Something Mysterious seems to be going on in the Night Sky

On March 12, 2018 big sky flashes have been observed from Wellington, Ohio as a satellite high above the earth detected the same mysterious pulses!

Many people around the world notice that something strange is going on in the sky.

In the video below, MrMB333 analysis the strange phenomenon while people who have witnessed the phenomenon say:

Night skies are much brighter and there is a strange glow from where the Sun has set.

I definitely noticed a strong glow some nights long after the sun has set.

Like the glow is different along the entire horizon.

I can say the same for the night sky here in Opononi, Northland, New Zealand. I don't see the western ocean horizon, but there is a 'glow' to the west well after sunset.

I saw that glow after the sun went down and it was dark, on a cruise in Feb going south to Puerto Vallarta.

It might be some kind of energy being released from movement of the Earth’s core, maybe pole shift connected?

Could the flashes of light be caused by the solar winds penetrating a weakened magnetic shield? 

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

According to Russian scientists, the sun is about to hit us in the head. A solar weather forecast from the Russian Academy of Sciences says that, on March 18, the sun will spit a solar flare in our direction, triggering a geomagnetic storm with the potential to shut down electronics as well as cause headaches, dizziness, and sleeplessness in people around the world. The March 18 storm is the third solar storm to hit the earth this year, but 2018 is expected to be a relatively quiet period of activity for the Sun.  The last “solar maximum,” the period in the sun’s 11-year cycle with the most activity, occurred in 2014.

Extreme solar storms can wreak havoc on satellites, GPS, and other communication systems. In the event of a major solar storm, essential services can be shut down to prevent permanent damage. NASA says that the storm later this month will not be powerful to affect communications devices. Just like terrestrial weather, however, solar storms can strengthen or weaken in intensity, and the exact power of the storm won’t be known until it hits.

Solar storms don’t just affect technology. A good solar pummeling can have adverse effects on humans too. Increased risk of stroke during geomagnetic storms has been reported, as has increased intensity in migraine headaches and cluster headache cycles. Disruptions to sleep cycles have been correlated with solar flares as well.

Geomagnetic storms have also been associated with depression, headaches, dizziness, confused thinking, and erratic behaviors  In other words, it won’t be the St. Patrick’s Day hangover on March 18 that will have you doubled over begging for death and yelling obscenities at anyone unlucky enough to be in earshot, it will totally be the Sun’s fault.

“Put up your dukes!” -the Sun

Geomagnetic storms are due in part to Coronal Mass Ejections (CME), clouds of plasma released alongside solar flares.  These massive emissions of charged particles can cause Earth’s magnetic field to behave wildly when faced with a direct hit.

It’s a relatively common occurrence. The phenomenon of aurora borealis, or northern lights, is caused by the ejection of magnetic radiation from the sun. The storms are usually harmless, but a major solar storm could be devastating to a world increasingly reliant on global communications. In 1989 most of the Canadian province of Quebec was effected by a solar storm blackout, and the northern lights were seen as far south as Texas.

This is the sun trying to kill you. Sleep tight!

Recently the U.S. Geological Survey has deployed new techniques to model the effects of geomagnetic storms in 3D, allowing a more accurate forecast of the impact of these storms will have.

NASA says that the March 18 solar storm will not be anything to worry about. That’s good news, because the same forecast has two more similar solar storms occurring only a few days later. You can come up with your own joke about weathermen being wrong.

{ http://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }

Given all of the declassified files and recordings of unexplained aerial phenomena being made public in the United States, it’s no surprise that other countries including America’s closest neighbors would begin disclosing their own interest in or knowledge of UFOs. Case in point: a new trove of documents have been released which shed light on the Canadian government’s role in researching UFO phenomena. What will these add to the growing body of declassified UFO files?

Noted Canadian ufologist Chris Rutkowski uncovered the documents in Canada’s national archives and recently posted them to his blog Ufology Research. The 27 pages of documents detail six UFO cases recorded in 1967 and were prepared by Wing Commander Douglas Robertson. It is unknown to whom the documents were presented, though Rutkowski speculates it could have been for a newly-appointed Minister of Defence. Between 1966 and 1967, UFO reports went up by over 400% in Canada and several government departments began taking serious interest in these phenomena.

The documents ultimately breakdown numerous sightings and reports into seven categories: hoaxes, mass hysteria or psychological suggestion, misinterpretations of natural events, advanced or unknown military technology, and sightings likely due to psychological conditions. However, the report does list a category which includes truly anomalous sightings defined as “unusual sightings which the viewer is unable to identify or explain, namely, UFOs.” The document also contains references to various educational and medical institutions which aided the Ministry of Defence in debriefing, interviewing, and assessing witnesses.

Among the incidents referred to in the documents are the Falcon Lake incident, widely regarded as one of Canada’s most famous encounters. The new documents reveal that the Ministry of Defence found evidence of radioactivity which corroborates eyewitness testimony, and that scientists were unable to explain the anomaly, noting “a satisfactory ending or conclusion is still lacking.” Another incident in which a man reported a UFO flying over trees near Clear Water Bay found evidence of wilted leaves on said trees, with the Department of Forestry concluding “they are unable to explain the reason for the wilting.” Images of the documents and an analysis of them can be found on Rutkowski’s blog here.

A 1967 photograph taken in Nanton, Alberta.

Other incidents referred to include photographs of various unidentified flying objects, anomalous radar sightings, and even crop circles. Like in last year’s disclosure of the Pentagon’s secretive UFO research projects, these documents are far from the smoking gun proof of alien visitation we all wish they were. Still, disclosing that governments are indeed taking the UFO phenomenon seriously is a step in the right direction.

Unless, of course, all of these so-called disclosures are simply some kind of misdirection or some type of psy-op. Without a doubt, the real spooky stuff will never see the light of day, all evidence of it incinerated or buried at the bottom of a salt mine years ago. Is this new evidence meant to placate us just a little longer, keeping our attention on the government bureaucracies which hide these secrets as opposed to on the skies?

{ http://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }

The Lower Peninsula of the state of Michigan is often referred to as “the mitten” because its shape resembles winter hand coverings or perhaps the leather gloves that baseball players wear. That shape may be ironic if the latest predictions hold true that China’s dead and falling Tiangong-1 space station will pierce Earth’s atmosphere on or about April 3rd and head straight for the pocket of Michigan’s mitt. Will this be the last out for Wolverine State?

“An Aerospace graphic shows that parts of southern Lower Michigan fall into the regions listed with the highest probability of debris landing.”

The Aerospace Corporation operates a federally funded research and development center in El Segundo, California, which provides technical guidance and advice on all aspects of space missions to military, civil, and commercial customers. One critical aspect is the end of these missions and Aerospace maintains a page on its website for tracking the ultimate demise of Tiangong-1, the 8.5 ton space station which China’s National Space Administration launched in 2011 and lost contact with and control over in January 2016. Since then, its final resting place has been the subject of speculations, predictions and warnings – along with varying degrees of indifference by the Chinese space program.

A map of the world provided by Aerospace (seen here) shows two narrow bands across in the northern and southern hemispheres that it predicts are the most likely areas for Tiangong-1 to hit. Other high probability areas include Northern China, central Italy, northern Spain, the Middle East, New Zealand, Tasmania, South America, southern Africa, and the northern states of the U.S. Should people living in these areas be worried?

“When considering the worst-case location (yellow regions of the map) the probability that a specific person (i.e., you) will be struck by Tiangong-1 debris is about one million times smaller than the odds of winning the Powerball jackpot. In the history of spaceflight, no known person has ever been harmed by reentering space debris.”

Drawing of Tiangong-1 in better days

Considering the Powerball jackpot as of this writing is up to $420 million due to no winning tickets for weeks, no one should be worried. And yet, the news is filled with stories of worried Lower Michigan residents. It could be that they’re uneasy after the same area was hit by pieces of a mysterious meteor on January 20th of this year – a meteor that attracted hunters hoping to cash in with a collector offering $20,000 for a kilo of meteorite matter. Who knows what pieces of Tiangong-1 might sell for?

Wait a minute! Is Michigan scare-mongering rumors about the Chinese space station to keep prospectors away so they can find and sell the valuable chunks of Chinese space debris for themselves? With the way the area’s economy has been hit over the past few decades, who can blame them?

No matter where it lands, Aerospace warns that it may not be wise to get too close to any debris.

“Potentially, there may be a highly toxic and corrosive substance called hydrazine on board the spacecraft that could survive reentry. For your safety, do not touch any debris you may find on the ground nor inhale vapors it may emit.”

Wait a minute! Is Aerospace spreading rumors so its people can collect the debris for themselves?

You can’t trust anybody these days.

{ http://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }

The Navy keeps encountering mysterious UFOs — and no one can figure out what they are

Another “UFO” Video, And A Former DoD Officials Asks Why The Pentagon Doesn’t Care

JAZZ SHAW

{ https://hotair.com/ }

(Fact Check) The Great Pyramid Of Giza Contains Enough Stone To Build Wall Around Earth

That sounds just ludicrous, doesn’t it? But is it crazy?

You’d be surprised by the answer.

The Great Pyramid of Giza hides many secrets. In fact, despite the fact that it was (according to mainstream scholars) built some four thousand years ago, we have still not unraveled all its mysteries.

The Great Pyramid of Giza.

Image Credit: Shutterstock.

Thousands of years ago, the Great Pyramid of Giza was erected in modern-day Egypt.

The result? A stunning ancient monument home to many mysteries, yet few answers.

Despite having studied, researched and explored the pyramid for centuries, mainstream scholars have been unable to understand how the builders of the structure managed to erect such a precise monument, thousands of years ago, without the use of modern tools and technologie

An even greater mystery is how the Pyramid’s builders erected what was long considered as the most accurately aligned structure in existence, facing true north with only 3/60th of a degree of error.

However, not only is this ancient monument one of the most accurately aligned buildings on the surface of the planet, there are countless other details that make it even more stunning.

Image Credit: Shutterstock.

Did you now that, somehow, thousands of years ago, the ancient builders of the Pyramid used more than 2,300,000 stone blocks that weigh from 2 to 50 tons each to build a structure that would stand the test of time?

If that fact did not arouse your curiosity, did you know that the base of the pyramid covers 55,000 m2? And that the outer mantle was composed of 144,000 casing stones, all of them highly polished and flat to an accuracy of 1/100th of an inch, about 100 inches thick and weighing approximately 15 tons each?

Stunning characteristics of a structure built thousands of years ago

However, did you know that the Great Pyramid of Giza contains enough stone to build a wall around the Earth?

Yeah, it’s not fake news, not craziness, and not me trying to write up a cool article, all of my articles are cool. So yeah after this claim, you’d ask… where’s the proof?

Show me proof.

Ok.

Let’s get the facts straight.

The height of the Great Pyramid is 139 meters. The Great Pyramid has a width of 230m.

Our planet’s circumference is 40,075,000m.

2 feet in meters: 0.6096m

So, the volume of the Pyramid is:

2302 * 139 * (1/3) = 2,451,033 m3 = 2.4 x106 m3

Suppose the width of the wall is X m.

Then, the volume of the wall is: (40,075,000 * 0.6096) * X = 24,429,720 * X m3 ~ 24×106 * X m3

Now since 2.4×106 / 24×106 = 0.1, we have that, for the statement to be true, the width of the wall must be no wider than 10cm or about 0.33 feet. Source

There’s another one, source, Reddit:

The volume of the Pyramid: ~91,227,778 ft³

The circumference of Earth = Length of Wall: 131.48 * 10⁶ ft

The height of the Wall: 2 ft

The volume of Pyramid / (Circumference of Earth * Height of Wall) = Width of Wall

91,227,778 / (131.48*10⁶ * 2) = 0.35 ft = ~10cm

Or:

The radius of the earth: 20.9*10⁶ ft

The radius of the top part of the wall: 20.9*10⁶ + 2 ft

Cross section area of the wall: pi * ( (20.9 * 10⁶⁾² – (20.9 * 10⁶ + 2)² )

The volume of the Pyramid / Cross section area of wall = Wall thickness

91,227,778 / (pi * (20.9 * 10⁶ + 2)² – ( 20.9 * 10⁶ )² ) = .35 ft

Meaning that there is, in fact, enough stone in the Great Pyramid of Giza to build a 2ft high wall around the earth that is 10cm (.35ft) thick.

{ https://www.ancient-code.com/ }

This Is The Ancient Rock Fortress Of Sigiriya, The Eight Ancient Wonder Of The World

At an altitude of 200 meters, on the top of a massive column of rock lie the magnificent ancient ruins of a temple reaching for the stars.

Located in the northern Matale District near the town of Dambullain in Sri Lanka lie the enigmatic ruins of an ancient rock fortress. Near-vertical walls soar to a flat-topped summit that is said to house the ruins of an ancient civilization, thought to be once the epicenter of the short-lived kingdom of Kassapa.

Amilia Tennakoon / CC By 2.0

According to the ancient Sri Lankan chronicle the Culavamsa, it is believed to have been built by King Kasyapa, between 477 – 495 CE.

Erected on the massive rock, the temple and its surroundings were meticulously decorated with colorful frescoes in the distant past.

The history of the temple and the times that predate it are surrounded by rich history and magnificent ancient legends.

Said to be the Alakamandava, or the City of the Gods built up before 50 centuries ago by King Kubera who was the half-brother of Ravana (Ravan) as described in the Ramayanaya, Lal Sirinivas and Mirando Obesekara described Sigiriya as a post-historical archeology turning point of Ravana.

A stunning view of the Lion’s Rock.

Image Credit: Shutterstock.

Despite having a rich history dating back to around 495 CE, researchers have found evidence of human occupation nearly five thousand years ago during the Mesolithic Period.

Today’s tourists are welcomed by enormous lion paws about halfway up the side of this rock. The name of this place is derived from this structure —Sīhāgiri, the Lion Rock.

Image Credit: Shutterstock.

As noted by geologists, the Sigiriya rock is a remnant of an eruption of hardened magma of an extinct and long-eroded volcano.

It stands out above the surrounding plain, visible in kilometers from all directions.

Aerial view of the rock fortress.

Image Credit: Shutterstock.

The temple was built on a surface that according to many appears to have been cut clean.

Standing as evidence of ancient man’s ingenuity, the ancient rock fortress offers a rich history with is more than enough to impress every single visitor, offering a breathtaking view of the ingenuity and creativity of the builders.

The upper palace, located on top of the rock, still has cisterns cut into the rock, where you can still find water.

The pits and walls that surround the lower palace are richly ornamented.

An aerial view of the Rock Fortress.

Image Credit: Shutterstock.

After the death of its builder, King Kasyapa, it remained a monastic complex until the fourteenth century, after which it was entirely abandoned.

In 1831 Major Jonathan Forbes of the 78th Highlanders of the British army, while returning on horseback from a trip to Pollonnuruwa, encountered the “bush covered summit of Sigiriya”.

The Sigiri inscriptions were deciphered by the archaeologist Paranavithana who published a renowned work in two volumes, in Oxford, known as “Sigiri glyphs”.

“I am Budal [the writer’s name]. Came with hundreds of people to see Sigiriya. Since all the others wrote poems, I did not!”

Paranavithana wrote the popular book “History of Sigiriya”.

Featured image credit: http://tripland.info

{ https://www.ancient-code.com/ }

As some readers of Mysterious Universe will know, one of my big interests is the Contactee/Space Brother phenomenon, which was most prominent in the 1950s. It’s a subject which is very often derided by many in Ufology (and, at times, with good reason…). But, that doesn’t take away the fact that the issue is an important one. Of those who tackled the whole controversy, certainly one of the most knowledgeable was the late Colin Bennett. He wrote what – in my opinion – remains the most important and insightful book on contactee George Adamski. The title of Colin’s book? Looking for Orthon – Orthon being the alleged name of the equally alleged alien that Adamski claimed to have met in November 1952.

Back in 2009, I interviewed Colin about his ideas on Adamski, the Space Brothers and the Contactee crowd. And, today, I thought I would share with you – and without interruption – Colin’s observations on those long-gone times of the 1950s when the Contactee movement ruled the ufological roost. Colin, who died in 2014, told me:

“Many Orthons have appeared throughout history. The equivalents to Adamski’s Venusian ‘space brother’ have appeared on mountain tops, in deserts, and have appeared to walk on water, or fly in the sky. Their sole function is to sow seeds in the head; just as a farmer grows a particular crop. These seeds act on the imagination, which replicates and amplifies whatever story-technology is around at the time. People such as Adamski and the rest of the contactees were, and still are, like psychic lightning-rods for certain brands of information. Undoubtedly, rich or poor, clever or dumb, they are possessed by a kind of higher cerebral disturbance, and like Moses, they are as prepared for the ‘visitation’ as they anxiously await for a new product brand, for the equivalent to RFID-type branding is what ‘contact’ is all about.

“Contactees are host-nutrients for whatever cultural sales lines are on offer from visions conjured up by clouds, sea or sand. The message is ‘consumed’ and thoroughly processed exactly as a viral product is absorbed. The incomprehensibility of the received stories is irrelevant. They represent a heavily codified branch of postmodern intellectual consumerism. In receiving ‘messages’ at all, Contactees are bar coded as it were, and elements of the induced story-technology are ready to crystallize out into that final alchemical stage called the mechanical real.  But we must be careful here. As the alchemist said to his apprentice, ‘The game may be rigged, but it’s the only game in town.’

“Deception and all its ramifications is the key to this whole business. This does not burst the bubble of the mystery however, for manipulative levels of faction may well be our first clue as to how a possible alien mind might work. If the levels of deception of all kinds in human culture are anything to go by, the range of such within an alien culture must be both multiple and profound.

“The ‘space-folk’ are sculptured by wars between rival viral memes competing for prime-time belief. It may be that, as an independent form of non-organic life, memes as active viral information can display an Orthon entity at a drop of a hat. They come complete with sets of cultural agendas. After they have rung the doorbell as it were, and the goods are sold, these metaphysical salesmen disappear like the traditional Men in Black, no doubt traveling on to seed other dreams in other towns and other heads. The goods we have unwittingly bought are half-formed memories of having met someone from another world.

 “Over a half-century later, we can no more erase the legendary Contactees from our heads than we can erase Elvis Presley or Marilyn Monroe. Once induced by mere transient suggestion, these powerful images become permanent fast-breeders, turning out scripts and performances in all our heads – for no-one can escape – even as we sleep. It might come as a disappointment to extraterrestrial nut-and-bolters, but as [Jacques] Vallee says in Passport to Magonia, Orthon and his brood may be a form of ‘alien’ life that has been with us for a long time. Such ethereal beings are part of the structure of that much-despised and rather unfashionable idea described by the phrase mystical experience.

“A man says he has seen a fairy being. Another man says that is impossible, because fairy beings do not exist. When we subtract the two beliefs we do not get zero as an answer. We have the thinnest of belief-tissue remaining, but perhaps mechanical quantity is irrelevant. The smallest part of an HTML address contains the whole address, rather like a fractal. These creatures, though seen and photographed, leave no trace of fights, no food swath, no blood, no sweat. They appear as partially formed displays rather then flesh and blood as we know it. As soon as we are into display we are into Media. It is somewhat chilling to think that if an Orthon or even perhaps a Jesus can appear in this manner, then so can many things else, including objects and even situations. In this it is possible that we are host-receptors of skunk-smoke from life forms not yet known to us.

“There is no doubt that Contactee claims allow access to a refreshing world which includes humor, and inspired absurdity. They allow humanity to breathe and access a Matrix world in which anything that can be imagined can happen. It might be denied by social-scientific left, but the truth is that dreams, fantasies, and mystical experiences of all kinds play an absolutely essential part in all human mental operations.

“George Adamski played a significant part in establishing New Age thinking. It might be well to remember that the entire body of our moral philosophy and spiritual life is formed by visions and inspirations. It does not come from science or technology. Those who thoughtlessly dismiss mystical experience cut themselves off from all art, literature, and no small part of all thought and philosophy. As mystics and prophets know, when desert light strikes the retina, anything that can be imagined can happen. The greatest tribute that can be paid to Adamski is that through both foul means and fair, he helped to create one of the very few routes to the unconscious that we have.”

{ http://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }

Ancient humans thrived during a supervolcano eruption

BY MIHAI ANDREI

Imagine a year without summer. The sky turns gray during the day and glows a sinister red at night. Trees wither and start to fall, all vegetation dries down and becomes a desolate shadow of its former self. Animals also start to suffer and thin down, and the damage propagates up the food chain, wiping out entire ecosystems. The same cycle repeats year after year, with no visible end in sight.

Sounds like an apocalyptic scenario, doesn’t it? Well, that’s exactly what the world, and us too, as part of it, went through some 74,000 years ago during a supervolcano eruption. And some of us actually thrived.

Surviving a disaster

Volcanic eruptions are scary enough as it is, but supervolcanoes are an entirely different beast. A supervolcano eruption brings deposits of at least 1,000 cubic kilometers (240 cubic miles), affecting the entire planet’s climate and chemical make-up. There are about 20 known supervolcanoes on the planet, and geologists have managed to discover just 12 eruptions from supervolcanoes, the oldest known one dating from about 25 million years ago.

Toba, in Indonesia, was one of these eruptions.

The eruption was large enough to have deposited an ash layer approximately 15 cm (6 in) thick over all of South Asia and ejected some 10,000 million tonnes of sulfurous acid, as well as 6,000 million tonnes of sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere. It was a catastrophic eruption, of biblical proportions, but the worst happened after the eruption: the aerosols ejected by the volcano dropped global temperatures 3.0 to 3.5 °C (5 to 6 °F) for several years.

No species were spared from the effects, and there is evidence of a population bottleneck (a sharp reduction in the size of a population) in central east Africa and India, which affects the genetic make-up of the human worldwide population to this day. But some populations might have been better off than others.

Some ecosystems (called refugia) still had the necessary resources to survive. Most notably, populations close to the sea would have likely been able to eat shellfish, which are nutritious and less affected by eruptions.

Unlikely evidence

Researchers have found new evidence relating to this eruption in an unlikely place: archaeological sediment in South Africa.

When the Toba eruption took place, it spewed rock, gas, and tiny microscopic pieces of glass. Under a microscope, they have a very distinctive hook-like shape which can trace them to the eruption. These fragments are so small that when they’re ejected into the atmosphere, they can spread across the entire world. Such a fragment was chanced upon by Panagiotis (Takis) Karkanas, who found it in some sediment encased in resin.

“It was one shard particle out of millions of other mineral particles that I was investigating. But it was there, and it couldn’t be anything else,” says Karkanas.

He and his colleagues had considered the possibility of finding such a volcanic shard, but it wasn’t easy to identify one.

“Takis and I had discussed the potential of finding the Toba shards in the sediments of our archaeological site, and with his eagle eye, he found one,” explains Curtis W. Marean, project director of the Pinnacle Point excavations where the shard was found.

The research team has been excavating caves at Pinnacle Point, South Africa, for nearly 20 years. Glass shards from Mount Toba were discovered at the PP5-6 location.

Image credits: Erich Fisher.

They sent it to Eugene Smith, a volcanologist with the University of Nevada at Las Vegas. For Smith, it was a long trip down memory lane.

“The Pinnacle Point study brought me back to the study of glass shards from my master’s thesis 40 years earlier,” says Smith.

It was kind of like looking for a needle in an archaeological haystack, Smith told ZME Science in an email.

“The shards are small (less than 100 microns in size) and very rare (one shard per about 10,000 grains), but through careful processing in our lab at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas (UNLV) we were able to identify multiple shards from both Pinnacle Point and Vleesbaai. For Pinnacle Point, we have three chemical analyses for three shards (but we found about 40 more). For Vleesbaai, we now have 12 analyses for 12 different shards.”

Finding such a shard obviously involves a lot of chance, but through thoughtful and careful preparations, researchers can improve their chances, Smith says.

“Although the shards are very rare, we increase the odds of finding them by doing careful processing in the UNLV lab. Samples are first cleaned to remove organic and carbonate material. They then go through several heavy liquid steps to remove both heavier and lighter material leaving grains with a specific gravity in the proper range to find shards. These grains are mounted on an epoxy round and polished. We then look at each grain on the round using a petrographic microsope.”

It’s a tedious, but rewarding process.

“The rounds contain a lot of mineral grains but they can be identified using their optical properties. Shards are glass, so they are optically isotopic and easy to distinguish from mineral grains like quartz or feldspar. After identifying the shards, we analyze them using electron microprobe and laser ablation inductively coupled mass spectrometer. This is a very tedious process that takes quite a bit of care and patience, but finding shards and identifying their source is an amazing experience.”

Together, they were able to confirm the source of the shard. Putting two and two together (the archaeological and the volcanologic evidence), they concluded that humans must have survived the eruption in order to leave the remains behind.

“Many previous studies have tried to test the hypothesis that Toba devastated human populations,” Marean notes. “But they have failed because they have been unable to present definitive evidence linking a human occupation to the exact moment of the event.”

There’s a rich record of archaeological remains in the area, indicating a continuously inhabited area, Marean tells ZME Science.

“There is a rich record of human habitation along the south coast of South Africa from about 120,000 years ago to the present. The record from 160,000 to 120,000 is more ephemeral. The evidence includes their discarded stone tools, food remains, and fire places. The groups would be hunter-gatherers living in social groups of about 20-30 people, and perhaps organized into larger ethnolinguistic groups, but we are not sure about the latter.”

Researchers say the archaeological evidence indicates not only that the human populations managed to survive, but that they were able to go about their lives relatively undisturbed — which was a rare privilege, given the scale of the volcanic eruption.

“These models tell us a lot about how people lived at the site and how their activities changed through time,” say Erich Fisher, associate research scientist with the Institute of Human Origins, who built the detailed photorealistic 3D models from the data. “What we found was that during and after the time of the Toba eruption people lived at the site continuously, and there was no evidence that it impacted their daily lives.”

It’s quite possible that their proximity to the rich coast ensured a stable diet and allowed them to thrive, as other populations were partially or completely wiped out.

“We speculated in the paper that the rick coastal foods, such as shellfish, may have provided a more resilient food base than terrestrial foods and this might have allowed people to make it through better than interior groups,” Marean concluded for ZME Science.

“Of course being very near the volcano one would see a very strong temporary effect on weather. But there would have been worldwide climate impacts, but these would also vary regionally.”

Journal Reference: Eugene Smith, Zenobia Jacobs, Racheal Johnsen, Minghua Ren, Erich C. Fisher, Simen Oestmo, Jayne Wilkins, Jacob A. Harris, Panagiotis Karkanas, Shelby Fitch, Amber Ciravolo, Deborah Keenan, Naomi Cleghorn, Christine S. Lane, Thalassa Matthews, and Curtis W. Marean (2018). Humans thrived in South Africa through the Toba super-volcanic eruptions ~74,000 years ago. Nature DOI:10.1038/nature25967.

{ https://www.zmescience.com/ }

Stellar Nursery Unites Star-Formation Theories

Waking up in the middle of the night to find your body frozen and pinned down by an invisible weight is the stuff that ghost stories are made of. Sure enough, a range of cultures have folded sleep paralysis into their horror lore — Americans did so recently in the 2016 horror film Dead Awake — suggesting that this recurring nightmare isn’t specific to any one time or place. Scientists studying the terrifying phenomenon think that it’s actually a neurologically driven process — rather, one that goes awry, suggesting there’s no escaping it unless we intervene directly in our heads.

Until science illuminated the origin of this disturbing nightmare, humans assumed it had a supernatural source. In places as varied as Scandinavia, Newfoundland, Korea, the American South, and Turkey, folklore blames the experience on some kind of evil spirit, witch, or creature that sits on a person’s chest or holds them down while they sleep. Now we know that what people have blamed on the Night Hag for so many centuries is actually the result of the sleep cycle going wrong (sorry, Night Hag).

You probably don’t realize it, but you’re actually physically paralyzed while you sleep for a big chunk of the night, which scientists in the Journal of Neuroscienceblamed on the tandem work of the neurotransmitters GABA and glycine in 2011. This state is known as “muscle atonia,” and it only happens during rapid eye movement (REM) sleep — the deepest part of the sleep cycle that produces the most vivid dreams. It’s thought that we evolved this temporary paralysis because otherwise we might act out our dreams more than we already do, which could be very dangerous. During REM sleep, which happens in periods lasting 90 to 120 minutes, your breathing also becomes faster and highly irregular. It’s not a great part of the sleep cycle to interrupt.

Unfortunately, poor sleep habits, exhaustion, shift work, and jet lag can shake you awake during REM sleep, according to researchers at the Anomalistic PsychologyResearch Unit, Goldsmiths, at the University of London. When you’re in the groggy, half-awake state — quickly waking up from REM sleep is notoriously difficult — breathing feels laborious because it’s been happening at an irregular pace, and you’re keenly aware that you can’t move. As panic sets in, it only exacerbates the feeling that you can’t breathe.

To make matters worse, studies have shown that hallucinations often accompany the physical terror. In 2011 in the journal Sleep Medicine Reviews, researchers combed through 35 studies on sleep paralysis from the past 50 years and grouped the hallucinations into three horrific types: “The presence of an intruder, pressure on the chest sometimes accompanied by physical and/or sexual assault experiences and levitation or out-of-body experiences.” Researchers think these hallucinations are a remnant of the dream state, though it’s not clear why these three types are the most common.

Luckily, the sensation passes as you ease out of the dream state, and it’s not thought to cause any long-term harm, at least physically. Psychologically, though, sleep paralysis can mess with your head long after you get out of bed. In 2013, a study in Clinical Psychological Science looked at the types of distress people experienced after having an episode and found that that the effects include sensing unseen presences, feeling like death is imminent, having a heightened fear of threat or assault, and generally ruminating on the episode, though the type of distress that ensues depends on the details of the experience. People who had particularly sense-based experiences — like straight-up seeing and feeling a demon crouched on your chest — tended to have more physical distress later. The effects are bad enough that the researchers say sleep paralysis could “make a significant contribution to the billions of dollars, worldwide, in costs associated with accidents, illnesses, and lost productivity associated with sleep disturbances.

Even if you’re one of the 92 percent of the general population that doesn’t experience sleep paralysis, you’ll never fully escape their influence. The word “nightmare” was actually first coined to describe sleep paralysis, folding in the Old English word mare — which refers to the mythological incubi, demonic sleep-molesters that were more than willing to crush a dreamer’s lungs.

{ https://www.inverse.com/ }

Musk Says SpaceX Mars Ship to Start Testing Next Year

He wants pizza joints and bars on Mars. 

By Oscar Gonzalez

 

Elon Musk is optimistic that next year SpaceX’s first interplanetary shuttle will take flight.

During a Q&A event at South by Southwest today, Musk answered several questions regarding Mars, from how would a colony would govern itself to what kind of businesses he’d like to see on the red planet. (Yes, he really wants a Mars bar.) As for the timeline of when interplanetary travel may happen, he didn’t delay with an answer.

“People have told me my timeline is very optimistic,” he said. “We are building the first Mars interplanetary ship. It’ll be able to do short up and down flights in the first half of next year.”

He expects the ship to be capable of moving 150 metric tons into orbit with double the amount for the payload. As expected, the ship and the rockets will be reusable, which he explained will reduce the cost per flight dramatically.

Once the ship is built, he hopes other countries and companies will now have proof that space travel is viable so they can “up their game.” When interplanetary travel becomes available, he believes that will open up many entrepreneurial opportunities including some Mars entertainment.

“Mars will need everything from pizza joints and will need great bars. Mars bars,” he laughed. “I love great dad jokes.”

Once a colony makes it to Mars, Musk suggested that the people govern themselves as a direct democracy with laws that have fewer words than The Lord of the Rings. The laws should also have a sunset clause or at least be easier to remove than to pass.

Last month, SpaceX launched its Falcon Heavy rocket putting the company ahead of schedule.

{ https://www.inverse.com/ }

You know how – when you’re standing at the front or bow of a moving boat – you can see a curved ridge of water moving out to either side of you? These are called bow waves, and objects in space create them, too. Unlike bow waves in water, which only occur on the water’s surface, cosmic bow shocks happen in three dimensions. NASA ScienceCasts posted a new video about them to YouTube on March 8, 2018. As the video points out:

There are bow shocks everywhere, even in space–and these cosmic bow shocks can tell scientists cosmic secrets.

Even the emptiest regions of space contain protons, electrons, atoms, molecules and other matter. When planets, stars, and the plasma clouds ejected from supernovae fly at a high speed through this surrounding medium, cosmic bow shocks are generated in that medium.

As mentioned in the video, Earth creates a bow shock, too, as we move in orbit around the sun. It happens when the solar wind (a stream of charged particles from the sun) meets Earth’s magnetosphere (the magnetic environment around Earth). Explanations of Earth’s bow shock get complicated and jargon-laden fast, but this Encyclopedia Britannica article about Earth’s magnetosphere provides a good picture of what’s happening, if you’re interested.

You’ll find a transcript of the NASA video here.

Also, if you’re interested in bow shocks, be sure to check out this cool article from 2011 about how the moon’s shadow creates waves in Earth’s atmosphere during a solar eclipse. The waves emanating from the moon shadow – as it penetrates the atmosphere and falls on Earth’s surface on eclipse day – happen much as a ship moving through the ocean creates waves at its bow and stern.

The Hubble Space Telescope obtained this beautiful image of a cosmic bow shock in February 1995. The bow shock – the arcing, graceful structure – is about half a light-year across, created from the wind from the star LL Orionis colliding with the general flow of gas and dust in the Orion Nebula.

Image via Wikimedia Commons.

Bottom line: A new NASA ScienceCast about cosmic bow shocks, a word and a link about Earth’s bow shock, and a link to a story about the bow shock created by the moon’s shadow during a solar eclipse.

{ http://earthsky.org/ }

Declassified UFO Footage Filmed by Air Force F/A-18 Super Hornet Leaves Experts In Shock

This is it, folks. This incredible video footage, captured by an F/A-18F Super Hornet is considered the real deal when it comes to proof of UFO’s and ‘alien life.’

“It’s time to put aside taboos about UFOs and listen to our pilots and radar operators,” says Christopher Mellon, former staff director of the Senate Intelligence Committee.

The US State Department has just declassified a recording obtained by a Boeing warplane F/A-18F Super Hornet where a mysterious UFO can be seen flying at high speed, leaving the pilots in disbelief.

The mind-bending video, released on March 9 by the To the Stars Academy of Arts and Science website, was recorded on the East Coast of the United States in 2015.

See that little white dot? Image Credit: To the Stars Academy / YouTube

Ufologists consider it as one of the best pieces of evidence supporting the idea that UFO’s are real, and they are not from Earth.

The mysterious object was captured by the pilot’s thanks to the AN/ASQ-228 Advanced Targeting Forward-Looking Infrared(ATFLIR), a multi-sensor, electro-optical targeting pod incorporating a thermographic camera, low-light television camera, target laser rangefinder/laser designator, and laser spot tracker developed and manufactured by Raytheon.

In the video, you can observe a white dot moving at great speed and hear how the surprised pilots comment on the situation.

“I have it!” One of the pilots rejoices when he locates the target with the radar.

Following this newly declassified video footage, Christopher Mellon, former staff director of the Senate Intelligence Committee and former deputy assistant secretary of the Intelligence Defense Sub-Secretariat for the administrations of Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, has criticized the silence of the Pentagon and the Department of Defense on the UFO phenomenon.

UFO’s are real, and its time to start paying attention to the countless declassified documents, images, video files, and comments of highly ranked government and military individuals when speaking about these mysterious objects.

Mellon explains in an article published in The Washington Post that he is aware of “numerous conversations” by Pentagon officials in which they describe these phenomena as “isolated incidents.”

However, UFO sightings are anything but isolated.

The former senior official says that his colleague Luis Elizondo, who led a Pentagon intelligence program aimed at studying UFO evidence, “resigned last fall to protest the lack of government attention,” the expert said.

The former adviser also mentions unusual cases described in some reports reviewed by the staff of the USS Princeton aircraft carrier in 2004, whose radar recorded the descent of unidentified aircraft from atmospheric heights “at supersonic speeds,” stopping a few meters above the ocean.

“The United States does not possess anything capable of such exploits,” Mellon emphasizes.

However, as we have noted before, these are not isolated events.

Mr. Mellon also recalls two other cases when F-18 fighters were involved in a UFO chase that they described as “white apparatuses approximately 13 meters long”.

Faced with this type of evidence, the expert does not understand why the US Government has not handled the issue with more significant effort.

“If the origin of these objects is a mystery, so is the government’s paralysis,” he laments.

The phenomenon became relevant last December when the State Department declassified two videos of the same nature and unveiled a secret Pentagon program for the Identification of Advanced Aerospace Threats.

{ https://www.ancient-code.com/ }

Mystery Anomaly Found Beneath African Could Cause Earth’s Poles To Switch

According to scientists, this mysterious anomaly could be a precursor to Earth’s poles changing positions.

New scientific studies have found something rather alarming.

Earth’s magnetic field is dramatically weakening. As noted by a new research, the disruption of Earth’s magnetic field is part of a pattern that has existed for the last 1,000 years.

And while experts have known that Earth’s magnetic field has been weakening over the decades, of all the places on the planet, one region of Africa suffers a more dangerous anomaly than the rest.

Our planet is wrapped in a dipolar magnetic field that originates in the planet’s core.

This field moves as the core flows and, after long geological periods, Earth’s poles can switch positions, as magnetic north moves to the south (and vice versa).

This is a process that can last up to thousands of years, and the last time it happened was about 780,000 years ago, although it was closed again about 40,000 years ago.

Some researchers say we should be worried.

But why exactly?

Well, if Earth’s poles really do switch, the main problem is that during the process the intensity of the magnetic field that protects our planet from solar radiation would vary more than normal. Scientists fear that during this occurrence, the planet’s magnetic field could allow more hazardous radiation from space penetrate the protective layer, causing problems on the surface of the planet.

As of now, we have no idea when the flip may occur, especially due to the lack of data.

However, researchers have spent years studying a number of clues that can help predict that hypothetical inversal as much as possible.

This study has pointed experts to a part on Earth that is troubling. Referred to as the South Atlantic Anomaly: this massive area that extends from Chile to Zimbabwe.

Scientists say that the field is so weak within the anomaly that its dangerous for the satellites to come into contact since the additional radiation it lets through could disrupt electronic devices.

“We’ve known for quite some time that the magnetic field has been changing, but we didn’t really know if this was unusual for this region on a longer timescale, or whether it was normal,” says physicist Vincent Hare from the University of Rochester in New York.

However, evidence of Earth’s magnetic field weakening and possible pole reversal is scarce, mostly because of the lack of archaeomagnetic data: physical evidence of magnetism in the Earth’s past, preserved in archaeological relics of ancient times.

According to a recent study, some 1,000 years ago, the Bantu peoples performed rituals in times of environmental difficulties.

During periods of drought, they burned their huts of clay and grains, in a ritual of sacred cleansing to make the rains return, without knowing that they carried out a kind of scientific fieldwork for researchers centuries later.

“When you burn clay at very high temperatures, you actually stabilize the magnetic minerals, and when they cool from these very high temperatures, they lock in a record of the earth’s magnetic field,” one of the team, geophysicist John Tarduno explains.

“We were looking for the recurrent behavior of anomalies because we think that’s what is happening today and causing the South Atlantic Anomaly,” Tarduno says.

“We found evidence that these anomalies have happened in the past, and this helps us contextualize the current changes in the magnetic field.”

The fact that the ancient burned down their huts of clay and grains has allowed experts to figuring out that the weakening of the so-called South Atlantic Anomaly is not a standalone phenomenon in history, as similar fluctuations were ‘registered’ in 400-450 CE, 700-750 CE, and 1225-1550 CE.

Furthermore, as noted by Science Alert, the fact that there’s a pattern tells us that the position of the South Atlantic Anomaly isn’t a geographic fluke.

“We’re getting stronger evidence that there’s something unusual about the core-mantle boundary under Africa that could be having an important impact on the global magnetic field,” Tarduno says.

{ https://www.ancient-code.com/ }

Time Distortions and UFOs: Knowles Family’s Close Encounter

BY CHET DEMBECK

Knowles Family’s Encounter with a Hostile UFO

Lost time, everything suddenly going into slow motion, shadows out of sync, objects and voices out of sync are common phenomena experienced by those who come in close contact with extraterrestrial vehicles and their inhabitants

 Australian Dual UFO Sighting Time Distortion

On the night of Jan. 22, 1988 the Knowles family said that they were driving on a road in a secluded part of the Australian outback when they noticed a light in the sky seemed to be following them. After a few miles the light came closer and revealed itself to be an egg-shaped craft navigated by intelligent beings. It soon hovered in front of them, according to the mother and her two sons, and lifted them and their car off the road using some mysterious tractor beam coming from the UFO.

It was at this moment that members of the family noticed that everything suddenly went into slow motion, including their voices, which were so slow they couldn’t understand each other. In addition, after the UFO put their car back on the road, the Knowles realized that more than 20 minutes had passed, which none of them could account for.

The Knowles Contact Authorities

Not surprisingly, the family was in a state of shock as they pulled into a gas station a few miles from where the incident occurred. They frantically told the attendant about their abduction by aliens in such a convincing manner that he immediately called the police, who dutifully took the incredulous report.

This would probably been the end of the case and it would have been eventually sealed with a shrug of the shoulders if it weren’t for the fact a few hours later a boat full of Australian fisherman found themselves also the specimens of the same craft and its extraterrestrial crew.

Here was an example of dual UFO sightings and alien contact reports that simply could not be explained away for a myriad of reasons.

Summary Of The Case

• (1) The incidents, which occurred separately, one near Sidney Australia and the other off the country’s coastline, were reported by the Associated Press to have occurred on the same evening.
• (2) The description of a UFO buzzing a car occupied by Faye Knowles and her three sons was identical to the description of a similar incident experienced by the crew of a tuna boat fishing in the Great Australian Bright the same evening.
• (3) Knowles and her sons all witnessed the event, which they say involved their vehicle being lifted off an isolated Outback road by a mysterious beam coming from a UFO shaped like an egg in a cup.
• (4) The fact that Knowles, her sons and the crew of the fishing boat independently testified that their voices changed and that they appeared to speak in slow motion makes this case one in a million!

Time Distortion A Shared Experience

This shared phenomenon of having their speech slow down and everything about them appearing to be in slow motion indicates a time distortion, which some physicists theorize would occur if a person came in the proximity of an object moving faster than or approaching the speed of light.

Similar slow motion effects, or time distortions, have been described in some of the most credible alien abduction cases and this alone raises the Australian case to a high level of believability in my view.

Faster Than The Speed of Light

Again, even though Einstein did not believe it was possible for an object to travel the speed of light or faster, today some scientists speculate that it could be done if a technology were developed that could create an alteration in the local space-time.

They also theorize that any person who came close enough to such a time anomaly would experience a time distortion similar to those described by the Knowles family and the fishermen.

Here’s an actual interview of the family soon after the event:

Also read: Project Supervisor Claims UFOs Have Threatened U.S. Missile Defense

© 2018 Chet Dembeck

{ https://unknownboundaries.com/ }

{ https://www.inquisitr.com/ }

A recent study on a space anomaly that has perplexed scientists for years has some suggesting that it could be explained by a parallel “bubble universe” — although there are other, more standard potential explanations, as well.

Too Cold

For years, scientists have been baffled by a weird anomaly far away in space: a mysterious “Cold Spot” about 1.8 billion light-years across. It is cooler than its surroundings by around 0.00015 degrees Celsius (0.00027 degrees Fahrenheit), a fact astronomers discovered by measuring background radiation throughout the universe.

Previously, astronomers believed that this space could be cooler simply because it had less matter in it than most sections of space. They dubbed it a massive supervoid and estimated that it had 10,000 galaxies fewer than other comparable sections of space.

But now, in a recently published survey of galaxies, astronomers from the Royal Astronomical Society (RAS) say they have discovered that this supervoide could not exist. They now believe that the galaxies in the cold spot are just clustered around smaller voids that populate the cold spot like bubbles. These small voids, however, cannot explain the temperature difference observed.

Multiverse?

To link the temperature differences to the smaller voids, the researchers say a non-standard cosmological model would be required. “But our data place powerful constraints on any attempt to do that,” explained researcher Ruari Mackenzie in an RAS press release. While the study had a large margin of error, the simulations suggest there is only a two percent probability that the Cold Spot formed randomly.

Credit: The Royal Astronomical Society

“This means we can’t entirely rule out that the Spot is caused by an unlikely fluctuation explained by the standard model. But if that isn’t the answer, then there are more exotic explanations,”  said researcher Tom Shanks in the press release. “Perhaps the most exciting of these is that the Cold Spot was caused by a collision between our universe and another bubble universe.”

If more detailed studies support the findings of this research, the Cold Spot might turn out to be the first evidence for the multiverse, though far more evidence would be needed to confirm our universe is indeed one of many.

Source futurism.com

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

LE PENTAGONE PUBLIE UNE TROISIÈME VIDÉO D'OVNI FILMÉE PAR DES PILOTES DE L'US NAVY

La troisième vidéo du Pentagone vient d'être publiée, à travers l'Académie To The Stars, et comme l'a dit Luis Elizondo, qui était en charge d'un projet du Pentagone de 22 millions de dollars, d'enquêter sur les menaces qui pourraient représenter le OVNIS pour la sécurité nationale.

To The Stars Academy a été fondée par le Rock Star Tom DeLonge, du groupe Blink 182, et a été dédiée au reportage des cas d'ovnis avec Elizondo.

Cette nouvelle vidéo, appelée GO FAST, a été enregistrée par un combattant F / A-18 Super Hornet de l'US Navy, en utilisant une équipe appelée Raytheon ATFLIR Pod, sur la côte est des États-Unis, en 2015.

Lors du démarrage de la vidéo, nous pouvons voir que le capteur est en infrarouge, ce qui montre les régions de noir comme les plus chaudes. Ce capteur dispose de deux modes d'imagerie : demi-onde et infrarouge visuel. Il a une haute résolution et peut localiser et désigner des cibles à des distances supérieures à 40 nm. Les images vidéo représentent l'image affichée dans le cockpit et les opérateurs de système d'armes (WSO).

Tout en capturant la vidéo, l'avion américain Il faisait 7 600 mètres de haut et à une vitesse de 400 km / h. Comme vous pouvez le voir dans la vidéo, le capteur pointe à 22 degrés sous l'horizon et 36 degrés à gauche de l'avion. La surface de l'océan est clairement visible en arrière-plan.

Le véhicule non identifié a une forme ovale et une couleur blanche. Il se déplace à grande vitesse de la partie supérieure droite vers la partie inférieure gauche de l'écran, volant très bas au-dessus de l'eau. Initialement, le capteur ne peut pas capturer l'objet. L'opérateur des systèmes d'armes (WSO) dirige le capteur devant l'objet pour essayer une autre capture. Lors de la troisième tentative, la capture du suivi du capteur est réussie.

Le capteur est maintenant en mode "autotrack", où le capteur utilise le contraste et d'autres paramètres pour verrouiller sur une cible, en le maintenant automatiquement centré dans le cadre d'affichage du capteur. Ce mode peut suivre les objets ayant des vitesses et des accélérations dans des limites définies, qui sont définies par les limites de manœuvre attendues de la cible.

À droite de l'écran, le télémètre indique que l'objet se trouve à une distance oblique de 4,4 milles marins (5,1 milles terrestres). Le F / A-18 commence un virage à gauche pour maintenir l'objet dans le champ de vision du capteur ATFLIR.

A midi vingt-deux, l'OSM (Office of Surface Mining) est interrogé : "Avez-vous classé une cible en mouvement ?" Et répondu : "Non, c'est dans l'autotrack." La question révèle la surprise de la possibilité de capturer l'objet manuellement. Ceci indique la difficulté de suivre manuellement l'objet avec le capteur ATFLIR.

Observations

Il est important de garder à l'esprit

• • Il n'y a pas d'ailes ou de queue évidentes sur l'objet. Même les images IR d'un missile de croisière auraient des ailes visibles dans cette gamme.

• Il n'y a pas de stylo d'échappement de l'objet. Une colonne d'échappement est clairement visible sur les avions conventionnels à la fréquence infrarouge moyenne des ondes utilisées par l'ATFLIR. Ensuite, une image infrarouge à ondes moyennes d'un F-16 en vol est montrée. Le capteur est en mode "blanc chaud". Notez que la longueur de la colonne d'échappement est presque la longueur de l'avion. La vidéo dont elle était encore extraite indique clairement que le F-16 est subsonique, ce qui signifie que l'accélérateur a un réglage bas qui crée des températures d'échappement et un volume de gaz d'échappement relativement bas. Dans une configuration de puissance plus élevée, la colonne d'échappement serait beaucoup plus grande et plus lumineuse.
Vous pouvez regarder la vidéo ci-dessous :


Bien que la vidéo ne montre pas autant que les deux précédentes, il est possible de voir un objet ovale se déplacer à grande vitesse sur la mer. Nous devons garder à l'esprit que ce matériel a été vu et analysé par le personnel de la marine américaine. Correctement formés pour détecter les appareils volants connus (vous pouvez écouter et lire les sous-titres de la vidéo qui montrent la surprise des pilotes avant cet objet inconnu). Cette vidéo est maintenant plus d'évidence d'activité d'OVNI sur notre planète, et comment les diverses entités gouvernementales ont été au courant de ceci au cours des années. Fernando T.
Vous pouvez voir les deux vidéos précédentes ci-dessous :

Vidéo 1

Vidéo 2

{ http://areazone51ufos.blogspot.be/ }

10 Crazy Conspiracy Theories About Extraterrestrial Beings

GREGORY MYERS

The idea of other intelligent beings has long been fascinating to us. Ancient myths have us interacting with gods and all kinds of strange, mythical creatures such as centaurs. The stars have also played an important role in cultures around the world. Over time, ancient myths became nothing more than legends, while technology and scientific discovery started to destroy our belief in strange nonhumans.

This made us look further to the stars for our hopes, and all-new theories have been born since. Many of today’s theories about intelligent, nonhuman life are not only bizarre but try to trace everything back to ancient days. Modern conspiracy theorists believe that everything is connected and that the events of Roswell were not even close to the beginning.

10. The Mass UFO Sightings Over Los Angeles Decades Ago

Before Roswell, a strange incident happened that might have gotten way more attention in history books if not for the fact that it happened in the middle of World War II. In 1942, several years before the infamous Roswell incident, the city of Los Angeles was in an extremely tense mood. The Japanese had only recently bombed Pearl Harbor, so anything strange in the sky was immediately assumed to be a Japanese air raid.

On the night of February 24, 1942, residents of Los Angeles saw many unidentified aircraft in the sky. Everyone started panicking, thinking that the aircraft were Japanese bombers. However, despite the city launching an all-out, coordinated attack against these strange objects in the sky, there’s no physical evidence that they managed to hit anything, nor is there any evidence that the UFOs attempted to fire back or interact in any way.

Some witnesses claimed to have seen objects shaped like lozenges. Poor-quality pictures taken from that night make it look like there’s a stereotypical alien ship ominously hovering over Los Angeles. To add fuel to the fire, the Navy and Air Force gave contradicting reports on the incident. The incident may seem very mysterious, but there was a massive war going on. It may simply have been experimental technology of some kind. We may never know.

9. The Crawling Space Slug On Pluto

Recently, NASA made history by making brand-new, color photos of Pluto that we had never seen before and getting close enough to make interesting, new observations. Before long, people were speculating about what NASA may have covered up and what it may have “leaked” to the public about alleged alien life. One photo in particular caught the eye of conspiracy theorists, who insisted that it showed a gigantic alien space slug slowly moving across the surface of the planet. While the gigantic moving object does look vaguely like a slug, it—unfortunately—is not an example of alien life.

However, the explanation given by NASA is still pretty interesting. The folks at NASA claim that what people saw was a gigantic chunk of nitrogen-rich ice that floated to the surface of Pluto only to slowly melt and sink below again. Experts say that this behavior on the surface of Pluto is very similar to that of a lava lamp. The “slug” people saw was a block of this ice floating temporarily on the surface before slipping beneath the waves. It may not be alien life, but a vast part of an entire planet’s surface acting like one giant lava lamp is pretty cool, too.

8. The Giant People Who Live Under The Earth’s Crust

Most people look to space in the hopes of finding alien life; others search among us for those who may be “hybrids.” Yet there are also those who are convinced that much of the world above us is a sham and that the true secrets are beneath our feet—beneath the Earth. With the advent of social media, conspiracies that suggest that the Earth is nothing like people think are becoming more popular.

While many theorists like to claim that the Earth is flat, others say that it is hollow and that there is a completely separate world inside of it, which somehow has its own, functioning Sun despite being inside our Earth. According to these conspiracy claims, Admiral Byrd did not actually fly over the North Pole in the 1940s—he flew inside it. He discovered another world inside the Earth’s crust, and the government has been doing its best to cover up the story ever since.

Some conspiracy theorists also take seriously an old legend from a group of Scandinavians who were sailing and ended up near the Pole. The Scandinavians thought it strange that it started to get warmer instead of colder, and they suddenly found themselves sailing inside the Earth. They found a fantastic land full of rich bounty and kind, giant people who ate similarly giant fruits and vegetables. According to the conspiracy theorists, these beings are much smarter than we are and sometimes communicate through intermediaries in order to try to better steer humanity’s fate. Some even claim they secretly talk to the Dalai Lama.

7. The Secret Reptilian Aliens Who Control The World’s Governments

Most of us are already well aware of the theory about reptilians dreamed up by David Icke. The claim is that long ago, alien beings seeded themselves among us and held on to their power through the ages by keeping it in the family. Whether they have managed to keep all knowledge of their original roots or ways depends on the theory, but the claim is that these people are at least hybrids, are aware of it, and are using their connections and power to control the world. However, what many people don’t realize is that the main point of this theory is even more ridiculous than that.

The truth is that many details about the prior history of these reptilians were added to this theory much later to make it sound more plausible. The theory’s actual main evidence is simply that most people who are royalty or have spent time in a higher office are distant cousins or otherwise related. At the very least, people suggest that this is some kind of a conspiracy, even if it is not an extraterrestrial one.

However, all those people being related is not really that strange. Anyone who’s played the game “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon” knows the theory that no two people are more than six people away in terms of introduction. Seeing how back in the day, many royal families married for political expediency, it doesn’t seem very odd that people in royalty or politics are distantly related or at least connected by marriage.

6. The Alien Woman Supposedly Spotted On The Martian Landscape

With the advent of the Internet, the community of conspiracy theorists has grown at an accelerated rate. These theorists are able to go through thousands of publicly available photos from NASA in the hopes of finding alien life or some evidence of suspicious government activity and quickly affirm the most bizarre theories inside their echo chamber of unreason and paranoia. Others are simply obsessed with the idea of finding alien life and will often convince themselves of its existence when there is no reason to think so.

A good example of this is the “Martian woman” story that popped up in 2015. People were sharing a photo taken by the Mars Curiosity rover that showed what some claimed to be an alien woman on Mars. As you might imagine, the photo was extremely unclear. Many people compared calling the image a person to seeing shapes in the clouds: the stirrings of imagination and nothing more. Others went so far as to claim that a rock in the picture might be the alien’s “house.”

CNET followed the story and could not get an explanation from NASA beyond their spokespeople saying it was likely people’s overactive imaginations. However, while they didn’t hear back from NASA, the folks at CNET did analyze the other photos from Mars Curiosity. They pointed out that, based on the rover’s scale, if the “woman” were an alien being, she would be an incredibly small fraction of our size.

5. The Real Men In Black May Be Our Government Messing With Us

While many suspect that the government is trying to hide the existence of alien life, some people think that it may actually be more complicated than that. According to them, there is evidence that former government agents have infiltrated UFO enthusiast circles and fed them fake information about UFOs, even going so far as to suggest that there was more government information to spill than there actually was.

Sometimes, these agents allegedly had full institutional help in order to fool gullible UFO enthusiasts. They even helped plant fake evidence to get people more riled up about the subject. This also gave the agents a way to monitor UFO groups to see if they were getting close to figuring out any of the actual military projects the government was working on, which was especially important at the time because they didn’t want the Russians to get wind of it.

This conspiracy theory suggests that the vast majority of alien lore is actually the government trying to intentionally confuse us in order to keep us and the Russians away from the truly important projects. This was also a great way for the government to explain away any strange things that happened due to experiments that didn’t go as planned.

4. Governments Are Aware Of More Than 80 Distinct Alien Species

Many theorists claim that governments around the world have already made contact with at least one alien species. Usually, the claims are that these aliens are benign and wish to help us or work with us in some way. There have also been stories about government officials coming out and saying there’s more going on than the public is being told. However, one particular story is unique in that its claims are far beyond the usual.

The theory goes that a high-up Canadian official confirmed that we contacted multiple alien species and worked with several different ones over the years. Where it gets even more insane is when the theorist claims that—thanks to information gleaned from government officials—we know there are at least 80 distinct, intelligent species of aliens.

Of course, the theory is somewhat hurt by the descriptions of these “alien” races. The vast majority of them look a lot like humans and read more like descriptions of different races in a video game than they do actual alien species. The more unique-looking ones are supposedly able to shift forms and move through different dimensions. For what it’s worth, the theorist emphasizes multiple times that he or she is “not just making this up.”

3. Venus Was Once Host To Earth-Like Life

Venus has long been known as Earth’s sister planet, despite the fact that Venus spins its own way in the universe and has an atmosphere that is incredibly toxic to those who live on our planet. The reason for the “sister” status is that scientists believe that Venus may have once been very much like Earth. It’s believed that Venus once had a lot more water on it and lost it over time. Some theories have suggested that Venus ended up with a runaway greenhouse gas effect on a level way worse than anything we are dealing with on Earth. Eventually, these greenhouse gases ended up causing Venus to lose its water and turned its atmosphere into something inhospitable to human life.

In recent years, studies have further confirmed this, suggesting that Venus was once a water-rich planet and may have been capable of supporting intelligent life of the human variety. This has led conspiracy theorists to wonder if perhaps Venus once was home to human-like species or if some Venusians managed to survive the cataclysm and evolve into a new breed of intelligent beings. The idea of intelligent life so close to Earth is very exciting to alien theorists.

2. Jesus Christ Was An Alien-Human Hybrid

For the longest time, most alien conspiracy theories focused on the time period between the Roswell incident and the present day. Recently, we have seen a rash of theories about alleged ancient alien visitors who came to our planet millennia ago and changed our culture and history forever. These theories tend to claim that if something done by ancient people can’t be explained with our knowledge of their technology, it was therefore done by alien visitors with technology far superior to ours. Many of these theorists believe that aliens lived among us through the early days of recorded history, and that some of them, or at least their hybrids, might still be alive today.

One of these theories suggests that Jesus Christ was actually an alien-human hybrid. The theorist points out that there are great similarities between the dream visits Mary receives and some of the strange stories you hear of people being abducted by aliens. They also suggest that the virgin birth was possible because the aliens artificially inseminated Mary during one of their abduction experiments.

The theorist goes on to point out all the important people in history who have similar origin stories of either a virgin birth or some kind of hybrid birth involving a so-called “god.” The suggestion is that many of our important figures were designed by aliens in order to influence the path of humanity. These figures would include the vast majority of early religious thinkers and philosophers.

1. Human DNA Has Been Irrevocably Tampered With And Altered By Past Alien Visitors

The same people who believe that ancient alien visitors are responsible for the pyramids, Jesus, the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, all of the Mayan ruins, the Easter Island heads, and anything else made by early man, are also convinced that humans themselves could not have achieved their place in the world without the help of ancient aliens. Essentially, such theorists have decided to replace the traditional God with a group of nebulous sentient beings with vague motivations and advanced technology that might as well be magic, as far as our understanding is concerned.

Many not only believe in alien-human hybrids but think that human DNA was at one point greatly altered by alien visitors, either to jump-start our evolution, make us into better worker drones for the aliens’ purposes, or just to experiment on us to see what would happen. Recently, conspiracy theorists went crazy at the news that human DNA appeared to have foreign DNA in it, which couldn’t have occurred through natural evolution.

The explanation from scientists is that the foreign DNA is from microorganisms that were present in the same environment as developing humans, but the theorists are convinced that it is the result of deliberate tampering by ancient alien visitors.

{ http://listverse.com/ }

Blue salt crystals on meteorites stoke conversation about extraterrestrial life

New Fast Radio Burst Detected: FRB 180301

Astronomers from the Breakthrough Listen initiative, the largest ever scientific research program aimed at finding evidence of alien civilizations, have detected a new ‘fast radio burst,’ an extremely powerful radio signal from a distant galaxy.

An artist’s impression of a fast radio burst reaching Earth.

Image credit: Jingchuan Yu / Beijing Planetarium.

Fast radio bursts (FRBs) are mysterious and rarely detected bursts of energy from space. Scientists estimate that there are between 2,000 and 10,000 FRBs occurring in the sky every day.

These events have durations of milliseconds and exhibit the characteristic dispersion sweep of radio pulsars. They emit as much energy in one millisecond as the Sun emits in 10,000 years, but the physical phenomenon that causes them is unknown.

Less than two dozen FRBs have been detected to date. Most give off only a single burst and do not flash repeatedly.

“While astronomers don’t know all that much about FRBs, we can infer some intriguing details about them,” said Breakthrough Listen project scientist Dr. Danny Price, an astronomer at the University of California at Berkeley.

“Firstly, they exhibit a tell-tale sweep in frequency that suggests they are incredibly far away: billions of light years. FRBs travel billions of years to get to us, and only last a few milliseconds, suggesting the emission mechanism is short-lived. For us to detect them clearly after such a long journey, they have also to be insanely bright.”

“What can produce such bursts? We don’t know yet, but leading theories involve neutron stars and cataclysmic events,” he said. “There’s also a neat theory that they are due to interstellar extraterrestrial travel. We’d love that to be the case, but have to rule out all plausible astrophysical theories first.”

“There is no known astronomical source that generates radio bursts at such a high brightness, which is tens of billions of times brighter than the known population of pulsars, for example,” said Breakthrough Listen and Harvard physicist Professor Avi Loeb.

Detection of FRB 180301 with the Breakthrough Listen backend instrument at CSIRO’s Parkes Radio Telescope: the top panel shows the de-dispersed pulse while the bottom panel shows the frequency structure with the pulse dispersed across 340 MHz of the observed band.

Image credit: Breakthrough Listen.

The Breakthrough Listen initiative is foremostly a search for technologically-capable life beyond Earth; however, a real-time search for FRBs runs in tandem.

The new burst, dubbed FRB 180301, was detected on March 1, 2018, at 7:34 a.m. UTC, during Breakthrough Listen observations with the 21-cm multibeam receiver of CSIRO’s Parkes Radio Telescope.

The receiver was centered on J2000 coordinates RA 06:12:43.4, DEC +04:33:44.8.

This is not the first time that the Breakthrough Listen researchers have picked up one of these mysterious and fleeting bursts — in August 2017 FRB 121102, the only FRB known to repeat, was caught in the act by the team using the Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia.

But the FRB180301 event is the first new FRB source that Breakthrough Listen has discovered.

“During our observations at the Parkes Radio Telescope on March 1, 2018, we detected a mysterious and fleeting phenomenon known as a FRB,” Dr. Price said.

“As we did when we caught the only FRB known to repeat, FRB 121102, in the act, we’ve written up initial details in an Astronomer’s Telegram to encourage follow-up observations with other facilities.”

{ http://www.sci-news.com/ }

Ancient civilisation used sound energy to 'LEVITATE and contact aliens' – shock claim

ARCHAEOLOGICAL findings suggest previous civilisations used circular structures as energy-generating devices to create man-made portals in time, according to boffins online

By Callum Hoare 

The research – which extended over a two-year period – suggested that human beings from thousands of years ago produced natural sound harmonic frequencies produced from the surface of the Earth.

In the clip, the narrator explains that the Sumerian civilisation may have inhabited parts of southern Africa thousands of years ago.

The Sumers are one of the earliest known civilisations known to walk the Earth.

They are said to date back to 3,000BC.

UFO MANIA - THE TRUTH IS OUT THERE

ALIEN CONTACT: Could previous civilisations spoken with extraterrestrial beings

The technology they apparently used is said to be similar to the way we use laser technology today.

Some of the frequencies recorded are believed to reach more than 380 gigahertz – much greater than any levels used today.

The discovery has left many confused as to what this previous society could possibly have done with the energy they created and whether they could have possibly known more about our planet than we do today.

The video was uploaded to YouTube channel UFOmania yesterday, and has already racked up more than 5000 hits.

And viewers suggested that previous societies have been in contact with extraterrestrial life.

One comment read: “Sound is one of the most abundant forms of free energy on the planet.

“It is the primordial source of all things and is the common denominator of all creation.

“With that being said, if an extraterrestrial race wanted to harvest energy from the planet, it could create such energy with sound.

“Sound was used as energy to levitate objects in order to create the monuments that opened vortices which allowed spacecraft to come and go."

And another added: “I always thought that many ancient rock carvings show a spiral, which could be some kind of sound wave.

“This is something they can only draw and couldn't put into words.

“Many petroglyphs around the world show a spiral of some kind I think it's some kind of sound energy that we cannot understand at this point in time.”

• Ancient ‘GATE TO HELL’ uncoveredand it can KILL anyone who gets too close
• Bloke finds mysterious cabin in the woods – what happens next will SHOCK you
• Israel orders rocket strike EVACUATION drills amid fears of WAR with Iran

{ https://www.dailystar.co.uk/ }

UFO Seen Heading Out To The Ocean Over Texas, March 7, 2018, UFO Sighting News.

Date of sighting: March 7, 2018
Location of sighting: Bangs, Texas, USA
Source: MUFON #90697

In Texas this week a glowing disk was seen appearing and disappearing over and over in the sky. You can see that this is not the sun, which is probably in the distance outside the range of the camera lens. This UFO is heading out over the ocean, which covers 75% of the earths surface. It must be heading to an underwater base. 
Scott C. Waring

Eyewitness states:

Teardrop/Meteor shape but hovering, slightly descending; appeared/disappeared materialized/dematerialized.

{ http://www.ufosightingsdaily.com/ }

White UFO Recorded Moving Near Chem Trail Raises Questions About Why? UFO Sighting News.

Date of sighting: 10-2-2017
Location of sighting: Killington, Vermont, USA
Source: MUFON #90707

UFOs are frequently seen near the chem trails of jets around the globe. They are sometimes seen flying in and out of the trail itself, taking samples, running statistics and analysis, to help predict future events. What global events? Aliens have AI which can make future predictions with a very low failure rate. These predictions could be anything from how far are we to the next level of aircraft, to how far we are from global extinction due to pollution. 
Scott C. Waring

Eyewitness states:

Planes were making chem-trails. I took some photos. I did not see the object until reviewing my photos 2 days later.

{ http://www.ufosightingsdaily.com/ }

An F/A-18 Hornet lands on the deck of the USS George H.W. Bush aircraft carrier in the Atlantic ocean on Oct. 25, 2017.

(Andrew Caballero-Reynolds/AFP/Getty Images)

{ https://www.theepochtimes.com/ }

Military encounter with UFO revealed in 2015 footage

'What the f*** is that'? UFO leaves US military jet pilot stunned in new footage

FASCINATING new declassified footage captures the moment a US Navy military jet pilot sees a UFO, leaving him speechless.

By Paul Harper 

A sensational two-minute clip documents the meeting off the East Coast three years ago.

US NAVY

ENCOUNTER: This UFO incident left the pilot of a US fighter jet speechless

At breakneck speed the UFO heads underneath the American fighter.

The video, released by the Stars Academy of Arts and Science, is now the third featuring unexplained incidents involving US military planes and UFO.

And it has led a former key official in the Bush and Clinton administrations to urge the US government to take action.

Writing in the Washington Post, Christopher Mellon said: “Is it possible that America has been technologically leap-frogged by Russia or China?

GETTY

US MILITARY: The strange encounter three years ago involved a US F18 fighter jet

“Or, as many people wondered after the videos were first published by the New York Times in December, might they be evidence of some alien civilisation?

“Unfortunately, we have no idea, because we aren’t even seeking answers.”

Footage emerged last year of a sighting involving jets from the battleship USS Nimitz in 2004 off the San Diego coast.

Both the Nimitz and F/18 strange encounters were believed to have been investigated as part of the Pentagon’s top-secret Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP).

“Might they be evidence of some alien civilisation? Unfortunately, we have no idea, because we aren’t even seeking answers.”

Ex Bush official Christopher Mellon

This groundbreaking programme, had a budget of £16.5million allocated to it annually by the Department of Defence.

Military intelligence officer Luis Elizondo, who ran AATIP, recently made astonishing claims about how investigators believed they had been to understand how the UFOs fly.

Working with expert scientists, they believe the craft can effectively create their own time-space bubble, which allows them to fly at such incredible speeds.

While the US government said AATIP was closed in 2012, Elizondo claimed he worked on the highly-sensitive project until October last year until he resigned over “excessive secrecy and internal opposition”.

• US government HIDING groundbreaking images of UFOs, ex-insider claims
• Alien tech REVEALED: US government insider explains how UFOs fly
• Top whistleblower says US has ‘tech to SHOOT down UFOs’

{ https://www.dailystar.co.uk/ }

Un OVNI sphérique repéré en orbite autour de la Lune (vidéo)

Il y a peu un OVNI rond et noir a été filmé alors qu’il passait à grande vitesse au-dessus de la surface de la Lune. Les images de cet objet extraordinaire ont été publiées sur YouTube.

Cette vidéo, qui a fait sensation, nous montre un engin non identifié se déplaçant très rapidement autour de la circonférence du seul satellite naturel de notre planète. Malgré le fait que la caméra zoome sur cet OVNI, il demeure impossible d’expliquer rationnellement son origine.

Au bout d’une poignée de secondes, il finit par disparaître sur le côté droit. Ces images ont été initialement mises en ligne sur la chaîne YouTube UFO Institute le 2 mars 2018.

Un description accompagne la vidéo : « Je filmais la pleine lune et j’ai capturé un disque sombre qui se dirigeait vers le sud en face de la lune. »

Et depuis qu’elle a été postée, elle a reçu beaucoup d’attention, puisqu’elle a été partagée sur divers autres canaux.

Un internaute avance : « Au début, je pensais que ça pouvait être quelque chose d’autre qui se trouvait dans l’atmosphère de la Terre, mais après avoir fait un zoom dessus, on pouvait vraiment voir qu’il semblait être en orbite autour de la Lune. »

Un autre a ajouta : « On dirait que cet (OVNI) va du côté obscur de la lune, est-ce le nôtre ou est-ce le leur ? »

Et un troisième a déclaré : « Super vidéo mon ami. Ils (les OVNIs) sont réels et ils sont là. »

Les observations d’OVNI font régulièrement la une de l’actualité ces derniers temps.

Source: Daily Star, le 9 mars 2018

Par Activité Paranormale

Dans le même registre:

1. Un Ovni doré MASSIF qui orbite la Terre. HD. Un Ovni d’un Kilomètre de long! 1er Août 2016 (vidéo)
2. Un Ovni géant au dessus de l’océan repéré dans une photo de la NASA (Vidéo)
3. Un Gigantesque OVNI apparaît durant la mise en orbite de la Tesla Roadster de SpaceX autour de la Terre le 6 février 2018 (vidéo)
4. Un Ovni géant a été repéré dans le ciel de Cleveland, 28 février 2018 (vidéo)
5. Un ovni en orbite près de l’ISS, 4 Mars 2015, (Vidéo de la NASA)

{ https://www.nouvelordremondial.cc/ }

Solar Storms Can Crash Communications, But 3D Models Aid Prediction

In a new U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) study, a scientific team used Earth data to calculate the voltages along power lines in the mid-Atlantic region of the U.S. They found that many of these measurements were significantly different from the results that the previous 1D model produced.

"Our study suggests that 3D data of the Earth should be used whenever they are available," Greg Lucas, research physicist at the USGS and lead author of the study, said in arecent statement about the new findings, which were published Feb. 26 in the journal Space Weather.

Using 3D modeling to gain a better understanding of the complex structures below the measurement sites, scientists can better determine which U.S. sites are most vulnerable to blackouts when powerful geomagnetic storms strike.

In their new study, the USGS looked at the geomagnetic storm event of March 1989 in which the Canadian city of Quebec suffered a blackout. By modeling this scenario in 3D, the USGS scientists found 62 vulnerable sites that the 1D model did not catch.

"This discrepancy between 1D- and 3D-based calculations of the 1989 storm demonstrates the importance of realistic data, rather than relying on previous 1D models, to determine the impact that a geomagnetic storm has on power grids," Lucas said in the statement.

The U.S. Geological Survey is a scientific agency in the Department of the Interior. It researches the environment to provide information about Earth, its processes and any potential hazards they present.

• Follow Doris Elin Salazar on Twitter @salazar_elin.
• Follow us@Spacedotcom, Facebook and Google+.
• Original article on Space.com .

{ https://www.space.com/ }

Peering deep into the core of the Crab Nebula, this close-up image reveals the beating heart of one of the most historic and intensively studied remnants of a supernova, an exploding star. Celestial bodies like supernovae helped Riess’s team of astronomers gauge distances to determine how quickly the universe is expanding.

Image via Space Telescope Science Institute.

By Donna Weaver and Ray Villard/Johns Hopkins

Here’s the good news: Astronomers have made the most precise measurement to date of the rate at which the universe is expanding since the Big Bang.

Here’s the possibly unsettling news: The new numbers remain at odds with independent measurements of the early universe’s expansion, which could mean that there is something unknown about the makeup of the universe.

Is something unpredicted going on in the depths of space?

Adam Riess is a Nobel Laureate and Bloomberg Distinguished Professor at Johns Hopkins University. He said:

The community is really grappling with understanding the meaning of this discrepancy.

Riess leads a team of researchers using the Hubble Space Telescope to measure the expansion rate of the universe. He shared a Nobel Prize in 2011 for the discovery of the accelerating universe.

The team, which includes researchers from Hopkins and the Space Telescope Science Institute, has used the Hubble Space Telescope over the past six years to refine the measurements of the distances to galaxies, using stars as milepost markers. Those measurements are used to calculate how fast the universe expands with time, a value known as the Hubble constant.

Image via NASA, ESA, A. Feild (STScI), and A. Riess (STScI/JHU).

Measurements made by the European Space Agency’s Planck satellite, which maps the cosmic microwave background, predicted that the Hubble constant value should now be 42 miles (67 km) per second per megaparsec (3.3 million light-years), and could be no higher than 43 miles (69 km) per second per megaparsec. This means that for every 3.3 million light-years farther away a galaxy is from us, it is moving 42 miles (67 km) per second faster. But Riess’s team measured a value of 45 miles (73 km) per second per megaparsec, indicating galaxies are moving at a faster rate than implied by observations of the early universe.

The Hubble data are so precise that astronomers cannot dismiss the gap between the two results as errors in any single measurement or method. Riess explained:

Both results have been tested multiple ways. Barring a series of unrelated mistakes, it is increasingly likely that this is not a bug but a feature of the universe.

Explaining a Vexing Discrepancy

Riess outlined a few possible explanations for the mismatch, all related to the 95 percent of the universe that is shrouded in darkness. One possibility is that dark energy, already known to be accelerating the cosmos, may be shoving galaxies away from each other with even greater – or growing – strength. This means that the acceleration itself might not have a constant value in the universe but changes over time.

Another idea is that the universe contains a new subatomic particle that travels close to the speed of light. Such speedy particles are collectively called “dark radiation” and include previously known particles like neutrinos, which are created in nuclear reactions and radioactive decays. Unlike a normal neutrino, which interacts by a subatomic force, this new particle would be affected only by gravity and is dubbed a “sterile neutrino.”

Yet another attractive possibility is that dark matter – an invisible form of matter not made up of protons, neutrons, and electrons – interacts more strongly with normal matter or radiation than previously assumed.

Any of these scenarios would change the contents of the early universe, leading to inconsistencies in theoretical models. These inconsistencies would result in an incorrect value for the Hubble constant, inferred from observations of the young cosmos. This value would then be at odds with the number derived from the Hubble observations.

Riess and his colleagues don’t have any answers yet to this vexing problem, but his team will continue to work on fine-tuning the universe’s expansion rate. So far the team, called the Supernova H0 for the Equation of State – nicknamed SH0ES – has decreased the uncertainty to 2.3 percent.

Building a Better Yardstick

The team has been successful in refining the Hubble constant value by streamlining and strengthening the construction of the cosmic distance ladder, a series of interlinked measuring techniques that allow astronomers to gauge distances across billions of light-years.

Astronomers can’t use a tape measure to gauge the distances between galaxies – instead, they use special classes of stars and supernovae as cosmic yardsticks or milepost markers to precisely measure galactic distances.

Among the most reliable used to measure shorter distances are Cepheid variables, which are pulsating stars that brighten and dim at specific rates. Some distant galaxies contain another reliable yardstick, exploding stars called Type Ia supernovae, which flare with uniform brightness and are brilliant enough to be seen from relatively farther away. Using a basic tool of geometry called parallax, which measures the apparent shift of an object’s position due to a change in an observer’s point of view, astronomers can measure the distances to these celestial bodies independent of their brightness.

Previous Hubble observations studied 10 faster-blinking Cepheids located 300 light-years to 1,600 light-years from Earth. The latest Hubble results are based on measurements of the parallax of eight newly analyzed Cepheids in our Milky Way galaxy located about 10 times farther away than any studied previously, residing between 6,000 light-years and 12,000 light-years from Earth.

To measure parallax with Hubble, Riess’s team had to gauge the apparent tiny wobble of the Cepheids due to Earth’s motion around the sun. These wobbles are the size of just 1/100 of a single pixel on the telescope’s camera, which is roughly the apparent size of a grain of sand seen 100 miles (160 km) away.

To ensure the accuracy of the measurements, the astronomers developed a clever method that was not envisioned when Hubble was launched in 1990. The researchers invented a scanning technique in which the telescope measured a star’s position a thousand times a minute every six months for four years. The telescope slowly slews across a stellar target and captures the image as a streak of light. Riess said:

This method allows for repeated opportunities to measure the extremely tiny displacements due to parallax. You’re measuring the separation between two stars, not just in one place on the camera, but over and over thousands of times, reducing the errors in measurement.

Riess’s team compared the distances of galaxies in relation to Earth with the expansion of space measured by the stretching of light from receding galaxies, using the apparent outward velocity of galaxies at each distance to calculate the Hubble constant. Their goal is to further reduce the uncertainty by using data from Hubble and the European Space Agency’s Gaia space observatory, which will measure the positions and distances of stars with unprecedented precision.

Bottom line: Scientists measuring the universe’s rate of expansion say their new numbers remain at odds with independent measurements of the early universe’s expansion, which could mean that there is something unknown about the makeup of the universe.

{ http://earthsky.org/ }

4 surprising things we just learned about Jupiter

Latest Juno spacecraft results fill in details about Jupiter’s interior and polar storms

BY CHRISTOPHER CROCKETT 

 

STORMY SKIES  A quintet of cyclones encircles a sixth cyclone at Jupiter’s south pole in this mosaic of infrared images from the Juno spacecraft. Color represents heat coming from below: Yellow is where clouds are thin; red is where they are thick.

JPL-CALTECH/NASA, SWRI, ASI, INAF, IAPS

Bit by bit, Jupiter is revealing its deepest, darkest secrets.

The latest findings are in from the Juno spacecraft. And they unveil the roots of the planet’s storms, what lies beneath the opaque atmosphere and a striking geometric layout of cyclones parked around the gas giant’s north and south poles.

“We’re at the beginning of dissecting Jupiter,” says Juno mission leader Scott Bolton of the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio. And the picture that’s emerging — still just a sketch — topples many preconceived notions. The results appear in four papers in the March 8 Nature.

Juno has been orbiting Jupiter since July 4, 2016, on a mission to map the planet’s interior (SN: 6/25/16, p. 16). The probe loops around once every 53 days, traveling on an elongated orbit that takes the spacecraft from pole to pole and as close as about 4,000 kilometers above the cloud tops.

As it plows through Jupiter’s gravity field, Juno speeds up and slows down in response to shifting masses inside the planet. By measuring these minute accelerations and decelerations, scientists can calculate subtle variations in Jupiter’s gravity and deduce how its mass is distributed. That lets researchers build up a three-dimensional map of the planet’s internal structure. At the same time, Juno snaps pictures in visible and infrared light. While other probes have extensively photographed much of the planet, Juno is the first to get an intimate look at the north and south poles.

“The whole thing is really intriguing, especially when you compare [Jupiter] to other giant planets,” says Imke de Pater, a planetary scientist at the University of California, Berkeley. “They are all unique, it looks like.”

Check out these four surprising new things we’ve learned that make Jupiter one of a kind:

1. Rings of cyclones

Parked at each pole is a cyclone several thousand kilometers wide. That part isn’t surprising. But each of those cyclones is encircled by a polygonal arrangement of similarly sized storms — eight in the north and five in the south. The patterns have persisted throughout Juno’s visit.

“We don’t really understand why that would happen, and why they would collect up there in such a geometric fashion,” Bolton says. “That's pretty amazing that nature is capable of something like that.”

Eyes of the storms

This highest-resolution-yet view of the south pole reveals temperature variation as well as intricate eddies and turbulence around the main cyclones. 

A. ADRIANI ET AL/NATURE 2018

2. More than skin deep

Researchers have long debated whether the photogenic bands of clouds that wrap around Jupiter have deep roots or just skim the top of the atmosphere. Juno’s new look shows that the bands penetrate roughly 3,000 kilometers below the cloud tops. That’s 30 times as thick as the bulk of Earth’s atmosphere. While just a tiny fraction of Jupiter’s diameter, that’s deeper than previously thought, Bolton says.

3. Weighty weather

Within those 3,000 kilometers lies what passes for an atmosphere on Jupiter. It’s the stage on which Jupiter’s turbulent weather plays out. The atmosphere alone is about three times as massive as our planet, or 1 percent of Jupiter’s entire mass, researchers estimate.

4. Stuck together

Below the atmosphere, Jupiter is fluid. But unlike most fluids, the planet rotates as if it’s a solid mass. Like kids playing crack-the-whip, atoms of hydrogen and helium figuratively link arms and spin around the planet in unison, scientists report. Earlier results from Juno also indicate there’s no solid core lurking beneath this fluid (SN: 6/24/17, p. 14), so anyone dropped into the planet can expect a terribly long fall.

Many of these results are preliminary, and it’s unclear what it all means for how Jupiter operates. But what’s been learned so far, Bolton says, “is quite different than anybody anticipated.”

Citations

• A. Adriani et al. Clusters of cyclones encircling Jupiter’s poles. Nature. Vol. 555, March 8, 2018, p. 216. doi:10.1038/nature25491.
• T. Guillot et al. A suppression of differential rotation in Jupiter’s deep interior. Nature. Vol. 555, March 8, 2018, p. 227. doi:10.1038/nature25775 .
• L. Iess et al. Measurement of Jupiter’s asymmetric gravity field. Nature. Vol. 555, March 8, 2018, p. 220. doi:10.1038/nature25776.
• Y. Kaspi et al. Jupiter’s atmospheric jet streams extend thousands of kilometres deep. Nature. Vol. 555, March 8, 2018, p. 223. doi:10.1038/nature25793.

Further Reading

• L. Grossman. Jupiter’s massive Great Red Spot is at least 350 kilometers deep. Science News. Vol. 193, January 20, 2018, p. 7.
• A. Yeager. Juno spacecraft reveals a more complex Jupiter. Science News. Vol. 191, June 24, 2017, p. 14.
• C. Crockett. Juno is closing in on Jupiter. Science News. Vol. 189, June 25, 2016, p. 16.

{ https://www.sciencenews.org/ }

Massive stellar flare may have fried Earth’s nearest exoplanet

The radiation explosion from Proxima Centauri has scorched hopes for habitability nearby

BY LISA GROSSMAN 

TEMPER TANTRUM  Proxima Centauri released a gigantic flare on March 24, 2017, fizzling hopes that this nearby star’s Earth-mass planet is habitable.

ROBERTO MOLAR CANDANOSA/CARNEGIE INSTITUTION FOR SCIENCE, SDO/NASA, JPL/NASA

Proxima Centauri has a temper. Earth’s nearest planet-hosting neighbor released a gigantic flare in March 2017, a new analysis of observations of the star shows. And that’s bad news for the potential for life on the star’s planet, Proxima b.

The star got 1,000 times brighter over 10 seconds before dimming again. That can best be explained by an enormous stellar flare, astronomer Meredith MacGregor of the Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington, D.C., and colleagues report February 26 in Astrophysical JournalLetters.

Because Proxima b is so much closer to its star than Earth is to the sun, the flare would have blasted Proxima b with 4,000 times more radiation than Earth typically gets from the sun’s flares. “If there are flares like this at all frequently, then [the exoplanet] is likely not in the best shape,” MacGregor says.

Proxima b was one of the most sought-after sites for finding life outside the solar system. Just four light-years away, it has a mass about the same as Earth’s and probably has temperatures suitable for liquid water (SN: 12/24/16, p. 20). But its star is an M dwarf, a class of small dim stars notoriously prone to flaresthat could rip away their planets’ atmospheres (SN: 6/24/17, p. 18).

Peak energy

Proxima Centauri became 1,000 times brighter and then dimmed again over about two minutes (red lines). The black line refers to normal emission from the star, and the yellow and blue lines are smaller flares.

M. MACGREGOR

MacGregor and her colleagues reanalyzed data from a recent study led by astronomer Guillem Anglada of the Institute of Astrophysics of Andalusia in Granada, Spain. Anglada and his colleagues had observed Proxima Centauri with the Atacama Large Millimeter Array telescopes in Chile. The team saw extra light that it interpreted as a ring of dust analogous to the solar system’s Kuiper Belt, scattering the light in all directions, the team reported November 15  in Astrophysical Journal Letters.

But Anglada and his colleagues had averaged the amount of light over 10 hours of observations. That smeared out any short-term changes in the star’s brightness — such as a bright flare.

When MacGregor’s team reanalyzed the data, they found that all the excess light came from the same two-minute period on March 24. A massive flare explains all the extra light, she says — none of it was masquerading as a glittering dust ring.

Anglada says he and his colleagues are aware of the March 24 flare and are currently revising their original claim. But he says the flare can’t account for all the extra light, so the dust ring theory might still survive.

Citations

• M. MacGregor et al. Detection of a millimeter flare from Proxima Centauri. Astrophysical Journal Letters. Published February 26, 2018.
• G. Anglada et al. ALMA discovery of dust belts around Proxima Centauri. Astrophysical Journal Letters. Published November 15, 2017.

Further Reading

• C. Crockett. Year in review: A planet lurks around the star next door. Science News. Vol. 190, December 24, 2016, p. 20.
• C. Crockett. Life might have a shot on planets orbiting dim red dwarfs. Science News. Vol. 191, June 24, 2017, p. 18.

{ https://www.sciencenews.org/ }

Mogen we enkele verzegelde maanstalen openen?

Tussen 1969 en 1972 brachten de astronauten van de zes Apollomissies in totaal negen verzegelde pakketten met materiaal van het maanoppervlak mee terug naar de aarde. De verzameling maanstenen, sedimentkernen, keien, zand en stof is goed voor 2.200 individuele bodemstalen.

Twee van de grotere verpakkingen bevatten materiaal dat verzameld is tijdens de maanwandeling van de Apollo 17-missie in december 1972. Drie verzegelde pakketten van Apollo 15, 16 en 17 blijven tot op vandaag ongeopend. Volgens verschillende vooraanstaande maanwetenschappers is het nu tijd om daar misschien toch eentje van open te maken.

Apollo 12-astronaut Alan Bean houdt een container met een grondstaal van de maanbodem in de hand. (Foto: NASA)

Nog steeds waardevol

De bodemstalen worden onder specifieke omstandigheden beschermd, bewaard en onderzocht in het Lunar Sample Laboratory Facility, een speciaal gebouw in NASA’s Johnson Space Center (JSC) in Houston. En de monsters blijven tot op vandaag waardevol voor wetenschappelijk onderzoek: aan de hand van nauwkeurige analyses met een massaspectrometer (die zoekt naar zeer kleine hoeveelheden isotopen, moleculen en molecuulcomplexen) hebben wetenschappers bijvoorbeeld water gedetecteerd in basaltglas dat de Apollo 15 en 17 naar de aarde hadden meegebracht. Dat betekent dat er water in de ondergrond van de maan zit.

Nauwgezet plannen

“De stalen werden indertijd bewaard voor de toekomst, in afwachting tot de technologie en instrumenten verder geëvolueerd zouden zijn. We wilden immers de best mogelijke onderzoeksresultaten verkrijgen”, zegt Ryan Zeigler van NASA. Hij beheert de Apollostalen en is de manager van het Astromaterials Acquisition and Curation Office (Bureau voor de Verwerving en het Beheer van Ruimtemateriaal) in Houston.

Volgens Zeigler kan enkel een groep experts dergelijke onderzoeken met de nodige nauwkeurigheid plannen en uitvoeren. Zij hebben immers ervaring met het hanteren en analyseren van maanstalen. “Tegenwoordig is er een toegenomen interesse in de maan, en meer specifiek in de vluchtige stoffen (substanties met relatief lage kooktemperaturen – zoals water, zuurstof en methaan) die zich in het oppervlaktemateriaal bevinden. Bovendien bevatten de ongeopende stalen waarschijnlijk belangrijke informatie voor het plannen van toekomstige maanmissies.” Volgens verschillende wetenschappers zou de productiviteit en de waarde van het onderzoek verbeteren naarmate we meer kennis over de vluchtige stoffen van de maan opdoen.

Nieuwe inzichten

Zeigler is niet de enige onderzoeker die graag enkele van de overblijvende Apollostalen zou willen openen. Twee andere experts, namelijk Charles Shearer1 en Clive Neal2 zijn het met hem eens. Samen zullen ze hun standpunt verdedigen op de 49^e Lunar and Planetary Science Conference (Conferentie voor de Lunaire en Planetaire Wetenschap), die later in maart zal plaatsvinden. “Ten eerste zullen die ongeopende stalen ons nieuwe wetenschappelijke inzichten verschaffen. Ten tweede zullen we met behulp van die inzichten een werkwijze kunnen bedenken om nieuwe stalen van vluchtige stoffen te verzamelen op de maan, om ze dan vervolgens mee te nemen naar de aarde en te analyseren”, zei Neal tegen Space.com.

Digitaal themanummer

Albert Einstein

Honderd jaar geleden publiceerde Albert Einstein zijn algemene relativiteitstheorie. De bewijzen voor die theorie hebben zich de afgelopen eeuw opgestapeld. Van zonsverduisteringen tot vliegende atoomklokken, wetenschappers grepen alles aan om Einsteins theorie te ontkrachten. Zonder succes.

Niet geopend of bestudeerd

De reeks ongeopende stalen van de Apollomissies bevat maanmateriaal dat nog nooit onderzocht is. Bovendien zijn de pakketten groter dan wat toekomstige robotmissies zullen meebrengen van de maan. Experts noemen de Apollo 17-stalen zelfs “ongeopende schatkisten”. De astronauten van die missie, Harrison “Jack” Schmitt en Eugene Cernan, konden namelijk langer op de maan blijven en zich er beter voortbewegen omdat ze een maanrover hadden, waarmee ze in totaal 36,9 kilometer hebben afgelegd. Dankzij het voertuig heeft het duo een groot gebied in de Taurus-Littrowvallei kunnen bestrijken en er 110,5 kg aan verschillende soorten stalen kunnen verzamelen. Dat is ongeveer 30 procent van de totale hoeveelheid onderzoeksmateriaal, namelijk 381 kg, die het Apolloprogramma over de jaren vergaard heeft.

De kwaliteit van de verpakking

Er zit echter een addertje onder het gras. De ongeopende pakketten lijken langs de buitenkant wel luchtdicht te zijn, maar het is niet zeker of ze nog steeds zo luchtledig zijn als de atmosfeer op de maan. Toch denkt men dat ze op een degelijke manier afgesloten zijn en dat de inhoud nooit met de aardse atmosfeer in contact gekomen is. Daarom zijn de verpakkingen gebruikt tijdens het Apolloprogramma een verdienstelijke poging om zo veel mogelijk eigenschappen van de maanbodem te bewaren. Sterker nog: ze zullen ook tijdens toekomstige missies gebruikt worden, door mensen en misschien zelfs door robots.

Zeigler en zijn collega’s geloven dat de technologie in de toekomst zal blijven verbeteren en dat de bijkomende waarnemingen en gegevens de wetenschappelijke doelen zullen verleggen. “Daarom willen we graag één enkel monster openen en de twee overige bewaren voor toekomstige generaties maanwetenschappers”, schrijven Shearer, Neal en Zeigler in hun paper die ze tijdens de aankomende conferentie willen voorstellen.

Niet alleen een wetenschappelijke, maar ook een persoonlijke zaak

Er is het afgelopen decennium al veel nagedacht over waarom en hoe we de ongeopende maanstalen zouden moeten onderzoeken. Dat zegt Carlton Allen, voormalige beheerder van ruimtemateriaal bij JSC. Ook hij ondersteunt het idee om de Apollostalen te openen, en wel om de volgende redenen: ten eerste is de technologie nu zo ver gevorderd dat we de inhoud van afgesloten pakketten kunnen onderzoeken zonder ze te openen. En als we ze dan toch willen openen, bestaan er technieken om het risico op aantasting door de aardse atmosfeer te minimaliseren. Ten tweede kunnen we met gespecialiseerde instrumenten microanalyses uitvoeren. Zo kunnen we spoorgassen en vluchtige stoffen, zoals het waterspoor in basaltglas, heel nauwkeurig onderzoeken. Ten derde zitten er nog veel gaten in onze kennis over de maan. We weten bijvoorbeeld nog lang niet alles over het bestaan en de geschiedenis van water en ijs onder het maanoppervlak.

Ten slotte is het volgens Allen ook een persoonlijke zaak. “Sommige astronauten die de stalen verzameld hebben, technici die de sedimentkernen geopend hebben en wetenschappers die de stalen destijds onderzocht hebben, zijn nog steeds professioneel actief bij ons. Het belang van die onvervangbare menselijke kennis mogen we niet over het hoofd zien.”

Referenties

{ https://www.eoswetenschap.eu/ }

My Alien & UFO Existential Crisis

I’m not kidding that a few years ago, I wholeheartedly believed aliens were visiting our planet. I believed that religions all bore a resemblance to each other because of aliens having visited the earth in ancient times. I even witnessed a UFO myself. But nowadays, I’m having a crisis. You see, I no longer believe that UFOs are alien-controlled ships. I no longer believe that we’ve been visited. I don’t believe those alien abductions are real. And I don’t believe aliens guided our ancestors in ancient times. So what the hell happened?

Photo by Sidney Perry on Unsplash

Science & Critical Thinking

First of all, I’m a science guy. I have a degree in engineering and I do IT work as a full-time career. As a result, my education and work experience have taught me the rules of critical thinking. They’ve taught me about drawing conclusions from evidence. They’ve also taught me the dangers of searching for evidence solely to support an existing conclusion. After writing about UFO encounters and researching alternative explanations for the past couple years, very rarely does something come up that isn’t explainable.

I’m not a closed-minded person, in fact, I’m open to the idea that we’re being visited. Unfortunately, a glowing ball in the sky that you can’t identify just isn’t enough to convince me. Alien abduction stories that are clearly cases of sleep paralysis simply don’t convince me. And the History Channel show Ancient Aliens definitely can’t convince me.

Witnesses Too Eager to Believe

The desire to believe is one thing consistent in all of my research on UFO sightings. This desire creates a bias in the witness that’s undeniable. I’ve seen witnesses who quickly come to a conclusion simply based on their existing beliefs.

When a vibrant and beautiful aurora borealis appeared over Siberia, one witness stated, “It’s a gap in the space-time continuum”. This witness didn’t take any measurements. He didn’t measure any gravitational changes. He didn’t check his watch speed to see if it changed. All he did was look up in the sky. He literally just made it up because he believed those things happen. His quote appeared in the Daily Mail which contained many such quotes from locals who observed this totally natural phenomenon.

A deliberate hoax perpetrated on YouTube

Lots of Deliberate Hoaxes

The fact is I’ve found a ton of deliberate hoaxes when it comes to UFOs & aliens. While I love and appreciate a good mystery, deliberate hoaxes are the worst. Some of the best footage of aliens and UFOs has turned out to be fake. Remember the alien autopsy? Fake. The Adamski videos? Fake. Crop Circles? Fake.

I totally understand that the existence of hoaxes doesn’t mean there are no real mysteries out there. But their existence and predominance should make anyone take pause before assuming they’re reporting and sharing a real encounter.

The X-Files - I Want To Believe TV Poster Print

By BananaRoad

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UFO Community Not Policing Itself

This is a topic that’s always infuriated me. UFOlogists and researchers regularly share and propagate known hoaxes because they haven’t done their due diligence. It’s the single greatest detriment to the ‘science’ of UFOlogy. What’s worse is they aren’t even likely to call out others who do it either.

I’ve written about the issues with credibility in the UFO community before. I was attacked on social media and banned from certain UFOlogy groups on Facebook as a result. Yet, all I did was present facts. Real facts.

Wrapping it Up

The echo chambers created by the UFO community have made it very difficult to discern the truth from fantasy. If you don’t go along with the status quo, you will likely be ostracised. Consequently, I find myself much more critical of reports. My threshold for proof has become very high. But at the end of that day, when you want to talk about something as extraordinary as alien visitation, shouldn’t the standard for proof be very high? We are, after all, talking about our fate as a species.

So, can you convince me? I want your stories, your evidence, and your experiences.

---

Featured Image Credit | Photo by Greg Rakozy on Unsplash

{ https://alienufoblog.com/category/ufo-sightings/ }

You Know That Aliens are in Control, According to Physicist

You know that Aliens are in control, we can hear their voices according to most of the popular and authetic physicists. One of the world’s most respected theoretical physicists Michio Kaku has predicted that humans will make contact with an alien civilisation within this century. While he doesn’t know if we’ll be able to talk back to them by then, Kaku thinks that humans will detect aliens before 2100 by listening in to their radio communications.

He gave the prediction on reddit last week during an Ask Me Anything (AMA) question-and-answer session. “Dr Kaku, if we make contact with alien civilizations, then what? And how will we talk to them?” asked redditor MalachiNorris.

Kaku responded: “Let me stick my neck out. I personally feel that within this century, we will make contact with an alien civilization, by listening in on their radio communications. But talking to them will be difficult, since they could be tens of light years away. So, in the meantime, we must decipher their language to understand their level of technology. Are they Type I, II, or III??? And what are their intentions. Are they expansive and aggressive, or peaceful.”

The “types” of civilisations he’s referring to represent the three categories in the Kardashev scale – a scale that measures a civilisation’s technological advancement based on the amount of energy they are able to use for communication. For reference, humans aren’t quite a Type I civilisation as yet, as that would require learning to harvest every ounce of energy from their home planet, including all solar, thermal, oceanic energy, and more.

As Kaku added to his response: “Another possibility is that they land on the White House lawn and announce their existence. But I think that is unlikely, since we would be like forest animals to them, i.e. not worth communicating with.”

Ooh, burn.

Kaku’s not the first scientist to suggest we’re not far off making contact with extraterrestrial life.

Seth Shostak, a senior astronomer with the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI) Institute has placed a wager we’ll find signs of alien life within just 20 years. Even Stephen Hawking recently said he’s “more convinced than ever that we are not alone” and warned humanity to stop reaching out to aliens before it’s too late.

Hawking is involved in the Breakthrough Listen project, which will scan planets around the nearest million stars for signs of life within radio signals – including Earth-like planet Gliese 832c. “One day we might receive a signal from a planet like Gliese 832c, but we should be wary of answering back,” said Hawking.

Shostak, Hawking, and Kaku are all predicting that alien contact will come through radio waves, a narrow frequency band of electromagnetic waves that are often used for long-distance communication. Scientists are so focussed on this small part of the electromagnetic spectrum because it stands out from the naturally occurring background noise in the Universe, which typically extends across a much wider frequency range.

Radio telescopes around the world are constantly scanning the Universe for any signs of life, and although we’ve had some close calls, we haven’t seen anything as yet to suggest aliens are out there. But according to the Drake equation, based on the sheer number of stars out there, it’s highly unlikely that we’re the only life in the Universe.

Alternatively, another alien civilisation might end up detecting our radio wave communications first. If that’s the case, let’s just hope they’re friendly.

{ https://thesciencealert.com/category/science/ }

{ https://futurism.com/ }

By Christopher Mellon 

Christopher Mellon served as deputy assistant secretary of defense for intelligence in the Clinton and George W. Bush administrations. He is a private equity investor and an adviser to the To the Stars Academy for Arts and Science.

US Government releases footage of Super fast UFO captured by Navy Jet

In December, the Defense Department declassified two videos documenting encounters between U.S. Navy F-18 fighters and unidentified aircraft. The first video captures multiple pilots observing and discussing a strange, hovering, egg-shaped craft, apparently one of a “fleet” of such objects, according to cockpit audio. The second shows a similar incident involving an F-18 attached to the USS Nimitz carrier battle group in 2004.  

The videos, along with observations by pilots and radar operators, appear to provide evidence of the existence of aircraft far superior to anything possessed by the United States or its allies. Defense Department officials who analyze the relevant intelligence confirm more than a dozen such incidents off the East Coast alone since 2015. In another recent case, the Air Force launched F-15 fighters last October in a failed attempt to intercept an unidentified high-speed aircraft looping over the Pacific Northwest .

A third declassified video, released by To the Stars Academy of Arts and Science , a privately owned media and scientific research company to which I’m an adviser, reveals a previously undisclosed Navy encounter that occurred off the East Coast in 2015.

Watch: Military jet video tracks high-speed UFO

(To the Stars Academy of Arts & Science)

Is it possible that America has been technologically leap-frogged by Russia or China? Or, as many people wondered after the videos were first published by the New York Times in December, might they be evidence of some alien civilization? 

Unfortunately, we have no idea, because we aren’t even seeking answers.

I served as deputy assistant secretary of defense for intelligence for the Clinton and George W. Bush administrations and as staff director for the Senate Intelligence Committee, and I know from numerous discussions with Pentagon officials over the past two years that military departments and agencies treat such incidents as isolated events rather than as part of a pattern requiring serious attention and investigation. A colleague of mine at To the Stars Academy, Luis Elizondo, used to run a Pentagon intelligence program that examined evidence of “anomalous” aircraft, but he resigned last fall to protest government inattention to the growing body of empirical data. 

Meanwhile, reports from different services and agencies remain largely ignored and unevaluated inside their respective bureaucratic stovepipes. There is no Pentagon process for synthesizing all the observations the military is making. The current approach is equivalent to having the Army conduct a submarine search without the Navy. It is also reminiscent of the counterterrorism efforts of the CIA and the FBI before Sept. 11, 2001, when each had information on the hijackers that they kept to themselves. In this instance, the truth may ultimately prove benign, but why leave it to chance? 

(A Pentagon spokesman did not respond to requests from The Washington Post for comment, but in December, the military confirmed the existence of a program to investigate UFOs and said it had stopped funding the research in 2012.)

The military personnel who are encountering these phenomena tell remarkable stories. In one example, over the course of two weeks in November 2004, the USS Princeton, a guided-missile cruiser operating advanced naval radar, repeatedly detected unidentified aircraft operating in and around the Nimitz carrier battle group, which it was guarding off the coast of San Diego. In some cases, according to incident reports and interviews with military personnel, these vehicles descended from altitudes higher than 60,000 feet at supersonic speeds, only to suddenly stop and hover as low as 50 feet above the ocean. The United States possesses nothing capable of such feats.

On at least two occasions, F-18 fighters were guided to intercept these vehicles and were able to verify their location, appearance and performance. Notably, these encounters occurred in broad daylight and were independently monitored by radars aboard multiple ships and aircraft. According to naval aviators I have spoken with at length, the vehicles were roughly 45 feet long and white. Yet these mysterious aircraft easily sped away from and outmaneuvered America’s front-line fighters without a discernible means of propulsion. 

From my work with To the Stars Academy, which seeks to raise private funds to investigate incidents like the 2004 Nimitz encounter, I know they continue to occur, because we are being approached by military personnel who are concerned about national security and frustrated by how the Defense Department is handling such reports. I am also familiar with the evidence as a former Pentagon intelligence official and a consultant who began researching the issue after the Nimitz incident was brought to my attention. On several occasions, I have met with senior Pentagon officials, and at least one followed up and obtained briefings confirming incidents such as the Nimitz case. But nobody wants to be “the alien guy” in the national security bureaucracy; nobody wants to be ridiculed or sidelined for drawing attention to the issue. This is true up and down the chain of command, and it is a serious and recurring impediment to progress. 

If the origin of these aircraft is a mystery, so is the paralysis of the U.S. government in the face of such evidence. Sixty years ago, when the Soviet Union put the first manmade satellite in orbit, Americans recoiled at the idea of being technologically surpassed by a dangerous rival, and the furor over Sputnik ultimately produced the space race. Americans responded vigorously, and a little more than a decade later, Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon. If these craft mean that Russia, China or some other nation is concealing an astonishing technological breakthrough to quietly extend its lead, surely we should respond as we did then. Perhaps Russian President Vladi­mir Putin’s recent chest-thumping claims about propulsion breakthroughs are not pure braggadocio. Or, if these craft really aren’t from Earth, then the need to figure out what they are is even more urgent.

Lately, media coverage of the issue of unidentified aerial vehicles has focused on an expired $22 million congressional earmark for Bigelow Aerospace, a contractor with ties to former Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid (Nev.). The money mostly funded research and analysis by that contractor, without participation from the Air Force, NORAD or other key military organizations. The real issue, though, is not a long-gone earmark, helpful though it may have been, but numerous recent incidents involving the military and violations of U.S. airspace. It is time to set aside taboos regarding “UFOs” and instead listen to our pilots and radar operators. 

Within a roughly $50 billion annual intelligence budget, money is not the issue. Existing funds would easily cover what’s needed to look into the incidents. What we lack above all is recognition that this issue warrants a serious collection and analysis effort. To make headway, the task needs to be assigned to an official with the clout to compel collaboration among disparate and often quarrelsome national security bureaucracies. A truly serious effort would involve, among other things, analysts able to review infrared satellite data, NORAD radar databases, and signals and human intelligence reporting. Congress should require an all-source study by the secretary of defense while promoting research into new forms of propulsion that might explain how these vehicles achieve such extraordinary power and maneuverability.

As with Sputnik, the national security implications of these incidents are concerning — but the scientific opportunities are thrilling. Who knows what perils we may avoid or opportunities we might identify if we follow the data? We cannot afford to avert our eyes, given the risk of strategic surprise. The future belongs to not only the physically brave but also the intellectually agile.

Read more from Outlook and follow our updates on Facebook and Twitter. 

{ https://www.washingtonpost.com/ }

On February 28 of this year, the FBI posted to its website, The Vault, its now-declassified file on Stanley Kubrick. He was the director of numerous movies, including 2001: A Space Odyssey, Dr. Strangelove, A Clockwork Orange, and Eyes Wide Shut. The file only amounts to four pages, so there isn’t that much said about him. We are told, however, that “…Kubrick was an old chess-playing friend of [Deleted] who has been the subject of a security-type investigation conducted by this Bureau. [Deleted] reportedly had a large circle of communist associates.”

What’s more intriguing, though, are the references in the file to a controversial movie of 1964, Seven Days in May. It’s an absorbing, thought-provoking story that tells of an attempted military coup to take control of the U.S. Government. The authors of the novel that the movie was based on were Charles W. Bailey II (who died in 2012 at the age of eighty-two) and Fletcher Knebel who, in 1960, wrote a chapter on JFK for a book titled Candidate 1960.

Seven Days in May starred a number of major movie-stars of that era, including Kirk Douglas, Ava Gardner, Burt Lancaster, Fredric March, Martin Balsam, and Edmond O’Brien. In the story, Lancaster’s character of General James Mattoon Scott secretly initiates a plan to take over the elected U.S. Government (run by President Jordan Lyman and played by March). General Scott sees President Lyman’s plans to enter into a nuclear treaty with the Soviet Union as weak and ineffectual and a danger to U.S. national security and to the American people. The battle is then on, with General Scott trying to ensure the coup succeeds and President Lyman doing his utmost to stop it. But, why is Seven Days in May referenced in the Kubrick file? Let’s see.

On March 20, 1964, the FBI recorded the following in a Confidential-level memo: “Admiral [Arleigh A.] Burke, U.S. Navy (Ret.), good friend of Bureau, has contacted Assistant Director Sullivan to state that movie ‘Seven Days in May,’ which tells of abortive plot of military clique to seize control of U.S. Government. Burke is in receipt of letters concerning recent attacks on military. One letter alleges communist connections of movie’s cast, namely, Fredric March, Burt Lancaster [deleted] and Ava Gardner.”

The document continues: “Another letter cites two new books, ‘The Passion of the Hawks,’ by Tristram Coffin, and ‘The Military Establishment,’ by John Swomley, and another new movie, ‘Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb,’ produced by Stanley Kubrick, all of which derogate military.” That’s how Seven Days in May came to be referenced in the Kubrick file. And, although there is little more on Kubrick, there is certainly more on Seven Days in May.

The FBI’s memo continues: “Fletcher Knebel, one of co-authors of ‘Seven Days of May,’ criticized Director in ‘Look’ magazine in 1955. Fredrick March and wife were subjects of closed security cases alleging them to have been Communist Party members and active in communist fronts in past…Burke stated that he had seen the film, which portrays every military and civilian leader in it as a man of great weakness, and he feels that the picture is detrimental to the Nation. His appraisal of the picture has appeared in the press, and, as a result, he said, he has received several letters.” The document also refers to one of Admiral Burke’s correspondents as stating that Burt Lancaster was a “zealous Moscow stalwart.”

The FBI concluded with these words: “It is entirely understandable why a military leader of Admiral Burke’s stature would find the theme of ‘Seven Days in May’ — even though it is pure fiction — offensive because it does tarnish the image of the American military.”

In some ways, at least, this kind of reminds me of how the military wasn’t too happy when Area 51 was portrayed in 1996’s Independence Day. This new file provides some interesting insight into the connection between Hollywood and government agencies.

{ http://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }

“What the f— is that thing?”

That’s not something you’d expect to hear a highly-trained Navy pilot say.

“Oh my gosh dude!”

That doesn’t quite sound like the vernacular of another military officer responding as he viewed what the pilot saw. Yet both of those quotes come from a newly-released Pentagon video of an encounter in 2015 between a US Navy F/A 18 jet and an unidentified flying object off the east coast of the U.S. What’s even more shocking is that the video was not released by the Pentagon but in an opinion piece in the Washington Post by a member of Tom DeLonge’s To the Stars Academy.

“Oh my gosh dude!”

That’s the edited-for-family-publications reaction by almost everyone after reading the op-ed written by Christopher Mellon, a well-heeled (member of the Mellon family of Gulf Oil and Mellon Bank fame), former U.S. Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Intelligence and of the Security and Information Operations. Mellon wrote the opinion and exposed the video (see the video here) as an advisor to the To the Stars media company chartered in part to pressure governments to release what secret information they allegedly have on UFO and extraterrestrial encounters.

“If the origin of these aircraft is a mystery, so is the paralysis of the U.S. government in the face of such evidence.”

The purpose of Mellon’s essay is not just to expose the video but to shame the Pentagon and the U.S. government for not even investigating this and “more than a dozen such incidents off the East Coast alone since 2015.” Mellon laments that these incidents could be encounters with military aircraft (Russian or from another country) far sophisticated to ours or they could be alien spacecrafts. However, he warns not to hold your breath waiting for a conclusive answer on which one it is because …

“Unfortunately, we have no idea, because we aren’t even seeking answers.”

Mellon blames the problem not on money (he says there’s roughly $50 billion in the annual intelligence budget) but on government bureaucracy …

“Meanwhile, reports from different services and agencies remain largely ignored and unevaluated inside their respective bureaucratic stovepipes. There is no Pentagon process for synthesizing all the observations the military is making.”

… and on attitudes.

“But nobody wants to be “the alien guy” in the national security bureaucracy; nobody wants to be ridiculed or sidelined for drawing attention to the issue. This is true up and down the chain of command, and it is a serious and recurring impediment to progress.”

To get past the second impediment, Mellon thinks we need to combine the military fears and scientific excitement of the early space program.

“As with Sputnik, the national security implications of these incidents are concerning — but the scientific opportunities are thrilling. Who knows what perils we may avoid or opportunities we might identify if we follow the data? We cannot afford to avert our eyes, given the risk of strategic surprise. The future belongs to not only the physically brave but also the intellectually agile.”

Does our current government have people who are “physically brave but also the intellectually agile”? Should these investigations – and the data associated with them – be turned over to the private sector instead? Or to To The Stars? Does Mellon have enough money to fund it himself? How much do you need to answer the question …

“What the f— is that thing?”

{ http://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }

Either space is weirder than we thought, or NASA ripped off The Fantastic Four. According to a study published by the space agency, space travel can permanently alter your DNA. Identical twin astronauts Scott and Mark Kelly were observed over the course of a year after Scott touched down on Earth after a yearlong stay on the International Space Station. The Twins Study is part of an ongoing NASA effort called the Human Research Project which studies the effects of space on the human body in preparation for eventual manned missions to Mars and other prolonged trips through the void.

Identical twins have almost identical DNA, which makes them ideal candidates for studying the mental and physical health effects of space: any changes in the space-faring twin’s physical health would have to be caused by an outside force and not due to natural variation. Identical twins are rare, and astronauts even rarer; luckily NASA has plenty of the latter and two of the former. It was Scott Kelly himself who suggested NASA use him and his brother Mark as test subjects.

What they found is quite strange. While many of the changes to Scott’s physiology returned to normal soon after returning to Earth, they found permanent changes as well. It seems that 7% of Scott Kelly’s DNA has been altered permanently. NASA has speculated on the existence of a “space gene,” which might be activated by conditions in space, causing changes in DNA. NASA says the changes to Scott’s DNA “related to his immune system, DNA repair, bone formation networks, hypoxia, and hypercapnia.” Whether these changes were seen as positive or negative were not said. We may have an answer if the retired astronaut suddenly begins a career as a vigilante superhero, or if it turns out he’s the mothman.

NASA, don’t tell this guy about space genes.

Predictions for the Twins Study were also proven wrong. Telomeres are components of chromosomes that shorten with age, and NASA expected the radiation of space to accelerate that shortening. They found, however, that Scott’s telomeres actually lengthened during his stay on the ISS. They returned to normal within two hours of his return to Earth, however, squashing any hope there might have been for finding the space-fountain of youth.

There were other findings, too. While on the ISS, Scott’s gut bacteria changed dramatically. It returned to normal once back on solid ground, and scientists do not know whether it was differences in the food he ate or environmental factors, such as gravity and radiation, which were responsible. NASA also studied Scott’s mental abilities. Being in space had no effect on his cognition, yet after returning to Earth his mental speed and accuracy began showing slight decreases. Perhaps this is due to returning from a year of peace and quiet in space to a life of medical tests and interviews on terra firma.

Scott Kelly went from looking at this every day to being constantly asked about his space genes.

While NASA may be furthering the goals of the human species and finding us a way off this rock, they apparently don’t have the best bedside manners. Scott says that he found out about the results of the study the same way as everyone else.

“I did read in the newspaper the other day… that 7 percent of my DNA had changed permanently,” Kelly said. “And I’m reading that, I’m like, ‘Huh, well that’s weird.’”

The full results of the study will be released later in 2018.

{ http://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }

Mysterieuze ufobeelden slaan Amerikaanse legerpiloten met verstomming: “WTF is dat ding?” - HLN.be

Bron: Washington Post, New York Times

De clip duurt twee minuten en is sensationeel. Legerpiloten filmden een ufo vanuit een F-18 van de US Navy, die op een hoogte van 25.000 voet vloog. “What the fuck is dat ding?” roept een piloot. De video werd online gepost door de To the Stars Academy of Arts and Science, een privaat onderzoeksbedrijf. 

De vrijgegeven beelden werden in 2015 geschoten aan de Amerikaanse Oostkust. Hoe het onderzoekscentrum eraan geraakte, zei het niet. Maar iedereen zou ze kunnen opvragen. Vorig jaar werden twee gelijkaardige video’s openbaar gemaakt.

Volgens Christopher Mellon vormen de video’s “het bewijs voor het bestaan van vliegtuigen die ver boven alles staan waar de VS of haar bondgenoten over beschikken”. Mellon is adviseur bij de To the Stars Acacemy en werkte voor de geheime dienst onder Bill Clinton en George W. Bush. Hij vindt dat de overheid te weinig onderzoek doet naar dat soort bewijsmateriaal: “Als het een mysterie is waar die vliegtuigen vandaan komen, dan is de passiviteit van de overheid tegenover zulke bewijzen dat ook”. 

Hij verwijt het leger en de overheid dat ze “dat soort incidenten beschouwen als geïsoleerde feiten en niet als onderdeel van een patroon dat op een ernstige manier aandacht en onderzoek vraagt”. Hij vergelijkt die houding in de Washington Post met de inspanningen van de CIA en de FBI tegen terrorisme vóór 9/11, toen beide diensten wel informatie hadden over de kapers maar die voor zich hielden en niet met elkaar deelden.

Mellon vraagt zich af of “Rusland of China technologisch haasje-over doen met de VS” dan wel dat de beelden “het bewijs kunnen zijn van een buitenaardse beschaving”. Hij schrijft dat Poetins recente gepoch over een Russische doorbraak in voortstuwingstechnieken misschien wel niet zomaar bluf is. Mellons besluit: “Helaas hebben we geen idee, omdat we zelfs geen antwoorden zoeken.”

{ https://www.hln.be/ }

US Navy F/A-18 Super Hornet Records UFO Over East Coast Waters, 2015, Newly Released! UFO Sighting News.

Date of sighting: 2015

Location of sighting: East Coast of USA

 

Here is another great military report that contains some raw footages of a NAVY Super Hornet recording a UFO moving at high speed over the water. It had no wings, no blades and no known method of propulsion. It was diamond shaped, having four sides. Its a welcome sight for me to see raw US military footage. Absolutely 100% evidence that aliens exist and are monitoring everything and anything on this planet. However, I have noticed that UFOs frequent aircraft more than other objects. The tech or the people are more easily accessible to them. 

Scott C. Waring

Video states: 

GO FAST is the third of three official USG videos selected for release after official review by multiple government organizations. While To The Stars Academy of Arts & Science was the first to obtain a copy, it should be available to any member of the press or public via the Freedom of Information Act. This footage was captured by a U.S. Navy F/A-18 Super Hornet using the Raytheon ATFLIR Pod that was being operated by a highly trained aerial observer and weapons system operator whom the government has spent millions of dollars to train. Go Fast reveals a Navy encounter that occurred off the East Coast of the United States in 2015 and the object in view remains unidentified. Read further analysis of what is being observed in Go Fast by our team of experts including additional videos and reports on our community of interest: coi.tothestarsacademy.com. It is the mission of To The Stars Academy to support underfunded areas of research that could lead to a better understanding of scientific anomalies and breakthrough discoveries in technology.

UFO with three green lights UFO sightings 2017 over the city UFO 2017 mp4 (Video)

{ http://www.ufosightingsdaily.com/ }

Hong Kong Taxi hit by Supernatural Being

A video of what appears to be an apparition hitting a Hong Kong taxi has gone viral on the social media

The video, posted by Hung Leung on his Facebook page, was captured by a dashboard cam of a car following the taxi on a narrow road and shows a blast of fog for a split-second before it blown into the left side of the taxi, reports thesundaily.my

Then the taxi swerves off the road to the right and nearly collides with a tree.

The driver in the vehicle behind the taxi can be heard freaking out in the 23-sec clip.

Screenshots from the video clearly show the blast of fog that looks like a supernatural being that collided with the car. Below the video of the very strange phenomenon.

  

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

Live Fox News Broadcast Shows Cluster Of UFOs Dashing Around

A live news broadcast in the United States has become a controversial one after a cluster of UFOs were spotted, which has let some alien enthusiasts believe aliens have arrived on Earth.

Many viewers, who tuned in at 4:43 am, on Fox 6 News noticed a bizarre astronomical display on February 28. They were treated with the appearance of series of bright lights dashing around a live feed of Milwaukee.

At least ten bright dots were moving in the distance, glowing, and then disappearing before shining a light again.

The viewers were not the only one who got surprised as even the man, and woman presenters of the show appeared to be equally surprised of the strange activity.

The female broadcaster initially thought of fireworks but later confirmed they were not. She then asked if those were aliens.

The male counterpart said that he also saw the strange activity and added that it kept getting weirder by the second. He explained that it looked like they were sticking around.

Authorities later claimed that seagulls were responsible for the mysterious darting formation of lights. They explained that they were just seagulls reflecting light.

However, many viewers of the video were not buying that excuse. In a video uploaded to YouTube channel Suspect Sky, one viewer said that they watched it 500 times and those were not seagulls.

Another user said that tiny seagulls at that distance could only be seen with binoculars and even then it would be challenging with the limited light.

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

British Popular Singer Robbie Williams Recalls Bizarre UFO Sighting

British pop star Robbie Williams has experienced an exciting ride of his life and often shared details of his alcoholic and drug addictions in the past. And the world-renown star, 44, has recently shared his bizarre experiences that he referred to as phenomena that can’t be explained.

He revealed they had taken place in America and the United Kingdom. He described them as intriguing and powerful.

On one UFO sighting, the Let Me Entertain You hit-maker said that he had seen one right over him and he could have hit the mysterious thing with a tennis ball if he has it at that time.

The Take That boy band member’s admission has shocked everybody who follows the singer. Robbie confidently said that no substance was involved at all.

Last year, he also spoke the experience saying that he has seen stuff that he can’t explain and he had a UFO right over his head hovering less than 150 feet.

Robbie is married to American actress Ayda Field, and they have two children.

Robbie had a terrifying health issue late last year.

The singer was found with abnormalities in his brain, prompting him to cancel his final two European tour dates in September 2017 after spending seven days in intensive care.

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

{https://nypost.com/ }

Antarctica’s secrets EXPOSED? Google Earth images show 'hidden camps, UFOs and Nazi bases'

ANTARCTICA is one of the remotest regions on the planet and could hide some incredible secrets if these Google Earth images are anything to go by.

{ http://www.ladbible.com/ }