Filer’s Files #14 – 2018 Spiritual Warfare - PART III

UFO Sightings in the United States

Arkansas Object

Don Torcuato — Mr. Miguel Shimizukawa , a relative of mine, took that photo on September 17, 2017,

After a few months, while revising his flash cards, realized of this craft above the airplane.  The plane appears to have only one engine?

Thanks to MUFON CMS

Colorado Green Spaceship

Evergreen — Caught in a photo of the full moon, I could not see it with the naked eye on March 31, 2018.. But when I was looking at photos, there was this strange green spaceship looking thing, with a purple exhaust coming out the bottom. And it is in a few different photos. I was facing east.

And in the photos there was a rainbow around the moon with some clouds below the moon. The green spaceship starts to descend threw the clouds. Thanks to MUFON CMS

Florida Orbs

Orlando Airport — I waited for my mom’s flight on March 28, 2018, and took two pictures of aircraft for the children. When I reviewed them seconds later I saw 3 objects. No reflecting lights on the window inside the building and not visible when I took the photos through the camera. Not going to jump the gun on it as a ufo but would like someone to assess the photo to determine if the objects are actually in the sky. They appear to be in motion from my take on it. Thanks to MUFON CMS

Michigan Light

Traverse City — My girlfriend took a photo, driving down the road January 28, 2018. She was unaware of the object at the time.

After reviewing her photos later that day, she saw this object with lights beaming down, like it was scanning the ground. I have another amazing happening. Unreal.

Thanks to MUFON CMS

New Mexican Orbs

Deming — Traveling to Las Cruces took a picture of the sky.

I observed the picture later and saw 4 objects in the sky. I can’t explain it. to me it looks like two air planes without wings, 1 tractor trailer (weird) and 1 huge helicopter.

Thanks to MUFON CMS

New York Diamonds

Honeoye Falls — We were looking for deer or fox out our kitchen window on March 30, 2018,  2. There was an extremely bright large light hovering behind two large pine trees. You couldn’t help but notice it.
3. We had never seen any light like it hovering there, so we used binoculars.
4. The object was extremely large diamond with rounded points. The entire surface was covered with thousands of small very bright white lights. It reminded us of the New Year’s Eve Ball in Times Square in NYC. Just then the UFO began to move slowly forward, ascending to just above the trees and split into two diamond shapes covered with red and white lights. They then turned into 3 circles. then into four, and finally into a triangle with small white yellow, green, and red lights along the edge. Thanks to MUFON CMS

North Carolina Lights

Columbus – The photographer captured lights in the sky in the rough shape of a triangle.

The lights were captured on April 3, 2018 with a video camera.

Thanks to MUFON CMS

Texas Object

Fort Worth Dallas Airport — I was grilling and taking a video to send to my family on March 21, 2018, and my family member told me about the UFO when I slowed the video I saw two UFOs fly by at very high speeds.

The video was longer I cut it to the beginning where the two UFOs flew by.

Thanks to MUFON CMS

Washington Lights

Crescent Lake U.S. National Park craft captured on March 30, 2018

Crescent Lake — I am a climate scientist working as a consultant. I monitor air quality conditions via a web site run by the U.S. National Park office. This web site contains data, and it also has photos taken every 15 minutes for verification of visibility and conditions. I use this web page frequently, and seldom see anything out of the ordinary.

I captured an image from one of these cams on March 30, 2018, that cannot be explained. This I believe is a true an accurate photograph. Thanks to MUFON CMS

Sightings Around the World

Australia

Sydney – A iPhone video taken in slow motion of electrical storm at Sydney’s northern end on April 2, 2018. Upon review of footage I noticed lightning bolts connected several times with a dark geometric shape. When sheet lightening happens it illuminates the clouds and the same cube shape and a second oval shape become momentarily visible, but only on video, not at the scene. Thanks to MUFON CMS

Canada Star

Moncton — This “star” seemed to really want to get my attention. The flashing lights were very noticeable against the night sky so I thought it would be interesting to try out my new camera. As I zoomed in, it was apparent that the star was changing shape as well as color. I didn’t observe any movement other than the rapid flashing of lights.
I was able to capture this on video but unfortunately I didn’t have a tripod which resulted in camera shake. Thanks to MUFON CMS

France Orb

Six Fours — The sighting happened on October 18th, 2017, about 10:30 pm, when I saw a luminous ball. It was orange glittering abnormally that seemed to attract my gaze. I stood on the horizon just above the sea. This ball flew towards me at a slow speed. My girlfriend took my cell phone to film the scene. There was clearly a silent black triangle with three white lights at each point of the triangle and one at the center flashing red color Thanks to MUFON CMS

India Circle of Lights

Jaipur, Rajasthan — We were at an annual religious processions and there were many fancy lights that I wanted to record on March 31, 2018. It was while making a boomerang video only that I realized that I had captured something that I did not remember seeing in the sky while recording it. I’m attaching a clip in which you can see 4 disc like objects hovering in a pattern in the sky. Thanks to MUFON CMS

Mexican Orb

Cabo San Lucas International Airport — I was sitting at a window seat on March 28, 2018, on takeoff and filmed an orb with my iPhone 8. Later, I noticed the orb like object following in front of the left wing about two feet forward. It appeared to be stable in relation to the wing throughout the turning of the plane onto the runway, acceleration of the plane and take off. Also this object did not seem to move as I panned to the wingtip and forward a few times. There are obvious reflections from the window pane that remained constant. It then all of a sudden disappeared. I cannot understand what it is. Thanks to MUFON CMS

UK Red Orbs

London — I was walking home at about 8:15 pm,  on January 26, 2018. I live in a small town about 25 miles east of London. As I walked along the pavement, something in the night sky caught my eye. I saw a string of small, bright red orbs rising up into the sky at an angle. They were as many as 20 small red orbs, all the same size, all constantly moving at the same speed, close together like a string of red Christmas tree lights. The orbs were bright red spherical shape, moving fast. They were maybe 10 miles away moving much faster than planes. As I watched, they rose up from 30 to 60 degrees. then moved in a circular motion swirling around above East London area. The 20 red orbs were much bigger than aeroplane lights moving fast. Thanks to MUFON CMS

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{ https://nationalufocenter.com/ }

Hubble snaps amazing photo of Einstein Ring phenomenon

BY MIHAI ANDREI 

The new picture snapped by the Hubble Telescope and analyzed by NASA scientists is jam-packed with galaxies — and among them, there’s an even more spectacular feature: a so-called Einstein Ring.

Image credits: ESA/Hubble & NASA / Judy Schmidt.

This charming part of the universe is called SDSS J0146-0929, a galaxy cluster which features a great variety of spiral and elliptical galaxies presented to us at different angles — some are face-on, some are angled, but all are locked together by the inescapable tug of gravity. But here, gravity does even more than just hold the galaxies together: it bends light in a way that creates a ring-like feature, a so-called Einstein Ring.

Einstein’s ring occurs when light coming from a bright source is bent by the gravitational effect of a very large structure or object — in this case, SDSS J0146-0929. The phenomenon is called gravitational lensing and requires that the three participants (the light source, the massive structure, and the observer — which is Earth) be aligned in a straight-line configuration of called a syzygy.

In this sense, an Einstein Ring is a special case of gravitational lensing, caused by the exact alignment of the source, lens, and observer. This results in a symmetry around the lens, causing a ring-like structure. NASA’s Karl Hille describes the image:

“In this image, the light from a background galaxy is diverted and distorted around the massive intervening cluster and forced to travel along many different light paths toward Earth, making it seem as though the galaxy is in several places at once.”

Einstein predicted this phenomenon back in 1912, even before his theory of general relativity. However, Einstein didn’t think we’d ever be able to observe one because our technology wasn’t capable of it. Well, our technology has progressed way beyond what Einstein thought possible and today, hundreds of gravitational lenses are currently known. In recent years, astronomers have used gravitational lensing to zoom in on extremely distant parts of the universe.

Just a few days ago, scientists published a study in which they described the farthest start ever observed, and in late 2017, a different team found a planet so big that it might not be a planet after all.

If you think this is awesome (and it is), I’ve got something even more amazing: a few years ago, Hubble snapped a spectacular image of a double Einstein’s ring — an extremely unlikely scenario which astronomers were lucky to witness.

{ https://www.zmescience.com/ }

2018 UFO Researcher of the Year Award and Acceptance - International UFO Congress

This year’s UFO Researcher of the Year Award went to journalist and author Cheryl Costa! This video reviews her background and the reasons she received the award.

Read her UFO blog on the Syracuse New Times here: https://www.syracusenewtimes.com/auth...

To purchase DVD of her lecture at the 2018 International UFO Congress, go here: http://ufo-congress-store5.mybigcomme... 

To watch her lecture online, go here: https://www.ufocongressvideos.com/med...

{ https://www.youtube.com/ }

Megalithic Mystery: The Enigmatic Dragon Houses Of Greece

Located on the Greek Island of Euboea lies a true archaeological mystery: 25 massive structures called Drakóspita or Dragon houses. Erected using supermassive limestone blocks forming a pyramid-shaped roof, the mysterious dragon houses are a true ancient enigma. Experts are unsure who built them, how they were built, but most importantly, experts have no idea when they were built.

The dragon houses (in Greek Drakospita) are 20 large buildings spread across the south of the island of Euboea, the sixth largest in the Mediterranean, located off the eastern coast of mainland Greece.

The so-called Dragon houses are rectangular constructions composed of huge stones, built in a cyclopean style, placed one above the other without any type of mortar.

The spaces between them are filled with other smaller stones, and the roof is covered with equally large stone plates leaving a gap for the entrance of light.

Ochi Dragon-house: entry as seen from inside.

Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons.

The best preserved Dragon houses are those located on Mount Ochi , in the southeast of the island. Three other Cyclopean Dragon Houses can be found at Palli-Lakka and in Kapsala.

Despite the fact that they are called Dragon houses, the massive structures don’t really have anything to do with these mythological creatures.

They are dubbed Dragon houses because the local tradition attributed to their creators unknown superhuman powers, given the size of the stone blocks used in the building process. Ordinary people could not have built these massive structures, right?

Ochi Dragon-house: Roof.

Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons.

Their true age remains a mystery, just as their unknown builders.

Although ‘Dragon Houses’ were first described at the end of the 18th century, there is still no exact dating of the buildings.

Some scholars believe that they can be traced back to the seventh century BC, being the precursors of the later Greek temples.

Others consider them defensive constructions of the Hellenistic period, of the III-IV century BC.

Ochi Dragon-house: Southern front.

Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons.

However, experts are still unable to agree on their date, and the lack of materials surrounding the massive structures has made the job more difficult.

The Dragon houses were ‘found’ by British geologist John Hawkins, who ascended Mount Ochi (1,398 meters of altitude) on October 21, 1797.

There, he found a construction that he inspected and from which he drew sketches, concluding, based on their design that the massive structures should be older than classic Greek temples.

After word got out of the existence of massive structures in the Mediterranean, many others ventured out to Greece to see the ‘Dragon houses’ for themselves.

In the following years after Hawkins discovered them, numerous archaeologists visited the site, such as Heinrich Ulrichs, who published a monograph about the structures in 1842.

In more recent times the main researchers are those of the Americans Jean Carpenter and Dan Boyd.

The enigmatic Dragon Houses of Mount Ochi are located at an altitude of 1386 meters of and have an average dimension of 12.7 by 7.7 meters, with a door in the center of the south wall, 2 meters high by one wide and crowned by a huge 10-tonne lintel protruding above it, as well as small windows on the sides.

The walls have an average thickness of 1.4 meters, suitable to support the heavy stone roof, and the interior rises to an average height of around 2.4 meters.

The surface of the construction is 48 square meters and the entire floor is covered with stone panels.

Dragon-House Palli-Lakka building North near Styra/Euboia/Greece.

Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons.

As noted by experts, the three Dragon Houses of Palli-Lakka are very similar in dimensions to that of Mount Ochi, but the walls are less thick, only 1.1 meters on average.

The stone blocks used are smaller and, in general, the style is more rustic, less elaborate and possibly even older.

The strange things is that, despite their supermassive size and intricate design elements, there is absolutely no reference to these buildings in the ancient sources, so all the available information comes from the legends and folklore of the area where they were built, as well as details of explorers who have visited the structures in more recent times.

In 1959, excavations were carried out on the structures of Mount Ochi which brought to light ceramic fragments which have been dated to the Hellenistic period.

Archaeologists also found various reinforcements, on one of which they fund a small text written in an unknown script, which is now kept at the archaeological museum of Karystos.

An Otherworldly Connection?

The Night Sky and the various constellations.

Interesting details were discovered in 2002 and 2004 when researchers from the Department of Astrophysics at the University of Athens studied the orientation of the Dragon Houses on Mount Ochi. Experts came to the conclusion that the Dragon Houses were oriented to the Sirius star system around 1100 BC., suggesting that the mysterious Cyclopean structures may have been used as some sort of astronomical observatories.

However, due to the lack of more exhaustive data, the Greek Dragon houses continue to be an enigma for archaeologists

As noted by some authors, the mysterious structures could well be the key to understanding the evolution of later Greek architecture.

Whatever their purpose was, it remains a mystery as to how the massive structures were built, how they have remained standing, and most importantly their exact age.

Featured Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons.

{ https://www.ancient-code.com/  }

Finger fossil puts people in Arabia at least 86,000 years ago

A desert discovery builds the case for humans’ early departure from Africa

BY  BRUCE BOWER 

ARABIAN POINTER  A human finger fossil found in a Saudi Arabian desert dates to between 95,000 and 86,000 years ago, researchers say. This find, shown here from different angles, strengthens the view that ancient humans expanded into Asia via Arabia.

IAN CARTWRIGHT

A single human finger bone from at least 86,000 years ago points to Arabia as a key destination for Stone Age excursions out of Africa that allowed people to rapidly spread across Asia.

Excavations at Al Wusta, a site in Saudi Arabia’s Nefud desert, produced this diminutive discovery. It’s the oldest known Homo sapiens fossil outside of Africa and the narrow strip of the Middle East that joins Africa with Asia, based on dating of the bone itself, says a team led by archaeologists Huw Groucutt and Michael Petraglia. This new find strengthens the idea that early human dispersals out of Africa began well before the traditional estimated departure time of 60,000 years ago and extended deep into Arabia, the scientists report April 9 in Nature Ecology & Evolution.

“Although long considered to be far from the main stage of human evolution, Arabia was a stepping stone from Africa into Asia,” says Petraglia, of the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Jena, Germany.

Don’t be misled by the vast deserts that dominate the Arabian Peninsula today. Geologic evidence indicates that Al Wusta lay within a well-watered, human-friendly area between around 95,000 and 86,000 years ago, the estimated age range for the human finger fossil, Groucutt and Petraglia’s team says. Dating relied on measures of the decay of a radioactive form of uranium in the human fossil and a nearby hippo tooth. Those results were combined with a measure of exposure to natural doses of radiation in the tooth. Another technique estimated the time since the finger bone and adjacent finds were buried by sediment.

FAR-FLUNG FINGER Excavations at Saudi Arabia’s Al Wusta site produced a human finger fossil dating to at least 86,000 years ago. This discovery provides the first fossil evidence for ancient human excursions from Africa to Arabia.

M. PETRAGLIA

The 2016 Al Wusta find is probably the middle bone from an adult’s middle finger, suspects Groucutt, of the University of Oxford. It’s unclear whether the bone came from a man or a woman, or from a right or left hand.

It’s definitely human, though. To establish the fossil’s identify, the researchers compared a 3-D image of the ancient finger bone with corresponding bones of present-day people, apes and monkeys, as well as Neandertals and other ancient hominids.

The newly discovered fossil fits into a rough timeline of Stone Age human departures from Africa. H. sapiens reached what’s now Israel as early as 194,000 years ago (SN: 2/17/18, p. 6) and East Asia by at least 80,000 years ago (SN: 11/14/15, p. 15). Humans arrived in Indonesia (SN Online: 8/9/17) and Australia (SN: 8/19/17, p. 10) shortly before 60,000 years ago.

How humans moved into Arabia is uncertain. Along with the finger, Al Wusta yielded 380 stone tools and 860 nonhuman animal fossils from the same time. Some of those animals, including hippos and gazelles, originated in Africa and no longer inhabit the Arabian Peninsula. Ancient groups of hunter-gatherers followed these grazing animals from North Africa into Arabia as climate fluctuations periodically turned deserts into grasslands with lakes and rivers, Petraglia proposes. When those landscapes dried out every 20,000 years or so, people could have returned to Africa or headed farther into Asia.

Al Wusta’s ancient human fossil — combined with comparably ancient stone tools found at other Arabian Peninsula sites (SN: 4/4/15, p. 16) — challenges the view that humans left Africa in one or a few major migrations, says paleoanthropologist María Martinόn-Torres. Instead, small groups of African H. sapienscontinually traveled into Arabia and beyond starting nearly 100,000 years ago or earlier, suggests Martinόn-Torres, who directs the National Research Center on Human Evolution in Burgos, Spain. Periods of increased rainfall may have provided “windows of opportunity” for human movements into Arabia, she adds.

Al Wusta stone tools differ in some ways from those at slightly older sites in Israel. Paleoanthropologist Donald Henry of the University of Tulsa in Oklahoma interprets those differences to mean culturally distinct African populations took a southern route into Arabia. To reach Al Wusta, East African travelers could have crossed a narrow sea channel from the Horn of Africa to Arabia’s southwestern corner before heading up to Al Wusta, Henry suggests in a comment published with the new report.

Petraglia doubts that scenario. Ancient humans could easily have followed grazing animals up the Nile River Valley into the Middle East and then south into Arabia, he says, adjusting their tools to new settings along the way.

Citations

• H.S. Groucutt et al. Homo sapiens in Arabia by 85,000 years ago. Nature Ecology & Evolution. Published online April 9, 2018. doi:10.1038/s41559-018-0518-2.

Further Reading

• B. Bower. An ancient jaw pushes humans’ African departure back in time. Science News. Vol. 193, February 17, 2018, p. 6.
• M. Temming. Humans first settled in Australia as early as 65,000 years ago. Science News. Vol. 192, August 19, 2017, p. 10.
• B. Bower. Ancient people arrived in Sumatra’s rainforests more than 60,000 years ago. Science News Online, August 9, 2017.
• B. Bower. Long before going to Europe, humans ventured east to Asia. Science News. Vol. 188, November 14, 2015, p. 15.
• B. Bower. Telling stories from stone tools. Science News. Vol. 187, April 4, 2015, p. 16.

{ https://www.sciencenews.org/ }

Mysterious Beam Of Light Spotted In Near Dallas

Residents of Rockwall near Texas were baffled when a mysterious beam of light was seen on the horizon which illuminated the stormy dark sky to the east on 6 April 2018.

Numerous Reasons Might Have Caused Mysterious Beam of Light

https://www.facebook.com/Rockwallian/videos/1578120838922960/?t=4

There were many reasons given as to why people saw the strange sky phenomenon bear Rockwall in Texas. The official version for the beam of light was that the sun was shining through a hole in the clouds in the sky. However, if this was the case then the beam of light should have spread to the horizon and it did not according to witnesses.

A photo of the mysterious light was shown on Facebook and the photograph had been taken through the windshield of a car. Some people suggested that the light was a shadow on the windshield on the vehicle. But then this could not be the cause as the beam of light is seen in the background with other vehicles in-between it and the windscreen of the car. It was even said that perhaps it was a tornado but the beam of light was not changing shape nor moving.

If the strange light was a natural phenomenon then perhaps it is what is known as an anticrepuscular ray. This is a ray that is sharp at the horizon and then spreads out and widens as it goes up. If man made it could be a business spotlight or laser beam that has shown up against the dark background of the storm or a searchlight or fog light.

Some people even said that it was related to the Dark Book of Shadows by S. M. Brennan, a tale of dark witchcraft and sorcery. They said that perhaps the gates had finally been opened up and the ancient Gods had been set free upon the world along with the Dark Flame of Satanas. Others have suggested that it might be aliens and a UFO is about to land.

{ https://www.disclose.tv/ }

Jupiter's Great Red Spot Captured by Juno in Stunning NASA Photos

By Mary von Aue

The latest photos from NASA’s Juno orbiter are getting up close and personal with Jupiter. Known as Perijove 12 – because it’s this mission’s 12th encounter with the giant planet – the images only add to the recent mysteries that have emerged regarding the Great Red Spot.

Since Juno first entered a polar orbit of Jupiter on July 5, 2016, the mission continues to change everything scientists once thought about the planet. Jupiter’s magnetic field is significantly stronger than scientists had expected, and Juno’s observations have revealed new insight on the stability of the planet’s storms. Juno’s most recent drive by of Jupiter was on April 1, and this new crop of photos succeed in raising even more questions about Jupiter’s giant storm.

Juno’s mission is to provide data regarding Jupiter’s magnetic field and internal composition. After every perijove session, the images taken on Juno’s camera are sent back to Earth, where astronomers and photo editors are hired to process.

Not only does NASA share the raw images, but the agency invites photo editors to download them and add their own enhancements. NASA then shares some of the images, which have been cropped and highlighted to showcase specific planetary features.

The Great Red Spot has been in the spotlight lately and new information regarding its size has sparked debate. A study published in The Astronomical Journal last month suggests that the Great Red Spot might be getting taller as it shrinks, meaning it’s not losing as much mass as scientists once thought.

Juno’s close encounters with Jupiter come every 54 days, which means the next batch of photos from Perijove 13 can be expected around May 24. Juno’s mission is scheduled to conclude after Perijove 14 in July and the spacecraft is slated to be intentionally de-orbited into Jupiter’s atmosphere. However, given how many unanswered questions come with each Juno encounter, the mission could receive an extension.

{ https://www.inverse.com/ }

Everything we learned about (probable) aliens in 2017

Stockphoto

The truth is probably already here.

The evidence that aliens exist has been slowly mounting for decades and 2017 marks the most convincing year yet for the belief that life must exist beyond our planet.

And believing in the extraterrestrial is no longer reserved for conspiracy theorists in tinfoil hats. Nearly half of humanity believes aliens are out there, according to a recent study, and in June, the European Space Agency signed off on a $668 million mission that will hunt for other life forms 932,000 miles into space. Meanwhile, scientists continue to be baffled by a bunch of mysterious signals that keep emanating from faraway galaxies.

Here are five stories that prove it’s only a matter of time before we meet our celestial neighbors.

1. Scientists keep finding Earth-like planets

Scientists have long presumed that if we’re going to find life on other planets, we’re going to find them in the “Goldilocks zone” — spots throughout the universe where conditions are just right for water to exist.

The intergalactic search for our neighbors grew more promising in 2017 with dozens more “super-Earth” discoveries.

And even though we don’t yet have the technology to reach these planets, 2017’s “super-Earths” have included:

• Wolf 1061c: Discovered in January, located 14 light years away
  
• LHS 1140b: Discovered in April, located 40 light years away
  
• Ross 128b: Discovered in November, located 11 light years away
  
• K2-18b: Discovered in December, located 111 light years away

In June, NASA’s Kepler telescope found 10 “Goldilocks-zone” planets and in October, the telescope found 20 more “hiding in plain sight.”

“Are we alone?” Kepler scientist Mario Perez asked at a news conference following NASA’s June discovery. “Maybe Kepler today has told us indirectly, although we need confirmation, that we are probably not alone.”

2. Reported UFO sightings are at their highest ever

In February, a doctoral student found that UFO sightings have hit an all-time high and that most of the sightings come from the US.

Sam Manafort, who’s studying Human Factors and Applied Cognition at George Mason University, crunched numbers from the National UFO Reporting Center. In his report, he found that since the first recorded UFO flew over Portugal in 1905, there have been at least 104,947 sightings.

But the number of yearly sightings has spiked dramatically from about 5,000 in 1980 to about 45,000 in 2010. In the US alone, there are 2,500 sightings per 10 million people — something Manafort attributes to the fact that most of the US has access to the internet.

Most of the sightings have come from the West and Northwest, an area that lines up with America’s “UFO highway” — a latitude line across the US that a pair of sibling alien hunters believes is an entrance for extraterrestrial spacecraft.

The duo, whose book “37th Parallel” is being made into a movie, state that during years-long travels across the US, the most bizarre paranormal phenomenon took place along the 37th latitude line.

This line stretches from California through Nevada, Colorado, Kansas, Missouri, Illinois, Kentucky and across to Virginia.

3. Life may already be hanging out in our own solar system

Modal Trigger

Pluto might have been demoted from a planet to a dwarf planet back in 2006, but the icy world could be holding a lot more than hurt feelings.

In November, NASA scientists revealed that ice planets, like Pluto and Neptune, could harbor life deep beneath their icy surfaces, thanks to their moons.

Dubbed Trans-Neptunian objects, these celestial bodies might benefit from tidal heating. This means that these icy planets have moons with enough gravitational pull to create energy beneath the planet’s surface — which generates heat and allows a sub-surface ocean to exist. The findings were published in Icarus.

“These objects need to be considered as potential reservoirs of water and life,” Prabal Saxena of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center said in a press release. “If our study is correct, we now may have more places in our solar system that possess some of the critical elements for extraterrestrial life.”

A separate study published in May suggested that Pluto, Saturn’s moon Enceladus and Jupiter’s moon Europa may have life due to a different process known as radiolysis. And in December, the American Geophysical Union reported that tectonic activity on Europacould be feeding life to Jupiter’s icy moon.

4. NASA hired someone to protect us from aliens

In August, NASA posted a job listing that quickly went viral.

The space agency was looking to hire a planetary protection officer — someone in charge of making sure that spacecraft and astronauts don’t contaminate other worlds and don’t bring back anything that could contaminate our own.

“NASA maintains policies for planetary protection applicable to all space flight missions that may intentionally or unintentionally carry Earth organisms and organic constituents to the planets or other solar system bodies and any mission employing spacecraft, which are intended to return to Earth and its biosphere with samples from extraterrestrial targets of exploration,” the job description stated.

The job, which pays between $124,406 and $187,000, is only one of two full-time posts in the world. It became available after Catherine Conley, the former planetary protection officer, accepted a different position inside NASA.

NASA first created the position following the signing of the Outer Space Treaty of 1967 — a UN-approved agreement that outlines international space law.

The application closed Aug. 14 and there’s been no update on who landed the extraterrestrial gig.

In November, a NASA scientist at Goddard Institute For Space Studies said he believes we’ll find alien life within the next 20 years.

5. The Pentagon has receipts

The footage, which was taken off the coast of California, was released after the Pentagon acknowledged the existence of the Defense Department’s Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program. This program, which costs $22 millionbetween 2008 and 2012, was set up to investigate reports of unidentified flying objects. Some officials have said that parts of the program have continued. “It was a real object, it exists and I saw it,” Cmdr. David Fravor, one of the pilots who saw the UFO, told the Washington Post. Fravor said the object resembled a white Tic Tac and was “something not from the earth.”

{ https://nypost.com/ }

THE ULTIMATE ABYSS

It used to be thought that the world was flat. That beyond the horizon lurked a bottomless void, measureless to humans. As our ships got better and our navigators more confident, vessels that disappeared over one horizon began returning triumphant from the other. The Earth was curved, a sphere with no edges. We didn’t fall off because a mysterious force called gravity kept everyone and everything stuck to the planet’s surface.

Then Albert Einstein came along and told us that space itself was curved. Now we realise that if we sail off into the sea of curved space we call the Universe, there are indeed bottomless voids that the unwary traveler can fall into – and they are measureless to humans. They lurk on the other side of their own dark horizons, and we call them Black Holes.

FATAL ATTRACTION

A black hole is an astronomical contradiction – a dark star, an invisible nothing, a prison of light. Its boundary is marked by the so-called Event Horizon, a sphere of darkness that shrouds the inside and defines the point of no return. There is no solid surface beyond, just a bottomless gravitational whirlpool so strong that it sucks everything – even light – relentlessly inward. Oblivion waits at the centre in the form of the Singularity, Gravity’s fatal attractor.

Hidden eternally from view, the Singularity marks the spot where an immense gravitational force has been concentrated. All the mass, light and energy that has ever fallen into the black hole is compressed by its own overwhelming gravity into a point that is infinitely small and infinitely dense. The more a black hole swallows, the heavier it gets, yet the singularity never changes. Space has been squelched out of existence and Time has been squeezed to a stop. Step over the event horizon and for all intents and purposes you’ve fallen off the edge of the universe.

A BRIEF HISTORY OF GRAVITY

The concept of Gravity, this unseen force that dominates our lives and pulls us eternally towards the ground, has long challenged the greatest human minds. Even in Galileo’s day, the tower at Pisa had a good lean to it – perfect for dropping things off. Galileo wondered why no matter how heavy or light objects were, they all took the same amount of time to fall to Earth. He puzzled too about why the planets moved they way they did. His conviction that they orbited around the sun led to house arrest for heresy. He was still trying to put the gravity puzzle together when he died in Florence in 1642.

On Christmas Day that same year, the gravity baton was handed to Isaac Newton, born weak and premature in a Lincolnshire farmhouse. Twenty three years later, Newton returned to Woolsthorpe Manor to sit out the plague sweeping southern England. With 18 months quiet thought in the countryside he discovered calculus, unravelled the nature of light, and began formulating laws for the motion of the planets: discoveries that still underpin most of modern physics. One day when he was having a short break with a cup of tea, a falling apple interrupted his thoughts and led him to ponder gravity itself.

The reason the apple fell straight down was that it was trying to fall to the centre of the earth where gravitational attraction was focused. And the Earth wasn’t the only object that had gravity, so did the moon, the sun and the planets. In fact, Newton reasoned, every object in the universe – including ourselves – has gravity. The bigger and heavier, the greater it’s gravitational force. We are glued to the surface of the Earth – and not the other way round – only because it is has so much more mass. The Earth orbits around the sun for the same reason. Finally, Newton had found a reason for the heavens to move the way they do.

DARK STARS

In 1784, John Michell, Rector of Thornhill Church in Yorkshire and great forgotten 18th Century scientist, became intrigued with the idea of escape velocity – the minimum speed with which you need to travel upwards from a star or planet to escape its gravitational clutches. He knew that gravity depended upon mass and he knew the speed of light was fast but finite. How heavy, he wondered, would the sun have to become before its gravity would become so great that even light (which travels at 299,792 km/second) would be held back at its surface? The answer, Michell reasoned, was that if the sun was the same size but weighed 500 times more, the light from the Sun would not escape the Suns own gravity. The Sun would simply disappear from view. A few years later the great French mathematician Laplace came to the same conclusion independently. The concept of the Dark Star was born.

A UNIVERSE OF HOLES

Black holes remained an ignored theoretical curio until a young clerk in a Swiss patent office published his General Theory of Relativity in 1915. Albert Einstein realised that the universe was a fundamentally different place to the clockwork universe of Newton and commonsense. The three dimensions of space could not be separated from the fourth dimension of time. Together they form the ‘Spacetime’ continuum, a kind of invisible scaffolding that defines existence. Spacetime, though, is not an absolute, fixed thing. It can be warped, bent and curved.

Spacetime is ‘straight’ only when it doesn’t have anything in it. Wherever there is mass, there is gravity. Wherever there is gravity, space is curved. The curvature of space dictates how an object will move through it. The object will dictate how space bends around it. Gravity, according to Einstein, is the curvature of space.

Einstein’s thought experiment was to imagine space and time being squashed flat like a 2D rubber sheet. Put a massive object like the sun on the sheet and it will bend. The more dense an object is, the deeper the depression it makes in Spacetime and the stronger the gravity. Eventually a point is reached when the walls of the depression are stretched so steeply that nothing can climb out of it. It is, quite literally, a hole in the universe.

A STAR IS BORN

To understand the very large in the universe, you need to start with the very small. With the unlocking of the secrets of nuclear energy, scientists finally got a clue to how black holes might form in nature. Stars are born when enormous clouds of cosmic dust and hydrogen begin to clump and condense under their own gravitational weight. Gravity grows stronger by the hour as the increasing density of the protostar curves space more strongly. Faster and faster, the hydrogen gas falls in upon itself in the condensing core. The more it collides the hotter it grows. When the core reaches 10 million degrees, the hydrogen protons begin to fuse into helium. Some of the mass disappears, having being turned into energy and light. Like a giant cosmic light bulb, the star has switched itself on.

Every star we see in the heavens has a giant nuclear reaction raging at its core. It’s what makes a star like our sun shine so hot and bright. Gravity is still trying to pull the star’s gas tighter and tighter but is matched now by the energy pouring outwards from the nuclear reaction in the core. The star settles into a precarious balance that gravity will always win in the end.

THE BIG SQUEEZE

The ultimate fate of a star depends upon its mass. Our sun is middle-aged. It switched on 5 billion years ago and has enough fuel to burn for 5 billion more. But when, in that far distant future, the spent heart of the sun sheds its outer layers and shuts down, gravity will squeeze the core so tight it cannot be squeezed any more. It will become a ‘white dwarf’, a feeble ember the size of the earth but a hundred thousand times more dense.

The more massive the star is, the faster it burns its fuel and the shorter its life expectancy. A star 10 times as massive as the sun may survive only millions, not billions, of years. As it starts to collapse, the crush of in-falling matter slamming into the iron core sends the temperature rocketing to 50 billion degrees. The core has only seconds to respond – and it does so Supernova-style.

A supernova is a massive explosion. Huge quantities of material are blown into space, but only from the outer regions of the star. Most of the star has actually imploded, with the core being given a gravity bear hug so extreme that the protons and electrons have been squeezed into a ball of superdense subatomic particles called neutrons. The resulting ‘neutron star’ would weigh about one and a half times as much as the sun but would measure only about 20 kilometres across – about the size of Brisbane.

Astronomers can prove that neutron stars exist, because they give off a unique distress signal. Like a lighthouse warning of a dangerous shore, a neutron star sweeps space with a blinding beam of radiation, generated by a magnetic field more than a trillion times greater than the Earth’s. Such a neutron star is called a pulsar. To astronomers, the pulsing beam sweeping the darkness of space is an unmistakable warning that extreme gravity lurks nearby.

GRAVITY’S FINAL TRIUMPH

A neutron star resist the ongoing crush of gravity, only with its neutrons packed in like sardines in a tin. But if the remnants of the star after supernova weigh more than three times the mass of the sun, even neutrons cannot hold back the inexorable force of gravity. The neutrons are squashed into oblivion. The star’s core becomes so dense that gravity overwhelms space itself, distorting it so horribly that it, and time with it, is wrenched off from the outside universe. A darkness forms at the star’s heart and moves relentlessly outwards as the stars brilliance is sucked inwards. This is the hungry, growing maw of a black hole: gravity’s final triumph. There is no escape, no turning back, until the entire mass of the star has been swallowed and its brilliance completely extinguished.

A BLACKNESS BEYOND BLACK

Visible only by its invisibility, the margin of the black hole is marked by the event horizon, so-called because all events beyond are hidden from view. For a black hole like this the event horizon may be only a few kilometres in diameter but the void beyond impossibly deep to measure. The entire mass of the star has been reduced to a singularity – a point of infinite smallness and infinite density at the very centre of this black malevolence.

The singularity is where science ends and speculation begins. Space and time have ceased to exist, replaced by a seething chaotic mass we call quantum foam. This bizarre conjecture is where Einstein’s laws fail. This is where the laws of quantum mechanics fail. This is the realm of something called Quantum Gravity – one of the hottest areas of advanced mathematical research.

It is from a singularity that the Universe is believed to have begun. In many ways the collapse of a star to form a black hole singularity is the reverse of the Big Bang. Is this the way the Universe is going to end? Wilder speculation is that our entire universe might lurk inside someone else’s singularity. or even that universes can bud off from each other like this, like some sort of heavenly breeding organism.

It wasn’t until 1967 that John Archibald Wheeler slipped the term “Black Hole” into his paper at a scientific conference, and into the lexicon of the late 20th Century. They may have become a household name – but are they real?

BLACK HOLE OR WHITE ELEPHANT

Einstein himself couldn’t believe that such an invisible impossibility as a black hole could exist in the real universe beyond his theories. Today, his successors have no such problems. Astronomers not only think they have identified nearly 30 black hole candidates in our own Milky Way galaxy, they are now getting the proof that the holes behave in the relativistic way that Einstein’s theories predict.

A black hole is an elusive quarry with perfect camouflage: total blackness in the blackness of space. Searching for a black hole no bigger than Sydney’s CBD across hundreds or thousands of light years of space demands a sneaky approach. First you have to find a visible star that a black hole has trapped in orbit. Then you have to study how the star wobbles. John Wheeler described it as like looking for a pair of dancers on a dark dance floor. The heavy man dressed in black is invisible, but the bright white dress of a light women is an easy target as she is whirled around. Astronomers look for the bright stars that ‘orbit’ dark partners in the same way.

One of the best candidates is the star called V404 Cygni. Calculations shows V404’s dark partner is twelve times more massive than our Sun, yet totally invisible. But for every black hole orbiting another star, there must be many more solitary ones yet unseen. One of these could lurk quietly much closer to home.

THE COSMIC HOOVER

Although black holes have the power to hoover up anything and everything that strays too close, they can’t hunt. Contrary to popular belief, if you replaced our Sun with a black hole of the same mass the Earth wouldn’t get sucked in, there just wouldn’t be any sunlight. You could even orbit a black hole in a spacecraft just so long as you kept a safe distance.

Get too close though and strange things start happening. Space gets stretched longer and skinnier. You would find your feet being pulled miles away in front of you while your body is squeezed sideways. You will have become a piece of space spaghetti long before you reach the event horizon. Then you’d be ruptured into your own fundamental particles and disappear behind the veil of darkness.

It’d be a spectacular way to go but no-one would see it because time is being stretched as well. The photons carrying the image would struggle harder to leave your body the closer you fell. Even with a few million years to spare, an outside observer will see you slow to a halt above the event horizon, before slowly fading from view.

HEARTS OF DARKNESS

Most astronomers now concede that a black hole heavyweight lurks in the centre of our own Milky Way galaxy. Latest estimates are that it weighs in at a whopping 2 million times the mass of the sun – a dwarf in comparison to some of the truly supermassive black holes that may lurk in the cosmos.

By the 1950s, astronomers began turning optical telescopes towards some of the strongest signals that the new radio telescopes were picking up. Source number 3C 273 was found to be a bright star-like object with a ‘jet’ of intense radiation sticking out of it. It was the first of a number of similar objects given the name of ‘quasar’ or ‘quasi-stellar radio source’, but their real identity remained hidden for decades.

Quasars have now been revealed to be the energetic hearts of very active galaxies: brilliant discs of superheated gas and ruptured stars swirling at nearly the speed of light. Great jets of charged particles are blasted thousands of light years into space from above & below – like an axle through a wheel. The central engine that is driving all this activity, though, is hidden deep inside. It has to be small and it must be extraordinarily dense. The mathematics demand that the only beast that can drive such a display of raw power is a supermassive black hole. The heavier the hole, the faster the gases whirl in orbit. Astronomers have observed speeds which tally with black holes weighing up to five thousand million suns.

The theory goes like this: a galaxy evolves from a vast rotating cloud of gas that begins to clump and condense under its own weight into billions of stars arranged like an enormous Catherine wheel, a Mexican hat or a bee swarm. In the centre, where the gas is concentrated, enough matter to make millions or even billions stars has undergone titanic gravitational collapse to make a supermassive black hole. While the hole is still actively feeding on the inner part of the new galaxy it manifests itself as a quasar. Later, when all nearby food has been consumed, the black hole becomes quiescent, leaving a relatively quiet galactic core like the one in the Milky Way. If this theory is correct, then supermassive black holes are present in all but the smallest galaxies.

TOWARDS THE WITHIN

For all their ferocity, these supermassive black holes are surprisingly gentle giants up close. You can fall into one without turning to spaghetti.

Suppose you or I were an astronaut about to step into such an abyss at the edge of the universe. As I approach the event horizon, blackness spreads upwards around me. The Universe shrinks to a bright point directly overhead. As I meet and cross the horizon the universe above disappears in a blinding flash of photons trapped in orbit around the hole.

I am now inside the black hole and falling towards the Singularity. It’s not dark like I expected. I see a ring of dancing light where the singularity should be. It must be spinning so fast that the centrifugal force has balanced out gravity. Now it’s a naked glowing hula-hoop of indeterminate size. Around it I see glimpses of heavens unimaginable to humans, universes within universes, time within time…

But hey! No matter what I might see or experience inside the black hole, I could never send a message out. The secrets I discover will die with me as I achieve oneness with the Universe, at the central Singularity.

Source www.abc.net.au

{ http://alien-ufo-sightings.com/ }

Assuming E.T. Can Control Gravity What Other Capabilities Can We Expect Them To Have?

The actual way that the universe works is the same everywhere, however, every intelligent life form will have a different understanding of it. Not only have our laws of physics changed over time, even today, different people have different interpretations of how things work. The more advanced a civilization becomes the closer their model of reality will match the actual universe.

While eventually any two independently developed set of laws of physics should converge, Their current similarity will depend both on how different they were to start with and how much progress has been made.

We don’t understand how gravity works. We understand the effects. It is an attractive force in three dimensions. The ‘fabric’ analogy is a tool to help us visualize what is happening. Space-Time is not real. It is a tool to help us figure out reality. We say gravity bends space-time because we can understand that. In reality, nothing is bent, there is no ‘fabric’, and so far as we have discovered, there is no actual entity that we call ‘time.’ Time is another tool we use to help us figure out our reality and what is happening in our reality. Neither the time particle/wave nor the gravity particle/wave has been confirmed. It has been recently glimpsed but that is not confirmation. Only the effects have been seen or discovered. Like a shadow, when we see it, we know that there is something blocking the light, but in the cases of time and gravity, when we look, we can not find the actual entity that is causing the effect.

Gravity control and inertia suggest that they might possess some form of reactionless drive. A reactionless drive is a device to generate motion without a propellant, presumably in contradiction to the law of conservation of momentum. The name comes from Newton’s third law, which is usually expressed as, “for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.” A large number of infeasible devices, such as the “Dean drive”, is a staple of science fiction, particularly for space propulsion. To date, no reactionless drive has ever been validated under properly controlled conditions. Since we do not have a theory of quantum gravity it might be possible to construct such drive by an advanced intergalactic intelligence.

Since such feats would require a lot of understanding of basic physical laws we can assume that any race with such capability have a quantum theory of gravity and can exploit it to practical gains.

Having control over gravity permits interesting industrial processes to become possible. Assuming that one has not limitation over it. You can imagine that the aliens could create what is essentially a “matter furnace” using gravity to create something like accretion disk allowing conversion matter to energy – far safer than antimatter power.

To be a master of gravity means you are a master of time as well. Times fiery arrow relentless chugging forward can be stopped in its tracks. Time would be putty in the hands of these advanced intelligences. They could stop time, stretch it and make it their plaything. They may not age and they may be timeless.

To control gravity is to control the Universe at a level at this time we can only dream of. It brings sources of propulsion and energy that would appear as magic to us hairless apes.

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{ http://www.theangryufologist.us/ }

Bewijst leugendetectortest dat astronauten buitenaards leven zagen?

NASA De eerste ruimteselfie ooit werd in 1966 genomen door Buzz Aldrin, de tweede man op de maan

Bestaan er echt buitenaardse wezens? Ook bekende astronauten zijn overtuigd van hun reizen teruggekomen met verhalen over buitenaards leven. Nu zijn de verklaringen van vier astronauten, onder wie de 'tweede man op de maan', Buzz Aldrin, onderworpen aan een leugendetectortest. En blijkt dat ze deze allemaal hebben doorstaan!

Volgens experts laten de resultaten voor 100 procent zien dat de ondervraagden ervan overtuigd zijn tijdens hun ruimtemissies tekenen van buitenaards te hebben gezien of ervaren. Astronauten Aldrin, Al Worden, Edgar Mitchell en Gordon Cooper deden mee aan de test, die tot de nieuwste technologie voor leugendetectie behoort. De test werd onder meer uitgevoerd op basis van stemanalyses.

Buzz Aldrin: 'Ik zag een ruimteschip'

Aldrin heeft altijd volgehouden dat hij tijdens zijn missie naar de maan een ruimteschip heeft gezien. "Er was daar iets dat dichtbij genoeg was om te kunnen zien, het had een beetje een L-vorm," aldus de astronaut. Worden claimt zelfs dat hij echte buitenaardse wezens heeft gezien. Voor de verklaringen van de inmiddels overleden NASA-pioniers Mitchell en Cooper werden oude stemopnames geanalyseerd. Zij claimen UFO’s te hebben gezien, en ook die informatie werd als betrouwbaar geacht.

Kritiek op organisatie

Ook wordt er kritiek geuit op de organisatie die de tests uitvoerde. De technologie die is gebruikt, de Computer Voice Stress Analyzer (CVSA), zou zijn aangegrepen om 'new age'-denkbeelden geloofwaardiger te maken. Nick Pope, expert op het gebied van research naar buitenaards leven, noemt het nieuwe onderzoek 'pseudo-wetenschap'. 

Nick Pope

✔@nickpopemod

Despite claims Buzz Aldrin and other astronauts passed lie detector tests about having seen UFOs, the truth seems to be that a New Age institute is using CVSA (computer voice stress analysis) on old interviews to infer astronaut belief in aliens. Many regard CVSA as pseudoscience

07:30 - 9 apr. 2018

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 Reuters Buzz Aldrin was de tweede man op de maan in 1969.

{ https://www.nporadio1.nl/ }

Expeditie gaat op zoek naar verzonken menselijke nederzettingen op bodem Noordzee na vondst van fossielen en bewerkte botresten - HLN.be

Bron: Eigen berichtgeving

“Tijdens de IJstijd bevond heel wat zeewater zich in de vorm van ijs op het land en dat maakte dat de zeespiegel ongeveer honderd meter lager lag”, aldus dokter Jan Seys van het VLIZ in een interview op vrt. Dat betekent dat het Europese vasteland in die periode over land bereikbaar was vanuit Groot-Brittannië.

Lees ook

Aan deze vreemde ziekte leed de prehistorische man van Cro-Magnon

Zeebodem

“Onze expeditie wil een 3D-kaart van de zeebodem maken en de interessantste plaatsen vinden om in detail te gaan zoeken naar nederzettingen van onze voorouders”, gaat Seys verder. “Ook toen vestigden mensen zich het liefste aan water – zoals meren en rivieren – zodat ze makkelijker aan voedsel konden geraken. Die zullen we proberen te lokaliseren.” (lees hieronder verder)

EU Maritime & Fish

✔@EU_MARE

Our best wishes to marine scientists and archeologists on board @HowBigIsBelgica Belgian research vessel, starting a journey to understand our prehistoric past in the #NorthSea, sometimes helped by bones found by fishermen! #Brownbank2018 #EYCH2018

9:50 AM - Apr 10, 2018

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Een van de plaatsen die de marine-experts en archeologen onder de loep willen nemen is de Bruine Bank, een 30 kilometer lange zandbank op de bodem van de zuidelijke Noordzee, halfweg tussen de Nederlandse en de Britse kust. Archeologen vermoeden al langer dat het ooit de thuis was van duizenden mensen, op basis van de toevallige vondsten van onder meer vissers.

“Die haalden er al bewerkte stenen en botresten boven”, vertelt dokter Tine Missiaen (VLIZ) vanop het terrein aan onze redactie. “Er werden ook al flink wat fossielen van dieren gevonden en waar dieren zijn, houden zich ook vaak mensen op. Vandaar onze interesse.”

Groot meer

De universiteit van Gent slaagde er ook in om vlakbij een gebied af te bakenen waar een groot meer gelegen moet hebben en een rivierensysteem. Wat het vermoeden dat er ooit ook mensen in de buurt leefden, nog versterkt. “Onze expeditie wil nu de blinde vlekken in kaart brengen in het zuiden van de Noordzee, zodat we een beeld krijgen van het vroegere landschap daar”, aldus nog Missiaen. (lees hieronder verder)

De zoektocht op de Bruine Bank zal vermoedelijk naar het einde van de week op gebeuren, omdat het weer het voorlopig niet toelaat. Momenteel wordt dichter bij de Belgische kust gewerkt.

Sporen

Als de bodem van de Noordzee over enkele maanden gereconstrueerd is op de interessante plaatsen, zal er geboord worden naar microscopische sporen die duiden op de aanwezigheid van mensen en dieren. Zo kunnen kiezelwieren ons bijvoorbeeld vertellen of er op een bepaalde plaats zoet of zout water voorkwam en ons een beeld geven van wat zich duizenden jaren geleden op een bepaalde plaats afspeelde.

De zoektocht wordt nu pas ondernomen omdat nu pas de technologie voor handen is om de expeditie uit te voeren. “We kunnen in vergelijking met bijvoorbeeld 10 jaar terug steeds beter en gedetailleerder speuren naar sporen op de zeebodem”, aldus nog Seys. “Ook met het oog op de toekomst kunnen we er nog iets van leren. Denk aan de opwarming van de aarde die ook een effect zal hebben op ons milieu en de zeespiegel.” 

{ https://www.hln.be/ }

SpaceX sure knows how to stay in the news. I mean, they’re only reinventing spaceflight for a new age of exploration and commercial travel. It’s not all shiny red Tesla Roadsters and mysterious military launches, though. SpaceX launches all sorts of payloads into space, including scientific instruments for the International Space Station. A SpaceX Dragon made it into orbit earlier this month carrying a new scientific lab designed to track some of the most mysterious atmospheric phenomena: red sprites, blue jets, and ELVES.

The lab is called the Atmosphere-Space Interactions Monitor, or ASIM, and the data it could gather could help shine light on some of the least understood occurrences in the natural world. The ASIM is designed to detect and record upper-atmospheric lightning, also known as transient luminous events or terrestrial gamma-ray flashes. These are a broad category of atmospheric disturbances which include the rare red sprite and ELVES, or Emissions of Light and Very low frequency perturbations due to Electromagnetic pulse Sources.

These phenomena have been observed for centuries, but it wasn’t until the development of high-speed cameras in the last few decades that they have been able to be photographed. Gamma-ray flashes weren’t discovered until 1994 and remain largely unknown to science aside from a few photographs taken from space.

Among the phenomena ASIM will study are blue jets, some of the least well known atmospheric electrical disturbances.” The jets are not very well studied because they’re very faint,” the University of Bath’s Martin Fullekrug told the BBC, “They’re mainly blue. Also they’re not necessarily associated with lightning. They pop up now and again and they’re very mysterious.” The ASIM will be turned on this Friday, April 13th and is led by the European Space Agency.

Red sprites last only a few milliseconds.

Stories like this always make me wonder what future generations will discover about our planet. Just a few hundred years ago, we hadn’t even mapped the entire globe, and we’ve only been able to observe the Earth from space for a few short decades. Who knows what natural phenomena we haven’t even a clue about yet because we don’t have the tools to observe them?

{ http://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }

While it seems longer, it’s been only seven years since the last Space Shuttle mission ended on July 21, 2011. That’s nothing compared to how long it’s been since the first humans to land on the Moon in July 1969. Yet both Apollo 11 and one particular shuttle mission – STS-77 in July 1996 – were back in the news this past week, and both for the same reason … UFOs.

“MOON walker Buzz Aldrin and three other astronauts have passed lie detector tests over claims they experienced alien encounters.”

That headline comes from a Daily Star article referring to a “lie detector test” conducted by The Institute of BioAcoustic Biology in Albany, Ohio, on astronauts Buzz Aldrin, Al Worden, Edgar Mitchell and Gordon Cooper. All at one time or another claimed to have seen UFOs during their space missions. However, the so-called lie detector tests may be that in only the loosest sense of the word as this latest technology, as pointed out by Micah Hanks at Mysterious Universe, was actually conducted on voice recordings of the men talking about their alleged encounters since Mitchell and Gordon are both deceased and their stories cannot be tested using more conventional lie detectors.

“NASA releases video of ‘UFO’ from 1969 space mission sparking frenzy online”

That headline comes from a follow-up article the following day by the same Daily Star, which could use a proofreader as well as that “latest technology” lie detector. While the date says “1969,” which was the year of Buzz Aldrin’s alleged UFO sighting, the “video” it refers to is actually from the Space Shuttle mission STS-77 in 1996.

STS-77 crew

That apparent juxtaposition of the numbers in the year is not the only problem with this article. While it’s true that NASA released this video (seen here), it was not a recent release. It’s actually been around since 1996 and was the subject of a Popular Mechanics debunking in 2009 in which identified the UFO as the Passive Aerodynamically Stabilized Magnetically Damped/Satellite Test Unit(PAM/STU), whose launch and deployment was tracked by shuttle cameras and narrated by the astronauts, who often referred to it as the “target” – a common military term for just about everything being watched, not just enemies and UFOs.

It’s too bad we’re forced to look at these sensationalized clips when so much of what was studied on these Space Shuttle missions was only lightly covered at the time and not at all today. STS-77, the 77th of 134 missions, tested one of the early inflatable space structures so common today and performed experiments developed jointly by numerous countries. The astronauts even had some fun working with a Fluids Generic Bioprocessing Apparatus-2 (FGBA-2) to determine if separately stored carbon dioxide, water and thick liquids could be combined in space and consumed without bubble nucleation and resulting foam formation. In other words, they tried (successfully) to make Coca-Cola and Diet Coke in space.

Buzz Aldrin is still looking

Sure, exploration is the ultimate goal of all space programs, but the mundane groundwork and testing is crucial to future success. It’s also a place for many to be a part of the space program – while Neil and Buzz stepped onto the lunar surface, one of the most remembered videos was of the many people in the control room celebrating the success of the project so many had worked so hard to achieve.

It’s time to get back to developing new interest in space exploration, space science and space technologies instead of rehashing old (and misleading) events. As a different Buzz once said (and you don’t need a lie detector test to prove it):

“To infinity and beyond!”

{ http://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }

It’s spring in the Northern Hemisphere, which means anyone with a lawn will soon be spreading fertilizer all over their grass to make it grow long enough and green enough so they can walk on it barefoot for a few days before it turns brown from the drought and excessive heat. According to a new study, that stuff you’re spreading – or at least one element in it — may show aliens in other solar systems evidence that there’s life on Earth. Conversely, the fact that we can’t see it on planets orbiting other stars means they may not have life at all. That element is the ‘P’ in the NPK balance listed on the bag of fertilizer – phosphorus.

In a presentation at the European Week of Astronomy and Space Science in Liverpool last week, astronomers Jane Greaves and Phil Cigan of Cardiff University, described what happened when they recently aimed the William Herschel Telescope in the Canary Islands at the Crab Nebula, a supernova remnant located just 6,500 light-years away in the Taurus constellation. The data, which they’ve only begun to process, showed that it contained what would be considered an average amount of phosphorous for the Milky Way – which surprisingly isn’t much. For comparison, Cassiopeia A – a supernova remnant in the constellation Cassiopeia – was found in 2013 to contain 100 times more phosphorous that the Milky Way average. Because it’s such an new and challenging process, these are the only two supernovae analyzed for phosphorus so far

Crab Nebula

Greaves and Cigan were studying supernova explosions because that is the source of phosphorus in the universe and phosphorus is one of the six chemical elements which all life on Earth depends on. (Can you guess the rest?) In an interview with phys.org, Greaves explains why the low level in the galaxy is a concern to astronomers looking for alien life.

“The route to carrying phosphorus into new-born planets looks rather precarious. We already think that only a few phosphorus-bearing minerals that came to the Earth—probably in meteorites—were reactive enough to get involved in making proto-biomolecules. If phosphorus is sourced from supernovae, and then travels across space in meteoritic rocks, I’m wondering if a young planet could find itself lacking in reactive phosphorus because of where it was born? That is, it started off near the wrong kind of supernova? In that case, life might really struggle to get started out of phosphorus-poor chemistry, on another world otherwise similar to our own.”

(Have you guesses the other five elements? Here’s a hint: Sponch.)

Greaves speculates that Cassiopeia A created more phosphorus because it was a bigger star (duh). It means that life forming on a planet may depend less on its location in a warm “Goldilocks zone” near its own star and more on its proximity to a massive supernovae explosion. That also means the search for life on other planets should focus on the amount of phosphorus detected, along with the other five elements for life – Sulfur, Nitrogen, Oxygen, Carbon and Hydrogen. Thrown in P for phosphorous and their chemical symbols spell SPONCH – a good name for the first alien we find on a phosphorus-laden planet.

Based on the sparsity of phosphorus in the galaxy, will we find life? Should we forget about our lawns and start fertilizing outer space?

{ http://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }

Beams of light coming from the skies in Texas and Phoenix

On April 6, 2018 an unknown beam of light coming from the sky near Rockwall, Texas and it is almost impossible but two days later on April 8 another beam of light coming from the sky in Phoenix.

As with the Texas beam also the Phoenix beam has not the specific characteristics of a sun ray, it is clearly something different and it is hard to explain from where these beams come from.

  

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

NASA Link: https://hirise.lpl.arizona.edu/ESP_025723_1950

Here is a very interesting discovery on Mars of many structures with clear signs of intelligence construction. These are ruins of an alien civilization. Had they been found on Earth, people would have no qualms about it. However this is Mars, and since knowing that alien life existed so close to Earth would really shake up the entire world. This is why NASA doesn't want the world to know about it. NASA wants to keep it secret to see if they could find any alien technology that could be useful to America. Imagine finding a broken computer on Mars...and bringing it back, only to discover the computer has an alien version of artificial intelligence in it. NASA downloads the program and integrates it into todays modern tech, using it to control the world. 

Scott C. Waring-Taiwan

{ http://www.ufosightingsdaily.com/ }

Apollo 11 astronaut Buzz Aldrin 'pa sses lie detector test about his encounter with alien life, UFO Sightings News.

Awesome news! Buzz has passed his lie detector test. This means he never made up the story, its all true. The story of how he had seen UFOs on the opposite side of a moon crater is all true! Very cool and glad to hear he had no fear to take such a test. Just wish we had a video of the full test. 
Scott C. Waring

News states:
'There was something out there': Apollo 11 astronaut Buzz Aldrin 'passes lie detector test after recalling his encounter with alien life' during the historic 1969 mission to the moon. Apollo 11 astronaut Buzz Aldrin has reportedly passed a lie detector test after recalling his encounter with alien life during the historic 1969 mission to the moon. Aldrin, 88, was a part of the test that also analyzed interviews from astronauts Al Worden, Edgar Mitchell and Gordon Cooper.

VIDEO: Train causes strange 'blue UFO' across Bucks and Oxfordshire

The mystery of the strange blue glow seen moving through the skies over Buckinghamshire on Wednesday night appears to have been solved.

And is seems it was not down to aliens - despite a wave of rumours on social media.

Pictures emerged from across the county of an eerie blue light travelling slowly overhead.

Lots of theories have been put forward, including a UFO, blue alien eyes and light pollution.

The blue light moved across the sky and was spied from Chinnor and Thame to High Wycombe and Gerrards Cross, as well as in Oxfordshire. 

• READ MORE HERE: UFO sighting? Strange 'blue glow' spotted moving across the sky over Bucks

However, a video has emerged which appears to show the cause of the blue glow.

This CCTV video, posted on Facebook by Shelley Ifill, captures a train moving at speed at 9.15pm on Wednesday with a blue light shining from the roof towards the sky.

It's not yet known exactly where the video was shot.

Rail companies have been contacted to establish which train was carrying the powerful beam, and why.

{ http://www.bucksfreepress.co.uk/news/ }

Why Extraterrestrial Life May Be More Unlikely Than Scientists Thought

Space War is Here — And The U.S. Is Not Ready

A space war “is going to happen”, and the Pentagon is not ready to face it, warn several US experts and politicians.

As if we didn’t have enough problems here on Earth; Overpopulation, Diseases, Wars, Famine, etc., it seems that we need to be worried about a potential war in space.

An article published in Politico notes that Russia and China are “far ahead” of the United States when it comes to space militarization and in the development of means capable of destroying or rendering inoperative the satellites on which the US Army depends: from gathering intelligence to guiding precision bombs, missiles, and drones.

Meanwhile, the Pentagon is trying to catch up after years of underinvestment, injecting “billions of dollars” to bolster its defenses against antisatellite weapons, train troops and refine means to retaliate in a new form of combat that until now has only been present in Hollywood movies.

Image Credit: Shutterstock

“We are now approaching a point where ‘Star Wars’ is not just a movie,” said Steve Isakowitz, CEO of The Aerospace Corp., a government-funded think tank that serves as the military’s leading adviser on space.

According to Isakowitz, the U.S. can no longer afford to take its dominance for granted.

“That supremacy in space has enabled us to have the world’s greatest war-fighting capability … whether it is our soldiers on the field, our drones that fly overhead, our bombers that travel around the world, intelligence we collect,” he told POLITICO. “More and more every day, literally, we become more dependent on it.

“And our adversaries know that,” he added in an interview.

Unsurprisingly, US President Donald Trump recently called for the creation of a “space force”: a separate military branch responsible for guaranteeing US supremacy in space (a role now played mainly by the Air Force).

Likewise, Trump’s new National Security Strategy designated space as “vital interest” for the first time, and ordered the Armed Forces to consider space as “a priority domain,” Politico explains.

But that may not be enough.

Congressman Mike Rogers, who chairs the Subcommittee on Strategic Forces of the Armed Forces of the House of Representatives, predicts that war in space will “happen,” and that “it’s just a matter of whether it happens in the next two years or in the next five or six years.“

In this sense, Rogers is worried about whether the US Air Force is paying enough attention to space.

“They always say, ‘We got this, we’re planning for this in the future,’” Rogers said. “But when you ask them to prioritize space this year, they say they can’t. People have to remember when it comes to fighting a war, our eyes and ears are in space. We can’t let adversaries take our eyes and ears out.”

Other specialists urge the Trump Administration to think more carefully about its military space policy. Thus, Joan Johnson-Freese, a professor of national security at Naval War College, doubts that space can be treated like any other battle zone.

“You can not control all the space all the time,” he says, explaining that “simply the physics of space is different than the others.”

On the other hand, Cassandra Steer, acting executive director of the Center for Ethics and the Rule of Law at the University of Pennsylvania, warns that “an armed conflict in space would be catastrophic for all players,” including “Neutral States.”

Source: Space war is coming — and the U.S. is not ready

Featured Image Credit 

{ https://www.ancient-code.com/ }

Buzz Aldrin ‘Passes UFO Lie Detector Test’ Leaving Experts ‘Convinced’ Aliens Exist

The former American astronaut and the second man to land on the moon, Buzz Aldrin has passed a lie detector test for claims that he saw Aliens on his trip to the moon.

Along with Buzz, three other astronauts, Al Worden, Edgar Mitchell and Gordon Cooper, also underwent the test and the results were positive.

In an interview for the Science Channel in 2005, astronaut Buzz Aldrin said the crew of the famous Apollo 11 mission saw a UFO on its way to the Moon.

Later, Aldrin would say that his words were taken out of context, even though his story was supported by Dr. David Baker, principal scientist of Apollo 11.

However, over the years Aldrin has also made other strange statements which seem to indicate that he knows more about the extraterrestrial presence in space than he would like to share.

Buzz Aldrin deploys a seismometer in the Sea of Tranquility.

Credit: NASA

Even in 2014, the famous NASA astronaut clarified what he saw had seen in a series of questions on Reddit.

While speaking about his ‘alien encounter‘ Aldrin said;

“On Apollo 11 in route to the Moon, I observed a light out the window that appeared to be moving alongside us. There were many explanations of what that could be, other than another spacecraft from another country or another world – it was either the rocket we had separated from or the 4 panels that moved away when we extracted the lander from the rocket and we were nose to nose with the two spacecraft.”

“So in the close vicinity, moving away, were 4 panels. And I feel absolutely convinced that we were looking at the sun reflected off of one of these panels. Which one? I don’t know. So technically, the definition could be ‘unidentified’. We well understood exactly what that was. And when we returned, we debriefed and explained exactly what we had observed. And I felt that this had been distributed to the outside world, the outside audience, and apparently, it wasn’t, and so many years later, I had the time in an interview to disclose these observations, on another country’s television network.”

“And the UFO people in the United States were very, very angry with me, that I had not given them the information. It was not an alien.”

“Although there were many theories about it, none of the crew of Apollo 11 could find a logical and rational explanation for the strange phenomenon.”

Apparently, the Apollo crew quickly concluded that what they had seen on route to the moon was sunlight reflecting off an adapter panel – one of four ‘hatches’ that enclosed the Lunar Module and were jettisoned once that stage of the rocket detached.

“It was not an alien. Extraordinary observations require extraordinary evidence. That’s what Carl Sagan said,” Aldrin concluded in a Reddit AMA in 2014.

But now, new information reveals that Aldrin has passed the lie detector test on his encounter with a UFO during the Apollo 11 mission in 1969.

The investigation has also analyzed astronauts Al Worden, Edgar Mitchell and Gordon Cooper.

Apollo 11 astronaut Buzz Aldrin poses with the American flag on the surface of the moon in July 1969.

Image Credit: NASA

The experts confirmed that their results show that they were “completely convinced” that they had encountered extraterrestrial life during their trip to the Moon.

According to reports, the ‘Institute of BioAcoustic Biology in Ohio’ analyzed the voice of the astronauts proving that when speaking of alien life and strange encounters on the moon, the astronauts were not lying.

Speaking to controversial news outlet ‘The Daily Star’—known for publishing bizarre UFO stories— the ‘Institute of BioAcoustic Biology in Ohio’ explained that the recordings show that Aldrin was ‘completely convinced’ of the truth of his story.

Aldrin has claimed that he saw ‘something out there that was close enough to be observed, sort of L-shaped,’ on his journey to the moon – although he has since dialed back on the idea it was aliens, reports Metro.

However, Buzz wasn’t the only one to have allegedly spoken the truth about encountering aliens. Another astronaut, Edgar Mitchell – the sixth man to walk on the moon – also claimed to have witnessed aliens on his trip to the moon, and his voice, just as Aldrin’s, reveals he is also ‘telling the truth,’ the Institute has claimed.

However, as noted by experts, we have still no idea what the he Institute of BioAcoustic Biology is basing this on – as the company makes some rather outlandish claims for its technology.

The Institute says, ‘As a bridge between ancient ideas of sound healing and the futuristic, Star Trek, protocols that the institute provides, it is now possible to reverse diseases and traumas previously thought to be incurable, to reveal the secrets of our true nature, to enhance our lives, to predict what may be our fate through the frequencies of our voice.’

However, Science Alert has taken a swing at the tests, the results and the company itself saying that that’s not even remotely science.

Scient alert explains that while Bioacoustics is a legitimate branch of science, in this case, however, the institute’s line of study bears the hallmarks of pseudoscience.

{ https://www.ancient-code.com/ }

The Great ‘Ancient Alien’ Gallery Of Utah

The Southwestern United States is home to countless ancient figurines, depicting beings with elongated heads, halos, antennas, almond-shaped eyes, and even what some interpret as beings in astronaut-like space suits. These figurines were created around 4,000 years ago.

Holy Ghost panel in the Great Gallery, Horseshoe Canyon.

Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons.

In the southwestern United States, mainly in the state of Utah, there is a great concentration of places where thousands of years ago, early inhabitants depicted strange beings with elongated heads, massive height, and helmet-like objects, as well as a number of depictions of what many authors have identified as cosmic maps.

The enigmatic figures date back 1,500 and 4,000 years ago, although some could be older, while others figurines could have been created as recently as one thousand years ago.

But it doesn’t matter whether they were created four thousand years ago, or two thousand years ago, what matters is the message that the ancients tried conveying.

One of the greatest enigmas that experts have tried solving is the meaning of the figures painted on countless rocks in Utah.

Are these mysterious representations the result of ancient man’s ingenuity? Imagination? Are these figures depictions of ancient abstract art? Or is it possible, as some authors suggest, that these mysterious beings were the so-called sky people?

The most famous of all panels is located in the Horseshoe Canyon, formerly known as Barrier Canyon, west of the Verde River in the state of Utah.

The rock art at horseshoe canyon is known as Barrier Canyon Style (BCS) rock art.

The Great Gallery

Part of the Great Gallery.

Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons.

The Great Gallery is a spectacular ancient art panel of more than 60 meters in length by about 5 of height in which are represented some 20 anthropomorphic images of natural size, the largest of which exceeds 2 meters in height.

The so-called great gallery is divided into two differentiated areas, so that the most separated representations, on the left, are known as the Panel of the Holy Spirit, due to the presence of an unusual-looking figure that some identity with a spirit and others with some shamanic ritual.

The Holy Ghost panel of the Great Gallery has been dated to between 400 A.D. and 1100 A.D. by dating two rockfall events of which one exposed the rock face the panel was made and the second damaging part of the panel

This gallery offers the largest and best-preserved collections of Barrier Canyon Style rock art in the United States.

The Great Gallery, Canyonlands National Park.

Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons.

This panel has been dated by optically stimulated luminescence between 400 and 1100 AD.

According to experts, the pictograms of the Great Gallery were made using ocher-red color to represent more than 80 figures, whose meaning remains a profound enigma.

The creation and dating of the figurines is also a problematic issue for experts because the pigments used by the ancients lacks organic material and cannot be analyzed by radiocarbon dating.

The rock art of the great gallery is believed to have been the product of the Desert Archaic culture, a nomadic group of hunter-gatherers predating the Fremont and Ancestral Puebloans.

{ https://www.ancient-code.com/ }

Meet ‘Die Glocke’, The Mysterious Nazi Anti Gravity Machine

Die Glocke (The Bell) was a supposed Nazi Wunderwaffe, or wonder weapon.

It was described by Polish journalist and writer Igor Witkowski in Prawda or Wunderwaffe (2000), later popularized by military journalist and writer Nick Cook, as well as by Joseph P. Farrell and other authors who associate it with Nazi occultism antigravity and free energy research.

Witkowski came across details about Die Glocke in after obtaining access, through a contact in the Polish intelligence service, to the transcripts of the interrogation of an SS officer, Jakob Sporrenberg.

In them, the German narrated the details of an experiment carried out in a hidden base called Der Riese, which was in the Owl Mountains, near the Wenceslaus mine, in the Sudetes (near the Czech border).

The device, shrouded in mystery, has also been described by many authors as a possible Nazi time traveling machine.

According to Patrick Kiger’s article published in the National Geographic magazine, Die Glocke has become a popular topic of speculation, with a fandom around this and other so-called Nazi Wunderwaffen.

The Bell was presented as a magical, occult weapon, based on a technology that goes far beyond anything mankind was capable of producing.

However, the possibility that there was a hidden device completely revolutionary for its time and very rare, if possible, is something that has excited the imagination of many writers.

Some of them like Jan Van Helsing, Norbert-Jürgen Ratthofer and Vladimir Terziski did not have issues when mixing reality and fiction in a mixture that included mystical weapons, the Nazi esotericism, secret societies, and UFOs, a phenomenon that began spreading quickly in the fifties.

So, what the heck is the bell?

An illustration of the Bell.

Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons CC BY-SA 3.0

The Bell or Die Glocke was a supposed experiment carried out by scientists from Nazi Germany who worked for the SS in a facility known as Der Riese (The Giant, in German), near the Wenceslaus mine  close to the Czech border.

The Bell is described as a device “made of a hard and heavy metal”, with an approximate diameter of 2.7 m and a height between 3.7 m and 4.6 m, having a shape similar to that of a large bell.

According to Cook’s interview with Witkowski, this device contained two counter-rotating cylinders that would be “filled with a substance similar to mercury, violet in color”.

This metallic liquid was codenamed “Xerum 525” and was “stored in a tall, thin thermos, one meter high and encapsulated in lead.”

It is said that the experiments used additional substances, mentioned as Leichtmetall (light metal, in German), “including thorium and beryllium peroxides.”

Witkowski describes that when The Bell was activated, it had a range of 150 m to 200 m.

The Polish journalist explained that the goal of Die Glocke was to generate antigravity propulsion – that’s why it was tightened to the ground by means of thick chains.

Witkowski explains that when the device was activated it could cause deadly effects on living beings that were within a radius of 150 to 200 meters : freezing of the blood in the circulatory system, decomposition of the organic tissues…

This illustrates purported top secret Nazi scientific technological device knows as “the Bell” (Die Glocke). For illustration variety of sources and described features are combined. 

Image Credit:Wikimedia Commons CC BY-SA 3.0

Moreover, five of the seven members of the research team – led by physicist Walther Gerlach – perished during the tests, although it was not clear how.

Witkowski tells in his book that a French scientist named Elie Cartan had already taken important steps in that field of antigravity after the First World War, although the antigravity that generated by his alleged machine was too weak to have a practical application. Die Glocke may have been based on the technology introduced by Cartan.

Based on certain external evidence, Witkowski claims that the ruins of a concrete structure – nicknamed “The Henge” – in the vicinity of the Wenceslas mine (50 ° 37’43 ” N 16 ° 29’40 “E), about 3.1 km southeast of the main Sokolec Complex of the underground works of the Riese Project, could have served as a testing platform for an experiment on” antigravity propulsion “generated with The Bell.

However, the abandoned structure has also been interpreted as the remains of a conventional industrial cooling tower.

Whether the Bell may or may not have existed remains one of the best hidden Nazi secrets.

However, we do know that ‘Der Riese’ really existed and consisted of underground facilities that began to be built from 1943 from Książ Castle, with tunnels, railways, telephone lines, etc.

The labor force employed was about thirteen thousand prisoners, mostly transferred from Auschwitz, and according to the testimony of Albert Speer, the architect of the regime, the budget for the works amounted to one hundred and fifty million marks.

Featured image credit: Die Glocke / Discovery Channe

{ https://www.ancient-code.com/ }

'UFO sighting' leaves children screaming in terror

THIS spooky apparition terrified onlookers when it appeared behind the clouds and seemed to float down towards earth.

By Hayley Coyle 

VIRAL NEWS

UFO SIIGHTING: A menacing mass was spotted above the island of West Nusa Tenggara, Indonesia

The ominous dark mass appeared in the sky above the remote island of West Nusa Tenggara - sparking screams of terror from those below.

The glowing circular object resembled a UFO slowly descending from space, said onlookers.

A teacher at the school where it was filmed said children were "screaming hysterically" when it emerged - close to top holiday hotspot destination Bali.

He said: "This happened at about 2.35pm, when suddenly the students who were busy playing in the school yard, spontaneously screamed hysterically seeing unusual sights, I heard the children's voices, then came out to see and immediately recorded the phenomenon using my cell phone.

"I still don't know what it is. It could be some kind of rainbow. But people were very scared."

The teacher said that none of the people who saw the incident or anyone who has viewed the video have been able to identify the incident in the sky.

He said it was not the sun being obscured by clouds because the shape was too near and too large to be the sun.

However, the sighting could be a form of "fire rainbow" or circumhorizontal arc caused by different clouds interacting with crystals of water trapped in the atmosphere, according to experts.

Tropical temperatures in the region can also cause sudden movements of clouds and changes in atmospheric pressure, resulting in bizarre scenes.

Meanwhile a space boffin told the Daily Star online that “we are being watched” by aliens.

The conspiracy theorist, called Graham, said: “Sightings all over the world are increasing at a dramatic rate.

“We are being watched and observed like a large planet sized scale lab experiment, I am of the opinion that the other races visiting our planet are not hostile.

“After all, with the technology they must employ to travel vast distances etc, I’m sure they could wipe us out in the blink of an eye.”

CONSPIRACY DEPOT

ALARMING: These two scary blobs were seen on the ISS feed

His claims come after images emerged of “seven UFOs” on the International Space Station feed. (will add pics from yesterday's story)

Graham added: “Eventually, they will make themselves known.

“There is a theory that a timescale has been firmly set and agreed by world leaders and the ET's and I think the time for disclosure will be within the next 15 years.

{ https://www.dailystar.co.uk/ }

Stonehenge’s Giant Stones Were In Place Long Before Humans Existed

A paper published in the journal British Archaeology provides evidence that two of the largest and most significant blocks of stone at Stonehenge may have already been in ‘position’ millions of years before people arrived to Stonehenge.

One of the most mysterious ancient sites on the surface of the planet is Stonehenge. Located in near Amesbury, in the county of Wiltshire, England, about fifteen kilometers north of Salisbury, this ancient megalithic site has remained shrouded in mystery for decades.

Stonehenge is composed of large blocks of metamorphic rocks distributed in four concentric circles.

The exterior of Stonehenge is thirty meters in diameter and is formed by large rectangular stones of sandstone that, initially, were crowned by lintels, also made of stone.

Inside this outer row is another circle of smaller blocks of bluish sandstone.

Image Credit: Shutterstock.

This encloses a structure with a horseshoe shape built with sandstone stones of the same color.

In its interior remains a slab of micaceous sandstone known as the Altar.

And while officially, the ancient site was built between 3000 BC to 2000 BC, a new study claims the ancient site may have existed long before humans lived on Earth.

What Stonehenge is, and why and how these massive stones were ‘transported’ to where they stand today remains a profound mystery.

However, an archaeologist believes he may have found an answer that could help unravel Stonehenge’s mystery.

As noted by the Times, Mike Pitts, a British scientist who specializes in British pre-history, claims to have discovered evidence that two of the largest and most significant blocks of stone at Stonehenge may have already been there millions of years before people arrived.

The expert explains that the accidental alignment with the sunrise and sunset of the longest and shortest days of the year made ancient people—around 3,000BC—construct the site we see today.

Mr. Pitts also happens to be one of the few who have actually performed excavations on the site.

In a study published in the journal British Archaeology, Mr. Pitts describes uncovering a pit, around six meters (20 feet) in diameter, besides the heel stone in 1979. The Freelancer archaeologist explains that Stonehenge’s heel stone is 75 meters (250 feet) from the center of the stone circle, weighs around 60 tons and has not been shaped or dressed, unlike the other sarsens.

As explained by Mr. Pitts, the hole, rather than being a socket dug for a missing standing stone, was once home to huge heel stone.

In an interview with the Times, Mr. Pitt explains:

“The assumption used to be that all the sarsens at Stonehenge had come from the Marlborough Downs more than 20 miles away. The idea has since been growing that some may be local and the heel stone came out of that big pit.”

“If you are going to move something that big you would dress it before you transport it, to get rid of some of the bulk. That fact alone suggests it has not been moved very far. It makes sense that the heel stone has always been more or less where it is now, half-buried.”

As explained by the archaeological site’s website, Stonehenge was erected in four main stages:

The first Stonehenge was a large earthwork or Henge, containing a ditch, bank, and the Aubrey holes, all probably constructed approximately 3100 BC. The Aubrey holes are round pits in the chalk, about one meter wide and deep, with steep sides and flat bottoms. They form a circle about 284 feet in diameter. Excavations have unveiled cremated human bones in some of the chalk filling, but the holes themselves were probably made, not for the purpose of graves, but as part of the religious ceremony. Shortly after this stage Stonehenge was abandoned, left untouched for more than 1000 years.

The second and most dramatic stage of the construction of Stonehenge started sometime around 2150 BC. Around 82 bluestones from the Preseli mountains, in south-west Wales were somehow transported to the site. It is believed these stones, some weighing 4 tons each were dragged on rollers and sledges to the headwaters on Milford Haven and then loaded onto rafts. They were carried by water along the south coast of Wales and up the rivers Avon and Frome, before being dragged overland again to near Warminster in Wiltshire. The final stage of the journey was mainly by water, down the river Wylye to Salisbury, then the Salisbury Avon to West Amesbury.

This astonishing journey covers nearly 240 miles. Once at the site, these stones were set up in the center to form an incomplete double circle. ( During the same period the original entrance of the circular earthwork was widened and a pair of Heel Stones were erected. Also, the nearer part of the Avenue was built, aligned with the midsummer sunrise.)

The third stage of Stonehenge, about 2000 BC, saw the arrival of the Sarsen stones, which were almost certainly brought from the Marlborough Downs near Avebury, in north Wiltshire, about 25 miles north of Stonehenge. The largest of the Sarsen stones transported to Stonehenge weigh 50 tons and transportation by water would have been impossible, the stones could only have been moved using sledges and ropes. Modern calculations show that it would have taken 500 men using leather ropes to pull one stone, with an extra 100 men needed to lay the huge rollers in front of the sledge.

These were arranged in an outer circle with a continuous run of lintels. Inside the circle, five trilithons were placed in a horseshoe arrangement, whose remains we can still see today.

The final stage took place soon after 1500 BC when the bluestones were rearranged in the horseshoe and circle that we see today. The original number of stones in the bluestone circle was probably around 60, these have long since been removed or broken up. Some remain only as stumps below ground level.

Source:

• British Archaeology magazine

{ https://www.ancient-code.com/ }

Watch: UFO 'Mothership' Filmed in North Carolina?

An intriguing piece of footage out of North Carolina has paranormal enthusiasts buzzing as some suspect that it could show a veritable UFO mothership.

Purportedly filmed in the town of Columbus just a few days ago, the video was subsequently submitted to MUFON and eventually found its way online where it has captured the imagination and attention of UFO researchers.

The admittedly-nondescript footage shows a set of lights hovering in the sky with two in the center being particularly bright and two pairs of lights fanning out on each side from the middle.

The configuration suggest some kind of triangular shape, although this is largely speculation since the video is so hard to discern.

Fortunately the unnamed witness behind the camera also made sure to film the moon a few times during the sighting to provide something to compare with the objects as far as their size and height.

The fact that the video is not particularly fantastic almost works in its favor when it comes to the veracity of the footage, since it would seem to rule out a hoax of some kind.

And, for his part, the man who saw the anomaly sounds genuinely mystified by what he is watching unfold in the sky above him.

As to what it may have been, aside from the always-popular alien hypothesis, some have speculated that it is a secret government test craft.

Aside from those two options, the prosaic explanation to be offered up by skeptics that would perhaps best fit this scene is that the lights are simply lanterns that were sent soaring up into the sky and spotted by the unwitting witness.

What's your take on the weird footage? Let us know at the Coast to Coast AM Facebook page.

Source: Charlotte Observer

{ https://www.coasttocoastam.com/ }

Is Dark Matter Made Up of Mini Black Holes from the Big Bang?

Russia's Robot FEDOR to Be the First to Fly to Space on Board New Spacecraft

by Staff Writers
Moscow (Sputnik)

Final Experimental Demonstration Object Research - FEDOR

The new Russian manned spacecraft Federatsiya (Federation) is designed to deliver people and cargo to low earth orbit, as well as to the moon. The first such spaceship is expected to be commissioned by 2021.

It will be a modernized version of the humanoid robot FEDOR (Final Experimental Demonstration Object Research) that is expected to be the first to fly to outer space on board the state-of-the-art manned spacecraft Federatsiya (Federation), Yevgeny Dudorov, technical director of the Russian robot manufacturing company Android technology, told Sputnik.

"It will be the next version of FEDOR which will be created on the basis of technology that has already been developed ... It will most likely get a different name," Dudorov said. At the same time, he did not rule out that the new robot may be called "FEDOR-2" or "Test Engineer."

Dudorov explained that during the flight, the robot will be tasked with collecting data so that the developers can then assess the possibility of controlling the spaceship with its help both in the autonomous and the copying mode.

The Federatsiya was designed by Russian Space Corporation Energia to deliver people and cargo to low earth orbit and the moon. The spacecraft is capable of staying in the autonomous flight mode for up to 30 days and up to a year as part of a space station system.

The first Federatsiya spacecraft, which will be 80 percent made of composite materials, is due to be commissioned before the end of 2021.

Source: Sputnik News

Related Links
Roscosmos
All about the robots on Earth and beyond!

{ http://www.spacedaily.com/ }

Daytime UFO filmed over Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 8-Apr-2018

Here’s one new footage of a bright object flying across the sky above Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. This was filmed on 8th April 2018.

Witness report: 

I saw one orb so I filmed. When I edited I found two more. I was coming back from a dog walk heading north up Franford ave in Philadelphia when I saw an orb in the sky in what I believe is NW direction. I have been looking at the sky a lot since my first sighting so it was exciting to see another potentially, so I filmed an object fly towards the clouds and then I lost it behind clouds and then buildings. I still wondered if maybe it was a baloon or bird but I very muxh doubted it. I went back to check my footage and had trouble seeing what I saw so I played with the contrast and sharpened it and saw two more!

Author (source: MUFON)

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

Quel est cet ovni filmé depuis l'ISS

Régulièrement, les caméras de la Station spatiale internationale (ISS) filment des objets volants non identifiés, alias ovnis. Satellites, débris ou étages de lanceurs, quand ce ne sont pas de simples reflets dans les vitres : ces images font le bonheur des ufologues. Ici, on voit un objet allant dans le même sens que l'ISS, un peu plus bas et (logiquement) un peu plus rapide. Rêvons un peu.

Non, l'espace n'est pas rigoureusement vide. Juste au-dessus de l'atmosphère, il est même assez fréquenté, surtout par des objets créés de main d'Homme. Ce peut être des satellites ou des débris spatiaux mais aussi des étages de lanceurs en train de retomber dans l'atmosphère. Ces apparitions plus ou moins fugaces sont aussi, parfois, des phénomènes lumineux dans la haute atmosphère et il est arrivé qu'il ne s'agisse que de reflets sur un hublot ou dans l'optique de la caméra.

Qu'importe. Chaque évènement de ce genre fait le bonheur des amateurs de l'étude des ovnis, qui y voient facilement la preuve de l'existence de vaisseaux extraterrestres patrouillant dans le secteur. Mieux, la molle réaction de la Nasa, qui est le plus souvent « bon eh bien c'est un débris, comme d'habitude ; on va tâcher de voir ce que c'est, comme d'habitude », conforte les convictions de ces passionnés, qui pensent fréquemment que l'agence spatiale dissimule des preuves de tourisme d'extraterrestres. La Nasa est même régulièrement accusée de couper le flux vidéo au moment crucial.

Débris, satellite, ombre ou Surfeur d'argent

L'exercice d'identification est tout de même amusant, voire intéressant. Ici, on voit un objet, de dimension inconnue, filant à peu près dans la même direction que l'ISS et un peu plus rapidement. Il ne peut donc s'agir d'un avion. Sa distance est impossible à déterminer mais l'objet évolue au-dessus de la couverture nuageuse. Celui-ci est clairement en orbite, sur une altitude plus faible que celle de l'ISS. Sa vitesse plus élevée est donc logique. En effet, plus l'orbite est éloignée de la Terreplus la vitesse de satellisation est faible : elle est d'environ 8 km/s au niveau de l'ISS et de 1 km/s à la distance de la Lune (laquelle, bonne connaisseuse des lois de Newton, a d'ailleurs adopté cette vitesse).

Il reste en lice trois hypothèses :

• un satellite en orbite très basse ;
• un débris ;
• l'ombre d'un satellite (l'éclairage des nuages indique que la lumière solaire vient d'en haut à droite, ce qui exclut qu'il s'agisse de l'ombre de l'ISS elle-même).

Une quatrième hypothèse, bien sûr, est qu'un vaisseau spatial d'exploration venu d'une autre planète soit en train d'étudier la météorologie terrestre, qui serait encore mystérieuse pour les concepteurs de cet engin. Une cinquième est celle, tout simplement, du passage de Norrin Radd, le Surfeur d'argent, profitant des vagues atmosphériques au-dessus d'une formation cyclonique...

© Nasa

{ https://www.futura-sciences.com/sciences/ }

Archaeologists discover stunning Greco-Roman temple in the Egyptian desert

It took scientists a while before they realized the enormity of their discovery. Aside from the temple itself, archaeologists have also discovered a trove of artifacts, including statues, coins, and pottery.

Image Credits: Egypt Ministry of Antiquities.

The discovery was made in Egypt’s Western Desert, some 348 miles west of Cairo and 200 miles south of the Mediterranean Sea, in the Siwa Oasis. As archaeologist Sarah Parcak explained, it’s not every day that you find this kind of temple.

“What’s amazing is you don’t tend to hear every day of new temples found in Egypt,” space archaeologist Sarah Parcak, who isn’t involved in the dig, told Elaina Zachos at National Geographic. “It’s going to shed more light on the history of Siwa Oasis.”

Image Credits: Egypt Ministry of Antiquities.

The historical timeline of the oasis isn’t clear, but it seems that it has been inhabited for at least 12,000 years. However, it’s been one of the most isolated Egyptian settlements, deep in the desert — but not isolated from the influence of other cultures. The newly found temple dates from between 200 BCE and 300 CE, a period when Egypt was under Hellenistic and then Roman rule, thus explaining the nature of the temple. During this period, the influence of Ancient Greek and Roman people was felt in all layers of Egyptian life, including architecture, but not many buildings remain from that time, making this finding extra special.

Within the temple, archaeologists have uncovered a sculpture of a man’s head and two limestone lion statues, as well as impressive pottery and lots of coins. The total extent of the temple is not yet known, and the temple hasn’t been dated, but archaeologists believe that the it may offer valuable information about the Greco-Roman period in Egypt.

“I’m hopeful that this excavation team is going to uncover the settlements or the houses of the priests,” Parcak says.

Interestingly, the oasis is most known as the location where the Greek king Alexander the Great consulted the oracle of Ammon. Unfortunately, history didn’t record what Alexander asked and what the oracle answered.

The archaeological dig is still a work in progress, and researchers expect more findings in the future. Ayman Ashmawi, the head of the ministry’s Ancient Egyptian Antiquities department, says several other digs are planned for this year.

{ https://www.zmescience.com/ }

Zag Buzz Aldrin echt een UFO? Astronaut slaagt voor ‘leugendetectortest’ - HLN.be

Bron: News.com.au

De intussen 88-jarige Aldrin maakte gewag van een vreemd object toen hij op weg was naar de maan tijdens de missie van Apollo 11. “Er was daarbuiten iets dat dicht genoeg was dat we het konden observeren. Het had de vorm van een L”, klonk het. Volgens de Institute of BioAcoustic Biology in Albany (Ohio) mogen we zijn getuigenis ook niet zomaar van tafel vegen, want de man zou dat echt geloven. Hij en zijn collega’s Al Worden, Edgar Mitchell en Gordon Cooper zouden deelgenomen hebben aan een onderzoek en zouden ‘onder strikt opgevolgde wetenschappelijke omstandigheden’ geslaagd zijn voor een leugendetectortest.

De beweringen van het Instituut worden nu in heel wat media gepubliceerd, maar er duiken meteen ook heel wat kritische stemmen op. Zo wordt er op de website van de instelling met geen woord gerept over het onderzoek in kwestie, en is het helemaal niet duidelijk of de mannen wel hebben deelgenomen aan een test. Het zou bijvoorbeeld evengoed kunnen dat BioAcoustic Biology oude interviews met Aldrin geanalyseerd heeft, toen de man voor het eerst vertelde over de UFO op weg naar de maan.

Geen alien 

Aldrin twijfelt trouwens zelf sterk aan het feit dat hij in 1969 een ander ruimteschip zag. Drie jaar geleden maakte hij dat duidelijk tijdens een vraag- en antwoordgesprek op sociaalnetwerksite Reddit. “In Apollo 11 zag ik een licht uit het raam van ons ruimteschip, en dat licht leek ons te volgen. Er waren heel wat mogelijke verklaringen voor dit fenomeen, en achteraf bekeken ben ik ervan overtuigd dat het de reflectie van de zon op een van de panelen was. Maar omdat we niet helemaal zeker zijn wat het is, kan je in principe spreken van een ‘unidentified object’.”

De man heeft ook al laten weten dat zijn uitspraken destijds uit hun context werden getrokken in de media. “Ik zag toen geen alien, al geloof ik best dat er buitenaards leven kan bestaan in onze melkweg. En er zijn miljoenen andere melkwegstelsels buiten het onze. Het is dus erg waarschijnlijk dat er ergens anders nog leven is. Maar ik denk dat die honderden lichtjaren van ons verwijderd zijn.”

{ https://www.hln.be/ }

Stonehenge's massive pillars were 'in place long before humans arrived' and prehistoric architects built around the mystery monoliths

• Mike Pitts specialises in British pre-history and has excavated at Stonehenge
• He says the largest and most important sarsen stones site gave it its significance
• Unlike other rocks at Stonehenge they were already in place on Salisbury Plain
• Their coincidental alignment with the sun prompted people to build Stonehenge

By Tim Collins For Mailonline

The mystery of why Stonehenge was built on the unremarkable chalk plateau of Salisbury Plain may have finally been solved. 

An expert claims two of Stonehenge's largest stones had been in place at the site for millions of years before Neolithic people built the monument.

Their coincidental alignment with the sunrise and sunset on the longest and shortest days of the year prompted ancient people to construct Stonehenge around them. 

Scroll down for video 

The mystery of why Stonehenge was built on the unremarkable chalk plateau of Salisbury Plain may have finally been solved. An expert claims two of Stonehenge's largest stones had been in place at the site for millions of years before Neolithic people built the monument 

The coincidental alignment of sarsen stone 16 and the Heel stone with the sunrise and sunset on the longest and shortest days of the year prompted ancient people to construct Stonehenge around them

Mike Pitts specialises in British pre-history and is one of a small number of scientists who have excavated on the site of the ancient monument. 

In a paper published in the journal British Archaeology, the freelance archaeologist describes uncovering a pit, around six metres (20 feet) in diameter, besides the heel stone in 1979.

The heel stone is 75 metres (250 feet) from the centre of the stone circle, weighs around 60 tonnes and has not been shaped or dressed, unlike the other sarsens.

It is the point at which the sun rises and falls below the horizon at midsummer and midwinter, from the perspective of those looking towards it from inside Stonehenge.

Mr Pitts believes the hole, rather than being a socket dug for a missing standing stone, was once home to huge heel stone.

A second undressed stone in the centre of the circle lines up with the heel stone and sun at the winter and summer solstice.

This rock, known as stone 16, also has a pit next to it, suggesting it too originated at the site of Stonehenge.

Speaking to The Times, Mr Pitts said: 'The assumption used to be that all the sarsens at Stonehenge had come from the Marlborough Downs more than 20 miles away.  

The heel stone is 75 metres (250 feet) from the centre of the stone circle and weighs around 60 tonnes . It is the point at which the sun rises and falls below the horizon at midsummer and midwinter, from the perspective of those looking towards it from inside Stonehenge

'The idea has since been growing that some may be local and the heel stone came out of that big pit. 

'If you are going to move something that large you would dress it before you move it, to get rid of some of the bulk. That suggests it has not been moved very far. 

'It makes sense that the heel stone has always been more or less where it is now, half-buried.'  

Sarsen is a layer of sandstone that formed millions of years ago above the chalk layer on Salisbury Plain.

During the various ice ages, permafrost repeatedly froze and thawed this chalk layer, shattering the sarsen.

Over millennia, these stones sank below the surface, leaving a few fragmented rocks jutting out.

It is made of Sarsen, a layer of sandstone that formed millions of years ago above the chalk layer on Salisbury Plain and can be found across Salisbury Plain and the Marlborough Downs in Wiltshire. Pictured - Sarsen stones in a garden in Wiltshire

These stones, of varying sizes, can be found across Salisbury Plain and the Marlborough Downs in Wiltshire, as well as in Kent and in smaller quantities in Berkshire, Essex, Oxfordshire, Dorset and Hampshire.  

The act of building Stonehenge may have been as important a ceremony to its ancient creators as the use of the finished stone circle, experts claimed in March.

Construction of the 5,000-year-old monument drew people together from all over the country to drink and get to know one another in large ceremonial feasts.

Work on Stonehenge could have been used to show outsiders the power of the small community building it, researchers at English Heritage said.

The theory may explain why some of the Wiltshire site's stones were transported more than a hundred miles (160km) from a quarry in south Wales.

The large standing stones at Stonehenge are made of local sandstone, but the smaller ones, known as 'bluestones', come from a quarry in south Wales

Work on Stonehenge could have been used to show outsiders the power of the small community building it. The theory may explain why some of the Wiltshire site's stones were transported 140 miles (225km) from south Wales, experts said

Susan Greaney, a senior historian at English Heritage, said: 'In contemporary Western culture, we are always striving to make things as easy and quick as possible, but we believe that for the builders of Stonehenge this may not have been the case.

'Drawing a large number of people from far and wide to take part in the process of building was potentially a powerful tool in demonstrating the strength of the community to outsiders.

'Being able to welcome and reward these people who had travelled far, perhaps as a kind of pilgrimage, with ceremonial feasts, could be a further expression of the power and position of the community.'

The theory follows English Heritage's recent discovery of feasting at the nearby Neolithic Durrington Walls settlement, also found in Wiltshire.

Stonehenge has been used as a centre for ceremonies throughout its 5,000-year-history. Pictured is an artist's impression of a Neolithic ceremony at the site circa 3,000 BC, when the monument was just a series of ditches without the monoliths it is known for today

According to the charity's historians, this attracted people from across the country to help build the Neolithic monument. 

The discovery pushed English Heritage to look again at theories of how Stonehenge was built, concluding that building the monument was important ceremonially and cause for celebration.

Ms Greaney said the new theory may explain a mystery surrounding the impressive distances some of Stonehenge's monoliths were carried.

The large standing stones at the monument are made of local sandstone, but the smaller ones, known as 'bluestones', come from a quarry in south Wales.

Stonehenge's architects would have had to shift the huge rocks 140 miles (225km) from what is now Pembrokeshire Coast National Park to the monument's build site. 

Ms Greaney said: 'As soon as you abandon modern preconceptions which assume Neolithic people would have sought the most efficient way of building Stonehenge, questions like why the bluestones were brought from so far away - the Preseli Hills of south Wales - don't seem quite so perplexing.'

The announcement came as English Heritage hosted events to celebrate 100 years since the monument was donated to the nation, including inviting the public - for the first time at the site - to help move and raise a four-tonne stone (pictured)

She added that the idea of 'stone-pulling ceremonies', in which people celebrate moving monoliths by hand, is not a new one.

She said pictures from a 1915 stone-pulling ceremony on Nias, Indonesia, showed people in ceremonial dress 'revelling' in the task and taking part in feasts and dances.

Stonehenge is one of the most prominent prehistoric monuments in Britain.

The monument that can be seen today is the final stage of a project that spanned 1,500 years.

Stonehenge was donated to the nation's heritage collection in 1918 by owners Cecil and Mary Chubb.

Mr Chubb had bought the then-neglected monument on impulse at an auction three years earlier having been sent there by his wife to bid for a set of dining room chairs.

Read more:

• Council for British Archaeology | British Archaeology magazine
• Stonehenge rocks were there ¿long before humans¿ | News | The Times

{ http://www.dailymail.co.uk/ }

While the mystery of why Stonehenge was built remains a puzzle, the mystery of why it was built where it’s still somewhat standing may have been solved … and the answer opens up a new mystery. A leading Stonehenge expert and one of the few people to have actually excavated at the site claims that two of its largest stones were placed there millions of years before humans arrived … and their summer solstice alignment with the sun was merely a coincidence. Wait, what?

The Heel Stone

In an interview with The Times about his research which has just been published in the journal British Archeology, archeologist, journalist and photographer Mike Pitts describes how he came to this radical theory. It starts at the Heel Stone, the largest sarsen (sandstone block) at the site. Located 75 meters (250 feet) from the center of Stonehenge, outside the entrance and close to the highway, it weighs 60 tons and is 4.7 meters (15.4 feet) high, with an additional 1.2 meters (4 feet) underground. The Heel Stone’s significance starts with the fact that it’s the only sarsen at Stonehenge that has not been shaped or dressed – both signs that it would have been carved before being moved to its present location. Its size and shape indicated otherwise to Pitts.

“The assumption used to be that all the sarsens at Stonehenge had come from the Marlborough Downs more than 20 miles away. The idea has since been growing that some may be local and the heel stone came out of that big pit. If you are going to move something that large you would dress it before you move it, to get rid of some of the bulk. That suggests it has not been moved very far. It makes sense that the heel stone has always been more or less where it is now, half-buried.”

The “big pit” Pitts referred to is a six-meter diameter hole he himself discovered while digging near the heel stone in the 1970s. The size makes it too big to have been used for a standing stone, so he thinks it’s where the heel stone was lying before it was lifted out and moved. In fact, Pitts believes the Heel Stone and Stone 16, another odd-shaped stone, are visible remnants of a large number of broken sarsen boulders buried beneath Stonehenge. He also believes that Stone 16 came from a different hole near the center of Stonehenge … and the two stones at that time had something unusual in common.

“The most likely explanation is that it too held a natural sarsen boulder. It’s possible that at the end of the ice age we had two really large visible sarsen boulders, probably the two largest on Salisbury Plain, close together on the midsummer sunrise-midwinter sunset axis.”

Did that mysterious natural alignment millions of years ago of two huge boulders with the Sun draw people to this site over 5,000 years ago and inspire them to drag more massive stones from 20 mile away to build their own massive monument to … something?

As Egyptians looking at the pyramids might say … stranger things have happened.

{ http://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }

Over the weekend, a number of tabloids were discussing a lie detector test which purportedly confirms astronaut Buzz Aldrin saw a UFO on his way to the moon in July 1969.

On Sunday, the UK’s Daily Star reported on the story, borrowing from earlier reports in which the Apollo 11 astronaut addressed something unusual he and fellow astronauts Neil Armstrong and Michael Collins observed while en route to the moon.

“There was something out there that was close enough to be observed, sort of L-shaped,” Aldrin was quoted saying. The story was quickly picked up and re-written by other news outlets, some of which elaborated on sightings of unusual things seen by Aldrin, and other astronauts over the years.

The focus of the story had not been UFOs, however, so much as a study which purportedly “confirmed” what Aldrin and other astronauts had claimed to see. According to The Star, an Albany, Ohio-based company called The Institute of BioAcoustic Biology “carried out complex computer analyses of the astronauts’ voice patterns as they told of their close encounters.”

“Although the technology is still top-secret,” The Star reported, “these studies are claimed to be more reliable than current lie detector tests, and could soon replace those used by the FBI and police.”

Aldrin on the job.

Little else was said about the Albany-based company where the study was carried out, apart from the fact that astronauts Al Worden, as well as Edgar Mitchell and Gordon Cooper, participated. It is noteworthy that Mitchell passed away in February 2016, and Cooper in October 2004, indicating that the lie detector tests in question must have occurred at least 14 years ago; strangely, the tabloids are only now picking up on this story (Update: Newsweek commented on the story shortly after publication of this article, referring to voice recordings which were tested, rather than the actual voices of the astronauts; if nothing else, this would allow for a more recent, posthumous testing of Cooper and Mitchell’s voices to have been possible).

Looking for further details about the Institute of BioAcoustic Biology online first brings up a Facebook page associated with the company, which describes its endeavors as follows:

“The research being conducted by the Institute of BioAcoustic Biology is on the forefront of energy medicine; creating the doorway to our next dimension of health revolution. In addition, the techniques hold promise in answering questions about how our universe was formed, and how our aging and perception of time can be monitored using frequency.” 

Admittedly, I share an interest in subjects like cosmology and human perception of time too, although the wording of the company’s mission statement above seems a little odd (pseudoscientific is another way of putting it). From the Facebook page, a link to the company’s website leads to a page where URL links to everything from aura-color readers, to Mike Adam’s “Health Ranger” website can be found. Needless to say, links and associations like these would be enough to cause many to reconsider whether the studies involving Buzz Aldrin and others were indeed “more reliable than current lie detector test,” as The Star reported, let alone whether they might “soon replace those used by the FBI and police.” It might also explain why there hasn’t been much said about them until now.

Our intent isn’t to pass judgment here, so all discussion of the veracity of “top-secret” studies in acoustic biology aside, Aldrin has claimed many times that he and the Apollo 11 crew observed something while en route to the moon. The question remains as to what, precisely, that was.

In 2012, I wrote about the claims which appeared in writer Jay Barbree’s book Neil Armstrong: A Life of Flight, where the author said he was told by a confidential source that what the astronauts saw was sunlight reflecting off “a top-secret spy satellite” as it tumbled out of control.

Buzz Aldrin in space, with the Earth visible in the background.

According to Barbree’s account, “The only UFO Apollo 11’s astronauts were seeing as Neil had suspected had been built here on Earth — one they could not identify… and when I told him, he laughed and said, ‘Well, what the hell, isn’t that what a UFO is — an unidentified flying object?’”

The only issue with this explanation is that apparently neither Barbree, nor his “secret” source, bothered to validate the information. As pointed out to me in 2012 by space journalist and historian Jim Oberg, “Barbree’s story is way off base, he relied on an old memory of Armstrong’s instead of checking with actual mission records that show the encounter was 212,000 miles out, nowhere near the geosynchronous arc (24,000 miles) where the spy satellites lurked. He wanted to tie in an unrelated juicy rumor (a correct one) with his Armstrong biography, and didn’t take basic validation steps.”

In other words, while the spy satellite explanation is both juicier, and seems more down-to-earth than the alien spacecraft theory, it remains equally unlikely on further inquiry.

At the end of the day, we still don’t know exactly what it was Aldrin and his crew observed, although Aldrin himself has suggested in the past that it may have been a discarded rocket panel from their own vessel, and that “it was not an alien.” We also have no confirmation as to whether experimental bio-acoustic technologies are really any better than a standard polygraph test at validating his experiences. Hence, Buzz Aldrin’s UFO encounter remains an interesting case, but certainly not conclusive evidence of aliens.

{ http://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }

Aliens may someday take the place of the gods in the human collective consciousness. At least, that’s according to new research presented by Dr. Diana Pasulka at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington. Pasulka conducted a six-year study in which she travelled around the country speaking with scientists, Silicon Valley tech gurus, professionals, entrepreneurs, and other Very Important People who admit to believing in extraterrestrial intelligence. Pasulka’s study reveals that not only is belief in extraterrestrial intelligence widespread and found in nearly all strata of society, but it has also approached levels rivaling modern rates of belief in deities.

There’s a reason heaven is usually depicted as being in the sky.

According to a recent presentation Pasulka gave under the title The Incarnational Technological Self: The Case of the Crashed UFO Artifact, this widespread belief in aliens stems from a variety of cultural factors and scientific endeavors:

Widespread belief in aliens is due to a number of factors including their ubiquity in modern media like The X-Files, which can influence memory, and the realist effect produced by the search for planets that might support life, as well as alleged alien artifacts that have recently made news in outlets such as the New York Times.

In her new book American Cosmic, Pasulka claims that science fiction and other pop culture texts have become a means of answering questions formerly answered by religion. Through her research, Pasulka found that more than half of U.S. adults and more than 75% of young Americans believe in intelligent extraterrestrial life. Compare that to recent surveys by the Pew Research Center which have found that only around 68% of Americans are absolutely certain in their belief in God, and it’s clear to see that something is happening here. But we don’t know what it is yet, do we?

More importantly, will the symbol be a big-eyed grey alien head, or a flying saucer?

It makes total sense that advanced extraterrestrial aliens could take the place of gods in our mythologies. The similarities are many: both are omniscient beings who (mostly) live in the cosmic heavens and who are capable of near-magical abilities. Couple those with the mounting evidence that life likely began in space, and it’s safe to say that perhaps Scientology is only the beginning of what could be a wave of new religions which venerate alien beings as opposed to flying spaghetti monsters. Any potential discoveries of alien life will certainly lead to the creation of alien-worshipping religions, an idea which pops up in science fiction regularly. Is Earth ready for discovery, or will it lead to renewed clashes between and among the religious?

{ http://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }

A video posted on April 5, 2018 from Brazil appears to show a weird “humanoid” shape floating in the skies over the city of Goania. Taken from a cell phone in a car, the video shows this strange UFO floating completely stationary while trees and other objects come in and out of frame, briefly obscuring the bizarre shape. Curiously, the object (or whatever it is) filmed bears an eerie similarity to footage of odd floating humanoidshapes taken in Sydney, Australia, and Abu Dhabi, UAE in October of 2017.

The Brazilian video was originally posted on Facebook and then uploaded to YouTube by the channel secureteam10, where you can watch it for yourself. If it’s a fake, it’s a very good fake. That’s not to say it is, in fact, a floating alien, returned messiah, more ghost planes, or any of the other speculative explanations, of course. It could very well be a trick of the light or an oddly shaped cloud (probably not a weather balloon, swamp gas, or ball lightning, though). What’s strange is that very similar things have been photographed or videoed in wildly different parts of the world under different atmospheric conditions.

As Ian Fleming wrote, “Once is coincidence, twice is happenstance, three times is enemy action.” That’s a good line and metaphor, not a suggestion to go throw rocks at floating humanoids, which would be horrible, horrible advice.

In October of 2017, the Sydney humanoid was filmed. This sighting happened on a apparently clearer day, and earlier in the day than the Brazil video. Once again, this video shows a dark UFO with what look to be arms hanging by its sides. In contrast to the Brazil humanoid, this object does appear to move, and the “arms” are far less pronounced in the Sydney video. It’s hard to tell, but the object does look like it’s slowly moving through the sky, parallel to the ground. Also, the Sydney humanoid apparently disappeared and reappeared several times over the course of the sighting.

What if it’s just some guy minding his own business, just trying to float around for a while?

The Abu Dhabi sighting was also in October, 2017. From the very limited documentation on this sighting, it looks closer to the Sydney video than the Brazilian video. Which is interesting, considering that they happened around the same time.  The Dubai Astronomy Group stated that the object photographed in the sky over Abu Dhabi was likely pieces of a Russian refueling rocket breaking up in the atmosphere. While that explanation may make sense in the case of the Abu Dhabi event, specifically, it does not explain the sighting in Sydney, where the object appears to be moving perpendicular to gravity, and it certainly doesn’t explain the humanoid UFO in Brazil, where the object appears to be completely motionless, let alone falling and breaking apart.

It’s hard to say with any certainty at all that these events are connected. It’s easy to look at a shape and see what you want to see, and especially if that shape has the vaguest resemblance to something human. At this point it’s merely curious, but it will certainly be interesting to see if any more floating humanoids show up in the coming months.

{ http://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }

Rich Reynolds has a new post at his UFO Conjectures blog titled “Ufologists vs Paranormalists.” Rich begins as follows: “I’ve written about the drive of some in the UFO community to insert UFOs among the weird litany that encompasses the paranormal category, all things outside the normal scheme of things: ghosts, Big Footed creatures, ‘sea monsters,’ men who dress in black, mystical visions (of angels, Holy Mary, saints, and sinners), et cetera.” Rich adds: “…the persistent attempts to lump UFOs among the queer phenomena that pops up in situ to a few humans have to be thwarted by real UFO aficionados. UFOs are a phenomenon worthy of its own, singular attention, not a mystery to be hawked like a carnival ride or sideshow.” You can find Rich’s article at this link.

Me and Rich are good mates, but we certainly don’t agree on everything – and his new article is a perfect example of that! It’s important – as I see it anyway – to note that Rich’s interest in UFOs dates back decades. We’re talking about the period in time when UFOs were known as Flying Saucers, and when the aliens referred to us as “earthlings” and as the “people of planet Earth” (or was that just in old B&W sci-fi movies? Maybe…). We’re also talking about times when thieving aliens stole soil by the bucketful, when strange tripod-landing marks were found in the fields of irate farmers, and when long-haired, know-it-all aliens tried to save us from atomic destruction. But, those days are – largely – gone. Today’s Ufology, in many respects, is very different. And much stranger. Which brings us back to Rich.

As I have always said, the most important people in the field of Ufology are the witnesses. Not the radio-hosts, not the bloggers, not the authors, and not the researchers. Without witness testimony, we have very little to go on, in terms of what the UFO phenomenon is or might be, and what it’s up to. And, like it or like it not, there are far more than a few cases on record which do suggest a connection between the UFO issue and what we might call paranormal phenomena. To ignore the weird shit side of Ufology is, in essence, self-censorship. Of course, there is nothing new about this paranormal connection. Check, out – as just one example of many – John Keel’s 1970 book, UFOs: Operation Trojan Horse. Keel made it very clear that there are crossovers between Ufology and other supernatural phenomena.

Rich refers to “men who dress in black.” Rich may not like it (in fact, I’m sure he doesn’t) but the vast majority of all MIB encounters have nothing to do with visits from the likes of “government agents.” Things would be much simpler if they were from the NSA, the CIA or the FBI! The real MIB are often pale and cadaverous. They don’t seem to be fully self-aware. There are reports of UFO witnesses falling sick after encountering the MIB – sometimes seriously so, too. Other witnesses tell of violent poltergeist activity in the home, after the MIB have left. People feel mind-controlled and hypnotized by the Men in Black.

Rich also makes mention of “Big Footed creatures.” Yes, the Bigfoot-UFO phenomenon is without any doubt at all a highly controversial one. Indeed, I know for sure that the vast majority of Bigfoot seekers in the field of Cryptozoology absolutely cringe when the “Sasquatch and Saucers” issue rears its problematic head. But, the truth of the matter is that there are a lot of Bigfoot/UFO cases on record. Stan Gordon wrote an entire book on the subject: Silent Invasion. It’s essential reading for those who want to learn more about the paranormal links to the Bigfoot issue.

I could go on and on (and I will for a while): there are cases in which alien abductees have seen dead friends and relatives on-board UFOs. Abductees talk of their soul or life-force being ripped from their bodies. Strange synchronicities abound in Ufology. It’s possible to interact with entities that many perceive as alien via the likes of DMT. There is no need for our strange visitors to land on the lawns of the White House: they have far weirder ways of interacting with us at a personal level. Disturbing cases of paranormal “possession” have been reported by UFO witnesses. All of this is far removed from what I think Rich prefers Ufology to be – which is, I suspect, the days when the likes of Donald Keyhoe, Ed Ruppelt, Harold T. Wilkins, and APRO were flying high. Back then, it was all nuts-and-bolts spaceships (rocket-ships, even). Not now, though.

But, like I said, the witnesses are the people  who we need to listen to, as they are the ones who had the experiences. And even though it might not sit well with many, the reality of the situation is that there really is far more to Ufology than just us “earthlings” being visited by an extraterrestrial equivalent of NASA. The situation is way, way weirder.

{ http://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }

Extraterrestrial Life: AI Technology Predicts Probability Of Life On Other Planets

Alien PROOF: Buzz Aldrin and three other astronauts PASS lie detector on 'UFO encounters'

BUZZ Aldrin who was the second man to walk on the moon and three other astronauts have passed lie detector tests over claims they experienced alien encounters while in orbit, it has been claimed.

Canada Presents Radioactive Physical Evidence Of A Real UFO

Does new alien Canadian coin suggest that extra-terrestrial revelation is imminent?

Last week, the Royal Canadian Mint announced the release of a new coin depicting a man being borne over by an unidentified flying object. The inspiration behind this unusual coin is the so-called Falcon Lake Incident, the most sensational UFO story in Canadian history and one of the most inexplicable close encounter stories of all time. The release of the coin has naturally led to a great deal of chatter about the evidence behind contact with extra-terrestrial beings and whether it stands up to scrutiny.

The Falcon Lake incident in itself has provided UFO researchers with fairly robust evidence of extra-terrestrial involvement including fragments of the bizarre material used to forge the craft and the severe burn marks suffered by the man who encountered the vessel which was described as smelling very strongly of sulfur.

“If it does indeed turn out that there is relevant physical evidence, if this evidence is carefully collected and analyzed, and if this analysis leads to the identification of several facts concerning the UFO phenomenon, then will be the time for scientists to step back and ask, what are these facts trying to tell us? If those facts are strong enough to lead to a firm conclusion, then will be the time to confront the more bizarre questions. If, for instance, it turns out that all physical evidence is consistent with a mundane interpretation of the causes of UFO reports, there will be little reason to continue to speculate about the role of extraterrestrial beings. If, on the other hand, the analysis of physical evidence turns up very strong evidence that objects related with UFO reports were manufactured outside the solar system, then one must obviously consider very seriously that the phenomenon involves not only extraterrestrial vehicles but probably also extraterrestrial beings.”

books.google.ca/...

Of course, the Falcon Lake incident is not the only event in recent decades which have confounded skeptics. In addition to various fragments of supposed alien crafts, there has also been a huge amount of electrooptical data, video footage and eye witness testimonies over the years. This vast sum of evidence led Luis Elizondo, the former director of the ATTIP study which focused on unidentified flying objects, to say, “If this was a court of law, we are beyond reasonable doubt.”

Now that the evidence is becoming all the more overwhelming, it has been suggested that those in positions of authority have decided to slowly create a process of normalization before revealing that extra-terrestrial visitors to Earth are real. Why this process is beginning at this current time and why it has taken so long for the powers that be to admit to the world that the hundreds of UFO sightings the world over are real are questions which still have to be answered. However, it is very unlikely that the reason has anything to do with the threat of an impending alien invasion as it appears that these beings have been visiting this world for quite some time.

{ https://www.disclose.tv/}

Video – Do Extraterrestrials lived in Mexico before 7000 Years ago?

ANCIENT treasure including artefacts which are said to to depict alien beings “found in a historic cave” have added to claims ancient civilisations on Earth were visited by advanced species from outer space.

The ancient aliens theory claims there is evidence in historical records of a race of advanced astronauts arriving on Earth and helping our forefathers build monuments such as the Pyramids of Giza in Egypt.

It is based on supposed depictions of flying saucers and alien-like beings in thousands of year old arts and crafts, coupled with the mysteries of how structures like the pyramids and Stonehenge, in Wiltshire, which were constructed with technology of the time.

Now, a video has gone viral online claims to have produced further evidence to support the alien myth.

In the video, you see a number of what appears to be Klaus Dona artefacts, which are known to date back thousands of years.

Some of the figures display alien-like figures, with long faces and round eyes.

And more sculptures appear to show spaceships floating above the ground, Dailystar.co.uk reports.

Others are said to be completely unexplainable and some claim it could its proof several other races co-existed thousands of years ago.

The clip was captured in Mexico and uploaded to YouTube channel UFOmania before going viral.

Viewers have tried to get to the bottom of the mystery.

One posted: “Haven’t seen these artefacts before, but none of this surprises me. There’s a lot more to come.”

And another added: “Incredible evidence to support that extraterrestrials have been engaging the human race for a very long time.”

A third believed: “They lived on Earth for over 7,000 years and they created man.”

Others were not as convinced, stating they may not be entirely real.

A viewer pointed out: “All in mint condition, I reckon they are fake.”

Others said that just because objects in the shape of no human creatures were created, it did not mean these creatures ever truly existed.

One posted: “So, the fact that an ancient culture drew pictures and made sculptures of creatures that don’t look like any known life form on Earth proves their existence?

“Ok, so by the same logic, Centaurs, Minotaurs, Dragons, Unicorns, Satyrs, and Gryphons must all exist.”

Attribution:JON AUSTIN

{ http://www.etupdates.com/ }

This Week's Top Space Stories

Photo Credit: Ken Crawford

Photo Credit: Virgin Galactic/www.MarsScientific.com & Trumbull Studios

Photo Credit: Bhattacharyya et al., JGR 2018

Photo Credit: NASA

Photo Credit: Fraunhofer FHR

Photo Credit: Amy Thompson/Space.com

5. 60 years in the making, solar mission begins next step

On Sunday (April 1) NASA's Parker Solar Probe finished final checks and began its journey to Cape Canaveral, Florida. The final assembly of this mission will then pick up where scientists at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center left off, to prep the sun-studying mission for a July 31 launch. A solar mission like the Parker Solar Probe is 60 years in the making, and it's designed to observe the sun's outer atmosphere, known as the corona, up close like never before.

[Full Story: So Hot, It's Cool: Record-Breaking Sun Probe Nearly Ready for Launch]

Photo Credit: Ken Crawford

Photo Credit: ISRO

Photo Credit: ESO/UltraVISTA team/TERAPIX/CNRS/INSU/CASU

Photo Credit: Steve Scanlon

Photo Credit: F. Baganoff et al./NASA/CXC/MIT

Photo Credit: Paul E. Alers/NASA

Secretive X-37B Military Space Plane Wings Past 200 Days in Orbit

The X-37B space plane has a payload bay about the size of a pickup-truck bed, which can be outfitted with a robotic arm.

Credit: Boeing

Dual-use tech

"The X-37B has been and remains a technology demonstrator," said Joan Johnson-Freese, a professor in the National Security Affairs Department at the Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island. 

"Given that most space technology is dual-use, with the ever-increasing sway toward warfare in space, it's likely that the more militaristic uses of the space plane will be pursued more vigorously, and likely openly given the [presidential] administration's proclivity toward chest thumping," she told Space.com, expressing her personal view.

How long the unpiloted, reusable craft will stay aloft is not known, but experts have said it's likely to land at KSC's Shuttle Landing Facility, as the OTV-4 mission did back on May 7, 2017. That was a first for the program, as all prior missions had ended with a tarmac touchdown at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California.

These seafaring robots will search for life across the solar system

This rover is an early version of a vehicle that will one day be sent to Jupiter’s moon Europa

NASA/JPL-Caltech

We recognize Earth as the blue planet, but it’s not the only ocean world in our neighborhood. Oceans may be concealed beneath thick crusts of ice on moons orbiting Jupiter, Saturn, and Neptune, and on the dwarf planets Pluto and Eris. Saturn’s moon Titan even boasts liquid seas right on its surface, although they are full of methane rather than water.

All those tiny bubbles could cause two big problems. Firstly, they might get in the way of the submarine’s scientific equipment, making it more difficult to measure depth and other conditions. Even more worrying, the bubbles might prevent the submarine’s propellers from working properly.

“If we’re trying to move from one location in the seas to another, are all those bubbles going to coalesce at the back end of the submarine?” Hartwig says. “You try to spin the propellers and the vehicle won’t move, it will just sit and spin."

“This whole effervescence issue is a non-factor for submersibles on Earth because the amount of air that can get dissolved in water is very, very low,” Hartwig continues. “The pressure is higher on Titan and because the liquid is colder more gas is dissolved in the liquid, which means more gas can come out.”

Since we don’t know the exact chemical composition of Titan’s seas, it’s not certain how much nitrogen they hold. To get a better sense of what a submarine might encounter, Hartwig and his colleagues at Washington State University have recreated Titan’s seas here on Earth. They filled a test chamber with different mixtures of methane, ethane, and dissolved nitrogen at temperatures and pressures similar to those on Titan, then added a little heater in to mimic the heat that would radiate from an actual submarine.

The good news: if a submarine has stopped moving in order to collect samples, it might not have to worry. It probably wouldn’t emit enough heat to create the amount of fizz needed to stymie its instruments, the team reported in February in the journal Fluid Phase Equilibria. However, “We still haven’t ruled out the propeller issue,” Hartwig says. He intends to repeat the experiment with a propeller instead of a heater to find out how much bubbling the vessel might face as it journeys through Titan’s seas.

A possible design for a submarine that would explore Titan’s seas

NASA Glenn Research Center

The submarine we send to Titan could have the same long, slender shape we are used to seeing on Earth. This kind of vehicle would weigh around 2,600 pounds and be about 20 feet long, Hartwig says. However, it would have to return to the sea surface in order to communicate with Earth. It would also have to wait until the 2040s to arrive, when Earth will be high enough above Titan’s horizons to give the submarine a direct line of sight (and communication) back to our planet.

NASA is also considering sending a smaller, turtle-shaped submarine. This “Titan Turtle” would be paired with an orbiter to relay information to Earth. It could communicate while submerged and could potentially launch a few years earlier because it wouldn’t need to rely on Earth’s position in the sky.

Titan is unique among ocean worlds, Hartwig says. Nowhere else in the solar system are liquid seas so easy to reach. But a Titan submarine could inspire designs for future vessels that will explore seas hidden beneath the ice crust on other bodies. “I’ve always looked at Titan as a pathfinder,” Hartwig says.

Under the ice

One of these less accessible seas can be found on Europa. While the moon’s surface is lashed with radiation from Jupiter’s magnetic field and is a bleak -280 degrees Fahrenheit, the ocean underneath is protected by a wall of ice that averages 5 to 15 miles thick. Because this ocean is made of water, it’s a tantalizing place look for life and study what chemical conditions might be needed for it to form.

To get through Europa’s icy barricade, scientists are testing robots that would melt or cut their way down to the ocean. These robots could carry submarines, rovers to drive along the underside of the ice, or even landers that would sink to the seafloor. Once they hit the water, these probes would likely encounter balmy temperatures around 32 degrees Fahrenheit. “It’s actually a fairly comfortable environment for our electronics,” says Andy Klesh, an engineer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. “What is a little bit more troublesome is the saltwater.”

Europa’s seas could be as briny as or own and may even be significantly saltier, says Kevin Hand, a planetary scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. “As an added challenge, there is likely some sulfuric acid in the mix,” he says. This means a probe’s electronics will be in danger of corrosion. The robot would also face formidable pressures as it ventured deeper into the ocean. On the seafloor, the pressure would be akin to that at the bottom of the Mariana Trench on Earth.

All in all, a journey to Europa’s seas is going to be a pretty rough ride. “We have the challenges of deep space exploration along with the challenges of deep ocean exploration,” Klesh says. “We have a vacuum in space; we have high pressure under the ice. And we have radiation on the way out there…we’re protected from that underneath the ice but then the environment’s trying to corrode us along the way.”

The easiest place to visit will be the underside of Europa’s ice shelf, he says. Klesh, Hand, and their colleagues are working on a rover that would drive around on the bottom of the ice. A rover or deep-sea probe wouldn’t be buffeted by currents, as would likely happen with a submarine. “These rovers [and] these landers may be the best way to explore in a very controlled matter and not be tossed about or knocked into other things,” Klesh says. The underside of the ice is also a particularly good place to search for life. On Earth, algae and microbes like to anchor themselves beneath the ice. If life exists on Europa, it may be drawn to this kind of terrain as well.

Klesh and his team are eager to begin the hunt. They’ve been testing their rover—currently known as BRUIE (Buoyant Rover for Under-Ice Exploration)—in Alaska’s freezing lakes. Its wheels sport both circular sawblades and little panels that act like snowshoes, distributing the rover’s weight across the ice. This prevents BRUIE from cutting into the ice and getting stuck in place.

The version of BRUIE that will eventually visit Europa will likely be carried through the ice by the robot responsible for digging down to the sea. That means it has to be pretty small, likely 18 inches or less in length, Klesh says. In two weeks, he plans to test collapsible wheels on BRUIE, which would allow it to become more compact and portable. The team also hopes to send BRUIE on its most ambitious mission yet—a trip nearly 1,000 feet beneath sea ice without a tether.

Ideally, a rover on Europa would also be untethered. “We have had a tendency to end up slicing the tether at least once during almost every trip when we’ve been out there,” Klesh says. But despite the risk of tangling it represents, a cord may be needed to provide power and communicate with equipment on the surface.

BRUIE’s razor-sharp wheels are equipped with panels to prevent it getting stuck as it drives on the underside of the ice

NASA/JPL-Caltech

Klesh and his team are also looking for easier ways to reach the ocean. They have used submersibles to explore moulins—steep, flooded shafts that form inside glaciers—in Alaska. Last summer, their robot traveled about 160 feet deep beneath the ice, and was able to find connecting points between different tunnels. It’s possible that Europa also has moulins in its ice shell that a rover or submersible could use to travel part of the way down to the water.

There’s still a long way to go before a rover is ready to make the jaunt to Jupiter’s moons or beyond. Hopefully, Klesh says, the planned Europa Clipper and Europa Lander missions will pave the way for a probe to be sent beneath the ice.

In the meantime, the rovers that will one day explore Europa could teach us a few things about our own planet. BRUIE is already being used to scope out how thawing permafrost is releasing methane in Arctic lakes. And this fall, the intrepid rover will take a three or four-month-long sojourn in those chilly waters.

“The scientific goal is to leave the rover underneath the lake ice to watch the seasonal changes as the ice forms and thickens above these methane-rich lakes as the sun sets and the winter goes dark,” Hand says. This could reveal how a rover might become frozen in place as the ice around it thickens. It’s also a chance to learn more about an environment too punishing for humans to observe on our own.

“The largest ocean world of all is right here on Earth,” Klesh says. “The techniques we’re using to start to look at exploring Europa, we’re applying here to explore…regions we have never been able to go to before.”

{ https://www.popsci.com/}

Exclusive: Massive Ancient Drawings Found in Peruvian Desert

Etats-Unis : quand deux pilotes expérimentés croisent... Un ovni !

Publié par Julie Cohen-Heurton

Le 24 février dernier, un premier pilote survole l'Arizona et voit soudainement apparaître un objet volant qu'il n'arrive, à aucun moment, à identifier. Quelques minutes plus tard, c'est un autre pilote sur un autre vol qui voit surgir le même objet. Une drôle d'histoire dont Paris-Match se fait l'écho et qui, certes, laisse perplexe mais génère surtout un certain nombre d'interrogations.

• A lire aussi : Deux pilotes de ligne croisent un ovni

Que s'est-il vraiment passé ?

Compte tenu de cette curieuse apparition au dessus du désert de l'Arizona, les deux pilotes décident de contacter, chacun de leur côté, la tour de contrôle d’Albuquerque. Leurs appels ont été rendus public la semaine dernière par un site de référence spécialisé dans l'actualité de la défense répondant au nom de The War Zone.

Le premier avion aurait, semble-t-il, contacté les contrôleurs aériens de ladite tour et demandé : "Est-ce que quelqu’un est passé au-dessus de nous il y a environ 30 secondes ?". Réponse du contrôleur alors en place : "Négatif". Et le dialogue de se poursuivre : "OK, mais quelqu’un l’a fait"."C’est un OVNI !". Quelques minutes plus tard, même son de cloche. Un vol d'American Airlines contacté par la tour de contrôle répond à la question suivante : "Que je vous prévienne si quelque chose nous passe au-dessus ?"... "Ici America 1905. Oui, quelque chose vient juste de nous survoler. Je ne sais pas ce que c’était mais ça se trouvait environ 2000 ou 3000 pieds (entre 600 et 900 mètres) au-dessus de nous".

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WakondaEn@WakondaEn

#UFO caught between Jerome and Sedona, Arizona #ovni https://goo.gl/F8hBkQ 

11:08 PM - Mar 25, 2018

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Mais alors de quoi s'agit-il ?

Pour l'heure, le pilote oeuvrant au sein d'American Airline ne semble pas convaincu par le fait qu'il puisse s'agir d'un ballon lancé par Google dans le cadre de son projet Loon. Lequel projet consiste, tel que le rapporte le géant de l'Internet sur son site, en "un réseau de ballons stratosphériques conçu pour apporter une connectivité Internet aux communautés rurales et reculées".

A cela, s'ajoute le fait que, dans l'absolu, rien ne justifie le fait qu'un avion vole en plein jour sans s'être signalé auprès du contrôle du trafic aérien, poursuit le site The War Zone. Le mystère demeure donc entier. A moins, s'interroge le site spécialisé, qu'il puisse s'agir d'un ballon sonde dont le lancer n'est, pour l'heure, pas particulièrement bien réglementé.

{ http://www.planet.fr/ }