Ontdek de Fascinerende Wereld van UFO's en UAP's: Jouw Bron voor Onthullende Informatie!
Ben jij ook gefascineerd door het onbekende? Wil je meer weten over UFO's en UAP's, niet alleen in België, maar over de hele wereld? Dan ben je op de juiste plek!
België: Het Kloppend Hart van UFO-onderzoek
In België is BUFON (Belgisch UFO-Netwerk) dé autoriteit op het gebied van UFO-onderzoek. Voor betrouwbare en objectieve informatie over deze intrigerende fenomenen, bezoek je zeker onze Facebook-pagina en deze blog. Maar dat is nog niet alles! Ontdek ook het Belgisch UFO-meldpunt en Caelestia, twee organisaties die diepgaand onderzoek verrichten, al zijn ze soms kritisch of sceptisch.
Nederland: Een Schat aan Informatie
Voor onze Nederlandse buren is er de schitterende website www.ufowijzer.nl, beheerd door Paul Harmans. Deze site biedt een schat aan informatie en artikelen die je niet wilt missen!
Internationaal: MUFON - De Wereldwijde Autoriteit
Neem ook een kijkje bij MUFON (Mutual UFO Network Inc.), een gerenommeerde Amerikaanse UFO-vereniging met afdelingen in de VS en wereldwijd. MUFON is toegewijd aan de wetenschappelijke en analytische studie van het UFO-fenomeen, en hun maandelijkse tijdschrift, The MUFON UFO-Journal, is een must-read voor elke UFO-enthousiasteling. Bezoek hun website op www.mufon.com voor meer informatie.
Samenwerking en Toekomstvisie
Sinds 1 februari 2020 is Pieter niet alleen ex-president van BUFON, maar ook de voormalige nationale directeur van MUFON in Vlaanderen en Nederland. Dit creëert een sterke samenwerking met de Franse MUFON Reseau MUFON/EUROP, wat ons in staat stelt om nog meer waardevolle inzichten te delen.
Let op: Nepprofielen en Nieuwe Groeperingen
Pas op voor een nieuwe groepering die zich ook BUFON noemt, maar geen enkele connectie heeft met onze gevestigde organisatie. Hoewel zij de naam geregistreerd hebben, kunnen ze het rijke verleden en de expertise van onze groep niet evenaren. We wensen hen veel succes, maar we blijven de autoriteit in UFO-onderzoek!
Blijf Op De Hoogte!
Wil jij de laatste nieuwtjes over UFO's, ruimtevaart, archeologie, en meer? Volg ons dan en duik samen met ons in de fascinerende wereld van het onbekende! Sluit je aan bij de gemeenschap van nieuwsgierige geesten die net als jij verlangen naar antwoorden en avonturen in de sterren!
Heb je vragen of wil je meer weten? Aarzel dan niet om contact met ons op te nemen! Samen ontrafelen we het mysterie van de lucht en daarbuiten.
Berichten van 1 februari 2019 tot 28 februari 2019
The Rosetta space mission revealed a comet as 2 icy balls apparently stuck together billions of years ago. Now scientists say the comet’s double-lobed structure guided its evolution.
Rosetta’s comet – aka 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko – as captured in March 2016, when the spacecraft was about 200 miles (329 km) away.
What are the factors that cause a world in space to evolve? In the case of Earth, plate tectonics– the movement of the great plates of land that compose Earth’s crust – played a major role. But what if the world is very tiny, like a comet? And what if it’s made of icy materials, not rocky materials like Earth? On February 19, 2019, the European Space Agency (ESA) described a new study pointing out a key process that shaped the evolution of comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. This is the comet that was studied close-up, from orbit, by ESA’s Rosetta spacecraft for two years between August 2014 and September 2016. According to the new study, plate tectonics isn’t the driving process. Instead, ESA said, comet 67P/C-G likely evolved primarily due to geological stress arising from the comet’s dual-lobed shape.
Small, icy comets with two distinct lobes seem to be commonplace in the solar system, with one possible mode of formation a slow collision of two primordial objects in the early stages of formation some 4.5 billion years ago. A new study using data collected by Rosetta during its two years at Comet 67P/C-G has illuminated the mechanisms that contributed to shaping the comet over the following billions of years.
The researchers used stress modelling and three-dimensional analyses of images taken by Rosetta’s high resolution OSIRIS camera to probe the comet’s surface and interior.
Christophe Matonti of Aix-Marseille University, France, is lead author of the new study. He said:
We found networks of faults and fractures penetrating 500 meters (1,640 feet) underground, and stretching out for hundreds of meters.
Stress-formed fractures and terraces on Rosetta’s comet, via ESA.
According to the new study, these faults and fractures in the comet were created by shear stress, a mechanical force often seen at play in earthquakes or glaciers on Earth and other terrestrial planets. Shear stress happens when two bodies or blocks push and move along one another in different directions. Matonti commented:
This is hugely exciting: it reveals much about the comet’s shape, internal structure, and how it has changed and evolved over time.
These scientists said the model they developed found shear stress to peak at the center of the comet’s “neck,” the thinnest part of the comet connecting the two lobes. Co-author Olivier Groussin, also of Aix-Marseille University, France, said:
It’s as if the material in each hemisphere is pulling and moving apart, contorting the middle part – the neck – and thinning it via the resulting mechanical erosion.
We think this effect originally came about because of the comet’s rotation combined with its initial asymmetric shape. A torque formed where the neck and ‘head’ meet as these protruding elements twist around the comet’s center of gravity.
The scientists said their observations suggest shear stress acted globally over the comet and, crucially, around its neck. The fact that fractures could propagate so deeply into 67P/C-G also confirms that the material making up the interior of the comet is brittle, they said, something that was previously unclear.
But shear stress wasn’t the only factor at play on comet 67P/C-G. When comets come close to the sun, as this comet did in 2015, ices on their surface turn to vapor without ever going through a liquid phase. This process, known as sublimation, results in comet dust being dragged out into space. The scientists said this process of sublimation is a well-known process for deeply influencing a comet’s appearance over time. You can get a sense of some of the changes undergone by comet 67P/C-G in these images of dramatic outbursts captured by Rosetta.
Thus, these scientists said, their new study suggests that comet evolution is likely to result first from shear stress, acting over a timescale of billions of years following the formation of comets. Later in a comet’s life, especially if the comet falls into an orbit that takes it near the sun, sublimation erosion takes over.
Evolution of Rosetta’s comet over 4.5 billion years.
It’s good to bear in mind that comet 67P/C–G isn’t the only dual-lobed object known to astronomers. On January 1, 2019, NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft flew close to an object beyond Pluto – nicknamed Ultima Thule – located in the Kuiper belt, where icy comets and other small bodies reside, far from our sun. New Horizons found that Ultima Thule also has a dual-lobed shape. See the image below.
There are similarities between the shapes of comet 67P/C–G and Ultima Thule, but there are also differences. The same stress structures aren’t as apparent in Ultima Thule, the scientists said. Time – and probably more visits to comets and Kuiper Belt objects by more spacecraft – will reveal whether comet 67P/C–G’s evolution is unique or common among the small bodies of our solar system.
Ultima Thule versus comet 67P/C-G. They look really similar, don’t they? Both are icy objects that likely formed far from the sun. It might make you wonder how many other dual-lobed objects we’ll find in the far outer solar system.
Bottom line:Rosetta’s comet – aka comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko – looks like 2 icy balls apparently stuck together billions of years ago. A recent study, based on computer modeling, showed how the comet’s double-lobed structure guided its evolution.
Forty-seven years ago, an incident occurred in the southwestern desert of the United States that could have significant implications for all mankind. The incident was announced by the U.S. military, subsequently denied by the U.S. military, and has remained veiled in government secrecy ever since.
Although it is in a category fraught with false claims and hoaxes, it is not a hoax or false claim, but rather a known event that is thoroughly documented. It is the objective here to summarize the details of that event, affirm the right of all people throughout the world to know the truth about what occurred, and propose a course of action that will allow that truth to emerge.
The event took place during the first week of July 1947 and involved the recovery of wreckage by the military from a remote ranch northwest of Roswell, New Mexico. There is now considerable testimony from former members of the military known to have been involved, including two brigadier generals, that the recovered material was not of terrestrial origin. Admittedly, such a claim taxes the limits of credibility for discerning and rational individuals. It also tends to evoke a response of immediate dismissal. The preponderance of evidence, however, indicates the event occurred.
On January 12, 1994, United States Congressman Steven Schiff of Albuquerque, New Mexico, stated to the press that he had been stonewalled by the Defense Department when requesting information regarding the 1947 Roswell event on behalf of constituents and witnesses. Indicating he was seeking further investigation into the matter, Congressman Schiff called the Defense Department's lack of response "astounding" and concluded it was apparently "another government coverup." Most people are not aware that there exists an event of this nature so well substantiated. In the next year public awareness of the Roswell incident should grow. A new hardcover book has been released, a television movie will premiere, and a serious documentary is forthcoming. Questions, controversy, and a general distrust of U.S. government policy in this area are bound to increase. Detailed information on the recovery of the wreckage at Roswell and of related events is extensive.
Some years ago investigators were able to obtain a copy of the 1947 Roswell Army Air Field yearbook. This enabled them to locate witnesses throughout the country. Newspaper accounts show that during late June and early July 1947, there was a wave of reports of "flying disks" (UFOs) throughout the United States and Canada. Many of those reports came from credible witnesses, including pilots and other trained observers.
Sometime during the first week of July 1947, a local New Mexico rancher, Mac Brazel, while riding out in the morning to check his sheep after a night of intense thunderstorms, discovered a considerable amount of unusual debris. It had created a shallow gouge several hundred feet long and was scattered over a large area. Some of the debris had strange physical properties. After taking a few pieces to show his neighbors, Floyd and Loretta Proctor, Brazel drove into Roswell and contacted the sheriff, George Wilcox. Sheriff Wilcox notified authorities at Roswell Army Air Field and with the assistance of his deputies, proceeded to investigate the matter. Shortly after becoming involved, the military closed off the area for a number of days and retrieved the wreckage. It was initially taken to Roswell Army Air Field and eventually flown by B-29 and C-54 aircraft to Wright Field in Dayton, Ohio.
Roswell Army Air Field was the home of the 509th Bomb Group, which was an elite outfit--the only atomic group in the world.
On the morning of July 8, 1947, Colonel William Blanchard, Commander of the 509th Bomb Group, issued a press release stating that the wreckage of a "crashed disk" (UFO) had been recovered. The press release was transmitted over the wire services in time to make headlines in over thirty U.S. afternoon newspapers that same day.
Within hours, a second press release was issued from the office of General Roger Ramey, Commander of the Eighth Air Force at Fort Worth Army Air Field in Texas, 400 miles from the crash site. It rescinded the first press release and, in effect, claimed that Colonel Blanchard and the officers of the 509th Bomb Group at Roswell had made an unbelievably foolish mistake and somehow incorrectly identified a weather balloon and its radar reflector as the wreckage of a "crashed disk." One of those two press releases had to be untrue. There is now solid testimony from numerous credible military and civilian witnesses who were directly involved, that the "crashed disk" press release issued by Colonel William Blanchard of the 509th Bomb Group from Roswell was true and that the subsequent "weather balloon" press release from Eighth Air Force Headquarters in Fort Worth. Texas, was a hastily contrived cover story. Those who knew and worked with William Blanchard say he was a solid, nononsense, businesslike individual, and not someone who would make a fool of himself and the Air Force by ordering a press release about something as out of the ordinary and dramatic as the event at Roswell without being certain he was correct. In other words, if Blanchard issued a press release saying there was a crashed disk, there was a crashed disk. Colonel William Blanchard would later go on to become a four-star general and Vice Chief of Staff of the United States Air Force.
The first witness located by investigators "not of this earth. " Even if he had initially made such a gross misidentification, he would certainly have been able to see his mistake later after it had been brought to his attention. When returning to the base, he stopped by his house with a few pieces of the unusual wreckage to show his wife and eleven-year-old son. One piece, a small section of I-beam, had strange hieroglyphic like symbols on its surface. His son, Dr. Jesse Marcel, Jr., now a practicing medical doctor and qualified National Guard helicopter pilot and flight surgeon, remembers the incident well. He has been able to produce detailed drawings of some of the symbols.
During his career, Jesse Marcel Sr., went on to other important assignments, including the preparation of a report on the first Soviet nuclear detonation, which went directly to President Truman. The late General Thomas DuBose was a colonel and General Ramey's chief of staff at Eighth Air Force Headquarters in Fort Worth, Texas, in 1947. Before his death in 1992, General DuBose testified that he himself had taken the telephone call from General Clements McMullen at Andrews Army Air Field in Washington, D.C., ordering the coverup. The instructions were for General Ramey to concoct a "cover story" to "get the press off our backs." Retired General Arthur E. Exon was stationed at Wright Field in Dayton, Ohio, as a lieutenant colonel in July of 1947 during the time the wreckage from Roswell was brought in. In a 1990 interview, General Exon said of the testing, "Everything from chemical analysis, stress tests, compression tests, flexing. It was brought into our material evaluation labs. (Some of it) could be easily ripped or changed . . . there were other parts of it that were very thin but awfully strong and couldn't be dented with heavy hammers. . . ." Of the men that did the testing, he said, " . . . the overall consensus was that the pieces were from space."
The testimony of Mr. Glenn Dennis leaves little doubt about the nature of what was recovered in 1947. Glenn Dennis still lives in the Roswell, New Mexico, area and is a respected businessman and member of the community. He is down-to-earth and straightforward. In 1947 Glenn Dennis was a young mortician working for the Ballard Funeral Home, which had a contract to provide mortuary and ambulance services for Roswell Army Air Field. Prior to learning about the recovery of the unusual wreckage at Roswell, he received several telephone calls one afternoon from the mortuary officer at the air field. He was asked about the availability of small, hermetically sealed caskets and questioned about how to preserve bodies that had been exposed to the elements for several days. There was concern about possibly altering the chemical composition of the tissue. Later that evening, as a result of unrelated events, he made a trip to the base hospital. Outside the back entrance, he observed two military ambulances with open rear doors, from which large pieces of wreckage protruded, including one with a row of unusual symbols on its surface. Once inside, he encountered a young nurse whom he knew. At that same instant, he was noticed by military police, who physically threatened him and forcibly escorted him from the building. He met with the nurse the next day, and she explained what had been going on at the hospital. She was a very religious person and was upset to the point of being in a state of shock. She described how she had been called in to assist two doctors who were doing autopsies on several small nonhuman bodies.
She described the terrible smell, how one body was in good shape and the others mangled, and the differences between their anatomy and human anatomy. She also drew a diagram on a napkin showing an outline of their features. That meeting was to be their last-- she was transferred to England a few days later. The main part of the craft apparently came down some distance from the "debris field" at the Brazel ranch. Researchers were only recently able to confirm this second site because few people knew about it. According to witness testimony, this is also the site where the bodies were found. Most of the witnesses to this site have not, in fear of government reprisal, allowed their names to be used. A prestigious law firm has recently been retained to provide legal counsel to any such witnesses who might consider going public with their testimony. Attorneys from the firm have already met with several Roswell witnesses. In addition to Glenn Dennis, other witnesses were physically threatened or intimidated.
According to members of Sheriff Wilcox's family, he was told by the military, in the presence of his wife, that he and his entire family would be killed if he ever spoke about what he had seen. The rancher who originally discovered the wreckage, Mac Brazel, was sequestered by the military for almost a week and sworn to secrecy. He never spoke about the incident again, even to his family. In the months following the incident, his son, Bill Brazel, found and collected a few "scraps" of material, which he kept in a cigar box. The material was eventually confiscated by the military. Despite the fact that there has been publicity about the Roswell case since 1980, no witness involved in the recovery has ever come forward to corroborate the "weather balloon" story or to provide some other explanation for the wreckage, such as a V2 missile or experimental aircraft. (Both possibilities have been thoroughly checked out and eliminated.) If there had been a more mundane explanation for the unusual debris, it seems certain someone would have come forward with it by now. While it is possible that the Roswell witnesses, who live in diverse parts of the country, have been engaged in a perfectly orchestrated, long-term hoax with no clear motive, it is unlikely.
It is true there are a few minor gaps and inconsistencies in some of the accounts, but that is to be expected. There were many individuals involved and it has been a long period of time. Human memory is not perfect. For those familiar with the Roswell evidence, however, it would be hard to imagine a scenario in which the core event is not true. With Roswell so well documented, the question that arises is why the mainstream media has not pursued the story. Two factors stand out. The first is that of a negative mindset. There is a tendency in human nature to resist anything that challenges our preconceived perceptions of reality. In most cases, such an attitude serves us well and manifests itself as a healthy skepticism. In other instances, it may result in a close-minded refusal by otherwise intelligent people to consider compelling evidence--especially when that evidence seems to defy common sense or prevailing scientific theory.
Many past revelations of science, for example, have met such resistance--a round earth, evolution, relativity, continental drift, quantum theory, an expanding universe--to name a few. The second and most damaging factor is ridicule. Unfortunately, UFOs have long been associated with tabloid stories, hoaxes, and the "lunatic fringe." In addition, people tend to put UFOs in the same category as ghosts, mysticism, magic, and other forms of the occult or the supernatural. As a result, anything even remotely related to the area of UFOs is a difficult subject to broach without risking a loss of credibility. Consequently, members of the mainstream media rarely approach the subject, much less treat it with any degree of seriousness or depth. No one wants to make himself an easy target for cynicism or ridicule. Moreover, it is not necessary to resort to the supernatural to explain UFOs any more than it is necessary to resort to the supernatural to explain the Space Shuttle. UFOs could probably best be looked upon as an extrapolation of where our own technology might be thousands of years from now.
A television, jet aircraft, or nuclear bomb would have seemed magical or supernatural to a person from the Middle Ages. Similarly, by virtue of the fact that they apparently violate the laws of known physics, UFOs are perceived by us as an aberration of reality. They are, however, probably quite explainable under laws of science we aren't even close to discovering yet. Further exacerbating the credibility problem has been the extreme negative position taken by the U.S. government. Almost everyone has heard pronouncements from government officials claiming there is no evidence to support the existence of UFOs or extraterrestrial intelligence. Ironically, no matter how high their rank or position, those touting this line may be uninformed, yet telling the truth as they know it.
With the U.S. government's high degree of compartmentalization and need-to-know philosophy, chances are that few agencies or individuals would be briefed on or have access to such information. Agencies in which something might be known, such as the CIA, have refused to cooperate with investigators. When seeking Roswell or UFO-related documents through the Freedom of Information Act, researchers have been repeatedly stonewalled. Claims are made that documents don't exist or can't be released for national security reasons. The few documents that have been released have often been so blacked out that they are rendered meaningless. By way of contrast, in 1991 the Belgian Ministry of Defense released radar tapes from two Belgian Air Force F-16s that had been scrambled to pursue a UFO detected by four ground-based radar stations and seen by numerous citizens and by police. The tape was impressive--showing digital readouts of incredible altitude and speed changes made by the UFO. Under present government policy, it is hard to imagine such a scenario ever taking place in the United States. Perhaps the world's greatest democracy could learn a few things about a free and open society from its small NATO ally.
There was actually hope at one time that U.S. policy might change. It came when Jimmy Carter was elected President in 1976. In October 1969 while Governor of Georgia, Jimmy Carter had reported a UFO sighting. Later, in 1976 as a presidential candidate, he pledged: "If I become president, I'll make every piece of information this country has about UFOs available to the public and the scientists." He then somewhat mystifyingly never said one more word about it publicly after taking office. If he found there was no information to release, why did he not announce it? Doing so would have been a natural and easy way to honor his commitment. Why the U.S. government defiantly maintains there is nothing to the UFO phenomenon and why it would want to withhold evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence remain a matter of speculation.
Three possible reasons have been suggested: fear of mass panic, perceived national security problems, and concern about offending religious groups. Whether arguments in any of these areas have merit is questionable. Most would agree, however, that whatever reasons there may be for withholding such information, they are far outweighed by those for releasing it. The classic argument for government withholding of information on extraterrestrial intelligence from the public is that it might cause a response similar to that of the famous 1938 Orson Welles "War of the Worlds" radio broadcast. (The program featured a simulated news broadcast announcing an attack by Martians on Grover's Mill, New Jersey, which panicked a small number of listeners who had tuned in late.)
The argument, however, is flawed and the comparison is invalid. It is not realistic to compare a simulated emergency news broadcast graphically describing a devastating, ongoing attack or invasion to a low-key, formal announcement confirming that other intelligent life exists in the universe and occasionally visits earth. Furthermore, we are nearly 35 years into the Space Age and at the brink of the 21st century. This is a generation that until recently lived for years under the threat of nuclear destruction and that now must deal with such threats as AIDS, rising rates of violent crime, international terrorism, etc. The possibility that the confirmation of extraterrestrial intelligence would cause mass panic in this day and age is so remote that it hardly merits mention. The arguments for maintaining secrecy based on national security are just as specious as those based on mass panic. Assuming the wreckage the military retrieved from Roswell was that of an extraterrestrial craft, it would be understandable that the U.S. Government would want to reverse-engineer the technology.
It would be reasonable that the government would want to keep certain details of that technology secret. As with any technology with the potential for misuse, such precaution would be prudent and justified. However, the very existence of such a craft would have profound implications. The mere knowledge by the public of that existence would not pose any kind of threat. Denying the public such knowledge would not be justified and would be an abuse of the power entrusted to those who oversee the country's national security. When the Carter campaign pledge was not carried out, it was speculated that concern about offending certain religious groups was the reason. If true, it would represent a violation of the principle of separation of church and state. It would also be placing the interests of a small minority above those of the majority.
Like the discoveries of Darwin and Copernicus, the Roswell evidence could have implications that challenge certain religious doctrines. Darwin's theory that there could be fossil evidence linking modern man and other present-day higher primates to a common primate ancestor conflicted with the creationist view on the exalted position of man with respect to other forms of life. Likewise, the Roswell evidence, which would imply the existence of a superior nonhuman intelligence, could be seen as equally threatening to the creationist viewpoint It could be interpreted as implying that on a scale comparing the evolutionary development of different advanced species throughout the universe, human beings may not rate very high. Such a humbling realization might bother some people, but probably not most. Copernicus' finding that the earth along with the other planets circled the sun contradicted the teachings of the time that the earth was the center of creation. That notion persists today in that many perceive the earth to be the center of intelligent life in the universe.
The Roswell evidence could dispel such an ethnocentric view by confirming that the human race is just one single member in a large community of other intelligent races in the universe. Specific effects, if any, that such a revelation might have on society would be purely a matter of speculation. Generally, however, when knowledge replaces ignorance, the long-term result is positive. There is no reason to think that that would not be the case here. If nothing else, the knowledge that it is possible for a civilization to survive the growing pains of becoming technologically advanced, without completely destroying itself and its environment in the process, would in a sense provide a renewed hope for the future of man and his environment. Despite the media's inattention to the matter, and contrary to what some in the U.S. government would like people to think, Roswell is not a figment of someone's imagination or the product of modern folklore. It involves real people and a real event.
The man who issued the press release announcing that event, Colonel William Blanchard, was not someone prone to making mistakes, much less monumental blunders. He would go on to achieve the highest peacetime rank attainable in the U.S. military, four-star general. Credible witnesses, including retired generals, have testified that the original press release issued by Blanchard was correct and that the Roswell wreckage was of extraterrestrial origin. A United States Congressman was recently stonewalled by the Defense Department on the matter and has expressed his belief that there is a coverup. Yet the U.S. government steadfastly maintains it has no evidence indicating extraterrestrial intelligence. Something does not ring true.
There is a gross inconsistency here, and it involves an issue of great magnitude, an issue that should transcend domestic politics and that demands an explanation. It is time to lay the cards on the table so that this matter can be resolved, one way or the other. History has shown that unsubstantiated official assurances or denials by government are often meaningless. Nevertheless, there is a logical and straightforward way to ensure that the truth about Roswell will emerge: an Executive Order declassifying any information regarding the existence of UFOs or extraterrestrial intelligence. Because this is a unique issue of universal concern, such an action would be appropriate and warranted. It is essentially what presidential candidate Jimmy Carter promised and then failed to deliver to the American people eighteen years ago in 1976. Additionally, it would cost nothing, offend no one, and be applauded by all. To provide positive assurance for all potential witnesses, the Order would need to be clearly stated and written into law. Security-clearance violations can bring heavy fines and long prison sentences. In addition to the original witnesses from 1947, there are most certainly individuals involved with the Roswell material today who would be affected by such a declassification.
Undoubtedly, many of them, along with the original witnesses, would want to see this information shared with others--be they friends, family, grandchildren, or all mankind. If, as is officially claimed, no information on Roswell, UFOs, or extraterrestrial intelligence is being withheld, a declassification order would be a mere formality, as there would be nothing for anyone to disclose. What legitimate concern could there be about declassifying "nonexistent" information? If, however, information is being withheld, there could be significant resistance to officially disclosing it.
This resistance could range from contriving excuses as to why an Executive Order should not be issued, to ignoring the matter altogether. In the end, however, whether information is being suppressed or whether it is not, the effect of an Executive Order declassifying it would be positive. If nothing is being withheld, the result of such an Order would be to set the record straight once and for all. Years of controversy and suspicion would be ended, both in the eyes of the United States' own citizens and in the eyes of the world. If, on the other hand, the Roswell witnesses are telling the truth and information on extraterrestrial intelligence does exist, it is not something to which a privileged few in the United States government should have exclusive rights.
It is knowledge of profound importance to which all people throughout the world should have an inalienable right. Its release would unquestionably be universally acknowledged as an historic act of honesty and goodwill.
A former Navy Seal and a Marine Corps special operator have just revealed in an interview their knowledge of a secret space fleet that operates out of Antarctica, which flew a landing mission to the recent interstellar visitor to our solar system, Oumuamua. They were interviewed by veteran UFO researcher Linda Moulton Howe who released their startling testimonies on herYouTube channel live streamingon February 20, 2019.
Howe had previously released Part 1 of her interview where Spartan 1, a former Navy Seal, described entering an octagon shaped structure covering approximately 62 acres near the Beardsmore Glacier in Antarctica. His account of what he witnessed and his mission there is described in my earlier article.
Spartan 1 had also shared his knowledge of the existence of a coalition of major nations that are signatories to the Antarctic Treaty, who operate a secret space program out of Antarctica.
This coalition that I talk about, it’s Great Britain, United States, France, Germany, Canada, Russia. There has been a space fleet in existence for the last 25 years” [Timestamp 9:01]
In response to Howe’s question about who is paying for and operating the space fleet, Spartan 1 asserted: “All these coalition countries”.
Spartan 1 went on to describe the different extraterrestrial races that collaborate with the space coalition and how Antarctica is the hub of operations:
Spartan 1: I have only been told about of at least seven different species of aliens that the coalition has been in contact with.
Howe: How have they been described?
Spartan 1: Anywhere from warlike to very peaceful… [Timestamp 17:20]
Howe: Do you have the impression that Antarctica is the central crossing hub for these seven species?
Next, Howe introduced the second whistleblower, Spartan 2, who is also a special operator, but whose service branch was instead the US Marine Corps.
Spartan 2 first contacted Howe on March 22, 2017 by email and wrote: “Antarctica contains wonders beyond what most can comprehend. It has ties to space and technology beyond belief”. [Timestamp 22:06]
He revealed that for the last decade he has worked with an official from U.S. Cyber Command, whose 8thfloor office is responsible for conducting trade with extraterrestrial races. The official, whose first name is Kim, told Spartan 1 and 2 about a secret mission to Oumuamua – the interstellar object that sparked scientific speculation due to its unusual cigar shape and how it accelerated as it began leaving our solar system, which Howe discussed in her live streaming session.
Spartan 2 then dropped a bombshell when he said:
We got confirmation that our buddies landed on Oumuamua like months before anybody even knew it was out there. Our guys were on Oumuamua, or whatever they call that thing. It’s not a rock … it’s an old derelict ship. At least that’s what they told us… and we boarded it months before anybody knew about it. [Timestamp 25:00]
In response to Howe’s question of who gave them their information, Spartan 1 disclosed:
“I can only tell you his first name is Kim, he worked for NSA, has worked for NSA for years. Then, just recently, in the last year he has been put in charge of a certain department in Cyber Command. All I know is that it’s on the 8th floor of the NSA building” [Timestamp 25:30]
Spartan 1 confirmed that the 8th floor of Cyber Command is like a communications department in charge of interstellar trade with extraterrestrials.
The revelations by Spartan 1 and 2 about the secret space mission to Oumuamua before its “official discovery” on October 19, 2017 corroborates an earlier account of this mission by secret space program insider Corey Goode. Goode says that on December 17, 2017, he was taken to a secret moon base called Lunar Operations Command where he received a briefing about the Oumuamua mission involving an alliance of space programs and nations.
Goode asserted that during the briefing he viewed a video of the Oumuamua mission, and that it was led by a senior USAF official he had dubbed “Sigmund”. Goode said:
Sigmund puffed up proudly and stated, “I led an expedition to see who this craft belonged to. Wait until you hear what we found.” Suddenly we started seeing all sorts of readings and telemetry on the monitor. I could also hear what sounded like an old NASA radio transmission. There were beeps along with a pilot calling in positions of his craft, as well as the one he was trying to dock with. That lasted for about five minutes as I saw the two craft spiraling closer and closer together.
As the pilot matched the spin of the object they were approaching, you could see a long cigar-shaped structure that had shiny patches of what looked like ice on the outside. It was obviously made of stone, and looked as if it had been through many meteor showers and collisions. The video broke to a scene where a few people who were suited up in space suits were pushing themselves through what looked like a bored-out hole going down into the rock.
More information about what Goode was told about the secret Oumuamua mission is available here.
Artist illustration of Oumuamua and visiting spacecraft.
Credit: Gaia TV/Sphere Being Alliance
Significantly, key elements of what Goode was told and publicly revealed back in January 2018 about the Oumuamua mission have now been independently corroborated by the two new whistleblowers, Spartan 1 and 2. This means that there are three individuals who have now gone on the public record about receiving first hand testimony of a classified mission to Oumuamua by a coalition of nations controlling a secret space fleet.
Goode has also spoken in the past about Antarctica being a hub for deep space operations by different groups, nations, and corporations, which is consistent with what Spartan 1 and 2 have revealed.
Goode has also described the creation of an international space fleet created in the early 1990’s that focuses on scientific research in deep space and other solar systems, which he dubbed the “Global Galactic League of Nations.” Again, this is consistent with what Spartan 1 and 2 have just revealed.
Howe has conducted due diligence on her two new whistleblowers in terms of reviewing documents confirming their military service. This makes their respective testimonies about Antarctica and Oumuamua difficult to dismiss, thereby corroborating what Goode had revealed more than a year earlier about the secret mission to Oumuamua.
Baltic Sea Anomaly BOMBSHELL: Diver team reveals Anomaly is CONCRETE 'moulded by someone'
THE Baltic Sea Anomaly could be an artificial concrete structure and not a natural formation, according to a diver who saw the Baltic Sea Anomaly up close.
The Baltic Sea Anomaly is a bizarre object discovered in 2011 at the bottom of the northern Baltic Sea. The mystery object, which measures roughly 210ft (70m) across has been likened to UFOs, World War 2 bunkers and ancient temples. The latest findings by a team of divers who explored the Anomaly up close, suggest the structure could be artificial and built from concrete. But the jury is still out on the exact nature of the Anomaly andconspiracy theoristsare attempting to unravel the mystery.
The Baltic Sea Anomaly was discovered eight years ago by a team of treasure-hunters, known as Ocean X Team.
Found in the Gulf of Bothnia between Sweden and Finland, the Anomaly stunned its founders and the conspiracy community at large.
Ocean X has now revealed a shocking documentary, where a team of divers explored the Anomaly at a depth of around 300ft (100m).
One of the Ocean X divers, Stefan Hogeborn, revealed the experience of approaching the submerged object did not compare to anything he has witnessed before.
Baltic Sea Anomaly: Divers found a bizarre ring of rocks at the Anomaly
(Image: OCEAN X)
Baltic Sea Anomaly: The unusual object was discovered in 2011 by Ocean X
(Image: OCEAN X)
He said: “The most peculiar thing, or the most strange thing, was a hole.
“It was like a circle, two or three metres in width and had like a frame around it.
“I mean like a square frame and like a circular hole and that’s kind of weird.”
What is even more amazing, the diver added, is the experience has left him with even more questions about the nature of the Baltic Sea Anomaly.
However, a 2018 study by Stockholm University claims to have unravelled the mystery of the Baltic Sea Anomaly, saying it was carved out by glacial processes.
Volker Brüchert, an associate professor of geology at Stockholm University, said: "I was surprised when I researched the material I found a great black stone that could be a volcanic rock.
“My hypothesis is that this object, this structure was formed during the Ice Age many thousands of years ago.
"Because the whole northern Baltic region is so heavily influenced by glacial thawing processes, both the feature and the rock samples are likely to have formed in connection with glacial and postglacial processes.
"Possibly these rocks were transported there by glaciers."
The European Space Agency (ESA) saidon February 20, 2019, that 20-year-old data from the space-basedSOHOobservatory has revealed an amazing fact about the Earth. The data have shown that the outermost part of Earth’s atmosphere – called its geocorona – extends beyond the moon’s orbit.
This gaseous geocorona – a cloud of hydrogen atoms, made faintly luminous in the far-ultraviolet via scattered sunlight – was known to exist. But no one knew it reached so far into space. It extends nearly twice as far as the moon’s orbit, nearly 400,000 miles (630,000 km), or 50 times Earth’s own diameter.
Igor Baliukin of Russia’s Space Research Institute led this research. He commented in a statement:
The moon flies through Earth’s atmosphere.
SOHO stands for Solar and Heliospheric Observatory. The mission was launched in 1995 as a joint project by ESA and NASA, with a projected two-year lifespan. Now, 24 years later, the craft is still in space and still studying the sun and sun-Earth environment. It orbits the L-1 point in the Earth-sun system.
One of SOHO’s instrument, called SWAN, provided the data on Earth’s geocorona. SWAN’s sensors traced the hydrogen in the geocorona and precisely detected where it dwindled to nothing.
Apollo 16 astronauts on the moon acquired this ultraviolet image of Earth and its hydrogen envelope, or geocorona, in 1972.
The evocative image above is a very interesting and historic one of Earth’s geocorona. It comes from the first telescope on the moon, placed by Apollo 16 astronauts in 1972. The image shows the geocorona surrounding Earth and glowing brightly in ultraviolet light. Jean-Loup Bertaux is the former principal investigator of SWAN, and he’s a co-author of the new paper. He commented:
At that time, the astronauts on the lunar surface did not know that they were actually embedded in the outskirts of the geocorona.
By the way, we skywatchers sometimes see a similar-looking corona around the moon or sun. But that’s an entirely different phenomenon, with the glow caused by Earth’s own air, not by any extended lunar or solar atmosphere.
Artist’s concept of the ESA/NASA Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO), superimposed on a real image of the sun as seen by SOHO’s extreme-ultraviolet imaging telescope on in 1999.
Bottom line:Scientists used data from the SWAN instrument on the SOHO spacecraft to learn that the outermost part of Earth’s atmosphere – called the geocorona – extends outward almost twice as far as the moon’s orbit.
Keer op keer is de organisatie die ontkent dat er buitenaards leven bestaat degene die, per ongeluk, met het bewijs komt.
Zo ook nu duiken er weer door NASA gemaakte beelden op van bouwwerken op Mars.
Er zijn op aarde heel veel "bewegingen" die voor van alles strijden: Van een goede gezondheid, een beter klimaat tot "geen 5G", overal heb je wel “bewegingen” voor.
Maar, voor zover ons bekend heb je geen beweging die eist dat NASA na al die jaren bewijsmateriaal te hebben geleverd voor het bestaan van buitenaards leven, nu eens echt openheid van zaken geeft. Misschien een mooie taak voor iemand om dit te beginnen, want dit kan echt zo niet langer.
We hebben door de jaren heen zoveel bewijsmateriaal gepubliceerd over dat er veel meer is op Mars dan dat men ons vertelt en er komt maar geen eind aan. Iemand die absoluut een compliment verdient voor het vele speurwerk dat hij doet is Scott Waring. En opnieuw heeft hij wat gevonden.
De volgende opnames zijn gemaakt door de Curiosity Rover. Je ziet het vrij kale Mars landschap, maar in de verte op de heuvelrand zie je iets onnatuurlijks uitsteken.
Wat verder ingezoomd zie je iets dat zonder enige twijfel kan worden geclassificeerd als een gebouw, een door intelligente wezens gemaakte constructie.
Dit soort ontdekkingen zouden wereldnieuws moeten zijn, maar zijn dit uiteraard niet. Want, ook al zou er op dit moment geen leven op Mars zijn, dit bewijst dat er in ieder geval intelligent leven geweest is op Mars en dat buitenaards leven dus bestaat.
Voor wie denkt dat dit een toevalstreffer is, hierna een deel uit een eerder artikel, waar eveneens een gebouw wordt ontdekt op een foto van NASA. Een gebouw dat enige tijd later is verdwenen uit de archieven van NASA.
Wat als er nu een foto is van NASA uit 2013, genomen door één van de NASA rovers op Mars, waarop duidelijk een gebouw is te zien?
Het gaat om een zwart/wit foto die is genomen op 6 september 2013 en waarop je in de verte duidelijk een soort (flat)gebouw ziet staan, achter de heuvels.
Wanneer je wat verder inzoomt, dan wordt duidelijk dat daar iets staat wat niet anders omschreven kan worden dan als een constructie, een gebouw.
Wie de originele foto wil bekijken, kan dat hier doen. Dan wordt er enkele jaren later opnieuw een foto gemaakt van hetzelfde gebied op Mars en de datum op de foto is dan 11 februari 2017.
Dit keer is het een kleurenfoto en ziet er als volgt uit.
En wanneer we hier wat inzoomen, dan blijkt opeens het gebouw uit de foto van enkele jaren geleden te zijn verdwenen.
Wie deze originele foto wil bekijken, kan dat hier doen. Er bestaat geen enkele twijfel over de locatie en er bestaat ook geen enkele twijfel over dat er in de zwart/wit foto’s een soort gebouw is te zien. Ook in het geval het gebouw op de slooplijst heeft gestaan.... iemand heeft het dan dus gesloopt, Mars is dan bewoond en dat weet NASA dan ook.
If you thought the only place in the universe where you have to worry about predator capitalists is on Earth … think again. Two professors in Germany have written a new book detailing possib
le outcomes of a human encounter with an intelligent alien species and in it they warn that our SETI messages sent into space may be attracting the wrong kind of extraterrestrials – namely, the capitalistic kind who will see only the financial gains to be had by exploiting (or worse) the physically, technologically and intellectually weaker species they encounter on this wet blue planet. Does this scenario sound vaguely familiar? Even scarier, human capitalistic space explorers could find alien technology that gives them an advantage over other humans and use it against their fellow Earthlings. Cue the Twilight Zone music.
In an interview with Bild, Michael Schetsche, a Research Coordinator at the Freiburg Institute for Frontier Areas of Psychology and Mental Health and an adjunct professor at the Institute for Sociology of the Albert-Ludwigs-University Freiburg, discussed the book “The Alien Society — Introduction to Exosociology” which he co-authored with his scientific assistant, Andreas Anton. He sees the second scenario – humans finding alien technology, whether current or an artifact – as the more dangerous one, because it could happen on the Moon or one of the asteroids we’re already visiting.
“Maybe it’s space debris that a strange probe has left on the moon or in the asteroid belt. But imagine, the artifact is still functional. Maybe it is a drive segment intended for free space. Of course we humans want to explore that, we bring it to earth, experiment with it, activate it with overflowing curiosity. And then it rips away a quarter of the planet’s surface.”
On the other hand, the discovery of this technology may not destroy humanity on its own but instead be used as a tool by greedy states or corporations. Even the quest to get it and bring it back could be deadly.
“(It could happen) that an artifact discovered somewhere in the asteroid belt provides the reason for warlike conflict on Earth.”
Schetsche recommends immediately setting up an international agreement to “subordinate extraterrestrial finds to the supervision of the United Nations” and let the U.N. determine how found alien technology is handled and when, if at all, it should be brought back to Earth. (A U.N. agreement on alien technology to prevent one nation or corporation from becoming almighty? Good luck with that.)
It’s the first scenario – that of contact with an extraterrestrial species with human capitalistic tendencies – that conspiracy thoerists like Alex Jones picked up on and screamed “GERMAN SCIENTISTS URGE TO STOP SENDING SIGNALS INTO SPACE TO ‘CAPITALIST ALIENS’.” (His all-caps headline.) Schetsche compares it to the European ‘discovery’ of America and the conquest of Africa. As Native Americans and Africans found out, overwhelming power changes everything.
“All action of nation states is based on power. The entire structure is obsolete in the moment in which an overpowering extraterrestrial actor appears in the sky. It would be a struggle between Bambi and Godzilla, and we would be Bambi in the case.”
Take me to your money.
Even if the aliens are benevolent, human response to no longer being superior to everything could cause chaos.
“Even if people do not kill each other, direct contact can destroy the social, economic, political and religious structures of countries.”
Based on these speculations, Schetsche obviously thinks it’s better to be the discoverer, not the discoveree, and recommends that we stop sending signals to superior aliens, especially ones that might have the same conquer and capitalize tendencies as their Earth counterparts once and most likely still have (sorry Trekkies).
It won’t be like this.
Should we stop sending signals and start sending more humans and exploration robots into space? That’s already happening. Should we fear contact with superior life forms? Look in the mirror. Should we trust those in power to do the right thing should alien technology be found? Look in the mirror again.
Either way, it looks like most of us will probably end up like Bambi.
I’ve often wondered whether future varieties of artificial intelligence might not help humans discover incredible new things about reality. Perhaps machines will even unveil little nuances that have been hidden beneath our noses all along, but which required the kind of critiques that only a computer mind could offer.
But while we are thinking about the ways ever-watchful A.I. may help us critique reality in the future, another question comes to mind which mirrors the old idea, “quis custodiet ipsos custodes?” proposed by Roman satirist Decimus Junius Juvenalis: in a world where we’re learning from the machines we’ve built, who fact-checks those machines, and more importantly, how do we know that what we learn from them even be trusted?
This might sound like a silly proposition, due in part to the sorts of stigmas we have about artificial intelligence and machine learning. On the one hand, many would ascribe to notions like, “of course we shouldn’t trust machines completely… they aren’t human!” In direct contrast to this, advocates of machine learning and A.I. might argue that this is precisely the reason they should be trusted: machines are, and will continue to be, capable of processing and synthesizing information in ways that often far exceed what the human brain can do.
Genevera Allen, a Rice University statistician recently made the argument that until machine learning systems can be designed in ways that allow for objective critiques of the information they provide, their trustworthiness remains flawed.
Allen spoke earlier in February at an Annual Meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, where she addressed this problem as part of her lecture:
“The question is, ‘Can we really trust the discoveries that are currently being made using machine-learning techniques applied to large data sets?’ The answer in many situations is probably, ‘Not without checking,’ but work is underway on next-generation machine-learning systems that will assess the uncertainty and reproducibility of their predictions.”
Fundamental to the problem is the predictive nature of many (if not most) computational systems. Allen argues that because making a prediction about information is what these computers are designed to do, they are unlikely not to find data when tasked with doing so… even if a human observing the same data could easily discern that, in some instances, none exists.
“[Machines] never come back with ‘I don’t know,’ or ‘I didn’t discover anything,’ because they aren’t made to,” Allen said in a Rice University press release. However, the concerns Allen raises aren’t merely prospective: some instances already exist where it appears that questionable information may have been gleaned, at least in part, from studies that incorporated computational data that remained uncorroborated with relation to cancer research.
Allen explains:
“[T]here are cases where discoveries aren’t reproducible; the clusters discovered in one study are completely different than the clusters found in another… Because most machine-learning techniques today always say, ‘I found a group.’ Sometimes, it would be far more useful if they said, ‘I think some of these are really grouped together, but I’m uncertain about these others.'”
I recall a discussion I had with a futurist a few months ago, where we discussed the question over dangers stemming from interpretive issues that may arise from the way machine learning differs from our own. The example he gave was relevant here, although more in line with the “Hollywood” conception of potential problems we may one day have with A.I. (we might call this the “Terminator” model, which I think needs no further explanation here).
Imagine, he said, if we told A.I. to find a way to destroy a particular human disease. We input the information, and the computer outputs the following solution: “destroy all carriers of the disease.” In other words, rather than finding a cure, the machine interprets the problem in simple terms of its elimination… whereby the machine makes no distinction between “solving” the problem and committing murder.
This is a dramatic example, but it works analogically in comparison with what we already see in studies where machine learning is involved. Computers, in other words, function and respond to data sets in ways that differ vastly from human reason. Thus, we do need to be aware of these kinds of issues as more and more computational systems are affecting the knowledge science is acquiring and working with in the future.
Mayotte Meteor: Panic as ‘Fireball' Causes Huge Outburst Above French Islands
Mayotte meteor: Residents reported hearing a huge explosion in the sky
Initial reports indicated an explosion had taken place somewhere on the island. The local authorities said on Twitter: “Tonight, several testimonies reported a noise that would have occurred in the Mahorais sky. At this stage no explanation could be provided. All states are mobilised to find an explanation of this phenomenon.”
It later became clear a meteor had entered the Earth’s atmosphere above Mayotte.
One resident said: “It’s gone int he direction of the sea. It was a ball of fire that had a kind of tail and was going very fast.
“The fire was very bright on the front. The fireball travelled from Labattoir to head offshore.”
A dash-cam video also appeared to show the meteor streaking towards the ground in a huge blaze of light.
Mayotte meteor: Residents reported hearing a huge explosion in the sky
(Image: TWITTER/ZykaDeRetourV2)
A meteor has exploded above the French islands of Mayotte(Image: TWITTER/ZykaDeRetourV2)
Cloud Tunnel Making UFO Seen Over East Sussex, Great Britain In Amazing Video, UFO Sighting News.
Date of sighting: 7- 27-2018, but reported today. Location of sighting: East Sussex, Great Britain Source: MUFON #98681 This UFO is seen in only three frames of this video, but it is mind-blowing that something could fly that fast. The UFO is a retangle shape from the side, but a diamond shape from a tilted position. Also the fact that unusual tunnel clouds appear in the background make me believe this is a UFO and it may be responsible for making that cloud tunnel. The cloud tunnels are used for moving from one base to another on Earth. They allow the UFOs to travel from the locations they want when they want and still keep them unseen by human eyes. However this cloud maker was caught. Scott C. Waring Eyewitness states:
The kids at school spotted this strange cloud formation this afternoon in East Sussex. No idea how this thing formed.
Mars has sand dunes, as Earth does. But now, NASA’s Odyssey orbiter has revealed something odd: a large dune field shaped roughly like a hexagon. The finding is expected to provide more clues as to how dunes form in Martian winds.
Unusual dune field on a crater floor in Terra Cimmeria, part of the heavily cratered southern highland region of the planet Mars. The interesting patterns of the dunes themselves are contained within a boundary that is roughly hexagon-shaped.
Image via NASA/JPL-Caltech/Arizona State University.
Mars can be a weird place sometimes. Although there are many of the same atmospheric and geological processes as on Earth, they can take on unusual forms not seen on our planet. The Mars rovers have discovered, for one example, verythin and delicate rock formationsthat are common in Mars’ lower gravity and thinner atmosphere (although similar ones can be found on Earth as well). Mars is also covered in sand dunes, much like those in earthly deserts. NASA’sMars Odysseyorbiter recently took photos of a dune field that – unlike any dune field seen on Earth – has a strange-looking, roughly hexagonal shape. It’s not a perfect hexagon, but close enough to make you take notice.
The dune field is on a crater floor in the Terra Cimmeria region, 68 degrees south of the equator, towards the south polar cap. This location on Mars, scientists believe, figures into the appearance of the dune field. As explained on ASU’s Flickr page:
Dunes at high latitudes – near the polar caps – are affected by seasonal frost and ice. The interactions with frost/ice reduces the amount of movement of sand grains within the dunes. This changes the morphology of near-polar dunes when compared to dunes at lower latitudes where ice/frost do not occur as frequently.
Wider view of the strange hexagonal dune field on Mars. Image via NASA/JPL-Caltech/Arizona State University.
There are also many dust-devil tracks visible in the images. Dust devils are common on Mars, just as they are on Earth, despite Mars’ thinner atmosphere. They have even been photographed in-action by the Spirit, Opportunity and Curiosity rovers, as the dust devils raced across the Martian landscape.
Lori Fenton is a planetary aeolian geomorphologist at SETI Institute. She studies wind-formed features such as sand dunes. She commented on the hexagonal dune field on Twitter:
Lori Fenton@LoriKFenton
Southern high latitude dunes seriously get their freak on. Nobody has yet tried to understand them. They know they're too cool for us anyway.
RidingWithRobots@ridingrobots
A dune field on a crater floor in Terra Cimmeria. From Mars Odyssey, which has been in orbit for 18 years.
Yep. @jmars_gis has got your back, here's a view. If you look at the whole dune field, it's not entirely hexagonal. I also included another crater nearby that also has an odd-shaped dune field. DTM is from MOLA, rainbow goes from elevations 300 to 2700 m. pic.twitter.com/vcDnu3kupW
As to how the dune fields formed the way they did, Fenton expressed some ideas via Twitter:
Yeah, the crater shape is one factor shaping the dune field, and it also affects incident winds (blocks them or enhances them). The dunes this far south are partially stabilized, which interferes with that interpretation (which is already complex).
Dunes are common on Mars, just as they are in deserts on Earth, and come in various shapes and sizes. Smaller sand drifts are also common. Most of the landers and rovers on Mars have seen dunes and drifts up close, a chance to study them in detail as to their composition and how they can form – even up to about 20 feet (6 meters) tall, like ones in the Bagnold Dune Field seen by Curiosity – in such a thin atmosphere.
Close-up view of the dunes themselves, from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.
Image via NASA/JPL/University of Arizona.
What makes these new dunes seen by Odyssey so peculiar is the overall shape of the dune fields themselves. Scientists, including Fenton, will examine them closely to figure out the processes involved in their formation.
Fenton had also recently written about another dune field on her blog that has similar crisp edges, but a different shape. She proposed two ideas for how these types of southern latitude dune fields – slower and more eroded – form:
1. (Less interesting) Dunes and ripples are forming and moving at high southern latitudes, but because of the ground ice, they do so more slowly than dunes at lower latitudes. They’re born that way, baby. (On second thought, that’s still interesting, because it means high latitude dunes would then record wind patterns over a longer time period than low latitude dunes. But they’d be hard to interpret.)
2. (More exciting) Dunes and ripples in the high southern latitudes formed long ago, in a climate state where the ground ice wasn’t yet formed, and have since become mostly locked in place. We’re essentially looking at fossil dunes. That means their shape would record ancient wind patterns, which we could compare with modern winds to see how the climate state on Mars has changed. It means we could use dunes to study climate change on Mars.
The huge, near-perfect hexagon at Saturn’s north pole, as seen by the Cassini spacecraft in 2014.
Image via NASA.
And what about that hexagonal shape? Are we surprised? Yes and no. Hexagons can be found in other places in nature. Another striking example is the jet stream formation at Saturn’s north pole, which is a massive, near-perfect hexagon centered at the pole itself. It’s absolutely astonishing.
Bottom line: These odd dune fields seen by the Odyssey orbiter – with one having a roughly hexagonal shape – are an interesting puzzle for planetary scientists, and are expected to help provide more clues about wind-driven dune formation processes on Mars.
An Israeli moon lander just took to the skies, but we'll all have to wait nearly two months for its historic touchdown try.
The robotic lander, called Beresheet,launched atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocketyesterday evening (Feb. 21) from Florida's Cape Canaveral Air Force Station. If everything goes according to plan, Beresheet will zip around Earth for about six weeks in ever-widening orbits before heading toward its final destination. The craft will arrive in lunar orbit in early April and attempt a landing on the 11th of that month.
Beresheet will end up putting about 4 million miles (6.5 million kilometers) on its odometer when all is said and done. That's more than any other moon-landing mission, said the spacecraft's builders, the nonprofit group SpaceIL and the company Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI).
Beresheet's lengthy stay in Earth orbit may seem surprising. After all, China's Chang'e 4 farside lander reached lunar orbit just 4.5 days after its Dec. 7 liftoff (though Chang'e 4 didn't actually touch down until Jan. 2).
But the 5-foot-tall (1.5 meters) Beresheet cannot take a direct path to the moon, project team members said, because the lander shared a rocket ride with two other payloads. Also aboard the Falcon 9 last night were an Indonesian communications satellite and an experimental U.S. Air Force craft, both of which are making Earth orbit their home.
A graphic showing the Israeli lunar lander Beresheet's path to the moon. Dates correspond with Israel Standard Time.
"This is Uber-style space exploration," SpaceIL co-founder Yonatan Winetraub said Wednesday (Feb. 20) during a prelaunch news conference.
The strategy is cost-effective, helping keep Beresheet's total price tag, including launch, at about $100 million — quite low for a mission to another world. But there is a trade-off.
"The problem with that is, it doesn't allow us to choose the orbit completely," Winetraub added. "We have to consider the requirements from the other payloads" on the rocket.
And you can't just jet straight off to the moon from Earth orbit, Winetraub said; the two celestial bodies must be lined up properly before Beresheet — whose name means "in the beginning" in Hebrew" — can make its move.
"The moon is coming around, and we're doing our own orbit, and we need to synchronize everything," Winetraub said. "For that, we need to do something that's called 'phasing loops,' to make sure that the moon comes around in the right position so you can capture with it. And that takes time."
Mission team members won't just be sitting on their hands while they're waiting for this sync-up. The time in Earth orbit will allow them to test Beresheet's various systems and make sure they can track and communicate with the spacecraft. [The 21 Most Marvelous Moon Missions]
"Only after we will be sure that everything is OK, we will jump — make the lunar-capture maneuver, what we call it — and jump to the moon," Yigal Harel, the head of SpaceIL's spacecraft program, said during Wednesday's news conference.
The touchdown process will be fully automated and take about 20 minutes, team members said. Beresheet will land on the moon's near side, within the large basaltic plain called Mare Serenitatis ("Sea of Serenity").
A successful touchdown would be a huge deal. Beresheet would become the first privately funded craft to land on the moon. And the SpaceIL/IAI team would be the first nonsuperpower entity to pull off the feat: To date, only the Soviet Union, the United States and China have done it.
Beresheet will study the local magnetic field during its lunar approach and its two-Earth-day mission on the moon's surface. It will also investigate lunar craters, project team members have said. But the main mission goal is to inspire young people, especially kids in Israel, to become more interested in science, technology, engineering and math.
Indeed, team members have already met with many kids around the world, to bring the mission — and spaceflight in general — down to Earth.
"It is rocket science, but our goal is to show them that it's not magic — it's something they can understand," SpaceIL co-founder Kfir Damari said during Wednesday's briefing. "If they can understand that, and if they can meet engineers and hear their story and see that they come from all different kinds of backgrounds, they can understand that they themselves can be those who will build the next spacecraft."
Beresheet is toting an Israeli flag and a time capsule. Among the capsule's contents is the "Lunar Library," a collection of materials that includes the full English-language version of Wikipedia. The library is a project of the Arch Mission Foundation, which aims to help preserve human knowledge and culture by storing bits and pieces of it in off-Earth locales.
Beresheet began life as a moon-race robot. SpaceIL is a former competitor in the Google Lunar X Prize, a $30 million contest to put a robot on the moon and have it perform a few basic tasks. The Prize ended in 2018 without a winner, but SpaceIL — and several other former teams, including the American company Moon Express — have kept developing their moon missions. µ
Mike Wall's book about the search for alien life, "Out There" (Grand Central Publishing, 2018; illustrated byKarl Tate) is out now.
CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — Israel's first space mission is on its way to the moon!
A used SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket successfully launchedan Israeli moon landeralong with an Indonesian communications satellite from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida tonight (Feb. 21). After deploying its two payloads into orbit, the Falcon 9's first stage returned to Earth and aced a landing (the third for this booster) on SpaceX's drone ship "Of Course I Still Love You," which was stationed in the Atlantic Ocean.
Liftoff occurred at 8:45 p.m. EST (0145 Feb. 22 GMT) just as the moon rose above the horizon here.
A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket carrying the SpaceIL moon lander and satellites for Indonesia and the U.S. military streaks into space from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Florida on Feb. 21, 2019.
Although the primary payload for this mission was Indonesia's satellite, named Nusantara Satu, the tiny moon lander that hitched a ride with the satellite as a secondary payload stole the show today. It became not only the first Israeli spacecraft to venture beyond Earth's orbit, but also the first-ever privately funded moon mission.
Today's launch was a momentous occasion for Israel, a small country that has never launched a mission into space, save for a handful of communications satellites and Earth-observation satellites that never left Earth's orbit.
The lander, named Beresheet (meaning "in the beginning" in Hebrew), was built by the Israeli nonprofit organization SpaceIL, which began working on this mission in 2011 as a contestant in the Google Lunar X Prize. That international competition offered $30 million to whichever privately funded team could land a robotic spacecraft on the moon. When none of the teams were able to reach that goal before the deadline, the competition ended without a winner. But that didn't stop SpaceIL from pursuing its goal.
"We have a vision to show off Israel's best qualities to the entire world," Sylvan Adams, a SpaceIL donor and Canadian-Israeli philanthropist, said during a pre-launch briefing in Orlando, Florida, on Wednesday (Feb. 20). "Tiny, tiny Israel is about to become the fourth nation to land on the moon, and this is a remarkable thing because we continue to demonstrate our ability to punch far above our weight and to show off our skills, our innovation [and] our creativity in tackling any difficult problem that could possibly exist."
If the mission is successful, Israel will be both the fourth nation and the fourth-largest nation to land on the moon, he added.
Beresheet will spend seven weeks making its way to the moon, swinging by Earth a few times and using our planet's gravity to build the momentum it needs to get to its destination. If Beresheet successfully executes a soft landing on the lunar surface, Israel will become the fourth nation to achieve such a landing on the moon, following in the footsteps of the world's "space superpowers" — the United States, Russia and China.
The first soft landing on the moon was achieved by the Soviet Union's Luna 9 spacecraft in 1966. NASA's Surveyor 1 spacecraft touched down on the lunar surface later that year. China joined the scene in 2013 with its Chang'e 3 lander and Yutu rover.
"We thought it's about time for a change, and we want to get little Israel all the way to the moon," Yonatan Winetraub, a co-founder of SpaceIL, said during the briefing. "This is the purpose of SpaceIL."
When Beresheet approaches the lunar surface, it will aim to touch down in a region called Mare Serenitatis, meaning "Sea of Serenity." The spacecraft will survive for only about two days before running out of power. During that time, it will study the moon's magnetic fields and take photos of the lunar surface — along with some out-of-this-world selfies, Yigal Harel, head of the SpaceIL Spacecraft Program, said in the briefing.
Once Beresheet's two days are up, the dead spacecraft won't be entirely useless. Mounted on the spacecraft is a laser retroreflector, a mirroring device that requires no power and can be used for space-to-ground communications via NASA's Deep Space Network (DSN). NASA contributed the device to this mission as part of an agreement with SpaceIL that would allow the startup company to utilize the DSN for its moon mission.
Part of the time capsule on SpaceIL's Beresheet mooon lander, this small coin contains the text of the entire Hebrew Bible laser-etched onto its surface.
The retroreflector is not the only payload on board Beresheet that is designed to stand the test of time. SpaceIL has also included a time capsule in the spacecraft packed with digital files that hold information about the spacecraft and a variety of Israeli memorabilia. That includes a copy of Hebrew Bible, Hebrew songs, artwork created by Israeli children and a photo of Ilan Ramon, Israel's first and only astronaut.
Inside the time capsule is an enormous digital database known as the Arch Lunar Library, a project of the nonprofit Arch Mission Foundation. The library contains "millions of documents from all around the world, different dictionaries [and] encyclopedias" on three laser-etched coins each about the size of a nickel, Winetraub said. "It's going to be the most densely packed artifact to reach the moon from information point of view, and it's going to stay there for future generations to see what is it like on Earth here in 2019."
Nusantara Satu
SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket launches two satellites and Israel's first moon lander on Feb. 21, 2019.
While Beresheet may be dominating the publicity for today's launch, the mission wouldn't be heading to the moon if it weren't for Indonesia's Nusantara Satu satellite and SpaceX's ability to offer ride-share missions. "We can't afford a full rocket ... so we basically do a ride share," Winetraub said. "This is Uber-style space exploration, so we're riding shotgun on the rocket."
Also known as PSN-6, Nusantara Satu is a geostationary communications satellite built by the California-based aerospace company SSL for Pasifik Satelit Nusantara, Indonesia's first private telecommunications company.
"Nusantara Satu is Indonesia's first high-throughput satellite that will serve to improve internet connectivity in the region," SpaceX officials said in a statement. "Additionally, the satellite's C-band and Ku-band transponders will be used for voice and data communications and video distribution throughout the Indonesian archipelago.
One booster, three missions
Beresheet and Nusantara Satu launched on a used Falcon 9 booster that had already traveled into space for two separate missions. Its maiden flight was for the Iridium-7 mission on July 25, 2018, when it launched 10 new Iridium communications satellites into orbit. After the booster stuck a drone-ship landing in the Pacific Ocean, SpaceX refurbished it and used it to launch Argentina's SAOCOM-1A Earth-observation satellite 11 weeks later. After successfully delivering SAOCOM-1A into orbit, the booster returned to Earth once more to touch down at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California.
This is the second Falcon 9 booster to execute three successful launches and landings. In December 2018, a twice-flown booster launched 64 small satellitesinto orbit for the SSO-A Smallsat Express mission. That booster landed on SpaceX's West Coast drone ship, named "Just Read the Instructions," and could be refurbished for a historic fourth flight. By reusing rocket boosters, SpaceX aims to reduce the cost of spaceflight.
Email Hanneke Weitering at hweitering@space.com or follow her @hannekescience.
Wallace’s giant bee is about four times larger than a honeybee.
Credit: Global Wildlife Conservation.
After being missing in the action for more than four decades, Wallace’s giant bee (Megachile pluto) has been found in a remote part of Indonesia. The huge insect with enormous jaws — about the size of a human thumb — is the largest bee species in the world.
The ‘flying bulldog’
The giant bee, also known as the ‘flying bulldog’, was first discovered by British naturalistAlfred Russel Wallace, famous for independently proposing the theory of evolution through natural selection alongside Charles Darwin. When Wallace first came across the beefy insect in Indonesia’s North Moluccas islands in 1858, he described it as a “large black wasp-like insect, with immense jaws like a stag-beetle.”
Despite its conspicuous size, Wallace’s giant bee likes to keep to itself. For more than a century it hadn’t been spotted by Western scientists, only to be seen again by entomologist Adam Messer in 1981, who called it the ‘king of bees’. The lack of sightings, despite scientists’ best efforts, coupled with wide scale habitat loss, has led many to believe that the insect had gone extinct. Although Indonesia has abundant flora, it’s also a country where regulations are weak and forests are being cut down for agriculture.
But then Clay Bolt, a specialist bee photographer, did the unimaginable: he found Wallace’s giant bee, where many others had failed before him. Several months prior to the discovery, Bolt was introduced to a museum specimen of the giant bee by Eli Wyman, an entomologist at the American Museum of Natural History. The two quickly bonded through their shared interest of seeing the bee in the wild and hatched a plan for an expedition.
Natural history photographer Clay Bolt takes the first ever photos of a living Wallace’s giant bee.
Credit: Simon Robson.
In January, the two had arrived with a search party in Indonesia where they explored the rainforest in North Moluccas. For a week, the crew braved extreme heat, humidity, and thunderstorms, as they looked for the giant bee’s nests that are typically carved into termite mounds in trees. They were down to their last day with nothing to show when a guide spotted a promising low-lying termite mound. When they peeked inside the resin-covered enclosure, the explorers thought they had spotted a snake. To everyone’s surprise, they found that the creature making a racket inside was a Wallace’s giant bee. They quickly blocked the nest’s exit and collected the bee.
“We were just basically freaking out after so many years of planning and almost giving up hope,” Bolt told Earther. “It was an incredible moment to realize that we came all this way, other people have looked for it, and here we were: filthy and sweaty and we somehow found this insect. For me, it was a moment of tremendous gratitude and humility that I was a part of this moment and this team.”
Rediscovering the giant bee is certainly a breakthrough — yet the real tough part is only just beginning. Now, researchers will have to work on plans designed to protect the species, which will require more studies that might estimate how many individuals are left and what the state of their habitat is. The fact that the bees live in very remote locations is reassuring, but there is still a lot we don’t know about this elusive species.
“I hope this rediscovery will spark future research that will give us a deeper understanding of the life history of this very unique bee and inform any future efforts to protect it from extinction,” Wyman said in a statement.
Virgin Galactic’s supersonic space plane, the VSS Unity, took off on its fifth test flight today. Mothership WhiteKnightTwo released the suborbital space plane at around 44,000 feet — and VSS Unity reached a new maximum altitude of 55.85 miles (89.9km.)
The second generation SpaceShipTwo, dubbed VSS Unity, reached an altitude of 51.4 miles (82.7 km) during its fourth test flight in December 2018. This time, the space plane traveled with a much heavier payload — close to full commercial weight — and a third crew member, Beth Moses, the first woman to enter space on a commercial US spacecraft.
“Although we passed a major milestone in December, we still have a way to go in testing the many factors that can affect a flight,” reads a press release. “So, for this flight, we will be expanding the envelope to gather new and vital data essential to future tests and operations, including vehicle center of gravity.”
Take a look at the flight path our SpaceShipTwo will take during our fifth supersonic powered test flight. The flight window opens again tomorrow. More info on our flight test program can be found here https://virg.in/UpU
Virgin Galactic is developing the SpaceShipTwo platform to be part of its space tourism fleet, giving those who can afford a ticket — $250,000 isn’t cheap — a taste of micro-gravity.
But it’s not quite a ride to the International Space Station — that’d require it to fly to more than four times its current maximum altitude.
Former Navy Officer Tells The Truth Behind Antarctica
A naval officer came clean about the biggest secrets he saw in the no-fly area in Antarctica. Among everything, he mentioned an enormous gap in the ice within a region they were traversing with the medical emergency. He also carried a group of scientists who vanished for an entire period of two weeks and were terrified after that.
Antarctica is a place that never stops surprising with its secrets. Starting from the mystery of its ancient past and ending with the numerous alleged accounts suggested during the years, this remote continent remains to be a real enigma.
According to many authors, Antarctica is a place full of secrets beneath its surface. They further claim that this is the exact reason this place is so isolated from the public.
One of the theories circling around this continent is that once, it was resided by an ancient civilization.
Much evidence supports the hypothesis that the icy continent wasn’t as frosty as it is now in the distant past. On the contrary, it could have had a blooming vegetation and people could have lived there, building advanced structures.
The main question, however, is why Antarctica has become the heart of all kinds of fascinating conspiracy theories? We will try to explain this question with the simplest answer. This continent is the most detached place on Mother Earth, thus, people can’t just easily go there and study its past.
Moreover, there are multiple ancient maps that illustrate Antarctica not as we see it today but rather iceless.
For instance, the 1513’s map by Turkish Admiral Piri Reis is one of the most polemical of them all, still causing debates in our contemporary society even today.
This map, namely, draws Antarctica which was only, in fact, discovered between 1818-1820.
According to the mainstream claims, the first journeys to the continent happened in 1820. The Russian travel’s leaders were Fabian Gottlieb von Bellingshausen and Mikhail Lazarev, while the British journey’s leaders were Edward Bransfield and an American sealer Nathaniel Palmer.
On the other hand, the first landing likely happened one year later, when the American sealer Captain John Davis set foot on the icy surface.
Norwegian Ronald Amundsen ultimately reached the Pole on December 14, 1911. He managed to defeat the British Robert Falcon Scott during a dramatic contest.
What the stories above have in common is that they all originate, less or more, from recent times.
Then again, the maps we mentioned date back 5 centuries ago, yet, they clearly do depict the continent. Some of them even show it without ice.
In 2012, a satellite picture of the icy continent was the reason for the rise of many unanswered questions. It showed a bizarre oval-shaped structure arranged in such a remote place on Earth.
Measuring 400-feet across, this structure imposed the dilemma whether it emerged naturally or it was man-made.
Anyway, this structure is just a part of the whole collection of many unusual things that exist there.
And they only add to the stories of numerous informants who claim the society doesn’t own a clue about the real deal going on in Antarctica.
What is mentioned as a ‘truly shocking and astonishing video on extremely strange events in the Antarctic continent’ has recently been uploaded to YouTube, prompting a large discussion?
“A naval officer tells us what he remembers, including seeing a huge opening in the ice in a no-fly area they were crossing with a medical emergency on board. Then he ferried a group of scientists who had disappeared for two weeks, and has specifically been warned not to refer again to this subject. As he put it, they looked scared. When they returned to McMurdo, their gear was isolated and they were flown back to New Zealand in special plane. He discusses what he saw and experienced in detail. This is the most provocative story about what is going on in Antarctica ever presented anywhere.”
WETENSCHAPHet ruimtetoerismebedrijf Virgin Galactic heeft vandaag vanuit de Amerikaanse Mojave-woestijn opnieuw en met succes een supersonische test verricht met zijn ruimteschip SpaceShipTwo, zo was op Twitter te volgen.
Het moedervliegtuig Eve steeg met het SpaceshipTwo op in de Mojavewoestijn om het ruimtevliegtuig op 40.000 voet zoals een bom los te laten. Het ruimtevliegtuig bereikte op eigen kracht tegen drie keer de snelheid van het geluid 93 kilometer hoogte, of boven de grens van de ruimte zoals die in de VS is vastgelegd: 80 kilometer hoogte. Het toestel had die arbitraire grens ook al in december bereikt, en streek na rechtsomkeert te hebben gemaakt probleemloos weer neer in de Mojave-woestijn.
Het SpaceShipTwo, alias Unity, voerde voor het eerst drie mensen mee: naast de piloten Dave Mackay en Michael Masucci ook astronautentrainer Beth Moses. Haar rol was niet alleen om voor het eerst een derde opvarende te zijn, maar ook om delen van de cabine te testen vooraleer Virgin Galactic zijn eerste klanten even in de ruimte laat vertoeven.
Het ruimtevliegtuig van de Britse miljardair Richard Branson kan naast de twee piloten zes passagiers vervoeren. Volgens zender CNBC kost een ticket 250.000 dollar en hebben er al meer dan 600 mensen een contract ondertekend. Al met al leunde het gewicht kort aan bij wat het bij een commerciële vlucht zal zijn, aldus Branson.
De Unity voerde tijdens zijn vijfde supersonische vlucht ook vier wetenschappelijke experimenten van het Amerikaanse ruimtevaartbureau NASA mee.
Stonehenge's bluestones 'were NOT made in Wales': Archaeologists at war over claim prehistoric man chipped rocks from the site before dragging them 140 miles to Wiltshire
Last week, a UCL-led study claimedthe bluestones were transported from Pembrokeshire in south west Wales by our prehistoric ancestors
Found two sites in the Preseli Hills said to be where stones were quarried
But a separate team has slammed the claims, saying there's no traces of man-made 'engineering features' at the site
The enigma of how the 'bluestones' arrived at Stonehenge was said to have been solved last week when experts claimed the blocks had been transported to Wiltshire from Pembrokeshire.
The team pinpointed two sites in the Preseli Hills - Carn Goedog and Craig Rhos-y-felin - where the researchers said the stones had been quarried before being dragged 140 miles (225 km).
But their assertions have been branded 'all wrong' by another team of scientists which claim there are no traces of man-made 'engineering features' at the site which would indicate it was a quarry.
Last week, a team of experts claimed Stonehenge's bluestones had been transported from Pembrokeshire in south west Wales by our prehistoric ancestors, having been originally used for a different monument. An image of what they claim is the prehistoric quarry is shown above
It has long been thought the bluestones, which form Stonehenge's inner ring came from Wales, and were transported to Wiltshire using primitive Stone Age technology.
And last week, a team of archaeologists and geologists led by academics from University College London (UCL) claimed Stonehenge was originally built in Pembrokeshire, hundreds of years before the monument was taken down and rebuilt in its current location.
The UCL team said it has discovered two prehistoric quarries in the county, 140 miles (225km) away from Stonehenge, which appear to be the origin of the bluestones used to build the monument.
Carbon dating suggests the stones were dug out 500 years before the famous monument was erected in Wiltshire.
One archaeologist suggested that the new evidence shows Stonehenge was 'a second-hand monument', with the site where its stones were quarried being 'the Ikea of Neolithic monument building'.
But their assertions have been branded 'all wrong' by another team of earth scientists who claim there are no traces of man-made 'engineering features' at the site. A stock image of Stonehenge is shown
The group does not accept the idea of a Neolithic quarry in the Preseli Hills and said the supposed signs of 'quarrying' by humans at Craig Rhos-y-Felin (pictured) were entirely natural
WHY SCIENTISTS CLAIM UCL-LED RESEARCH IS 'ALL WRONG'
Dr Brian John, Dr Dyfed Elis-Gruffydd and John Downes said there are 'no traces of human intervention' at the two sites in the Preseli Hills, indicating it wasn't a quarry used for Stonehenge.
In particular, they said there is no evidence to prove how the site was used - with no artefacts, bones or tools discovered at the site.
They believe rhyolite deposits linking the site and Stonehenge don't prove the stones were carried to Wiltshire by humans, but that the fragments may have been moved there by glaciers.
The team claims the UCL archaeologists behind the report may have inadvertently created certain features during five years of 'highly selective sediment removal'.
Their study says: 'It is suggested, on the basis of careful examinations of this site, that certain of the "man-made features" described have been created by the archaeologists themselves through a process of selective sediment and clast removal.
'An expectation or conviction that "engineering features" would be found has perhaps led to the unconscious fashioning of archaeological artifices.'
In particular, the researchers said they had discovered a series of recesses in the rocky outcrops of Carn Goedog and Craig Rhos-y-felin that match Stonehenge's bluestones in size and shape.
They even said they found similar stones that the prehistoric builders extracted, but left behind, and 'a loading bay' from where the huge stones could be dragged away.
But these claims have been disputed by a separate team writing in the the journal Archaeology in Wales.
Dr Brian John, Dr Dyfed Elis-Gruffydd and John Downes said there are 'no traces of human intervention in any of the features that have made the archaeologists so excited'.
Writing on his blog, Dr John said: 'We have no argument with the geological work that links this site with Stonehenge.
'But we cannot accept the idea of a Neolithic quarry here without firm evidence - and in our considered opinion there is none.
'The archaeologists admit that there are no artefacts, bones or tools at the site.'
Specifically, the group does not accept the idea of a Neolithic quarry in the Preseli Hills and said the supposed signs of 'quarrying' by humans at Craig Rhos-y-Felin were entirely natural.
They also believe the archaeologists behind the report may have inadvertently created certain features during five years of 'highly selective sediment removal'.
'This site has been described by lead archaeologist Prof Mike Parker Pearson as "the Pompeii of prehistoric stone quarries" and has caused great excitement in archaeological circles,' the report said.
'The selection of this rocky crag near the village of Brynberian for excavation in 2011-2015 was triggered by the discovery by geologists Richard Bevins and Rob Ixer that some of the stone fragments in the soil at Stonehenge were quite precisely matched to an unusual type of foliated rhyolite [a type of extrusive rock] found in the crag.
They also believe the archaeologists behind the report may have inadvertently created certain features during five years of 'highly selective sediment removal'. A picture of the UCL-led dig is shown
The UCL team claims the stones were transported 140 miles (225km) from Pembrokeshire to Salisbury Plain in around 2900 BC, but the conflicting study said debris used to link the sites was caused by glaciers
'This led the archaeologists to conclude there must have been a Neolithic quarry here, worked for the specific purpose of cutting out monoliths for the bluestone settings at Stonehenge.'
But Dr John is convinced the rhyolite debris at Stonehenge, studied by both groups, instead comes from glacial erratics.
These are stones and rocks that were transported by a glacier and then left behind after the glacier melted - which were eroded from the Rhosyfelin rocky crag.
This happened almost half a million years ago by the overriding Irish Sea Glacier and the fragments were then transported eastwards by ice towards Salisbury Plain, he explained.
The study continued: 'It is suggested, on the basis of careful examinations of this site, that certain of the "man-made features" described have been created by the archaeologists themselves through a process of selective sediment and clast removal.
'An expectation or conviction that "engineering features" would be found has perhaps led to the unconscious fashioning of archaeological artifices.
'While there appears to be no landform, rock mechanics or sedimentary evidence that this was a Neolithic quarry site devoted to the extraction of bluestone' for use at Stonehenge, or anywhere else.
But the team accepts there may have been temporary Mesolithic, Neolithic or later camp sites here over a very long period of time at the site.
The team accepts there may have been temporary Mesolithic, Neolithic or later camp sites here over a very long period of time at the site. The 'quarry' site is shown above
Commenting on the UCL-led research, Dr John said: 'The new geological work at Rhosyfelin and Stonehenge is an interesting piece of 'rock provenencing' - but it tells us nothing at all about how monoliths or smaller rock fragments from West Wales found their way to Stonehenge. Here, Workers sort through stones at the site
Commenting on the UCL-led research, Dr John said: 'The new geological work at Rhosyfelin and Stonehenge is an interesting piece of "rock provenencing" - but it tells us nothing at all about how monoliths or smaller rock fragments from West Wales found their way to Stonehenge.
'We are sure that the archaeologists have convinced themselves that the glacial transport of erratics was impossible. We are not sure where they got that idea from.
'On the contrary, there is substantial evidence in favour of glacial transport and zero evidence in support of the human transport theory.'
'We think the archaeologists have been so keen on telling a good story here that they have ignored or misinterpreted the evidence in front of them.
'That's very careless. They now need to undertake a complete reassessment of the material they have collected.'
Further excavations of the 'quarries' are planned for 2016.
'We think the archaeologists have been so keen on telling a good story here that they have ignored or misinterpreted the evidence in front of them,' Dr John said. Craig Rhos-y-felin (pictured) is set in the picturesque Pembrokeshire countryside
THEORY ROCKS WERE USED ORIGINALLY FOR ANOTHER MONUMENT AND TRANSPORTED FROM PEMBROKESHIRE BY ANCIENT PEOPLE
A team of archaeologists and geologists, led by academics from UCL, last week claimed Stonehenge was originally built in Pembrokeshire, hundreds of years before the monument was taken down and rebuilt in its current location.
They said they have discovered two prehistoric quarries in the county, 140 miles (225km) away from Stonehenge, which appear to be the origin of the bluestones used to build the monument, with carbon dating suggesting the stones were dug out 500 years before the famous monument was erected in Wiltshire.
One of the quarry's excavators compared it to a 'Neolithic Ikea' because of the way the raw materials were used elsewhere. An aerial view of the site is shown
The stone is formed into 'pillars' which would have made it easy for ancient men to chisel them off
They said a series of recesses in the rocky outcrops of Carn Goedog and Craig Rhos-y-felin, in Pembrokeshire, match Stonehenge's bluestones in size and shape.
And that they found similar stones that the prehistoric builders extracted, but left behind, and 'a loading bay' from where the huge stones could be dragged away.
Professor Mike Parker Pearson of UCL, the director of the project, said: 'We have dates of around 3400 BC for Craig Rhos-y-felin and 3200 BC for Carn Goedog, which is intriguing because the bluestones didn't get put up at Stonehenge until around 2900 BC.
'It could have taken those Neolithic stone-draggers nearly 500 years to get them to Stonehenge, but that's pretty improbable in my view.
'It's more likely that the stones were first used in a local monument, somewhere near the quarries, that was then dismantled and dragged off to Wiltshire.'
He said it was a 'possibility' that the evidence could mean Stonehenge is older than previously thought.
The function of Stonehenge (stock image) remains a long-standing mystery, although it is believed to have something to do with religious ceremonies revolving around the solstice.
But he added: 'We think it's more likely that they were building their own monument, that somewhere near the quarries there is the first Stonehenge and that what we're seeing at Stonehenge is a second-hand monument.'
The research was published in the journal Antiquity alongside a new book by the Council for British Archaeology, titled Stonehenge: Making Sense of a Prehistoric Mystery.
There is also the possibility that the stones were taken to Salisbury Plain around 3200 BC and that the giant sarsens in the outer ring, which come from within 20 miles of the site, were added much later.
The function of Stonehenge remains a long-standing mystery, although it is believed to have something to do with religious ceremonies revolving around the solstice.
Stonehenge is the gift that keeps on giving employment to minions of archeologists, historians, reality show hosts and the like by keeping its origin, purpose and other mysteries mysterious. Every once in a while, a piece of the Stonehenge puzzle is solved – usually closing one hole but, unlike conventional puzzles, opening a few more. One puzzle that would seem to be easy to solve is finding the original quarry where the stones were cut. And yet, it’s taken until now to find that quarry (make that quarries) … where the monument’s smaller bluestones came from. A second piece of the puzzle may also have been solved – how they were transported to their final standing place. What new holes have these pieces opened? Anxious archeologists with bills to pay are awaiting.
“What’s really exciting about these discoveries is that they take us a step closer to unlocking Stonehenge’s greatest mystery – why its stones came from so far away. Every other Neolithic monument in Europe was built of megaliths brought from no more than 10 miles away. We’re now looking to find out just what was so special about the Preseli hills 5,000 years ago, and whether there were any important stone circles here, built before the bluestones were moved to Stonehenge.”
In press release from University College London and a paper published in Antiquity, UCL Archaeology professor and study leader Mike Parker Pearson explains that the bluestones (found in the inner horseshoe and outer circle of Stonehenge) have now been proven to come from almost 180 miles away in Wales from the stone outcrops of Carn Goedog and Craig Rhos-y-feli. These outcrops are made of natural vertical pillars of stone with cervices or vertical joints that would have made things easy for Neolithic carvers to simply insert wedges, pound, yell “Look out!” and watch them fall. Being incredibly hard stones, breakage was minimal.
That obviously was the easy part. The rest of this contract involved getting the bluestones from the Preseli hills to Salisbury. While much credence has been given to the theory that the heavy stones were floated up the Bristol Channel and along the Bristol Avon towards Salisbury on rafts (similar to the way pyramid stones were transported in Egypt), study co-author Professor Colin Richards (University of the Highlands and Islands) says the researchers found the remnants of man-made stone and earth platforms at the bottom of the outcrops.
“Bluestone pillars could be eased down onto this platform, which acted as a loading bay for lowering them onto wooden sledges before dragging them away.”
And co-author Professor Kate Welham (Bournemouth University) points out that the quarries are on the north side of the Preseli hills which gives a relatively flat route for them to be pulled on rollers by cattle and men overland all the way to Salisbury Plain.
Even this far is a long way to pull these giants.
Pulled from Wales to Salisbury? Perhaps that’s the new hole opened by fitting this study’s “the bluestones are definitely from Wales” piece into the Stonehenge puzzle.
Rest easy all you archeologists, historians and druid priests – your jobs are safe … for now.
It was 2 in the morning on a placid summer night of 1996 in Catalonia, Spain, and the only activity inside the luxurious country house of Rafael Farriols was focused inside his semi-circular study, located at the top floor. There, Farriols had locked himself in after his family had retired to bed, and was circling around his broad work table, whispering. But he wasn’t praying or conducting a meditating practice; instead the elderly Catalonian gentleman was doing something far more unconventional: trying to communicate with extraterrestrials, as they had expressly invited him to do so in a letter he had just received in the mail.
Rafael Farriols, during a UFO conference
Just by these early brushstrokes of the larger picture I’ll be trying to paint, you might be left with the impression that the man was just another crackpot, and yet nothing could be further from the truth. Rafael Farriols (1928-2006) was a respected, bright and wealthy industrialist from Barcelona, who had successfully applied his studies in chemistry in order to make his company one of the biggest exporters of acrylic plastic in Europe. He was an animal lover and his fortune allowed him to raise horses, raptor birds and other kinds of exotic pets. He also had a passion for photography and philosophy; but without a doubt the reason his name transcended the frontier of his business interests and numerous friends was his active interest in “platillos volantes”(flying saucers), a mystery which found fertile ground in Spaniard soil, with regular news of sightings and even close encounters of the 3rd kind reported by newspapers printed all across the Iberian peninsula ever since the modern age of UFOs began –and even way before that, as dogged Spanish researchers have found out, when looking for witnesses of those elusive objects and their occupants amid remote villages where people could barely read or write, and such sightings were often regarded as supernatural portents rather than otherworldly visits.
One such researcher is Juan José Benítez, an author I’ve mentioned in previous articles, who has published more than 50 books about UFOs and other topics. It is in one of those books that Benítez mentioned the incident with Farriols –who was a dear friend of his– as part of a larger tapestry of weirdness, deception and half-truths that constitute the infamous UMMO affair. Just like Roswell symbolizes the ‘American-ness’ of the UFO narrative —“Them aliens crashed in the desert and we retrieved the wreckage, Yee-ha!”— UMMO is perhaps the most Spanish example of alleged contact with Extraterrestrials you will be able to find in the Literature –“Rediez! The extraterreshtrialsh want to keep correshpondenze with me”– which is probably why to this day what most people in the anglophone side of UFOlogy know about this fascinating series of cases is just the iconic )+(glyph, faintly reminiscent of the astrological symbol of Uranus, or a Cyrillic letter
Explaining the whole UMMO enchilada (um, paella?) would take way too many pages and it’s not the real point of the present article, so to make a really REALLY long story short: in February 8th of 1966 a newspaper from Madrid published the story that a landing of a UFO had reportedly taken place in the neighborhood of Aluche two days earlier. The ground of the site was burned, and later inspections found deep rectangular impressions with a weird cross mark in the middle, along with faint traces of radioactivity. One of the witnesses, a man by the name of José Luis Jordán Peña, wrote a letter to the press describing the sighting of the object, which had the typical shape of a flying saucer except for one detail –a strange, dark emblem in its underside that resembled a vertical line between two inverted parenthesis symbols.
Around the same time several individuals in Spain started to receive letters with postage stamps from all over the world, displaying a similar marking as a form of a rubber stamp. Among them was Fernando Sesma, a flying saucer enthusiast who in 1954 had created the “Sociedad de Amigos del Espacio”(Society of Space Friends) and was very interested in the topic of contactees. Sesma said that in January of 1965 he received a call from an unknown individual with a strong foreign accent, who told him he would soon receive “items of an extraterrestrial order.” Sesma’s dream of interacting with entities from other planets had come true, and soon he would be joined by other similar contactees, who began a series of regular salons at the Café Lion in the Madrilenian street of Alcalá, to exchange impressions on the astonishing information they were getting through the post mail. Among them was Jordán Peña, the Aluche witness mentioned above.
The authors of the lengthy typewritten letters introduced themselves as extraterrestrial emissaries who had come from a planet called UMMO, orbiting the red dwarf star Wolf 424, located in the constellation Virgo (some 14.2 light years away from the Earth). Unlike most Contactee cases, these nordic-like visitors were more than forthcoming in describing themselves, their culture and technology to their astonishing recipients using highly detailed explanations that were peppered with words supposedly written in the aliens’ native tongue —OYAGAA was for example the name they had given to planet Earth, and all the rest of the Ummite language made anyone sound as if they were suffering a stroke if spoken out loud.
Here, it seemed, was the holy grail UFO enthusiasts had been waiting for. Instead of the psychic means like channeling employed by American contactees –which was too resemblant of spiritual mediumship, for the taste of both the scientifically-oriented and the religiously conservative– to get in touch with the Venusian space brothers who seemed to be only interested in spreading the gospel of interplanetary peace among the warmongering people of Earth (rather than dabbling in the finer points of advanced Cosmology) the rational explorers from UMMO were more pragmatic and preferred to get in touch with their chosen ones (the recipient of the letters eventually expanded from Madrid to Barcelona, and then to France, Argentina and Italy) through more conventional methods; aside from the mail, sometimes they would also use the phone to call their contacts, like they did with Sesma, and their voices sounded nasal and aphonic; the explanation being that Ummites were so advanced their main form of communication was telepathy (duh) and so their vocal cords were severely atrophied. The Ummites were even incapable of typing their long epistles themselves, due to their high sensitivity in the fingertips, so they had to rely on terrestrial secretaries who were handsomely paid for their transcribing services, as well as their discretion.
(The above clip is an alleged recording Farriols made of a telephone call with a ‘Ummite’ in 1969)
These extraterrestrials’ science and theorems, delivered in an extremely dry and technical style and accompanied by elaborate hand-drawn diagrams and illustrations, seemed not to be too far-fetched and in conflict with our own scientific knowledge. Even the stern admonitions of the Ummites to nottake their revelations at face value had a certain whiff of plausibility, since that sounded like the kind of cautionary approach real aliens would take during a gradual acclimation program, in order to establish a formal relationship with humanity without causing a total social disruption by their arrival. At least that was what I believed when I first read about UMMO as a very young boy in the pages of a 1978 book written by Alejandro Vignati, a little-known Argentinian UFOlogist –their computers, for example, stored vast quantities of information in quartz crystals instead of magnetic disks; something that sounded like Flash Gordon stuff in the late 1960’s, but is now a reality as incredibly as it may sound.
I even thought the photos of a white disk sporting the now-famous )+( symbol, allegedly taken near a castle in San José de Valderas on June 1st, 1967, were indisputably authentic, even though they had been sent to the press by an anonymous photographer (a clear red herring, but back then I hadn’t learned of such things). This particular close encounter of the second kind, by the way, had actually been announced by the Ummites on a previous letter received by their “OYAGAAbrothers” in Madrid the previous month, and near the place where the disk had supposedly touched ground a mysterious metallic tube was said to have been found by a local child who carelessly opened it, revealing a green plastic film inside it marked with the typical UMMO logo. The San José de Valderas case was seen as confirmation by the Madrilenian circle that the documents were real, and it attained international attention thanks to the book “Un Caso Perfecto” (A Perfect Case) originally published in 1969 (a second, revised edition was printed in 1973), co-written by legendary UFOlogist Antonio Ribera and Rafael Farriols, the same Catalonian industrialist I introduced in the first paragraph of this article, who eventually became a key figure in the UMMO affair and a recipient of many letters himself –when Ribera passed away, Farriols became the repository of all his UMMO files, and he also ended up buying the original San José de Valderas negatives for the pricey sum of $30,000 pesetas.
“Don’t believe in us, and don’t disseminate these letters to the masses” was the counter-intuitive mantra repeated again and again in the UMMO letters. And yet, how could their growing number of adepts not believe, when they had been chosen as grassroots liaisons between our world and a superior civilization? How could they not shout the good news to the winds?? The popularity of the UMMO topic grew, more books were written, and conferences were organized where the true converts and the mere curious gathered, much to the annoyance of ‘serious’ UFO investigators who thought the whole thing was pure nonsense –an echo of the contempt NICAP and other groups in the United States always showed to the contactees (and later to abductees) because they stole the media spotlight and scared away the few scientists genuinely interested in the phenomenon.
In his book “The Invisible College” (1975) Vallee devotes the entire fourth chapter to UMMO (“The Function of OEMII”) where he speculates whether it could have been some sort of experiment in socio-psychological manipulation, perpetrated perhaps by a military intelligence group. His reasoning was backed by the analysis of the metal and plastic samples from the San José de Valderas case, which had been obtained by Farriols through a third party –the man who had allegedly obtained them and told the story of the kid who found the metal cylinder, Antonio Pardo, was never interviewed– and were sent to the Spanish National Institute for Space Research (INTA) whose president happened to be an uncle of Farriols. The laboratory analysis concluded the metal was a very pure (99%) alloy of nickel, and the plastic film was polyvinyl fluoride, which was only manufactured by the DuPont company with the commercial name of TEDLAR, and was used by NASA (and the military!) due to their very special chemical and dielectric properties. So even though the material was not found to be of otherworldly origin, neither it was something you could purchase in any hardware store in Madrid.
The years passed. The supply of new letters ebbed and flowed, which was explained as the result of the Ummites leaving and returning to Earth. Unlike most contactee groups, there was never a centralized leader who was the sole repository of information, and the mail recipients formed groups that would later dissolve or split –one of those groups, Eridani, was presided by Jordán Peña, who took a very skeptical approach to UMMO and UFOs in general. Also unlike typical contactee groups in the United States, there was never any grand prophecy foretelling a massive arrival of OAWOLEA OUEWA(the alien word for their lenticular spacecraft) at the major cities of the world. The Ummites were bound by a strict ‘cosmic law’ –a sort of ‘prime directive’– which forbade them from overtly meddling and interfering with human society.
Only once or twice did the UMMO affair took an apocalyptic spin, by warning their followers in one of their collective messages (meant to be read during a general assembly at a predeterminate date) that there was a very high chance of a global nuclear conflagration due to the Yom Kippur war of 1973, and they even offered refuge to their terrestrial allies inside a nuclear shelter they had prepared under the Sierra de Gredos mountains in Salamanca; the catch though, was that each follower could only bring nine other companions to the extraterrestrial base, mortifying those who took the warning seriously and were waiting for final confirmation from the Ummites, while trying to determine who among their friends and family to save, and who to leave behind! Fortunately this ‘orange alert’ did not devolve into a true tragedy, and to my knowledge no one ended up committing suicide or selling all their possessions, like in the book “When Prophecy Fails” –perhaps because the Ummites didn’t claim to know the future with absolute certainty, so instead their predictions were the result of mathematical and sociopolitical probabilities. Or maybe because all those typewritten “don’t believe us!” had actually sunk in after all…
By 1993, when nobody cared about the Space Brothers of the ’60s and the UFO scene started to be monopolized by Roswell, alien abductions and Area 51, José Luis Jordán Peña –the skeptical president of the Eridani group, and one of the witnesses of the Aluche landing– gave the biggest ‘mea culpa’in the history of Spanish UFOlogy, by claiming he was the sole mastermind behind the entire UMMO affair. It was him, he announced, who had written all the letters and drawn all the diagrams illustrating them. Not only that, but he also claimed to have fabricated the Aluche landing, and hoaxed the San José de Valderas photos using a small model made out of translucent picnic plates and suspended through a thin nylon wire.
“Case closed!” announced the hard-line skeptics… Or was it?
In UFOlogy the will to believe is only superseded by the will to disbelieve, depending on where you stand on the issue of alien life. No matter how tenuous and improbable a debunking explanation may turn out to be, that’s always a better alternative than opening the Pandora’s Box of a true anomaly for people who adopt the “it can’t be, therefore it isn’t” posture (what we call “big ‘S’ skeptics”). Remember the Belgian flap of the 1990’s? It only took one person to claim he had been the one who had faked that famous ‘triangle UFO’ photo, which has been considered by some to be one of the best graphic evidences in history –without providing ANY sort of evidence to back up his claim, mind you– for skeptics and the media to buy it without question, and use that as an excuse to dismiss the entire series of sightings of unidentified objects that occurred in that country, which were reported by both citizens as well as civilian and military authorities.
A similar thing happens with the self-proclaimed culpability of Jordán Peña, who could very well be compared to Richard Doty both in infamy as well as trustworthiness. Without providing any claim of evidence whatsoever, he bragged that his little ‘social experiment’ as he called it, had been supported and financed by none other than the CIA (“Joder, tío!”). They were the ones who had provided the scientific expertise needed to fabricate the illusion of the highly advanced UMMO technology, and who also mailed the forged letters at post offices scattered all around the world, in order to give them more believability.
The Aluche landing marks and burned ground? He and a couple of friends –who were the ones who entered a bar to report their alleged sighting of the flying saucer– dug up the rectangular prints using a beach bucket and burned the ground with a blow torch, he said; he had even acquired a small amount of radioactive sand (provided by the CIA, of course) that he spread around the site. The problem is Jordán Peña leaves out the fact that he and his accomplices were not the only witnesses of the landing: they were also some soldiers who claimed to have seen the object that day. Even after the incident, Jordán Peña and his wife received the visit of a man in uniform who claimed to be an officer of the Spanish Air Force, to interrogate him about the event. The officer told him he had also seen the object, which completely surprised Jordán. How could this military officer claim to be a witness of something he had made up? He thought. The officer advised Jordán not to talk about the incident any further “because it could all be the work of the Americans.” To complete the MIB tone of the incident, the man gave Jordán Peña a card with phone number where he could be reached, but months later when Jordán tried to call the officer, he found out the name and number were completely fictitious! Was the CIA ‘experimenting’ with their own operative?
With regards to the San José de Valderas photos, Jordán Peña claimed to have traveled to the site a few days beforehand with one of his accomplices (Vicente Ortuño) and took the photos of the model when there was no one in the area, they processed the photos themselves and sent them to the press anonymously. ‘Antonio Pardo’ –the guy who supposedly took photos of the nickel cylinder and sent them to the press with the metallic and plastic samples– had been him using an alias, and the samples had been fabricated by “the Institution” as he referred to the CIA. But once again, Jordán dismisses the fact that there were more witnesses that observed a strange object with an orange glow that evening, who were interviewed by Antonio Ribera and Rafael Farriols for their book “Un Caso Perfecto.” Were they all liars? “Yes,” said Jordán, dismissing the whole thing all too conveniently.
Which leaves of course the big, lenticular-shaped elephant in the room? WHY did he do it?? “I wanted to study the behavior of sects, masochistic conducts and leader figures,” he told Juan José Benítez when he interviewed him years later. “It was clear to me the UFO subject was a fallacy –meaning a deception or lie intended to harm a person. Thus was born UMMO as an experiment to prove the extraterrestrial issue was just another falsehood.” Which is why the name he coined sounded just as the Spanish word for ‘smoke’ (humo).
With this in mind, Jordán said, is that he put himself in touch with two American anthropologists, to see if they would be interested in helping him both professionally and financially with his social experiment –he was after all, a lay person with no scientific degrees in psychology. According to him, one of the academics rejected the idea and considered it completely unethical. The other one was not as dismissive but didn’t agree to it either; yet months later –according to Jordán’s testimony to Benítez– that same anthropologist (who was never named) contacted him again out of the blue, telling Jordán his proposal had been discretely sent to the CIA, who had conducted a study of his profile and background (in the 1950’s he had worked for Fé Católica, an intelligence service run by the Jesuit order) and the Intelligence organization was willing to fully support his project.
What could the Yankees possibly get out of his little UFOlogical deception, though? According to him, the “Institution” was capable of sending ciphered messages within the letters to infiltrated agents behind the Iron Curtain –East Germany and Romania, predominantly. Even though such a notion does not sound totally implausible, to this day there’s never been anynews of UMMO letters received in Germany.
‘Project UWW’, which was supposed to be the codename given to the contactee deception, ended in 1989 “coinciding with the fall of the Berlin wall,” in the words of Jordán. Yet it’s far more likely the real reason the UMMO megalomaniac stopped sending letters to the still-expectant UMMO fans was the fact that in 1988 he suffered from a stroke caused by a brain clot which left half of his body paralyzed (hemiplegia), rendering him incapable to keep typewriting the letters or drawing the Ummite diagrams –perhaps it was a fitting punishment, that the man behind the guttural language of UMMO ended up having a difficulty to properly communicate phonetically for the rest of his life…
José Luis Jordán Peña, after he suffered his stroke
Juan José Benítez interviewed Jordán Peña several times for many months, as it is stated in his book “El Hombre que Susurraba a los Ummitas” (The Man who Whispered to the Ummites), and it is clear from his ‘testimony’ that the man was a pathological liar with delusions of grandeur, who kept changing his story again and again –on one occasion he told Benítez his first meeting with CIA representatives took place by late 1965, but on another occasion he said the offer to support the UMMO project happened on November of 1966. Sometimes he explained the San José the Valderas maquette was held with a fishing pole held by Vicente Ortuño, and another time he said the model was supported by a frame resembling a soccer goal. As Ortuño, his old accomplice, told Benítez: “Jordán makes a sport out of lying.”
Should we dismiss then the idea that the CIA could have been involved in the UMMO deception? Here’s where things get even more messy: you see, contrary to what Jordán claimed, people were still getting letters allegedly sent by the Ummites after 1989. One of them was none other than Rafael Farriols, who still thought Jordán’s ’93 confession was not enough to explain the whole UMMO affair. He had, after all, used some of the scientific descriptions explained in those documents to attain a couple of patents; other scientists and engineers, like Jean-Pierre Petit –senior researcher at National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) as an astrophysicist in Marseille Observatory– to this day still find the UMMO ideas to be very ingenious and too advanced for their time.
On July 15, 1996, Farriols received a letter signed by “OOLEEOO 2, son of EEWAANII 1”, who had just been stationed on Spain with the mission of re-establishing liaisons with the old network of like-minded Earthlings with whom his Ummite comrades had been in touch in years past. OOLEEOO 2 was requesting Farriols’s aid in this matter, and should he accept, he had but to express it by way of openly voicing it out loud inside his studio, as they had instructed him how to do so on previous communications –the Ummites had not only told Farriols they had conveniently tapped his phones (which he seemed to be okay with him) but also that they had installed a minuscule microphone inside his studio with which they could listen and record his voice.
The letter also warned him about a new outbreak of equine fever, and urged him to take the necessary precautions. Remember Farriols was an animal lover and horse breeder, and at that particular date he was considering the possibility of exporting some of his horses to Germany, so that equine fever recommendation was certainly an interesting ‘coincidence’. But what really caught Farriols off guard was that in the letter the UMMO beings were praising him for his book “El Hombre, El Cosmos y Dios” (Man, the Cosmos and God) even though they politely encouraged him to re-examine the paragraphs he’d written with regards to Marx’s theories and Gauss’s mathematical theorem. What Impressed Farriols wasn’t the fact his buddies from the Virgo constellation had taken the trouble to read his book –what else are you gonna do to pass the time during an interdimensional trip, right?– or that they were correct in their assessments regarding the Marx and Gauss segments (he later corrected them) but the fact that the book hadn’t even been published yet! The manuscript, which was kept as a word processing file inside his computer, had yet to be sent to his publisher for approval, and the only hard copies in existence had shared with a small circle of close friends and family members. How could Jordán Peña (who never set foot inside Farriols’s country home) have known of its existence??
Home of Rafael Farriols. Notice the UMMO symbol at the top of the round study
Which brings us full circle to the beginning of our story: with Farriols pacing around his studio, completely alone, gently whispering questions to his Ummite friends, instead of uttering them out loud like he had done so on other, numerous occasions. Perhaps this time he was ‘testing’ to see if, despite all evidence to the contrary, this crazy adventure that had consumed so many decades of his life wasn’t a total fabrication spawned by a sick individual. Well, proof that there was something else afoot came in the form of a new letter –received on August 26th, 1996– in which the Ummites courteously requested of him to formulate his answer to their previous query at a tone of voice louder than 17 decibels, since they could hardly hear him the last time! How could anyone have known that this time he whispered his response?
When confronted with the question, Jordán responded to Benítez: “It was the CIA the ones who were spying on Farriols. They have the means to detect voices by way of the vibrations in the glass of windows.” In his book (published in 2007) Benítez didn’t sound too convinced by this explanation, and attributed it to yet another one of Jordán’s lies. But thanks to the Snowden’s revelations of 2013 we now know using laser beams in order to snoop conversations inside closed rooms is more than possible. When googling ‘laser microphones’Wikipedia tells you the first concepts existed since 1947 (using infrared beams, since the laser wasn’t invented until the 1960s) and a US patent for a device that uses a laser beam and smoke or vapor to detect sound vibrations in free air was issued in 2009.
Could the CIA have the same technology 13 years earlier? That’s highly probable. Could it have been used to spy on a harmless Spanish civilian who thought he was in touch with benevolent aliens? That sounds more unlikely, but not entirely impossible. What these spooks might not have known, though, is that all the windows in Farriols’s studio were not made out of glass. Instead, the plastic industrialist had used bullet-proof acrylic that was 20 millimeters thick (¾”) which also insulated the room against outside noises. Could that have rendered his voice to low for the glass-calibrated laser microphone employed by the CIA?
What about the ‘hacked’ computer and the ‘leaked’ book? In 1996 the Internet was in its diapers yet email was already a reality. Although Benítez never mentions whether Farriols’s PC was connected to a modem or not, the idea of accessing the contents of an Internet-less computer is not within the realm of possibility. Again, in the case of a man whispering things to imaginary (or imaginal) extraterrestrial beings, it is not so much a matter of ‘How’ but ‘Why’. Why the hell bother?
Psy-ops shenanigans or true anomalous phenomena, Farriols went to his grave believing there still remained a kernel of truth at the heart of his beloved UMMO. He published his book, which I hope to get my hands on some day, and eventually died of lung cancer (his Ummite friends, unfortunately, never warned him of the dangers of tobacco). At the top of his countryside home there always remained the cryptic symbol as a proof of enduring loyalty. Where he managed to get the inspiration from said symbol, and what else was buried beneath the mountain of lies and deceit he had built for more than 4 decades, is something Jordán Peña –who himself passed away in 2014– never satisfactorily answered in the eyes of his critics. Such a mountain seems so big, so murky and so fetid most UFO investigators today dare not to touch it with a ten-foot pole; those are the kind of naive individuals who still dream of that unquestionable silver bullet –a ‘perfect case’, like in the title of Ribera and Farriols book– that will finally set the record straight on the reality of UFOS, and let them say “I told you so!” to their critics (Tic-tac anyone?)
Jordán Peña´s obituary. The incluson of the UMMO symbol was his son’s idea, and not according to some post-humous wish
But unfortunately for them, not only is there no such thing as a ‘perfect’ case in the world of UFOlogy, but those things they call ‘imperfections’ are –paraphrasing Robin Williams’s character in “Good Will Hunting”— the ‘good stuff’ for the open-minded Fortean.
Because the open-minded Fortean acknowledges that, despite the fact the UMMO letters are more than likely a hoax, that does not discount the fact that the UMMO symbol has been reported in dozens of other genuine UFO cases all around the world –a point for which Benítez provided ample evidence in his book. Some of those cases even preceded the UMMO activity of 1966-1967, but the best example of is without a doubt the famous Voronezh encounters of 1989 –when ‘project UWW’ officially ended, according to Jordán– in which the witnesses (most of them children) reported the )+( emblem. Even Jacques Vallee himself acknowledged this confounded contradiction in one of his later books as an example of the trickster-like nature of the phenomenon. And HEREis where we might start getting some answers…
Drawings from the Voronoezh witnesses
If we accept the more-than-likely possibility that one or more intelligence agencies were involved in the UMMO affair –perhaps the CIA or maybe even the KGB, which would actually help to explain Jordan Peña’s cagey attitude and proclivity to change his story, since being in bed with the communists would have been an unforgivable sin in the ultra-conservative Spain of Francisco Franco– perhaps said agency or agencies were the ones who encouraged Jordán to use the UMMO symbol in the first place; a theory Benítez himself puts forward in his book.
But here I’m daring to go even one step forward than Benítez, and speculate that perhaps the REAL purpose of the project was not to discredit the UFO phenomenon and the UMMO symbol, as Benítez believes, but to actually MANIFEST genuine UFO events! In which case the symbol could be used as some sort of ‘marker’ to try to determine which activity was the direct result of the experiment, and which one was ‘natural’ or ‘uncorrelated’.
In this outlandish hypothesis hereby proposed, I’m not only invoking the ideas I’ve learned by reading such books as “Mutants and Mystics” and “The Super Natural”, but also the parapsychological possibilities explored in the famous ‘Philip experiment’ as well as the ‘Entity Letters’ experiences, which have been the subject of previous Mysterious Universe episodes. I ask you: what could be the result of so many people starting to devote so much time and energy focusing on a given belief system, which was syncretized by a particular symbol which may have already had a deep, esoteric significance? Could that actually translate into actual ‘eclosions’ of trueparanormal energy? Critics would say that such a theory would be discredited by the fact that at the time of the Aluche and San José de Valderas case, not too many people were cognizant of the UMMO affair to begin with; to which I would reply those are only contradictions from a primitive ‘linear’ interpretation of Time –psychic investigations in phenomena like remote viewing, however, have amply proven Time does not flow on a straight line as we would normally perceive it, and even cutting-edge physics theories are comfortable with future events affecting the past.
Not only that, but in this kind of framework –as will surely be appreciated by seasoned MU fans– hoaxes are an important (but misunderstood) component in the scaffolding of high strangeness phenomena.
In the Philip experiment and Alexandra David-Néel’s famous story of the tulpa she allegedly created, the invented thoughtforms started to get a life of their own, and got out of the control of their originators until they sought to ‘starve’ their creations of energy. Could the UMMO Frankenstein monster seek to set itself free from its arrogant maker, and look to subsist within the minds and energy of the still-faithful followers of the Ummite doctrine? At this point I’m willing to bet the Discordian friends of Robert Anton Wilson, Greg Hill and Kerry Thornley, would have giggled at how the Trickster sought to prick Jordan Peña in the ass with a H-like shaped fork once or twice, as I have mentioned on previous paragraphs.
And with this final stroke I see this UMMO portrait complete and ready to be hung. I hope you found it enjoyable enough –if you got this far, chances are you probably did!– and as a final admonition I will leave you with this: Do not throw the entirety of this affair in the wastebasket, for hoaxes do have a frustrating role to play in the unfolding of these confounding mysteries. And be on the lookout, because you never know when and where that pesky old symbol (sigil?) will pop its cryptic head once again in the future –remember: signs don’t shout. They whisper.
Hayabusa-2: Japan spacecraft touches down on asteroid
By Paul Rincon - Science editor, BBC News website
Image copyrightREUTERSImage captionArtwork: Hayabusa-2 successfully touched down on asteroid Ryugu
A Japanese spacecraft has touched down on an asteroid in an attempt to collect a sample of rock from the surface.
The Hayabusa-2 probe was trying to grab the sample from a pre-chosen site on the asteroid Ryugu just before 23:00 GMT on 21 February.
The spacecraft reached asteroid Ryugu in June 2018 after a three-and-a-half-year journey from Earth.
Hayabusa-2 is expected to return to Earth in 2020 along with its rocky hoard.
During sample collection, the spacecraft approached the 1km-wide asteroid with an instrument called the sampler horn. On touchdown, a 5g "bullet" made of the metal tantalum was fired into the rocky surface at 300m/s.
The particles kicked up by the impact should have been be caught by the sampler horn.
"We made a successful touchdown, including firing a bullet," said Hayabusa-2 project manager Yuichi Tsuda.
"We made the ideal touchdown in the best conditions," he said.
Image copyrightAFPImage captionThere were celebrations in the control room in Sagamihara, Japan
The spacecraft began descending from its "home position" of 20km above the asteroid's surface in the early hours of 21 February (GMT) - several hours later than planned.
Ryugu belongs to a particularly primitive type of space rock known as a C-type. The near-Earth asteroid (NEA) is a relic left over from the early days of our Solar System.
Image copyrightJAXA ET ALImage captionThe red arrow shows the location of the target marker on the surface
Prof Alan Fitzsimmons, from Queen's University Belfast, told BBC News: "We think we understand how carbon-rich asteroids migrate from the asteroid belt to become near-Earth asteroids, but the samples from Ryugu will allow its history to be explored.
"After the Rosetta mission, it's now clear that most of Earth's water did not come from comets in the early days of the Solar System. We believe carbon-rich (C-type) asteroids may have significant amounts of water locked up in their rocks. It's possible such asteroids may have brought to Earth both the water and the organic material necessary for life to start.
"These samples will be crucial in investigating this possibility."
Hayabusa-2 had earlier dropped a small, reflective, beanbag-like "target marker" on to Ryugu. This was used as a guide as the spacecraft descended to the rough surface of the asteroid.
Controllers were aiming for the centre of a circle, some 6m in diameter, located about 4-5m away from the target marker.
The Japanese space agency (Jaxa) had originally planned to carry out the touchdown operation in October last year. But the asteroid's surface was found to be much more rugged than expected, with numerous, hefty boulders making it hard to find a location that was large and flat enough to sample.
Controllers had hoped they would have an area of about 100m in diameter to target. But because of the surface properties, this had to be reduced to a 6m circle for what team members are calling a "pinpoint touchdown".
The sampler horn that extends out from the bottom of the spacecraft has a length of 1m. It's therefore vital that there are no boulders more than 50cm in height at the landing site, to reduce the chances that the body of the spacecraft could hit a rock.
Image copyrightJAXAImage captionThe sampler horn will be used to collect material for delivery to Earth in 2020
Unexpected surface properties also have the potential to affect the amount of material collected. Before arriving at Ryugu, researchers had expected the surface to be covered in a powdery layer of fine-grained material - the regolith.
In fact, the upper layer turned out to be akin to gravel, consisting of rocky chunks that are centimetre-sized or larger.
Prof Fitzsimmons told BBC News: "This was a surprise, as other near-Earth asteroids we have visited previously have shown areas dominated by small particles.
"It might be due to the carbon-rich composition, as the previous NEAs are composed of silicate rock, which are more Earth-like. But the shape of Ryugu also implies it was spinning much faster in the past, so it's possible this could have affected the particles' sizes in some fashion."
Scientists carried out additional tests in Japan to determine whether the sample material could still be gathered by the spacecraft.
They used a container of artificial gravel with a similar size distribution to that on Ryugu. In a vacuum chamber, they fired a tantalum bullet identical to that used by Hayabusa-2 into the gravel.
According to Jaxa, the results of the test exceeded expectations, with the tantalum projectile yielding fragments of rock in size ranges that should easily pass through the sampler horn.
This suggests that Hayabusa-2 should have been able to collect a sample.
In September, Hayabusa-2 deployed two robotic "hoppers" that propelled themselves across the surface of Ryugu, sending back images and other data.
Then, in October, the "mothership" despatched a French-German instrument package called Mascot to the surface.
Later this year, perhaps in March or April, Jaxa plans to detonate an explosive charge that will punch a crater into the surface of Ryugu.
Hayabusa-2 would then descend into the crater to collect fresh samples of material that have not been altered by aeons of exposure to space.
"We know that the surfaces of asteroids are changed over time by bombardment with energetic particles from the Sun and interstellar space," said Alan Fitzsimmons.
"Yet studies with telescopes show that this 'space weathering' affects the surfaces of carbon-rich asteroids differently to those mostly made from more rock-like silicate minerals. We don't know why this is, and the fresh sub-surface samples from Ruygu will play a very important role in understanding how this happens."
Artist’s impression of Earth’s magnetosphere and leaky upper atmosphere. Illustration credit: ESA/ATG medialab.
Earth’s atmosphere is leaking. Every day, around 90 tonnes of material escapes from our planet’s upper atmosphere and streams out into space. Although missions such as ESA’s Cluster fleet have long been investigating this leakage, there are still many open questions. How and why is Earth losing its atmosphere – and how is this relevant in our hunt for life elsewhere in the universe?
Given the expanse of our atmosphere, 90 tonnes per day amounts to a small leak. Earth’s atmosphere weighs in at around five quadrillion (5 × 1015) tonnes, so we are in no danger of running out any time soon. However, understanding Earth’s atmosphere, and how it escapes to space, is key to understanding the atmospheres of other planets, and could be crucial in our hunt for habitable planets and extraterrestrial life.
We have been exploring Earth’s magnetic environment for years using satellites such as ESA’s Cluster mission, a fleet of four spacecraft launched in 2000. Cluster has been continuously observing the magnetic interactions between the Sun and Earth for over a decade and half; this longevity, combined with its multi-spacecraft capabilities and unique orbit, have made it a key player in understanding both Earth’s leaking atmosphere and how our planet interacts with the surrounding solar system.
Earth’s magnetic field is complex; it extends from the interior of our planet out into space, exerting its influence over a region of space dubbed the magnetosphere.
The magnetosphere – and its inner region (the plasmasphere), a doughnut-shaped portion sitting atop our atmosphere, which co-rotates with Earth and extends to an average distance of 20,000 kilometres – is flooded with charged particles and ions that are trapped, bouncing back and forth along field lines.
At its outer Sunward edge the magnetosphere meets the solar wind, a continuous stream of charged particles – mostly protons and electrons – flowing from the Sun. Here, our magnetic field acts like a shield, deflecting and rerouting the incoming wind as a rock would obstruct a stream of water. This analogy can be continued for the side of Earth further from the Sun – particles within the solar wind are sculpted around our planet and slowly come back together, forming an elongated tube (named the magnetotail), which contains trapped sheets of plasma and interacting field lines.
Artist’s impression of Earth’s magnetosphere. Image credit: ESA/ATG medialab.
Weaknesses in our magnetic shield
However, our magnetosphere shield does have its weaknesses; at Earth’s poles the field lines are open, like those of a standard bar magnet (these locations are named the polar cusps). Here, solar wind particles can head inwards towards Earth, filling up the magnetosphere with energetic particles.
Just as particles can head inwards down these open polar lines, particles can also head outwards. Ions from Earth’s upper atmosphere – the ionosphere, which extends to roughly 1,000 kilometres above the Earth – also flood out to fill up this region of space. Although missions such as Cluster have discovered much, the processes involved remain unclear.
“The question of plasma transport and atmospheric loss is relevant for both planets and stars, and is an incredibly fascinating and important topic. Understanding how atmospheric matter escapes is crucial to understanding how life can develop on a planet,” said Arnaud Masson, ESA’s Deputy Project Scientist for the Cluster mission. “The interaction between incoming and outgoing material in Earth’s magnetosphere is a hot topic at the moment; where exactly is this stuff coming from? How did it enter our patch of space?” Initially, scientists believed Earth’s magnetic environment to be filled purely with particles of solar origin. However, as early as the 1990s it was predicted that Earth’s atmosphere was leaking out into the plasmasphere – something that has since turned out to be true.
Observations have shown sporadic, powerful columns of plasma, dubbed plumes, growing within the plasmasphere, travelling outwards to the edge of the magnetosphere and interacting with solar wind plasma entering the magnetosphere.
More recent studies have unambiguously confirmed another source – Earth’s atmosphere is constantly leaking! Alongside the aforementioned plumes, a steady, continuous flow of material (comprising oxygen, hydrogen, and helium ions) leaves our planet’s plasmasphere from the polar regions, replenishing the plasma within the magnetosphere. Cluster found proof of this wind, and has quantified its strength for both overall (reported in a paper published in 2013) and for hydrogen ions in particular (reported in 2009).
Artist’s impression of the plasmasphere in Earth’s magnetosphere. Illustration credit: ESA/ATG medialab.
Overall, about 1 kg of material is escaping our atmosphere every second, amounting to almost 90 tonnes per day. Singling out just cold ions (light hydrogen ions, which require less energy to escape and thus possess a lower energy in the magnetosphere), the escape mass totals thousands of tonnes per year.
Cold ions are important; many satellites – Cluster excluded – cannot detect them due to their low energies, but they form a significant part of the net matter loss from Earth, and may play a key role in shaping our magnetic environment. Solar storms and periods of heightened solar activity appear to speed up Earth’s atmospheric loss significantly, by more than a factor of three. However, key questions remain: How do ions escape, and where do they originate? What processes are at play, and which is dominant?
Where do the ions go? And how? One of the key escape processes is thought to be centrifugal acceleration, which speeds up ions at Earth’s poles as they cross the shape-shifting magnetic field lines there. These ions are shunted onto different drift trajectories, gain energy, and end up heading away from Earth into the magnetotail, where they interact with plasma and return to Earth at far higher speeds than they departed with – a kind of boomerang effect.
Such high-energy particles can pose a threat to space-based technology, so understanding them is important. Cluster has explored this process multiple times during the past decade and a half – finding it to affect heavier ions such as oxygen more than lighter ones, and also detecting strong, high-speed beams of ions rocketing back to Earth from the magnetotail nearly 100 times over the course of three years.
More recently, scientists have explored the process of magnetic reconnection, one of the most efficient physical processes by which the solar wind enters Earth’s magnetosphere and accelerates plasma. In this process, plasma interacts and exchanges energy with magnetic field lines; different lines reconfigure themselves, breaking, shifting around, and forging new connections by merging with other lines, releasing huge amounts of energy in the process.
The four Cluster spacecraft crossing the northern cusp of Earth’s magnetosphere. Image credit: ESA/AOES Medialab.
Here, the cold ions are thought to be important. We know that cold ions affect the magnetic reconnection process, for example slowing down the reconnection rate at the boundary where the solar wind meets the magnetosphere (the magnetopause), but we are still unsure of the mechanisms at play.
“In essence, we need to figure out how cold plasma ends up at the magnetopause,” said Philippe Escoubet, ESA’s Project Scientist for the Cluster mission. “There are a few different aspects to this; we need to know the processes involved in transporting it there, how these processes depend on the dynamic solar wind and the conditions of the magnetosphere, and where plasma is coming from in the first place – does it originate in the ionosphere, the plasmasphere, or somewhere else?”
Recently, scientists modelled and simulated Earth’s magnetic environment with a focus on structures known as plasmoids and flux ropes – cylinders, tubes, and loops of plasma that become tangled up with magnetic field lines. These arise when the magnetic reconnection process occurs in the magnetotail and ejects plasmoids both towards the outer tail and towards Earth.
Cold ions may play a significant role in deciding the direction of the ejected plasmoid. These recent simulations showed a link between plasmoids heading towards Earth and heavy oxygen ions leaking out from the ionosphere – in other words, oxygen ions may reduce and quench the reconnection rates at certain points within the magnetotail that produce tailward trajectories, thus making it more favourable at other sites that instead send them Earthwards. These results agree with existing Cluster observations.
Another recent Cluster study compared the two main atmospheric escape mechanisms Earth experiences – sporadic plumes emanating through the plasmasphere, and the steady leakage of Earth’s atmosphere from the ionosphere – to see how they might contribute to the population of cold ions residing at the dayside magnetopause (the magnetosphere-solar wind boundary nearest the Sun).
Both escape processes appear to depend in different ways on the interplanetary magnetic field (IMF), the solar magnetic field that is carried out into the solar system by the solar wind. This field moves through space in a spiralling pattern due to the rotation of the Sun, like water released from a lawn sprinkler. Depending on how the IMF is aligned, it can effectively cancel out part of Earth’s magnetic field at the magnetopause, linking up and merging with our field and allowing the solar wind to stream in.
Plumes seem to occur when the IMF is oriented southward (anti-parallel to Earth’s magnetic field, thus acting as mentioned above). Conversely, leaking outflows from the ionosphere occur during northward-oriented IMF. Both processes occur more strongly when the solar wind is either denser or travelling faster (thus exerting a higher dynamic pressure).
Magnetic reconnection in the tail of Earth’s magnetosphere.Illustration credit: ESA/ATG medialab.
“While there is still much to learn, we’ve been able to make great progress here,” said Masson. “These recent studies have managed to successfully link together multiple phenomena – namely the ionospheric leak, plumes from the plasmasphere, and magnetic reconnection – to paint a better picture of Earth’s magnetic environment. This research required several years of ongoing observation, something we could only get with Cluster.”
Applying what we learn to other planets Learning more about our own atmosphere can tell us much about our planetary neighbours – we could potentially apply such research to any astrophysical object with both an atmosphere and a magnetic field. We know that planetary atmospheres play an essential role in rendering a planet habitable or lifeless, but there remain many open questions.
Consider the diversity seen in the planets and moons of our solar system, for example. In our small patch of the universe we see extreme and opposite worlds: the smog-like carbon dioxide atmosphere of Venus, the much-depleted tenuous atmosphere of present-day Mars, the nitrogen-rich atmosphere of Saturn’s moon Titan, the essentially airless Jovian moon Callisto, the oxygen-bearing atmosphere of Earth.
How do we know if these planets could support life, or whether they may once have done so? Mars, for example, is thought to have once had a thick, dense atmosphere that has been considerably stripped away over time. Although the Red Planet is unlikely to be habitable today, it may well have been so in the past.
“Understanding more about our own atmosphere will help us when it comes to other planets throughout the Universe,” said Escoubet. “We need to know more. Why does Earth have an atmosphere that can support life, while other planets do not?”
Cluster is a unique mission; it comprises four spacecraft – a format that NASA recently used for their Magnetospheric Multiscale (MMS) mission, launched in 2015 – which allow continuous study of Earth’s magnetic field and the solar wind from multiple locations and orientations. Cluster has been operating since 2000, and in that time has compiled a wealth of information about our magnetic environment across various periods of solar and terrestrial activity.
“Additionally, Cluster’s orbit is truly unique amongst all current missions; the fleet is on a polar orbit, meaning they can explore our planet’s dynamic polar regions – specifically the cusps and polar caps – up close and in unprecedented detail,” added Escoubet.
“Overall, long-term space missions like Cluster are helping us to understand a whole lot more about our planet, its atmosphere, and atmospheric loss in general – which in turn will help us to understand the solar system in which we live.”
WETENSCHAPDe sonde Hayabusa2 is erin geslaagd om vrijdagochtend Japanse tijd kort neer te strijken op asteroïde Ryugu. Dat zegt het Japanse ruimtevaartagentschap Jaxa, dat de delicate missie met extreme voorzichtigheid aanpakt.
“We moeten nog de diverse gegevens analyseren die we geleidelijk aan binnenkrijgen vooraleer we kunnen bevestigen dat het een succes is, maar we denken dat dit het geval zal zijn”, zei een Jaxa-woordvoerder. De asteroïde Ryugu bevindt zich op 340 miljoen kilometer van de aarde, wat verklaart waarom het enige tijd duurt voor de gegevens in het controlecentrum van de missie binnenkomen.
De Hayabusa2 zette de landing op Ryugu donderdag in om 13.15 uur, 5.15 uur in België, met enige vertraging. Maar de sonde raakte de asteroïde uiteindelijk één uur eerder dan gepland. Zoals de bedoeling was, bleef ze maar enkele seconden op Ryugu. Het zou pas binnen een paar dagen moeten duidelijk worden of de stalen die van de bodem zijn gemaakt bruikbaar zijn.
Drie jaar en tien maanden
Het avontuur van de Hayabusa2 begon op 3 december 2014. De sonde begon toen aan een lange reis van 3,2 miljard kilometer, een reis die nog lang niet voorbij is.
Het duurde exact drie jaar en tien maanden om de bestemming te bereiken. In juni 2018 stabiliseerde de sonde op 20 kilometer van Ryugu, een zeer oude asteroïde in de vorm van een diamant, die ten tijde van de vorming van het zonnestelsel zou ontstaan zijn.
De sonde wierp in oktober een kleine Duits-Franse robot af op de asteroïde, Mascot. Die werkte meer dan 17 uur om de samenstelling van de bodem van het primitieve rotsachtige lichaam te analyseren. Gehoopt wordt om zo beter de vorming van het zonnestelsel te begrijpen.
Het ultieme doel is om de kennis over ons zonnestelsel te versterken “om beter het ontstaan van leven op aarde te begrijpen”, zegt Jaxa.
APVreugde in de controlekamer van het Japanse ruimtevaartagentschap Jaxa.
RT’s Sophie Shevardnadze discusses with Dr. Steven Greer, director of the Centre for the Study of Extra-terrestrial Intelligence on the global UFO cover-up.
OPEN SECRET
UNCOVERING THE GLOBAL UFO COVER-UP
Testimonies, documents, photos, biological specimens here to prove alien life’s existence
43% of Americans believe that we’re currently being visited by non-human civilizations
Govts reluctant to acknowledge existence of alien life, fear disruption to status quo UFO sightings increased dramatically after humanity developed weapons of mass destruction
Most info about UFOs is disinformation created by Intelligence agencies to mislead the public
Alien technologies go beyond the speed of light and across different dimensions
As long we don’t bring WMDs into space, alien civilizations pose no threat to us
Secrecy over UFOs not alone one-country endeavor, transcends through geopolitical borders
Military footage available showing UFOs chased by Chilean and Mexican fighter jets
ETs covered up over fears that they’ll bring energy technologies that would ruin oil industry
Climate change can be tackled with brand-new tech, but studies are covered up from public
Disclosure of ETs would undermine Bretton-Woods economic system tied to petrodollar
Alien life is the biggest non-secret that everybody knows, but few have access to it
Level of secrecy over whole range of issues is criminal, threat to U.S. democrasy
Alien life disclosure offers solutions to many existential problems humanity is facing
World leaders and top brass kept in the dark about extraterrestrial intelligence projects
Media prevented from investigating into physical evidence of alien life’s existence
I was looking through a gigipan photo of Mars and discovered loads of old cement rock structures that had small light blue tiles affixed to them. There were at least a two dozen of them. I am posting only a few. This is not sapphires because they don't grow this way, perfectly sized and perfectly spaced. There is no logical explanation for such an occurrence in nature, its just not possible. So the only logical explanation is that someone created a wall or floor with these tiles. Now those tiles sit in ruins of whats left after hundred of thousands of years. NASA knows it they reveal the truth to the public, it will also be revealed to companies that want to benefit and send rovers, rockets and basically beat NASA to Mars to claim rights to areas of it for mining, scavenging, or whatever. Just like Elon Musk is doing right now.
UFOS, Warp Drives, and Stargates Are On The Secret List Of Pentagon Research Projects
The United States Defence Intelligence Agency has one great fear, and that is someone, somewhere has a secret advantage in the form of an unknown weapon that could wipe out the world’s superpower or even the world itself. So, it takes the talk of UFOs, warp drives and stargates seriously. In fact, it spent some serious money on it.
DIA went full secrecy and formed teams to deeply examine every single outlandish idea it encountered, according to files released under a freedom of information request.
Project on Government Secrecy director Steven Aftergood of Federation of American Scientists said that these kinds of topics need more money than you know to pursue.
The existence of research projects on nuclear-powered deep space propulsion, wormholes through space, invisibility cloaking, biomaterials and among others involving the likes of NASA, DARPA and private firms investigating these subjects are already known. However, their potential ties to black money of US Defence Department wasn’t.
In 2008, for example, NASA had serious studies on the potential of interstellar warp drive engines. In 2013, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory of NASA had engaged in serious studies on creating a warp field. Conspiracy theorists argued that it was a farfetched idea for NASA to be studying these subjects but not so much if DIA prodded and funded them.
Conspiracists believe the secret research funding of the DIA is a murky affair when it comes to spending defence funds. The New York Times wrote a report in 2017 revealing that much of the Pentagon’s $US22 million of black money research into UFOs could not be traced.
New moon discovered circling Neptune spotlights solar system's violent past
Hippocamp is thought to be a fragment of a neighboring moon shattered by the impact of a comet.
Artist's concept of Hippocamp, a tiny moon that was first seen by the Hubble Space Telescope in 2013.
NASA / ESA/J. Olmsted (STScI)
By David Freeman
Say hello to Hippocamp, a celestial pipsqueak that's making big waves at the edge of our solar system. With help from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, astronomers have confirmed the existence of this tiny moon in orbit around Neptune.
Hippocamp was first seen in photos taken by Hubble in 2013. But its presence — situated close to a much larger moon known as Proteus —posed a mystery: Why hadn't Hippocamp coalesced with or been cast aside by Proteus, an irregularly shaped, 260-mile-wide moon that is roughly 1,000 times more massive?
But after several years of sleuthing — including a fresh look at photos of the Neptune system taken by Hubble and NASA's Voyager 2 spacecraft — astronomers led by Mark Showalter of the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California, determined that Hippocamp is a piece of Proteus that had been sheared off from the larger moon when a comet struck it billions of years ago.
There's no smoking gun for a collision so ancient. But as Showalter and his colleagues say in a paper about their research, published Thursday in the journal Nature, a large impact crater consistent with a comet strike can be seen in photos of Proteus taken in 1989 by NASA's Voyager 2 spacecraft.
"The origin scenario we discussed in the paper is consistent with everything we know about the history of the Neptune system," Showalter told NBC News MACH in an email. "It is the only workable scenario that we have identified. On the other hand, if somebody else in the astronomy community comes up with an alternative explanation, we would love to hear about it."
It's a big backstory for such a puny moon, but other astronomers agree it's probably the correct one.
Sara Seager, a planetary scientist at MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts, said in an email that the explanation made sense. She called it “a fascinating hypothesis for the tiny moon’s origin — with solid support from Hubble data gathered over the last few years."
This diagram shows the orbits of several moons close to the planet Neptune. All were discovered in 1989 by NASA's Voyager 2 spacecraft, with the exception of Hippocamp (S/2004 N 1). It was discovered in archival Hubble Space Telescope images taken from 2004 to 2009.NASA / ESA/A. Feild (STScI)
Hundreds of moons have been found in our solar system. But the Proteus-Hippocamp pair "provides a dramatic illustration that moons are sometimes broken apart by comets," Jack Lissauer, a scientist at NASA's Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California, and a coauthor of the paper, said in a written statement.
The discovery of Hippocamp brings to 14 the number of moons discovered in orbit around Neptune. There are seven inner moons, including Hippocamp, along with six outer moons and Neptune's largest moon, Triton.
Triton is a bit of an oddball because it's the only moon in the solar system with a so-called retrograde orbit, meaning it orbits in the opposite direction of its planet's rotation.
Showalter said that we've learned just about all we can about Hippocamp, at least for the time being. But he added that if NASA or the European Space Agency were to put a spacecraft in orbit around Neptune or its planetary neighbor, Uranus, "we could learn more in a few days that the sum total of everything we have ever learned about either planet so far!"
The World's 8 Best Places To Hunt For Extraterrestrials And Search For UFOs
It was a clear summer afternoon in Lake Tahoe, California in the late 70's when I saw my first UFO. The rough-hewn cigar-shaped craft hovered for a long period of time at a distance over the lake. It was so obvious that all of my neighbors joined me on the street watching it until it suddenly disappeared. Despite over a dozen witnesses, it was never reported, most people keep UFO experiences to themselves for fear of being labeled crazy. According to the National UFO Reporting Center, there were over 4,881 reported sightings in the United States in 2017, imagine how many were not reported.
What was once a subject of clandestine conversation has now become an international fascination with tourists visiting famed sighting areas and governments from around the world organizing extensive exploration. Even the U.S. Pentagon admitted it ran a secret program to investigate sightings by military pilots of countless unidentified flying objects. The Advanced Aviation Threat Identification Program officially ended six years ago, but many believe the program is still active.
My fascination with the unknown compelled me to explore unique areas from around the world where visitors can discover the mysteries of the universe, as well as be entertained by historical sightings. Here are my 8 favorite locations for your own out of this world experience.
Alien landscape in ChileCASCADE TRAVEL
CHILE
Chile is often mentioned as the country with the highest recorded number of UFO sightings. Due to its low humidity, high altitude ridges, and clear skies with little pollution, Chile has become a favorite among UFO-seekers from around the world.
The country has even launched the CEFAA (Committee for Studies of Anomalous Aerial Phenomena (CEFAA), a government body which investigates UAPs (Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon) under the control of the Chilean Air Force.
Cerro Paranal in the Chilean Atacama DesertESO PHOTO AMBASSADOR YURI BELETSKY
Located in the Atacama Desert of Chile, ESO’s Paranal Observatory is one of the best astronomical observing sites in the world and is the flagship location for Europes ground-based astronomy. It contains several major telescopes including the Very Large Telescope, the Visible and Infrared Survey Telescope for Astronomy, and the VLT Survey Telescope.
The ESO Hotel and La Residencia adjacent to Paranal Observatory provide accommodation for staff and media only. Tourists are not allowed to stay overnight. In order to visit the observatory, it is a two-hour drive from Cerro Moreno airport and opens on weekends only with an advance reservation.
The Alma Observatory at Chajnantor PlateauCARLOS PADILLA -AUI -NRAO
ALMA Observatory is the most ambitious radio observatory on Earth. Unlike optic telescopes, radio telescopes are designed to capture radio waves emitted by sources in space. This is a segment of the electromagnetic spectrum that allows researchers to take a closer look at the Universe. ALMA has 66 antennas: fifty-four 12-meter diameter antennas and twelve 7-meter diameter antennas.
It is open every Saturday and Sunday to members of the public who want to visit its facilities located in northern Chile (30 miles from San Pedro de Atacama). Visitors get to see the ALMA Operations Support Facility (OSF), where ALMA personnel work and where you can observe the control room, laboratories, and the antenna transporter. The area of Chajnantor Plateau (where the massive number of antennas are located) are not open to visitors.
San Clemente, Chile is considered to be the unofficial UFO capital of the world. Researchers say that hundreds of UFO sightings have been reported there, as much as one per week. So popular is the area that the Chilean tourism board established an official UFO trail in 2008. The 19-mile trail runs through the Andes mountains covering sights where close encounters have been reported. Included in the experience are Colbún Lake, which has proved popular with UFOs because of its high mineral content, along with various areas highlighting historic sightings. But the trail's must-see location is El Enladrillado, a huge, bizarre flat area formed by 200 perfectly cut volcanic blocks that were reportedly laid by ancient civilizations. It takes four hours to get to the location on horseback and is believed by many to be a landing pad for extraterrestrials.
Elqui Domos Astronomical Hotel is a small 10-year-old hotel located in the heart of the Elqui Valley, a narrow valley stretched in between the Andes Mountains. The hotel is equipped with a restaurant, an astronomical observatory, an outdoor pool and 11 air-conditioned and centrally-heated rooms. The rooms are divided into 7 geodesic domes and 4 observatory-style cabins.
The domes have a private bathroom, a living room on the first floor and a bed on a mezzanine floor, from where you can uncover the roof of the domes and search the skies.
The Elqui Valley is well known for its perfectly clear skies and nice weather, as well as for its great potential for UFO spotting and studying astronomy.
Take this excursion on horseback to the Andes along the trails of the local cowboys, an adventure that will take you through a natural and wild landscape under a perfect blue sky and along the Cochiguaz river. You will be accompanied by a trained guide who will educate you on the skies using a 12" telescope while sitting around a campfire and drinking pisco sours.
The next morning is a trip to the scientific observatory of Cerro Tololo, which includes a visit to the observatory’s facilities and a guided tour introducing the research done at the complex. That evening check-in to a hotel in Vicuña before a night tour to the observatory.
Mysterious patterns have appeared in the fields of Wiltshire, just one mile from the equally bizarre Stonehenge. Many sightings have occurred here including a large disc-shaped object hovering above the site. The prehistoric monument includes a ring of massive stones dating back to around 3100 BC and is listed as a World Heritage site. Supporters of the theory that ancient aliens built the landmark also consider the area a landing pad for spaceships or a location marker for extraterrestrials.
Sign for Little A'Le'Inn and flying saucer near Area 51. (Getty Images)
AREA 51, NEVADA (S4 Papoose Mountain Facility)
This U.S. military installation is located almost 100 miles north of Las Vegas and is commonly known to UFO conspiracy theorists as a location the U.S. government refused to acknowledge. They believe that the area is a storage facility for the examination of a crashed alien spacecraft including its occupants both living and dead as well as materials recovered at Roswell. They also believe the area is used to manufacture aircraft based on alien technology.
Some UFOlogists are now claiming a secret underground facility has been discovered in the base of the Papoose Mountains, in Lincoln County, Nevada, where recovered alien space crafts and extraterrestrial beings are kept hidden away and no longer at Area 51.
This tour takes you to locations near the famed Area 51, departing from Las Vegas for nighttime explorations. Area 51 is a highly classified remote detachment of Edwards Air Force Base so visitors are limited on how close they can get.
Sedona, Arizona is one of America's most popular destinations for spotting U.F.O.s. Nightly tours go out with visitors equipped with night vision glasses, binoculars, and telescopes. The amount of activity recorded is staggering including reported sightings of; Orbs, portals, aliens, and even Bigfoots all within the high desert.
The mysterious Bradshaw Ranch also draws numerous tourists. Located deep within the national forest, it is reported to have been confiscated by the U.S. Government because it housed one of the most powerful inter-dimensional portals on the planet. Visitors are not allowed in the National Forest at night, but several tour operators will take you there and stay until dusk. According to accounts, it’s in the last hour of twilight when many of these phenomena take place. There are even more outrageous reports of a top-secret underground base at the ranch as well as an elaborate tunnel system, possibly used by both extraterrestrials and the U.S. military.
This tour begins with a two-hour meditation walk starting at the Amitabha Stupa, Sedona’s most spiritual vortex. Guides will take you through a guided meditation and even offer a paranormal video tour. After sunset, you can visit a well known hot spot of UFO activity where the company guarantees sightings of UFO’s, using special night vision goggles.
UFOs are not an uncommon sight in Wycliffe Well. They are known to appear at the beginning of the dry season, from May to October. Wycliffe Well is located in the Northern Territory along the Stuart Highway between Alice Springs and Tennant Creek and considers itself the UFO capital of Australia. Wycliffe Well is said to be one of the top five UFO hotspots in the world and guarantees a sighting every couple of days. Visitors can stay in cabins at the Wycliffe Well Holiday Park located 236 miles from Alice Springs.
Ural Mountains Perm Anomalous Zone (Shutterstock)
M TRIANGLE, RUSSIA
This famous Perm Anomalous Zone is located in a remote area near the Ural Mountains in Russia. The M Triangle is one of the most mysterious places in the world and was discovered in the 1980s. Reports of watches that stop, and bright glowing and colored lightning appearing in the sky. Ufologists consider this a sign of underground fractures where strong energy emits. This wave duct for electromagnetic energy usually results in color, sound, and other phenomena.
The village of Molyobka sits on the border of the Perm and Sverdlovsk regions. Opposite the village, on the left bank of the Sylva River, is the famous Molyobka Triangle. When Perm geologist Emil Bachurin found a circular, 206-foot impression in the snow in the 80's, the location quickly became a location for enthusiasts to explore Yetis, UFOs, shining spheres, and plasmoids.
The area is currently developing a UFO park, and local businesses are building hotels and observatories for tourists as well as installing gravity meters, infrared cameras, and magnetic-field sensors. UFO tourism is also popular in nearby Tolyatti, where visitors can see some of the world’s largest crop circles.
Joshua Tree SunsetCONTACT IN THE DESERT
JOSHUA TREE, CALIFORNIA
Joshua Tree is on 29 Palms Highway, about a three-hour drive from LAX. The area is known to have many underground waterways all featuring a high mineral content. Joshua Tree National Park was once home to 300 mines and includes a unique white crystal quartz hill behind Giant Rock. Visitors often go searching for the hidden alien base that is rumored to be located somewhere beneath the expansive desert.
UFOlogists believe that Joshua Tree sits on the 33rd North parallel just like Roswell. The research behind the 33rd North parallel provides the location for the most UFO sightings.
Dr. Steven Greer is a controversial UFOlogist who founded the Center for the Study of Extraterrestrial Intelligence (CSETI) and the Disclosure Project, which seeks the disclosure of allegedly suppressed UFO information. Each week-long expedition is limited to about 25 and includes an intensive training program with Dr. Greer. At night the group meets under the stars for 4-5 hours to make contact using Greer's CE-5 Contact Protocols. During the intensive training program, visitors learn how to make contact with ET civilizations and how to really become an Ambassador to the Universe.
For the past five years, UFO researchers ranging from professionals to fans converge on the California High Desert for a long weekend of lectures and workshops on the unexplained. The Woodstock of UFOlogy is a weekend of education into the Science of UFOs & Extraterrestrial Life, Ancient Aliens, Human Origins, Crop Circles, Government Disclosure, UFO Sightings and Interplanetary Living.
UFO Festival in RoswellROSWELL UFO FESTIVAL
ROSWELL, NEW MEXICO
Roswell has been at the heart of the UFO scene since July 1947 when the military announced it had found the remains of a crashed UFO in the desert nearby. Ever since the legendary Roswell UFO crash of July 1947 alien conspiracy theorists have claimed the remains of a flying saucer, and even dead aliens, were secretly taken into storage.
Visits to the crash sites are difficult to navigate deep in the desert, so many tourists visit the Roswell Spacewalk and the International UFO Museum and Research Center.
Every Fourth of July weekend the city of Roswell organizes the UFO Festival, a celebration of all things extraterrestrial. Thousands of people meet on Main Street for the Comic-Con of UFO devotees. Costume contests, and a long weekend of lectures and book signings put on by Roswell’s International UFO Museum.
PROFESSIONAL ALIEN EXPLORATION
Aside from the numerous tourist locations around the world, the scientific community is ramping up efforts to discover the unknown and to hopefully make contact with extraterrestrials. The following are the top satellite and research programs that are currently active with a few offering tourists to visit their facilities.
A planned space telescope for NASA's Explorers program, designed to search for exoplanets using the transit method is planned to launch in March 2018. The conclusion is that Europa or Enceladus are both possible life planets as well as the discovery of Kepler-452b. It is the first near-Earth-size world to be found in the habitable zone of a star that is similar to our sun. And, in 2015, NASA announced strong evidence that liquid water flows intermittently on present-day Mars.
The James Webb Space Telescope is a large infrared telescope with a 6.5-meter primary mirror. The telescope will be launched on an Ariane 5 rocket from French Guiana in Spring 2019 and will study the formation of solar systems capable of supporting life on planets like Earth.
(NExSS) is a NASA research coordination network dedicated to the study of planetary habitability. The goals of NExSS are to investigate the diversity of exoplanets and to learn how their history, geology, and climate interact to create the conditions for life.
Project Breakthrough Co-Founders Mark Zuckerberg (L) and Yuri Milner
Billionaire Yuri Milner, physicist Stephen Hawking, and Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg have launched the $100 million Breakthrough Listen program. The program is focused on astronomical observations in search of evidence of intelligent life beyond Earth. It is by far the most comprehensive search ever undertaken for artificial radio and optical signals encompassing a complete survey of the 1,000,000 nearest stars, the plane and center of our galaxy, and the 100 nearest galaxies.
The CNES French Space Agency service is funded by the French government. Its mission is to collect reports of UFO or UAP (Unidentified Aerospace Phenomena) sightings that have occurred over the French territory, to provide an explanation when possible, and to answer questions from the public.
SETI, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence is located in Mountain View, California and seeks evidence of life in the universe by looking for some signature of its technology. More than 90 scientists work at the Institute looking for life beyond Earth. The Allen Telescope is sometimes available for tours and is located 350 miles North of the Institute.
Great Refractor Telescope in CaliforniaUC OBSERVATORY
UC Santa Cruz and UC Berkeley have given the Lick Observatory's 40-inch Nickel Telescope a new pulse-detection system capable of finding laser beacons from civilizations many light-years away. The automated planet finder (APF) is the world's first robotic telescope capable of detecting rocky planets that might support life in other solar systems. Located one hour from San Jose in the Santa Clara Valley, visitors are allowed inside the dome of the36-inch great refractor Thursday-Sunday.
Operated by the Institute for Astronomy at the University of Hawaii. A strange oblong asteroid named Oumuamua was recently detected by Pan-STARRS through its collection of telescopes perched high above the Hawaiian island of Maui. The SETI Institute began scanning Oumuamua with its Allen Telescope Array on Nov. 23, 2017. So far, they have spent 60 hours checking for transmissions over a wide range of frequencies. Another SETI project, Breakthrough Listen, will soon devote 10 hours to investigating Oumuamua using a large antenna in West Virginia.
Chinas five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Telescope (FAST), is located in a rural part of China’s Guizhou province and will be used to try to solve some of the universe’s biggest mysteries. One of its primary missions is to detect communication signals or messages from alien civilizations.
New NASA Team Tackles Next Challenges in Detecting Life Beyond Earth
The question, "Are we alone?" has been a subject of speculation for centuries. The answer may soon lie within the grasp of science.
Decides of research have led scientists to look deeply into the nature of life itself — what it is, how it began on Earth, and what other worlds might also support it. A shift in focus is now emerging as scientists recognize that with a strategic push the possibility of detecting life beyond Earth could be on the horizon.
To support NASA’s growing emphasis on detecting life beyond Earth, NASA’s Ames Research Center in California’s Silicon Valley has established the Center for Life Detection Science. CLDS brings together a diverse group of researchers at Ames and NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland to tackle the next set of challenges science must overcome to be able to one day detect life beyond Earth.
“We now have the scientific and engineering expertise to address this profound question with the clarity of scientific evidence — and we have a great community of scientists ready for that grand challenge,” said Tori Hoehler, the principal investigator of CLDS and a researcher at Ames
The center’s formation comes at a critical moment in the field of astrobiology, the study of the origin of life and its potential in the universe. A recent report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine found that NASA should ramp up efforts to develop technologies capable of detecting life beyond Earth to use on future missions. The report, intended to help NASA develop its science strategy and research goals for the next 20 years, also urged the agency to seek collaboration with a diverse expertise outside of traditional space sciences to get more out of space mission opportunities.
In this spirit, the center is playing a foundational role in establishing a new consortium of researchers from within and outside of NASA with expertise in the physical sciences, biology, astrophysics and more. The Network for Life Detection, or NfoLD, will drive research in ways that inform where NASA should best invest its resources and the design of future missions with the capabilities of detecting life.
CLDS is joined by competitively selected teams from Georgetown University in Washington, DC and Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, Georgia to comprise the founding membership of NfoLD.
The Laboratory for Agnostic Biosignatures asks how we can recognize life “as we don’t know it.” Led by principal investigator Sarah Stewart Johnson of Georgetown University, this team of international researchers will lay the groundwork for detecting biosignatures of lifeforms that could be very different than those found on Earth, allowing for yet-to-be-conceived biochemistries that could produce exotic biomolecules.
The Oceans Across Space and Time team will investigate the possibilities of past or present life in the oceans of the icy, outer moons of our solar system, or on ancient Mars. By studying the conditions of aquatic systems that control their habitability, the team, led by principal investigator Britney Schmidt of Georgia Tech, will determine possible means of detecting biological activity in those systems.
Meanwhile, the center is connecting this new community of NfoLD researchers by building an interactive repository of information where researchers can explore and debate approaches in life detection that may one day be used to search for evidence of life on other worlds.
“The search for life beyond Earth cannot be a one-size-fits-all approach,” said Hoehler. “To give ourselves the best shot at success, we need to develop tools and strategies that are tailored to detecting life in the unique conditions of other worlds, which are very different not only from Earth but also from each other.”
NfoLD’s three founding teams are expected to be joined in the coming year by dozens of new teams that are pursuing life detection-themed science or technology development. It represents a relatively new organizing model supported by NASA, called a research coordination network. NASA’s Astrobiology Program organized its first successful one in 2015 — the Nexus for Exoplanet System Science, which was formed to study the habitability of planets beyond our solar system. NfoLD is the second one to come online with at least three more expected to form in future years in areas of astrobiology.
Top Image: This image is an artist's conception of what life could look like on the surface of a distant planet. Credit: NASA
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For news media: Members of the news media interested in covering this topic should get in touch through the NASA Ames media contacts page.
There are lots of reasons why colonizing space seems compelling. The popular astronomer Neil deGrasse Tysonarguesthat it would stimulate the economy and inspire the next generation of scientists. Elon Musk, who founded SpaceX, argues that “there is a strong humanitarian argument for making life multiplanetary…to safeguard the existence of humanity in the event that something catastrophic were to happen.” The former administrator of NASA, Michael Griffin, frames it as a matter of the “survival of the species.” And the late astrophysicist Stephen Hawking hasconjecturedthat if humanity fails to colonize space within 100 years, we could face extinction.
Illustration by NASA/JPL-Caltech
To be sure, humanity will eventually need to escape Earth to survive, since the sun will make the planet uninhabitable in about 1 billion years. But for many “space expansionists,” escaping Earth is about much more than dodging the bullet of extinction: it’s about realizing astronomical amounts of value by exploiting the universe’s vast resources to create something resembling utopia. For example, the astrobiologist Milan Cirkovic calculates that some 1046 people per century could come into existence if we were to colonize our Local Supercluster, Virgo. This leads Nick Bostrom to argue that failing to colonize space would be tragic because it would mean that these potential “worthwhile lives” would never exist, and this would be morally bad.
But would these trillions of lives actually be worthwhile? Or would colonization of space lead to a dystopia?
In a recent article in Futures, which was inspired by political scientist Daniel Deudney’s forthcoming book Dark Skies, I decided to take a closer look at this question. My conclusion is that in a colonized universe the probability of the annihilation of the human race could actually rise rather than fall.
The argument is based on ideas from evolutionary biology and international relations theory, and it assumes that there aren’t any other technologically advanced lifeforms capable of colonizing the universe (as a recent study suggests is the case).
Consider what is likely to happen as humanity hops from Earth to Mars, and from Mars to relatively nearby, potentially habitable exoplanets like Epsilon Eridani b, Gliese 674 b, and Gliese 581 d. Each of these planets has its own unique environments that will drive Darwinian evolution, resulting in the emergence of novel species over time, just as species that migrate to a new island will evolve different traits than their parent species. The same applies to the artificial environments of spacecraft like “O’Neill Cylinders,” which are large cylindrical structures that rotate to produce artificial gravity. Insofar as future beings satisfy the basic conditions of evolution by natural selection—such as differential reproduction, heritability, and variation of traits across the population—then evolutionary pressures will yield new forms of life.
But the process of “cyborgization”—that is, of using technology to modify and enhance our bodies and brains—is much more likely to influence the evolutionary trajectories of future populations living on exoplanets or in spacecraft. The result could be beings with completely novel cognitive architectures (or mental abilities), emotional repertoires, physical capabilities, lifespans, and so on.
In other words, natural selection and cyborgization as humanity spreads throughout the cosmos will result in species diversification. At the same time, expanding across space will also result in ideological diversification. Space-hopping populations will create their own cultures, languages, governments, political institutions, religions, technologies, rituals, norms, worldviews, and so on. As a result, different species will find it increasingly difficult over time to understand each other’s motivations, intentions, behaviors, decisions, and so on. It could even make communication between species with alien languages almost impossible. Furthermore, some species might begin to wonder whether the proverbial “Other” is conscious. This matters because if a species Y cannot consciously experience pain, then another species X might not feel morally obligated to care about Y. After all, we don’t worry about kicking stones down the street because we don’t believe that rocks can feel pain. Thus, as I write in the paper, phylogenetic and ideological diversification will engender a situation in which many species will be “not merely aliens to each other but, more significantly, alienated from each other.”
But this yields some problems. First, extreme differences like those just listed will undercut trust between species. If you don’t trust that your neighbor isn’t going to steal from, harm, or kill you, then you’re going to be suspicious of your neighbor. And if you’re suspicious of your neighbor, you might want an effective defense strategy to stop an attack—just in case one were to happen. But your neighbor might reason the same way: she’s not entirely sure that you won’t kill her, so she establishes a defense as well. The problem is that, since you don’t fully trust her, you wonder whether her defense is actually part of an attack plan. So you start carrying a knife around with you, which she interprets as a threat to her, thus leading her to buy a gun, and so on. Within the field of international relations, this is called the “security dilemma,” and it results in a spiral of militarization that can significantly increase the probability of conflict, even in cases where all actors have genuinely peaceful intentions.
So, how can actors extricate themselves from the security dilemma if they can’t fully trust each other? On the level of individuals, one solution has involved what Thomas Hobbes’ calls the “Leviathan.” The key idea is that people get together and say, “Look, since we can’t fully trust each other, let’s establish an independent governing system—a referee of sorts—that has a monopoly on the legitimate use of force. By replacing anarchy with hierarchy, we can also replace the constant threat of harm with law and order.” Hobbes didn’t believe that this happened historically, only that this predicament is what justifies the existence of the state. According to Steven Pinker, the Leviathan is a major reason that violence has declined in recent centuries.
The point is that if individuals—you and I—can overcome the constant threat of harm posed by our neighbors by establishing a governing system, then maybe future species could get together and create some sort of cosmic governing system that could similarly guarantee peace by replacing anarchy with hierarchy. Unfortunately, this looks unpromising within the “cosmopolitical” realm. One reason is that for states to maintain law and order among their citizens, their various appendages—e.g., law enforcement, courts—need to be properly coordinated. If you call the police about a robbery and they don’t show up for three weeks, then what’s the point of living in that society? You’d be just as well off on your own! The question is, then, whether the appendages of a cosmic governing system could be sufficiently well-coordinated to respond to conflicts and make top-down decisions about how to respond to particular situations. To put it differently: If conflict were to break out in some region of the universe, could the relevant governing authorities respond soon enough for it to matter, for it to make a difference?
Probably not, because of the immense vastness of space. For example, consider again Epsilon Eridani b, Gliese 674 b, and Gliese 581 d. These are, respectively, 10.5, 14.8, and 20.4 light-years from Earth. This means that a signal sent as of this writing, in 2018, wouldn’t reach Gliese 581 d until 2038. A spaceship traveling at one-quarter the cosmic speed limit wouldn’t arrive until 2098, and a message to simply affirm that it had arrived safely wouldn’t return to Earth until 2118. And Gliese 581 is relatively close as far as exoplanets go. Just consider that he Andromeda Galaxy is some 2.5 million light-years from Earth and the Triangulum Galaxy about 3 million light-years away. What’s more, there are some 54 galaxies in our Local Group, which is about 10 million light-years wide, within a universe that stretches some 93 billion light-years across.
Illustration by NASA/JPL-Caltech
These facts make it look hopeless for a governing system to effectively coordinate law enforcement activities, judicial decisions, and so on, across cosmic distances. The universe is simply too big for a government to establish law and order in a top-down fashion.
But there is another strategy for achieving peace: Future civilizations could use a policy of deterrence to prevent other civilizations from launching first strikes. A policy of this sort, which must be credible to work, says: “I won’t attack you first, but if you attack me first, I have the capabilities to destroy you in retaliation.” This was the predicament of the US and Soviet Union during the Cold War, known as “mutually-assured destruction” (MAD).
But could this work in the cosmopolitical realm of space? It seems unlikely. First, consider how many future species there could be: upwards of many billions. While some of these species would be too far away to pose a threat to each other—although see the qualification below—there will nonetheless exist a huge number within one’s galactic backyard. The point is that the sheer number would make it incredibly hard to determine who initiated a first strike, if one is attacked. And without a method for identifying instigators with high reliability, one’s policy of deterrence won’t be credible. And if one’s policy of deterrence isn’t credible, then one has no such policy!
Second, ponder the sorts of weapons that could become available to future spacefaring civilizations. Redirected asteroids (a.k.a., “planetoid bombs”), “rods from God,” sun guns, laser weapons, and no doubt an array of exceptionally powerful super-weapons that we can’t currently imagine. It has even been speculated that the universe might exist in a “metastable” state and that a high-powered particle accelerator could tip the universe into a more stable state. This would create a bubble of total annihilation that spreads in all directions at the speed of light—which opens up the possibility that a suicidal cult, or whatever, weaponizes a particle accelerator to destroy the universe.
The question, then, is whether defensive technologies could effectively neutralize such risks. There’s a lot to say here, but for the present purposes just note that, historically speaking, defensive measures have very often lagged behind offensive measures, thus resulting in periods of heightened vulnerability. This is an important point because when it comes to existentially dangerous super-weapons, one only needs to be vulnerable for a short period to risk annihilation.
So far as I can tell, this seriously undercuts the credibility of policies of deterrence. Again, if species A cannot convince species B that if B strikes it, A will launch an effective and devastating counter strike, then B may take a chance at attacking A. In fact, B does not need to be malicious to do this: it only needs to worry that A might, at some point in the near- or long-term future, attack B, thus making it rational for B to launch a preemptive strike (to eliminate the potential danger). Thinking about this predicament in the radically multi-polar conditions of space, it seems fairly obvious that conflict will be extremely difficult to avoid.
The lesson of this argument is not to uncritically assume that venturing into the heavens will necessarily make us safer or more existentially secure. This is a point that organizations hoping to colonize Mars, such as SpaceX, NASA, and Mars One should seriously contemplate. How can humanity migrate to another planet without bringing our problems with us? And how can different species that spread throughout the cosmos maintain peace when sufficient mutual trust is unattainable and advanced weaponry could destroy entire civilizations?
Human beings have made many catastrophically bad decisions in the past. Some of these outcomes could have been avoided if only the decision-makers had deliberated a bit more about what could go wrong—i.e., had done a “premortem” analysis. We are in that privileged position right now with respect to space colonization. Let’s not dive head-first into waters that turn out to be shallow.
Phil Torres is the director of the Project for Human Flourishing and the author of Morality, Foresight, and Human Flourishing: An Introduction to Existential Risks.
A citizen astronomer looking for Planet 9 found something that actually exists but still has professional astronomers scratching their heads and mouthing the words, “This changes everything.” It’s an ancient white dwarf star with rings like Saturn that is far older and colder than any other ringed white dwarf star, which may force astronomers to change their theories on how white dwarfs form, age and die. Will Planet 9 be forced out of hiding due to jealousy over the publicity this discovery is getting?
“This object was found by Melina Thévenot of Germany using the Backyard Worlds project. She originally thought it might be a cold brown dwarf, something the project is very interested in and has had a lot of success finding.”
In a press release by Arizona State University, (and in a paper published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters), ASU astronomer Adam Schneider announced the discovery which he had verified as part of NASA’s Backyard Worlds: Planet 9 project which was launched two years ago as a way to get free research assistance by using volunteer astronomers to sort through infrared data available online and look for anomalies. Citizen astronomer Thévenot was hoping for a cold brown dwarf (no Snow White jokes, please) because they’re rare and unusual objects that are too big to be a planet but too small for a star – the perfect key to fame when your project has no fortune.
“When Melina investigated further, she found that although the object had significant infrared brightness; it was not a nearby brown dwarf. The team looked at it together, and we determined it was likely a white dwarf with infrared excess.”
An illustration of LSPM J0207+3331 )
Image credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center / Scott Wiessinger)
The ringed white dwarf (located 145 light-years away in the constellation Capricornus) still brought Melinda fame because the infrared excess is a sign the rings are warmer than normally seen around a white dwarf and highly unusual because of its advanced age — LSPM J0207+3331 (the dwarf’s official non-Disney name) is 3 billion years old, which is three times older than any other white dwarf with a ring or disk.
Is this a big deal? Schneider didn’t know because he’s a brown dwarf expert (who knew NASA astronomers were such specialists?) so he sent it to John Debes, an astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore and a white dwarf expert. As such, he was gushing with astronomical excitement when he saw the data.
“This white dwarf is so old that whatever process is feeding material into its rings must operate on billion-year timescales. Most of the models scientists have created to explain rings around white dwarfs only work well up to around 100 million years, so this star is really challenging our assumptions of how planetary systems evolve.”
But wait … there’s more! Debes looked at follow-up observations taken by the Keck II telescope at the W. M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii and discovered that the ring or disk around this old white dwarf was made of multiple components. Normally, as a ringed white dwarf dies, the particles in the ring fall to the surface of the old star and the ring eventually disappears. LSPM J0207+3331 is far too ancient to still have rings of any kind.
Artist’s impression of a baby star still surrounded by a protoplanetary disc
Put all of those anomalies together and Melina Thévenot gets a “this changes everything” merit badge and a laurel and hardy handshake. Believe it or not, Schneider says that’s enough incentive for Backyard Worlds: Planet 9’s estimated 150,000 volunteers to have discovered over 1,000 potential brown dwarfs in just two years.
What about Planet 9? Are these dedicated citizen astronomers being used by NASA for free research under the guise that it really wants them to find the elusive and yet-unproven Planet 9?
Melina Thévenot is probably back on her computer trying to prove them wrong.
One of the problems with UFO reports from over the years actually has to do with their diversity. That is to say, some of the already far-fetched sounding reports of “flying saucers” might be more easily accepted by scientists if they all described essentially the same thing, rather than a seemingly endless variety of unusual aerial vehicles in our skies. The fact that such variety does exist, according to many accounts, lessens the likelihood that a majority of those cases represent some legitimate phenomenon.
Another problem is that very few of the so-called “flying saucers” appear to be anything that actually resembles saucers or discs at all. Even Kenneth Arnold’s famous 1947 sighting, which led to this first unofficial name for what later became known as unidentified flying objects or UFOs, raises some doubts: Arnold initially described objects that more closely resembled some variety of flying wing or delta shaped craft, on par with some of our modern stealth aircraft. His memory of the incident appears to have changed slightly within a few months, after the proliferation of the “flying saucer” meme in American newspapers.
However, there have been plenty of incidents from over the years that did involve alleged objects resembling pancakes, flattened spheres, doughnuts without holes, and other similar disc-shapes. Often, these more traditional “saucers” that appear in UFO literature from time to time are fitted with something akin to a spherical dome on the top and/or the bottom of the craft. Many of these unusual objects also produce light from one or more locations, usually on the underside of the craft.
It is one such alleged “saucer” along these lines that also comprises what may be, arguably, one of the most unusual UFO incidents of the 20th century. The sighting occurred on September 10, 1976, shortly before 1 AM at a farm outside Colusa, California, where Bill Pecha was awake and watching television that morning. His viewing was interrupted with what began as some kind of interference, followed by his television turning off completely. Moments later, his air conditioner also quit running, leading Pecha to think that a circuit breaker might be to blame.
As Pecha went outside and headed in the direction of the breaker, he began to notice his hair standing on end, as though some source of high-voltage electricity could be felt nearby. This concerned Pecha, since he now suspected there might be faulty cabling to blame, presenting a potential electrocution hazard. It was about that time that something in the sky a short distance away caught Pecha’s attention.
“I glanced up and saw this big object,” Pecha recalled. “And I saw these objects hanging down, like cable-like fixtures hanging down below it.” The main body of the craft was a disc shape, which appeared to be rotating in a clockwise orientation, with a large dome that remained stationary on top. The object made little or no sound, and was silver or gray in color, except for the very bottom of the craft, which Pecha described as having a “porcelain” look about it. Light could also be seen emanating from below the craft. The object appeared to be hovering directly above a television antenna at the top of a telephone pole nearby, which Pecha presumed to be the cause of the power disturbance inside his home a few minutes earlier.
Pecha’s description of the weird aircraft sounds more like something from War of the Worlds than from other UFO literature around that time. “As I watched it,” Pecha said, “these tentacle-like things went up and these lights came out of this saucer-like thing, and these big lights came on which was a shaft of lights two of them.”
Pecha went back to his house and awakened his wife, who was still asleep inside. By the time she was able to look out the window at the craft, she described seeing the lights which reminded her of traditional landing lights on a plane. Bill Pecha then went into his 10-year-old son’s room, the window of which provided a view to the west of their home, where Pecha says he was able to see two more similar craft in the distance, also positioned directly over power lines as the initial object had been.
Badly frightened, Pecha and his wife reportedly left with their children and went to the home of a nearby friend named Gail Arrant, speeding despite having their pickup truck’s lights off, for fear that the object would see them. Arriving at the Arrant home, Gail came outside and was able to see a distant object which the Pechas identified as the large, domed saucer that had hovered over their home.
“I couldn’t believe what I was seeing,” Arrant said in an ABC news interview the following year. “No question whatsoever, it was there. I thought, it doesn’t matter to me if anyone believes me or not I know what I saw and Bill too. I mean, it was frightful.”
The National Enquirer, who at the time investigated UFOs fairly often, sent Bob Pratt to look into the case, but the story never made it to print. The Aerial Phenomena Research Organization (APRO) also investigated the incident, of which the following detailed information about Pecha’s observation of the distant objects over the power lines was given, appearing later in a write up by Brad Sparks in the February, 1977 APRO Bulletin:
Each of these far encounter UFOs emitted two light-like beams that hit the tops of the power transmission towers each object was between. The right hand UFO’s beams were blue and all four towers were lit up in blue light. The beams were emitted upwards at 30 to 45 degrees below the horizontal. The towers held up six power lines. One or both of the highest two of these lines glowed bright red from the insulators oftowers-1 and 2 out to an estimated fifty to one hundred feet on both sides of the towers, Pecha reported. (These were the same towers lit up in blue light by the UFO on the Left.) The beams on towers 1 and 2 had “darker” (by this Pecha said he meant brighter, or more intense) blue “jerky” light streams inside them, Pecha said. He said the “jerkiness” was unlike lightning or a zig-zag and it did not seem to have a phase velocity or motion. He could not determine if the beams from the UFO on the right had these “jerky” light-streams or if the power lines near towers-3 and 4 glowed red. The towers and the UFO on the right were more distant than the ones on the left. The left-hand towers were about 4,450 and 5,150 feet away (towers-1 and 2, respectively)—the lines between these towers pointed about 53 degrees off Pecha’s line of sight (so he had a good view of them). The right-hand towers were about 6,200 and 7,320 feet away (towers-3 and 4 respectively). But the lines on these latter towers are pointed only 4 1/2 degrees off Pecha’s line of sight—hence they would have been difficult to see. (The lines from towers-1 and 2 run southeast to northwest, but turn almost due west at tower-2.)
Despite the specificity of the information about Pecha’s observation in the APRO bulletin, finding corroborating data from agencies in the nearby vicinity was more difficult. Allan Hendry, who at the time of the Colusa incident was a full time investigator at J. Allen Hynek’s Center for UFO Studies (CUFOS), followed several potential lines of interest, and was unable to find any additional data, as he noted in The UFO Handbook: A Guide to Investigating, Evaluating, and Reporting UFO Sightings:
I checked with the following agencies to see if they could account for the event, with no success: Sacramento Air Traffic Control, Chico Air Traffic Control, the Oakland Air Route Traffic Control Center, Colusa County Airport, and Beale Air Force Base. On the outside chance that a helicopter with a bright searchlight was somehow behind the sightings, I checked with the California Highway Patrol, the California Forestry Air Coordinator, and the Sacramento National Guard, with negative results; still, there are other sources of helicopters, both civilian and military, within an hour of Colusa. I even tried balloon launch sites; the National Weather Service balloon launched at 4 P.M. bursts after two hours and is not illuminated—if the UFO was one, it would have departed against the wind.
Hendry also contacted the Central Valley Project to see if they had registered any outages in the area coinciding with the disturbances Pecha described, and none were logged by the company. Nonetheless, Hendry noted that “Everyone from the policemen to the publisher of the local paper vouched for Pecha’s reputation of honesty and calmness,” and found no reason to believe he had misreported or sensationalized his family’s experience in any way, strange though it was.
The following year Pecha, family friend Gail Arrant, and even J. Allen Hynek and Allan Hendry of CUFOS, were featured in an ABC news segment which covered the case, as featured in the video below:
By some measures, one might say that the circumstances Pecha and the other witnesses described were the least unusual aspect of the entire affair. The description of the object, however, seems to fall squarely into the realm of early 20th-century science fiction; seldom are “tentacles” or other similar appendages reported elsewhere, even in the more colorful reports of actual saucer-shaped unidentified flying objects. In that regard, the Colusa, California UFO incident remains one of the most intriguing, and yet also truly perplexing cases of unidentified structured aircraft seen in the last century.
WARMED FROM WITHIN? Mars has frigid polar ice caps. But a theoretical underground chamber of magma could help melt ice near the south pole, creating what some scientists think is a lake hiding under the ice.
NASA, ESA AND STSC
If Mars conceals a lake beneath its south polar ice cap, the planet must also have a hidden chamber of magma to keep the water liquid, a new analysis suggests.
Signs of a 20-kilometer-wide lake, buried beneath about a kilometer and a half of ice near Mars’ south pole, were first reported in 2018 by a team led by planetary scientist Roberto Orosei (SN: 8/18/18, p. 6). The discovery kicked off a debate over what it would take to keep the lake liquid in such a frigid environment.
Planetary scientists Michael Sori and Ali Bramson considered various scenarios, including dust mixed in the ice cap to improve its insulating abilities and episodes of past volcanism on the Red Planet. The only way to create enough heat to explain the lake is if a subsurface pool of magma under the ice also exists, the duo reports in the Feb. 12 Geophysical Research Letters.
“We tried to do our due diligence and think of all sorts of alternative factors that could raise the temperature,” Sori says. “The magma stuff was the only one that did it. None of the other factors really even came close.”
The possible lake — the first report of so much liquid water existing on Mars today — appeared as a bright reflection to the radar of the European Space Agency’s Mars Express orbiter. The Martian environment, though, is too cold for water to remain liquid on its own. Orosei, of the National Institute of Astrophysics in Bologna, Italy, and his colleagues had suggested that salts dissolved in the water could keep its melting point low, allowing the lake to exist as a briny sludge.
Conditions beneath the ice are still too cold — an average of –68° Celsius — to explain the lake’s existence just with salts, argue Sori and Bramson, both of the University of Arizona in Tucson. But their calculations show that if around 300,000 years ago, a volcano released magma into a chamber at least five kilometers wide and buried about 10 kilometers beneath where the lake appears to be, that pool could generate enough heat to still be melting salty ice today. Without salt, the magma chamber would have to be larger or closer to the surface, the researchers say.
If the magma chamber is real, it would mean that Mars has been geologically active much more recentlythan planetary scientists think (SN: 3/4/17, p. 12). Previous studies suggested that the most recent geologic activity near Mars’ south pole was millions of years ago, at least.
The chamber’s existence could also be a blow to the purported lake’s habitability: If the lake is only a few hundred thousand years old, that doesn’t give life much time to have gotten started.
Sori and Bramson remain neutral on whether their findings make the lake more or less likely to exist. “Honestly, we’re not sure,” Bramson says. The researchers suggest that future searches look for either the magma chamber or the lake. So far, other radar searches using NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter have not spotted the lake (SN: 12/22/18, p. 29).
The jury is out among other researchers too. The new research doesn’t rule out the role of salts in melting ice, says planetary scientist Bethany Ehlmann of Caltech who was not involved in either study. But “this paper is a nice contribution that explores an alternative hypothesis,” she says.
Orosei stands by his team’s observations. Theoretical arguments showing how difficult it is for liquid water to be present beneath the ice, he says, do not prove the water is not there. “I think that we are just entering a long and exhausting debate,” he says.
CHIP OFF THE OLD BLOCK A massive collision that left Neptune’s second largest moon, Proteus (as seen in the background of this illustration) with a huge crater may have spawned its smallest moon, Hippocamp (foreground).
NASA, ESA, AND J. OLMSTED/STSC
Neptune’s smallest moon may be a chunk of a neighboring moon that was knocked off by a comet.
In 1989, Voyager 2 flew by Neptune, right, and spotted six small inner moons, represented in the composite at left. A tiny moon between Proteus and Larissa went undetected at the time, but Mark Showalter discovered the moon in 2013 using the Hubble Space Telescope and has now officially named it Hippocamp. (Image not to scale.)
One of seven moons that orbit closer to Neptune than the planet’s largest moon, Triton, the newly dubbed Hippocamp is just roughly 34 kilometers across, researchers report in the Feb. 21 Nature. The second-largest moon, Proteus, is Hippocamp’s nearest neighbor, orbiting about 12,000 kilometers away.
“Why would such a small moon be so close to such a big moon?” wondered astronomer Mark Showalter of the SETI Institute in Mountain View, Calif. He and his colleagues used more than a decade’s worth of observations with the Hubble Space Telescope to find the new moon, which was first reported in 2013 (SN Online: 7/16/13). Bigger moons tend to gobble up small ones as the moons form. Stranger still, the pair was probably even closer in the past, because the physics of their orbits suggests that Proteus is slowly migrating away from Neptune.
Pale gray dot
Neptune has seven inner moons (illustrated here with the planet’s rings), and the smallest now has a name: Hippocamp.
C. CHANG
Source: A.J. Verbiscer/Nature 2019, M.R. Showalter et al/Nature 2019
Showalter thinks Hippocamp is a piece of Proteus that was chipped off by a massive collision with a comet. Proteus has a massive crater, called Pharos, which is so big that the impact that made it nearly broke Proteus apart. The collision could have kicked up a cloud of debris that eventually coalesced into a smaller moon.
“They’re far away now, but they were part of the same object in the past,” Showalter says.
The name Hippocamp references a half-horse, half-fish creature from Greek mythology, which pulled a chariot for the god Poseidon (the Roman Neptune). All of Neptune’s moons have names related to the sea in Greek and Roman mythology.
That suits Showalter, who is a scuba diver. “The true story is, I’m very fond of sea horses,” he says.
Editor’s note: This story was updated February 20, 2019, with a new artist’s illustration of Hippocamp.
Citations
M.R. Showalter et al. The seventh inner moon of Neptune. Nature. Vol. 566, February 21, 2019, p. 328. doi: 10.1028/s41586-019-0909-9.
Around this time of year – if the western horizon stays clear – the last few minutes of daylight fall perfectly on Horsetail Falls, making it glow as if on fire. Photographers call it the firefall …
For two weeks out of the year, a spectacular event known as the firefall takes place within Yosemite National Park. Hundreds if not thousands of photographers flock to the valley in hopes of capturing the elusive moment, that is, if the weather, snow and light cooperate. If Yosemite receives an ample amount of snowfall throughout the winter, and if the western horizon stays clear, the last few minutes of daylight fall perfectly upon Horsetail Falls and illuminate it in a vibrant orange and red. The waterfall glows so fiercely that it appears to be on fire. Yesterday, after the valley received several feet of snow for a few days, one last clearing snowstorm led to the perfect mix of ingredients. Water flowing from the beautiful Horsetail Falls and a dazzling mix of broken clouds floating past El Capitan as the sunset set the fall ablaze.
Thank you, Mike!
Bottom line: Fireball at Yosemite National Park, February 17, 2019.
It’s a question that has grabbed the attention of humanity since long before history has been recorded. What life exists outside of this little ball that we call Earth? Whether we’re talking about the gods of Olympus or the Klingons ofStar Trek, it is a theme that has appeared consistently throughout all of human history.
As science expands our knowledge of the universe every year, we half expect the news that extraterrestrial life has been found. But what if we’ve been looking in all the wrong places?
Science predicts many examples of counterintuitive forms of life. While impossible on Earth, they could very well exist elsewhere in the universe. So, without further ado, here are the top 10 scientifically possible extraterrestrial life-forms.
Silicon is a molecule whose structure and chemical properties are remarkably similar to the properties of carbon—the element on which most life on Earth is based. An important part of life as we know it is the ability of carbon to form complex chains of atoms and molecules sufficiently large to contain biological programming such as DNA.
Silicon, also commonly used in computer chips, is the closest that humanity has ever come to designing their own intelligent system. It would have the potential to organically form its own version of DNA under the right circumstances.
Additionally, there are examples on Earth of organisms using silicon in biological structures, specifically in a form of algae known as diatoms. They are responsible for the usage of over six billion metric tons of silicon each year in Earth’s oceans as well as the production of almost 20 percent of the planet’s oxygen.[1]
As a result, it is likely that silicon might exist as a stage of early life on other planets, converting their atmospheres into oxygen and getting them ready for more advanced life later on.
9. Arsenic-Based Life
Although it seems counterintuitive that one of the most iconic poisons on Earth has a basis in forming life, science suggests that it is entirely possible for arsenic to be incorporated into complex biomolecules.
The argument for arsenic in life-forms stems from its chemical similarity to phosphorus, a staple part of DNA in Earth life. Some studies suggest that arsenic may have once been a part of the DNA in early life on Earth, taking the place in DNA that phosphorus does now.
In an early stage of life before microbial activity was able to leech phosphorus from rocks in the ocean, arsenic would have been far more available to organisms living near hydrothermal vents deep in the ocean.[2]
Although evidence suggests that phosphorus is a more efficient chemical than arsenic in advanced life, the poisonous element would likely be good enough for early, simple forms of life. Creatures made of this substance may lurk in the depths of alien oceans.
8. Ammonia-Based Life
Water is an essential part of all Earth life. Our bodies use the liquid as a solvent, which is necessary for almost all chemical reactions that create energy and sustain functions. This is seen in humans and all the way down to the smallest microbes.
But what if there was an alternative to water? Recent science suggests that there is.
For life to exist in a substance other than water, it would be necessary for it to either have a large temperature range at which it is liquid or exist on a planet with little, if any, temperature change over the course of its year. Water exists in a liquid form between 0 degrees Celsius (32 °F) and 100 degrees Celsius (212 °F), a range of 100 degrees Celsius (180 °F).
Ammonia is liquid between -77.7 degrees Celsius (-107.86 °F) and -33.3 degrees Celsius (-27.94 °F), a relatively large range of 44.4 degrees Celsius (79.92 °F). While one might think that such temperatures would be too cold to sustain life, it is likely that the reactions and processes necessary for life could still exist, albeit at a slower speed.[3]
As such, organisms using ammonia rather than water as a chemical solvent would likely live longer but metabolize and evolve more slowly than water-based life.
7. Methane-Based Life
There are some environments in which methane would be far more prevalent than water. Saturn’s moon Titan is a prominent example.
According to a computer model, life which relies on methane would be able to exist in extremely cold areas as well as regions entirely without oxygen. The model revealed that a cell wall could be constructed that would work in liquid methane at -180 degrees Celsius (-292 °F).
Along with the fact that cell membranes could be created with nitrogen, carbon, and hydrogen molecules, which are known to exist in Titan’s oceans, this function means that simple organisms could exist in the frozen depths of methane oceans.[4]
As with ammonia-based organisms, life in methane oceans would inherently be paced much slower than life on Earth. Slow evolution and metabolism would occur due to the frigid temperatures necessary to maintain the ocean of liquids.
Carbon-based life-forms are the only type which we, being carbon-based ourselves, know anything about. Thus, we’re sure that hundreds of planets exist within the potentially habitable zones of their stars. These planets would be able to support life as we know it with oxygen, liquid water, and even the chemicals and reactions necessary to jump-start life.
Additionally, carbon-based life is the only type that we are sure exists, as evidenced by our own planet.
This isn’t to say that carbon-based life on other planets would look at all like Earth’s. Through evolution, it is possible for extraterrestrial carbon-based life to take on a dramatically different form by adapting to fit its environment.
Just look at the massive number of life-forms that exist on Earth. They live everywhere from frigid oceans to the mouths of active volcanoes and fault lines. The existence of organisms on Earth in such extreme environments is proof that it is entirely possible for this kind of life to exist on a wide variety of other planets, including some that we would consider uninhabitable for humans.[5]
5. Hybrid Life
If creatures could hypothetically evolve using an entirely different basis for life than that on Earth, why couldn’t they combine multiple methods? For example, life could be based primarily in silicon, contain elements of carbon or arsenic, and use ammonia as a solvent.
As previously mentioned, some life-forms on Earth incorporate silicon structures into their cells. So why not take it a step further? If an organism evolved on a planet with a relative abundance of multiple elements that could be used in the processes of life, why not take those two and make them into a composite whole?
Silicon and carbon can bond with each other as well as silicon and oxygen, carbon and oxygen, and silicon and fluoride. So it is possible for these molecules to react and form complex chains that would store and transmit information in a manner similar to DNA.
This could also work if a planet had a biosphere with a subset of creatures which used an element such as carbon as their base and another subset which used a different element such as silicon. Rather than a creature being based in two different elements, the biosphere as a whole could contain two different elemental bases for life.[6]
By modeling conditions that are possible in space, a 2007 study found that plasma and dust can function in a way that may qualify as life. They may even form microscopic double helix strands of solid particles through the polarization of plasma and dust. Sound familiar?
Even more fascinating, the study found that these strands can undergo changes such as those associated with organic molecules, specifically DNA. They can divide, copy, and even evolve as less stable strands break apart and more stable ones endure.[7]
These life-forms could exist as chilling entities formed of nonorganic materials in the void between stars inside massive dust clouds or in plasma or dust rings surrounding stars. Through continued evolution, it is entirely possible for such clouds to one day achieve sentience.
Although science does not currently suggest that stars or galaxiesthemselves could form life, it does indicate that life with organic compounds can form outside of a home planet with the help of nearby stars and star structures.
Using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array, organic compounds have been detected in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a satellite galaxy of our own Milky Way. Complex organic molecules such as methanol, dimethyl ether, and methyl formate, all of which are essential in organic life, were detected in two nebulae in the Large Magellanic Cloud.
This suggests that given time and the right circumstances, these compounds could eventually form into self-replicating molecules that would become the basis of life in such nebulae. Later, they could create more complex biological structures. As they would evolve without the basic function of gravity such as on Earth, we have no idea what these creatures might look like.[8]
2. Panspermia
A popular theory is that life propagates through the universe through planetary ejection caused by large impacts on previously populated planets. This theory states that life can be distributed by dust, debris, asteroids, and comets carrying microorganisms from other planets.
For panspermia to be plausible, the organisms must be able to survive intense forces and extremely hot and cold temperatures for extended durations. This is due to the inherent forces involved in an asteroid impact, the heat from friction with a planet’s atmosphere, and the extended time when the organism is in transit through space—potentially thousands or millions of years.[9]
Organisms like that exist on Earth already. These extremophiles can resist extreme cold and heat as well as UV rays and intense forces. Although they are among the most basic known forms of life, they have an unparalleled ability to survive conditions that would kill most other organisms.
Thus, it is entirely plausible that life could have spread throughout the universe via asteroid impacts and the extremophiles that were carried on these alien asteroids.
Even if life was based on the extremophiles from another planet, the simplistic nature of these organisms makes it unlikely that they would evolve into anything that looked like the more complex creatures on the original planet. This is due to the different traits necessary to survive on the two planets.
1. Not At All
Unfortunately, it is entirely possible that we are the only planet in the universe that has life. Due to the vastness of space and the limit that light speed imposes on intergalactic travel, it may be impossible for us to ever discover other life or even determine if it exists at all. In the observable universe, we have not found any concrete evidence that life does or has ever existed on other planets.
With that being said, the universe is only about 13.8 billion years old. While this may seem like a long time, we have no way of knowing how old the universe will become. Perhaps we are the first planet to evolve life, with many others to follow in the future.
We estimate that the universe’s heat death (a state in which there is no longer any free thermal energy) will occur somewhere in between 1 and 100 trillion years. In the worst-case scenario, we are only 1.38 percent of the way through the universe’s expected life span. At best, we are about 0.01 percent of the way there. That is a lot of time for life to happen.[10]
Still, we can’t help but wonder if our signals will ever be received by someone or something out there or if they will just shoot forever through the cold, dark void of space.
'No cause for alarm, Captain!': NASA confirms mysterious blue light spotted in InSight photos by actor William Shatner is just a lens flare, as the robotic lander plays cup-and-ball on Mars - PART I
InSight played Martian game of cup-and-ball over the weekend as it attempted to stow its grapple instrument
The InSight lander placed its seismometer closer to the ground to better hear faint Marsquakes days prior
The InSight lander deployed its first instrument onto the surface of Mars around the end of December
NASA says instruments have been positioned to lowest point yet for the best possible listening opportunity
It might be some time before NASA’s InSight lander starts churning out data, but the new Mars explorer is steadily trucking on with its preparations.
A new animation shared by the space agency shows InSight getting its grapple instrument in place, in a process that looks much like the age-old cup-and-ball game.
InSight has spent the last two months slowly setting up its instruments and conducting equipment health assessments ahead of its mission to listen for underground marsquakes.
In the meantime, the lander’s social media account has attracted the attention of many space enthusiasts – including Star Trek actor William Shatner, who questioned the source of a peculiar blue light that has appeared in some of the photos.
Scroll down for video
A new animation shared by the space agency shows InSight getting its grapple instrument in place, in a process that looks much like the age-old cup-and-ball game. The grapple is one of the many instruments that will help InSight collect unprecedented data about the red planet
‘After a few tries, I’ve successfully stowed by grapple, by grabbing a small restraint mounted on my arm,’ the InSight Twitter account shared this weekend.
‘Sort of a Martian twist on the classic cup-and-ball game.’
An animation posted alongside the update shows the claw-like gripper chasing around a small ball before finally catching it.
The grapple is one of the many instruments that will help InSight collect unprecedented data about the red planet.
InSight’s Twitter updates sparked curiosity on social media last week when actor William Shatner noticed a blue light in one of the animations.
The lander’s social media account has attracted the attention of many space enthusiasts – including Star Trek actor William Shatner, who questioned the source of a peculiar blue light that has appeared in some of the photos
But, NASA says there’s nothing unusual (or alien-related) about the dancing light.
‘Just a bit of lens flare as the sun dips low on the horizon,’ NASA explained on Twitter. ‘(Both photos were taken shortly before sunset.) No cause for alarm, Captain!’
Earlier this month, the InSight lander leaned in for a better listen of Mars’ underground tremors. The robotic explorer placed its seismometer on the surface at the end of last month, and is now getting even closer ‘for a better connection with Mars.’
This will help its instruments pick up fainter signals that may otherwise have been missed.
Days prior, InSight leveled out its seismometer and adjusted the internal sensors ahead of lowering everything down toward the ground.
NASA’s InSight lander is leaning in for a better listen of Mars’ underground tremors. The robotic explorer placed its seismometer on the surface at the end of last month, and is now getting even closer ‘for a better connection with Mars.’ Before and after images show its instrument at its lowest position yet
INSIGHT'S THREE KEY INSTRUMENTS
The lander that could reveal how Earth was formed: InSight lander set for Mars landing on november 26th
Three key instruments will allow the InSight lander to 'take the pulse' of the red planet:
Seismometer: The InSight lander carries a seismometer, SEIS, that listens to the pulse of Mars.
The seismometer records the waves traveling through the interior structure of a planet.
Studying seismic waves tells us what might be creating the waves.
On Mars, scientists suspect that the culprits may be marsquakes, or meteorites striking the surface.
Heat probe: InSight's heat flow probe, HP3, burrows deeper than any other scoops, drills or probes on Mars before it.
It will investigate how much heat is still flowing out of Mars.
Radio antennas: Like Earth, Mars wobbles a little as it rotates around its axis.
To study this, two radio antennas, part of the RISE instrument, track the location of the lander very precisely.
This helps scientists test the planet's reflexes and tells them how the deep interior structure affects the planet's motion around the Sun.
‘It’s always good to be centered and balanced,’ the InSight Twitter account shared.
The lander also released the slack in its cable to keep it from fluttering around in the wind.
Now, NASA says the instruments have been positioned to the lowest point yet for the best possible listening opportunity.
‘My seismometer has now crouched down to its lowest level, for a better connection with Mars,’ the InSight Twitter account posted this week. 'Faint signals are easier to hear if you keep your ear close to the ground.’
The InSight lander deployed its first instrument onto the surface of Mars around the end of December.
Images from the lander show the seismometer on the ground, after it was lifted onto the surface by the lander's robotic arm.
It will record the waves traveling through the interior structure of the planet, and could help explain mysterious 'marsquakes' scientists believe occur regularly.
At the time, NASA said the lander war performing flawlessly, and was ahead of schedule.
New images from the lander show the seismometer on the ground, after it was lifted onto the surface by the lander's robotic arm. It will record the waves traveling through the interior structure of the planet, and could help explain mysterious 'marsquakes' scientists believe occur regularly. This was the first time a science instrument had ever been placed onto the surface of another planet.
WHAT WILL THE SEISMOMETER DO?
The seismometer allows scientists to peer into the Martian interior by studying ground motion — also known as marsquakes.
Each marsquake acts as a kind of flashbulb that illuminates the structure of the planet's interior.
By analyzing how seismic waves pass through the layers of the planet, scientists can deduce the depth and composition of these layers.
'InSight's timetable of activities on Mars has gone better than we hoped,' said InSight Project Manager Tom Hoffman, who is based at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.
'Getting the seismometer safely on the ground is an awesome Christmas present.'
The InSight team has been working toward deploying its two dedicated science instruments onto Martian soil since landing on Mars on Nov. 26.
Engineers tested the commands for the lander, making sure a model in the test bed at JPL deployed the instruments exactly as intended.
Scientists also had to analyze images of the Martian terrain around the lander to figure out the best places to deploy the instruments.
On Tuesday, Dec. 18, InSight engineers sent up the commands to the spacecraft.
On Wednesday, Dec. 19, the seismometer was gently placed onto the ground directly in front of the lander, about as far away as the arm can reach — 5.367 feet, or 1.636 meters, away).
'Seismometer deployment is as important as landing InSight on Mars,' said InSight Principal Investigator Bruce Banerdt, based at JPL.
'The seismometer is the highest-priority instrument on InSight: We need it in order to complete about three-quarters of our science objectives.'
NASA InSight✔@NASAInSight
Whew – winding down after a long day, but I’ve done it: I’ve placed my seismometer on the surface of Mars! With SEIS, I’ll be able to listen in for marsquakes and help reveal the heartbeat of
The 'Martian rock garden' it built in a Pasadena warehouse to test its InSight rover Engineers practice deploying InSight's instruments in a lab at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. Several of them are wearing sunglasses to block the bright yellow lights in the test space, which mimic sunlight as it appears on Mars.
The seismometer allows scientists to peer into the Martian interior by studying ground motion — also known as marsquakes.
'Having the seismometer on the ground is like holding a phone up to your ear,' said Philippe Lognonné, principal investigator of SEIS from Institut de Physique du Globe de Paris (IPGP) and Paris Diderot University.
'We're thrilled that we're now in the best position to listen to all the seismic waves from below Mars' surface and from its deep interior.'
In the coming days, the InSight team will work on leveling the seismometer, which is sitting on ground that is tilted 2 to 3 degrees.
The first seismometer science data should begin to flow back to Earth after the seismometer is in the right position.
'We look forward to popping some Champagne when we start to get data from InSight's seismometer on the ground,' Banerdt added.
'I have a bottle ready for the occasion.'
Meanwhile, the Rotation and Interior Structure Experiment (RISE), which does not have its own separate instrument, has already begun using InSight's radio connection with Earth to collect preliminary data on the planet's core.
Not enough time has elapsed for scientists to deduce what they want to know — scientists estimate they might have some results starting in about a year.
This image shows some of the instruments visible in the selfie image sent back to Earth by InSight early last Tuesday morning
NASA also recently has finally pinpointed the exact landing location of its new Mars explorer, thanks to a powerful camera on its Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.
While the space agency knew InSight had landed within an 81-mile-long (130 km) ellipse on the red planet, there was no way to determine exactly where it touched down within this region.
Now, a series of images captured this week by MRO's HiRISE camera have confirmed that the lander, heat shield, and parachute all sit within 1,000 feet of each other on a lava plain called Elysium Planitia.
NASA has finally pinpointed the exact landing location of its new Mars explorer, thanks to a powerful camera on its Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. While the space agency knew InSight had landed within an 81-mile-long (130 km) ellipse on the red planet, there was no way to determine exactly where it touched down within this region
In the images released today by NASA, InSight and its parts appear as bright teal specks on rust-colored landscape.
But in reality, this is only a trick of the light.
'Light reflected off their surfaces causes the color to be saturated,' NASA explains.
'The ground around the lander appears dark, having been blasted by its retrorockets during descent. Look carefully for a butterfly shape, and you can make out the lander's solar panels on either side.'
Just days ago, NASA's new InSight lander snapped its first selfie from the red planet, giving the mission team (and the rest of the world) a good look at its solar panels and deck now that it's settled in.
InSight also sent back the first complete view of the 14-by-7-foot swath of land that will soon serve as its 'workspace.'
In the images released today by NASA, InSight and its parts appear as bright teal specks on rust-colored landscape. But in reality, this is only a trick of the light
A series of images captured this week by MRO's HiRISE camera have confirmed that the lander (red dot), heat shield, and parachute all sit within 1,000 feet of each other on a lava plain called Elysium Planitia. Previously, the space agency only knew they'd landed within an 81-mile ellipse (blue)
Each of the new images is a mosaic of several captures stitched together.
While the selfie, captured by the robotic arm, is a composite of 11 pictures, the workspace view includes 52 individual photos.
This is allowing scientists to get a good look at the area well before InSight starts putting down its instruments and digging into the ground.
'The near-absense of rocks, hills, and holes means it'll be extremely safe for our instruments,' said InSight's Principal Investigator Bruce Banerdt of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
'This might seem like a pretty plain piece of ground if it weren't on Mars, but we're glad to see that.'
NASA has confirmed the landing sites for InSight, its parachute, and other components thanks to new images from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter
InSight previously sent back the first complete view of the 14-by-7-foot swath of land that will soon serve as its 'workspace,' indicated in the blue crescent. The team says it looks 'extremely safe'. Its parachute, back shell, and heat shield all landed about 1,000 feet away
Even Mars robots act like tourists every once in a while. NASA's new InSight lander has snapped its first selfie from the red planet, giving the mission team (and the rest of the world) a good look at its solar panels and deck now that it's settled in
Over the last week or so, InSight has sent back the first of its observations – including a clip of light passing over the surface, and recordings of Martian winds.
All of this comes as the lander and the team behind its operations prepare for it to begin work in the next few months.
For now, however, InSight is taking baby steps.
The lander flexed its 6-foot-long arm this week, snapping images of the terrain directly in front of it.
'By carefully swinging my arm out in front of me, I'm starting to get a better look at the ground in front of me where I'll be doing my work', the Nasa InSight account tweeted.
'Meanwhile, kind of hypnotized by the play of light and shadow on my arm'.
'By carefully swinging my arm out in front of me, I'm starting to get a better look at the ground in front of me where I'll be doing my work', the Nasa InSight account tweeted this week. 'Meanwhile, kind of hypnotized by the play of light and shadow on my arm'. This effect can be seen in the clip above
'No cause for alarm, Captain!': NASA confirms mysterious blue light spotted in InSight photos by actor William Shatner is just a lens flare, as the robotic lander plays cup-and-ball on Mars - PART II
'By carefully swinging my arm out in front of me, I'm starting to get a better look at the ground in front of me where I'll be doing my work', the Nasa InSight account tweeted this week. 'Meanwhile, kind of hypnotized by the play of light and shadow on my arm'. This effect can be seen in the clip above
The data collected by InSight's Seismic Experiment for Interior Structure (SEIS) in the months before it's moved onto the ground will eventually be used to cancel out background noises as it works to detect marsquakes
Just days prior, NASA revealed the InSight lander captured the sound of a Martian 'dust devil' during its first days on the red planet.
According to the space agency, this is the first time we've ever heard Martian winds.
The low rumble detected by InSight's sensors are estimated to be blowing between 10 to 15 mph (5 to 7 meters a second) from northwest to southeast – and, the recordings are within the range of human hearing.
NASA says the sounds recorded on December 1 line up with dust devil streaks observed in the landing area.
The vibrations were recorded at a very low pitch, though those with sharp ears will be able to hear it as is, using headphones or subwoofers.
To make it clearer, NASA boosted the pitch by two octaves, making it audible on laptops and mobile devices.
The space agency shared a series of high-resolution photos captured this week. InSight will soon begin snapping images of the terrain directly in front of it, so the team can select the best location to drill down. The solar panel that will help power the machine is pictured
While InSight didn't set out to record Martian winds, specifically, the team says this type of data collection comes with the territory.
The lander detected wind vibrations with two of its sensors: one designed to measure air pressure, and with a seismometer on the deck.
'Capturing this audio was an unplanned treat,' says Bruce Banerdt, InSight principal investigator at NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab.
'But one of the things our mission is dedicated to is measuring motion on Mars, and naturally that includes motion caused by sound waves.'
According to the InSight team, the two different instruments recorded the noise in different ways.
While the Auxiliary Payload Sensor Subsystem's air pressure sensor recorded the vibrations directly, the seismometer picked up vibrations caused by the wind passing over the lander's solar panels.
The data collected by InSight's Seismic Experiment for Interior Structure (SEIS) in the months before it's moved onto the ground will eventually be used to cancel out background noises as it works to detect marsquakes.
Its short period (SP) silicon sensors can detect vibrations with frequencies of up to 50 hertz, which sits at the lower range of human hearing, NASA says.
'The InSight lander acts like a giant ear,' said Tom Pike, InSight science team member and sensor designed at Imperial College London.
'The solar panels on the lander's sides respond to pressure fluctuations of the wind.
'It's like InSight is cupping its ears and hearing the Mars wind beating on it. When we looked at the direction of the lander vibrations coming from the solar panels, it matches the expected wind direction at our landing site.'
InSight touched down in a region known as Elysium Planitia. Its location can be seen in the map above, not far from the landing site of the 2012 Curiosity mission, the last NASA probe to land on Mars
NASA's InSight lander has finally removed the lens cover from its cameras, allowing the robotic explorer to take its clearest pictures yet of its new home
The team has released both a raw, unaltered audio sample of the seismometer recording and a second version that's been raised two octaves to make it easier to hear.
For the latter, the APSS sample was sped up by a factor of 100.
According to the experts, the source of the sound is pretty straightforward; vibrations detected by the instruments are much like the air pressure changes you hear when a flag whips around in the wind.
'That's literally what sound is — changes in air pressure,' said Don Banfield InSight's science lead for APSS from Cornell University in Ithaca, New York.
'You hear that whenever you speak to someone across the room.'
Illustration of InSight probe with its two main instruments deployed, a heat probe (left) and seismometer (bell-shaped, right).
Credit: NASA.
NASA’s InSight lander arrived on Marsin late 2018 tasked with the mission of studying the planet’s geology. Its main instrument is a seismometer which the probe will soon use to listen to marsquakes. However, the probe is also equipped with sophisticated meteorology gear like a highly sensitive air pressure sensor that is already revealing some unexpected surprises.
The Martian surface is very thin — less than one percent of Earth’s surface pressure — but it’s enough to accommodate weather and significant air pressure differences that cause the soil to slightly tilt and rumble. Therefore, InSight’s air pressure sensor data is essential to the probe’s missions since it calibrates the seismometer.
InSight’s mission is unlike that of any spacecraft we’ve ever sent to Mars. All of our past probes have studied the planet’s environment above ground, but InSight is focused on what happens beneath the surface by listening to ‘marsquakes’. By studying these slight seismic waves, scientists want to determine what makes up the planet’s mantle and core. Basically, InSight will study seismic waves as they pass through the Red Planet, using that information as a sort of ultrasound to find out what is lurking underneath the crust.
While the seismometer isn’t operational yet, NASA scientists have been busy studying data from other sensors, including those on temperature and air pressure. Some interesting discoveries include the presence of gravity waves, the displacement of a fluid from its position of equilibrium. These are not to be confused with gravitational waves, which are disturbances in the curvature (fabric) of spacetime, and most commonly during the evenings. And in the last 72 hours, researchers measured infrasound waves with a period of only one-hundredth of a hertz over a period of 100 seconds — that’s several octaves well below the range of human hearing. According to a Forbes report, the infrasounds may be caused by a meteor crashing into the red planet’s atmosphere, a landslide, or airflow over an underlying stable local atmosphere.
The most surprising finding is a strange pattern in the air pressure data, which shows surface pressure dipping slightly twice a day, at around 7 AM and 7 PM local time. Ars Technica reports that NASA has ruled out causes linked to the sensor or heating source.
Three-day weather data for Mars at the site of InSight probe. Notice dips at 7 AM and 7 PM in air pressure section.
Credit: NASA,
Scientists think that this feature may be due to some atmospheric wave generated by the sunrise and sunset on Mars. Alternatively, downslope air flow passing by irregular topography might lead to brief atmospheric changes.
Perhaps this anomaly may be important in answering some questions regarding the formation of dust devils on Mars. These low-pressure whirlwinds can spin at up to nearly 60 miles an hours and reach colossal heights of 10 kilometers.
A dust storm ultimately sealed the fate of the iconic Opportunity rover, which was officially declared defunct last week. Most importantly, these atmospheric disturbances could threaten human lives when astronauts finally arrive on Mars. Before any boots touch Martian soil, NASA wants to understand what are the minimum winds required to lift dust off the surface in order to forecast dust storms and dust devils.
On a different note, NASA now also has an updated page where you can monitor the weather around InSight’s landing site at Elysium Planitia. This week temperatures varied between -17°C and -10°C (3°F and 15°F) during the day and hovered around -94°C (-140°F) during the night.
“What is clear is that it is a cylindrical object of two meters in length. No doubt it is not part of a terrestrial technology so it could be a sort of robotic probe programmed to monitor what happens on our planet.”
We’ll let you draw your own conclusions after watching videos that surfaced on YouTube recently – the first showing a high-speed cylindrical UFO and the second showing night-vision images of what appear to be orbs exiting from a hole or cave in the ground near where the first was taken in La Rioja in northern Spain. The source claims there are more. Let’s see if the next one is worth waiting for.
The videos come from YouTube channel Verdad Oculta (Hidden Truth) and the first was published on January 25, 2019. Taken by drone, it shows something flying by the camera at a high speed that most people would initially consider to be an insect. However, Verdad Oculta’s analysis puts it as being too big and too fast to be a bug and speculates that it could be “a new type of UFO that takes off from an extraterrestrial base hidden somewhere in Spain.” That’s an awfully big stretch from this one video that again, most would say is a bug or possibly CGI. Some comments refer to a “Utah drone video” which appears to be this one (see it here) posted on January 12 showing a similar UFO that similarly could be a bug or CGI.
Inspired by the excitement said to have been generated by the video (over 1 million views – not too shabby), Inexplicada reports this week that another crew of investigators led by Nacho Rojo met with the authors of the original video and visited the UFO site. There they found “La Grieta” (the Crack), a “vast” cavern “20 meters in length,” which mean either a diameter (big) or a circumference (not so big) of 65 feet which the authors were now saying was the origin point of the UFO. Not seeing anything during the day (but picking up some nice drone shots), this team set up infrared night vision cameras and … well, here’s what they said:
“(We captured) something no one was prepared to see. We couldn’t believe it. Not just one UFO, but two, and they crossed each other’s path in the sky. These are anomalies that shine like stars in a linear travel path, but they are not airplanes,” concludes the researchers, adding that “this is the first video-program of all the material we have, and believe me, the best is still to come.””
While not jumping to any conclusions, Nacho Rojo says “many have questioned the veracity of the recordings and many believe there is no extraterrestrial base. Our research points out the truly extraordinary nature of that place.”
Could these be something other than alien UFOs? The websiteplanetanovosti.com says this:
“According to experts, it could be orbs – energy entities from another dimension. The human eye can not notice these objects, while the equipment is under force. Orbs most often appear around similar dips. For example, they “chose” the Cave of the Swallows in Mexico. People who jump into such holes and shoot it on video, often notice mysterious lights on the recordings.”
As of this writing, there don’t seem to have been any more videos released and no reports of Spanish UFO investigators climbing into (or disappearing in) “La Grieta.” That’s usually not a good sign. Let’s hope the investigations continue (we’ll try and keep an eye out for them) and someone gets better evidence one way or the other. The orbs angle may bear more fruit than the alien base.
Aliens? Orbs? CGI? Something else? Are these alleged sightings being blown way out of proportion?
Now that the CIA has placed a trove of its dirty laundry online for all to see, all sorts of strange chapters of the intelligence agency’s past are beginning to be revealed. Since 2017, journalists and amateurs alike have been poring over the CIA’s CREST database in search of the truth about the many dark, twisted research projects and activities the Central Intelligence Agency has gotten into over the years.
Already, some interesting and somewhat unexplained things have been found. Earlier this month, files were discovered showing the CIA hunted the elusive Yeti and a mysterious “metallic disc” in the Nepalese Himalayas, while another set of files appeared to depict unexplained shadow people with curious numbers stamped on them. Who knows what else may be waiting to be discovered in the CREST databases?
This week, American government watchdog site Muckrock found an interesting set of documents outlining the CIA’s interest in and fears of psychic abilities. Many of the files describe experiments into telekinetic abilities conducted throughout the U.S., Europe, and the USSR, including experiments involving famous psychic Uri Geller. In many of these experiments, the files note, individuals were able to “evidence a new form of energy that moves and perhaps alters matter.” The documents claim that British scientists witnessed objects appearing or disappearing during some of these tests, leading to CIA fears that enemy psychics might create “poltergeist phenomena” in order to terrify and confuse their adversaries’ leadership with psychic attacks.
This aspect of the CIA’s research into possible uses of psychic phenomena is well-documented by our own Nick Redfern and others, but these documents show that the CIA’s fears went even deeper, involving worries that its greatest adversary at the time was developing psychic abilities that could be used as weapons which could cause “a massive change which will alter the direction, time, space and energy-matter relationship of our world.” Yikes.
According to these files, the CIA began tracking Soviet research into parapsychology in the 1970s. While some CIA analysts believe the KGB’s research may have been a counterintelligence ruse designed to confuse American spies, many elements of America’s intelligence agencies took the threat of Soviet psychic weapons seriously. Some analysts even feared that if enough Soviet psychics were combine their powers, they could potentially cause mass destruction with their minds:
With the above scientific speculation and laboratory experiments in mind, a weapon or weapons could be theorized. […] If we see awareness in a psychic framework and you concentrate ten individuals in one area – all of whom are evidencing disruptive telekinetic phenomena – do you cause a chain reaction, causing much matter to reverse direction and sink back into a sea of energy or be displaced in time and space? Could such a ‘critical mass’ affect a whole city?
Could such a psychic weapon exist? Have any actually been deployed? Would we know it if they were? Perhaps the “disruptive telekinetic phenomena” and mind manipulation mentioned in these files could explain our recent shift into a bizarre dystopian timeline.
While these files are a tantalizing glimpse behind the veil of government secrecy, I firmly believe that the really secret, spooky stuff will never see the light of day or was never documented on paper at all. Still, these CREST files are beginning to show that the many conspiracy theories and allegations made about the CIA’s paranormal research over the years are perhaps more true than we realize.
Yep, that probably is the strangest title I have ever applied to one of my articles. Back in 2005, I did some filming for a TV show on the world’s most famous UFO event. Yeah, you know the one: the desert, little bodies, 1947. That one. Roswell, New Mexico. Anyway, for some odd reason that I don’t think was ever really explained to me, the company chose to do the filming high in the mountains of Mexico. I actually wondered afterwards if they had mistaken Mexico for New Mexico. But regardless of the reasons behind the shoot-location, Mexico it was. And, for effect no doubt, the filming was done outside a small astronomical observatory that sat high in the mountains.
As the crew set up their equipment, I wandered around, looking for exotic lizards and a bar and something cold and potent to drink. Well, not long before we started filming, an American man – in his 50s or early 60s – strolled past, saw the cameras being set up, and engaged us in conversation. When he heard we there to film a show for a new mystery-based series, he asked – in totally casual terms – something like: “Oh, is it about the pterodactyl?” The what???!!! Yep, a pterodactyl. That got me much more interested than bloody Roswell ever could. It may surprise many to know that for absolutely years numerous reports of creatures sounding suspiciously like pterosaurs have surfaced from various parts of the worlds. Controversial? Of course!
Pteranodon
Consider the following: From 1982 to 1983, a wave of sightings of such a creature – presumed extinct for million of years – occurred in an area called the Pennines, also known as the “backbone of England.” It’s a story that, in much lengthier fashion, can collectively be found in Jenny Randles’ excellent 2002 book, Supernatural Pennines and in issue 9 of UFO Brigantia, a much-missed magazine of the 1980s and 1990s and which was edited and published by Andy Roberts.
There are also longstanding reports of sightings of such creatures in Papua New Guinea. Locally, the beasts are known as Ropen. Unlike the huge pterodactyls of yesteryear, today’s Ropen appears to be a scaled-down equivalent of its ancient ancestor. Its wingspan is often described as being in the region of four to six feet, which is not large for a pterosaur, since some of them were immense creatures. That does not stop today’s alleged equivalents from being formidable predators, however. By all accounts the Ropen has a mouth filled with vicious-looking fangs, a tail that is reptilian in appearance, and is a beast that can fly at fantastic speeds.
Back to the story…
So, I asked the man for more information. He explained he worked in the tourism industry and had heard – some two months earlier – a story of a visitor to the area who claimed to have seen a huge, leathery-looking flying monster only mere feet from where we were filming. I asked the man how he knew the exact location, and he replied along the lines of: “The guy said it was right above the observatory in the hills.” Which was exactly where we were filming. He proceeded to point to the direction of the mountains in which the monstrous creature disappeared. The man knew no more, went on his way, and I tried to think of something new and worthwhile to say for the cameras about Roswell. But to be filming a documentary on Roswell outside an astronomical observatory above which a pterodactyl was supposedly seen only mere months earlier was just plain surreal. I suppose I should not have been surprised though. I have come to learn over the years that there’s very little in this game that isn’t surreal!
Future moon settlers could produce all the water they need — by capturing solar winds.
Image via Pixabay.
Streams of charged particles propelled from the surface of the sun (known as ‘solar wind’) slam into the Moon’s surface every day. It’s not a gentle process — these particles reach speeds in excess of 450 kilometers per second (nearly 1 million miles per hour) — but it does enrich the lunar surface with the building blocks of water, a new study reports.
Water from a stone
“We think of water as this special, magical compound,” said William M. Farrell, a plasma physicist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, one of the study’s co-authors. “But here’s what’s amazing: every rock has the potential to make water, especially after being irradiated by the solar wind.”
The team ran a computer simulation to see what chemical changes take place in lunar rocks under the effect of solar winds.
Solar wind is basically a flow of protons. It continually blasts the Moon’s surface, breaking the bonds among molecules in regolith — lunar soil — pulling apart the atoms of silica (SiO2, basically sand) and iron oxides found within the majority of the Moon’s soil. Some of these protons also grab onto electrons in the lunar surface, producing hydrogen atoms. These atoms then work their way up through the regolith leeching the released oxygen. Together, hydrogen and oxygen make the molecule hydroxyl (OH), which is two-thirds of the water (H2O) molecule.
The findings should help further our goal of sending humans up to the Moon to establish a permanent presence there, says Orenthal James Tucker, a physicist at Goddard who led the research.
“We’re trying to learn about the dynamics of transport of valuable resources like hydrogen around the lunar surface and throughout its exosphere, or very thin atmosphere, so we can know where to go to harvest those resources,” he explains.
The research drew on infrared measurements performed on the lunar surface by several spacecraft — including NASA’s Deep Impact spacecraft NASA’s Cassini spacecraft, and India’s Chandrayaan-1. These readings offered us insight into the chemistry of the lunar surface, all of them finding evidence that water or its components — hydrogen and hydroxyl — were present in the regolith.
Exactly how such compounds wound up on the moon, however, was still a matter of debate. It was possible that they arrived on the back of meteorites impacting its surface, or that these impacts initiated the chemical reactions that created hydrogen, hydroxyl, and water. Tucker’s simulation, which traces the life cycle of hydrogen atoms on the Moon, supports the solar wind hypothesis.
“From previous research, we know how much hydrogen is coming in from the solar wind, we also know how much is in the Moon’s very thin atmosphere, and we have measurements of hydroxyl in the surface,” he says. “What we’ve done now is figure out how these three inventories of hydrogen are physically intertwined.”
The findings also helped us understand why spacecraft have found fluctuations in the amount of hydrogen in different regions of the Moon. All the hydrogen atoms created by solar wind bombardment eventually escape into space (since it’s much less dense than all other compounds). However, hydrogen tends to accumulate predominantly in the Moon’s colder areas since it gets energized by sunlight, making it escape much faster.
“The whole process is like a chemical factory,” Farrell said.
A key implication of the findings, Farrell said, is that every exposed body of silica in space — from the Moon down to a small dust grain — has the potential to create hydroxyl and thus become a chemical factory for water.
The paper ” Solar Wind Implantation Into the Lunar Regolith: Monte Carlo Simulations of H Retention in a Surface With Defects and the H 2 Exosphere” has been published in the Journal of Geophysical Research.
Pictured: one of Mary’s offspring in the aquarium at School of Life Sciences, University of Nottingham.
Credit: Laura Dean.
Stickleback fish (Gasterosteus aculeatus) make babies without having sex. Like most other fish, the female lays unfertilized eggs which the males later fertilize with sperm in the nest. But somehow, one such female got pregnant and produced offspring through an emergency C-section. The female, aptly named Mary, shows that evolution is fluid and that nature doesn’t always play by the rules.
“We were astounded at what we found when we examined Mary in our lab in the Outer Hebrides. She looked like an ordinary egg-bound fish so we couldn’t believe it when we found she had almost completely developed embryos inside her ovaries. This is pretty much unheard of in an egg laying species. The embryos were perfectly healthy, not deformed in any way, and most have gone on to live a normal adult lifespan,” Dr. Laura Dean, a researcher at the University of Nottingham and lead author of the new study, said.
This isn’t the first time that scientists have come across developing embryos inside unfertilized egg-laying fish. Previously, only two such cases were known to science and both also involved stickleback fish. This most recent case is even more striking because this time, the embryos survived and many of the pups grew into adults that are still alive today.
Researchers found Mary while surveying egg-bound sticklebacks in Scotland — and she wasn’t in great shape. She was swollen with her young and very close to dying. Researchers euthanized Mary with drugs and then opened her up to extract the eggs. A total of 56 eggs hatched and survived to adulthood inside a laboratory aquarium. Twenty of these individuals are still alive today, three years later, the authors wrote in the journal Scientific Reports.
VIDEO: Embryos moving showing beating hearts just before hatching.
Credit: University of Nottingham.
Stickleback males don’t just contribute sperm. They have an active parenting role, helping eggs develop by fanning them with their fins for two weeks until they hatch. But it seems like the environment inside Mary was good enough to ensure healthy embryo development.
“Although this almost accidental find revealed a vanishingly rare phenomenon, it might help us to understand a really important change that has happened throughout the tree of life,” Andrew MacColl, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Nottingham in England, said in a statement. “Most animals lay eggs, but some (including almost all mammals, but few fish) retain their eggs inside and give birth to live young. Although this appears to be a difficult thing to achieve in evolution, this one little fish seems to have got there almost by itself.”
As to how Mary got pregnant in the first place, that’s a mystery that might never be solved. Researchers thought that perhaps Mary had cloned herself or that maybe she was a hermaphrodite with both male and female sex organs. However, the authors ruled these two possibilities out since genetic testing showed that the offspring had versions of genes that could only have come from a father.
What probably happened is that Mary strayed by a nest where a male had just recently ejected sperm to fertilize normal eggs. Some of that sperm must have traveled up Mary’s egg tube, fertilizing some of the un-laid eggs inside her.
Researchers are now planning to go the site where they found Mary, hoping the catch similar specimens. Some fish, such as guppies pupfish, are livebearers and this ability may have evolved independently. In this regard, Mary may offer researchers with a glimpse of how such an evolutionary leap might occur.
The Most impressive UFO sighting of the last decades over area 51
For decades, a US military installation located approximately 161 kilometers north of Las Vegas has been one of the greatest secrets on the planet. We are talking aboutArea 51, a strange place where supposedly prototype tests of military spy planes are carried out, although it also has a certain relationship with extraterrestrials.(UFO sighting Area 51)
But in August 2013, secret information about Area 51 was finally declassified. The documents made references to Area 51 and detailed how the mysterious installation served as evidence for the CIA, the US Air Force and the aerospace company Lockheed. Even these documents included a map confirming their exact location. However, he mentioned absolutely nothing about experiments or extraterrestrial technology. This “revelation”It caused an earthquake in the conspiracy community, which publicly denounced how the government of the United States had eliminated this information in the disqualified documents thanks to the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA for its acronym in English). But the reclassification did not prevent news and publications from continuing to spread, as in Area 51, tests were made with aircraft created with extraterrestrial technology.(UFO sighting Area 51)
As expected, the US government did not confirm any of that. Fortunately, and thanks to the Internet, we can already enjoy evidence that shows how Area 51 is much more than a simple military installation. As a recently published video, it clearly shows a UFO at an incredible speed near Area 51. And for many, it is the best sighting of the last decades.(UFO sighting Area 51)
The incredible UFO of Area 51
The drone pilots Sam Chortek and Jimmy Chappie were in the US city of Beaver, Utah, near Area 51, with the intention of filming an extensive video for a documentary. But when they reviewed the images, they discovered that they recorded something more than the simple landscape.(UFO sighting Area 51)
In the video you can clearly see a strange silver-colored object that suddenly appears from a mountain and passes in front of the drone. It moves at a speed so fast that the shape of the object seems to deform, which makes it difficult to identify it.
According to the OVNI File portal , this incident occurred in October 2016, and both Chortek and Chappie decided not to make it public. But they have changed their minds, since earlier this year they contacted Huffington Post journalist Brian Hanley , who normally covers content related to politics. After watching the video, he was so impressed with the UFO sighting that he shared it on his YouTube channel.
“Normally I cover politics, but when Sam Chortek and Jimmy Chappie came to see me with this exclusive material, I had to change the story,” explains Hanley. “This video has never been seen by anyone until now.”
And after its publication in social networks, many users said that it is one of the best videos of UFOs, not only of the last decades, but also of history . Some experts in the field have considered that it has a saucer shape, others consider that it seems to change shape, but it is clear that it takes a second to leave behind the mountain and then pass in front of the drone, so its speed oscillates between 750 and 800 kilometers per hour.(UFO sighting Area 51)
Although the skeptics have another opinion about the strange unidentified flying object. Because airspace near or over Area 51 is used for test flights and training missions, it could be an experimental aircraft. Sometimes the aircraft can be strange, maybe even not identifiable.
Skeptics point out that many UFO sightings near Area 51 are secret aircraft training exercises, both manned and unmanned. The other possibility offered by “non-believers” is that it is an image generated by a computer program or an insect. Although, as noted by the experts of the UFO File , it can be clearly seen that the mysterious object turns and performs impossible movements , ruling out that it is an insect.
It is a really impressive video, and certainly the strange object does not look like any known aircraft and no insect. And if we discard the possibility that it is a computer generated image, we are facing one of the best UFO videos in history. Now we only need to know your opinion.
Is it the best UFO video in history? Or do you have another explanation?
Voor de kust van Cape Brett, bij het Nieuw-Zeelandse Noordereiland, filmde duiker Ben Laurie (21) een enorm wezen van maar liefst tien meter lang. “Het leek op een soort condoom of buis die dreef in het getij”, vertelt Laurie. “Een deel van mij wilde dichterbij en het aanraken, maar ik was ongerust dat het mogelijk giftig was, dus ik hield afstand.”
Het bleek een pyrosome die opdoemde uit de diepte. Die bestaat uit honderden tot duizenden manteldieren die samengehouden worden in een gelatine-achtige cilindrische of conische structuur. De wezens zijn zelden te zien omdat ze doorgaans heel diep leven.
Honderden fotografen en natuurliefhebbers trekken dezer dagen naar Yosemite National Park in de Amerikaanse staat Californië, want daar is deze week de zogenaamde “firefall” te bewonderen. Tussen december en april ontstaat langs de berg El Capitan een tijdelijke waterval door smeltende sneeuw. Als die waterval in februari al stroomt, zorgt de ondergaande zon voor een lichtspektakel met een bijzonder effect.
WETENSCHAP & PLANEETEen team van Britse archeologen heeft achterhaald waar een aantal van de massieve stenen vandaan komen waaruit Stonehenge is opgebouwd, een van de bekendste monumenten van Groot-Brittannië. Dat staat deze week te lezen in het wetenschappelijk tijdschrift Antiquity.
De blauwe hardsteen – genoemd naar de blauwgrijze kleur – zou uit twee steengroeven komen in het westen van Wales en over een afstand van maar liefst 290 kilometer versleept zijn. Daarvoor werden houten sledes gebruikt, die voortgetrokken werden door teams van sterke mannen.
Chemische studies hadden eerder al aan het licht gebracht dat de stenen ergens uit de Preseli Hills in Pembrokeshire moesten komen omdat dat type gesteente alleen daar te vinden is, maar de precieze plaats was nog niet ontdekt. Tot nu dus.
Archeologische opgravingen in 2014 en 2016 brachten 5.000 jaar oude houtskool en stenen werktuigen aan het licht in de steengroeven van Carn Goedog en Craig Rhos-y-felin. Op sommige plekken was het houtskool vermengd met modder en stenen om platformen te vormen, die gebruikt werden om massieve blokken op te laden.
Het uitgraven gebeurde rond 3.000 voor Christus – 5.000 jaar geleden dus – uit gesteente dat miljoenen jaren geleden gevormd was door grote blokken versteend magma die in de loop der eeuwen afsleten. Het uitgraven zou overigens vrij eenvoudig gegaan zijn. (lees hieronder verder)
University College LondonDe steengroeve van Carn Goedog.
Het gesteente had al de vorm van verticale zuilen, die door breuken gescheiden werden. In de breuken werden wiggen gedreven, waarna de stenen er met behulp van touwen en eenvoudig werkgerei konden worden uitgehaald als een losse tand. Met lasso’s rond de bovenkant werden de gevaartes van bovenuit neergelaten. De blokken van bijna 2 meter hoog en 2 tot 4 ton zwaar werden vervolgens op de sledes geladen en weggesleept.
De blokken werden in Salisbury Plain gebruikt om de binnenste ring van Stonehenge te vormen. De structuren van twee verticale stenen met daarbovenop een horizontale werden errond gezet. Dat zou 500 jaar later gebeurd zijn. En de zandstenen zouden een meer lokale origine gehad hebben. Waar die precies vandaan komen, is nog niet duidelijk.
Mensen
Opmerkelijk: de mensen die begraven zijn in Stonehenge kwamen waarschijnlijk uit dezelfde regio als de stenen. De resten bevatten namelijk isotopen uit de buurt van de steengroeven in Wales.
Volgens auteur en archeoloog Michael Parker Pearson van het University College Londen zou het monument een symbool geweest zijn dat de Britse stammen moest verenigen tijdens een periode dat het economisch en demografisch slecht ging. “Het zal gemeenschappen samengebracht hebben die uit elkaar aan het groeien waren”, zegt hij.
A few months ago, NASA held a conference on ways to detect artificial “technosignatures” of alien life, byproducts of civilization like radio waves, pollutants, and garbage. They seem to be taking the search for extraterrestrials seriously and have announced the creation of anew department dedicated to the search for alien life.
The department, called the Center for Life Detection Sciences (CLDS), is composed of scientists from inside NASA and from outside institutions including Georgetown University and Georgia Tech. The goal of CLDS is, in their words, to answer the question “are we alone?” CLDS principle investigator Tori Hoehler says:
“We now have the scientific and engineering expertise to address this profound question with the clarity of scientific evidence — and we have a great community of scientists ready for that grand challenge.”
Acknowledging that alien life probably won’t look like a spacier version of life on Earth, the CLDS says it aims to investigate all possibilities of alien life, noting that extraterrestrial life may not look like anything we would even recognize. According to Hoehler:
“The search for life beyond Earth cannot be a one-size-fits-all approach.
To give ourselves the best shot at success, we need to develop tools and strategies that are tailored to detecting life in the unique conditions of other worlds, which are very different not only from Earth but also from each other.”
Another CLDS investigator, Sarah Stewart Johnson of Georgetown University, defines the goal of her team as finding “life as we don’t know it.” It’s good to know that scientists are finally coming to grips with the idea that alien life might be far weirder than we can imagine. That’s a long ways from the earlier attempts at contact that included things like launching a gold record into space with an avant-garde sound collage on it, hoping that it made sense.
That weird alien life may be closer than we think too. Recent surveys of the planets and moons in our solar system have shown enticing leads in the search for life. The subsurface oceans of the moons of Saturn and Jupiter are the most likely candidates, but other work has shown that there may still be life on Mars, or even on the boiling hot surface of Venus.
The Center for Life Detection Sciences will start small, with only a few teams to lay the groundwork, but they say that as the project matures, more scientists from broader fields will be added.
NASA is still operating the SETI project which scans the skies for radio waves of unknown extraterrestrial origin. Alien radio waves have been in the news again lately as the second anomalous “fast radio burst” was observed coming from the same source in January of this year. The website TechnoSearch archives the data from SETI and is open to the public and allows users to submit their own searches and keep the data updated.
It seems NASA is actually invested in the search for alien life. Perhaps they have some leads they haven’t shared with the public yet. Or perhaps it’s all just a red-herring. Either way it’s exciting to be living in a time when the search for alien life is treated seriously. Who knows, we might get a picture of a weird space whale sometime in the near future.
Some cases within the world of cryptozoology, UFOlogy, and the paranormal have managed to become almost legendary in their fields. These are the rockstar cases that seem to have defied all attempts to dispute or debunk them, refusing to die and managing to live on and even transcend mere eyewitness reports to become legendary. One such case that is as well known and persistent as it is mysterious is that of a very strange creature that appeared one evening in a small U.S. town amid stories of a UFO landing, and would go on to catapult itself into the annals of great cases of the paranormal.
The setting for this very bizarre tale is the small rural town of Flatwoods in Braxton County, West Virginia. It is a quiet town pretty much in the middle of nowhere, where everyone knows each other and not much typically happens, but on September 12, 1952, all that would change, and the peace would be disrupted by a world changing event for them. On this evening, at around 7:15 PM, brothers Edward and Fred May were outside playing a friendly game of football when they were surprised to see what looked like a pulsating, blazing ball of fire go streaking across the sky to come down and seemingly crash in some hilly woods at a nearby farm owned by a G. Bailey Fisher.
Not quite believing what they had just witnessed, the excited boys ran to the house of a neighbor named Kathleen May, to whom they breathlessly told of what they had seen. May gathered up a flashlight and called together a group of people composed of local children Neil Nunley and Ronnie Shaver, as well as 17-year-old West Virginia National Guardsman Eugene Lemon, to go investigate the area where the strange ball of fire had gone down, along with Lemon’s dog. As they followed the beam of the flashlight out into the night past the dancing, flickering trees they still had no idea what they were dealing with or what to expect out there, and there was a sense of apprehension and even fear as they stumbled along up a hill on the farm. Little did they know that things were about to get very bizarre indeed.
When they reached the top of the wooded hill they could see through the trees what seemed to be a pulsating red light, and they were overcome by a sudden, nauseating metallic stench that they would later describe as a “pungent mist.” In the meantime, the dog snarled and barked before retreating with its tail between its legs, leaving them stabbing about in the darkness with the flashlight beam, searching for whatever it was that he chased the animal away. As they peered through the darkness trying to make out just what the light ahead was and what lie out there in the gloom, they could see glinting in the light of the flashlight what looked like the shining eyes of some nocturnal animal, but it soon became apparent that this was no animal any of them had ever seen before.
The mysterious eyes seemed to be set within a massive humanoid figure standing around 10 feet tall, with a round, fiery red face with glowing yellow eyes set within it, framed in some sort of hood or cowl shaped like “the ace of spades” embedded with flickering lights, and possessing small clawed hands, and a dark green, possibly black cylindrical body with what appeared to be folds upon it like some sort of draped fabric or molded metal, the whole of which was wreathed in some mist or fog. None of them got much of a chance to examine it for too long, because after a few moments whatever the entity was emitted “something between a hiss and a high-pitched squeal,” and then glided right towards them with a “thumping, throbbing noise” to send the terrified witnesses running for their lives down the hill, dropping the flashlight in the process to send them into near total darkness. Upon returning home they would all experience severe nausea, swelling of the throat, and even convulsions, compared with the symptoms of mustard gas by the doctor who examined them.
The next day, local law enforcement checked out the site of the purported incident, but were unable to find any corroborating evidence for anything the group said they had seen. There was no trace of any pulsing light, no sign of the creature or its odiferous stench, and nothing at all to suggest anything out of the ordinary. That was the official consensus, but of course word got out and it was not long at all before the media was stoking the fires of UFO rumors by claiming that signs of a landing, such as “skid marks” and an “odd, gummy deposit,” as well as strange pieces of a plastic like material, had been found at the scene by a reporter named A. Lee Stewart, Jr., and it was also discovered that numerous people in the area had also seen an object streak across the sky on the night in question. The case took off as a real UFO landing, and the media went with it, splashing it all over newspapers as various UFO enthusiasts and paranormal investigators descended on the area as well, including esteemed Fortean writers Gray Barker, Ivan T. Sanderson, and John Keel arriving to investigate.
Various strange accounts began to come out of the woodwork at the time, such as one woman who claimed to have seen the same monster that had been described just a few weeks before, and another witness who said that her house had reverberated and been shaken by some mysterious force on the night in question. Another report came from a couple who claimed that just hours after the original sighting they had been driving down the highway when they had noticed a horrible metallic smell and been assaulted with what felt like an electrical charge, before witnessing an otherworldly reptilian creature float across the road in front of them.
There were other odd accounts as well. Mrs. May would claim that the day after the incident she had been approached at her home by two mysterious men who said they were reporters and had asked to be shown the site, after which they would emerge from the trees with strange oily stains on their clothes. In later years even more strange accounts would surface, such as a commander of the West Virginia National Guard named Captain Dale Leavitt, who in the 1990s would say that he had examined the area with 50 Air Force personnel after the “crash” and find an oily substance and a mysterious “6m circle of depressed grass.”
There would also turn out to have been numerous other sightings of UFOs on the night of September 12 across several states. Indeed, in an account compiled by investigator Frank Feschino, Jr. in 2004, there would be hundreds of reports of unidentified flying objects and landings reported on from the same night as the incident. Adding to all of this were the odd physical symptoms reported by the witnesses and their doctors, as well as the subsequent strange death of the dog who had been with them, which allegedly began vomiting uncontrollably and dropped dead for no clear reason. All things told, the weird incident sparked UFOmania in the small rural town, and many were convinced that what had been seen was an actual alien spacecraft landing and its unearthly occupant. Indeed, Ivan T. Sanderson was sure that this was the case, and that the numerous other UFO reports from the same time frame implied perhaps a whole fleet of the objects passing the area.
In the years after the Flatwoods encounter the original witnesses would stick by their story, insisting on what they had seen, and it became one of the most famous alien encounters in the annals of the paranormal. So what was it they saw out there? What was that light, the noxious odor, and indeed that looming, glowing eyed beast? What connection did this have to the lights that so many people saw shooting across the sky on that same exact evening? Just what is going on with the case of the Flatwoods Monster? That depends a lot on who you ask.
A very persuasive skeptical argument is that the whole mysterious event is the result of a unique convergence of a mixture of misidentification and coincidence. In this theory the light, or lights as the case is often described, was perhaps a meteor, which was mistakenly thought to have crashed behind that wooded hill by the witnesses. There were indeed many people who reported the light seen as not a UFO, but as a meteor, so perhaps the witnesses saw this celestial event and jumped to a different conclusion. They then warily went up that dark hill in a state of fear, the atmosphere made more ominous by a blanket of fog that was covering the area at the time. In this state of dread, they saw one of the three aircraft warning hazard beacons in the area visible from that hill, and considering the meteor they had seen mistook it for a UFO.
But what about the horrible monster they saw, you ask? The skeptical take on it is that this was no monster at all, but rather a large barn owl perched atop a high branch. In the murky darkness, with fear pervading the air and low visibility and that sinister light visible through the trees, the witnesses misidentified the owl and its perch as being part of a single entity. The owl, just as startled as the witnesses, had then flown off past them into the night, letting out one of the bird’s distinctive shrill cries in the process. In their panic and surprise, the witnesses had mistaken it for an alien entity flying towards them, sending them running. Many of the features of a barn owl match up with the description of the creature, and looking at artistic representations comparing the monster and an owl it is easy to see the similarities, especially considering that they had only seen it fleetingly for a few moments in dim lighting before fleeing in terror.
This all seems to make sense so far, but then we are left to ask just what about the other evidence found, such as the oily residue and the strange track marks? Some have pointed out that these tracks could have been caused by a tractor that was in the area at around the time of the sighting, the oil perhaps leaking from it, or even from the truck of a local man who had gone driving through hoping to see the creature. The foul odor had been suggested as being exuded by a type of grass native to the area with a distinctive smell. And the negative physical symptoms are claimed by skeptics to have been simply caused by deep fear and over exertion. Skeptic Joe Nickell wrote a whole deconstruction of the case for the Skeptical Enquirer, which you can read here, and it is so convincing that even many paranormal researchers and UFOlogists have conceded that this is probably what actually happened.
Joe Nickell’s sketch comparing a barn owl and the alleged “monster”
It certainly seems to be open and shut when looking at all of the clues and evidence that this may have just been one big misunderstanding seen through the lens of anxiety and fear, later sensationalized by the media and embellished with countless books and articles in the lore of the paranormal. Yet there are many who think that the case is far from solved, pointing out that there are still aspects that don’t fit in neatly with the skeptical theory, such as the pulsing quality of the “meteor” and the fact that a whole group of people saw the creature and maintained that it was no owl.
Whatever the answer may be, whether this was some alien entity or the product of misidentification and overactive imaginations, the tale of the Flatwoods Monster still gets plenty of play in paranormal circles, and is still talked about and debated to this day. It has become such a legendary case that the town of Flatwoods has a museum dedicated to the creature and an annual weekend festival to commemorate it called “Flatwoods Days,” which features live music, and food and craft vendors. There is even a sign on the road leading into town that reads “Welcome to Flatwoods / Home of the Green Monster,” so it seems that whatever the Flatwoods Monster was or wherever it went, it has been ingrained in the town’s culture and in the world of Forteana, and in a sense is here to stay.
Meer van UFO'S of UAP'S, ASTRONOMIE, RUIMTEVAART, ARCHEOLOGIE, OUDHEIDKUNDE, SF-SNUFJES EN ANDERE ESOTERISCHE WETENSCHAPPEN - DE ALLERLAATSTE NIEUWTJES
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