Governor Fife Symington reportedly witnessed the V-shaped as well. At the time he felt sure it wasn’t aliens, but his mind changed in 2007, after retiring from politics: He told media that as a pilot, he knows “just about every machine that flies,” and these lights definitely weren’t terrestrial.

The “Warminster Thing”
Warminster’s long, controversial association with UFOs began in the English town on Christmas Day in 1964, when a local woman heard a “crackling sound” rip over her head. Other so-called sonic attacks plagued scores of others in town around the same time. Townspeople had no clue what was behind them, so they began blaming the “Thing.” Additional reports of inexplicable lights in the sky made it clear the “Thing” might have hailed from outer space.

Travis Walton’s Abduction
In 1975, a team of loggers claimed their 22-year-old co-worker Travis Walton disappeared for five days after a glowing disc in the Arizona woods zapped him with a “bluish ray.” Intrigued, he’d reportedly wandered underneath the hovering object, and it abducted him. He claims he awoke on a table in a sterile-looking room surrounded by three “well-developed fetuses” wearing tan robes. He tried to flee, passed out, then regained consciousness only once the aliens had ditched him on the Arizona roadside.

The story received loads of publicity — authorities thought Walton had been murdered, and seven eyewitnesses corroborating a single close encounter was unheard of. The National Enquirer ultimately paid the group $5,000 for the story, after they passed polygraphs and Walton agreed to be interviewed by the tabloid’s “prestigious” hypnotist. In 1993, Paramount released Fire in the Sky, a movie it said was based on “the most famous case of UFO abduction ever recorded.” Skeptics have shot holes in what they assume was a hoax and note that James Earl Jones’s NBC movie The UFO Incident had aired two weeks before Walton’s own UFO incident. The encounter has a cult following to this day, though, enough that a first edition of Walton’s 1978 memoir The Walton Experience now fetches hundreds of dollars online.

The Battle of Los Angeles
On February 25, 1942, reports filtered in of a glowing object floating over Culver City. Air-raid sirens sounded; the Army proceeded to pepper it with 1,400 anti-aircraft shells. Eventually it disappeared from view, but not before a citywide blackout was ordered, shell fragments got lodged in surrounding buildings, and five civilians died. The Navy later explained it had been a weather balloon. But ufologists suspected an alien spacecraft, which would explain why an hour’s worth of heavy artillery had failed to eliminate a single weather balloon.

Steven Spielberg would mercilessly satirize the incident in 1941, a “comedy spectacular.” But ufologists immediately suspected an alien spacecraft, which would explain why an hours’ worth of heavy artillery had failed to eliminate a single weather balloon. Conspiracists site a famous L.A. Times photo as extra proof; it seemingly caught searchlights trained on a very un-balloon-like object getting barraged with shells. The next day’s Times ran an editorial on page A1 (“Information, Please”) demanding the Army and Navy release more info, “if only to clarify their own conflicting statements about it.”

—C.R.

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By David Wallace-Wells, James D. Walsh, Neel Patel, Clint Rainey,Katie Heaney, Eric Benson, and Tim Urban

11. And Continuing Right Up to the Present Day

New encounters happen all the time — even to famous people. When Guillermo del Toro spotted one in Guadalajara, he says, “It was so crappy. It was a flying saucer, so clichéd, with lights.” Above, a sampling from ufosightingsdaily.com over recent months.

January 18, Japan. Photo: Ufosightingsdaily

February 4, Popocatépetl, Mexico. Photo: Ufosightingsdaily

February 28, Cleveland, Ohio. Photo: Ufosightingsdaily

March 7, Bangs, Texas. Photo: Ufosightingsdaily

12. We Even Have Some Pretty Developed Theories About Why We Haven’t Heard From ET Yet

Maybe we’re the pond scum.

The Aliens Are All Dead
Let’s start with the most depressing theory: Maybe we haven’t found extraterrestrials because they’re all dead — at least now. The universe is 13.78 billion years old, and in that amount of time, there might have been plenty of civilizations that evolved and went extinct.

The Aliens Are All Sleeping
But maybe they’re not dead — just hibernating. Another theory suggests that perhaps there’s an extraterrestrial species out there that’s so advanced it cannot efficiently make use of its technology right now, because the universe’s temperature is currently too high. Good news, though: The universe’s temperature is cooling down (even as Earth’s is heating up). So aliens may have decided to take a snooze for a few trillion years while they wait for colder weather that’s more suited.

The Aliens Are Hiding
If even a genius like Stephen Hawking thought that aliens might destroy us if they ever were to find us, then maybe we should be a little afraid. Perhaps the aliens think the same thing, so they’ve gone into hiding — from us. If another civilization were technologically savvy enough and had enough resources, it could build a massive orbital structure like a Dyson sphere to keep it cloaked from detection. Or it might use high-powered lasers to provide an optical façade that keeps its planet from being detected by telescopic instruments.

The Aliens Are Still Evolving
Maybe alien life is actually everywhere — it’s just not intelligent enough to speak with us. It took about 3.5 billion years of evolution to turn single-celled microbes into humans. Maybe we just happened to evolve faster and earlier than everyone else.

Humans Haven’t Spent Enough Time Looking
Realistically speaking, we’ve only had the proper equipment to search for aliens for a little over half a century. On the scale of the cosmos, that time frame is less than a fraction of the blink of an eye. The process could take centuries or even millennia — optimistically speaking.

The Aliens Are Already Here
This is where the conspiracy theorists get to go nuts. Yes, maybe the aliens are already here and we just haven’t figured it out yet. They might be taking some time to study us before unveiling themselves, or maybe they have already let themselves be known to certain groups. The truth isn’t out there — it’s here.

—N.P.

13. And in the Meantime, Aliens Can Be Whatever We Want Them to Be

Joseph O. Baker is a sociologist and the co-author of the 2010 book Paranormal America.

Katie Heaney: Why, when we think of aliens, do they all look the same — three feet tall, gray or green, big black eyes?

Joseph O. Baker: It didn’t used to be that way. UFO narratives became much more popular in the 1950s and ’60s, and during that era, the descriptions of the aliens would be almost humanlike in form. If you see drawings that some of the so-called contactees made, the aliens almost look like Swedish people — very attractive blond types with shining eyes. The abductee narrative really took over pop culture in the 1970s and ’80s, and after that, there’s this homogenization of the public perception because of all the stories and TV and movies about abductions.

KH: Even those guys look pretty human — why do we have such a hard time imagining radically different forms of life?

JB: We’re the people doing the projecting here. Much the same way people do with God — really, what sense does it make for a supernatural entity to have a gender or be humanoid Anthropomorphized supernatural entities tend to be more compelling.

KH: Is there a reason why so many of the abduction stories feature “probing”?

JB: The probe part of the abduction narrative took over in some sense because it tends to be the most salacious aspect of these stories. It’s almost become shorthand for alien abduction. But the stories of abduction among believers are really diverse, and usually probing is only one small part of it. Men will report having sperm extraction, and women will report having eggs extracted. Positive encounters tend to be akin to religion in some ways, in which beings of higher enlightenment show people the errors of humanity, or help them reach a higher plane of consciousness.

KH: Who is likely to believe?

JB: Men, and people with lower levels of income, are more likely to believe. We don’t really find strong patterns by education, and if we do, there’s usually a slight positive effect. But one of the strongest predictors you can find for believers is their extreme distrust of the government. That’s part of the reason it got so big in the ’70s, when trust in institutions was low. Trump might actually increase belief in UFOs.

Another one of the strongest predictors is not participating as strongly in forms of organized religion. In some sense, there’s a bit of a clue there about what’s going on with belief — it’s providing an alternative belief system.

KH: Most alien-encounter stories give aliens one of two motives: Either they want something from us or they want to kill us. What does that say about us?

JB: It shows that we have a high level of perceived self-importance. The idea that, in this vast universe, these beings sought us out in this tiny corner of the spiral arm of the Milky Way to come learn omething 
from us, or eliminate us, is a bit flattering.

KH: I’ve heard that sightings are way down in the smartphone era, when people presumably don’t take a story as proof enough.

JB: Well, it’s easier to hoax things now than it used to be. I would think that with an increased availability of videos, if it was going to do anything, it might lead to more belief, but from most of what I’ve seen, it looks more like stasis. Rates of reported sightings and rate of belief have been pretty stable. The 2005 Baylor Religion Survey found that 25 percent of respondents agreed or strongly agreed with the statement “Some UFOs are probably spaceships from other worlds.”

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Golden UFOs Seen Leaving Mountain Peeks Of Sedona, Arizona On March 2018, UFO Sighting News.

Date of sighting: March 2018
Location of sighting: Sedona, Arizona, USA 
Source: MUFON #90899

Bright golden lights were seen at Sedona this week in the mountains. The bright lights were caught in two different photos, always in the same location. The mountains would make a great exit area for UFOs that were leaving an underground base in the area. Also in the clouds above the mountains is another golden UFO. 

Its unknown if the lights were seen by the eyewitness or when they got home, but often cameras catch the full activities of the moment, where the human eye is more flawed and processes much less. 
Scott C. Waring

{ http://www.ufosightinsdaily.com/ }

Home Security Camera Records A Fairy Visiting In London, England, Photos, UFO Sighting News.

Date of sighting: April 10, 2013
Location of sighting: London, Great Britain
Source: MUFON #90907

This report took place back in 2013, but was reported today. Look closely at the objects that were caught on a outside home security camera and you will notice a strange resemblance to a fairy. Could they be an alien species visiting this planet? Yes, most likely. Stories of fairies have existed for hundreds of years. For a story to last so long, some truth must be in it.

Humanity only knows a small percent of the life that exists on our own planet, and this could be a species that has visited often enough that stories of the little flying people have spread far and wide. 
Scott C. Waring

{ http://www.ufosightinsdaily.com/ }

Was Stephen Hawking murdered to stop him from revealing the existence of aliens? UFO Sighting News.

Was Stephen Hawking murdered to stop him from revealing top secret information about the existence of aliens? People have been killed for much less, and its easy for someone to be killed an make it look of natural causes. However, in his case, he really did look exhausted in the last few months of his life. It was clear his ailments were taking a huge toll on him. You decide, tell us in the comments below please. 
Scott C. Waring

UFOMania of Youtube states:

A stunning new Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) circulating in the Kremlin today claims it is “more than likely” that world renowned British Theoretical Physicist Stephen Hawking was murdered as his 14 March death came just 10 days after his 4 March revision to his scientific research paper titled “A Smooth Exit from Eternal Inflation?” 

{ http://www.ufosightingsdaily.com/ }

UFO PROOF? Shock footage emerges of 'ALIEN AIRCRAFT in pursuit of jet liner'

SHOCKING footage has emerged of a UFO in pursuit of a jet liner that could be the greatest evidence that aliens exist and have visited Earth that has left witnesses stunned, it has been claimed.

{ https://nationalufocenter.com/ }

Filer’s Files #11 – 2018 Trump’s Space Force - PART II

Fact Check: Did Stephen Hawking Become A Catholic After A Blessing From Pope Francis?

According to a controversial Facebook post, in a time-honored sacred ritual, Professor Hawking became a Catholic just before passing away.

But did Stephen Hawking really turn to Christianity before his death?

The world-renowned astrophysicist passed away at the age of 76, leaving behind a great scientific legacy. And when it came down to religion and God, Hawking wasn’t really someone who was religiously motivated, nor did he believe in the existence in god as he claimed, on numerous occasions, how God had no role in creating the universe.”

Now, as news about Hawking’s death has quickly spread among all social networks and news agencies, posts about Stephen Hawking have become very popular, after all, he was one of the most popular scientists of the 21st century.

On 14 March 2018, a Facebook Post published by a Page called „Catholics Online“ posted an image of Professor Stephen Hawking and Pope Francis with a caption reading: Before he died, ‘Stip’h ‘Hawkins’ (apparently the author didn’t even manage to spell Hawking’s name accurately) who did not believe in God requested to visit the Vatican. “Now l believe” was the only statement he made after the Holy Father blessed him.

Before he died, Stiph Hawkins who did not believe in God requested to visit the Vatican. "Now l believe" was the only statement he made after the Holy Father blessed him.

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However, we all know that Professor Hawking was an atheist, and saw no place for God in the universe.

Hawking often discussed the origins of the universe and his views about a Creator suggesting that the universe had no need for such a divine being.

As the Washington Post documented after his death, Hawking told the Guardian in 2011 that he did not believe in an afterlife or heaven:

I regard the brain as a computer which will stop working when its components fail. There is no heaven or afterlife for broken down computers; that is a fairy story for people afraid of the dark.

Furthermore, in his Book “The Grand Design,” which was co-written with American physicist Leonard Mlodinow, Hawking says according to a new series of theories, it is superfluous to think of a creator of the universe.

“The universe began with the Big Bang, which simply followed the inevitable law of physics,” Hawking wrote. “Because there is a law such as gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing. Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the universe exists, why we exist.”

“The universe didn’t need a God to begin; it was quite capable of launching its existence on its own,” said Hawking explained in his book, The Grand Design.

In today’s world, where new theories emerge reapply, physicists are constantly adapting new ideologies and theories to new discoveries in their respective fields.

In 2010, he told ABC News: “One can’t prove that God doesn’t exist, but science makes God unnecessary.”

But despite the fact that Hawking was an atheist, he was a member of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, appointed to it by Pope Paul VI in 1968.

As noted in an article written by the Catholic Herald, the academy said he told four popes he wanted to ‘advance the relationship between Faith and Scientific Reason’.

The Pontifical Academy of Sciences, which Pope Pius IX established in 1847, tweeted, “We are deeply saddened about the passing of our remarkable Academician Stephen #Hawking who was so faithful to our Academy.”

“He told the 4 Popes he met that he wanted to advance the relationship between Faith and Scientific Reason. We pray the Lord to welcome him in his Glory,” @CasinaPioIV, the academy, tweeted March 14.

It is precisely there, from where the Facebook Page Catholics Online created their little contribution to Fake News.

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Casina Pio IV@CasinaPioIV

Francisco saluta a Hawking che è contento, soddisfatto e sofferentemente per la malattia che lo imprigiona

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They used an image of Pope Francis and Stephen Hawking when he delivered his presentation on “The Origin of the Universe” at the academy’s plenary session on science and sustainability in 2016.

But despite the fact that Professor Hawking did not believe in God, he was greatly appreciated and respected in the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, and the Catholic Church in General.

Curiously, Vatican astronomer Jesuit Brother Guy Consolmagno, who has studied both physics and philosophy, told Catholic News Service in 2010 that “the ‘god’ that Stephen Hawking doesn’t believe in is one I don’t believe in either.”

“God is not just another force in the universe, alongside gravity or electricity,” he added. “God is the reason why existence itself exists. God is the reason why space and time and the laws of nature can be present for the forces to operate that Stephen Hawking is talking about.”

Source:

Featured image credit: Vatican Media.

• Stephen Hawking was a longtime member of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences
• Casina Pio IV‏ ‘I’m not afraid’: What Stephen Hawking said about God, his atheism, and his own death

{ https://www.ancient-code.com/ }

The Atomic Theory Was Developed 2,600 Years Ago By An Ancient Hindu Sage

Is history as we know wrong? Despite the fact that John Dalton, an English Chemist, and physicist is credited with developing the atom theory, the truth may be more surprising than you could imagine.

If we take a look at historic records, some 2,600 years before Dalton, an ancient Hindu sage, and philosopher called Kashyap, developed it.

Born in 600 BC,  near Dwarka, Kashyap is the actual father of the Atomic theory.

People called him ‘Kanad,’ as ‘Kan’ which in ancient Sanskrit is translated to ‘the smallest particle’ after he was seen gathering grains from the street while on a pilgrimage to Prayag.

Kashyap was fascinated by small particles and began collecting them.

When asked why he was accumulating them he responded that while individual grains might appear as useless or worthless, a collection of hundreds of grains could make someone’s daily meal. He explained how a selection of meals could feed a family and ultimately all of humankind, demonstrating how the smallest grains mattered more than anyone could imagine.

Kashyap was fascinated with the world around him and started writing down his views on everything that surrounded him, and eventually conceptualized the idea of ‘the smallest particle’ that constitutes everything we see and don’t see.

Kashyap passed his knowledge onto others, and people then started referring to him as  ‘Acharya,’ the teacher.

Eventually, he became known by the name of Acharya Kanad or ‘the teacher of small particles.’

“Every object of creation is made of atoms which in turn connect with each other to form molecules,” –Kanad.

The more you read about Kanad, the more fascinated you will become with his life and work.

The story behind how he imagined the idea of a particle that could not be divided any further is remarkably compelling.

One day, he was walking with food in his hand, and started breaking it into smaller and smaller pieces until he realized he could not break down the food any further because it was too small It was then when Acharya Kanada described the ‘invisible matter as Paramnu or Anu which translated means ‘atom.’

Acharya Kanad explained how invisible matter could not be sensed through any human organ, nor can it be seen by the naked eye.

Acharya Kanadstated that an inherent urge made one Anu (atom) combine with another.

Acharya Kanad further explained that when two Anu which belonged to the same ‘class’ of substance were combined, a dwinuka or binary molecule was created.

The Ancient Hindu Saga theorized that different mixtures of Anu produced very different types of substances.

It was Kanad who also put forward the idea that anu (atoms) could be combined in several different ways which would produce chemical changes in the presence of other factors like heat.

To provide a more uncomplicated explanation, Kanad gave the blackening of earthen pot and ripening of fruit as an example.

Kanad was also the founder of the Vaisheshika School of philosophy, a place where he shared his ideas, knowledge and explained his theories about atoms, the nature of the cosmos, and all that surrounds us, both visible and invisible.

He also wrote a book titled “Vaisheshik Darshan” where he presented all of his research.

In regards to Kanad, his ideas, theories and discoveries, A.L. Basham, a veteran Australian Indologist asserted that Kanad’s teachings “were brilliant, imaginative explanations of the physical structure of the world, and in large measure, agreed with the findings of modern physics.”

However, Acharya Kanad wasn’t the only source of superior knowledge from ancient India.

According to observations by one of the most prominent Indian scientists, certain ‘slokas’ aka verses of the holy Vedas texts make mention of several undiscovered natural phenomena that were discovered by Westerners many centuries later.

Madhavan Nair stressed that the Vedas, or also known as the four sacred texts of one of the oldest missing Vedic religion, described the presence of water on the moon, the gravitational force, and other scientific phenomena there were not supposed to be known of until centuries later.

The Vedas hold an incredible wealth of information in the field of space and atomic energy.

We were on the right track until the year 600 BC, before the invasions said 71-year-old Padma Vibhushan awardee who believes the Vedas are a treasure trove of knowledge, comprising information on metallurgy, algebra, astronomy, math, architecture, and astrology among other things.

According to the former head of the Indian space agency, the Chandrayaan 1 satellite, orbited around the moon thanks to an equation expressed thousands of years ago by Aryabhata.

Source and reference

Image credit

{https://www.ancient-code.com/ }

1st Known Interstellar Visitor Gets Weirder: 'Oumuamua Likely Had 2 Stars

What’s up with Steve: A new kind of aurora demystified by scientists

BY TIBI PUIU

Few things compare to the dazzling light show performed by nature’s northern and southern lights — but they’re not alone. It was only in the past few years that a new type of aurora was found. Thanks to the watchful eye of citizen scientists and photographers, we can now add to programme an exquisite short-lived shimmering purple ribbon of plasma called Steve. Meanwhile, scientists have had time to carefully study the phenomenon in an attempt to learn what makes it tick.

A band of dedicated Canadian aurora chasers was among the first who took pictures of Steve. The aurora feature was first posted on the Facebook group Alberta Aurora Chasers in 2016 and, initially, most thought they were looking at a ‘proton arc’ — another rare type of aurora, which isn’t caused by electrons hitting Earth’s magnetic field but by more massive protons following a solar flare.

Eric Donovan from the University of Calgary was one of the first scientists who probed Steve, a 25 to 30 kilometer (15 to 18 miles) wide arc that aligns east-west and can extend over hundreds of miles. He recognized that this wasn’t a proton arc for a number of reasons, including the fact that a proton aurora is hardly visible.

Meet Steve. Image: Dave Markel Photography.

Donovan called some colleagues, and soon enough people like Elizabeth MacDonald, a space physicist at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, sent ESA’s Swarm magnetic field mission through Steve. Swarm is a constellation of satellites tasked with studying Earth’s magnetic field. The instruments recorded accelerated and heated charged particles coming from the sun, which physicists found that they interact with a particular part of the Earth’s magnetic field in the ionosphere. So, rather than a proton arc, Macdonald and colleagues associate Steve with a so-called “subauroral ion drift,” they wrote in a new paper published in Science Advances on Wednesday. This occurs 60 degrees above the equator, where the global electric and magnetic fields align, making ions and electrons fly rapidly from east to west.

These rather rare auroras last only an hour and must coincide with space weather, specifically an ejection of charged particles from the sun. And instead of red, green, or yellow auroras shaped in mesmerizing curtains, Steve forms a ribbon across the sky that looks purplish in color. Sometimes, as some lucky photographers found, Steve also features small green picket fence-like arcs.

Most recently, Steve has been sighted in Scotland, from near Oban in Argyll and Gairloch in Wester Ross. Other places where Steve has been spotted so far include the UK, Canada, Alaska, northern US states, and New Zealand.

Credit: Catalin Tapardel‎, Alberta Aurora Chasers.

To legitimize Steve in academia, the researchers also found a clever backronym for Steve: Strong Thermal Emission Velocity Enhancement. Originally, the people who first discovered the new aurora called it Steve in honor of the children’s movie Over the Hedge, in which a character arbitrarily conjures up the name Steve to describe an object he’s not sure about.

NASA is now calling on citizen scientists and photographers to help research Steve by reporting any sightings to the Aurorasaurus project. If you live in the right latitude, this might be your chance to make a huge contribution to science.

“Because this is a new way of observing a phenomenon linked to space, it provides a new way to study it,” Vassilis Angelopoulos, a space physicist at UCLA not involved in the study, told National Geographic. “Citizen scientists can also be involved in triangulating them and determining their altitudes."

{  https://www.zmescience.com/ }

What is a Supervolcano?

BY MIHAI ANDREI

As the name implies, a supervolcano is an extremely large volcano, capable of ejecting over 1,000 cubic kilometers (240 cubic miles) of deposits. There are six known supervolcanoes and twelve known super-eruptions.

Graphic scale of known volcanic and supervolcanic eruptions. Image in public domain.

1. What is a supervolcano

If we want to see what makes a supervolcano, we need to first understand what a volcano is — and what makes it ‘super’.

The Earth’s internal structure is layered in three spherical shells: an outer solid crust(everything we see and walk on), a viscous mantle, an outer core that is much less viscous than the mantle (often considered liquid), and a solid inner core. A volcano is a rupture in the crust that allows material from the asthenosphere to reach the surface in the form of lava, volcanic ash, and gases.

You can think of volcanoes as vents through which molten rock escapes to the surface.

Most volcanoes appear because the Earth’s crust is fractured into rigid plates called tectonic plates. These plates “float” on a hotter, softer layer in its mantle. When pressure from gases within the molten rock becomes too great, an eruption occurs, but in order for this to happen, a volcano must first gather magma in a magma chamber.

A magma chamber is like a cauldron of molten rock, put under great pressure, that gradually fractures the other rocks around it, as it tries to reach the surface in order to release its pressure. These magma chambers lie deep inside the earth, generally at around 1-10 km deep.

A depiction of the Yellowstone magma chamber. Yellowstone is a known supervolcano. Image via NPS.

When an eruption takes place and material is ejected from the magma chambers, they sometimes form features called calderas: large circular or oval depressions, more than 1 km (0.6 miles) in diameter. Calderas appear because the magma was supporting the weight above it, and when the magma is ejected through the volcano, the whole thing can collapse under its own weight. For this reason, calderas can somewhat resemble craters.

But sometimes, the magma can’t push through to the surface, so it gathers in the magma chamber, building up the pressure. As the magma pool gets bigger and bigger, the chamber grows, reaching ungodly pressures — and when it does it erupt, it’s an enormous eruption; you could say, a super-eruption.

That’s right: supervolcanoes form when they gather enough magma and pressure for a gargantuan explosion. In more formal terms, geologists classify supervolcanoes as having a “VEI” of 8. The Volcanic Explosivity Index (VEI) is a relative measure of the explosiveness of volcanic eruptions, devised by researchers from the United States Geological Survey. The largest possible VEI magnitude is 8 — so, in other words, a supervolcano is the largest possible volcano.

VEI and ejecta volume correlation — note that the VEI is a logarithmic scale, meaning that each degree of magnitude is ten times larger than the previous one. Tephra is the material produced by a volcanic eruption regardless of composition or fragment size.

3. What are the supervolcanoes?

Thankfully, there aren’t that many supervolcanoes on Earth. It’s not entirely clear just how many super-eruptions there have been in Earth’s history (we’ll use that term even though it’s not quite proper). Some research has found evidence of 60 super-eruptions, while other studies report 47 such events, with the most recent one being the Oruanui eruption of New Zealand’s Taupo Volcano, 26,500 years ago. The Oruanui eruption was a highly unusual one, with a complex interplay of ejection and pyroclastic flows, covering New Zealand’s North Island with ignimbrite (a type of hardened tuff) up to 200 meters (660 ft) deep. The same volcanic area caused two other super-eruptions, 340,000 and 1,080,000 years ago respectively.

Another famous eruption is Lake Toba, which occurred some 74,000 years ago (it’s rather unusual to have two super eruptions in such quick geological succession). The eruption of Toba led to a volcanic winter (a drop in global temperatures caused by volcanic ash and droplets of sulfuric acid and water which obscure the Sun) with a worldwide decrease in temperature between 3 to 5 °C (5.4 to 9.0 °F), and up to 15 °C (27 °F) in higher latitudes. This had catastrophic consequences for the planet’s wildlife — including early humans. It killed most of the humans living at the time, creating a population bottleneck in central east Africa and India, which affects the genetic makeup of the human worldwide population to this day.

An incomplete map of supervolcanoes around the world. Red is VEI 8 and orange is VEI 7.

However, without a doubt, the most famous supervolcano is Yellowstone.

4. The Yellowstone supervolcano

Unlike most volcanoes, which emerge at the boundary of tectonic plates, Yellowstone (in Idaho, US) is a hotspot. Hotspots are pockets of unusually hot magma. It is thought that these hotspots are fed by the underlying mantle. Intriguingly, their position is not influenced by plate tectonics — as the plates move, the hotspot stays in the same place, because it lies beneath the crust. This can create a so-called hotspot trail, which leads to the illusion that the hotspot is moving — it is, in fact, the surface of the Earth that is moving above the hotspot. There is a lot of scientific debate around the nature and development of hotspots, but let’s get back to Yellowstone, shall we?

Remember how we said hotspots can leave a trail behind them? That’s exactly what the Yellowstone hotspot did. So it has not one, but several calderas (including the Island Park Caldera, the Henry’s Fork Caldera, and the Bruneau-Jarbidge caldera). The current hotspot lies beneath the Yellowstone Caldera.

The calderas of Yellowstone.

Image credits: NPS.

The largest eruption at Yellowstone took place 2.1 million years ago and had a volume of 2,450 cubic kilometers. However, it had several smaller eruptions. Volcanism at Yellowstone seems to happen periodically — there was an eruption 1.3 million years ago, and another one approximately 630,000 years ago. Much smaller eruptions (not super-eruptions) have happened as early as 2,270 years ago.

A Yellowstone eruption would be a catastrophic scenario. Thankfully, that’s not likely to happen.

Image credits: NPS.

6. Should we worry?

Not really. Studies have found that super-eruptions are extremely rare — on the basis of volcanic activity during the past 13.5 million years — there’s a 1% chance of an eruption of this scale in the next 460–7,200 years. Statistically, there are about 1.4 supervolcano eruptions every million years, so that would mean there is at least a 75% probability of a VEI 8 eruption in this timeframe.

La Garita Caldera is a large volcanic caldera in the San Juan volcanic field. It took place around 28 million years ago and it is among the largest known volcanic eruptions in our planet’s history.

Image via Wikipedia.

So while these eruptions can be extremely damaging, they’re so rare that the time-averaged impact really isn’t that big. However, here’s the thing: VEI 7 eruptions occur much more frequently (10-100 times), so that means that on average, we should be more worried about these VEI 7 eruptions than the supervolcano eruptions.

Supervolcanoes are some of the most impressive features on our planet, capable of ungodly eruptions which would send the entire planet into disarray. But as it so often happens, it’s not the big sword that’s threatening, but the thousand smaller cuts.

8. Bonus: A super-super volcano

Interestingly, a 2004 study reports evidence of a VEI 9 eruption, responsible for the Fish Canyon Tuff.

Wait a minute — I thought you said VEI 8 was the maximum possible eruption?!

Well, yes, but scientists found evidence of an eruption with a mass of >10¹⁶ kg and a magnitude of 9.2. So while VEI 8 is technically the largest classification, the Fish Canyon Tuff eruption was more than 10 times larger what would be necessary to classify as a supervolcano.

{ https://www.zmescience.com/ }

UFOS AND “ALIENS” OVER KAPUSTIN YAR: RUSSIA’S MYSTERIES

Paranormal Research Paul Stonehill

What is Kapustin Yar? There are rumors of secret underground facilities by Kapustin Yar, where UFOs and “aliens” are kept by the Russian government.

Well...after the WWII, Soviet missile development program gave impetus to the creation of the Kapustin Yar test range.

The 1946 decree, officially establishing the rocket industry in the country, directed the Ministry of Armed Forces to propose the location for the Central Test Range for all jet-propelled weapons. The major factors which favored Kapustin Yar over other locations were the access by railroad, relative proximity to industrial infrastructure of the city of Stalingrad (Volgograd) on the Volga River and land availability for the construction of the range. The future range designated the 4th State Central Range (4th GTsP) centered is located at 48.4 degrees Northern latitude and 56.5 degrees Eastern longitude.

And UFOs have been sighted there ever since…

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• Science & Technology

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• Standard YouTube License

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Video shows Navy jet’s encounter with a UFO, group says

CNN's Ryan Browne contributed to this report.

{ https://edition.cnn.com/ }

YouTube Kids Has Videos on How Reptilians Rule the World, Moon Landing Was Fake

Tom McKay

Screenshot: Business Insider (YouTube/UFOTV)

YouTube Kids, the supposedly child-friendly version of YouTube that’s been shown to often play host to troves of slop content and disturbing videos, apparently was showing videos from British conspiracy theorist David Icke, a guy who believes reptilian aliens secretly control the world and are responsible for the Holocaust.

According to a Saturday report in Business Insider, searching for the term “UFO” on YouTube kids turned up a video purporting “to show a UFO shooting at a chemtrail.” The suggested followups for that video featured a number of Icke’s clips, including a nearly five-hour lecture on how aliens built the pyramids and secretly run the planet through a ruling class extraterrestrial-human hybrids. The video also delves into a number of other conspiracy theories, including claims Freemasons indulge in human sacrifice and President John F. Kennedy was assassinated by his own government.

According to Business Insider, “Two other conspiracy theory videos by Icke appeared in the related videos, meaning it was easy for children to quickly go from watching relatively innocent videos about toys to conspiracy content.

Searching for the term “moon landing” also resulted in a number of conspiratorial videos emerging, including one making the claim that CERN’s Large Hadron Collider had opened a portal to another world that an unfortunate employee then vanished in. While YouTube removed 25 videos specifically flagged by Business Insider, the site reported conspiracy content remains widely available on YouTube Kids and watching some of the videos resulted in others showing up in the app’s recommended video queue.

While the regular version of YouTube has its own problems with propaganda and disinformation (some of which, like videos blasting mass shooting survivors as “crisis actors,” have repeatedly made the site’s top page), YouTube Kids is ostensibly supposed to be totally free of this kind of content. It’s also likely that many parents are letting their kids watch it unattended, which may be ill-advised on the parents’ part, but is clearly part of the site’s business model.

YouTube has previously promised to clear out this kind of content, and shut down a number of channels featuring inappropriate videos starting last year. It’s debatable whether it’s actually possible to ensure this stuff doesn’t begin creeping in, though, since there are millions upon millions of videos intended for children available on both the main site and YouTube Kids, and YouTube and its parent company Google tend to rely first and foremost on algorithms to police this sea of content rather than human moderators. When it began paying attention in November 2017, YouTube demonetized at least two million videos and 50,000 channels with disturbing content aimed at kids, suggesting the scale of the problem whichever app is used.

In a statement to Business Insider, YouTube even alluded to how solutions to this problem rely on its “human trained systems” rather than actual humans:

The YouTube Kids app is home to a wide variety of content that includes enriching and entertaining videos for families. This content is screened using human trained systems. That being said, no system is perfect and sometimes we miss the mark. When we do, we take immediate action to block the videos or, as necessary, channels from appearing in the app. We will continue to work to improve the YouTube Kids app experience.

In any case, prior advice stands: Don’t let YouTube babysit your childrenunless you want them watching disturbing Spiderman-bikini girl mashups, videos of Peppa Pig being fed bleach, or apparently, elderly British men telling them that the government is secretly staffed by alien lizard monsters wearing human skin.

[Business Insider]

{ https://gizmodo.com/ }

A better way to search for space aliens?

By Seth Shostak

{ http://www.euronews.com/ }

Top 6 Theories About Lost City Of Atlantis

“Sleeping Atlantis

Silent cool waters
dancing upon her skin ~
silent cool water
ushering dreams within…” 
― Muse, Enigmatic Evolution

There have been many theories about Atlantis. A great naval power in the ancient world, the utopian island kingdom mysteriously disappeared into the sea over the course of a single day. Some researchers have a firm belief that this mysterious island existed very much in history, while some suggest that it just existed in the pages of history as a speculated story. According to Plato, Atlantis existed 9,000 years ago, even before his time.

Here is a list of 6 such theories about this mysterious lost civilization.

1 – Atlantis Was A Continent In The Mid Atlantic That Suddenly Sunk Into The Ocean

The speculations about the existence of Atlantis surfaced in the 19th century, when in 1882 Ignatius Donnelly in his book, ‘Atlantis, the Antediluvian World’ mentioned the arguments that metallurgy, language and agriculture, are things handed over to people who were more advanced, civilised and knowledgable. He kind of supported the theory proposed by Plato that Atlantis sank because of flooding due to shifting ocean waters.

2 – The Bermuda Triangle Swallowed Up Atlantis

Some researchers believe in the theory that Donnelly proposed and some don’t. Those who believed in the Donnelly’s speculation, proposed their own claims as to where Atlantis must have been. One of the writers were Charles Berlitz. He claimed that Atlantis was a real continent located off the Bahamas that had fallen victim to the notorious Bermuda Triangle. Supporters of this theory believe that there were walls and street like remains found in the coast of Bimini.

3 – Atlantis Was Antarctica

Some theorists believe that Atlantis was a more temperate version of Antarctica. It is based on the work of Charles Hapgood, ‘Earth’s Shifting Crust’ according to which, around 12,000 years ago the Earth’s crust shifted, and displaced the continent that became Antarctica from a location that was much further north than it is today.

4 – The Story Of Atlantis Was A Mythical Retelling Of The Black Sea Flood

The researchers who proposed this theory believed that Atlantis was not real but the story of its demise was inspired by the real life incident of flooding of the Black Sea, around 5600 B.C. The flooding inundated civilizations known to flourish along its shore and as the inhabitants of the region scattered, they spread tales of the deluge.

5 – Atlantis Is The Story Of The Minoan Civilization That Flourished In The Greek Islands Circa 2500-1600 B.C

One of the most recent theories that are proposed by the researchers concerns the civilization that flourished on the Greek islands of Crete and Thera (now Santorini) more than 4,000 years ago, the Minoans. This was considered as Europe’s first great civilization. This great and powerful civilisation suddenly disappeared, which is linked to Plato’s theory relating to the sudden disappearance of Atlantis. Theorists believe that the Minoans disappeared following a massive Earthquake and Tsunami.

6 – Atlantis Didn’t Exist At All–Plato Invented It

The theorists who don’t believe Atlantis was real, support the claims that Plato’s theory of Atlantis was nothing else than fiction. They also believe that Plato invented Atlantis as his vision of an ideal civilization, and intended the story of its demise to be a cautionary tale of the gods punishing human hubris.

Despite many research efforts by the modern oceanography, no substantial proofs of a sunken civilisation have been found.

{http://www.look4ward.co.uk/ }

DON’T TALK TO ALIENS, WARNS STEPHEN HAWKING (VIDEO)

The aliens are out there and Earth had better watch out, at least according to Stephen Hawking. He has suggested that extraterrestrials are almost certain to exist — but that instead of seeking them out, humanity should be doing all it that can to avoid any contact.

The suggestions come in a new documentary series in which Hawking, one of the world’s leading scientists, will set out his latest thinking on some of the universe’s greatest mysteries.

Alien life, he will suggest, is almost certain to exist in many other parts of the universe: not just in planets, but perhaps in the centre of stars or even floating in interplanetary space.

Hawking’s logic on aliens is, for him, unusually simple. The universe, he points out, has 100 billion galaxies, each containing hundreds of millions of stars. In such a big place, Earth is unlikely to be the only planet where life has evolved.

“To my mathematical brain, the numbers alone make thinking about aliens perfectly rational,” he said. “The real challenge is to work out what aliens might actually be like.”

The answer, he suggests, is that most of it will be the equivalent of microbes or simple animals — the sort of life that has dominated Earth for most of its history.

One scene in his documentary for the Discovery Channel shows herds of two-legged herbivores browsing on an alien cliff-face where they are picked off by flying, yellow lizard-like predators. Another shows glowing fluorescent aquatic animals forming vast shoals in the oceans thought to underlie the thick ice coating Europa, one of the moons of Jupiter.

Such scenes are speculative, but Hawking uses them to lead on to a serious point: that a few life forms could be intelligent and pose a threat. Hawking believes that contact with such a species could be devastating for humanity.

He suggests that aliens might simply raid Earth for its resources and then move on: “We only have to look at ourselves to see how intelligent life might develop into something we wouldn’t want to meet. I imagine they might exist in massive ships, having used up all the resources from their home planet. Such advanced aliens would perhaps become nomads, looking to conquer and colonise whatever planets they can reach.”

He concludes that trying to make contact with alien races is “a little too risky”. He said: “If aliens ever visit us, I think the outcome would be much as when Christopher Columbus first landed in America, which didn’t turn out very well for the Native Americans.”

The completion of the documentary marks a triumph for Hawking, now 68, who is paralysed by motor neurone disease and has very limited powers of communication. The project took him and his producers three years, during which he insisted on rewriting large chunks of the script and checking the filming.

John Smithson, executive producer for Discovery, said: “He wanted to make a programme that was entertaining for a general audience as well as scientific and that’s a tough job, given the complexity of the ideas involved.”

Hawking has suggested the possibility of alien life before but his views have been clarified by a series of scientific breakthroughs, such as the discovery, since 1995, of more than 450 planets orbiting distant stars, showing that planets are a common phenomenon.

So far, all the new planets found have been far larger than Earth, but only because the telescopes used to detect them are not sensitive enough to detect Earth-sized bodies at such distances.

Another breakthrough is the discovery that life on Earth has proven able to colonise its most extreme environments. If life can survive and evolve there, scientists reason, then perhaps nowhere is out of bounds.

Hawking’s belief in aliens places him in good scientific company. In his recent Wonders of the Solar System BBC series, Professor Brian Cox backed the idea, too, suggesting Mars, Europa and Titan, a moon of Saturn, as likely places to look.

Similarly, Lord Rees, the astronomer royal, warned in a lecture earlier this year that aliens might prove to be beyond human understanding.

“I suspect there could be life and intelligence out there in forms we can’t conceive,” he said. “Just as a chimpanzee can’t understand quantum theory, it could be there are aspects of reality that are beyond the capacity of our brains.”

Source www.thesundaytimes.co.uk

{ http://alien-ufo-sightings.com/ }

Ancient Oceans on Mars May Have Been Older and Shallower Than Thought

Oceanen op Mars werden volgens nieuwe studie 300 miljoen jaar eerder gevormd dan gedacht en zouden niet zo diep geweest zijn - HLN.be

Bron: Nature, UC Berkley

De geofysici linken de oceanen van Mars aan het ontstaan van het grootste vulkanische systeem in ons zonnestelsel – Tharsis – en de sleutelrol die de opwarming van de planeet speelde in het mogelijk maken van vloeibaar water op de rode planeet.

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Zo wil Elon Musk Mars koloniseren en de mensheid redden bij oorlog

IJskappen

Zij die beweren dat er nooit vloeibaar water was op Mars, verwijzen naar het feit dat de grootte van de oceanen niet strookt met de schatting van de hoeveelheid water die er in de ijskappen en bevroren ondergrond van Mars zit en verdampt kan zijn in de ruimte. Er zou in dat scenario niet genoeg water aanwezig geweest zijn om de oceanen te vullen. (lees hieronder verder)

Volgens de nieuwe theorie zouden de oceanen zich echter 300 miljoen jaar eerder gevormd hebben, vóór of op hetzelfde moment als Tharsis. Omdat het vulkanische gebied toen nog niet zo groot was, verstoorde het de planeet nog niet zo veel als later. In het bijzonder de vlakten die het grootste deel van de noordelijke hemisfeer bedekken en waarvan gedacht wordt dat ze de oude oceaanbodem zijn. De zeeën zouden daardoor minder diep zijn geweest en maar de helft van het water bevat hebben als altijd werd aangenomen.

“Tot nu toe werd aangenomen dat het vulkanische systeem Tharsis zich vroeg en snel ontwikkelde en dat de oceanen pas later kwamen”, aldus professor Michael Manga, een van de auteurs van de paper die deze week in Nature verscheen. “Volgens ons kwamen de oceanen eerst en lagen ze er al toen het vulkanische gebied met zijn lavastromen ontstond.”

Gassen

“We vermoeden dat Tharsis gassen de atmosfeer in spuwde, die een broeikaseffect deed ontstaan die vloeibaar water aan de oppervlakte mogelijk maakte. En dat vulkaanuitbarstingen kanalen deden ontstaan die het ondergrondse water toeliet om de oppervlakte te bereiken en de noordelijke vlaktes met water te vullen”, aldus nog Manga. (lees hieronder verder)

De nieuwe theorie rekent ook af met een ander argument tegen het bestaan van oceanen op Mars: dat de kustlijnen van de oceanen erg onregelmatig zijn en in hoogte tot wel 1.000 meter verschillen. Terwijl ze zoals op de Aarde eigenlijk vlak zouden moeten zijn.

Kustlijn

Dat kan volgens de studie verklaard worden als de eerste oceaan – Arabia – zich 4 miljoen jaar geleden begon te vormen en - eventueel met tussenpozen - bestond tijdens de eerste 20 procent van het ontstaan van Tharsis. De groeiende vulkaan kan het land omlaaggedrukt hebben en de kustlijn vervormd hebben, wat de onregelmatigheden in de hoogte van de kustlijn van Arabia kan verklaren. De onregelmatige kustlijn van de volgende oceaan – Deuteronilus – kan op vergelijkbare wijze worden verklaard als die ontstond tijdens de laatste 17 procent van het ontstaan van Tharsis, ongeveer 3,6 miljard jaar geleden. (lees hieronder verder)

Tharsis deed uiteindelijk een bult ontstaan aan de andere kant van de planeet en een laagte halfweg ertussen. Het verklaart waarom het volume water dat die laagte nu kan bevatten twee keer zo groot is dan wat de nieuwe studie schat dat die bevatte 4 miljoen jaar geleden”, klinkt het nog.

Hypothese

De onderzoekers drukken er wel op dat het om een hypothese gaat. “Maar wetenschappers kunnen een preciezere datering proberen te maken van Tharsis en de kustlijnen om te zien of ze overeind blijft”, aldus Manga.

De volgende Marslander van de NASA kan ook helpen om het raadsel te ontrafelen. Hij wordt in mei gelanceerd en zal een seismometer op de bodem van de planeet zetten, die een beeld moet geven van wat er zich onder het oppervlakte van Mars afspeelt. En misschien wel bevroren overblijfselen kan vinden van die eeuwenoude oceaan of zelfs vloeibaar water.  

{ https://www.hln.be/wetenschap-planeet }

Visser ontdekt mysterieus zeewezen dat lijkt op monster van Loch Ness -  HLN.be

Bron: Daily Mail, The Sun

Has the Loch Ness Monster been found dead in the US? Mystery beast found washed

 Is het Loch Ness Monster dood terug gevonden in the US? Een mysterieus beest aangespoeld gevonden

Warren, een visser uit Waycross in de Amerikaanse staat Georgia, was aan het varen met zijn zoon in de buurt van Wolf Island toen hij het vreemde zeewezen ontdekte. Aanvankelijk dacht hij dat het om een dode zeehond ging. Toen de man een foto maakte, merkte hij op dat het dier lijkt op het monster van Loch Ness, het mythische wezen dat volgens een legende rondzwemt in het troebele water van het gelijknamige meer in Schotland.

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Gigantisch zeewezen spoelt aan op Filipijns eiland

Enkele experts zagen de beelden op het internet, maar konden het wezen niet onmiddellijk identificeren. Sommigen beweren dat het om een franjehaai gaat, anderen zeggen dat het een reuzenhaai is. Vooralsnog zijn wetenschappers het grondig oneens. Een reuzenhaai is immers zo’n acht meter lang, maar het aangespoelde dier is veel kleiner.

{ https://www.hln.be/wetenschap-planeet }

Wereldberoemde standbeelden op Paaseiland verdwijnen onder de stijgende zee -  HLN.be

Bron: AD.nl

De geheimzinnige beelden - de moai - behoren tot de beroemdste sculpturen ter wereld. De metershoge beeldhouwwerken uit vulkanisch gesteente maken Paaseiland een van de meest fascinerende plekken op aarde.

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De beelden, die aan de kust van het klein eiland in de Stille Oceaan staan, herinneren aan de bloeiende civilisatie die er eeuwen geleden bestond. Polynesiërs bevolkten het eiland en bouwden honderden sculpturen tussen de 12de eeuw en 15de eeuw. Maar nu zou het allemaal vernietigd kunnen worden, waarschuwen de Verenigde Naties in een bericht. De oorzaak is de klimaatverandering. Sommige klimaatmodellen voorspellen dat de zeespiegel tussen de 1,5 en 1,8 meter zal stijgen tegen 2100. Volgens een artikel in de New York Times vrezen bewoners en wetenschappers het einde van de moai en de historische graven. Stormen en golven vormen een bedreiging zoals nooit tevoren.

Nederlander 

Drie van de beroemdste toeristische attracties op het eiland zijn bedreigd, zo stelt de New York Times. Het ceremonie-platform Tongariki met vijftien moai, die landinwaarts kijken. Anakena; een strand met wit koraalzand waar volgens de overlevering een Polynesische hoofdman met zijn gevolg landde en dat eiland koloniseerde. En Akahanga, waar de eerste koning van de Rapa Nui, de inheemse bevolking, is begraven in een tombe.

Nog steeds is niet opgehelderd hoe de sculpturen, die tot 200 ton wegen, werden gebouwd en waardoor de bevolking is gedecimeerd nadat de Nederlander Jacob Roggeveen het eiland op paaszondag 1722 ontdekte.

Muur

Volgens de New York Times proberen de eilandbewoners tegen de natuur te vechten. Zij bouwden een muur als bescherming tegen de golven. Als die niet de erosie stopt, moeten zij de sculpturen van de kust weghalen om ze te redden. Een wetenschapper waarschuwt hiervoor: “Dat kan je doen, maar dan verlies je hun geschiedenis.”

AP

{ https://www.hln.be/wetenschap-planeet }

A few years ago, an April Fool’s piece in the Daily Mail referred to “the U.S. Military’s supposed research into using microwaves as a mind control weapon”. For many people, however, the subject is no joke. Machines designed to tamper with a victim’s thoughts are, according to those who know about such things, employed on a routine basis by governments and other agencies. What few people realize, however, is that reports of such devices have a long history that stretches back more than two hundred years.

Until relatively recently, belief in mind control machines was automatically assumed to be a sign of madness. The first detailed study of the subject was an article entitled “On the Origin of the Influencing Machine in Schizophrenia”, written by the Austrian psychoanalyst Viktor Tausk in 1919. From a study of various psychiatric patients, Tausk concluded that a relatively common form of delusion involved what he referred to as an “influencing machine” (or in the original German, Beeinflussungs-apparat): a device that “produces, as well as removes, thoughts and feelings by means of waves or rays or mysterious forces which the patient’s knowledge of physics is inadequate to explain”.

If such beliefs are symptomatic of mental illness, then according to Mike Jay “Patient Zero” was an English businessman named James Tilly Matthews. In 1797, after accusing the government of treasonous conspiracy, Matthews was incarcerated in the Bedlam lunatic asylum in London. It was there that he developed his theory of the “Air Loom” – the progenitor of all future influencing machines and mind control devices. To quote from Jay’s article:

Matthews was convinced that outside the grounds of Bedlam, in a basement cellar by London Wall, a gang of villains were controlling and tormenting his mind with diabolical rays. They were using a machine called an Air Loom, of which Matthews was able to draw intimate technical diagrams, and which combined recent developments in gas chemistry with the strange force of animal magnetism, or mesmerism. […] Its discharges of magnetic fluid were focused to deliver thoughts, feelings and sensations directly into Matthews’ brain. […] To facilitate this process, the gang had implanted a magnet into his head. As a result of the Air Loom, Matthews was tormented constantly by delusions, physical agonies, fits of laughter and being forced to parrot whatever nonsense they chose to feed into his head.

The Air Loom

In an article about the Air Loom in the May 2003 issue of Fortean Times, Mark Pilkington described how subsequent delusions evolved to keep pace with the latest developments in science: “patients were quick to grasp new technologies in their attempts to rationalize what was happening to them”. In 1886, soon after the invention of the telephone, one doctor observed that his patients would now complain “that people use these instruments to torment them”. In 1897, the Swedish author August Strindberg wrote in his autobiography that “the idea that I was being persecuted by enemies who employed electricity began to obsess me”. By the time Tausk came to write his famous paper in 1919, the situation had evolved still further:

The schizophrenic influencing machine is a machine of mystical nature. The patients are able to give only vague hints of its construction. It consists of boxes, cranks, levers, wheels, buttons, wires, batteries, and the like. Patients endeavour to discover the construction of the apparatus by means of their technical knowledge, and it appears that with the progressive popularization of the sciences, all the forces known to technology are utilized to explain the functioning of the apparatus. All the discoveries of mankind, however, are regarded as inadequate to explain the marvellous powers of this machine, by which the patients feel themselves persecuted.

Despite their technical sophistication, the mind control devices – from the days of the Air Loom to the early 20th century – were always the work of human beings. Sometimes the shadowy operators were members of a criminal gang, in other cases they were agents of the government – but no-one imagined they were anything but human. Then Richard Shaver came onto the scene, and everything changed.

On the face of it, Shaver was a science fiction writer. The bulk of his output was published in Amazing Stories magazine, under the editorship of Ray Palmer, between 1945 and 1949. But Shaver maintained that his writings were based on the truth, and Palmer went along with this – presenting the stories in the guise of a neo-fortean “Shaver Mystery”. Central to the Shaver Mystery was the idea of a vast, unknown subterranean world populated by ancient, degenerate creatures known as “deros”. According to David Hatcher Childress, writing in Lost Continents and the Hollow Earth:

The deros have special beam weapon rays that they use to create as much trouble with the outside world as possible. The dero secretly foster wars, crimes and disasters while working among surface people or using their “controlling rays”. These rays can create solid-looking illusions, nightmares, hypnotic compulsions and urges to commit a crime.

This is remarkably close to the widespread belief in clandestine government activities that can be found on the web today – not just mind control on an industrial scale, but the deliberate creation of wars and “natural” disasters.

So was Shaver telling the truth? Many people will have difficulty with the concept of subterranean deros… but if he had talked about aliens, or an alliance between aliens and the government, his ideas would still meet with approval in many quarters today. This begs the question: were Shaver’s deros really aliens who created the illusion of a vast underground world in his mind?

And that brings us up against the Catch-22 of mind control. If Shaver was lying, or deluded, then of course we can’t believe a word he said. But if he was telling the truth – and he really was the victim of systematic mind control – then… well, we still can’t believe a word he said, can we?

Dero, from Amazing Stories June 1947

Andrew May

Mind control history channel

{http://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }

We all want to be a little smarter, a little more effective and skilled.  Some people exercise and take vitamins, some people do jigsaw puzzles, and some of our Silicon Valley overlords micro-dose themselves with LSD every morning.  Now an Australian company has developed a new tool in our eternal quest for perfection. HUMM Tech recently announced the Edge V One, a wearable device—a headband, to be precise—they claim can boost brain power by up to 20%, but some experts worry that this headband of intellect could be hacked to mind control the person wearing it.

The Edge V One works by reading the electrical signals produced by the brain and delivering a small jolt of electricity approximately equivalent to the power of an electric toothbrush to parts of the brain that are not performing at optimum levels. CEO of HUMM Tech Iain Mcintyre described it like this:

What we’re doing is artificially connecting parts of the brain and letting those parts of the brain talk to each other better.

Our understanding of consciousness and the human brain is being upended all the time. Recently, we’ve learned that about the role of brain waves in consciousness, and we have a better picture of what the mind looks like. This brain boosting headband seems to fall in line with many other current discoveries.

Studies show that the mind looks like a wave of electricity through the brain. This device can, allegedly, redirect that electricity to boost brain power.

HUMM Tech says that their headband is the “beginning of a revolution,” that will lead to direct human interfacing with machines. They did, however, agree that there was a risk to the technologies. Asked if the tech was a type of mind-control, HUMM Tech co-founder Dr. Tim Fiori said it was “kind of mind-control.” Iain Mcintyre also agreed that, if the technology was abused, it might be possible for bad actors to hack the brains of those who wear this device.

Perhaps we should be concerned with this potential mind control technology falling into the hands of companies who have already admitted efforts to manipulate populations getting their hands on it. Facebook is currently working on similar technologies, as is Elon Musk, and as our own Brent Swancer recently examined, government research into mind control is a well established tradition.

Iain Mcintyre described the potential applications of machine interfacing technologies in a way that sounds like a dream come true for Facebook, and many Facebook users:

“Instead of needing to type on your phone, your brain can send the word to the person you want to message.”

So, machine enabled telepathy. Telepathy filtered through the corporate service providing it. Yikes. Will we soon see targeted ads based on our dreams and private thoughts?

This is what the zombie apocalypse looks like.

Of course, none of this is a new idea. Transhumanism has been around for a long time, but it’s only now that the first wave of technologies are being released to the civilian population. Should we run for the hills?

That’s up to you. Every technological revolution carries with it new and weird risks that were impossible to conceive of before it was invented. As our capability for incredible and amazing feats of progress increases, so too does our capability for exciting new ways to do terrible things to each other. So it goes.

At least this headband might let you savagely beat your friends at video games before Facebook completely zombifies you.

The Edge V One will be released on Kickstarter later this year.

{http://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }

Scientists Are Amazed By Stone Age Tools They Dug Up In Kenya

Rhitu Chatterjee

Assortment of Early and Middle Stone Age tools found in the Olorgesailie Basin, Kenya. The tool at left is a hand axe.

Jay Reed/NPR

Our ancestors in Kenya's Southern Rift Valley made some pretty innovative tools. And they made them far earlier than previously thought.

The oldest innovations were axes designed to be held in the palm of the hand. They were shaped like a tear drop, with a rounded end and a pointed eye. The edges were wavy and sharp. And they look as if they were great at chopping down branches — or chopping up the carcass of a large animal.

This early Stone Age hand axe was excavated at Olorgesailie, Kenya. A chemical analysis of the stone shows it was made with locally available rocks.

Jay Reed/NPR

"I think of the hand axes as the Swiss army knife of the Stone Age," says paleoanthropologist Rick Potts, director of the Human Origins program at the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History and one of the lead scientists in a new study by a team of international scientists.

The researchers also found that the next technological revolution, marking the beginning of the Middle Stone Age happened tens of thousands of years earlier than previously thought.

And the researchers think that long periods of stress from repeated earthquakes and cycles of drought and heavy rains may have pushed these early humans to partner up with neighboring communities to come up with ways to cope.

Rick Potts, director of the National Museum of Natural History's Human Origins Program at the Smithsonian. He has been excavating in the Southern Rift Valley in Kenya since the 1980s.

Jay Reed

The team was digging in a region called Olorgesailie in southern Kenya, an area filled with layers of sediment dating back 1.2 million years. The oldest stone tools discovered there are characteristic of what's called the Acheulian culture of the Early Stone Age and consisted mostly of the hand axes.

In this Olorgesailie Basin excavation site, red ocher pigments were found with Middle Stone Age artifacts. This is the earliest evidence of the extraction and use of pigments among ancient humans.

Human Origins Program/Smithsonian

In addition to branch- and carcass-chopping, the axes were likely used to dig for water to drink or tubers to eat. The carcasses probably belonged to large animals like the giant (now extinct) ancestors of hippos, elephants and wild pigs that roamed the grasslands back then. Potts says the ancient humans of that time likely scavenged dead animals, as their heavy, clunky hand axes wouldn't have served well for hunting big game. "These are very large tools," he says. "They might have been thrown but not very accurately."

The hand axe was a multipurpose tool used by our ancestors for chopping up branches and carcasses as well as digging for tubers. They remained unchanged for several hundred thousand years.

Jay Reed/NPR

Nevertheless, these hand axes served the ancient humans well for several hundred thousand years — from 1.2 million years ago to 500,000 years ago — and the technology remained largely unchanged during the time.

But around 320,000 years ago, the ancient humans seem to have switched to an entirely new technology. The scientists found numerous smaller, flatter, sharper stone tools.

"We see a smaller technology, a more diverse series of stone tools," says Potts. These tools were designed for specific purposes — some were used as blades, some as scrapers or spear heads. The scientists report their findings in three new studies published Thursday in the journal Science.

"In Olorgesailie, you have the only record of the last million years in Africa," says Marta Mirazon Lahr, a paleoanthropologist who wasn't involved in the new study. And it's "the earliest ever documented Middle Stone Age in the whole continent."

The new studies also show that by 320,000 years ago this technology was well established in the region, suggesting that human ancestors likely started developing it even earlier, she says.

"The technology they have is not a crude, early version of the Middle Stone Age. It is the full-blown Middle Stone Age," Lahr says. "They have stone tools that are small, that are prepared and retouched, that are made with technique thought to come hundreds of thousands of years later."

Obsidian rock found at Olorgesailie was originally brought by the ancient humans from distant places, some as far away as 50 miles from the site. Scientists think this is evidence of a larger social network of groups of ancient people who stayed in touch and exchanged obsidian and other resources.

Jay Reed/NPR

The diversity of stone tools from the Middle Stone Age suggests advanced thinking and planning. "The flakes are being much more carefully prepared for a particular purpose," says Alison Brooks, an anthropologist at George Washington University and an author of the three studies.

"They are fairly small in size, compared to the technology of earlier people. And in addition, they are made with much finer grained material," which allowed them to better control shapes and sizes of the stone tools.

"We see the ability to produce small triangular points, that look like they were projectile points," says Potts. "They were tapered at the end, so that could have been put on the shaft of something that flew through the air." In other words, a potentially lethal spear.

So our ancestors likely shifted from scavenging to hunting. An analysis of the fossilized animal bones found in the sediments show that people in that period were eating a range of mammals — which were by now much smaller, and closer in size to the animals of today — including hares, rabbits and springbok and even a couple of species of birds and fishes, says Brooks.

And they weren't just picking up nearby stones to create their weapons. Earlier hand axes were made primarily from volcanic basalt, sourced within 2 to 2.5 miles of where these humans lived. The latter weapons were made of stones like obsidian, which originated far from Olorgesailie.

A small stone point made of non-local obsidian. The chemical composition of the artifact matches obsidian sources as far as 55 miles away.

Jay Reed/NPR

"That black obsidian, that rare rock was being transported, brought in in chunks, from 15 to 30 miles away," says Potts. "We have a couple of rocks that were brought from up to 55 miles away."

These distances are far greater than what modern-day hunter gatherers travel over the course of a year, he says.

"They weren't just traveling long distances and chipping rocks as they go," he adds. "If they did that, then there would have just been small chips of obsidian left at the archaeological sites where we dig. Instead we see large pieces of raw material coming in. The rocks were shaped at Olorgesaile itself."

That kind of exchange of raw materials is a tell-tale sign of exchange between different groups of people, the scientists say. "In the Middle Stone Age, we begin to see the early stages of social networks, of being aware of another group and exchanging rocks over longer distances."

Potts and his colleagues also find evidence of exchange of brightly colored red and black rocks that were then drilled into, possibly to extract pigment. This is the earliest evidence of the extraction of pigments, says Lahr.

It's also evidence of a complex culture, where the ancient humans probably used pigments symbolically — perhaps to paint themselves, or their hides, or weapons. And where different groups exchanged raw materials (and possibly food).

Red rock found on the site. There is evidence that the rock was drilled to extract its red pigment.

Jay Reed/NPR

There's that same kind of exchange today, says Brooks, referring to hunter gatherer groups like the Hadza people of northern Tanzania.

"They deliberately maintain distant contacts with people in these other groups," she says. They have strategies to maintain these contacts — either by encouraging their children to marry into these other groups, or they take trips to visit the groups, to maintain ties by giving gifts. "It's a way of building up these distant contacts, which are extremely important for their survival."

During times of stress, when food or water is scarce, people from one group can disperse and take shelter with other groups that they've cultivated a relationship with. "So the networks are like money in the bank, or wheat in your silo or cows in your barn," says Brooks. "They don't have any other way of saving for a rainy day."

And as she and her colleagues show, the beginning of the Middle Stone Age in Kenya was preceded by a long and tumultuous phase in the region.

"Things were going haywire, in terms of the development of geological faults, earthquake activity that moved the low places high and the high places low," says Potts. "It changed the shape of the landscape." This was accompanied by repeated cycles of droughts and high rainfall.

"And it is precisely during those time periods that we expect to see hunting and gathering people to move further distances," says Potts, "and to begin to nurture relationships with groups beyond their own group."

It is no different than what humans all over the world do today, he adds. When times are tough, we look for greener pastures. The archaeological records from the Middle Stone Age at Olorgesailie reveal "the roots of that kind of migration," he says.

{ https://www.npr.org/sections/}

It seems like each month, there’s a new discovery proclaimed to have the potential to “rewrite the history of human civilization.” Like in every scientific discipline, the exponential rate of technological growth and development has led to many new breakthroughs in human archaeology and anthropology lately. Last year, a set of fossil teeth were discovered in Germany which were claimed to push the earliest known date of human migration back by millions of years. Even as those claims are still being validated, a new discovery published this week has yet again generated headlines of “rewriting” human history.

According to two twin studies published this week in Science, archaeologists have discovered sophisticated stone tools in Kenya’s Olorgesailie Basin which are the oldest of their kind. In confirmed, this discovery could mean early humans were trading with one another, fashioning tools, and painting objects far earlier than we know – implying a level of intelligence and sophistication usually associated with much more recent ancestors. 

Kenya’s Olorgesailie region contains some of the best examples of Stone Age tools known to science.

The majority of the excavation was performed under the direction of by Richard Potts of the Smithsonian Institution in conjunction with the National Museums of Kenya. The bulk of the discovery consists of stone tools, nearly half of which were carved from obsidian sourced from volcanic areas 50 kilometers away from where they were discovered. These Middle Stone Age tools have been dated to 320,000 years old. Eighty-eight lumps of pigment were also discovered, some of which show evidence of grinding or tooling. The researchers believe these pigments could have been used to signal some sort of group identity or social status, and the fact that they were carried long distances shows they were of some specific significance to the group of humans or human ancestors who left them there.

Unfortunately, the excavation of this site has yet to reveal any hominid fossils, so it’s impossible to tell if these tools were used by early Homo sapiens or by another human ancestor species. George Washington University’s Alison Brooks co-authored these new papers and says that without any definitive fossil record, the identity of these tools’ creators remains a mystery:

There was the argument that Homo sapiens came along and then developed all these things. But now it seems that the behavior and the morphology came along together. Maybe the behavior even came first.

Will we ever really know the early history of our species? Who knows what hidden aspects of history lie just under our feet, forgotten along with so many other vestiges of the past? While this new discovery might not be a perfectly-preserved early human found in a block of ice, it adds to the growing body of evidence which suggests human civilizations could be much older than we think.

{ http://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }

Though it may come as a surprise to many, debates surrounding extraterrestrial invasion are not restricted to the UFO community and Hollywood. In recent years, mainstream science and even the US defense establishment have openly discussed ‘falling skies’ scenarios and what humanity might do to repel potential alien aggressors.

The late, great Sir Stephen Hawking was perhaps the most high-profile individual to warn of the potential dangers of extraterrestrial contact. In April 2010, Hawking made international news by stating his firm belief that humanity should seek to avoid any form of interaction with aliens. In an episode of the Discovery Channel’s Into the Universe with Stephen Hawking, the professor said: “If aliens ever visit us, I think the outcome would be much as when Christopher Columbus first landed in America, which didn’t turn out very well for the American Indians.” Hawking suggested that aliens “might exist in massive ships, having used up all the resources from their home planet” and would perhaps be “looking to conquer and colonize whatever planets they can reach.”

Hawking’s anti-alien comments captured the attention of Hollywood and, later that same year, were incorporated into the marketing campaign for the alien invasion blockbuster, Skyline(2010). The trailer for the film begins with bold text against a cosmic backdrop, reading: “On 28 August 2009, NASA sent a message into space farther than we ever thought possible in an effort to reach extraterrestrial life.”

This is true. On the date specified, the Australian government, through its “Hello from Earth” science initiative, and with the help of NASA, sent some 26,000 carefully vetted messages from the public to the extra-solar Earth-like planet Gliese 581d in a single transmission. This proactive approach to alien contact, known as METI (Messaging Extraterrestrial Intelligence), differs from the traditional passive approach favored by SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence), which devotes its efforts simply to listening for any potential incoming alien signals. Stephen Hawking was not a fan of the METI approach as he considered it unwise to knowingly alert our presence in the galaxy to any technologically superior civilizations.

In a bid to blur fact and fantasy for viral marketing purposes, Skyline made use of Hawking’s comments in its trailer, which featured well known American newsreaders—including Dan Rather—citing the famed professor on the potential dangers of extraterrestrial contact. The trailer then cuts to panoramic views of an American city being obliterated by dozens of the “massive ships” to which Hawking had referred. Against a black screen, and again referring to the professor’s warning, bold text then reads: “Maybe we should have listened.”

Skyline wasn’t the only movie to draw inspiration from METI initiative, or from Hawking’s dire warnings against phoning E.T. The 2012 movie, Battleship, opens with a scene in which NASA prepares to transmit a signal to the Gliese system, exactly as the space agency had done in real life two-years prior. In the movie, a wise-cracking scientist paraphrases Stephen Hawking, quipping, “it’s going to be like Columbus and the Indians—only we’re the Indians.” But the signal is sent anyway, and NASA gives itself a hearty pat on the back. Needless to say, alien contact ensues, and it ain’t pretty.

In April 2012, a month before the release of Battleship in American cinemas, Professor Paul Springer of the US Air Command and Staff College was granted special clearance by his employers at the Pentagon to discuss how the military would respond in the event of an alien invasion. Springer’s comments were aired in a televised interview for Australia’s Channel 9.

When asked by his interviewer exactly how an alien invasion might unfold, Springer replied:

“That really depends on why they are here in the first place. If they are here for the extraction of a specific resource, for example, they might just want to eliminate any resistance that might block them from their objective. If, on the other hand, their goal was actual occupation and conquest, then they would probably have to prioritize anything they perceive as a threat to their own dominance. So, they would probably start by wiping out as many communications networks as possible and eliminating as many weapons that might represent some form of threat either to them, or to the resources they are trying to extract.”

However, any plans the Pentagon may have drawn to fight-off evil aliens are almost certainly in vein. If any aliens out there do harbor plans for invasion, it is probable that their tactics and technology would make any resistance on our part entirely futile. “If they are hostile,” warns Professor Michio Kaku, “it would be like Bambi meeting Godzilla if we ever had to fight them… we would present no military challenge to such an advanced civilization… We would be a pushover for them. Forget all the Hollywood movies.”

In my book, Silver Screen Saucers, I take Hollywood to task for its simplistic, pumped-up depictions of how an interstellar civilization might invade our planet. If aliens should ever decide to attack Earth for its natural resources (water, minerals, human DNA, etc.), it seems unlikely in the extreme that they would opt for the scorched earth approach depicted in the likes of War of the Worlds and Independence Day. Actually, it seems improbable that the aliens would launch air strikes at all, let alone anything so messy as the ground invasions seen in, say, Falling Skies or Battle: Los Angeles. Any tactics that would provoke a military response from Earth’s leaders would probably result in damage to the very resources the aliens are seeking to acquire, especially if weapons of mass destruction are used by either side.

Even if the aliens’ goal is simply to eradicate humanity, direct engagement with our military forces would likely be entirely unnecessary. Many UFO movies depict aliens using psychic forces to harm or control those around them—but if real aliens have developed advanced psychic abilities, might they be able to use these on a mass scale? If so, our psychically puny species would be conquered within a matter of hours, or instantly, even.

Possible psychic abilities aside, advanced ETs might very well have psychotronic and psychotropic weapons with which to attack the mind, or even weapons that target specific parts of the body, both external and internal—even the heart or brain—causing targets to fall down dead en masse, and all without inflicting so much as a scratch on the skin. There would be no resistance from us, and minimal effort on their part. For Hollywood’s purposes, however, such scenarios are utterly lacking in spectacle and drama.

In his later years, Stephen Hawking remained firm in his stance that the universe is likely teeming with life, some of it intelligent, but he was less optimistic about the inherent benevolence of advanced ET civilizations, believing that advanced technology does not necessarily go hand-in-hand with moral and ethical enlightenment.

Jill Tarter, former Director of SETI.

Before Hawking died, former SETI director Jill Tarter (the real-life Ellie Arroway from Contact) voiced her disagreement with the Cambridge professor about the probable nature of any future alien contact scenarios. Tarter also advised the public to disregard Hollywood entirely as an even remotely realistic representation of what to expect on contact day. “Often the aliens of science fiction say more about us than they do about themselves,” Tarter remarked on the SETI website in 2012. “While Sir Stephen Hawking warned that alien life might try to conquer or colonize Earth, I respectfully disagree. If aliens were able to visit Earth that would mean they would have technological capabilities sophisticated enough not to need slaves, food, or other planets. If aliens were to come here it would be simply to explore.”

Tarter added: “Considering the age of the universe, we probably wouldn’t be their first extraterrestrial encounter, either. We should look at movies like Men in Black, Prometheusand Battleship as great entertainment and metaphors for our own fears, but we should not consider them harbingers of alien visitation.”

{ http://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }

“Is there life on Mars?”

David Bowie asked the question. Last week, Barry DiGregorio looked at rover photos of the surface of Mars and decided the grooves in the surface are the same type of fossilized trails and tracks left by bacterial life forms on prehistoric Earth … and NASA is covering up this fact to protect its upcoming manned space missions to allow humans to “discover” life on Mars. Now in a new interview in the Daily Star Online he’s warning NASA – not to mention Elon Musk — that sending humans to Mars would cause the late Mr. Bowie to write a sequel to his song, calling it “Is There Death on Mars?” and the girl with the mousy hair will find out why America has a tortured brow … the life on Mars will kill us.

“Astronauts could be exposed to unknown pathogenic microbes and viruses that we have no idea how to control. That is why it is so important to fly additional life detection instruments to Mars – to make sure it is safe to send human beings or to return samples to Earth.”

Dr. DiGregorio has a point – one that NASA dealt with during the Apollo lunar missions by quarantining everything that they brought back until it was determined there was no life on the astronauts, their equipment or their rocks. Since they were only there for a short period, covered a small area and never breathed the atmosphere – what little there is – NASA felt comfortable nothing would happen to the astronauts while on the Moon. That won’t be the case on Mars and DiGregorio singles out Elon Musk first, since he seems to be leading the way to not just visiting but establishing permanent colonies on the Red Planet.

“He’s totally ignoring the fact that there could be microbial life on Mars, and as far as being a scientist goes, the one thing you want to make sure of is that your people have a degree of confidence that the surface of Mars is sterile.”

Musk might be impressed that DiGregorio thinks he’s a scientist, but he’d most likely disagree that Mars needs to be “sterile” before going there. Livable, breathable and non-fatal are probably good enough for Elon. However, DiGregorio points out another thing that has nothing to do with science.

“If you sent astronauts to Mars and they die of pathogenic diseases from indigenous microbes, you’re not going to have another mission go back there, the publicity would be terrible.”

Have humans really evolved from the days of massive Earth exploration to the point where it will not take on a non-military mission with the near-certainty that some people won’t come back? DiGregorio wants NASA to reduce that risk to near-nothing by sending more robots and autonomous exploration vehicles to Mars with the equipment onboard to find and identify life forms without the need for humans on the Martian surface.

Not everyone in the Martian exploration community believes DiGregorio’s theory that the tracks on Mars are indications of bacterial life. However, his arguments for continued robotic exploration make sense. Is a robot discovering life forms on Mars really anathema to NASA management? NASA public relations? Elon Musk?

Are they spitting in the eyes of fools as they ask us to focus on the best-selling show?

{ http://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }

The demise of honey bee populations worldwide has become one of the most pressing ecological concerns of our time. Over the last decade, it’s been estimated that some 30–70% European honey bee colonies have collapsed or disappeared, prompting fears of agricultural collapse due to the vital role honey bees play in pollinating crops. Scientists still aren’t sure what the exact cause of colony collapse might be, although it is believed pesticides, genetically modified crops, or even electromagnetic radiation from cellphone towers might be factors.

Selective commercial breeding is also suspected as contributing to a diminished bee gene pool, opening the doors for many diseases.

To help stave off agricultural catastrophe, engineers around the world have begun tossing around ideas to create tiny droneswhich might pollinate crops in the absence of real bees. While this idea sounds like exactly like a recent Black Mirror episode, things got even more dystopian with the recent discovery of the filing of patent applications for robo-bee systems on behalf of retail giant and all-around nefarious corporation Walmart. What exactly might Walmart be up to?

The same thing they’re up to every night, Pinky: trying to take over the world.

The patent was found and posted online by CB Insights, a market research firm which leverages artificial intelligence to analyze trends and identify future disruptions. The patentdescribes a pretty straightforward centralized network which can control legions of tiny bee drones which go from flower to flower pollinating crops. The patent lists many variations of the same system of pollinating unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV), some of which do not require human control whatsoever:

In some embodiments, the UAV deployed in the exemplary system does not require physical operation by a human operator and wirelessly communicates with, and is wholly or largely controlled by, the computing device.

Hmm… hordes of tiny autonomous flying bee-bots controlled by the world’s largest retailer…say it with me now: what could go wrong?

A lot, once Wal-Bee version 2.1.0 rolls out.

Walmart has already been aggressively pursuing the grocery market, and many analysts believe these patents show that the massive multinational corporation might be attempting to control the food supply chain. While many of us (myself included) tend to view anything Walmart does with disdain and loathing, CB Insights notes that such a drone bee system could help the retailer “manage crop yields more effectively” and “increase its emphasis on transparency and sustainability to attract shoppers.” Still, is it wise to allow a retailer to have so much control over such a vital part of our society? Time, as always, will tell.

{ http://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }

On Saturday, March 3rd, two men armed with instructions on how to contact extraterrestrials and a protocol on what to do if they show up tried to contact aliens on the shore of a lake in Sicamous, British Columbia, Canada. After a few hours of meditating and watching, they left without a successful contact. Did they leave too soon?

On the morning of Sunday, March 4th, a woman walked to the very same lake and spotted a series of mysterious ice circles on the lake’s frozen surface. Coincidence? Contact? Something else?

Let’s start with the location. Shuswap Lake is in south-central British Columbia, Canada, and is known for (among other things) its odd shape – the four fingers of the lake look like the letter H from the air. The name comes from the Shuswap or Secwepemc First Nations people and it’s now a popular recreational lake centered around the city of Salmon Arm, which gets ITS name from the fish and the lake’s appendage. Besides salmon and trout, Shuswap Lake is Like many other lakes, Shuswap Lake has a legendary 25-foot long monster known as the Shuswap Lake Monster or Shuswaggi.

Does it also have close encounters of the third-thru-fifth kind? The Salmon Arm Observer reports that local (Sunnybrae) area resident Grace Edwards was walking on the lake shore in nearby Tappen when she spotted and photographed the ice circles on the frozen lake. These were not ice discs, which are circular pieces of ice formed in cold rivers as the chunks break off and are swirled and worn into circles. What Edwards saw were more like swirling patterns made in the ice – kind of like frozen crop circles. One thought is that they were made by spinning snowmobilers who someone managed to make perfect circles without leaving any other visible tracks. Another thought might be …

Aliens!

Grace Edwards’s photos (see here) were published by the Salmon Arm Observer and other local media, where they eventually were shown to Dan Berg (Berg? As in iceberg? Another coincidence?). Berg is the man who attempted to contact aliens on the night of March 3rd in Sicamous, another small town on Shuswap Lake. He told the Observer that he and a friend from Salmon Arm he met through SETI social media decided to celebrate International CE-5 day by conducting a Close Encounter of the Fifth Kind (direct communications with ETs) using the CE-5 protocol developed by Steven M. Greer of the Center for the Study of Extraterrestrial Intelligence (CSETI). For Berg, that was “meditation through consciousness.”

“In my meditation all I did was concentrate on the edge of the Rocky Mountains and Shuswap Lake for 40 minutes nonstop.”

After scanning the skies and their minds for a few hours and seeing nor hearing nothing, Berg and his friend left and thought no more about the incident until someone showed the article about Edwards and the ice circles to Berg. What did he think now?

“I think it was kind of cool and kind of ironic that something as strange as those circles that no one has ever seen before showed up the night that we were out here.”

As with crop circles, the Shuswap Lake ice circles could be explained by humans making very precise patterns in the dark on snowmobiles. Possible? Yes, but the perfection leaves an opening. Is the lake’s H pattern a beacon or marker for aliens? What about the Shuswaggi? Some crytozoologists believe these creatures are visitors from other planets.

Berg has piqued the interest of others and will probably have a crowd with him the next time he tries a CE-5. Let’s hope they bring cameras and a net for the Shuswaggi.

{ http://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }

Triangle-shaped formation filmed over Colorado Springs 3-Mar-2018

This UFO sighting was filmed in the sky above Colorado Springs on 3rd March 2018.

Witness report: 

Bright large stationary orbs disappearing then reappearing. Vacationing with friends and spouse at Cheyanne Mountain resort in Colorado Springs, Co. After a long day of outside activities we returned to the resort for dinner. Afterwards we went to the outside patio to sit at the fire pit and talk about our day.

At first I didn’t notice anything strange but my friend pointed out a weird light in the sky that just hovered. When I looked to where he was pointing I pulled out my iPhone and began recording it. Shortly after a 2nd orb materialized above the 1st. Once they were both visible they simultaneously got brighter and slightly larger.

At the time I was confused as to what I was looking at. There was a lake between the orbs and myself and the lights were reflecting off the water. The lower light suddenly disappeared and another orb appeared ABOVE the remaining one. At one point there were 3 visible orbs that from my angle appeared to be in a relatively straight line. I wondered if maybe they were flares but every orb held it’s place in the sky with no apparent descent or change. I tried at various times to zoom in but it would not hold focus. This went on for over 2min so I felt I was neglecting my group. I stopped the recording and returned to the fire pit, which was about 30’ away.

When I turned back around all of the orbs were gone. I still don’t know what I saw but during the incident the server came out and my friend asked if he knew what it was. His reply was, “I’ve been here for 10 yrs and have never seen anything like it”, which adds to the mystery. There were other vacations making some noise in the pool but we’re no airplanes in the sky and other than those talking it was silent.

Author (source: MUFON)

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

Mysterious Loch Ness like sea creature washes up on South Georgia Beach

A mysterious sea creature washed ashore in St. Simons Island and it has beachgoers scratching their heads.

Credit images: News4Jax and Jeff Warren.

Jeff Warren and his son were at Wolf Island National Wildlife Refuge just north of St. Simons Island in Georgia Friday when they came upon the creature on a barrier island.

Warren thought it was a dead seal, but said when he got a closer look it resembled more of the Loch Ness monster.

Warren sent the photo to News4Jax and said the creature was about 4 to 5 feet long with two fins.

Credit images: News4Jax and Jeff Warren.

A local writer and novelist contacted News4Jax saying he believes the mysterious sea creature looks exactly like the legendary Altamaha-ha, a river monster of the Altamaha River located just west of Wolf Island and could be a survivor of the Mesozoic Era.

  

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

'It's a space WAR' Alien ‘battle’ near Area 51 baffles UFO hunters

ALIEN hunters were left in a frenzy when they spotted what they believed to be a UFO ‘battle’ in the skies above a city in Nevada which is just a two hour driver from Area 51 – an alleged extraterrestrial hotspot.

Did UFO 'chase' military plane? Bizarre footage shows saucer-shaped object 'following' aircraft through sky

In the strange footage, a mysterious object emerges from behind the plane's contrails and appears to follow the aircraft

A bizarre video which conspiracy theorists believe shows a military jet being 'chased' by a UFO has sparked speculation online.

In the footage, the mysterious, saucer-shaped object emerges from behind the plane's contrails and appears to follow the aircraft.

It then eventually overtakes it.

The cameraman was reading at home when they zoomed in to capture the bright object flying near the jet in the skies over Lincoln, New Hampshire.

They said: "I was reading on my deck around 7 o'clock.

"I am told that military pilots train in the mountains around where I live and I've always enjoyed seeing them fly through."

READ MORE

• 'Everyone thought I'd been on the Pinot Grigio': Kim Wilde reveals how alien encounter inspired her pop comeback

"This happens all the time, jets and helicopters are a common sighting. So I naturally saw the jet and did a double take, because there was something following it.

"I immediately thought I was witnessing some strange aircraft, possibly military but it was not a jet.

"I knew it wasn't a jet because it was actually right behind one. The jet it was chasing left a long contrail behind it, but the UFO did not.

"The UFO was gaining on a jet. No helicopter could do that. I was blown away and luckily got out my phone in time to take a video.”

READ MORE

• "What the f**k is that?" Mysterious object captured flying across Atlantic Ocean baffles US Navy pilots

The footage was originally captured in 2016, but reemerged on YouTube this week where it has racked up thousands of views.

"I watched the object gaining on the jet for about 10 seconds when I lost them in the trees," the witness added.

"I was very excited and anxious. I felt I has witnessed something very hard to dismiss as a 'weather balloon' or some obvious type of aircraft.

"Shortly after the jet and object left my range of sight I saw three more jets and 1 helicopters going the same direction (in my opinion chasing the UFO)."

But not all viewers were convinced the video was proof of alien visitors , with many thinking the object was just another plane.

One viewer commented: “Two planes flying at different height which causes the contrail.”

Another added: "It's two planes traveling at different altitudes, one creating a vapor trail."

{ https://www.mirror.co.uk/ }