Scientists have found on Mars an ideal place for extraterrestrial life

An international group of scientists led by astrobiologist Sean McMahon of the University of Edinburgh suggested that iron-rich rocks on Mars near the ancient dried-up lakes are the most suitable place to look for traces of microorganisms that lived billions of years ago.

An international group of scientists led by astrobiologist Sean McMahon of the University of Edinburgh suggested that iron-rich rocks on Mars near the ancient dried-up lakes are the most suitable place to look for traces of microorganisms that lived billions of years ago. The article is published in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets. This is reported by the publication Science Alert.

At the moment, there is no evidence that Mars was inhabited, but there were once life-friendly conditions on the planet. Observations from the orbit showed that on the surface there are dried river valleys, winding and branched channels, lakes typical for lakes in depressions of the relief, as well as cones of eruption formed by deposits in the mouths of water streams.

Liquid water existed there 4,100-3500 million years ago, when Mars possessed a dense atmosphere, preventing the penetration of harmful solar radiation.

The experts analyzed the available scientific literature and identified the places that are best suited to search for traces of microbial life on Mars, if it ever existed. They are rich in iron and silica lacustrine deposits, which correspond to an oxidation-reduction medium, suitable for bacteria with anaerobic metabolism. They are also suitable for fossilization – the process of transformation of dead organisms into fossils. Another suitable place may be former hot springs, but their existence on Mars must be confirmed.

In 2020, NASA will launch the Mars 2020 mission as part of the long-term Mars Exploration Program. A rover will be sent to the Red Planet, similar in design to the rover Curiosity. The new planet-boat is designed for astrobiological studies of ancient rocks and the search for traces of life. It will be equipped with a drone for reconnaissance and have greater mobility than its predecessor, but scientists believe that the success of the mission depends on the successful choice of the landing site.

{ https://www.planet-today.com/ }

A scientist from Russia proposed a gloomy explanation of the Fermi paradox

The unimaginable size of the universe for a long time made scientists believe in the almost infinite abundance of the worlds inhabited in it. If so, then where is everything? In general, this is the whole essence of the so-called Fermi paradox, a puzzling scientific anomaly that indicates the absence of visible traces of the activity of extraterrestrial civilizations that would have to be scattered throughout the universe for billions of years of its development. Only one of our Milky Way galaxy has several billion stars according to various estimates, but we still did not find any signs of the existence of extraterrestrials. Actually, why?

The paradox formulated several decades ago has been puzzled by more than one generation of scientists and thinkers. Hypotheses were advanced that aliens simply “sleep”, thus showing no signs of their activity. Others assumed that the technological development of extraterrestrial civilizations is hampered by some incomprehensible factors. Or maybe they just do not want to communicate with us and carefully hide their presence?

However, the theoretical physicist Alexander Berezin of the National Research University “Moscow Institute of Electronic Technology” has his own opinion about why we are still alone in the universe. In a paper titled “First in, last out”, whose preret is on arXiv.org and awaits evaluation by other scientists, Berezin offers his solution to the Fermi paradox. Berezin himself calls it “trivial, not having any contradictory assumptions,” but at the same time “difficult to accept, as it predicts the future that awaits our own civilization.” And this future will be worse than extinction. ”
In his work, Berezin notes that the main problem of the previously proposed solutions to the Fermi paradox is due to the fact that they all too narrow the possible range of species of extraterrestrial life.

“Some specific nature of civilizations reaching the interstellar level should not be taken into account at all, since it does not play any role,” Berezin said.

“They can be biological organisms, like we, for example, or artificial intellects, rebelling against their creators, or in general the quintessence of the collective mind of the planetary level, like the one described by Stanislaw Lem in Solaris.”

But even with such a variety, we still do not see any signs of the existence of other civilizations in space. Nevertheless, according to Berezin, the only parameter that must be taken into account for the solution of the paradox – from the point of view of determining extraterrestrial life – is our ability to detect the existence of this life.

“The only variable that we are able to measure objectively is, perhaps, at what distance can we determine the existence of life in space from the Earth,” Berezin said.
“For simplicity, let’s call it” parameter A “.”

If the intelligent extraterrestrial civilization for some reason failed to achieve the required “parameter A” – did not develop methods of interstellar travel, communication methods, or other ways to demonstrate its existence to the rest of the cosmos – it will still exist, but it will not help us in solving the paradox .
The real solution to the Fermi paradox, proposed by Berezin, follows a rather gloomy scenario.

“Actually, why are we so sure that the first living species that has achieved the possibility of interstellar travel will not destroy all the” competing “civilizations discovered in its path in order to further its expansion?” Berezin asks.
Readers familiar with the novel by Douglas Adams “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” can remember the incident that laid the foundation for the entire plot. There one kind of very highly developed aliens decided to build an intergalactic highway right through the place where our Earth is located, not really caring about the life that can exist on it.
Berezin explains that this is only an assumption. The scientist notes that a highly developed civilization can destroy other living forms at all not consciously. Literally this without even suspecting.

“They can do it quite by accident and do not even notice it. We, too, do not notice how we destroy the same anthill in the construction of the road? We do not even think about it. ”
No, Berezin does not say that we are ants and the reason why we have not yet found extraterrestrial civilizations is that they have not yet decided to build a new road through us. On the contrary, the scientist believes that in the future we ourselves will become destroyers of the worlds, which we are looking for all this time.

“Assuming that the proposed hypothesis is correct, what future awaits us?”
“The only solution is to turn to the anthropic principle. We will be the first to reach the interstellar level. And, most likely, the last who will end their existence. ”
Again, such a potential destruction of all life on the path of expansion does not have to be pre-engineered and organized – it can be the result of a larger system – something that does not lend itself to any attempts to control the process.
As an example, Berezin leads the capitalism of free competition, and as another – artificial intelligence, not limited to the power given to him.

“Only one evil AI will potentially be able to populate an entire superexplosion with copies of itself, turning every solar system into a kind of collective supercomputer. And here it does not even make sense to ask why he should do this, “Berezin said.
“The answer will be obvious: because he can.”
According to Berezin, we can become winners in the deadly competition, of which we do not even suspect participation. Moreover, we are the answer to the paradox. It is we, our species, who will populate the entire universe, destroying everything that gets in the way. It is impossible to exclude this possibility, Berezin believes, since to stop this process “it will require the existence of forces far greater than mere free will.”
Berezin himself admits that he very much hopes that he is mistaken in his assumption.

“The only way to find out the truth is to continue exploring the universe in the hope of finding a different life,” the scientist says.
Although from all of the above, some will certainly conclude that now this may not be the wisest way to proceed.

{ https://www.planet-today.com/ }

Is this why we haven't found ET yet? Alien killer robots may have destroyed every extraterrestrial civilisation in the universe, scientist claims

• New theory attempts to explain why humans have not detected signs of alien life
• It states any lifeform that colonises the stars will destroy every species in its way
• Scientists warns that humanity needs to take to the stars itself – or inevitably face destruction at the hands of aliens or AI-powered robots

By Aaron Brown For Mailonline

There may be a strange reason why we haven't been able to track down aliens despite the vast size of the universe.

A theoretical physicist believes its because 'alien killer robots may have destroyed every extraterrestrial civilisation' in the cosmos.

Alexander Berezin of the National Research University of Electronic Technology in Russia came up with bizarre theory to explain something known as the 'Fermi paradox'.

This paradox describes the contradiction between the likelihood that alien life is present somewhere in the vastness of the universe, and the lack of any evidence to prove its existence. 

Scroll down for video 

According to one scientist, any civilisation that is capable of colonising beyond its own planet 'necessarily eradicates all competition to fuel its own expansion'

(Stock Image)

The Fermi Paradox, named after physicist Enrico Fermi, has perplexed scientists for decades. 

But Professor Berezin suggests it occurs because advanced civilizations will destroy other lifeforms with their technology.

He believes any civilisations of ‘biological organisms like ourselves or rogue AIs that rebelled against their creators’ which tries to colonise other planets will inevitably destroy every species in its way.

Berezin has published a paper, which has yet to be peer-reviewed, which describes his so-called ‘first in, last out’ solution to the Fermi Paradox.

He writes: ‘I am not suggesting that a highly developed civilization would consciously wipe out other lifeforms.

‘Most likely, they simply won’t notice, the same way a construction crew demolishes an anthill to build real estate because they lack incentive to protect it.’

WHAT IS THE FERMI PARADOX?

The Fermi Paradox questions why, given the estimated 200bn-400bn stars and at least 100bn planets in our galaxy, there have been no signs of alien life. 

The contradiction is named after its creator, Italian physicist Enrico Fermi.

He first posed the question back in 1950.

Fermi believed it was too extraordinary that a single extraterrestrial signal or engineering project has yet to be detected in the universe — despite its immense vastness. 

Fermi concluded there must a barrier that limits the rise of intelligent, self-aware, technologically advanced space-colonising civilisations.

This barrier is sometimes referred to as the 'Great Filter'.

Italian physicist Enrico Fermi devised the so-called Fermi Paradox in the 1950s. It explores why there is no sign of alien life, despite the 100 billions planets in our galaxy

If the main obstacle preventing the colonisation of other planets is not in our past, then the barrier that will stop humanity's prospects of reaching other worlds must lie in our future, scientists have theorised.  

Professor Brian Cox believes the advances in science and engineering required by a civilisation to start conquering the stars ultimately lead to its destruction.

 He said: 'One solution to the Fermi paradox is that it is not possible to run a world that has the power to destroy itself and that needs global collaborative solutions to prevent that.

‘It may be that the growth of science and engineering inevitably outstrips the development of political expertise, leading to disaster.'

Other possible explanations for the Fermi Paradox include that no other intelligent species have arisen in the universe, intelligent alien species are out there — but lack the necessary technology to communicate with Earth.

Some believe that the distances between intelligent civilsations are too great to allow any kind of two-way communication.

If two worlds are separated by several thousand light-years, it's possible that one or both civilisation will be extinct before a dialogue can be established. 

The so-called Zoo hypothesis claims intelligent alien life is out there, but deliberately avoids any contact with life on Earth to allow its natural evolution.

If humanity achieves interstellar travel and begins colonising any of the estimated 100 billion planets in our galaxy alone, it will eradicate ‘all competition to fuel its own expansion’.

But if humanity doesn’t achieve this advanced level of space travel, it is doomed to be eradicated by aliens or extraterrestrial AI-powered computers as they expand their civilisation.

Berezin warns: ‘The incentive to grab all available resources is strong, and it only takes one bad actor to ruin the equilibrium, with no possibility to prevent them from appearing at interstellar scale

‘One rogue AI can potentially populate the entire supercluster with copies of itself, turning every solar system into a supercomputer, and there is no use asking why it would do that.

‘All that matters is that it can.’

A.A. Berezin cautions that rogue AIs that rebelled against their creators could pose a threat to humanity if it does not begin colonising the stars first

(Stock Image)

According to the paper, the only way for humanity to avoid destruction from a superior extraterrestrial race is to become the first to conquer the stars.

The latest solution to the Fermi Paradox is one of a multitude of possible explanations.

Professor Brian Cox believes the advances in science and engineering required by any civilisation to start conquering the universe will ultimately lead to the destruction of the lifeform itself.

Speaking to The Times, Professor Cox said: ‘One solution to the Fermi paradox is that it is not possible to run a world that has the power to destroy itself and that needs global collaborative solutions to prevent that.

It may be that the growth of science and engineering inevitably outstrips the development of political expertise, leading to disaster.'

Some believe that the distances between intelligent civilsations are too great to allow any kind of two-way communication.

If two worlds are separated by several thousand light-years, it's possible that one or both civilisation will be extinct before a dialogue can be established. 

The so-called Zoo hypothesis claims intelligent alien life is out there, but deliberately avoids any contact with life on Earth to allow its natural evolution.

WHAT ARE THE KEY DISCOVERIES HUMANITY HAS MADE IN ITS SEARCH FOR ALIEN LIFE?

Discovery of pulsars

British astronomer Dame Jocelyn Bell Burnell was the first person to discover a pulsar in 1967 when she spotted a radio pulsar.

Since then other types of pulsars that emit x-rays and gamma rays have also been spotted.

Pulsars are essentially rotating, highly magnatised neutron stars but when they were first discovered it was believed they could come from aliens.

'Wow!' radio signal

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

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

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

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

Fossilised martian microbes

In 1996 Nasa and the White House made the explosive announcement that the rock contained traces of Martian bugs.

The meteorite, catalogued as Allen Hills (ALH) 84001, crashed onto the frozen wastes of Antarctica 13,000 years ago and was recovered in 1984. 

Photographs were released showing elongated segmented objects that appeared strikingly lifelike.

Photographs were released showing elongated segmented objects that appeared strikingly lifelike

(pictured)

However, the excitement did not last long. Other scientists questioned whether the meteorite samples were contaminated. 

They also argued that heat generated when the rock was blasted into space may have created mineral structures that could be mistaken for microfossils. 

Behaviour of Tabby's Star in 2005 

The star, otherwise known as KIC 8462852, is located 1,400 light years away and has baffled astonomers since being discovered in 2015.

It dims at a much faster rate than other stars, which some experts have suggested is a sign of aliens harnessing the energy of a star.

The star, otherwise known as KIC 8462852, is located 1,400 light years away and has baffled astonomers since being discovered in 2015

(artist's impression)

Recent studies have 'eliminated the possibility of an alien megastructure', and instead, suggests that a ring of dust could be causing the strange signals.

Exoplanets in the Goldilocks zone in 2015 

In February this year astronomers announced they had spotted a star system with planets that could support life just 39 light years away.

Seven Earth-like planets were discovered orbiting nearby dwarf star 'Trappist-1', and all of them could have water at their surface, one of the key components of life.

Three of the planets have such good conditions, that scientists say life may have already evolved on them. 

Researchers claim that they will know whether or not there is life on any of the planets within a decade, and said 'this is just the beginning.' 

{  http://www.dailymail.co.uk/  }

IF WE RECEIVE A MESSAGE FROM ALIENS, SHOULD WE DELETE IT WITHOUT READING?

Roughly half a century ago, Cornell astronomer Frank Drake conducted Project Ozma, the first systematic SETI survey at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in Green Bank, West Virginia.

Since that time, scientists have conducted multiple surveys in the hopes of find indications of “technosignatures” – i.e. evidence of technologically-advanced life (such as radio communications).

To put it plainly, if humanity were to receive a message from an extraterrestrial civilisation right now, it would be the single greatest event in the history of civilisation.

But according to a new study, such a message could also pose a serious risk to humanity. Drawing on multiple possibilities that have been explored in detail, they consider how humanity could shield itself from malicious spam and viruses.

The paper, titled “Interstellar communication. IX. Message decontamination is impossible“, recently appeared online.

The study was conducted by Michael Hippke, an independent scientist from the Sonneberg Observatory in Germany; and John G. Learned, a professor with the High Energy Physics Group at the University of Hawaii.

Source www.sciencealert.com

{ http://alien-ufo-sightings.com/ }

Daytime UFO activity over Montréal, Canada 29-May-2018

New footage of a bright UFOs in the sky above Montreal in Canada. This was filmed on 29th May 2018.

Witness report: 

2 like sphere with 2 rotating lights. I was sit on picnic table with a friend. I saw 2 objects in the sky. I was curious about what it is. I record these on my iphone. I stop recording when the object sere to far.

Author (source: MUFON)

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

Moet je stekkers uit het stopcontact trekken als het bliksemt ? (en 6 andere vragen over onweer) - HLN.be

1. Waarom onweert het zo vaak de afgelopen dagen?

“Enerzijds is er een lagedrukgebied boven Frankrijk, en tegelijkertijd een hogedrukgebied boven Scandinavië,” legt weerman David Dehenauw uit. “Dat zorgt bij ons voor warme temperaturen en een hoge vochtigheid, waardoor er makkelijk onweer ontstaat.” Het gaat niet om een uitzonderlijk fenomeen, vult weerman Frank Deboosere aan. “Dit zijn typische zomerse onweders, die ontstaan op warme dagen.  Weerkundig gezien is het nog steeds lente, maar qua temperaturen zijn we al volop in zomermodus.” Mei telt gemiddeld 13,5 onweersdagen, volgens cijfers van het KMI. Als het weer de komende dagen de voorspellingen volgt, zouden dat er dit jaar 17 kunnen worden. Dat is iets boven het gemiddelde, maar komt nog niet in de buurt van het record uit 1981 met 22 onweersdagen.

2. Hoe komt het dat die onweersbuien zo plaatselijk zijn?

“De afgelopen dagen kampten we niet met een grootschalige storing over het hele land, maar met lokaal erg verschillende onweerszones,” zegt Dehenauw. “Het zijn vaak hele kleine plaatselijke verschillen in de atmosfeer die lokaal voor onweer kunnen zorgen. Een bepaalde luchtvochtigheid, in combinatie met hoe de wind waait enzovoort. Waar het onweer zal ontstaan, is daarom erg moeilijk te voorspellen.” “Zomers onweer beslaat nooit grote regio’s tegelijkertijd, omdat er simpelweg niet genoeg water voor in de atmosfeer is,” zegt Deboosere. “Als er op sommige plaatsen meer dan 50 liter water per vierkante meter valt, kan er ergens anders niet nog eens zoveel water uit de lucht vallen.”

3. Moeten we onze elektrische apparaten uit het stopcontact halen als het onweert?

“Ja en zelfs nu nog meer dan vroeger,” tipt Deboosere. “We hebben intussen veel meer gevoelige elektronische apparaten dan pakweg vijftig jaar geleden, toen we hooguit een telefoon en een televisietoestel hadden. Als een bliksem inslaat, dan loopt die elektrische lading nog een tijdje door in de grond en via onder- en bovengrondse elektriciteitskabels. Zo kan een blikseminslag op enkele tientallen meters van jouw huis ook aan jouw apparaten schade aanrichten. Trek dus de computer, televisie, maar ook het wasmachine en de droogkast uit als er onweer zit aan te komen. Leg de stekkers ver genoeg weg van het stopcontact.”  

4. Hoe groot is de kans op een blikseminslag? 

“In België is er gemiddeld om de 20 maanden een blikseminslag per vierkante kilometer, oftewel 0,7 inslagen per jaar per vierkante kilometer.” legt Deboosere uit. “Dat cijfer is relatief en er zijn meer blikseminslagen in Hoog-België dan in Laag- en Midden-België. Het aantal mensen dat door een bliksem wordt getroffen, ligt met minder dan tien per jaar erg laag. De kans dat je van de trap valt, is veel groter dan de kans dat je ooit door een bliksem wordt geraakt. Bovendien is er nog één kans op de drie om te overleven als je door een bliksem wordt getroffen.”

5. Waar kan je beter (niet) schuilen als het onweert?

Blijf binnen, sluit de ramen en ga niet te dicht bij het raam staan. Ook in de wagen ben je veilig. Loop je toch over straat als er een onweer losbarst, maak je dan zo klein mogelijk, hou je voeten tegen elkaar en ga gehurkt zitten. Ga vooral niet schuilen onder een boom, wat de kans op een blikseminslag vergroot. Ben je met meerdere personen, probeer jullie dan zoveel mogelijk te verspreiden over het terrein. “De eerste bliksems zijn het gevaarlijkst,” aldus Deboosere. “Vaak regent het dan nog niet, waardoor je zelf nog niet nat bent. Water is een goede geleider, dus met een natte jas heb je een kleiner risico op het raken van vitale organen.” Toch wil Deboosere benadrukken dat een code oranje geen reden tot paniek mag zijn. “Het is een richtlijn die aangeeft dat je voorzichtig moet zijn en maatregelen kan nemen om je voor te bereiden. In zones die gevoelig zijn voor wateroverlast kan de riool worden vrijgemaakt of zandzakjes worden uitgedeeld bijvoorbeeld. Die kleurencodes zijn bedoeld om schade te voorkomen, niet om paniek te zaaien.” 

6. Hoe weet je of er een onweer zit aan te komen in jouw buurt?

“Je kan een app met een buienradar raadplegen, die meestal voorspellingen maakt op basis van waar het op dit moment al onweert,” zegt Deboosere. “Zo’n apps concluderen bijvoorbeeld als het nu in Luik onweert, dat Limburg daarna zal volgen, op basis van de windrichting. Ikzelf gebruik de app van het KMI, die behalve de radarbeelden ook een mathematisch model gebruikt om te bekijken of de windrichting nog evolueert. Zo krijg je een meer accurate voorspelling.” 

7. Blijft het onweer nog langer aanhouden? 

“Woensdag zou het iets minder hevig zijn, maar donderdag is er opnieuw een grotere kans op onweer,” voorspelt Deboosere. “Pas in de loop van het weekend ziet het er iets beter uit op de weerkaarten.”  

{ https://www.hln.be/ }

The 1970s had the Pentagon Papers – the documents released in 1971 by Daniel Ellsberg which detailed how President Johnson’s administration “systematically lied, not only to the public but also to Congress” about the Vietnam War, secret bombings of Cambodia and Laos, raids on North Vietnam and more. It looks like the 2010s are becoming the era of the Pentagon Tapes – the videos released detailing U.S. military encounters with UFOs and a secretive Defense Department program that investigated the sightings. The Pentagon Tapes are not as controversial as the Pentagon Papers … yet. However, if new reports keeping being released or leaked and they start to sound more and more like an extraterrestrial coverup, they could be bigger than the Pentagon itself.

The latest 13-page document was obtained by George Knapp, the award-winning investigative reporter at KLAS-TV in Las Vegas and a frequent host on Coast to Coast AM. The announcement by KLAS doesn’t reveal how it obtained the information but it has been working with former Senator Harry Reid who has said many times that there is considerable information available about military UFO encounters. That includes those seen in 2004 by crew members on the U.S.S. Nimitz aircraft carrier, the U.S.S. Princeton and a number of F-18 pilots who provided the video feeds and shocking commentary.

“Over a two-week period in late 2004, an unknown, 45-foot long Tic Tac shaped object played cat and mouse with the U.S. Navy off the coast of California.”

Knapp reports on lasvegasnow.com that this was not a single UFO incident but a series of encounters lasting two weeks. The report refers to them as Anomalous Aerial Vehicles (AAV) but social media today calls them the Tic Tac UFOs because of their white elongated oval shape.

“Among the key findings in the report — the AAV is not something that belongs to the U.S. or any other nation. It was so advanced, it rendered U.S. capabilities ineffective. It showed velocities far greater than anything known to exist, and it could turn itself invisible, both to radar and the human eye. Essentially, it was undetectable, and unchallenged.”

According to Knapp, claims like that in the report are corroborated by seven F-18 pilots and by radar operators on the ships, who saw the AAV descend from 60,000 feet down to 50 feet in seconds, remain stationary, accelerate to high speeds and make impossible turns – at least for known aircraft.

“At no time did they consider the AAV a threat to the battle group. Finally, they had never seen anything like this before and never again.”

No harm, no foul. No further investigation occurred at the time, although there is apparently another secret report from five years later that Knapp believes will never be released.

A simulation of the Tic Tac UFO

Why not? This one was. Well, kind of. Take a good look at it.

“The analysis report is not dated and has no logo, but four separate people who are familiar with its contents confirmed to the I-Team it is the real deal and was written as part of a Pentagon program.”

Are these Pentagon Papers or is this a Pentagon caper? As is so often the case, these UFO reports contain fuzzy photos, fuzzy documents and fuzzy sources. What’s clear is that many people like George Knapp, Harry Reid, Tom DeLonge and others believe the unfuzzy photos, documents and sources exist and they plan to keep on looking.

{ http://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }

In some ways, mummies are the closest thing we have to real-life time travelers from the past. These preserved bodies clue us in on the ways people lived in ages long past and even reveal what they believed about death and the afterlife. Mummies are also an enduring source of mystery, as they rarely ever reveal a complete picture of their lives, deaths, or mummifications. Case in point: earlier this year, a bizarre and terrifying tiny mummy made headlines when modern DNA analysis revealed it to be merely the mummified skeleton of a horribly disfigured child as opposed to the alien everyone hoped it was.

Now, the mystery of another child mummy which has perplexed archaeologists has been unraveled, revealing a previously unknown mummification technique. In 2005, an archaeological excavation at a cemetery in a small village revealed over 500 graves dating from the 12th and 16th centuries. Among the discoveries was a tiny mummified child’s hand which had turned a rich, dark green over the centuries. The means by which the hand was mummified and became green remained a mystery until researchers at the University of Szeged in Hungary recently performed a detailed chemical analysis, publishing their results in the journal Archaeological and Anthropological Sciences.

According to the study, the tiny green hand belonged to either a stillbirth or a premature baby which died short after birth. The skeletal remains had levels of copper hundreds of times higher than average, the highest researchers had ever seen in a mummy. More interestingly, a copper coin was clutched in the baby’s hand. The researchers concluded that the copper’s antimicrobial effects helped protect the hand from decay, leading to its mummification as the rest of the body decomposed with the aid of bacteria. If confirmed, this would be the first known case of copper mummification.

The practice of placing coins on the eyes of the recently deceased is primarily associated with the ancient Greeks and Romans, although many Middle Eastern or Western Asian cultures practiced it as well.

The practice of burying loved ones with coins has been observed around the world throughout history, although it’s generally assumed that this practice stems from the belief that loved ones might need money in the afterlife for various reasons. Could they have been in cluded in other burials for the inherent microbial properties of the metals they were made from, or is this all a macabre coincidence?

{ http://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }

Sky cam recorded weird flashes over Spiez, Switzerland

On May 27, 2018 SkyWatch Earth Cameras captured strange flashes in the sky over Spiez, Switserland.

The sky cam shows large purple flashes, then suddenly an enormous bright white flash and the night sky turns into daylight.

What has caused these flashes is not clear, but it does not look like a thunderstorm or a meteorite.

  

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

Popular Group Of Researchers Release Videos Allegedly Showing Evidence Pilots Have Encountered With UFOs

Newly released videos apparently show military pilots encountering unidentified foreign objects.

To the Stars Academy for Arts and Science group claims that they have the videos that show proof pilots are coming into contact with UFOs

According to UFO researcher and board member of the Mutual UFO Network (MUFON) Rob Swiatek, these types of sightings have been going on for decades, and they can’t explain them. Swiatek added that the UFO seemed to move in intelligent manners and patterns, and it did not seem to be a natural phenomenon.

Swiatek said that there were thousands of UFO reports across the world every year. While UFO investigators can find explanations for the vast majority, 20% remains a mystery, he added

Swiatek believes that they are dealing with another intelligence, but cannot prove it.

The releasing of the videos spark a renewed interest whether or not aliens are piloting their spaceships. The New York Times reported in December about a military project Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, which looked into UFO reports. The official announcement says the program ceased to operate in 2012, but many speculate the work continues.

Hampton Roads have many sightings, local researchers say. UFO Club of Virginia President Jessica Youness believes alien life has existed in our universe for millions of years.

Youness has shared her UFO sighting while walking her dog in Virginia Beach where she felt it was getting closer. She told her husband candidly that they should go in because it was coming closer.

Despite seeing a UFO herself, she tried to take a sceptical approach in her UFO report investigations. She explains that she wants to get rid of the sceptics and people who just want attention.

Researchers say they need the scientific community to prove there are extraterrestrials. Swiatek stressed that they need scientists and money to bring a lot of necessary brains and scientific tools to bear on the project, which has never been done to a large extent.

The Navy released a statement saying that most sightings by aviators are explainable while admitting that some are not. However, they noted that experimental aircraft, drones, and weather balloons are often challenging to identify from a distance while flying at high speed. They further stated that any UFO sighting is reported to the air space’s commanding authority.

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

You Can Now Visit Alien Worlds Thanks To This Awesome Interactive NASA Site

{ http://www.iflscience.com/ }

NASA website lets you explore alien planets in 360 degrees

IMAGE: NASA-JPL/CALTECH

BY MIRIAM KRAMER

In all likelihood, no one from Earth today will set foot on a world orbiting another star, but thanks to NASA, we may have the next-best thing.

NASA's Exoplanet Exploration tool lets anyone with an internet connection experience what it might be like to stand on the surface of a planet light-years from Earth and look up into the sky. 

• SEE ALSO: Here's how NASA's TESS will hunt for alien planets

The website is designed to transport you to some popular exoplanet destinations — like Kepler-186f, the newest planet to be given this treatment — to look around the planet in 360 degrees. 

A screenshot of the 360-degree view.

IMAGE: NASA-JPL/CALTECH

The images are interactive as well, allowing viewers to learn more about what you might actually see when standing on the planet's surface. 

It's possible that some of these worlds could harbor water or even life, but that said, scientists don't know if any of them do. 

Researchers understand that some of these worlds could be rocky, like Earth, due to their mass and distance from their host star, but they don't yet know if these worlds can actually sustain life. 

There's a lot of guesswork when it comes to this kind of cutting-edge science. 

"Because  and the majority of Kepler-discovered planets are so distant, it is currently impossible to detect their atmospheres – if they exist at all – or characterize their atmospheric properties," Martin Still, a NASA exoplanet scientist, said in a statement.

"Consequently, we have limited knowledge about what these distant worlds are really like, but these surface visualizations allow us to imagine some of the possibilities," Still, who works on NASA's new exoplanet-hunting mission TESS, added in the statement.

That said, this ambiguity could change sometime in the near future. 

NASA's James Webb Space Telescope — expected to launch in 2020 — could help scientists peer into the atmospheres of alien worlds to figure out if they could support life. In total, scientists know of more than 3,700 confirmed exoplanets out there in the universe.

TESS, short for Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, will also help scientists find more exoplanets circling some of the nearest stars to Earth in the not-too-distant future.

But until then, NASA's Exoplanet Travel Bureau has you covered, with its 360-degree images and even special, vintage-inspired travel posters that look like ads for the brave new worlds NASA and others have discovered. 

What would Exoplanet Trappist-1 e look like?

What would Exoplanet Kepler-186f look like?

WATCH: NASA is attempting to fly a helicopter on Mars for the first time

US aircraft carrier was 'stalked for days by a UFO', leaked Pentagon report reveals

A leaked Pentagon report has revealed new details about the UFO encounter that shocked Navy fighter pilots above the Pacific.

The 2009 report does not bear any date or agency logo, but four officials confirmed that it was written as part of a Pentagon programme with input from multiple agencies, KLAS reported.

The Las Vegas news station obtained the unclassified report while visiting Washington, DC for a debriefing arranged by former Senator Harry Reid.

The guided missile cruiser USS Princeton, right, The USS Princeton (seen in file photo) made multiple radar contacts with the objects in 2004.

Photo / Getty Images

The report reveals stunning new first-hand accounts of the November 14, 2004 encounter, which was documented in video that emerged in December of last year, the Daily Mail reported.

The incident unfolded as the Nimitz carrier group was conducting training exercises off the coast of southern California and Mexico ahead of a deployment to the Arabian Sea.

Beginning around November 10, the USS Princeton, a Ticonderoga-class guided missile cruiser, made multiple radar contacts with what the report calls an Anomalous Aerial Vehicle (AAV).

The senior chief fire controlman on the Princeton, which was equipped with ultra-advanced AN/SPY-1 multifunctional phased-array radar, reported that the AAV appeared from above 60,000 feet - the radar's scan ceiling - and descended "very rapidly" to about 50 feet above the surface of the ocean.

They would hover for a short time and then depart at high velocities and turn rates demonstrating advanced capabilities, the senior chief said.

The senior chief, who had 17 years of experience in fire control on cruisers, said he never obtained an accurate track on the AAV, because they exhibited speed consistent with a ballistic missile, but the radar was set to air intercept mode rather than ballistic missile tracking mode.

Then on November 14, the Princeton again detected an AAV around 11am and called it in two F/A-18 Hornets that happened to be returning to the USS Nimitz from a training exercise.

An E-2C Hawkeye surveillance plane was also operating in the area and attempted a radar contact on the AAV, but made only intermittent contact as was unable to gain a track.

The skies were clear and blue with unlimited visibility that day, and the sea was calm, according to the report.

The first fighter jet to investigate, a USMC single-seat F/A-18C, flew within five to 10 nautical miles of the AAV's location, but could not see it. Instead, he reported seeing a circular disturbance in the water about 50 to 100 meters in diameter. It reminded the pilot of something rapidly submerging in the ocean, like a submarine.

The report hypothesizes that 'it is possible that the disturbance was being caused by an AAV but that the AAV was "cloaked" or invisible to the human eye.'

The Marine pilot was called off after the controller asked a plane carrying ordnance to respond, which he was not. When he returned to the USS Nimitz, his intelligence officer asked him if he'd seen the 'supersonic Tic Tac'.

The next jet to respond was a Navy F/A-18F piloted by Cmdr. David Fravor and Lt. Cmdr. Jim Slaight, who made visual contact with the AAV that they have since publicly discussed, corroborating the report.

Fravor also spotted a disturbance in the water, almost as if it were boiling. But this time, hovering above the disturbance was a strange object.

The object was shaped like an elongated egg or a "Tic Tac", according to Fravor, and was "holding like a Harrier", the jump jet that can take off vertically.

The report reveals first-hand accounts of the November 14, 2004 encounter with the USS Princeton, pictured, which was documented in video that emerged in December of last year.

Photo / Getty Images

Slaight, whose name is redacted from the report, described it as "solid white, smooth, with no edges. It was uniformly colored with no nacelles, pylons or wings".

He described the exterior of the object as "like it had a white candy-coated shell, almost like a white board".

When Fravor attempted to make a close pass of the object to attempt visual recognition, the object appeared to react, realigning its axis to point at the approaching plane. The AAV then ascended quickly and departed at supersonic speed.

When Fravor and Slaight returned to the Nimitz, the sailors in the intelligence center donned tin-foil hats to greet them, asking eagerly about their 'UFO flight'.

Later in the day, another plane made the video that has since been released, according to the report.

Around 3pm, another Navy F/A-18F tracked a remarkable object on FLIR, which Fravor's plane had not been equipped with.

The pilot said he couldn't confirm whether he had tracked the same object seen by Fravor and Slaight, because he never made visual contact, only tracked it through FLIR.

The report notes that the USS Louisville nuclear fast-attack submarine was operating in the area, and detected no unusual undersea activity over the duration of the incidents.

The incident was filed in a regular training mission report and it is unclear if it was reported up the chain of command, the report finds.

The aircrews involved made and kept a copy of the FLIR recording, but were subjected to a "high level of ridicule" over the incident, the report found.

Whatever the AAV was, the report stresses that it was 'no known aircraft or air vehicle currently in the inventory of the United States or any foreign nation.'

Former Senator Reid, now recovering following cancer surgery, and others have urged Congress to create a new Pentagon programme to study similar incidents as a matter of national security.

Another highly classified version of the leaked report was also written, but it is unlikely to ever be released.

{ https://www.nzherald.co.nz/ }

Life on Mars: ‘Sphinx statue’ found in NASA photo evidence of ancient alien UFOs on Mars?

NASA photographs of rock formations on Mars have been interpreted as a 200 foot-tall Sphinx statue, possibly built by ancient alien civilisations, it has been spectacularly claimed.

By SEBASTIAN KETTLEY

ALIEN ART TV/GETTY

Life on Mars: Did NASA capture a Sphinx photo on the surface of Mars

Online UFO hunter and self-appointed space journalist Joe White claims to have stumbled upon the crumbling remains of a long-forgotten alien Sphinx statue on Mars.

Mr White presented his bizarre claim to the public after combing through hundreds of NASA photos taken by the space agency’s Curiosity Rover.

The bizarre rock formation in question at first glance appears to be reminiscent of an ancient Egyptian Sphinx statue, sparking fierce debate online.

Mr White shared the image online on his YouTube channel under the title “GIANT 200 ft SPHINX found on MARS”.

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The UFO hunter wrote in the video description: “A close look at the five different viewing angles of the Mars giant Sphinx.

“Photographed over a number of years by the Curiosity Rover this Martian Sphinx statue that is over 200 feet long.

“Could it be the same size as the Egyptian Sphinx at Giza? It could well be.”

The Great Sphinx of Giza is the second most recognisable symbol of ancient Egypt, after the Pyramids, and is believed to date back to the reign of Pharaoh Khafre between 2558 and 2532 BC.

The Sphinx is a mythical creature part man part lion and stands on the west bank of the Nile on Giza Plateau.

Mr White has now claimed he found its extraterrestrial twin on the dusty surface of the Red Planet.

He said: “Is this irrefutable evidence of a civilisation on Mars in the past that we have been looking for?

“It looks like a Sphinx from the front, back and side in multiple images. What more could you ask for?

ALIEN ART TV

Life on Mars: Conspiracy theorists believe in a great NASA coverup of Mars UFOs

“The carefully cross-referenced photos in this video presentation show this beyond any reasonable doubt.

Could it be the same size as the Egyptian Sphinx at Giza? It could well be

Joe White, UFO hunter

“Anyone who says otherwise probably has an agenda and is not acting in our best interests.”

The UFO hunter’s video has already racked up more than 3,000 hits on YouTube and many of the viewers were seemingly convinced by the NASA photographs.

Grant Tracy wrote in a comment: “Like the Thunderbird opening! I used to watch that show in the states every week.

“Great photo analysis. Looks like plenty of NASA sand all around the object.”

Donnie Blair said: “How in the hell can you say that is just a rock or pareidolia? That looks like a head of a statue.

“Look how NASA fudge the picture all around the statue and on the statue but they hardly touched the head it looks like. Like they did that on purpose.”

However not everyone was conceived the oddly shaped rock formation is anything more than just some dusty rocks.

ALIEN ART TV

Life on Mars: The photos are most likely a mind trick known as pareidolia

Mark Harrison commented: “I'm all down for there being possible artefacts of a potential civilisation having lived on Mars but the Sphinx to me looks more like Jabba the Hut.”

Many viewers also suggested the “Sphinx” is a classic example of the psychological mind trick known as pareidolia.

UF hunters who fall prey to pareidolia often see shapes and patterns on Mars and other planets where they do not exist.

Cosmologist Carl Sagan speculated in 1995 pareidolia was an evolutionary trick developed by early humans to recognise foes from friends.

RELATED ARTICLES

• SHOCK CLAIM: Nazca Lines created to attract ALIENS
• Aliens found? Scientists discover fresh evidence of life on Europa
• ALIEN WARNING: Extraterrestrials will be IMPOSSIBLE to contact

{ https://www.express.co.uk/ }

How birds may have escaped the dino-killing asteroid impact

New study explores what let some flying dinos survive what was almost the end of their world

BY SUSAN MILIUS 

 

RUN, BIRD, RUN  Birds most likely to have survived a mass extinction 66 million years ago would have been small (as seen in this artist’s depiction), able to fly and just fine living on the ground, researchers say.

PHILLIP M. KRZEMINSKI

Nothing against trees. But maybe it’s better not to get too dependent on them if you want to survive a big flaming space object crashing into Earth.

The asteroid impact that caused a mass extinction 66 million years probably also triggered the collapse of forests worldwide, a new investigation of the plant fossil record concludes. Needing trees and extensive plant cover for nesting or food could have been a fatal drawback for winged dinosaurs, including some ancient birds. Reconstructing the ecology of ancient birds suggests that modern fowl descended from species that survived because they could live on the ground, an international research team proposes in the June 4 Current Biology.

“You probably would have died anyway regardless of habitat,” says study coauthor Daniel Field, an evolutionary paleobiologist at the University of Bath in England. “But if you could get along on the ground, you at least had a shot at surviving across this devastated landscape.”

The shock wave from the strike probably flattened trees within a radius of 1,500 kilometers, Field says. Wildfires ignited around the planet and then came the acid rain. Clouds of ash and dust may have darkened the sky for several years, and researchers suspect that photosynthesis waned. Yet some lucky birds, but no other dinosaurs, survived the hellscape.

For clues to what made a survivor, researchers turned to fossilized pollen from before and after the fiery impact. Abundant kinds of flower-bearing and cone-bearing plants left pollen just before the asteroid hit and again starting about a thousand years afterward. In between those times of diversity, however, ferns dominated, the team notes. A kind of “disaster flora,” ferns (making spores instead of flowers and seeds) do well at recolonizing land. Seed plants, however, weren’t thriving.

Analyzing evolutionary histories of modern birds supports the idea of tree dependence as a vulnerability for the earliest fowl, the researchers say. Specialists in bird evolution now generally agree on the lowest, oldest branches of the bird family tree, Field says. The bottommost one, for instance, includes such modern species as ground-dwelling ostriches and smaller, flight-capable birds called tinamous, which might be more like the ancient birds that dodged extinction.

Working backward along these low branches, researchers used fossils and known bird traits to reconstruct the most likely lifestyles of the earliest survivors. These probably weren’t tree-dependent birds, the researchers conclude.

The glory days of dinosaurs had had plenty of flying tree-dwellers. So far, paleontologists have identified at least 80 kinds of what are called “opposite birds,” the Enantiornithes (SN: 2/4/17, p. 26). “If you saw one flying around today, you’d say, ‘Well, that’s a bird,’ ” Field explains. Their feet looked like those of birds that perch on tree limbs, so he’s not surprised that a fossil of an opposite bird from this probably arboreal group has never been found in rock formed after the dino doomsday.

What did happen, however, was that when trees and forests came back after the disaster, birds quickly evolved arboreal lifestyles, the team says.

Many people don’t realize that birds almost died off during the mass extinction, too, says paleontologist Stephen Brusatte of the University of Edinburgh who has studied bird evolution but was not involved in the new study. What let the few survivors squeak through, he says, has been a mystery for a long time. The whole scenario of a ground-dweller’s advantage and then a return to the trees “makes a lot of intuitive sense.”

Citations

• D.J. Field et al. Early evolution of modern birds structured by global forest collapse at the end-Cretaceous mass extinction. Current Biology. Vol. 28, June 4, 2018. doi: 10.1016/j.cub.2018.04.062.

Further Reading

• C. Gramling. New fossils are redefining what makes a dinosaur. Science News. Vol. 193, March 3, 2018, p. 18.
• M. Rosen. With dinosaurs out of the way, mammals had a chance to thrive. Science News. Vol. 191, February 4, 2017, p. 22.
• S. Milius. Some lucky birds escaped dino doomsday. Science News. Vol. 191, February 4, 2017, p. 26.
• S.L. Brusatte, J.K. O’Connor and K.D. O’Connor. The origins and diversification of birds. Current Biology. Vol. 25, October 5, 2015, p. R888. doi:10.1016/j.cub.2015.08.003.
• S.L. Brusatte. How some birds survived when all other dinosaurs died. Current Biology. Vol. 26, May 23, 2016, p. R415. doi:10.1016/j.cub.2016.03.043.

{ https://www.sciencenews.org/ }

Pluto’s demotion ignores astronomical history

Review of asteroid literature suggests voting isn’t right way to define planetary status

BY TOM SIEGFRIED 

 

The International Astronomical Union’s vote in 2006 to demote Pluto to dwarf planet status merely created “the illusion of scientific consensus,” according to a recent paper.

NASA, JHUAPL, SWRI

If Dr. Seuss had been an astronomer, Horton the Elephant (who heard a Who) would have said “a planet’s a planet, no matter how small.”

Even Pluto.

But don’t quote Dr. Seuss to the International Astronomical Union. In 2006, the IAU declared Pluto a planet not. 

IAU Resolution B5 (not to be confused with Le Petit Prince’s asteroid B 612) declared that in order to be considered a planet, a body must clear the neighborhood around its orbit. Pluto, then, doesn’t qualify, because its “neighborhood” (way out beyond the orbit of Neptune) is populated by other bodies referred to as trans-Neptunian or Kuiper Belt objects. Two of them, Haumea and Makemake, have been recognized as “dwarf planets,” the same designation that the IAU now applies to Pluto.

This demotion of Pluto to dwarf status (no offense intended to dwarfs) makes sense, IAU defenders contend, because the asteroids (orbiting the sun mostly between Mars and Jupiter) aren’t planets, either — no one of them has cleared out the orbital neighborhood. After all, nobody would call an asteroid a PLANET. Except actually, nearly everybody called them planets for 150 years after they were discovered. Only half a century or so ago did astronomers stop considering most asteroids to be planets. And that shift had nothing to do with clearing out any neighborhoods, Philip Metzger of the University of Central Florida and colleagues point out in a new paper.

“The planetary science community did not reclassify asteroids on the basis of their sharing of orbits, which had been known … since the mid-19th century,” write Metzger and coauthors (including Alan Stern of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colo.). “Rather, they were reclassified beginning in the 1950s on the basis of new data showing asteroids’ geophysical differences from large, gravitationally rounded planets.”

When astronomers first discovered asteroids (Ceres and Pallas, in 1801 and 1802), the famous astronomer William Herschel did not consider them planets. He called them asteroids because they were “starlike,” too small to appear through his telescope as bigger than a point. All previously known planets (Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn and Uranus) appeared as discernible disks. Those (except Uranus) had been known since ancient times; the Greeks called them “planets,” the word for “wanderers,” because they moved through the constant background patterns of the “fixed” stars.

After Herschel, though, everybody else generally referred to the asteroids as planets, since they orbited the sun (unlike moons, which orbited other planets). In 1845, for instance, the prominent scientist Alexander von Humboldt wrote in his masterwork Kosmos that the solar system consisted of 11 “primary planets,” five of them asteroids. (In the 1858 English version, a translator’s note updated that number to 16, adding four more asteroids plus Neptune.) Soon dozens more were added to the asteroid total. By the end of the 19th century hundreds of asteroids had been detected, and they were frequently referred to as “minor planets.” Metzger and colleagues scoured the astronomical literature since 1800 and found that astronomers consistently referred to asteroids as planets. Only Herschel, and in no case anyone after him, complained that shared orbits should disqualify asteroids from planetary status.

In 1951, Metzger and colleagues note, the authoritative Science News-Letter (now Science News, of course) proclaimed that “there are thousands of known planets circling our sun,” designating the big ones as “the chief planets” (including Pluto, discovered in 1930). Other astronomy writers held a similar view. In 1959, the prolific science popularizer Isaac Asimov noted that some preferred to call asteroids “planetoids” (because they are not, in fact, starlike). “Even planetoid isn’t quite a fair name,” Asimov wrote. “The planetoids do not merely have the form of planets; they are planets. To emphasize their small size, though, they are frequently called minor planets and that is perhaps the best name of all.”

But in the 1960s, Metzger and colleagues note, use of “minor planets” diminished as better observations revealed geophysical distinctions between the smaller asteroids and the major planets. Small asteroids had irregular shapes rather than the approximate roundness of big planets. And spectroscopic analyses of asteroid composition plus new ideas about how asteroids formed suggested that most of them were not really very much like planets after all.

“This history indicates that it was geophysical characteristics, not sharing of orbits, that led to the shift in terminology in which asteroids were no longer called planets,” Metzger and collaborators conclude.

Metzger, Stern and coauthors do not say anything about Pluto in their paper. But the implication is obvious: Denying planet status to Pluto is an arbitrary determination (by the IAU) based on a definition without justification in the astronomical literature. It was concocted and voted on at a big meeting, not derived from actual scientific usage. Planetary status should be determined, as it was with asteroids, by the progression of astronomical science, not by voting on an arbitrary definition.

“Voting on key taxonomical terminology and the relationships between taxa is anathema in science,” Metzger and colleagues write. It’s “contrary to the traditions evolved over many centuries to reduce social, political and personal cognitive biases in science. It injects unhelpful dynamics and social pressures into science and impinges on individual scientists’ taxonomical freedom…. We recommend that, regarding planetary taxonomy, central bodies such as the IAU do not resort to voting to create the illusion of scientific consensus.”

But don’t expect the issue about Pluto’s status to be resolved anytime soon. It’s not a case where the question is complicated but the answer is simple. Nevertheless, by reading through the historical literature on planets and asteroids, Metzger and colleagues have improved the prospects for a better-informed debate. After all, “The more that you read, the more things you will know. The more that you learn, the more places you’ll go.”

• Follow me on Twitter: @tom_siegfried

{ https://www.sciencenews.org/ }

UFO Sighting: Solid Black Triangle Over Jacksonville, Florida

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• Hardest UFO Proof ever! Filmed in Bolzano, Italy!

{ https://www.disclose.tv/ }

FLYING SAUCERERS: THE ROLE OF SCIENCE FICTION AND THE OCCULT IN THE BIRTH OF THE UFO ERA

GREG

However, before we look at these characters at the Dawn of the Modern Era of UFOs, we need to peek back into those strange pre-dawn years when the foundations were put into place for the bizarre edifice that would later be built.

Before the Dawn

Although Emanuel Swedenborg was reporting journeys to other planets back in the 18^th century, the origins of the ETH lie at the end of the 19^th century and the start of the 20^th. Here we see H.G. Wells’ Martians visiting in fiction and Helene Smith making the return journey in…‘fact’. Despite some suggestions that the craft seen in the 1896–1897 airship flap were from Mars, the first significant linking of strange lights in the sky with alien visitors was in the proto-ufology of Charles Fort. However, other people were also reporting contact with aliens a number of years before Fort started publishing his findings.

In my previous article I raised the possibility that science fiction was being passed off as factual accounts of real events, and when we go back to the late 19^th century we find Theosophy, which did this blatantly. And, in doing so, laid the foundations for the ETH.

The movement’s hugely influential founder, Helena Blavatsky, produced two key volumes, Isis Unveiled(1877) and The Secret Doctrine (1888), which claimed to synthesise the wisdom of the ancients. However, William Coleman looked at the sources and found a lot to be concerned about: rather than drawing on vast numbers of ancient texts, Blavatsky had copied large sections from a limited number of relatively recent books.

For our purposes, what is relevant is that she also drew heavily on speculative fiction, in particular the work of Sir Edward Bulwer-Lytton, best known these days for the opening line “it was a dark and stormy night.” It is his hollow earth novel The Coming Race (1871) which provided Theosophy with the concept of the ‘Vril’ power, but Blavatsky also drew on a range of his books. According to Prof. Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, an expert on Western Esotericism:

Her fascination with Egypt as the fount of all wisdom arose from her enthusiastic reading of the English author Sir Edward Bulwer-Lytton. His novel The Last Days of Pompeii (1834) had been conceived of as a narrative of the impact of the Isis cult in Rome during the first century AD. His later works, Zanoni (1842), A Strange Story(1862), and The Coming Race (1871), also dwelt on esoteric initiation and secret fraternities dedicated to occult knowledge in a way which exercised an extraordinary fascination on the romantic mind of the nineteenth century. It is ironical that early theosophy should have been principally inspired by English occult fiction.

This didn’t end with Blavatsky’s books, though. This information was passed on and the provenance obfuscated with each iteration:

An entire procession of cults and obscure religious sects has followed Blavatsky’s lead, copying their doctrines from her and from one another while simultaneously denying their true sources and instead attributing their second- and third-hand revelations to further contact with the Hidden Masters of the Great White Brotherhood. This process has been called “genealogical dissociation” (Johnson 1995; 158) and has continued through groups more-or-less in the classical Theosophical mold, such as Guy Ballard’s I AM or Elizabeth Clare Prophet’s Church Universal and Triumphant, and also into more up-to-date models in the form of the flying saucer contactee cults that replace the Hidden Masters in their Himalayan hideaways with Space Brothers winging in their cosmic wisdom from Venus or the Pleiades. J. Gordon Melton has noted that the flying saucer is practically the only new element of the story — many of the older tales had the element of interplanetary travel already, such as Blavatsky’s Hidden Masters originating in the distant past when the Lords of Flame traveled to earth from Venus — and that even this element is often absent from current contact accounts, leaving them almost indistinguishable from nineteenth-century accounts.

For example, Guy Ballard, and other Theosophists, gravitated towards Mount Shasta in California. The interest in this location was sparked by Frederick Spencer Oliver’s 1905 book A Dweller on Two Planets, which tells of Lemurians escaping the destruction of their home and taking up residence under the mountain. The book, written between 1883/1884 and 1886, but only published after Oliver’s death, was allegedly channelled through automatic writing. However, it is essentially science fiction, or according to L. Sprague de Camp (who we met in the last Darklore piece) “a tiresome occult novel.” According to the 2002 introduction by John B. Hare, who also considers it “a work of speculative fiction”:

This book is openly acknowledged as source material for many new age belief systems, including the once-popular “I AM” movement (whose founder, Guy Ballard, plagiarized extensively from this book), the Lemurian Fellowship, and Elizabeth Claire Prophet. According to Shirley MacLaine, A Dweller on Two Planets jumped out of a bookshelf into her hands in a New Age bookstore in Hong Kong (and obviously had a big influence on her subsequently).

Although Blavatsky included Ascended Masters from Venus, it was never a core of her teachings – it was Ballard who would “become the first to actually build a religion on contact with extraterrestrials.” He claimed that he was in frequent contact with them, being visited by Venusians while at Mount Shasta. The important distinction, as noted above, is that these interplanetary journeys (usually within the Solar System, as understood by science at the time) were done through more mystical means.

Contact was often made through channelling and automatic writing and “following the lead of the fantastic voyage novels, contactees either travelled astrally, woke up from a sleep to find themselves mysteriously transported to their destination, or experience some form of what might be called dematerialization” – a mode of transport best known through fiction, like John Carter’s voyages to Mars, first written about by Edgar Rice Burroughs in 1919. What is missing is the idea of the flying saucer itself – for that we have to look to another source, which has its roots in the work of Charles Fort.

While Fort’s ideas were carried on in their original form by the Fortean Society, it was another group altogether that would expose his work to a wider audience – science fiction authors. Jerome Clark has said that the Books of Charles Fort (1941) were “a classic only in the cult sense, functioning mostly as a source of ideas for science fiction writers.” In particular this included a serialisation of Lo!, starting in the April 1934 edition of Astounding Science Fiction, the leading magazine to spearhead the ‘Golden Age of Science Fiction’ (publishing a large number of the key players in my last Darklore article). Arthur C. Clarke has said, “No choice could have been more appropriate for a science fiction magazine, and Fort’s writing was to have an immense influence on the field,” in particular on the young Clarke. “I found his eccentric – even explosive – style stimulating and even mind-expanding,” Clarke would later write, and it is evident in his various television series on strange phenomena. 

We also know others read his work: Lovecraft checked out a number of his books from the library and even name-checked him a few times in his books. The dark theme behind the phrase “we are property” proved especially influential, as were the early glimmerings of the ancient astronaut idea, with some of the related ideas having Theosophical overtones. It would even be science fiction writer Damon Knight who helped with the rediscovery of Fort in the later parts of the 20^th century, writing the biography Charles Fort: Prophet of the Unexplained (1970) and overseeing the release of the Complete Works of Charles Fort (1974).

With these ideas simmering away in the background during the first half of the 20^th century, we now turn to look at how they emerged fully-formed as the ETH in the very early hours of the Dawn of the Modern Era of UFOs.

Ray Palmer

The late John Keel, the famous Fortean investigator best known for his Mothman Prophecies, has described Ray Palmer as “The Man Who Invented Flying Saucers,” and this wouldn’t be far wrong. In 1938, Palmer took over as the editor of an ailing science fiction magazine, Amazing Stories, that would have sunk without trace except for a chance discovery in the, normally rejected, crank pile. The letter was from one Richard Shaver, and was published in the December 1943 issue. The reader response to Shaver’s description of an ancient alphabet prompted Palmer to ask for more material. He received “A Warning for Man,” a 10,000-word piece which Palmer then reworked into a 31,000-word story with the more impressive (and Theosophically-influenced) name “I Remember Lemuria!” Published in March 1945, this wild ‘true story’ told of “death rays, tunnelling machines, high-tech ancient civilizations and even flying disks!” These stories, and subsequent tales – mainly revolving around the underground-dwelling race of ‘Deros’, with evil plans for us surface dwellers – proved an instant hit. Letters flew in and the circulation would grow by an order of magnitude until it was one of the most successful sci-fi magazines, selling a quarter of a million copies and moving from being a quarterly to a monthly. Although it could be dismissed as the ramblings of a paranoid schizophrenic, there was a degree of effort put into making these stories readable and engaging:

Shaver’s stories were heavily rewritten by Ray Palmer originally, and then later by other writers who were assigned to The Shaver Mystery job by Palmer…

…Palmer was the publishing genius behind Shaver, and it was no doubt Palmer’s sophisticated knowledge of literature, science fiction and contemporary science, myth and legend that propelled The Shaver Mystery into the public eye so successfully.

Another key story at this time was Harold Sherman’s Green Man tales, “The Green Man” (October 1946) and “The Green Man Returns” (December 1947), which also appeared in Palmer’s Amazing Stories. The tales – featuring Numar, the green-hued main character – were apparently inspired by Sherman’s own odd experience:

Sometime in the year 1945, when Martha and I were living in Chicago, I had a series of visions wherein I saw Space Beings, possessed of high intelligence, visiting our Earth in space ships of different shapes and sizes, for the purpose of exploration and eventually to fill our skies with large space vehicles, coming in force, hopefully on a friendly mission to help Mankind save itself from self-destruction.

So, by 1947, large numbers of readers were following the advice/warning that would become enshrined in the end of the 1951 film The Thing From Another World: “Watch the skies!” They didn’t have long to wait.

While flying near Mount Rainier, Washington, pilot Kenneth Arnold famously sighted a number of UFOs on June 24, 1947, which now officially marks the start of the Modern Era of UFOs. However, although the press coverage spawned the term ‘flying saucer’, the objects weren’t classic flying saucers, being described as something more like a flying wing (half-moon or bat-wing). In addition there was no claim that they were alien vehicles. However, Palmer spotted the parallels with the stories he’d been publishing, and quickly moved to jump on that particular bandwagon – a letter from Ray Palmer to Kenneth Arnold arrived on July 15. Palmer would send Arnold off to investigate the Maury Island Incident, which ‘happened’ three days before Arnold’s sightings. It would prove to be a strange conspiracy quagmire: suggestions of bugging emerged, and the main figure, Fred Crisman – who was known to Palmer – would go on to be linked with the JFK assassination.

Kenneth Arnold with an illustration of his UFO sighting

Palmer, with a keen eye on the zeitgeist, launched a factual magazine in 1948 called Fate, and the first issue included Arnold’s account of his encounter. The two would then collaborate on a book that expanded on this, The Coming of the Saucers (1952), published by Palmer’s Amherst Press.

Despite the fact that whatever Arnold saw wasn’t actually shaped like the classic flying saucer, the term proved suitably evocative and it was up to science fiction again to provide the image. The back cover of the November 1947 edition of Palmer’s Fantastic Adventures featured “a flotilla of golden saucers above the New York skyline, and the words: ‘Will the ancient gods of Egypt and other lost civilisations come back to Earth in time to avert an atom war?’”

As the UFO phenomena evolved, we find Palmer’s fingerprints all over the work of the early contactees. For example, Orfeo Angelucci worked at the Lockheed aircraft plant in California, not long after one of the giants of the early Contactee movement, George van Tassel, had left. In his 1955 book The Secret of the Saucers Angelucci describes how, on his way home from work, he would occasionally bump into aliens and their flying saucers. However, the origin of this seems to go back to the job he had before joining Lockheed, as he describes himself in his book:

For several months I worked as manager of the Los Feliz Club House. In my spare time I endeavored to write a motion picture script. It was more of a hobby than anything else. I didn’t really expect the script to be accepted as I’d had no writing experience. As the idea of space travel was quite popular in the films then, I concentrated on a story about an imaginary trip to the moon. Several studios were interested in the finished manuscript, but it was never made into a motion picture.

This has led one commentator to note…

Orfeo Angelucci’s contactee story began as a movie script titled Worlds are Mad Tonight. He came to realize it had little financial potential and “lay gathering dust and forgotten” before the aliens came forward to tell him it was  true.

It gets even more interesting though, because this book was published by Ray Palmer’s Amherst Press, and it appears Palmer was involved at every stage. Of course, Palmer was the editor and publisher, but there is something odd about the book’s credits, as described in the 2007 introduction:

Angelucci’s name doesn’t appear on the title page, simply Palmer as editor. Angelucci is, strangely, only listed as a copyright holder.  …The book makes a brisk read (again, a hallmark of Palmer), and if you suspend disbelief, it works as science fiction as well.

As we’ve seen with Shaver, Palmer took a very ‘hands on’ approach to his ‘editing’ and this seems to be no exception.

It was also Palmer’s Fate that gave an early venue to the man who would take the flying saucer story up to a new level. In Fate’s July 1951 edition was an article entitled “I Photographed Space Ships” – by one ‘Prof.’ George Adamski.

George Adamski

Adamski’s story is a strange and complex one. He had established the Royal Order of Tibet during the late 1920s, which preached a Theosophical-based philosophy, although Adamski claimed it was really a front for bootleg liquor during the Prohibition. However, the group continued on after the end of Prohibition in 1933 and started publishing books and pamphlets in 1936. They also moved on from their initial base at Laguna Beach, California and, after a time on a nearby ranch, he and his followers ended up at Mount Palomar in 1944. There they lived in a commune with Adamski working in a restaurant catering to people visiting the Mount Palomar Observatory, further up the mountain. His involvement with UFOs started with a series of sightings, one in October 1946 and another only weeks after Arnold’s had hit the news. This all seemed par for the course in the late forties, but things got interesting toward the end of 1949 when four military men dropped by – including two scientists from the Point Loma Naval Electronics Laboratory who asked Adamski if he could provide any photographs. He soon obliged, and it was these sensational images which garnered Adamski a lot of interest at the time…and a huge amount of scorn later, as they were obviously rather bad fakes.

Although stuck up the side of a mountain, Adamski seems to have had strong connections with other contactees and esoteric groups of the period. According to Jacques Vallee, Adamski had connections with the occult fascist William Dudley Pelley. Pelley had mystical experiences before WWII and become a supporter of Hitler during the war, which led to him being jailed for treason. He was only released on the understanding that he avoided politics, leading him to return to his more esoteric interests. Although there was strong crossover between his followers and Guy Ballard’s group, it was in the post-war period, around 1950, that another important individual, George Hunt Williamson worked for Pelley. The latter may have even introduced Williamson to Adamski.

Together Adamski and Williamson would be part of one of the most important events in the early years of the Modern Era of UFOs, when they travelled into the Mojave Desert on November 20, 1952. Leaving the rest of the party, Adamski met Orthon, a Nordic Venusian. After the alien had departed Williamson took plaster casts of some footprints, that are said to have included a reversed swastika in the pattern.

The first of Adamski’s books on his encounters with flying saucers and their occupants, Flying Saucers Have Landed, was released in 1953. Surprisingly, he did not write the bulk of it; instead, large portions were penned by British Theosophist Desmond Leslie. In keeping with the broader themes of this piece, Leslie’s journey started when his publisher asked him to research UFOs for a science fiction story and he ended up concluding they were real. Leslie’s contribution would also be significant because it was very Fortean in tone with a distinctly Theosophical spin to it, putting forward the case for ancient visitations by aliens.

Williamson would go on to write Other Tongues – Other Flesh, published in 1953 by… yes you guessed it, Ray Palmer’s Amherst Press. According to Donna Kossy, “Williamson’s version of the origin of humanity draws heavily on Pelley’s Star Guests, which itself draws from ‘I AM’ (Guy and Edna Ballard’s ‘Ascended Master’ cult which flourished in the 1930s), Theosophy, the Bible and possibly other sources.” Mankind’s ultimate origin was said to be Sirius, but the Earth was, he claimed, also populated by other sinister races from places like Orion. This leads Kossy to conclude “Many of the space brothers’ messages, as received by contactees such as Williamson and Adamski, are transparent right-wing political statements whose authority is legitimised because they come from a ‘higher intelligence.”

The Theosophy link here is also important as it not only plugs Adamski firmly into the broader occult scene in California, but also seems to be a continuation of the long ‘tradition’ of basing your teachings on science fiction. The main difference here is that the science fiction he lifted and presented as fact, was his own. Adamski’s earlier science fiction novel was little known, until it was reprinted recently, and Marc Hallet had to order a copy from the Library of Congress. His findings, when he got to read the book, were quite startling – almost all of Adamski’s space adventures were actually already all there in the earlier, fictional, work, something Palmer knew well:

‘Inside The Space Ships’ is nothing more than a science fiction book. The best proof we have of this is that it is a “remake” of a science-fiction book entitled Pioneers of Spacewhich Adamski wrote in 1949.

…To your surprise you will discover that these two books give exactly the same descriptions of space (with the fireflies), the Moon (with snow on mountains, forests, lakes, artificial hangers and even small running animals), the scout ship (with the great lens in the middle of the cabin and the graphs on the walls), the mother ship (with its two “skins”), and even little details such as the portrait of the Great One in the mother ship, the famous Saturnian badge with the balance, etc… You will also be pleased also to see that the Masters’ pompous statements are exactly the same, something that demonstrates that Adamski had a poor imagination and was unable to create new or original philosophical concepts. His lack of imagination was so great that his book Cosmic Philosophy published in 1961 was mainly based on texts he had written in the ’30s.

However, there is one element that is not from his books which helped make his story one of the most compelling from the early Contactee era – the meeting of a Venusian in the Mojave Desert.

Given Adamski’s fondness for ‘recycling’, and apparent problems with coming up with new material, the question arises: where did he get this idea from? The answer may come from an examination of the wider occult vortex in California, and it brings us back to the focus of my previous piece in Darklore: Jack Parsons and L. Ron Hubbard. In 1946, while the two were engaged in occult rituals in Pasadena, Jack Parsons claims to have met a Venusian in the Mojave Desert. The exact timing and context are unclear, but as he was apparently alone, this appears to be the time when his magickal partners L. Ron Hubbard and Marjorie Cameron were both away. During this time, on February 28, 1946, Parsons went into the Mojave Desert and ‘received’ Liber 49, The Book of Babalon. He said of the experience “[t]he presence of the Goddess came upon me and I was commanded to write the following communications.” According to biographer John Carter, “[t]he Venusian apparently was the implied source of Liber 49.”

Both Adamski and Parsons were part of the occult scene in California, although the latter seems more central, with authors and adepts dropping by his house when they were in town. However, there are more explicit links. According to one of Parsons’ biographers: “[Max] Schneider and his wife had a small cabin on Mount Palomar that members of the lodge often used for short retreats.” Paul Rydeen provides more details of the Palomar link:

In “Alchemical Conspiracy and the Death of the West” Michael Hoffman writes of Parsons. Hoffman tells us that the Ordo Templi Orientis (OTO) had a temple on nearby Mount Palomar. The local Indians regarded the mountain as holy. Hoffman says, “The OTO believed that Palomar was the sexual chakra of the Earth.” Parsons commuted regularly between Palomar and Pasadena. The Mount Palomar Observatory opened in 1949. Smith probably consecrated his temple on Palomar soon after his move to California in 1930, before the Observatory was planned.

There is one final potential link, which, if proved, would show the direct line of transmission of this last piece of the jigsaw. It has been suggested that Hubbard and Adamski met in 1951 (i.e. after Hubbard and Parsons’ relationship had soured, but a year before Adamski said he met the aliens in the Mojave), and discussed science fiction and UFOs.

Beyond Adamski

Charles Laughead is one of the best examples of the way people would rattle around the occult/contactee scene in the early days of the Modern Era of UFOs. He and his wife seem to have had a crisis of faith in the late 1940s and gone on the search for enlightenment, which brought them into contact with the group coalescing around Marion Keech (real name Dorothy Martin) in 1949–1950. This group started channelling contacts with aliens (which, as we’ve seen, continued seamlessly from the Theosophical groups into the contactees) and started producing messages about a coming apocalypse in December 1954. This caught the attention of the media and, through them, a group of sociologists and psychologists who infiltrated the group and were able to monitor the dynamics as the deadline of doom came and went – resulting in one of the best books on the topic, When Prophecy Fails (1956). Although they put it all down to a simple group state, there were certainly strange events swirling around the group, including a number of odd visitors, some of whom might later have been described as Men in Black. Following the collapse of the group, Keech returned to Hubbard’s Dianetics movement, which she had earlier been involved with, and would later journey to Peru where she and George Hunt Williamson established the Abbey of the Seven Rays in 1957. The Laugheads were also in Williamson’s orbit – but they also, importantly, met Dr. Andrija Puharich.

Puharich is perhaps best known for being Uri Geller’s mentor, but he had been researching parapsychology since the late 1940s. In December 1952 he was working with Dr D.G. Vinod, who started channelling communications from a group calling themselves ‘The Nine’. These communications continued on and off until 1953, when, in front of a group of nine (including people like Arthur M. Young), they revealed themselves as the various aspects of God. Laughead and his wife would come into contact with Puharich and Young three years later in a Mexican hotel. While Puharich was not initially impressed by the information passed on to him (apparently channelled by Williamson), a follow-up letter from Laughead made him pay attention because the communications it contained paralleled what he had received via Vinod, adding an extraterrestrial spin to proceedings. This seemed to be independent confirmation of the information, and the Nine would simmer away in the background until he met Uri Geller in the seventies when, after asking Geller leading questions under hypnotism, he seems to have got in contact with similar entities. Those who have read the previous article may start to spot a similar situation to the ones we saw with Parsons, Jessup and Bennewitz, in which an individual is an unknowing ‘actor’ in a ‘play’ where the other ‘actors’ have access to the ‘script’. Basically, it looks like Puharich is the focus of a Big Con – the information would only be convincing if the sources were really independent. Given Laughead’s links throughout the occult/contactee groups, and the way he kept popping up like a Joker in the pack, there must be the suspicion that he was able to access enough information to fool Puharich. Why anyone would do this is unclear, as he ran CIA-sponsored remote viewing experiments and is considered to be very much an insider. However, it could be read a different way. Could Puharich’s beliefs have been deliberately altered early on? This would then result in him being an unwitting actor in later events, which included widespread use of hypnosis to recover further information from Geller, which we know tends to generate a fiction based on a mix of the therapist’s and the patient’s beliefs. If so, this would mean the idea of the Nine originated elsewhere, and Puharich was manipulated into believing it was true.

N. Meade Layne was also in Southern California, had links with the OTO and was member of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. Layne’s contacts spanned the occult/contactee world, and he established Borderlands Science Research Associates (now Foundation) in 1945, which was discussing UFOs before even Arnold’s sightings. One key role was in publicising information emerging from other sources. These included the channelling of ‘E Yada Da Shi’ite’ from the ‘Interplanetary High Council’ by Mark Probert, which “in early 1946…swerved into the same new theme Harold Sherman caught in his story ‘The Green Man’ – the imminent arrival of extraterrestrial craft in Earth’s skies.” So it wasn’t just the science fiction fans who were watching the skies in 1946/1947.

Conclusion

I must admit when I was younger and knew less about UFOs I had assumed the Extraterrestrial Hypothesis stemmed from…you know, aliens visiting us. However, the true origins appear to lie in the occultists and science fiction writers (and some science fiction-writing occultists) who jumped on Arnold’s sighting of…something, and promoted the idea that these were the alien visitors they’d been writing about/talking to for the decades running up to 1947. Some would even go on to ‘meet’ these visitors from the stars. These individuals tend to fall into two groups. On the east coast we have the Chicago group associated with Raymond Palmer, “the man who invented flying saucers,” which also included Harold Sherman. They had effectively primed the pump and moved hard and fast to dominate the very earliest sightings and publications. On the west coast there is the giant cauldron of California containing the powerful mix of the occult, sci-fi and UFOs. It is here that the ball Palmer put into play was picked up and run with. However, we also see his direct influence, working on and publishing books and articles from this group.

There is also another organization which certainly moved quickly in the wake of Kenneth Arnold’s sighting (even if it was not overly successful in anticipating it). In light of the details covered earlier, the July 8, 1947 announcement by the Air Force that a flying saucer had crashed at Roswell – coming so soon after Arnold’s (during the initial wave of excitement it generated) – seems suspicious, as it was perfectly timed to keep the momentum going with an official acknowledgement of the phenomena (even if it was rapidly withdrawn). We also have the active involvement of the Navy in Adamski’s story. While we might expect to find them in connection with the Philadelphia Experiment (as it was allegedly a Navy project) and Parsons (who had contracts with the Navy), it is definitely odd in this context – and a wider examination of the field shows them popping up in strange places.

On analysing the Modern Era of UFOs we see it less as a new phenomena and more an evolution of existing ideas. Theosophy’s Ascended Masters became increasingly extraterrestrial, and contact with them moved from channelling, to their arriving in space ships (although, as we’ve seen, channelling was still important long after flying saucers appeared in the skies). The home of the ‘aliens’ has also changed – moving further away from the Earth as science brought us more information about the planets, forcing them to ‘abandon’ Mars, with its canals, for Venus and then the outer planets in the Solar System, before heading out into deep space. We can also see the abduction phenomena as a further evolution, one which shed a lot of the mystical trappings and made it a lot more personal and more modern – emphasising technology, and ditching uplifting messages for darker medical interventions.

What I do want to emphasize though is that I am not dismissing the majority of UFO reports as science fiction. My concern is that the peculiar mix of individuals had already defined the ‘story’ long before the Dawn of the Modern Era of UFOs, and they moved quickly to put their version of this story into place within days. A few years later this mythos was firmly in place and a number of the leading flying saucer proponents were perfectly happy to rebrand their science fiction as bona fide science fact. This established a framework that other people used to interpret their strange experiences, creating a positive feedback loop that reinforced the prevailing paradigm. The introduction of hypnotically-recovered memories made this even more problematic because – as has been ably described elsewhere – the hypnotist and/or the subject’s worldview can shape the memories. This can result in apparently consistent accounts that also help convince people of the reality of this idea.

There is another issue too. Ufology, which should be a broad and flexible discipline, is largely focused on flying saucers and their alien pilots. This serves to limit the scope of inquiry and pretty much guarantees that the broad consensus (especially amongst the general public) remains that they are in fact visitors from other worlds making a bit of a nuisance of themselves. As I showed in my first two articles for Darklore, there is an odd crossover between ufology and the wilder fringes of cryptozoology, with similar reports of strange clouds in connection with UFOs, religion and other Fortean phenomena. Greg Taylor also discussed this in relation to sounds in Darklore Volume 1, and there are many more such examples which suggest ufology isn’t a discretely defined field.

The idea that the ETH (as described) is essentially artificial slots into a number of other ideas that are out there. Operation Bluelight is a pretty wild conspiracy theory that suggests some shadowy group are going to undermine the world’s faiths, and then engineer a vast faked alien armada that would help them impose a new global UFO religion. We could say that this fits into a class of ideas we’ll call the ‘Strong Watchmen Plan’ – after Alan Moore’s classic comic book series, in which one of the superheroes launches a vast scheme to create such an overwhelming external threat that the people of Earth would have to back away from the brink of Mutually Assured Destruction.

A more general idea for faking ‘the Voice of God’ (and possibly also using some kind of aerial hologram) goes back to the ideas put forward to get rid of Fidel Castro (which seem to have originated with Ian Fleming, who I mentioned in the last Darklore), and came up again with the invasion of Iraq in 1991. Ufologist Jacques Vallee also stumbled across the infamous ‘Pentacle Memorandum’, which advocated that the military monitor specific places that had a lot of reported UFO activity, while further suggesting that “many different types of aerial activity should be secretly and purposefully scheduled within the area.” As should be obvious, it might be possible to fake this in a limited way, for a handful of people – however, increasing it up to a planetary scale is almost impossible to do convincingly (and let us not forget that belief is a difficult thing to shift, even when presented with actual facts). The beauty of the concept put forward here is that you don’t need to go to all that trouble. Having the idea in place early means you don’t need to micromanage proceedings – people have been seeing lights in the sky, and meeting strange entities, throughout history; all you need to do is update the model they use to interpret their unusual experiences.

Lynn Picknett and Clive Prince have also looked at the interconnections between people in the occult/contactee groups and suggested that there was some kind of conspiracy at work. The main axis for this seems to be Andrija Puharich and the group channelling the Nine, but it also connects with Hubbard/Parsons and the CIA. However, it would require Puharich to be some kind of eminence gris, pulling a lot of the strings behind the scenes. But, as I noted earlier, at some points in his story he seems to have been the victim of at least one Big Con. Nevertheless, the connections they uncover are significant no matter what the underlying driving force is.

While researching this piece I came across John Michael Greer’s new book, The UFO Phenomenon: Fact, Fantasy and Disinformation, which parallels a lot of my thinking on the subject and helped fill in some gaps. Greer suggests what might be going on is what we could consider the ‘Weak Watchmen Plan’:

Attempts to shape the consciousness of a culture or an age using powerful symbolic patterns, in other words, are among the things occultists do. The possibility exists that something of the sort lies behind the remarkable involvement of the American occult community in the first days of the UFO phenomena. While it is certainly possible that figures such as Meade Layne and Harold Sherman, who predicted the arrival of the flying saucers in advance were simply reporting visions and dreams that would shortly burst out in a flurry of apparitions across America’s skies, the possibility has to be considered that these highly publicised reports were meant to cause such an event.

…it is at least possible that somewhere in the broad overlap between the American occult community and the science fiction scene, a group of occultists driven by the same sense of desperation set out to deliberately create the belief that extraterrestrial beings were about to intervene on Earth.

They may have hoped simply to inject just that moment of hesitation into the minds of politicians and generals that could keep them from plunging into a nuclear abyss.

In essence this was a magickal working on a grand scale – perhaps not designed to directly effect change, but to create a viral meme that aliens were concerned about our onward march to nuclear Armageddon. Science fiction gave them a ready-made audience, and also a means to present various scenarios in fictional form. One of the key works in that regard is the 1951 film The Day the Earth Stood Still. Predating the rise of the high-profile Contactees, like Adamski, by a year, it showed a classic flying saucer landing in Washington so the pilot can deliver a message expressing the concern of the aliens about mankind’s development of nuclear weapons. It is believed to be the inspiration behind the off-script comments made by Ronald Reagan during his 1985 meetings with Mikhail Gorbachev that helped end the Cold War. It is also worth noting that, in essence (and without the occult overtones) this Weak Watchmen Plan is very much along the lines of the possibility I raised in the last essay: that the concept of the Star Wars program (conceived by an odd mix of space scientists, military men, aerospace executives and science fiction writers, including Heinlein) had a similar effect in the last days of the Cold War, and may have brought the world back from the brink at that time.

Another idea comes from occultist/ufologist Allen Greenfield, who is also a bishop in the Gnostic Catholic Church, the ecclesiastical arm of the OTO. Greenfield knew a lot of the players in this story, which might qualify him to speak on these topics; he has more doomladen claims to make about a lot of individuals we have looked at:

UFO buffs have of late been touting a theory that Hubbard came to Parsons with a purpose more grandiose than “the ordinary confidence game.” In pulp magazine circles, he had encountered any number of occultists and border occultists (Talbot Mundy, Col. Arthur Burks, Major Donald Keyhoe, Ray Palmer and Richard S. Shaver come to mind), and had already formulated the core of the “inner Scientology teaching” outlined above. He wished to bring this other world into Manifestation, but lacked the technical knowledge to do so. So, he came to the innocent sex magician Jack Parsons. In this version, the Babalon Working, guided by Hubbard, had little to do with “Babalon” and more to do with the hideous Old Ones of the H.P. Lovecraft Cthulhu Mythos.

Speaking of Lovecraft, one particular quote from the great man of horror and science fiction springs to mind when discussing these issues. In a letter to Clark Ashton Smith, dated October 17, 1930, Lovecraft wrote:

My own rule is that no weird story can truly produce terror unless it is devised with all the care & verisimilitude of an actual hoax. The author must forget all about ‘short story technique’, and build up a stark, simple account, full of homely corroborative details, just as if he were actually trying to ‘put across’ a deception in real life – a deception clever enough to make adults believe it.

Personally, I don’t really see a grand conspiracy at work. It would require a number of people to have had an important role in stage-managing a large performance. A key figure would have to be Ray Palmer who doesn’t come across as some cunning mastermind. Unfortunately, he seems more driven by Fun and Profit; most of his influence on the field seems to be more opportunistic, spotting trends and exploiting them with little concern about the line between fact and fiction.

There are just too many separate groups with different (often murky) agendas pushing in often opposing directions. What seems to have emerged accidentally from the collision of these ideas was a modern mythology that provided a lens for interpreting strange events. A mythology which appears to be no more of an approximation to the underlying ‘truth’ than ideas of fairies and angels/demons were in earlier ages.

How does science fiction influence the real world? | The Economist

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• The Emperor has written for Fortean Times and a number of British small press magazines and comics.

Ancient Aliens: A Reasonable Hypothesis Supported By Facts

REASONABLE HYPOTHESIS: Artificially sensible probes may be the path-blazers reporting back to their organic masters (assuming the biological ET entities are in reality nonetheless the masters and now not the put up-biological evolution handover to AI).

REASONABLE HYPOTHESIS: It is a long way less difficult to boldly go if you are a mind-in-the-gadget than if you have to tug your organic frame along for the journey which calls for vast and pricey lifestyles assisting infrastructure.

REASONABLE HYPOTHESIS: The Third Rock from the Sun (Planet Earth) has been stated, logged, catalogued, and examined (perhaps on an ongoing foundation) via one or extra of these boldly going technologically advanced ET civilizations.

REASONABLE HYPOTHESIS: That we are particularly not going to had been the (lucky) technology residing for the duration of the time of the very first discovery of Planet Earth by using ET. Probability dictates that such a primary discovery passed off a long time ago, perhaps in our distant, even prehistoric past, if no longer even manner earlier than that, however from that moment, but a ways again it was, ET might have then maintained an ongoing presence in our cosmic neck of the woods.

REASONABLE HYPOTHESIS: Planet Earth might preserve a special interest to an ETI considering the fact that 1) Planet Earth has a biosphere - a cosmic rarity, and a couple of) the inklings of indigenous intelligent lifestyles stirring.

SPECULATIVE HYPOTHESIS: Planet Earth may had been regarded by using ET as a tremendous herbal Petri dish and offered ET with a threat to do organic, behavioral and sociological experimentation on a grand scale that centered on at the least 3 elements: 1) creating an wise species thru synthetic choice and genetic engineering; 2) transporting the diverse species so created into differing environments to test for survival and flexibility and consequently relative intelligence; and 3) augmenting that survival and adaptableness take a look at through giving numerous 'gifts' to the evolving species (like fire, agriculture, and many others.). Most species failed their jogging through the survival and adaptableness maze and went extinct; some did reasonably properly, as a minimum for a while (like Homo erectus and the Neanderthals) earlier than going extinct; one species, Homo sapiens is walking the maze efficaciously - as a minimum up to now.

FACT: In support of the above speculative speculation, we word those oft noted misplaced civilizations and abandoned settlements and towns. Deserted or deserted cities appear to be a frequent theme in archaeology and the reasons are often far from being clear reduce and any scholarly reasons usually arguable. There are peoples and cultures and societies who arrive suddenly, seemingly out of nowhere, and emerge as vanishing into apparently skinny air, if now not down a Black Hole, someday similarly on down the track. It's nearly as if that they had disembarked out of the ether and lifted off again after having installed a presence, proof they left behind. The Olmecs are a case in point.

FACT: Ancient human mythologies from round the world have a commonplace theme that some of the seemingly mythological entities have a humanoid however non-human look like the Cyclopes, numerous winged humanoid beings (like the Greek goddess Nike or the Egyptian goddess Maat), numerous hybrid beings (like the Birdmen of Easter Island or the winged guys of historic Mesopotamia) plus numerous non-terrestrial acting lifestyles forms which can be frequently hybrids (consisting of the griffin or the dragon).

FACT: Ancient human mythologies from around the world, all manner of differing societies and cultures, even have a common subject matter of sky gods, celestial/heavenly beings, star human beings, and related.

FACT: The vital factor here is that those had been not sightings of sky gods and goddesses at a distance, but up near and private encounters, be it God and Jonah or God and Moses; angels and Abraham; Jesus and his disciples; Zeus and Europa; Paris up against Hera, Aphrodite and Athena; and so forth. Tales of close encounters that have filtered down from all ancient cultures and societies.

FACT: Ancient human mythologies from round the sector have a common topic that these entities have simply advanced excessive technology, like Thor's hammer; Zeus's thunderbolts; Poseidon's trident; Hades' invisibility helmet; Odin's spear, Hermes' winged shoes, the magic wand of Circe, etc. They additionally own aerial automobiles as mentioned in the Bible and in other texts from round the sector.

FACT: There are not any shortages of highly enigmatic historical systems around the arena (excepting Australia) that both have 1) no obvious rhyme or motive or regarded purpose for current (like the ones often large stone balls) and/or 2) might have hired technology we simply do not/can't associate with their proprietors and/or three) are even attributed by using their proprietors to non-human assets (like the Cyclopean Walls) and/or 4) or which had been transported with the aid of non-human sources and manner (like the ones Easter Island statues that walked through themselves), or in trendy over-the-pinnacle systems that required an super amount of effort and time, apparently manner out of share to the need for them, and thus subtracting from time to be had for greater searching after more primary needs like food (searching, collecting, tilling the fields), safe haven, defense, and making and repairing clothing). I'm questioning here like the pyramids (Egyptian and Mesoamerican); obelisks, Stonehenge (and many different comparable megaliths); gigantic statues (Egyptian, Asian, even Easter Island) and other rock carvings; the ones large earthen mounds of jap North America, and so on.

FACT: There are severa and great historic geo-glyphs from round the world which have been reputedly designed to be favored and visible for what they're from aerial heights. There are also numerous historical structures that mirror a fairly restricted number of a number of the admittedly distinguished constellations - The Egyptian trio of pyramids at Giza that replicate Orion's Belt straight away involves mind. Is this an ancient shape of worshiping the sky gods?

FACT: The sky gods, and so forth. Are generally associated with just a surprisingly few celestial gadgets or constellations which can be repeated again and again as you go from one ancient culture's mythology to some other. Orion's Belt, the Pleiades, and Sirius are celestial gadgets of note.

FACT: In mythologies throughout the historical international, human beings attribute their advent to the sky/celestial/heavenly gods (plural). If there have been simplest one society so saying this, it could probable be brushed off, but separate and apart accounts variety inside the multi-dozens and then some. Anomaly one is why advent of humanity would be postulated at all by human beings, except of direction these ancient cultures have been sincerely informed of this fact by using their creators; and anomaly two is that this advent implies some form of excessive-tech or superior shape of biotechnologies possessed by way of these so-called gods.

FACT: Humans are notably special from all our other primate ancestors and existing cousins in terms of getting a complicated way of life (art, tune, literature, religion, and so forth.); a minimum amount fur (we're the 'bare ape'); a totally high IQ and evolved brain; a bipedal gait without advantage of a balancing tail; very distinct facial capabilities; we come in awesome breeds (races); we've a complex written and verbal language that could address abstractions; as well as other traits that reputedly set us aside like questionable morals and ethics. Whether these differences makes us an apex of creation is a extraordinary count number, however can all of these variations be effortlessly explained by using natural choice and Darwinian evolution?

FACT: Universally, ancient human mythologies file that the sky gods gave humankind gifts in the shape of hearth, agriculture as well as a bunch of other practical technologies. That this is so is unusual in that humans do not have a tendency to turn away from taking credit score for his or her achievements. I can understand the want to invent the gods with the intention to give an explanation for (what to you is) the unexplainable, like eclipses, comets, supernovae, thunder and lightning, the rainbow, and many others. But why invent gods bearing presents to provide an explanation for your technologies and tradition you have already got which possibly you or your extended family or your ancestors created for themselves. This makes no experience, until it were absolutely proper of direction. If not, some thing is screwy someplace.

FACT: Well virtually now not universally. The Australian aboriginals, in spite of some 50,000 years (give or take) of Down Under habitation, furnished with abundant herbal sources, they in no way came up with the forms of items other cultures attributed to their gods. They never got here up with writing, the bow and arrow, the wheel, mathematics, everlasting settlements with homes or different structures, engineering, metallurgy, agriculture, maritime abilties, or whatever else even remotely like almost each different subculture had, now not even some thing as simple as pottery. They seemingly practiced no astronomical rituals or had any astronomically associated buildings. They did have lifestyle (rock artwork, music, cooking, and so forth.) and they did have hearth, but this is no longer unexpected in view that natural bushfires are a not unusual characteristic of the Australian panorama. So while historic Mesopotamia, Greece, Rome, India, China, the Vikings, the Incas, the Aztecs, the Maya, even the native North American Indians as well as the Polynesians out colonizing the massive Pacific, had been strutting their stuff, the Australian aboriginal continued on and on with just the maximum basic of hunter-gatherer life. Even while Australia was 'observed' and settled by way of white Europeans, the aboriginals were nevertheless locked into what archaeologists might time period the Stone Age.

SPECULATIVE HYPOTHESIS: Although the Australian aboriginals in their extensive mythologies have severa references to celestial beings and related, one now wonders in the event that they won't were the gods' experimental manipulate group. That simply one foremost society would fail to expand any semblance to the kind of civilization as described via all these above stated societies is incredibly anomalous, but what better way to preserve the purity of your manage institution - let's see what takes place if a society receives no godly gifts - than to have it absolutely isolated on the island continent.

REASONABLE HYPOTHESIS: If then, then now. It's now not hard to assume ET will maintain tracking Planet Earth with an ongoing presence, having executed the difficult yards to get here, having an ongoing hobby in this right here third rock even supposing it is only a token presence.

{ http://www.twenkess.win/ }

THE ELITE STOLE AND SILENCED THESE 5 INVENTIONS FROM NIKOLA TESLA AND RUINED OUR FUTURE

Without a doubt, the intelligent creations of the human mind change the whole pattern of our lives. Naive people would say that everyone in our society follows the path of kindness and unselfishness concerning the best interests of the humankind. Yet, the “crème de la crème” prefers the existing.

Yet, the “crème de la crème” prefers the existing, non-innovated environment. That act caused many inventions to fall down the river.

The mega creations of Nikola Tesla’s, one of the most famous scientists in the world history, unfortunately, fall under this section. Here are five of his inventions hidden by the elite:

1. The Death Ray :

Nikola Tesla called the death ray “Teleforce” and demonstrated it as a powerful weapon able to produce acute energetic rays of light. These beams would have been used for dealing with enemy warplanes, armies from abroad and any other unwanted person or appearance. This invention was never constructed because of its help people would sabotage themselves very quickly. Nikola Tesla said that with the help of this electromagnetic weapon a nation would have a protective wall impenetrable for foreign armies, destroying them from 200 miles away. He annulled his master plan by believing somebody wants to steal his idea.

2. Tesla's Oscillator:

Around 1898, Tesla alleged he had found a weapon capable of generating an earthquake. When he first tested his small, oscillating mechanism that matched the frequencies of what it was attached to, he nearly demolished his laboratory. He thought that this weapon is too dangerous and likely destructive, he smashed it with a hammer.

3. Free Electricity:

Aided financially by JP Morgan, Tesla arranged to build a wireless transmission tower called the Wardenclyffe tower, with the location in New York. While Morgan’s wishes were the tower to transfer wireless communication across the globe, Tesla had other intentions. He had a theory that the Earth can transfer signals and he wanted to prove it by wanting to transmit messages across the ocean to the ships into the sea. If his theory was right, he would have proven that the natural arrangements of the planet can be used for anyone to produce free electrical power. His theory and his plan never came true, of course, because they generated no money earnings.

4. Flying Saucer:

Nikola Tesla made quite a few statements about his flying saucer. He claimed his flying saucer never had wings or propellers, never flown regularly or didn’t even look like a flying object for that matter. Yet, he claimed this object it’s capable of moving ideally in the air with perfect security and with greater speed that people have ever seen. Tesla suggested the saucer can also stay immobile in the air even though the weather is not good or the wind is very strong. He pointed out that the capabilities of his flying saucer depend only on its positive mechanical action.

5. Electric Airships:

Tesla lived in a world where he could be able to make airships drink their power from the atmosphere. He also proposed airships that could work without the skills of a man. His work resulted in the today’s so-called drone ships.

Many of the colleagues and friends of Nikola Tesla suspect that his masterworks were stolen by the FBI and other powerful organizations.

{  http://www.mysterious-times.com/  }

FROZEN ANTARCTICA IS HIDING THE HERITAGE OF THE LOST CONTINENT ATLANTIS?

The dating method by Dr. W.D Urry from Carnegie Institution in Washington D.C. helped scientists to come upon the fact that the rivers of Antarctica were flowing as described on the Orontius Finaeus map 6,000 years ago.

What are the odds that the lost civilization of Atlantis is buried underneath the Antarctica’s ice?

Generally speaking, Antarctica and Atlantis are connected in many mysterious ways. People believe that Atlantis existed sometimes in the past and its location was on Antarctica.

The first masterpiece writer who mentioned the lost continent of Atlantis on paper was Plato, even though before him, many Native Americans had suspicions about it.

The stories and tales of the primitive Americans have different origins and yet they share resemblance in terms of the civilization that vanished but lived in the past. In Central America, the ancient culture that talked about this civilization lived in Aztlan. Myths say Aztlan, belonged to the south, on an island and ceased with no alert due to the devastating natural occurring. The Aztlan place was described as the “place of whiteness” and that feature explains the connection between Atlantis and Antarctica or more simply, that Aztlan might actually be Atlantis, the legendary place on the south.

The devastating events that happened in Aztlan (or Atlantis) left only a few survivors who migrated to different continents and blended with the others.

Doubters tend to reject the theories that associate Atlantis and Antarctica, mainly because Antarctica today illustrates an icy ambiance and no human civilization. Despite the scepticism, old artefacts prove that Antarctica was a place full with vegetation and courtesy. Examples of those artefacts are the ancient maps that paint America with no ice – zones. The most eminent one is the Piri – Reis map created by an admiral who served in the Navy of the Ancient Ottoman Empire.

The Piri – Reis map was established with the help of other, older maps which sketch the shoreline of Antarctica but not as we see it today, they sketch it free of ice. This confirms that whoever explored Antarctica and depicted it on the maps was doing that when the continent wasn’t frigid.

The question that pops now is how a continent with a location to the south could ever be free of ice? The response is that Antarctica wasn’t always occupying the South Pole and was rather between it and the Equator meaning it was based north and seasoned tropical climate and grew forests. Yes, Antarctica in the early history was a place that was home to many people who progressed into societies just like the other fellow continents.

The theory that justifies these allegations is called crustal displacement.

The dominant belief between the traditional scientists is the belief of continental drift. According to this theory, our planet’s layer is branched into tectonic plates that float over the inner layer. With the time passing by, these plates slowly bounce against one another.

The other, revolutionary theory, the theory of crustal displacement, enlarges the traditional history. This theory claims that every 40,000 years, the entire crust of our planet fluctuates as a single entity. After each fluctuation all the land masses on our planet, continents included, are dislocated to their new planet position.

Many researchers apply this is exactly what moved Antarctica from its position in the middle of the South Pole and the Equator to the top of the South Pole.

“We take it for granted that Antarctica has always been a frozen wilderness, but the ice caps only appeared relatively recently in geological history,” told Jane Francis of the University of Leeds.

In the present, Antarctica is built from a kilometre thick ice that consists 98 percent of its property. That means that all of the ancestry the ancient civilization made in the time Antarctica was “a green continent” is now entombed underneath the massive ice.

According the reports from Pravda.ru:

In 1949, Admiral Baird’s exploration drilled holes into the Ross Sea in three spots, where Orontius Finaeus sealed river – beds. At the end there were found fine – grained layers probably brought to the sea with the help of the rivers whose origins were located in zones free of glaciers. The samples were taken from three distinct locations: 70 deg. 17’ S 179 deg. 15’ W 2,990 M deep, 69 deg. 12’ S 180 deg. S. at 3,130 M. deep, 68 deg. 26’ S 179 deg. 15’W at 3,292 M. deep.

The fine – grained debris that was found is from the same kind as the one carried by rivers from non icy continents. Moreover, his expedition brought valuable data of fossils on Mount Weaver.

In 1952 the geologists found two species of a tree plant referred as Glossopteris that was regularly seen on the continents as Africa and Australia.

Core fragments taken from the Ross Sea during the excursion suggest glacial marine sediment from the present first appeared nearly 6,000 years ago.

In addition to that, there is a zone fine – grained sediment 30,000 years old which proves this continent was definitely not icy as it is now.

All these evidences tend to make us believe that between the 4^th and 12^th millennium before Christ, the Earth was housing extremely smart civilization with fascinating intellect of cartography, astronomy and other branches. They were much more advanced than their followers. The modern civilization was a precedent to the long lost civilization called Atlantis and the evidence is hidden the thick ice of Antarctica, theorists claim.

{ http://www.mysterious-times.com/ }

Is Time Travel Possible? Scientists Explore the Past and Future

Visit Exotic Exoplanets with NASA Visualization Tool

AI is better at diagnosing skin cancer than even some of the best human experts

 BY TIBI PUIU

Credit: Flickr, Many Wonderful Artists / Public Domain.

An international team of researchers has shown for the first time that artificial intelligence is better at diagnosing melanoma than human doctors. This particular form of machine learning, known as a deep learning convolutional neural network (CNN), was able to make more correct diagnoses and fewer misdiagnoses than some of the world’s most capable skin care oncologists.

Man vs machine

The CNN starts off as a blank slate. In order to teach the artificial neural network how to identify skin cancer, the researchers fed it a dataset of over 100,000 images of malignant melanomas and benign moles. With each iteration, it learned patterns of features characteristic of malignant and benign tumors, becoming increasingly better at differentiating between the two.

After this initial training round, the team of researchers led by Professor Holger Haenssle, senior managing physician at the University of Heidelberg, Germany, introduced the AI to two new sets of images sourced from the Heidelberg library. These dermoscopic images of various skin lesions were completely new to the CNN. One set of 300 images was meant to solely test the performance of the CNN. Another set of 100 images was comprised of some of the most difficult to diagnose lesions and was used to test both machine and real dermatologists.

Researchers were able to recruit 58 doctors from 17 countries. Among them, 17 (29%) indicated they had less than two years’ experience in dermoscopy, 11 (19%) said they had two to five years of experience, and 30 (52%) were experts with more than five years’ experience.

The volunteers were asked to make a decision about how to manage the condition — whether it was surgery, follow-up, or no action at all — based on two levels of information. At level I, the only information that the dermatologists had at their disposal was from dermoscopic images. Four weeks after making the level I assessment, each participant was asked to review their diagnosis at level II, where they were given far more information about the patient — including age, sex, and the location of the lesion, as well as magnified images of the same case.

At level I, humans could accurately detect melanomas 86.6% of the time and correctly identified benign lesions with an average score of 71.3%. The CNN, however, was able to detect benign moles 95% of the time. At level II, the dermatologists significantly improved their performance, as expected, having diagnosed 88.9% of malignant melanomas and 75.7% that were benign.

Even though the expert doctors were better at spotting melanoma than their less experienced counterparts, they were, on average, outperformed by the AI.

Around 232,000 new cases of melanoma are diagnosed worldwide every year, which result in 55,500 deaths annually. The cancer can be cured, but it typically requires an early diagnosis. This is why this CNN is so impressive — it would be able to identify more cancers early on, thereby saving lives.

“These findings show that deep learning convolutional neural networks are capable of out-performing dermatologists, including extensively trained experts, in the task of detecting melanomas,” Haenssle said.

Of course, all of this doesn’t mean that doctors will soon be scrapped. Far from it: the researchers say that the machine will augment the performance of doctors rather than replace them. Think of a second ‘expert’ opinion which doctors can instantly turn to.

“This CNN may serve physicians involved in skin cancer screening as an aid in their decision whether to biopsy a lesion or not. Most dermatologists already use digital dermoscopy systems to image and store lesions for documentation and follow-up. The CNN can then easily and rapidly evaluate the stored image for an ‘expert opinion’ on the probability of melanoma. We are currently planning prospective studies to assess the real-life impact of the CNN for physicians and patients,” according to Haenssle.

Concerning the study’s limitations, it’s important to note that the study’s participants made diagnoses in an artificial setting. Their decision-making process might look different in a ‘life or death’ situation, which might impact performance. The CNN also had some limitations of its own, such as poor performance with images of melanomas on certain sites such as the fingers, toes, and scalp. For this reason, there is still no substitute for a thorough clinical examination performed by a trained human physician.

That being said, these impressive results indicate that we’re about to experience a paradigm shift, not only in dermatology but in just about every medical field, thanks to developments in artificial intelligence.

The findings appeared in the journal Annals of Oncology.

{ https://www.zmescience.com/ }

AI-expert: “We moeten niet bang zijn van robots. Ze gaan deel uitmaken van ons gezin” -  HLN.be

Bron: The Telegraph

De vrees dat machines een bewustzijn zullen hebben en zich tegen de mensheid keren, is nergens op gebaseerd, zegt Nigel Shadbolt, professor computerwetenschappen aan de universiteit van Oxford.

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Van was opvouwen en hitsingle schrijven tot echt alles: zoveel jaar duurt het nog eer robots deze taken van ons overnemen

De manier waarop robots in Hollywoodfilms afgebeeld worden, geeft ons de indruk dat ze allemaal op een dag gek, slecht en gevaarlijk zullen zijn. “Maar dit gaat voorbij aan het echte probleem. Het is niet artificiële intelligentie waarvan je bang moet zijn. Het is natuurlijke domheid”, aldus Shadbolt op het Hay Festival, een festival voor literatuur in kunst in Wales. “Natuurlijk beginnen mensen zich zorgen te maken: gaan de machines wakker worden? Gaan ze superbekwaam zijn? Ik wil je vertellen: nee, nee dat gaan ze niet zijn.”

Volgens Shadbolt ligt de nadruk op de ontwikkeling van AI die gespecialiseerd is in nauw afgelijnde taken. Het zijn overigens mensen, niet computers die de relatie met robots verder willen ontwikkelen, verduidelijkt hij. Binnenkort zullen we empathie voor hen hebben. He zal niet lang duren voor deze toestellen de metgezellen zijn waarmee onze kinderen opgroeien en die voor ons zorgen als we oud zijn – van de wieg tot het graf.

“We projecteren emoties en bedoelingen op deze systemen. Het maakt niet uit dat er niemand ‘thuis’ is in de elektrische circuits, gewoon een erg goede chatbot. Het doet er niet toe. We zullen buitengewoon gehecht aan hen geraken”, aldus Shadbolt.

Volgens de professor is die evolutie al aan de gang. Hij haalde het voorbeeld aan van een ceremonie in Japan eerder deze maand waarbij boeddhistische monniken een herdenking organiseerden voor 114 “overleden” Sony-robothonden. “Er werd gehuild. Dit waren ook erg geliefde familieleden.”

We proberen gevoelens op robots, terwijl die zelf helemaal geen emoties ervaren, verduidelijkt hij, onder aanhaling van het voorbeeld van de IBM-supercomputer Watson. Die moest het in 2011 opnemen tegen twee kampioenen van de Amerikaanse tv-quiz Jeopardy ( Waagstuk, red.). “Watson presteerde in dit spel op bovenmenselijk niveau omdat hij in essentie een gigantische database gebruikte van feiten en training tijdens voorgaande spelletjes. Hij geeft de indruk slim en bewust te zijn. Maar ik kan je verzekeren dat Watson zich helemaal niet tevreden voelde toen hij de besten van de wereld versloeg.”

{ https://www.hln.be/ }

Archeologen ontdekken nog meer woestijntekeningen in Peru - HLN.be

Bron: Reuters

De geogliefen zijn enorme tekeningen in het woestijnzand in de Peruaanse pampa’s. Dankzij dronebeelden hebben wetenschappers nog meer reusachtige afbeeldingen ontdekt, onder andere van een orka en een dansende vrouw. 

Lees ook

Vrachtwagen beschadigt 2.000 jaar oud werelderfgoed in Peru

De meerderheid van de recent ontdekte afbeeldingen zijn het werk van de Paracascultuur. Ze zijn meer dan 2.000 jaar oud en bijgevolg honderden jaren ouder dan de Nazcalijnen van de hand van het Nazcavolk. Dat zegt Johnny Isla, een archeoloog van het Peruaanse ministerie van Cultuur.

Drones “geven ons de kans om onze documentatie te vergroten en nieuwe groepen van figuren te ontdekken”, aldus Isla. “We hebben nog niet tussen [de geogliefen] gewandeld, we hebben alleen foto’s genomen. Dit is de eerste fase van het onderzoek”, zegt de archeoloog.

In tegenstelling tot de Nazcalijnen, waarvan de meerderheid enkel zichtbaar is vanuit de lucht, zijn de pas ontdekte ‘Palpalijnen’ aangebracht op heuvels en kunnen ze gezien worden vanaf de grond.

Mysterie

De Nazcalijnen zijn tientallen figuren van dieren en geometrische vormen die werden aangebracht in het woestijnzand op de Peruaanse hoogvlakte. Dankzij de unieke klimaatomstandigheden in de regio werden de figuren al die tijd bewaard. Niemand weet precies waartoe de Nazca- en Palpalijnen precies dienen, waarom ze zo groot zijn of waarom ze zo lang deel uitmaakten van de cultuur van de precolumbiaanse volkeren. “In totaal spreken we over ongeveer 1200 jaar waarin geogliefen gemaakt werden” in de regio, aldus Isla.

De Nazcalijnen werden in 1994 uitgeroepen tot UNESCO-werelderfgoed, maar hebben te lijden onder de druk van Peruanen die zich illegaal in het gebied vestigen en verkeer dat van de nabijgelegen snelweg afwijkt.

{ https://www.hln.be/ }

Wondermooi maar o zo dodelijk: drone filmt rivieren van lava op Hawaï - HLN.be

Bron: KameraOne

Vulkaan Kilauea blijft Hawaï teisteren. Sinds de uitbarstingen begonnen op 3 mei zijn al duizenden mensen geëvacueerd. Lavastromen slokten tientallen woningen op, en de vulkaan spuwt assen tot meer dan drie kilometer hoog. De verwoestende kracht levert ook prachtige taferelen op, zoals deze videobeelden van lavastromen die werden gefilmd door een drone.

{ https://www.hln.be/ }

There’s a lot hidden under Antarctica. Spoiler: it’s not Nazi bases or UFO hangers, at least not yet. According to a paper published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, scientists have recently discovered an enormous series of mountain ranges and deep canyons buried beneath the south pole. This is the first real radar look at what’s underneath the South Pole, and gives scientists a better understanding of how the ice will flow out from the center of the world’s largest desert as climate change drives temperatures upwards.

The research was conducted by the European Space Agency PolarGAP project. The researchers discovered three canyons and a vast mountain range along the ice divide, a ridge in the south pole region that determines where ice will flow: the Weddell Sea in the east or the Ross Sea in the west.

Some of these mountains are over 8,000 feet high, and the largest canyon, named the Foundation Trough,  runs 250 miles long and a mile deep.  All of these geological features are completely hidden from view by solid ice. At its deepest point the ice covering these mountains and canyons is a full 1.2 miles thick.

The geographic South Pole, where the discovery was made.

The world’s most mysterious continent is covered almost completely in ice, and due to its incredibly remote location, scientists have been unable to get a decent view of the topographical features they knew were underneath. Because it’s at the South Pole of Earth, no orbiting satellites pass over it, and radio-echo sounding data is obscured by the massive amount of ice.  The PolarGAP project had to use radar sensing aircraft to collect the data on what Dr Fausto Ferraccioli calls “one of the least understood frontiers in the whole of Antarctica.”

Because of this data, scientists now have a far better understanding of the dynamics of how Antarctica might have changed over time and how it could possibly change in the future. Importantly, scientists now know that these mountain ranges are responsible for how ice makes its way across the continent.

Scientists say that these canyons make up an important “bottleneck” that controls the flow of ice into the sea, but say that thinning ice as a result of climate change could speed up this flow. According to lead author of the study, Dr Kate Winter:

“If the ice sheet thins or retreats, these topographically-controlled corridors could facilitate enhanced flow of ice further inland, and could lead to the West Antarctic ice divide moving.

This would, in turn, increase the speed and rate at which ice flows out from the center of Antarctica to its edges, leading to an increase in global sea levels.”

No mention was made, however, of whether or not thinning ice in Antarctica might increase our chances of finding evidence for the hollow Earth.

{ http://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }

Despite those beautiful pictures from the New Horizons spacecraft, Pluto continues to be the Rodney Dangerfield of space objects. The latest attack on it comes from a study the journal Icarus where astronomers present their evidence that the former planet and current dwarf planet is actually just a giant comet or, even worse, a giant dirty snowball made of billions of small comets held together by icy nitrogen. Will Pluto be reduced to being a frozen cosmic I-get-no-respect comic telling passing planets that it told its psychiatrist that every astronomer hates it and the shrink says “That can’t be true because every astronomer hasn’t seen you yet”?

“Using chemistry as a detective’s tool, we are able to trace certain features we see on Pluto today to formation processes from long ago. This leads to a new appreciation of the richness of Pluto’s ‘life story,’ which we are only starting to grasp.”

Sputnik Planitia on the right

That spin on the Pluto’s-just-a-ball-of-comets theory comes from Dr. Christopher Glein of the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) Space Science and Engineering Division in San Antonio, Texas, and co-author of the study. According to the press release, Glein and other astronomers got this radical idea not from Pluto itself but from another space object – Comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko – which was studied for over two years starting in 2014 by the Rosetta spacecraft. While looking at the Sputnik Planitia glacial area of Pluto in an attempt to determine why it had such a high concentration of nitrogen, Glein and his team had a Comet 67P-generted “Eureka!” moment.

“We found an intriguing consistency between the estimated amount of nitrogen inside the glacier and the amount that would be expected if Pluto was formed by the agglomeration of roughly a billion comets or other Kuiper Belt objects similar in chemical composition to 67P, the comet explored by Rosetta.”

Comet 67P

From that, they developed the “giant comet’ cosmochemical model of Pluto formation.” How did it happen? They’re not sure. In fact, they’re not even sure how much nitrogen Pluto had to start with, how much it leaked into space or why it has so little carbon dioxide. Is it buried under its surface? Was it destroyed by an ancient ocean? And then there’s the big question … how did billions of comets join together to form whatever it is we call Pluto?

“When Pluto was born, it was so ugly, the rest of the universe slapped the Big Bang.”

So what exactly is Pluto? Until more research is conducted and more space probes reach it, International Comet Quarterly (who knew comets had a quarterly publication?) had this to say:

“And, yes, it might be that we will want to consider placing Pluto in different categories, such as (minor) planet and comet. Such “dual status” already exists for some comets and minor planets, which are given formal numbers and names in both kinds of catalogues.”

Here’s an idea. Let’s show Pluto some respect by giving it a name and category all of its own … the Rodney.

“I looked up my cosmic family tree and found three dog stars using it.”

I get no respect. No respect at all.

{ http://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }

For the most part human beings have managed to dominate all but the most inaccessible and wild places of this planet of ours. Almost everywhere you go we are the rulers, the masters and subjugators of all around us, ever asserting our will over all we oversee. Yet there are places out over the horizon where we do not rule, and where animals of often mysterious origins have taken over.

One of the strangest and most amazing islands of animals can be found upon a remote speck of rough volcanic land sitting out in the middle of nowhere in the Tasman Sea between Australia and New Zealand. Measuring approximately 10 km long and between 2.0 km and 0.3 km wide, Lord Howe Island is part of an archipelago of 28 scattered islands called the the Lord Howe Island Group, and it was long an uninhabited lost world until 1788, when it was claimed as a British possession by Lieutenant Henry Lidgbird Ball, aboard the passing British prisoner vessel HMS Supply, while on the way to start a penal colony on Norfolk Island.

In the wake of its discovery by Europeans, Lord Howe island became first a major whaling outpost and provisioning port in the early 1800s, then a full-fledged settlement starting from 1834. None of this was particularly good news for the many endemic species here that were found nowhere else in the world. Here there abounded an incredibly diverse ecosystem of unique flora and fauna that had evolved in the complete absence of humans. Indeed, the island displayed a striking amount of biodiversity and a high degree of endemism for its size and relatively short geological history, and it still does. However, the arrival of humans brought with it earth shattering changes for the wildlife here.

Lord Howe Island

Humans readily hunted animals for food and also eliminated any that were perceived as a threat to their crops, which themselves required the clearing of large amounts of the island’s forests. Humans also brought with them invasive weeds that served to spread out to choke out native plant life, as well as various livestock animals such as pigs and goats, and unwanted stowaways in the form of rats and mice, as well as domesticated pets such as cats and dogs, which conspired to cause massive damage to the island’s ecosystem and wipe out many endemic plant and animal species that were found nowhere else on Earth.

The introduction of rats and mice to the island did perhaps even more damage to this previously untouched ecosystem than any other animal brought here by the hands of man. They ate practically anything they could get their paws on, including birds, eggs, insects, and lizards, ravenously bringing about destruction in their wake. The arrival of these rodents was an absolute scourge, and caused a breathtaking trail of decimation of native species, to the point where settlers of the island went to great lengths to eradicate rats and mice, even offering increasingly generous bounties for the tails of the little beasts, all of which made the hunt for rats and mice a very popular pastime and all of which had little effect on reducing the burgeoning rodent population on the island. This all did very little good in the end, and rats were eventually responsible for the apparent extinction of the island’s most enigmatic inhabitant, the massive Lord Howe stick insect.

The Lord Howe stick insect (Dryococelus australis) is truly a behemoth, with adult male specimens measuring up to 15 cm (6 inches) long and weighing in at around 25 grams (0.88 oz.), making them the largest and heaviest flightless stick insects in the world. The Lord Howe stick insect is so large and intimidating looking, in fact, that they have long commonly been aptly called “tree lobsters.” Indeed, they are impressive looking creatures, with thick legs, wingless armored bodies, and a heavy oblong shape. Despite their formidable appearance, they are actually quite harmless; with their main defenses being to climb trees or rocks and running surprisingly fast for their size, using their powerful legs to vault along. Besides their sheer size, the Lord Howe stick insects are known for their tendency to form strong life bonds with mates, and will adjust their behavior based on what the other is doing, follow each other everywhere, and even sleep together with their arms protectively wrapped around each other, which are all rather bizarre traits for an insect species.

Lord Howe stick insect

Once plentiful, the Lord Howe stick insect was found throughout the island, and was a common sight crawling about on trees and bushes, no doubt much to the chagrin of people afraid of very large bugs. In fact, the insects were so abundant that they were once used as bait for fishing. However, they were also seen as a delicacy for the island’s many rats, as was pretty much everything else, and had no real natural defenses against this alien threat. The rats made quick work of these easy targets, relentlessly hunting the stick insects down and eating through their population until by the early 20th century there were nearly none of these truly one-of-a-kind creatures left. The last Lord Howe stick insect was seen in 1920, after which they were considered to be extinct.

This seemed to be the end for these majestic insects, and for decades they were considered extinct. Then, in the 1964 an unusual report came in from a group of climbers who had been out scaling a precarious spire of rock jutting forth 1,844 feet into the air from the ocean off Lord Howe Island called Ball’s Pyramid. More or less a jagged tower of volcanic rock that soars straight out of the depths, the pyramid was a popular spot for climbers who were willing to navigate the treacherous rocks and swirling sea to ascend the spire. It also seemed like the last place anyone would expect to find anything living, but it was here that this particular group of climbers came across a recently deceased carcass of a Lord Howe stick insect, which was both exciting and baffling for biologists because it hinted that the insects were not gone after all, and also no one could figure out how in the world it had ended up on this isolated, forbidding slash of rock.

Ball’s Pyramid

Follow up expeditions were sent over the years to try and find living specimens, but these were unsuccessful and the Lord Howe stick insect became a sort of cryptid, a specter. Then, in 2001 a team of two Australian scientists by the names of David Priddel and Nicholas Carlile, along with their assistants, braved the dizzying heights, unsettling vertical drops, and craggy surface of the pyramid to climb up hundreds of feet above the waves, where they found a single, solitary Melaleuca shrub growing out of a crevice high in the air, under which they found the droppings of some large insect.

It was exciting to say the least, and when the team returned after dark, there upon the branches of this lone bush that was so secluded it may as well have been on another planet they were met with a startling sight; two large, black and shiny bodies scampering about on the branches amid the leaves. A closer look found even more of the enormous things crawling about in the murk, and the excited scientists were able to count 24 Lord Howe insects going about their business as if they had never been gone. Further searches of other similar bushes turned up no further insects, and it became apparent that the total population of remaining Lord Howe stick insects in the entire world consisted of just these 24 individuals, and they all lived in only one place; on and under this one lone spindly little bush perched atop a bleak, craggy spike of rock in the middle of nowhere far from their original habitat. So it was that one of the largest insect species in the world, which had been considered extinct for over 80 years, was found still clinging to life in this remote, very unlikely location.

In the wake of this amazing discovery there have been efforts to preserve this anomalous population of the giant insects, and a very few have been removed from the island in order to breed them for possible reintroduction to their original habitat. At one point, a landslide destroyed the original bush and it was feared that the insects were gone once again, but fortunately there were some breeding pairs remaining. Out of two breeding pairs that were removed from the island, one pair died off, but another has managed to successfully produce eggs, and it was these eggs from this sole female that would serve as the basis to establish a whole captive population of the Lord Howe stick insects numbering in the hundreds, with thousands of eggs, and bring them away from the dark brink of extinction. By 2012, there were over 1,000 adult Lord Howe stick insects in captivity and around 20,000 eggs, many of which have been sent to zoos all over the world, including the Bristol Zoo in Europe, the San Diego Zoo in the United States, and the Toronto Zoo in Canada.

Lord Howe stick insects

The Lord Howe insect is both a remarkable success story and a puzzling conundrum. It is still unknown how these giant bugs managed to wind up on Ball’s Pyramid hundreds of feet above the sea on a craggy rock face, or how they managed to survive all of those years sequestered under that one lone bush. It is thought that they may have hitched a ride on sea birds or floating debris, but the answer remains elusive. With so few remaining specimens it was also unknown just how they had kept their numbers for the past 80 years without dwindling away to nothingness, although it could have been due in large part to the fact that in times of very low numbers the Lord Howe stick insect can demonstrate parthenogenesis, or the ability to procreate without the presence of a male. Whatever the answers may be, the story of the Lord Howe stick insect and their bizarre lost world island lair is intriguing to say the least.

If giant insects aren’t creepy enough for you, then how about an island ruled by poisonous snakes? Ilha de Queimada Grande is an isolated, 110 acre tropical island that lies in the South Atlantic roughly 20 miles off of the coast of Brazil. Other than its quaint beauty, the tiny, uninhabited island seems otherwise fairly innocuous and average from a distance, until one goes ashore and sees that the island is known by its other namesake “Snake Island” for a reason. For slithering through the thick vegetation, lurking in the underbrush, and even hanging from the trees, are thousands upon thousands of deadly snakes of the species Bothrops insularis, known by its common name, the golden lancehead viper.

Indeed, this particular species is only found on this one island, but the truly startling thing about Snake Island is not simply that venomous snakes are found there, but rather just how many of them there are. The island is absolutely teeming with them. Estimates for the density of these venomous snakes on the island vary from a conservative 1 to a horrifying and perhaps exaggerated 5 snakes per square meter. The most common figure given by researchers is around 3 snakes per square meter. It is said that when stepping foot on the island you are never more than 3 feet away from a venomous viper. Since understandably very few scientific expeditions have done a thorough exploration of the island, the exact number is unknown, but it is widely considered to be more snakes per square meter than anywhere else on Earth.

Ilha de Queimada Grande

Over the years the island has perhaps not surprisingly accrued a rather ominous reputation, and there are numerous tales of people venturing there to disappear without a trace or to be found half-melted by the flesh dissolving hemotoxic bites of the snakes. While these reports are for the most part unverified, there is plenty of mystery in the fact that no one really knows why there should be such a remarkable concentration of these snakes on the island. It is known that they feed off of the vast numbers of migratory birds that pass the island, but as to why they are so intensely concentrated here is anyone’s guess. For now Ilha de Queimada Grande is off-limits to visitors, with only a very few scientists permitted to go shore. For those of you who don’t like snakes, that is probably all for the best.

Moving away from creepy crawlies such as bugs and snakes, there are other island’s with perhaps cuter, yet equally enigmatic inhabitants. Big Major Cay, near Exuma Island, in the Bahamas, is in every way a postcard perfect island paradise, with white sand beaches and clear azure waters. The one thing that doesn’t really seem to fit in are all of the pigs that call this little island home. Here on this otherwise uninhabited speck of land dozens and dozens of feral pigs can be seen lounging about on the beach, and very unusually swimming and cavorting about in the crystal clear waters.

As with the other animals we have looked at, no one is quite sure how these hogs got here, although it is suspected that they are descended from domesticated pigs aboard a shipwrecked vessel or a population that was intentionally released here as a food source at some point in history. Today the island and its pigs have become a tourist attraction, with several outfits offering excursions out to see the pigs, which are known to swim right up to boats looking for hand outs, much to the delight of tourists. There are tours that actually go ashore as well, but the pigs are said to be bold, unafraid of humans, and potentially dangerous.

Another island paradise with its own strange denizens is the Aldabra Atoll, in Seychelles, which is composed of four tiny uninhabited coral islands and a lagoon. Here one can find the largest population of giant tortoises in the world, with an estimated 150,000 of the gentle giants wandering the beaches and vegetation. Again it is unclear why such a large concentration of these animals should be here, but their presence has made the island a UNESCO World Heritage site and it is mostly off limits to visitors except for small numbers of scientists and naturalists. Those who wish to visit can undergo a vetting process by the Seychelles Islands Foundation and pay a steep fee, which is used towards conservation of the tortoises.

Japan has several islands that are overrun by animals, such as Tashirojima (Tashiro Island), in Miyagi Prefecture, which is a haven for cats. The animals, which were originally introduced in the Edo period to control the rats that fed on precious silkworms, and the population has since ballooned to the point that cats outnumber humans on the island 6 to 1. The cats are well-cared for and revered as bringers of good luck, to the point that a shrine has been erected in their honor, and they bring in masses of tourists year round.

Japan also has Ōkunoshima, also called Usagi Jima, literally “Rabbit Island,” which lies just off the coast of Hiroshima. Here rabbits are king, with around a thousand of the creatures inhabiting an island with no natural predators and cavorting about with not a care in the world. The island is crawling with rabbits, which are very friendly and will approach people in droves looking for handouts, and as with many of the other animals here their presence on the island has long been a bit of a mystery, as they are not an indigenous species. The main idea is that they are test animals that were abandoned with the closing of a Japanese chemical weapon facility from World War II, the ruins of which can still be seen today. However, it is said that all of these animals were euthanized and could not possibly have been the origins of the island’s rabbits. Another idea is that a few rabbits were released onto the island by schoolchildren in 1971, after which they did what rabbits do and multiplied unchecked and unhindered by any natural predators.

Regardless of how the rabbits got to Ōkunoshima, they have managed to reach numbers over a thousand on this tiny speck of land measuring just 2 miles long. With no predators, and laws in place to protect them, making it illegal to kill or harm them in any way, as well as a complete ban on cats and dogs, the feral rabbits of Ōkunoshima are numerous, and their rather tame, inquisitive nature has made the island a very popular place to go to for curiosity seekers. Here visitors flock to see, play with, and feed the many, many rabbits frolicking about, and videos of tourists interacting with the island’s fluffy denizens swarming around them are quite the sensation in a nation that reveres all things cute, with photos and videos from here proving to be quite popular. Indeed, the island is far more well-known for its rabbits than it is for its dark history or poison gas museum. The rabbits are not particularly good for the island’s ecosystem, but they seem to be here to stay.

Ōkunoshima

Cute and cuddly creatures are all good and well, but last we come to perhaps the most tragic island of animals. Within the African country of Liberia there lies an island within a river that for many years served as a research facility run by the New York Blood Center (NYBC) dedicated to finding a vaccine for the disease Hepatitis. The facility, called Vilab II, was established in 1972 and home to around 100 chimpanzees that were used for testing, and was able to keep up its operations through two civil wars in the war-torn nation. The work done at this island lab is considered to be instrumental in helping to develop the vaccine for Hepatitis B, as well as the perfection of sterilization methods.

Then in 2005 the facility was closed down and the NYBC promised to provide ongoing care for the remaining 66 chimpanzees left on the island by making it a chimp sanctuary. However, the funding did not last and in March of 2017 the chimps were simply abandoned to fend for themselves. This was a devastating proposition for the chimpanzees, as they were trapped on a tiny swampy island with no fresh water supply, no food, and very little chance of escape since chimpanzees are not good swimmers. They had effectively been left to die, and despite the fact that the chimps were sterilized they still have somewhat managed to continue breeding. Life finds a way.

When the plight of these apes came to public attention, conservation organizations such as the Humane Society, the Jane Goodall Institute, and Born Free, as well as private donators and various care groups, came forward to try and provide food and care for this isolated island of chimps, gathering more funds through online campaigns, but this has not proved to be sufficient and the chimps face a bleak future. The NYBC has done nothing to help, simply stating that the island has now gone over to the Liberian government, which itself does not have the funds to take care of a bunch of chimpanzees that were never native to the island. The Humane Society of the United States (HSUS) has repeatedly reached out to the NYBC for help, but this has turned up nothing, and Kathleen Conlee, the vice president of animal research issues at the Humane Society told the site Motherboard:

It can’t be us by ourselves. We need that New York Blood Center support. They absolutely should be doing this. We’re always cleaning everybody else’s messes up and they have the capacity here to do right by the animals. They’re going to have to.

Liberia’s Chimp Island

Sporadic donations and a steady but weak influx of money has helped the Humane Society and other groups provide some semblance of care for the island’s chimps, but it is not nearly enough, and in recent days the animals have become noticeably thin and haggard looking. Whenever caretakers arrive to feed them, which only happens every other day at best, the animals eagerly rush forward to meet them, frantically scrambling for every last scrap they are given. It is a sad state of affairs for these close human relatives, and without a steadier influx of money to help this island of chimps they are certainly doomed to die.

It is often uncertain where many of these animals came from, why they have risen to such heights, or what their futures may hold. They hold onto their island domains out past our control, sowing questions and mysteries. While it may not always be clear what the situation is with these strange lost worlds one thing that is for sure is that it seems that for as much as we reach out and usurp nature and its creatures there will always be some isolated pockets where creatures other than us reign supreme.

{ http://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }

Daytime UFO caught on tape over Melbourne, Australia 27-May-2018

Here’s one new footage of a bright unidentified flying object that was hovering in the sky above Melbourne in Australia. This was taken on 27th May 2018.

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

Life on Mars? Rocks near ancient lakes indicate there may have once been ALIENS on the Red Planet

Researchers from the University of Edinburgh believe that rocks near ancient lakes may contain traces of tiny creatures, known as microbes on Mars

By Shivali Best

(Image: Collection Mix: Subjects RM)

Mars may once have been home to alien life, according to a new study.

Researchers from the University of Edinburgh believe that rocks near ancient lakes may contain traces of tiny creatures, known as microbes on Mars.

These rocks formed during the Noachian and Hesperian Periods of Martian history between three and four billion years ago, when Mars’s surface was abundant in water.

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In the study, the researchers reviewed studies of fossils on Earth, and assessed the results of lab experiments replicating the conditions on Mars, to identify the most promising sites to look for traces of life.

Their findings could help inform the landing sites for NASA ’s next mission toe Mars, which is scheduled for 2020.

Dr Sean McMahon, who led the study, said: "There are many interesting rock and mineral outcrops on Mars where we would like to search for fossils, but since we can't send rovers to all of them we have tried to prioritise the most promising deposits based on the best available information."

{ https://www.mirror.co.uk/ }

The Voyager 'Golden Record' NASA hoped would help aliens learn about Earth could baffle them with Bulgarian folk music and show them humanity loves to argue, astronomers warn

• Records include 117 pictures, whale sounds and greetings in 54 language
• Experts say the greeting could 'sound like arguing' and warn the inclusion of so many types of music could be very confusing
• Also point out record relies on alien life having the same senses as us 

By Mark Prigg For Dailymail.com

The 'golden record' NASA sent aboard its Voyager craft to help alien life understand humanity may just confuse them, researchers have warned.

The records include maps, images and charts along with 117 pictures, humpback whale sounds, greetings in 54 language, a  20-minute 'sound essay' of life on Earth, and 90 minutes of music. 

However, Rebecca Orchard and Sheri Wells-Jensen at Bowling Green State University in Ohio say it could simply confuse alien lifeforms - and show them humanity likes to argue.

Scroll down for video 

The Voyager probes launched into space with golden records (pictured) on board. Each record was etched with a map (top right) similar to those placed on the Pioneer craft

'If the second one of these senses is absent, or an entirely different sense is added, the Golden Record becomes a bit confusing.'

They say the inclusion of greetings in 54 languages could also be disastrous.

The barrage of greetings 'pile up in a way that could be construed as arguing', said Orchard, in a language that has 'no grammatical congruity' - and also assumes the lifeforms hear in exactly the same way we do.

They say trying to match the images with the audio, assuming they can work out how to listen to is, could also end badly.

This image shows a gold record in its cover, attached to a Voyager space probe before launch in 1977. The records contain sounds from nature, such as volcanoes and thunder, as well as noises linked with humanity including a train and horse and cart

 'What if you pair the image of an open daffodil with the roar of a chainsaw?' said Orchard. 

However, she hoped the mere fact it was sent could bolster our reputation.

'I would hope that the mere fact that we've endeavoured to send a record of humanity shows something about our humanity,' she concluded. 

However, experts say it may be some time before the messages are read. 

NASA's Hubble Space Telescope map (pictured) of the paths of NASA's Voyager 1 and 2 spacecraft as they journey through the solar system and into interstellar space. Hubble is gazing at two sight lines (the twin cone-shaped features) along each spacecraft's path. The telescope's goal is to help astronomers map interstellar structure along each spacecraft's star-bound route. Each sight line stretches several light-years to nearby stars

What the golden record shows: The Golden Record CoverIn the upper left-hand corner is an easily recognized drawing of the phonograph record and the stylus carried with it. The stylus is in the correct position to play the record from the beginning. Written around it in binary arithmetic is the correct time of one rotation of the record, 3.6 seconds, expressed in time units of 0,70 billionths of a second, the time period associated with a fundamental transition of the hydrogen atom. The drawing indicates that the record should be played from the outside in. Below this drawing is a side view of the record and stylus, with a binary number giving the time to play one side of the record - about an hour. The information in the upper right-hand portion of the cover is designed to show how pictures are to be constructed from the recorded signals. The top drawing shows the typical signal that occurs at the start of a picture. The picture is made from this signal, which traces the picture as a series of vertical lines

Voyager 1 is currently 13 billion miles away from Earth, travelling northward through space.

However, it will be 40,000 years before it comes close to another star system. 

The probe has recently sent back data to Nasa that cosmic rays are as much as four times more abundant in interstellar space than in the vicinity of Earth.

This suggests that the heliosphere, the region of space that contains our solar system's planets, may act as a radiation shield.

During their 40 years of operation, the Voyagers have set several records.

HOW DID NASA MAKE VOYAGER'S GOLDEN RECORDS?

Many people were instrumental in the design, development and manufacturing of the golden record, NASA says.

Blank records were provided by the Pyral S.A. of Creteil, France. CBS Records contracted the JVC Cutting Center in Boulder, Colorado to cut the lacquer masters which were then sent to the James G. Lee Record Processing center in Gardena, California to cut and gold plate eight Voyager records. 

The record is constructed of gold-plated copper and is 12 inches (30 cm) in diameter

Gold plating took place on August 23, 1977; afterward, the records were mounted in aluminum containers and delivered to JPL. 

The record is constructed of gold-plated copper and is 12 inches (30 cm) in diameter.

 The record's cover is aluminum and electroplated upon it is an ultra-pure sample of the isotope uranium-238. Uranium-238 has a half-life of 4.468 billion years. 

The records also had the inscription "To the makers of music – all worlds, all times" hand-etched on its surface.

The record's cover is aluminum and electroplated upon it is an ultra-pure sample of the isotope uranium-238. Uranium-238 has a half-life of 4.468 billion years

In 2012, Voyager 1 became the only spacecraft to have entered interstellar space, which the Voyager 2 is the only spacecraft to have flown by all four outer planets – Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune.

Their planetary encounters include the discovery of the first active volcanoes beyond Earth – on Jupiter's moon Io – and the most Earth-like atmosphere in the solar system – on Saturn's moon Titan

The Golden Record was one of four attempts NASA made in the 1970s to send a message to alien lifeforms.

It sent maps revealing Earth's location into space on board four craft, in the hope of communicating with aliens.

But Dr Frank Drake, who designed the maps, last year spoke out about the potentially 'dangerous' decision to send the charts over 40 years ago.

All four craft have now left the solar system and are speeding into deep space with Earth's coordinates on board. 

This image shows the diagram carried aboard Pioneer 10 and Pioneer 11, showing aliens how to find Earth. To the right are images of a man and a woman, while the star-like shape on the left pinpoints Earth (centre) relative to a number of pulsar stars (end of each point)

THE MAPS TO EARTH 

Plaques placed inside the Pioneer craft show a man and a woman alongside a basic map of Earth which plots its position in relation to distant pulsar stars.

These star are long-lasting and bright so could still point aliens in the right direction if they are found millions of years from now.

The Voyager probes launched into space with golden records on board etched with similar pulsar maps to our planet.

The records contain sounds from nature, such as volcanoes and thunder, as well as noises linked with humanity including a train, horse and cart as well as a kiss between a mother and child. 

Dr Drake worked with Nasa to design charts placed aboard Pioneer 10 and 11, launched in 1972 and 1973.

And similar maps were placed on Nasa's 1977 probes Voyager 1 and Voyager 2.

In a new interview, Dr Drake spoke about the maps he helped design.

'In those days, all the people I dealt with were optimists, and they thought the ETs would be friendly,' he told his daughter, Nadia Drake, who writes for National Geographic.

'Nobody thought, even for a few seconds, about whether this might be a dangerous thing to do.'  

Plaques placed inside the Pioneer craft show a man and a woman alongside a basic map of Earth which plots its position in relation to distant pulsar stars.

These stars are long-lasting and bright so could still point aliens in the right direction if they are found millions of years from now.

The Voyager probes launched into space with golden records on board etched with similar pulsar maps to our planet.

The goal was to put something on the Voyager that said where it came from, and how long it was travelling.

The records contain sounds from nature, such as volcanoes and thunder, as well as noises linked with humanity including a train, a horse and cart, and even a kiss between a mother and child.

Voyager 1 (artist's impression pictured) and its identical sister craft Voyager 2 were launched to study the outer Solar System and eventually interstellar space 

Despite the potential dangers the interstellar maps pose, Dr Drake said that the chances of aliens picking up the messages are 'very small'.

He added: 'The thing is going something like 10 kilometres [6.2 miles] per second, at which speed it takes - for the typical separation of stars - about half a million years to go from one star to another.'

The astronomer is not the first expert to warn of the risks of contacting aliens.

Renowned physicist Professor Stephen Hawking suggested last year that meeting beings from another planet could lead to humans being wiped out.

Hawking said it could be similar to when the Native Americans first encountered Christopher Columbus – and 'that didn't turn out so well'. 

The physicist believes if aliens discovered Earth, they are likely to want to conquer and colonise our planet. 

{ http://www.dailymail.co.uk/  }

DID NOSTRADAMUS, EDGAR CAYCE, AND BABA VANGA SOMEHOW ACCESS THE AKASHIC RECORDS?

{ https://www.ancient-code.com/ }

HIDDEN WORLD UNDER ANTARCTICA REVEALED: SCIENTISTS FIND A WORLD THEY’VE NEVER IMAGINED

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WHAT WAS MANNA, THE MYSTERY FOOD ‘GOD’ SENT DOWN FROM HEAVEN?

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Military report reveals more strange details on ‘UFO’ sighting

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

US aircraft carrier was stalked for days by a UFO travelling at 'ballistic missile speed' which could hover above the sea for six days, leaked Pentagon report reveals

• Unclassified 2009 Pentagon report on a Navy encounter with a UFO has leaked
• F-18s encountered the strange object off the coast of Mexico in November 2004
• Previously released video shows the object flying at incredible speeds 
• New report suggests it may have been docking with an underwater craft
• Object was white, 46 feet long, shaped like a Tic-Tac with no wings or nacelles
• Descended from 60,000 feet to 50 feet at ballistic missile speeds then hovered

By Keith Griffith For Dailymail.com

A leaked Pentagon report has revealed new details about the UFO encounter that shocked Navy fighter pilots above the Pacific.

The 2009 report does not bear any date or agency logo, but four officials confirmed that it was written as part of a Pentagon program with input from multiple agencies, KLAS reported. 

The Las Vegas news station obtained the unclassified report while visiting Washington, DC for a debriefing arranged by former Senator Harry Reid.

The report reveals stunning new first-hand accounts of the November 14, 2004 encounter, which was documented in video that emerged in December of last year.

The incident unfolded as the Nimitz carrier group was conducting training exercises off the coast of southern California and Mexico ahead of a deployment to the Arabian Sea.

The USS Princeton (seen in file photo) made multiple radar contacts with the objects in 2004

The location of the incident as given in the leaked report is seen in the above map

Beginning around November 10, the USS Princeton, a Ticonderoga-class guided missile cruiser, made multiple radar contacts with what the report calls an Anomalous Aerial Vehicle (AAV).

The senior chief fire controlman on the Princeton, which was equipped with ultra-advanced AN/SPY-1 multifunctional phased-array radar, reported that the AAV appeared from above 60,000 feet - the radar's scan ceiling - and descended 'very rapidly' to about 50 feet above the surface of the ocean.

They would hover for a short time and then depart at high velocities and turn rates demonstrating advanced capabilities, the senior chief said. 

The senior chief, who had 17 years of experience in fire control on cruisers, said he never obtained an accurate track on the AAV, because they exhibited speed consistent with a ballistic missile, but the radar was set to air intercept mode rather than ballistic missile tracking mode.

Then on November 14, the Princeton again detected an AAV around 11am and called it in two F/A-18 Hornets that happened to be returning to the USS Nimitz from a training exercise.

An E-2C Hawkeye surveillance plane was also operating in the area and attempted a radar contact on the AAV, but made only intermittent contact as was unable to gain a track.

On November 14, the Princeton again detected an AAV around 11am and called it in two F/A-18 Hornets that happened to be returning to the USS Nimitz (pictured) from a training exercise

An E-2C Hawkeye surveillance plane (like the one seen above) was also operating in the area and attempted a radar contact on the AAV, but made only intermittent contact

The skies were clear and blue with unlimited visibility that day, and the sea was calm, according to the report. 

The first fighter jet to investigate, a USMC single-seat F/A-18C, flew within five to 10 nautical miles of the AAV's location, but could not see it. Instead, he reported seeing a circular disturbance in the water about 50 to 100 meters in diameter. It reminded the pilot of something rapidly submerging in the ocean, like a submarine.

The report hypothesizes that 'it is possible that the disturbance was being caused by an AAV but that the AAV was "cloaked" or invisible to the human eye.' 

The Marine pilot was called off after the controller asked a plane carrying ordnance to respond, which he was not. When he returned to the USS Nimitz, his intelligence officer asked him if he'd seen the 'supersonic Tic Tac'. 

The next jet to respond was a Navy F/A-18F piloted by Cmdr. David Fravor and Lt. Cmdr. Jim Slaight, who made visual contact with the AAV that they have since publicly discussed, corroborating the report.

Fravor was piloting an F/A-18F Super Hornet like the one seen above in a file photo when he reported making visual contact with a hovering object shaped like a 46-foot Tic Tac

Fravor (left) has publicly discussed seeing the object, corroborating the report

Fravor also spotted a disturbance in the water, almost as if it were boiling. But this time, hovering above the disturbance was a strange object.

The object was shaped like an elongated egg or a "Tic Tac", according to Fravor, and was 'holding like a Harrier', the jump jet that can take off vertically.

Slaight, whose name is redacted from the report, described it as 'solid white, smooth, with no edges. It was uniformly colored with no nacelles, pylons or wings.'

He described the exterior of the object as 'like it had a white candy-coated shell, almost like a white board.'

When Fravor attempted to make a close pass of the object to attempt visual recognition, the object appeared to react, realigning its axis to point at the approaching plane. The AAV then ascended quickly and departed at supersonic speed.

When Fravor and Slaight returned to the Nimitz, the sailors in the intelligence center donned tin-foil hats to greet them, asking eagerly about their 'UFO flight'.

Later in the day, another plane made the video that has since been released, according to the report.

Around 3pm, another Navy F/A-18F tracked a remarkable object on FLIR, which Fravor's plane had not been equipped with.

{ http://www.dailymail.co.uk/ }

Rencontre du 3ème type à Valensole

{ https://www.franceinter.fr/ }

{ www­.cropcircleconnector­.com }

You Can Now See the Damage from Hawaii's Kilauea Volcano from Space

The lava is becoming more widespread.

By Mary von Aue

With over 20 fissures still gushing lava on Hawaii’s Big Island, the damage caused by the Kilauea Volcano has become so widespread that it can now be seen from space.

On Friday, the European Space Agency (ESA) tweeted satellite images that were first captured by the Sentinel-2 on May 23. Sentinel-2 is the agency’s Earth observation mission that detects changes in the planet’s surface. The satellite, which offers forest monitoring and natural disaster management, offered surprising new photographs that reveal the extent of Kilauea’s damage.

It’s unusual for volcanic activity to make that great of an impact on satellite imaging, but the Kilauea Volcano has managed to cover nearly 2,400 acres in lava. According to Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), at least 82 structures have been damaged or destroyed by lava, 41 of which are homes. Lava spatter has led to serious injuries and the extent of lava flows catalyzed hundreds of displacements, where at least 230 people are now in shelters.

The lava isn’t the only carnage that the volcano has caused. Since Kilauea first erupted on May 3, it has spewed giant rocks the size of refrigerators, opened several dangerous fissures, literally screamed, and then farted copious amounts of toxic sulfur dioxide in the air, creating a rotten-egg smell that could, under some conditions, contribute to acid rain.

ESA’s satellite images of Hawaii’s Big Island suggest that it’s still possible for the Kilauea lava flows to cut off all access to the Lower Puna area. Government officials have already begun planning helicopter evacuations in preparation of that development.

The latest update from the US Geological Survey (USGS) notes that the fissure system continues to produce robust eruptive activity in the Lower East Rift Zone. Beyond the destruction visible from space, the agency also warns that volcanic gas emissions remain very high from the fissure eruptions.

Pluto is misschien ‘maar’ een gigantische komeet -  HLN.be

Bron: CNET, Huffington Post

Wetenschappers hebben interessante gelijkenissen gevonden tussen Pluto en komeet 67P die ESA-ruimtesonde Rosetta in 2004 onder de loep nam. De bevindingen zijn te lezen in het wetenschappelijke tijdschrift Icarus. De onderzoekers richtten zich op het stikstofrijke ijs in Sputnik Planitia, een grote gletsjer op Pluto. Christopher Glein van het Southwest Research Institute (SwRI): “We ontdekten een intrigerende overeenkomst tussen de geschatte hoeveelheid van stikstof in de gletjser en de hoeveelheid die we zouden verwachten als Pluto gevormd zou zijn door het samenklitten van ruwweg een miljard kometen of andere objecten uit de Kuipergordel die qua chemische samenstelling lijken op 67P, de komeet die Rosetta onderzocht”. Kortom, op basis van zijn scheikundige opbouw zou Pluto weleens een “flinke komeet” kunnen zijn, of het resultaat van een miljard samengeklonterde kometen. SwRI noemt dit het “kosmochemische model”.

Lees ook

Nieuw bewijs voor ‘Planeet Negen’ en mogelijk andere wereld voorbij Neptunus

Rosetta werd op 2 maart 2004 gelanceerd en kwam een goeie tien jaar later, op 6 augustus 2014, aan bij komeet 67P. Op 12 november 2014 zette Rosetta’s lander, Philae, voet op de komeet. In 2006 lanceerde NASA de ruimtesonde New Horizons richting Pluto, dat zich op een afstand van 4,28 tot 7,5 miljard kilometer van de Aarde bevindt. Pas in juli 2015 kwam de New Horizons dicht genoeg bij Pluto om de dwergplaneet te kunnen onderzoeken. Het SwRI heeft de resultaten van beide ruimtesondes nu naast elkaar gelegd. 

Onderzoekers: “NASA’s gouden plaat beeldt mensheid af als volk dat graag ruzie maakt en kan heel verwarrend zijn voor eventuele aliens” -  HLN.be

Bron: The Guardian

De Voyager Golden Record werd in 1977 samen met de Voyager-sondes gelanceerd. Zowel Voyager 1 als Voyager 2 heeft een kopie aan boord. De platen bevatten geluiden en beelden die de diversiteit van onze cultuur weergeven. Althans in onze ogen. 

Lees ook

NASA lanceert ruimtesonde (met Belgisch tintje) naar Mars

Voor buitenaardse levensvormen - als die er zijn - kan de plaat een totaal andere boodschap bevatten, zeiden Amerikaanse onderzoekers afgelopen weekend op een bijeenkomst van de National Space Society. Rebecca Orchard en Sheri Wells-Jensen van de universiteit van Bowling Green in Ohio bestudeerden het materiaal op de plaat. Ze maakten een analyse van hoe een buitenaardse maatschappij - met bewoners die andere zintuigen hebben dan wij - de plaat zou kunnen interpreteren.

Zintuigen

De 117 beelden, dolfijngeluiden, begroetingen in 54 talen en de aardse muziek zijn zeer mensgericht, menen de onderzoekers. “De gouden plaat is een prachtig artefact en is representatief voor hoe de mens zichzelf wil zien. Maar ze is bedoeld om ontvangen en geïnterpreteerd te worden door iets dat dezelfde zintuiglijke capaciteiten heeft”, aldus Orchard. “Als het tweede zintuig ontbreekt, of helemaal anders werkt, kan de gouden plaat verwarrend worden.”
Het salvo van begroetingen “volgt elkaar zodanig op dat buitenaardse wezens het kunnen interpreteren als geruzie, in een taal zonder grammatische uniformiteit”. Als ze kunnen horen, uiteraard.

Verwarring

De plaat bevat audio op de ene zijde en beelden op de andere. Dat kan volgens de onderzoekers tot nog meer verwarring leiden. Als een buitenaardse beschaving geluiden zou proberen te matchen aan de beelden, kan het leven op aarde er bijzonder vreemd uitzien. “Wat als je de foto van een narcis koppelt aan het gebrul van een kettingzaag?”, zegt Orchard.

Het moeilijkst noemen de onderzoekers de muziek, die varieert van Bach over Chuck Berry tot Bulgaarse folkmuziek. “Ik kan natuurlijk niet zeggen hoe deze verschillen geïnterpreteerd zullen worden”, zegt Orchard. “Maar wat ik wel kan zeggen, is dat ze een ingewikkelde puzzel vormen voor een luisteraar die totaal niet vertrouwd is met mensen en de geluiden die ze maken.”

Hoe dan ook, het is onwaarschijnlijk dat de plaat snel verwarring zal zaaien. Voyager 1 bevindt zich nu meer dan 21 miljard kilometer van de aarde en zal pas over 40.000 jaar in de buurt van een ander sterrenstelsel komen.

{ https://www.hln.be/ }

Stonehenge remains one of the most debated prehistoric monuments in the world. Archaeologists believe the ring of standing stones was erected some time between 3000 BC and 2000 BC, but since the culture who created it left no written records, its ultimate purpose remains unknown. Most theories posit that the structure had some sort of ancient astronomical significance, but those are still debated. Perhaps more mysteriously, scientists still aren’t exactly sure how ancient people could have constructed the monument with the technology available to them.

A long-standing theory about the stones is that they were somehow transported to their current resting place from likely Wales. The particular type of stone used to construct the monument isn’t readily found in the area. However, earlier this year, British archaeologist Mike Pitts published a radical new theory claiming that some of the Stonehenge stones were in place millions of years before humans arrived in the area. Pitts claims that the two largest stones’ alignment with the solstice sun is coincidental, but that this alignment was noticed by ancient people who then built the rest of the monument around these two stones.

Now, a controversial new theory has been published claiming the opposite: that the stones were carried from far away in Wales. Rather than being transported by humans as is commonly thought, though, this theory instead argues that the stones were carried by a glacier. The theory was put forth by geologist Brian John in his new self-published book The Stonehenge Bluestones due for a June 1 release. John saysthat much of the current thinking surrounding Stonehenge’s construction is all based on the idea that humans, not mother nature, carried the stones. John, however, thinks this is simply hubris:

Archaeologists, in general, have assumed that if the ice couldn’t have carried them, therefore they must have been carried by human beings. People have loved this story: all of the heroic ancestors slaving away, collecting up these stones from west Wales and then carrying them all the way to Stonehenge. We all love heroic tales, and I think that’s why people have just accepted this, more or less, at face value without any questioning of the evidence on which it’s based.

John’s theory is based on his analysis of the stones themselves, which he claims are “rather clumpy bits of stone” characteristic of the stones typically carried around and ground up by glaciers. There is no evidence that humans transported the stones to their current location, he adds.

Glacial activity can produce collections of broad, flat stones commonly misattributed to ancient human activity.

However, many other archaeologists do not agree. Josh Pollard, a University of Southampton archaeologist, toldLiveScience.com that the glacier hypothesis is “looking increasingly untenable.” Pollard adds that nearby rock outcroppings show evidence of ancient quarry activity and match the composition of the stones at Stonehenge. Pollard is part of The Stonehenge Riverside Project, a research venture which studies nearby exposed rock outcrops to try and find a local source for the Stonehenge stones.

This scientists’ squabble might just be an academic ‘turf’ war, but it demonstrates just how mysterious Stonehenge remains today. Despite our best efforts, we still can’t crack the mysteries of how or why the monument was built. Will we ever know?

{ http://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }

Saturn Rings Make Transmit Radio Waves Sounds, Alien Message Board? UFO Sighting News.

Source recording: 

https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/cassini/multimedia/pia07966.html

Alien messages are known to exist, and non of the radio transmissions have yet to be deciphered. For example Comet P67 has transmitted a song ever since it was discovered, which prompted ESA to build a probe and send it to the comet to find out if its an alien message. Once the probe got there, what it found is unknown since the ESA only published a few dozen of the thousands of photos it took. Why? Unknown? Probably hiding alien structures, since the comet itself looks like a alien face on a round head, with neck and shoulders. 

Saturn has been transmitting such songs, 24/7 like comet P67. However it seems that the rings of Saturn are an amplifier of sorts, sending the signals out into the cosmos. I believe that the rings are transmitting and receiving signals constantly, so deciphering them will be impossible, since separating just one from the thousands happening at once would be a job for AI, not for humans. 


Listen to the video below and decide for yourself. Saturn is calling you.
Scott C. Waring