Evidence of Ancient Stone Cutting Technology? Where is this coming from?

It is not surprising that the occasional eyebrow was raised in the past concerning the extent of the Egyptian masonry skills. Not only were the structures superior in a visionary capacity, but also in precision, design and execution.

The impressive cutting-in-stone technique reveals our ancestors were familiar with an extremely advanced technology we have long been unable to use. Large-sized holes found in ancient stone demanded engineering skills and proper cutting equipment. All kind of stones (even the hardest ones) were drilled for architectural, ritualistic or symbolic functions.

The methods employed by the Egyptians in cutting the hard stones which they so frequently worked, have long remained undetermined.

Various suggestions have been made, some very impractical; but no actual proofs of the tools employed, or the manner of using them, have been obtained.

Looking at these impressive cutting-in-stones technique one wonders if not plenty of our technologies which are thought to be modern have ancient roots or in some cases may have been lost and then reinvented.

{ https://www.disclose.tv/ }

Ryugu is probably a chip off one of these two other asteroids

Japan’s Hayabusa2 team has narrowed down the asteroid’s origins based on its color

BY LISA GROSSMAN 

CASTING A LONG SHADOW  The Japanese Hayabusa2 spacecraft (whose shadow is visible at the top of the image) took this picture of the asteroid Ryugu on February 22 about one minute after touching down on its surface and then lifting off again. 

JAXA, UNIV. OF TOKYO, KOCHI UNIV., RIKKYO UNIV., NAGOYA UNIV., CHIBA INST. OF TECHNOLOGY, MEIJI UNIV., UNIV. OF AIZU, AIST

{ https://www.sciencenews.org/ }

New photos from asteroid Bennu reveal stunning surprises

BY MIHAI ANDREI

NASA scientists have recently released a trove of data and images from the Bennu asteroid, a carbonaceous asteroid currently orbited by the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft. OSIRIS-REx is currently orbiting and mapping the asteroid, and will then attempt to land on the asteroid, gather samples, and return the samples to Earth.

Yes, this is an image from an actual asteroid’s surface.

Image credits: NASA/Goddard/University of Arizona/Lockheed Martin.

Although Bennu is only slightly larger than the Empire State Building, it’s already turning out to be even more intriguing than we thought it would be. For starters, it appears to contain minerals dating from the earliest days of the solar system, which could offer astronomers valuable insights into how the system formed and evolved through the eons.

It also appears to be rife with water-containing (hydrated) minerals. This will allow researchers to study the hypothesis that Earth and other planets in our solar system were “fertilized” by water-rich asteroids. Bennu also appears “craggier” than expected — the rocky structures on its surface came as a surprise to NASA.

Based on Earth observations, astronomers were expecting a relatively smooth surface, but images from OSIRIS-REx show that the asteroid is riddled with rough boulders. The boulders also appear to be denser than expected, raising concerns about the spacecraft’s ability to drill and extract samples. NASA engineers, however, are confident.

“Throughout OSIRIS-REx’s operations near Bennu, our spacecraft and operations team have demonstrated that we can achieve system performance that beats design requirements,” said Rich Burns, the project manager of OSIRIS-REx at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. “Bennu has issued us a challenge to deal with its rugged terrain, and we are confident that OSIRIS-REx is up to the task.”

But perhaps the most stunning discovery is that Bennu is still active, spewing giant plumes of matter.

This view of asteroid Bennu ejecting particles surprised astronomers. The photo was created by combining two images taken onboard NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft. The features have been accentuated through processing techniques such as cropping and brightness and contrast adjustment.

Credits: NASA/Goddard/University of Arizona/Lockheed Martin.

“The discovery of plumes is one of the biggest surprises of my scientific career,” said Dante Lauretta, OSIRIS-REx principal investigator at the University of Arizona, Tucson. “And the rugged terrain went against all of our predictions. Bennu is already surprising us, and our exciting journey there is just getting started.”

The plumes consist of dirt and rock, but their source is not yet known. OSIRIS-REx is hard at work to help answer that question.

Image of Bennu’s northern hemisphere.

Image credits: NASA/Goddard/University of Arizona/Lockheed Martin

The OSIRIS-REx mission of NASA’s New Frontiers program was launched towards on September 8, 2016. It is currently orbiting the asteroid at a distance of 3 miles (5 km), approximately 190,000 miles (300,000 km) away from Earth. OSIRIS-REx is expected to return samples to Earth in 2023. There is a cumulative 1 in 2,700 chance that Bennu will impact Earth between 2175–2199.

{ https://www.zmescience.com/ }

TRIDENT SPACECRAFT

{ https://futurism.com/ }

Meteor no one saw coming exploded over Earth with force of 10 atomic bombs

NASA says the blast was the second-largest meteor impact on record.

By Brandon Specktor, Live Science

On Dec. 18, 2018, a school bus-size meteor exploded over Earth with an impact energy of roughly 10 atomic bombs. According to NASA, the blast was the second-largest meteor impact since the organization began tracking them 30 years ago, bested only by the infamous fireball that exploded over Chelyabinsk, Russia, in Feb. 2013.

Despite this, hardly anyone noticed it was happening — and nobody saw it coming.

This image sequence from the MISR instrument, aboard the Terra satellite, was taken a few minutes after a meteor exploded over the Bering Sea on Dec. 18. 2018. It shows the shadow of the meteor's trail, and the orange-tinted cloud it left behind.

Credit: NASA/GSFC/LaRC/JPL-Caltech, MISR Team    › Full image and caption

As to why one of the largest meteor impacts in recent history may have totally passed you by, that's likely because the space rock in question shattered over the Bering Sea, a cold stretch of the Pacific Ocean between Russia and Alaska, miles from inhabited land.

NASA learned about the December impact thanks to the U.S. Air Force, whose missile-monitoring satellites were among the first to detect the blast. The rumble of the impact also registered on infrasound detectors — stations that measure low-frequency sound waves inaudible to human ears — around the world, giving scientists enough data to draw some basic conclusions about the sneaky meteor.

Related

SPACE

Watch Japan's Hayabusa 2 spacecraft touch down on an asteroid

According to NASA, that meteor weighed about 1,500 tons, had a diameter of about 32 feet, and was traveling through the atmosphere at about 71,582 mph when it exploded. The blast occurred about 15.5 miles over the ocean and erupted with an energy equivalent to 173 kilotons of TNT — roughly 10 times the energy of the atomic bomb that the United States detonated over Hiroshima during World War II.

The world's asteroid-monitoring groups failed to see the rock headed our way likely due to its smallish size. Alan Fitzsimmons, an astronomer at Queen’s University Belfast in Northern Ireland, told New Scientist that most modern telescopes are best able to detect objects measuring several hundred meters or more in diameter, making smaller objects like this one easy to miss. NASA asteroid hunters are most concerned about identifying near-Earth objects measuring 460 feet across, which have the potential to obliterate entire US states if allowed to pass through the atmosphere, Live Science previously reported.

The December 2018 impact only came to attention this week thanks, in part, to a presentation at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in Texas that was delivered by Kelly Fast, NASA's near-Earth objects observations program manager. Fast told BBC Newsthat the December event exploded with "40 percent the energy release of Chelyabinsk," but didn't show up in the news because of the impact's relatively remote location.

The Chelyabinsk meteor, which measured 62 feet wide, passed over mainland Russia and was recorded by many motorists. The resulting shockwaves injured more than 1,200 people.

• Fallen Stars: A Gallery of Famous Meteorites
• Space-y Tales: The 5 Strangest Meteorites in History
• Danger! Falling Rocks: Asteroids and Meteorites Explained

Originally published on Live Science.

{ https://www.nbcnews.com/mach }

JAPAN’S YONAGUNI RUINS MAY HOLD THE KEY TO A SUNKEN CIVILIZATION

The mystery of the lost continent of Atlantis has puzzled researchers for centuries, as growing evidence supports the theory that an advanced civilization may have been destroyed and gone unnoticed by mainstream archeology. This antediluvian civilization is assumed to have been located somewhere in the Atlantic Ocean and is thought to have been the progenitor of ancient civilizations like those in Egypt and India. But could there have been another sunken continent from that era that predates Atlantis? The Yonaguni ruins might provide an answer.

THE YONAGUNI MONUMENT

In 1985, a Japanese diver named Kihachiro Aratake was exploring the seafloor off the southern shore of Yonaguni-Jima island, the western-most island in the Ryukyu archipelago of Japan. Aratake came across what appeared to be the sunken ruins of an ancient, megalithic, stepped pyramid, similar to the ziggurats built in ancient Sumer. Since his discovery, the provenance of the ruins has been debated as to whether they are man-made or naturally occurring, due to the possibility of natural geological terracing.

Dr. Masaaki Kimura from the University of Ryukyu is the biggest proponent for the theory supporting the artificiality of the ruins. Surprisingly, Dr. Robert Schoch is one archeologist who has contended Kimura’s theory, despite his support for the Sphinx water erosion hypothesis.Although, Schoch has conceded that he doesn’t perceive Yonaguni to be a closed case and that he hasn’t spent as much time diving there, compared to Kimura’s 15 years.

According to Kimura, the Yonaguni monument appears to depict carvings of animals and people as well as the remnants of a carved face, which he compares to the Moai heads on Easter Island.At the end of the last ice age, Yonaguni would have been connected to what is now mainland China. It is likely that the fate of the civilization that built the Yonaguni pyramid, was sealed by a massive tectonic event that triggered a tsunami and subsequent sea level rise.

Since the end of the last Ice Age, sea levels have risen some 40 meters, causing drastic changes in topography and lending credibility to the theory that there may have been cities or even continents that disappeared into the sea. Based on stalactite found in caves near the ruins, Kimura has calculated the Yonaguni pyramid to be at least 6,000 years old when it sank, with the potential to be up to 10,000 years old including the time prior to flooding. The oldest recorded flooding event at Yonaguni occurred in the late 1700s, during which a tsunami ravaged the island with 130 foot waves. This combination of sea level rise and catastrophic climatic events were likely the cause of this ancient city’s demise.

 An interesting discovery has been made when looking at the orientation of the angles in the Yonaguni ruins. One researcher believes that the radial lines, when extended out from the ruins, might potentially outline a territory in the Pacific. This theory employs geoglyphology, or the study of coded maps and messaging in ancient geoglyphs, and has drawn out the radial lines of the Yonaguni ruins. The Faram Research Foundation’s work shows lines that depict a map very similar to the territory sought after by Japan during WWII.

The area extends from Yonaguni and the South China Sea, up to the tip of Alaska’s archipelago, down to Hawaii and back over encompassing Indonesia and Burma (Myanmar). This territory, some believe, could be that which was occupied by the lost continent of Mu, a lost civilization larger and older than Atlantis.

THE LOST CONTINENT OF MU

The lost civilization of Mu, is thought to have spanned a large swath of the Pacific Ocean. Reaching from the Philippines Sea all the way to Easter Island, Mu would have encompassed most of the small islands in the mid-Pacific, including Guam, Fiji, Christmas Island, Midway and Hawaii. The conception of Mu was first proposed by Augustus LePlongeon in the 19^th century who was the first explorer to photographically document the ancient Mayan city of Chichen Itza. It was there that he supposedly learned of the lost continent of Mu through his translation of the ancient Mayan Troano Codex.

LePlongeon’s translation showed that the Mayan civilization was aware of and predated the ancient Egyptian and Greek civilizations, while also mentioning another civilization that was lost in a cataclysmic event. But LePlongeon’s account is thought to be spurious due his use of a false translation of the ancient Mayan language.

But a later account of the ancient continent from a book published in 1926, by James Churchward, is thought to possibly carry more veracity. Churchward was an English occultist who spent several decades living and studying with a group of mystic priests in India. There he was shown esoteric tablets that detailed the erstwhile civilization and its supposed 64 million inhabitants called the Nacaal, who lived roughly 50,000 years ago. The tablets contained a multitude of vignettes, or a series of pictographs that supposedly told the story of Mu. In order to properly transcribe the vignettes, Churchward had to study an ancient language called Naga-Maya, known to only a handful of people in the world.

Although it is difficult to conceive of a continent this size to have just disappeared underwater, some believe that the Yonaguni monument may be a key to the explanation. Though Churchward’s translation didn’t garner as much notoriety as the search for Atlantis, some believe his interpretation of Mu to be one in the same with the lost city of Lemuria, popularized by Russian theosophist, Helena Blavatsky. Blavatsky’s depiction of the Lemurian people shares many similarities with Churchward’s account, that she also claims to have learned from an esoteric text given to her by Indian mahatmas.

Were Lemuria and Mu one in the same, or two disparate, ancient civilizations that fostered the mysteriously advanced ancient cultures we’re aware of today. While we have been obsessed with the search for Atlantis, it appears that there could be evidence of an older society that may hold clues to the knowledge of our ancient ancestors. Could the Yonaguni ruins be the key to uncovering these antediluvian people?

{ https://www.gaia.com/ }

This Car Is Powered By Salt Water: 920HP, Top Speed 217.5 MPH, 373 Miles/Tank

By Arjun Walia

It works just like a hydrogen fuel cell except that the liquid used for storing energy is saltwater. This isn’t far from the water powered car, an idea labelled as a conspiracy by many despite the massive amount of evidence behind it. You can read more about that here.

In this case (saltwater) the liquid passes through a membrane in between the two tanks, creating an electric charge. This electricity is then stored and distributed by super capacitors. The four electric motors in the car are fed electricity which makes it run. The car carries the water in two 200-litre tanks, which in one sitting will allow drivers to travel up to 373 miles (600km). Overall, the four-seater is 5.25 metres (0.4ft) long, 2.2 metres wide (7.2ft), the 1.35 metre (4.4ft).

“After making its debut at the 2014 Geneva Motor Show (pictured) in March, the saltwater technology has now been certified for use on European roads.”

(source)

Nanoflowcell AG is the company behind the design, and they are currently preparing the technology for mass production.

‘We’ve got major plans, and not just within the automobile industry. The potential of the NanoFlowcell is much greater, especially in terms of domestic energy supplies as well as in maritime, rail and aviation technology”  

– NanoFlowcell AG Chairman of the Board Professor Jens-Peter Ellermann.

This is huge news, and is another example out of so many that clearly show how we have so many ways to do better here. Although money remains an issue, it doesn’t have to be.

All cars should be required to be made from this type, or other similar types of clean green energy. A few years ago, if you told somebody it’s possible to fuel a car by pouring saltwater into it, they would have called you a conspiracy theorist.

Last Year The U.S Navy Developed a Technology To Create Fuel From Seawater

Scientists at the U.S Naval Research Laboratory have developed a technology to recover carbon dioxide and hydrogen from seawater and convert it into a liquid hydrocarbon fuel. This could be a tremendous breakthrough and eliminate the need for old ways of generating fuel.

It’s just another example of the many ways of generating energy that are now available that could end our dependence on fossil fuels. These new, clean green ways of generating energy have been around for decades, so why are we always talking about them without ever implementing them?

“Refueling U.S. Navy Vessels, at sea, is a costly endeavor in terms of logistics, time, fiscal constraints and threats to national security sailors at sea. In Fiscal year 2011, the U.S. Navy Military Sea Lift Command, the primary supplier of fuel and oil to the U.S. Navy fleet, delivered nearly 600 million gallons of fuel to Navy vessels underway, operating 15 fleet replenishment oilers around the globe.”

(source)

The Navy successfully used the new fuel-from seawater process to power a radio-controlled scale-model replica of a World War II aircraft with an internal combustion engine. Below is the footage from the test flight.

“In close collaboration with the Office of Navel Research p38 Naval Reserve program, NRL has developed a game changing technology for extracting, simultaneously, CO2 and H2 from seawater. This is the first time technology of this nature has been demonstrated with the potential for transition, from the laboratory, to full-scale commercial implementation.”

– Dr. Heather Willauer (source)

Researchers say that this approach could be commercially viable within the next seven to ten years. They state interest in pursuing land-based options that could provide a solution to our current problems.

Again, another option, and example showing the power of human potential, so what’s stopping us from the implementation of cleaner and greener technologies?

Not long ago, Department of Defence adviser Dr. Harold Puthoff made some noteworthy comments while discussing the reality of free energy. This is what he said:

“I’ve been taken out on aircraft carriers by the Navy and shown what it is we have to replace if we have new energy sources to provide new fuel methods.”

You can watch that full interview HERE.

Whether it be Solar, Free Energy (zero-point), or converting seawater, it’s clear we can do better than we are doing now. It’s remarkable how Barack Obama has constantly pointed out that we will be using oil, gas and coal for the next twenty years, and that we don’t have the technology to lift our dependence off of these resources. Those who are looking into it can clearly see that this simply isn’t true. We have the means to live in ways that are more harmonious with the planet and all beings on it.

http://www.gizmag.com/quant-e-sportlimousine-approved-europe-roads/33020/

{ https://www.collective-evolution.com/ }

Ancient Egypt: Did aliens build the pyramids? Archeologist addresses SHOCK UFO claims

ANCIENT Egypt’s imposing Great Pyramids of Giza of have been at the heart of conspiracy debate and wild UFO claims for decades – but were the pyramids built by ancient aliens?

Linda Moulton Howe: The Moon is an Intelligent Machine That See's Everything!

{ https://beforeitsnews.com/v3/ }

It’s getting harder and harder to separate the alien spacecrafts and extraterrestrial orbs from the meteors, the secret military tests, the usual flares and Chinese lanterns and all of the other bright and unusual objects increasingly crowding our nighttime and even daytime skies. The latest example occurred this week in the air over Los Angeles on the night of the third and final supermoon of 2019 when thousands witnessed bright objects streaking across the sky that behaved nothing like the ones Californians are used to seeing, even without the aid of mind-altering substances. They became even more suspicious when officials quickly called their reports “bull.” Cover-up?

“A mysterious streak of light in the Los Angeles sky sent the imaginations of many onlookers over the moon.”

ABC News, along with other national, local, international and Internet news organizations were quick to report on the incident which occurred as night darkness approached on March 20. SyFyWire’s science writer and astronomer Phil Plait began receiving accounts and videos from the less imaginative wondering if the wandering fireballs were drunken meteors and, at first glance, Plait agreed.

“Apparently quite the meteor show over LA tonight! Looks like it skimmed through the upper atmosphere but I’m guessing. Waiting for more footage. It’s LA. There’ll be more footage.”

Those with better imaginations or better zoom lenses suspected flying humanoids, and it turns out they were closer to the truth. Tired of all of the emergency calls, the LA police and fire departments issued similar explanations.

“PSA: A meteor did not crash into Downtown Los Angeles, and no, it’s not an alien invasion…just a film shoot. This is Tinseltown after all.”

Were Los Angelenos witnessing the opening shots or battle scenes of the long-rumored Independence Day 3 sequel? If so, they will be disappointed, not just because a few measly little flaming humanoids would not be much of a blockbuster-worthy invasion but because this wasn’t a theatrical shoot but a commercial one. And yes, the elected officials who said “Bull!” were, for a change, telling the truth.

“As the third and final supermoon of 2019 rose over the iconic Los Angles skyline, the Red Bull Air Force – a team assembled from the most accomplished and experienced skydivers in the world – marked the occasion as only they can: springing into the air to get an up close and personal look at the phenomenon.”

(Watch the video here.)

Really? An energy drink promotion? Do we really need another “War of the Worlds” panic, a Phoenix Lights confusion, a Great Los Angeles Air Raid cover-up or a death-defying stunt just to sell more of a product that is already ubiquitous? Did it have to be tied to a supermoon – another over-hyped natural phenomenon that did not portend the apocalypse, much less an alien invasion, a new movie or an old product? Have we regressed from Mulder’s “I want to believe” back to Groucho’s “Who are you going to believe, me or your own eyes?”

Are we really becoming this gullible? This fearful? This enslaved to advertising?

Bull?

{ https://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }

Asteroids were once the forgotten lesser members of the Solar System, far behind planets, moons, comets and meteorites. That changed as telescopes, especially orbiting ones, became stronger and space probes began visiting the asteroid belt instead of just passing through on their way to Jupiter and beyond. Now we’re suddenly finding out intimate details about the behavior of these space rocks and learning we’re much closer relatives that once thought. This past week brought the news that the asteroid Bennu has a weird and possibly disgusting habit of spitting out smaller rocks, while a piece of a meteorite found in Turkey has been identified as a chunk of the asteroid Vesta.

Asteroid 101955 Bennu was discovered on September 11, 1999, during a Near-Earth asteroid survey by the Lincoln Near-Earth Asteroid Research (LINEAR). It’s roughly a smoothish sphere with a mean diameter of 492 m (1,614 ft; 0.306 mi). Because of its size and close proximity to Earth, Bennu was chosen as the destination for NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission to acquire and return samples from an asteroid. OSIRIS-Rex has been orbiting Bennu since December 3, 2018, and once it’s done mapping the surface it will land in July 2020, scoop up some material and return it to Earth in September 2023. Unless it gets hit by spitting rocks.

Bennu spewing particles

(Image: © NASA/Goddard/University of Arizona/Lockheed Martin)

“(This) is probably the biggest surprise of the early stages of the OSIRIS-REx mission and, I would say, one of the biggest surprises of my scientific career.”

OSIRIS-REx principal investigator Dante Lauretta of the University of Arizona, announced the discovery at a news conference on March 19. It turns out Bennu is a rare ‘active’ asteroid that has been observed at least 11 times spewing bursts of surface particles numbering up to 100 per spit, with some measuring 10 cm (4 inches) or larger and traveling at a rate of 11 km/h or 7 mph. That could sting, although Lauretta, being your typical space scientist, thinks it’s cool.

“Basically, it looks like Bennu has a continuous population of particles raining down on it from discrete ejection events across its surface. This is incredibly exciting.”

And incredibly puzzling, since they’re not sure what is causing the spewing. While it doesn’t appear to be a danger to Bennu, it could be to Earth. The asteroid-lets may be causing an annual meteor shower in September in the Southern Hemisphere, which Lauretta says astronomers are now searching for.

Speaking of meteor showers, that takes us to Turkey, where in 2015 a three-foot meteor burst into pieces near Sariçiçek. An amazing 343 chunks were recovered and researchers identified them as Howardites, an unusual type of meteorite believed to have come from the asteroid Vesta. Why Vesta? The brightest asteroid visible from Earth was hit by something 22 million years ago, creating a massive crater and knocking a huge amount of Vesta particles into space. When NASA’s Dawn spacecraft entered orbit around Vesta in July 2011 for a year, it studied what the 10 mile (17 km) wide Antonia crater and determined it was 22 million years old.

Vesta (Credit: NASA)

Still with me?

The Turkish researchers determined that the Howardite meteorite pieces were also 22 million years old. However, that wasn’t enough to connect the dots. That’s when they looked at the videos. Believe it or not, security cameras in Sariçiçek picked up the incoming meteor and gave them enough information to determine its trajectory, which they traced back to … get your eureka ready … the area in the sky where Vesta is located! Put it all together and they’re confident they’re holding a piece of the asteroid Vesta. All of this is published in the current edition of Meteoritics & Planetary Science.

That sound you hear is Turkish scientists yelling, “Eat our asteroid dust, OSIRIS-REx!”

{ https://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }

Photographs are an amazing thing. We now take them for granted, but have you ever stopped to think about how incredible they truly are? They manage to freeze one moment in time forevermore, a peek at a split second in time that we can never get back, but which remains eternally etched upon that picture as if it never left. We have come a long way since the first attempts to capture images on film, and it is weird to think that less than 200 hundred years ago the thought of taking a picture of any kind was magic. How many scenes and images over human history have been lost to die with those who last saw them, before we had the capability of preserving them for all to see? Vast swaths of history have been visually lost to us, from a time before cameras and Instagram. Looking at old photographs can be a surreal experience, a step through time to another era, and here we will take a look at some major pioneering firsts in the world of pictures, a peek through the ages to another era.

When it comes to fascinating photographs of the past, perhaps it is best to start at the very beginning, with the first one ever taken, or at least the oldest surviving one. This particular picture was taken in around 1826, by inventor Joseph Nicéphore Niépce, using a special, revolutionary method (for the time) that involved a pewter plate covered in an asphalt derivative. The process is though to have taken several days of exposure, and the result is a view out of a window at Saint-Loup-de-Varennes, France, in a time long forgotten but forever preserved in this image.

The oldest surviving photograph

Moving on to other early firsts, we have the 1838 photograph taken by Louis Daguerre at the Boulevard du Temple in Paris, France, at a place called the Place de la République, in what is thought to be the first photo ever taken of a human being. At the time, the process required at least 10 minutes of exposure to take a picture, meaning that human beings did not show up, and this was just a regular landscape photo for quite a long time until someone noticed that a human figure can be seen in the bottom left. It is believed that the unidentified man had been standing still for long enough to show up because he had been having his shoes shined. There is another blurry figure of a person that can be seen as well, although not nearly as clearly. Daguerre was actually the inventor of the device he used to take it, called a “daguerreotype,” which utilized silver plates and mercury fumes, and was used to take many of the earliest photos.

First photograph of a person. You can see him in the lower left.

From the following year, in 1839 we have what is considered to be the world’s first selfie, taken by a student in Pennsylvania named Robert Cornelius, who would also be instrumental in further refining and developing the daguerreotype. He tested it out by taking a photo of himself as he stood in front of a store front in Philadelphia, standing completely still for an estimated 10 to 15 minutes to capture this historic shot.

First selfie

Speaking of firsts, there is also the first photograph ever taken of a woman, a portrait taken by a Dr. John W. Draper of his sister, Dorothy Catherine Draper, at his New York studio in 1840. The photo looks like a pretty normal old-timey pic, but it is important to note that the subject had to keep completely still without even blinking for over a minute to achieve this.

First photograph of a woman

The oldest surviving photograph of a president was taken by daguerreotype in 1843, and shows the then former president John Quincy Adams approximately 14 years after his presidency had ended. The photograph was taken by Philip Hass, and although Adams was no longer in office at the time it is remarkable nonetheless.

First photo of an American president

The year 1845 saw more breakthroughs in photography when the French physicists Louis Fizeau and Leon Foucault managed to take the first ever photos of the sun. It is interesting to note that just 5 years before these same men had also been the first to take a photograph of the moon, from a rooftop observatory in New York. Also note that sunspots can even be observed in this photograph.

First photo of the sun

Another unique daguerreotype photograph is what is believed to be the first photo ever taken of New York City. The picture in question was taken in 1848 at Manhattan’s Upper West Side, and you can see that at the time it wasn’t nearly the big bustling metropolis we see today. There was another even older picture of New York, but it has been lost over the years, and so this is effectively the oldest.

First photo of New York City

There is also a very intriguing image taken in 1853 by a man named Solomon Nunes Carvalho at Big Timbers, Colorado. This photo would become part of the U.S. Library of Congress, and is thought to be the very first photograph taken of a Native American village. Most people only have the image of these places in their heads from Western movies and Cowboys and Indians shows, so to take a glimpse through time in this photo is fascinating to say the least, with even two Native American figures visible in the center left.

First photo of a Native American camp

Just less than a decade after this photo first, in 1860 there was taken the first aerial photo ever. Although we now take such pictures for granted, at the time it was unheard of, but James Wallace Black and Samuel Archer King managed to capture this image from 2,000 feet in the air, which shows Boston, Massachusetts at the time. There were earlier photos taken from hot air balloons, but they were lost and this is the earliest surviving one.

First aerial photograph

The very next year, in 1861, the first ever color photograph would be taken, by photographer Thomas Sutton. The technique used was first proposed by James Clerk Maxwell in 1855, and he was the first to suggest that three light sources could be mixed and matched to achieve any desired color. Sutton used Maxwell’s advice and took three different black and white photos of a ribbon and used blue, red, and green filters on each one, after which he merged them into one image to create the first known color photograph, a truly revolutionary concept at the time.

First color photograph

At the start of the following decade, in 1870 another photographic milestone was reached when photographer Carol Popp de Szathmari took what is regarded as the very first photograph taken of a battle. The picture shows Prussian troops advancing against French defenders, and it is largely due to images like this that Szathmari is widely said to be the first war photographer.

First photo of a battle

The ensuing decades would bring some other photographic firsts, when in April of 1884 the first photo of a tornado was taken by an A.A. Adams in Garnett, Texas. Adams was lucky enough to be present or the tornado and to find a comfortable vantage point from around 14 miles away, standing by the United Presbyterian Church in Garnett where he went about capturing this historic and unique image.

First photo of a tornado

Finally we come to a whole new avenue of photography in the early years, that of underwater photography. This had long been seen as virtually impossible, but in 1926 National Geographic photographer Charles Martin, along with botanist William Longley, were in the Florida Keys trying out their new fancy equipment utilizing waterproof housing and a magnesium flash, when they managed to snap this pic of a hogfish off the Florida Keys. It may seem rather quaint in modern times, but this had never been done before, and stands as a testament to human ingenuity and remains a rather dramatic photographic first.

First underwater photograph

While we now take and share photographs instantaneously at a moment’s notice, it seems that we should sometimes take a step back and look at where it all began, to the time when this was extremely cutting edge science fiction stuff. Looking at these photos we are brought to another era in history, frozen there for all time. Even as we move into the future and the world changes, these moments will not, frozen there on film forevermore, and earning their place in history.

{ https://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }

Just about everyone has heard of the Loch Ness Monster. You may be aware of some of the more well-known and famous cases. There are, however, aspects of Loch Ness’ long and strange history that you may not be aware of. So, I thought today I would share with you a few examples of some of the lesser known facts and tales concerning that huge body of water. One of the strangest stories of paranormal weirdness at Loch Ness came from an acclaimed author on all manner of mysteries, Andrew Collins. As Christmas 1979 loomed, Collins – with colleagues Graham Phillips and Martin Keatman – spent a week in Scotland, investigating the Nessie enigma. It involved interviewing witnesses, spending time poring over old archives in Inverness’ library, and checking out the loch itself. It was while they were deep in the heart of their investigation that the trio uncovered a very weird story. Back in the early 18^th century a young couple inexplicably vanished while riding a horse and trap near Loch End, on the south shores of Loch Ness. Rumors circulated that the pair was either murdered or abducted. And neither the horse nor the trap were ever seen again. It would have remained a complete mystery, were it not for one thing; a very uncanny thing.

A typical almshouse

More than one hundred years later, and at the height of tumultuous thunderstorm, a young man and woman walked into a local almshouse, inquiring if the priest that oversaw it would give them shelter for the night, which he did. The priest couldn’t fail to see that the pair was dressed in the kind of clothing that was popular around a century or so earlier. Plus, they seemed very confused, dazed and bewildered, and completely unable to explain where they were from. They remained in that odd, altered state for a couple of days, after which they simply walked out of the almshouse and were never seen again. When the story got out, however, several of the locals recalled old tales of the events of a century earlier, and the missing pair of young lovers. Was this, perhaps, a case of a slip in time having occurred? Did the couple vanish from the 18^th century, only to briefly and incredibly manifest in the 19^th? Or was the whole thing just an old legend that had endured? Take your pick. Moving on…

Alexander MacDonald made mention of Scottish lake monsters in his 1914 book, Story and song from Loch Ness-side, which was almost twenty years before the phenomenon of Nessie began. He said: “The fairy-lover in this story is identified in many parts of the Highlands with the water-kelpie, of which the conception that prevailed generally was one that inspired repulsiveness. There seems no getting away from the fact that, in the far back, obscure corridors of the past, came across the path of man as he slowly but diligently was making his way upward and onward.”

Four years later, Henry Cyril Dieckhoff revealed some interesting and eye-opening data in Mythological Beings in Gaelic Folklore, which was published by the Gaelic Society of Inverness. He was of the opinion that even though much of what had been written about Scotland’s supernatural kelpieswas clearly folkloric in nature, he solidly believed that the beasts had a basis in fact. It was his firm belief that the tales were specifically born out of a combination of inherited memory and oral lore of giant, violent creatures of an unknown kind that lived during the earliest years in which the Celts first appeared on the scene. It’s hardly surprising, then, that when the Nessie phenomenon hit the headlines in 1933, Diekhoff became a fervent follower of the mystery and an adherent of the theory that Loch Ness was the home of terrible monsters.

Then, there’s the possibility of the Nessies being supernatural in nature; maybe even paranormal shapeshifters. In 1880, Duncan MacDonald had a terrifying, eye to eye encounter with something that resembled a giant, goat-sized frog. A tusked beast was seen in the waters of the River Ness, in 1932, by a Miss K. MacDonald. Lieutenant McP Fordyce described seeing an animal that walked like an elephant, that looked like a combination of a “very large horse and a camel,” and which was shaggy in appearance. Arthur Grant’s sighting was of something more akin to a plesiosaur. Mr. and Mrs. George Spicer encountered a creature that had a jerky, wormy gait and which provoked both nightmares and what practically sounds like post-traumatic stress disorder. And, Hugh Gray photographed an animal with a beak-like, turtle-style head. Finally…

Aleister Crowley

Nineteen-seventy-one was the year in which Led Zeppelin guitarist, Jimmy Page, purchased Aleister Crowley’s old abode, Boleskine House, which, for years, overlooked Loch Ness. Until, that is, December 2015. That was when it was almost destroyed in a fire.  Ironically, for someone who was a major devotee and follower of the teachings of Crowley, Page actually spent very little time there. Boleskine House has had a long and turbulent history. Despite his lack of time spent at Crowley’s old home, Page certainly acknowledged that the entire place was saturated in high-strangeness. He acknowledged it had “bad vibes,” adding that, “A man was beheaded there and sometimes you can hear his head rolling down.” None of this kept Page away from the world of the occult. That much is evidenced by the fact that he later owned a famous London bookshop devoted to all things supernatural, paranormal, and esoteric. Its name: The Equinox. In addition, portions of Led Zepelin’s movie, The Song Remains the Same (released in 1976, but shot in 1973) were filmed on the grounds of Boleskine House. Page sold the creepy, old house in 1992.

{ https://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }

NASA Tries To Hide 3-5 Mile UFO By Calling It A Meteor Over Bering Sea, March 2019, UFO Sighting News.

Date of sighting: March 2019

Location of sighting: Bering Sea, 

News source: 

• https://news.yahoo.com/nasa-publishes-images-meteor-no-one-saw-210013939.html

NASA is trying to explain this huge 3-5 mile UFO as an explosion over the Bering Sea this week. I guess NASA couldn't think up a better excuse for this large UFO over the ocean. Surly they did it because they knew that it was seen on world wide radars and weather satellites, so they made up the excuse its a meteor. If you think about it, any 3 mile craft coming through our atmosphere at high speed would leave a bit of trail behind it, heating up the air. So, I just can't buy the NASA excuse of it being a meteor. Look at the UFO photo. Does it look like an explosion? Not really. But it does look like a 3 mile UFO that is lowering itself below the waters surface. I bet if ships were sent out there to investigate, they will find that as they approach the location, their electrical instruments will begin to go haywire and malfunction until further from the location. 

 

They also said it released 173 kilotons of energy. Thats 10X more that the atomic bomb over Hiroshima. And yet, we only see an area of 3 miles? If it was 10X the Hiroshima bomb, we would see a 30-60 mile radius explosion, but we don't. 

Scott Waring

{ https://www.ufosightingsdaily.com/ }

UFO Fleet Seen Over Mersey, England Flying Low, May Indicate Large Base Off Coast, March 2019, UFO Sighting News.

Date of sighting: March 21, 2019
Location of sighting: Mersey river, England 
News source: 

• https://www.reddit.com/r/Liverpool/comments/b3bct9/ufo_clouds_over_the_mersey/
  
  
  

This UFO was seen over Mersey, England two days ago. The eyewitness took the photo and posted it to Reddit to share with others interested in UFOs. If you look carefully you will see not one, but three cloaked UFO using clouds to hide in. The third UFO cloud is seen in the far distance directly below the large one. 

Its a well known fact that UFOs do create clouds to hide within and they can even contain the cloud around the ship so it doesn't fly off with the wind...probably keeping the cloud within a forcefield around the UFO itself. 
Scott C. Waring

{ https://www.ufosightingsdaily.com/ }

Beautiful Woman Figure Seen During Sunset Over China, Possibly Caused By Alien Thinking About Past Memory, March 21, 2019, UFO Sighting News.

Date of sighting: March 21, 2019
Location of sighting: Jiaxing City, China
Source: 

• https://www.newsflare.com/video/284154/weather-nature/cloud-shaped-like-a-girl-seen-floating-above-horizon-in-china
  
  

Two days people in many cities in China saw something during sunset that took them by surprise...the figure of a naked woman kneeling in the sky. 

Here is a fact many people don't know...that aliens visualise in such detail that sometimes their mere thoughts cause nearby clouds to take those shapes. Some call it Telekinesis others call it Psychokinesis...moving objects with your mind. Using thoughts only to control the movement of things around you. Aliens however often have a mind so powerful that they themselves don't even know that they are creating some of these cloud formations. They may just be thinking about a distant memory of their past and all the while a cloud near the alien UFO or base will take the shape of the persons figure, face or silhouette. It looks like this alien had a very happy memory of a very beautiful woman. 

This planet we live on...we share it. 
Scott C. Waring

{ https://www.ufosightingsdaily.com/ }

IN BEELD. De een-na-grootste meteoorexplosie in de laatste 30 jaar, en niemand die ’m zag - HLN.be

Bron: AD.nl, Belga

Volgens NASA explodeerde de grote metoor op 18 december 2018 boven de aarde. De knal was de een-na-grootste in de afgelopen dertig jaar en de grootste sinds de explosie van een meteoor boven het Russische Tsjeljabinsk in februari 2013. Dat bijna niemand het zag gebeuren komt omdat de knal plaatsvond boven de Beringzee in het oosten van Rusland, op honderden kilometers van de kust.

Lees ook

NASA onthult: in december ontplofte metersgrote meteoriet boven Beringzee met kracht van 10 atoombommen

Op de vandaag gedeelde beelden is de schaduw van de weg die de meteoor aflegt op de wolken, alsook de explosie, te zien. De beelden zijn geschoten door de satelliet Tera.

Lindley Johnson vertelt namens NASA dat een vuurbal van deze grootte per honderd jaar maar twee of drie keer voorkomt. De bewuste meteoor had een omvang van enkele meters en raasde met 32 kilometer per seconde (ruim 115.000 kilometer per uur) door de dampkring. Het gesteente knalde op 25,6 kilometer hoogte uit elkaar met een kracht van 173 kiloton TNT (met TNT wordt de kracht van een explosie uitgedrukt). 

Tsjeljabinsk

“Dat is veertig procent van de energie die vrijkwam bij de explosie boven Tsjeljabinsk (460 kiloton TNT)’’, zegt Kelly Fast van NASA. Die ontploffing boven de Russische Oeral was toen zo hevig dat de schokgolf twee keer de aarde rondging. Meer dan 1.500 mensen raakten gewond omdat door de drukgolf ramen sprongen en daken beschadigd raakten. 

“Gelukkig vond de explosie nu plaats boven water”, aldus Fast. “Er is dan ook gelukkig veel water op onze planeet.”

This image sequence from the MISR instrument, aboard the Terra satellite, was taken a few minutes after a meteor exploded over the Bering Sea on Dec. 18. 2018. It shows the shadow of the meteor's trail, and the orange-tinted cloud it left behind.

Credit: NASA/GSFC/LaRC/JPL-Caltech, MISR Team    › Full image and caption

{ https://www.hln.be/ }

Students of computer history know mathematician John von Neumann was key in the development of early digital computers and algorithms. Students of atomic history know von Neumann was involved with the Manhattan Project. Students of both science and science fiction history know he developed the theory of the self-replicating machine (also known as the universal constructor) which makes exact copies of itself which then make exact copies of themselves ad infinitum, or at least until the raw materials give out. John von Neumann died in 1957, but his work lives on today, as evidenced by a new paper which claims that the reason why we don’t see self-replicating interstellar probes from advanced alien civilizations – an idea many Earthlings also believe is the best way to explore space – is because their algorithms develop flaws that eventually turn them into predatory cannibals that cause their own extinction. Really? Would Von Neumann agree? How about Fermi? Asimov?

John von Neumann

“The concept of a rapid spread of self-replicating interstellar probes (SRPs) throughout the Milky Way adds considerable strength to Fermi’s Paradox. A single civilisation creating a single SRP is sufficient for a fleet of SRPs to grow and explore the entire Galaxy on timescales much shorter than the age of the Earth – so why do we see no signs of such probes? One solution to this Paradox suggests that self-replicating probes eventually undergo replication errors and evolve into predator-prey populations, reducing the total number of probes and removing them from our view.”

Duncan H. Forgan invokes both John von Neumann and Enrico Fermi in his new study, “Predator-Prey Behaviour in Self-Replicating Interstellar Probes” which will be published soon in the International Journal of Astrobiology and was recently reviewed in Cosmos magazine. Forgan, a research fellow in the School of Physics and Astronomy at the University of St Andrews, starts with the Fermi paradox (if there are billions of stars offering the possibility of billions of civilizations, why haven’t we seen a single one?) and applies it to von Neumann-style self-replicating space probes.

“Such a probe would be able to produce a copy every time it visits a new star system. As each copy makes copies, the number of self-replicating probes (SRPs) grows exponentially, and every star in the Milky Way is explored on a timescale much, much shorter than its age. Estimates for this exploration timescale vary, but are as short as ten million years (Nicholson & Forgan, 2013), and perhaps shorter still. Given that this timescale is much shorter than the age of the Earth, and only one ETI constructing SRPs is sufficient to produce this scenario, on balance we should expect to see an interstellar probe orbiting the Sun. And yet, we do not. How can this be resolved?”

Yeah, how? Forgan’s answer starts with the potential for encoding errors by the probes’ creators which, over time, could cause the breakdown of the probes and end their trips. A more interesting (and better for a sci-fi movie) scenario is that the error causes the probes to notice that it would be far easier and faster to gather parts from its own copies. As the clones become both self-predators and self-prey, they could eventually self-cannibalize themselves into self-extinction with nothing left to show for their existence but selfies.

Mmmm … dinner.

Forgan’s theory assumes that the advanced civilization which created the von Neumann machines was not sharp enough to make them perfect and not moral enough to ponder the negative consequences of sending them out into space to potentially attack other civilizations for cloning materials and decide it wasn’t worth the negative galactic publicity and cancel their creation. It also assumes that the last replicator standing wouldn’t find raw materials on a planet or asteroid, build more clones and start the process again. He does admit that some cloned replicating probes could escape before being eaten, but they would have the error in their software and would eventually succumb to cannibalism and self-destruction.

Does this explain why we’ve never seen any von Neumann-style self-replicating probes from other civilizations? That was one of the many theories bounced around when ‘Oumuamua passed through the solar system, but it didn’t stay and didn’t seem to make any copies. Or did it? If its program is flawed, how would we know?

Sic-fi movie plot or plausible explanation for the machine version of the Fermi paradox. Whatever you decide, don’t blame von Neumann.

{ https://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }

Remember in those literally dozens of science fiction stories where AI turned against its human creators after being armed with the most cutting edge weapons humanity possesses? Even Frankenstein, one of the most well-known horror stories of all time, is in many ways about humans reaching too high with our creation. Well, it seems nobody at the Air Force has seen or read a single one of them, because it turns out the Air Force wants to do exactly what so many tales have warned against for centuries: arm the robots.

YOUTUBE

The Pentagon is building a pilot's little helper.

According to a report published by Military.com, the Air Force is training AI to fly its most advanced unmanned aerial vehicles and potentially serve as assistants to human pilots in other aircraft. The system is called Skyborg, of course, and is being developed by the Air Force Research Lab to fly the XQ-58A Valkyrie stealth drone as well as the QF-16, a full-scale unmanned version of the F-16. Ultimately, the goal is to have a fully-capable AI assistant in the cockpit that can respond to natural language and even control various aircraft if Air Force pilots ever needed it to.

Skyborg version 1.0 didn’t impress Air Force brass quite like the engineers had hoped.

The Air Force wants Skyborg to work across multiple aircraft platforms and essentially be a ‘hive mind’ which can access and share the collected knowledge and data of the entire Air Force. Yeah, I know, I remember that awful movie too, and that was way back in 2005. Just think of how more advanced and terrifying the AI of today is.

Dr. Will Roper, assistant secretary of the Air Force for Acquisition, Technology and Logistics, says the Skyborg program is all about maintaining that coveted American air superiority in the age of AI. Skyborg-equipped aircraft could theoretically react to changing battlefield conditions more quickly than a human can, deploying weapons or executing aerial maneuvers almost instantly. “Imagine having trained person after person, generation after generation … what if, once you get on the curve, what if it’s exponential? And whoever gets on it first has an advantage forever?” Roper says. “I don’t want China on that curve, I want us on that curve, and us accelerating ahead of the pack.”

An unmanned QF-16 used for target practice.

Roper then actually added “you can’t spell Air Force without A [and] I,” and presumably threw up in his own mouth from the stress of holding that joke in throughout the entire interview. He’s probably been carrying that one around inside for weeks.

Will Skyborg inevitably become Skynet, or will this pan out to be merely the Air Force’s equivalent of Alexa for the cockpit?

{ https://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }

A disturbing new report indicates a U.S. Government agency’s involvement in a bizarre array of tests, which were conducted on cats and dogs purchased from what the story calls “Asian meat markets.”

According to the NBC report, the remains of hundreds of dogs and cats were purchased by the U.S. Government, for use with experiments that occurred in Maryland at the U.S. Department of Agriculture lab. Part of the testing included “feeding dog remains to cats and injecting cat remains into mice,” the report states.

The investigation was carried out by the White Coat Waste Project, a group who describes itself as “a taxpayer watchdog group representing more than 2 million liberty-lovers and animal-lovers who all agree: taxpayers shouldn’t be forced to pay over $15 billion every year for wasteful and cruel experiments on dogs, cats, monkeys and other animals.”

Although the Department of Agriculture research only recently became public knowledge following an NBC story based on White Coast Waste’s report, the testing appears to have occurred between 2003 and 2015, and was aimed at attempting to study the parasite behind toxoplasmosis, a food-borne illness.

However, the new revelations are particularly concerning since some of the animals acquired for tests carried out in the recent Department of Agriculture studies came from markets condemned by Congress in a 2018 House Resolution, according to the White Coat Waste report.

Several U.S. politicians spoke out in condemnation of the tests. “We can advance scientific discovery while treating animals humanely, and American taxpayers have every right to expect our government will meet that standard,” said Jeff Merkley, a Democratic Senator in Oregon.

Sadly, the explosive White Coat Waste report is not the only one of its kind which indicates such concerning behavior by government agencies. Over the course of the last several decades, there have been numerous examples of bizarre testing carried out on animals which raised ethical questions. Too many to name, in fact… although a few noteworthy examples (which might at least be on par with the “cat cannibalism” discussed in the recent NBC report) do exist.

The well-known and oft-cited tale of “acoustic kitty” is high on the list of wasteful government spending projects that also involved questionable treatment of animals. This incident, which I recounted previously here at MU, involved a Cold War-era CIA project that produced a bizarre surveillance system that was built into a house cat, which included antennae fittings within the creature’s tail, as well as hidden battery compartments and microphones. The cat was released outside the Soviet compound on Wisconsin Avenue in Washington, D.C., where it was deployed to monitor a conversation taking place in a park nearby. The cat was struck by a car and killed within minutes of being released; additional attempts at field testing “acoustic kitties” were not carried out.

There are still some varieties of “militarized” animal testing that occur today, although in far less ethically questionable forms. Just last year, a report revealed that DARPA hoped to find ways of genetically engineering various aquatic species for use in future surveillance programs. Much like the recent White Coat Waste project report, questions have been raised about the long term concerns pertaining to genetically modified organisms, as well as the fact that taxpayer money has been used to support such programs.

It is believed that an estimated 4000 cats may have been killed over the course of the 12 years the Department of Agriculture’s studies were undertaken. Based on previous statements made by the USDA, the agency has apparently defended the studies as “life-saving research,” although White Coat Waste argues that it was unnecessary and wasteful spending of U.S. taxpayer dollars.

{ https://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }

The Secret Space Program GARY MCKINNON 1st interview in years by Richard Dolan

UK citizen Gary McKinnon is the most famous UFO "hacker" of all time. Arrested in 2002, he was in danger of extradition to the US for ten years.

What he found was apparent evidence of a secret space program, including references to "non-terrestrial officers" and ship to ship transfers of vessels not in the U.S. military inventory.

Moreover, a high-resolution photograph, taken from space, of a smooth, cigar-shaped craft. Gary also talks about the repercussions of being sought by the U.S. government, his depression, suicidal thoughts, and more.

Richard Dolan who interviews Gary is one of the world’s leading researchers and writers on the subject of UFOs and believes that they constitute the greatest mystery of our time.

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

X-RAY: NASA/CXC/UNIVERSITY OF AMSTERDAM/N.REA ET AL; OPTICAL: DSS

{ https://www.technologyreview.com/ }

PLANEET NIBIRU NAAST DE ZON OF ENORM RUIMTESCHIP? ( VIDEO )

Dat er zich “iets” in de buurt van onze zon bevindt is zo langzamerhand niet meer te ontkennen. 

Maar, is het nu een planeet of misschien toch een enorm ruimteschip?

Toch is dat helemaal niet zo vreemd, als je bedenkt dat onze maan hol is en mogelijk ook een ruimteschip is (geweest). 

Eigenlijk doen ook al lang verhalen de ronde over de mogelijkheid dat de onbekende planeet Nibiru een ruimteschip is. 

Zoals hier in een artikel van Trouw uit 2003: 

Overigens gaat de mythevorming rond Nibiru nog veel verder. Op een religieus getinte website wordt bijvoorbeeld haarfijn uit de doeken gedaan hoe het zit met de samenleving op de planeet. Nibiru zou niet alleen een soort planeet zijn, maar ook een ruimteschip: het kan alle uithoeken van het heelal bezoeken. Anu is de patriarch van de familie die momenteel heerst over Nibiru. 

Dit alles is weer relevant omdat ufoloog Scott Waring nu ook met beelden en een verhaal komt dat vergelijkbaar is met het verhaal in Trouw destijds. 

Het gaat om de volgende afbeelding die afkomstig is van één van de NASA ruimtetelescopen.

Scott schrijft hierover op zijn website het volgende: 

Een enorm ruimteschip bracht vandaag een bezoek aan onze zon. Dit schip heeft een afmeting van ongeveer 15 keer groter dan onze aarde. Dus, ik durf te wedden dat de Amerikaanse regering en NASA hier al vanaf weten. 

Ze zullen deze informatie natuurlijk nooit van z'n leven delen met het publiek. Ze willen de bevolking in angst houden, zodat zij gemakkelijker in staat zijn om deze te controleren.

Ik denk dat dit enorme ruimteschip de legendarische Planeet X is, ook wel Nibiru genoemd. 

Het is een ruimteschip ter grootte van een planeet die iedere 15 tot 20.000 jaar ons zonnestelsel bezoekt. Ze komen alleen wanneer ze willen en hoe ze willen. 

Wanneer ze weer verschijnen, dan doen ze dat om gegevens te verzamelen over de evolutie van de mensheid op aarde. Ze zullen DNA analyseren en waar nodig aanpassingen maken en ze gaan zelfs zover dat ze bepaalde soorten wereldwijd misschien zullen uitroeien. Ja, ik bedoel de dinosaurussen. 

Dus, de vraag is wat ze in de buurt van onze zon doen, tenzij de zon hol is zoals ik eerder heb gezegd. Ik vind het vreemd dat van alle zonneobservatoria op aarde niet één melding heeft gemaakt van bovenstaande. 

Hoewel, dat is natuurlijk ook weer niet vreemd als je beseft dat 99 procent van die observatoria geld krijgt van NASA en alles via die organisatie loopt voordat het mag worden vrijgegeven. 

{ http://niburu.co/ }

Strange Moon Anomalies - No One is Talking About These Lunar Oddities

What is actually happening on the moon that no one has yet revealed?What is going on under that familiar crater-scarred surface?

Ever since the first measurements were made with the Passive Seismic Experiment instruments that were placed on the Moon during the Apollo 14 mission it’s been suspected by a few open-minded thinkers that our natural satellite could have an empty interior.

David Adair answer all these questions and more on our exploration of Earth’s very first satellite and the experts that maintain that the moon is definitely, absolutely, without a doubt, not what it seems.

{ https://beforeitsnews.com/v3/ }

Mysterious Egyptian ship described in ancient scroll FOUND in sunken city

ONE of history’s most mysterious ships has been found more than 2500 years after it was first described.

By Anders Anglesey 

“It wasn’t until we discovered this wreck that we realised Herodotus was right”

Damian Robinson

Ancient Greek historian Herodotus wrote extensively about the boat during his travels to Egypt in 450BC.

{ https://www.dailystar.co.uk/ }

Herodotus, the man referred to by the Roman orator Cicero as “The Father of History”(and who are we to argue with Cicero?), wrote in 440 BCE what is considered to be the founding work of history in Western literature — The Histories. In that book, Herodotus mentions a strange and mysterious river boat he saw in Egypt called a “baris” – strange because the extremely long boat had one rudder that passed through a hole in the keel, and mysterious because no one else in recorded history has ever seen one since … until now. Underwater archeologists excavating the sunken city of Thonis-Heracleion in Abu Qir Bay near Alexandria have discovered the wreck of a long boat that meets the description by Herodotus, restoring faith in the writings of the historian and the endorsement by Cicero.

“(The builders) cut planks two cubits long [100 cm or 40 inches] and arrange them like bricks. On the strong and long tenons [pieces of wood] they insert two-cubit planks. When they have built their ship in this way, they stretch beams over them… They obturate the seams from within with papyrus. There is one rudder, passing through a hole in the keel. The mast is of acacia and the sails of papyrus…”

Title page of Herodotus’ The Histories

With that excellent account of the building of one of these 92 foot (28 meters) barges, archaeologists have long known what to look for … they just never found an Egyptian baris, whole or wrecked. Their luck changed in 2000 with the discovery by French archaeologist Franck Goddio of the sunken city of Thonis-Heracleion (the former is its Egyptian name, the latter Roman) in the bay of the Canopic Mouth of the Nile, 2.5 miles off the coast. Since then, over 70 ships have been found in the area and given numbers. Archeologists noticed that Ship 17, with over 70 % of its original hull intact, had an unusual arrangement of planks that no one had ever seen before.

“Herodotus describes the boats as having long internal ribs. Nobody really knew what that meant. … That structure’s never been seen archaeologically before. Then, we discovered this form of construction on this particular boat and it absolutely is what Herodotus has been saying.”

Damian Robinson, the director of Oxford University’s Centre for Maritime Archaeology, said this in an interview with The Guardian about the recent release of a paper by Alexander Belov, an archaeologist and shipwreck specialist who worked with Franck Goddio, entitled “Ship 17: A Baris From Thonis-Heracleion.” Robinson believes the baris was used on the Nile to move imports from Greece and Persia and Egyptian exports of grain and salt.

Even though his writings have generally been proven to be historically accurate, Herodotus has often been criticized as being just an entertaining but not always factual historian. This discovery helps his reputation and also gives a little vindication to his promoter Cicero, who was killed, beheaded, mutilated and disparaged for his opposition to Mark Antony.

We’re here to help.

{  https://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }

Anjouan is a remote tropical island in the Indian Ocean that’s making headlines for being the location of one of the biggest geological mysteries of all time. The small island, which is located between Madagascar and the east coast of Africa, is 163 square miles, has lots of vegetation and has a population of approximately 277,000 people. Anjouan, which is one of the Comoro Islands, was created 4 million years ago from undersea volcanoes and has steep, mountainous terrain as well as beaches containing black sand.

Since the island was formed by volcanoes, it consists of a lava-derived rock called basalt, but that’s not all. There are sedimentary rocks which are lighter in color that are found all over the island and should not be there as they aren’t part of the volcanic rock that formed this island millions of years ago. The rocks are made from a type of sandstone called quartzite.

Cornelia Class, who is a geochemist at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University, said, “It doesn’t look like anything that could have formed on an island like that,” adding, “There is nothing there that could form a quartzite.”

Quartzite

Class led an expedition to the island in order to further research the rocks and found that there was much more quartzite than expected as it made up nearly half of a mountain. The scientists searched around the town of Tsembehou and found large boulders of quartzite. Then they climbed up a ridge called Habakari N’gani and found that the top was made almost entirely of the substance. Some locals use the quartzite to sharpen knives, as pieces of it have made their way to the villages by travelling down rivers and stream beds.

Sometimes crust ends up in the ocean after breaking off of a continent, and since quartzite comes from continental crust, it somehow must have made its way into the ocean basin and was lifted up with the volcanic rock to form the island.

There is still much more research that needs to be done in order to explain how the quartzite ended up on a volcanically made island. First, the researchers need to find out how old the quartzite is and find out where exactly it originated from. While Class thinks that it originated from Madagascar or East Africa, the substance needs to be studied much more thoroughly to find out for sure. She also said that additional geochemical measurements of the volcanic rocks need to be conducted in hopes of figuring out the geological history of the island.

Anjouan Island

This is definitely an interesting and mysterious find, “This is what nature presents, sometimes,” Class stated, “It’s something we consider impossible, but then we find it, and once we find it, we have to explain it.”

{  https://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }

Maj. George Filer Presents UFO Investigations

Retired Air Force intelligence officer George Filer will discuss his experiences onboard an aircraft tanker over the UK when he and his crew were asked to check out a UFO on radar. Later, while serving at Ft. Dix, he was asked to brief generals on an incident involving the shooting of an alien that had landed its craft on their runway. George Filer is a retired U.S. Air Force intelligence officer. He is now a MUFON regional director and produces a weekly UFO newsletter called Filer’s Files.

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

UFO filmed over the Moon, 2019

New UFO video filmed in Edirne, Turkey on 17th March 2019.

Witness report:

 I am doing astrophotography as an amateur.I saw an object on the moon when I prepared my equipment for the moon shot.got it on record very quickly.At 6 seconds, my computer is locked because there is no more space.I thought it was the space station pass that day, but it wasn’t at that hour.I hesitated and sent it to you..Thank You. 

My equipment 

Celestron Avx mount 
Meade 6000 80mm Apo Telescope 
Qhy5-iii 174mm camera 
SharpCap 3.1 
File type:Ser

Source: MUFON

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

The Pentagon Wants to Test a Space-Based 'Particle Beam' by 2023

The exotic directed energy weapon would be used to shoot down enemy missiles moments after takeoff.

By Kyle Mizokami

U.S. AIR FORCE PHOTO BY TECH. SGT. ANDREW SATRAN

The U.S. Department of Defense wants to test a directed energy weapon in space, one that it hopes will someday destroy ballistic missiles moments after launch. The weapon, a so-called neutral particle beam, would be boosted into space and tested from orbit in 2023.

Neutral particle beams don’t get as much attention as lasers but are attractive in their own right. The weapons work by accelerating particles without an electric charge—particularly neutrons—to speeds close to the speed of light and directing them against a target. The neutrons knock protons out of the nuclei of other particles they encounter, generating heat on the target object.

Promo for the 1953 movie "The War of the World", which featured alien invaders with heat rays.

MOVIE POSTER IMAGE ARTGETTY IMAGES

Particle beams are effectively the “heat rays” or even “death rays” of science fiction. Unlike lasers, which burn the surface of a target, particle beams penetrate beyond the surface to affect its interior. This makes particle beams immune to measures that can deflect lasers, like brightly polished, mirror-like surfaces. A sufficiently powerful beam could generate enough heat to burn a target, igniting its fuel supply, melting it and rendering it aerodynamically unstable, or frying a missile’s onboard electronics.

A neutral particle beam requires an accelerator to produce the atomic or subatomic particles that make up the beam. The accelerator must produce a tremendous amount of particles in very short amount of time, then release them in a focused beam. A weaponized neutral particle beam would also need a power supply, a power storage system, and staging system to feed energy to the accelerator. Finally it would require an aiming system and either onboard sensors or communications links allowing it to take targeting cues from other space or air-based sensors or a centralized battle management system.

A piece of aluminum burned by a ground test of the BEAR particle beam.

BETTMANNGETTY IMAGES

In 1989, as part of the U.S. Strategic Defense Initiative (“Star Wars”) the U.S. launched a neutral particle beam accelerator into space aboard a rocket. The Beam Experiments Aboard Rocket (BEAR) project launched the accelerator from White Sands Missile Range to an altitude of 124 miles, where it successfully tested, “(neutral particle beam) propagation characteristics in space and the effects on spacecraft components.” The satellite was recovered intact after reentry.

According to DefenseOne, the Pentagon wants to test a neutral particle beam weapon from orbit in 2023. Officials believe technological advances over the past three decades make such a weapon more viable, especially the getting it small enough to launch into space part. Previous particle beam designs had large accelerators and power supplies, but officials believe they could probably design a weapon that could be launched into orbit. The Pentagon is holding the door open for the possibility such a system still isn’t doable, but is setting the goal for a 2023 test.

The Pentagon evidently hopes to use particle beams to destroy ballistic missiles for the so-called “boost phase intercept” missile defense role. Once launched, ballistic missiles swiftly accelerate through and beyond Earth’s atmosphere to low earth orbit. Once there, one or more individual warheads separate from the missile and then continue on their own trajectories to the same or separate targets.

Boost phase missile defense would target missile such as this North Korean Hwasong-14 moments after launch.

AFP CONTRIBUTORGETTY IMAGES

Boost phase missile defense calls for shooting down ballistic missiles seconds after launch, while they are still accelerating, and before they have released their warheads. This simplifies matters greatly for the defender but has a number of problems, particularly getting the interceptor close enough to enemy territory to hit the missiles in time. The Pentagon evidently believes that space-based directed energy weapons—like lasers or particle beams—could react fast enough to shoot down ballistic missiles in the boost phase.

Will it work? There are a lot of technical issues that need to be resolved to make space-based particle beams work. The neutral particle beam will need to hold a coherent beam over the 1,000 kilometers or so from low-earth orbit to the ground. The system will need a sufficiently portable power supply. The Pentagon will need to figure out how to detect a launching missile, pass the data to a satellite, and then have that satellite engage the missile. It will also have to figure out how many satellites it will need, and since objects in low-earth orbit do not remain stationary, will need a fleet of satellites to ensure that one or more will be over the target in the event of a launch. These are all issues Washington wrestled with in the 1980s—and then failed to deploy a usable system. Only time will tell if things are different this time around. 

Source: DefenseOne

{ https://www.popularmechanics.com/ }

The stakes in the looming war in space keep getting higher and higher. This week, budget documents released by the Missile Defense Agency, or MDA show that the usual suspects in spooky weapons research are hard at work turning science fiction into reality by aiming to put a directed energy weapon in orbit. According to the proposed budget, the MDA wants the Pentagon to grant it $380 million in order to get a working “ Neutral Particle Beam” directed energy weapon in space by 2022. Why does the Pentagon want to put a particle beam in space?

For now, the beam’s intended purpose on paper is to shoot down enemy missiles. The Defense Department released documents this week outlining the Neutral Particle Beam’s budget along with the program’s aims. The documents state the Neutral Particle Beam is “a new directed energy capability to defeat the emerging threat” of ballistic missiles and is “a game changing space-based directed energy capability for strategic and regional missile defense.”  

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the High Energy Laser Joint Technology Office, Department of Energy, and the Air Force are all working collaboratively on the research and development of this new directed energy weapon. The ultimate plan is to “execute a directed energy kill chain; acquisition, tracking and lethality” using the Neutral Particle Beam.

I guess we may be in the future after all: the U.S. military industrial complex is working on putting a giant particle beam in space. While it’s objectively awesome, it’s pretty terrifying as well. The MDA’s request for a particle beam weapon comes just a few months after Chinese scientists announced plans for an allegedly peaceful solar-powered microwave energy beam in orbit. While that beam could theoretically be aimed at a collector below and converted into electricity, it could also likely melt other nation’s satellites or missiles in the process. Why not? Could it be used to burn whole swaths of the Earth at a time like a Bond villain’s superweapon? Is the Pentagon’s Neutral Particle Beam an effort to keep up with the Chinese and not allow a particle beam gap?

The whole document is worth a read and shows just what kind of threats these research agencies have to plan for each day. I found it interesting that in the MDA’s Fiscal Year 2020 Budget Estimate Overview section, the document states of course that the Neutral Particle Beam is only one of the new capabilities being tested for ballistic missile defense systems. Included in the MDA’s research are programs looking into “hypersonic defense technology” and “high-powered lasers” and as part of this research, the MDA is “conducting ground, airborne, and space-based technology experiments to track representative hypersonic threats.” Anyone who’s followed my research into mystery booms knows that I’ve been saying for years now that a large number of the booms are likely caused by military testing of new hypersonic aerospace and defense technologies. Could this tiny section of the MDA’s overview be in any way related to the mystery boom phenomenon?

The war for space weapon supremacy has been heating up in the last few years, and each of the world’s major space-faring superpowers has some form of ‘killer’ satellite in orbit. It’s believed the Russians may have even put secret killer satellites in orbit by ‘birthing’ them Matryoshka doll style because of course they would: they’re Russian. With so many mysterious launches worldwide lately, there’s no telling what’s up there at this point. Will the Neutral Particle Beam be able to save us in time?

{ https://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }

Two UFOs Over Moons Surface Flying Side By Side, Recorded From Telescope, March 17, 2019. Video, UFO Sighting News.

Date of sighting: March 17, 2019

Location of sighting: Earths moon

Source: MUFON #99274

 

A person in Edirne, Turkey was observing the moon through a telescope and was lucky enough to catch a great shot of not one, but two UFOs flying low over the moons surface. Yes I said that right. This object is actually two UFOs flying side by side, like a military wingman for USAF fighter jets. 

 

Both objects are diamond shaped, yet one is twice the size of the other. If these were meteors, they would be leaving a trail of debris behind them, and there is no way they would be perfect diamond flying side by side. These are alien craft flying over our moon!

 

Now, I wonder...if the eyewitness caught this while observing for a half hour...then how often does this occur on our moon daily? Well, if you say 24 hours in a day, and divide it by 30 minutes, we get 48. Thats a lot on only the side that we can see. I imagine its much more on the side we cannot see. This is 100% proof that aliens are actively using our moon not just as a base, but as a home.

Scott C. Waring

{ https://www.ufosightingsdaily.com/ }

Chinese Film 'The Wandering Earth' Imagines a Journey to a New Sun

Why This Poisonous Gas Could Be a Sign of Alien Life

By Mike Wall 

Artist’s illustration of the exoplanet Proxima b, the Earth-size world that orbits the red dwarf star Proxima Centauri.

(Image: © ESO/M. Kornmesser)

Scientists hunting for signs of alien life shouldn't be so quick to dismiss carbon monoxide (CO), a new study suggests.

The substance is highly poisonous to people and most other animal life here on Earth because it latches firmly onto hemoglobin, preventing this blood protein from carrying vital oxygen in the required quantities. 

And the gas hasn't typically rated as a promising "biosignature" that astrobiologists should target in the search for ET. Indeed, many researchers regard CO as an anti-biosignature, because it's a readily available source of carbon and energy that life-forms should theoretically gobble up. So, finding lots of CO in an exoplanet's atmosphere would suggest the absence of life as we know it, according to this line of thinking.

• Related: 10 Exoplanets That Could Host Alien Life

But it may be time to revise such reasoning, the new study said. In it, researchers used computer models to better understand the atmospheric chemistry of Earth about 3 billion years ago, when our planet's air contained very little oxygen. Microbial life was common on Earth back then, but animal life was a long way off. (The earliest fossils of multicellular organisms date to about 600 million years ago.)

The team's results indicated that CO could have accumulated in significant quantities in those long-gone days, reaching concentrations of around 100 parts per million (ppm), or about 1,000 times higher than current levels.

"That means we could expect high carbon-monoxide abundances in the atmospheres of inhabited but oxygen-poor exoplanets orbiting stars like our own sun," study co-author Timothy Lyons, a professor of biogeochemistry at the University of California, Riverside (UCR), said in a statement. 

The scientists also applied their models to exoplanetary systems — specifically, those centered on red dwarfs, the small, dim stars that make up about 75 percent of the Milky Way galaxy's stellar population. 

The team found that inhabited red-dwarf planets with lots of oxygen in their atmospheres likely sport high levels of CO as well. In fact, CO concentrations on such worlds could be as high as several percent.

"Given the different astrophysical context for these planets, we should not be surprised to find microbial biospheres promoting high levels of carbon monoxide," study lead author Edward Schwieterman, a postdoctoral researcher in UCR's Department of Earth Sciences, said in the same statement. 

"However, these would certainly not be good places for human or animal life as we know it on Earth," he added.

The new study, which was published last week in The Astrophysical Journal, serves as a reminder that the hunt for alien life is a very complicated endeavor. Given the incredible abundance and diversity of alien worlds, there's certainly no reason to assume that ET will look like Earth life or employ the same biochemical pathways.

So, researchers, such as Sara Seager of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, are greatly expanding the list of possible biosignatures beyond the handful (such as methane and oxygen) that work for Earth-like life. 

Such work will likely have practical applications, and soon. NASA's $8.9 billion James Webb Space Telescope will search for biosignatures in the air of some nearby exoplanets after the observatory's planned March 2021 launch. And three huge, ground-based scopes scheduled to come online in the mid-2020s — the Giant Magellan Telescope, the Thirty Meter Telescope and the European Extremely Large Telescope — will do some atmosphere-sniffing as well after they come online in the mid-2020s.

• 9 Strange, Scientific Excuses for Why Humans Haven't Found Aliens Yet
• 10 Exoplanets That Could Host Alien Life
• 7 Ways to Discover Alien Planets

Mike Wall's book about the search for alien life, "Out There" (Grand Central Publishing, 2018; illustrated by Karl Tate), is out now.

Follow him on Twitter @michaeldwall. 

Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom or Facebook. 

{ https://www.space.com/ }

Mercury is the planet closest to Earth — contrary to popular belief

BY MIHAI ANDREI

If you’d ask most people what; the closest planet to Earth, you’d probably come across one answer: Venus. That answer, while apparently logical, is not really true. Mercury is the planet closest to us.

Even more surprising is the fact that Mercury is the closest neighbor, on average, to each of the other seven planets in the solar system. How can this be?

Image credits: Image: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Carnegie Institution of Washington (Wikimedia Commons).

Mercury’s in retrograde

What’s the planet closest to the Earth? Even without any prior knowledge, a decent guess would be Venus or Mars — these are our planetary neighbors, after all. A simple Google search reveals that Venus’ orbit is closer to that of Earth’s so, naturally, Venus must be the answer, right?

Wrong. Mercury is the planet closest to Earth — at least on average.

As it turns out, Venus being the closest planet to Earth is simply a misconception — one that has propagated greatly through the years.

“By some phenomenon of carelessness, ambiguity, or groupthink, science popularisers have disseminated information based on a flawed assumption about the average distance between planets,” write engineers Tom Stockman, Gabriel Monroe, and Samuel Cordner in a commentary published in Physics Today.

Instead, they recommend a different method of measuring which planet is closest, which they demonstrated using the motions of the planets within the last 10,000 years.

“By using a more accurate method for estimating the average distance between two orbiting bodies, we find that this distance is proportional to the relative radius of the inner orbit.”

Using this method, Mercury is closer to Earth on average. A GIF created by Reddit user u/CharcoalCharts does a great job at depicting this (the Earth is in Blue). The Earth is usually closest to Mercury, although, at some points of the year, it’s closest to Venus or Mars.

Non-intuitive

It feels intuitive that the average distance between every point on two concentric ellipses is closer than ellipses which are farther apart, but this is not necessarily the case. While Venus can get very close to the Earth (at only 0.28 Astronomical Units, with 1 AU being the distance from the Earth to the Sun), the two planets can also be quite far apart, at 1.72 AU. In total, Venus is 1.14 AU from Earth, but Mercury is a much closer 1.04 AU.

There are also two other shocking conclusions from this: first of all, on average, the Sun is closest to the Earth than any other planet (because it’s at 1 AU by definition). Secondly, it’s not just the Earth — Mercury is the closest neighbor of all planets in the solar system. In other words, Uranus is, on average, closer to Mercury than its presumed neighbor, Neptune. The same stands for even the dwarf planet Pluto (we still love you, Pluto!).

The whirly-dirly corollary

Researchers also found that the distance between two orbiting bodies is at a minimum when the inner orbit is at a minimum — something which they call the “whirly-dirly corollary” — after an episode of the cartoon Rick and Morty.

The method might also be useful in estimating distances between other orbiting bodies such as satellites or extrasolar planets or stars. In the Physics Today commentary, the researchers explain:

“As best we can tell, no one has come up with a concept like PCM to compare orbits. With the right assumptions, PCM could possibly be used to get a quick estimate of the average distance between any set of orbiting bodies. Perhaps it can be useful for quickly estimating satellite communication relays, for which signal strength falls off with the square of distance. In any case, at least we know now that Venus is not our closest neighbor—and that Mercury is everybody’s.”

{ https://www.zmescience.com/ }

Physicists propose a new way to levitate and propel spacecraft-sized objects with light

BY TIBI PUIU 

In the future, spacecraft could travel to other stars faster than anything currently available by using laser light sources that are millions of miles away. For the moment, this prospect has been explored only theoretically by physicists at Caltech. In their new study, the researchers propose levitating and propelling objects using a beam of light by etching the surface of those objects with specific nanoscale patterns.

Conceptual illustration of a nano-patterned object reorienting itself to remain in a beam of light. 

(Credit: Courtesy of the Atwater laboratory)

A pattern that keeps objects afloat

For decades, researchers have been using so-called optical tweezers to move and manipulate microscopic objects (i.e. nanoparticles) using a focused laser beam. Nanoparticles can be suspended mid-air due to the light scattering and gradient forces resulting from the interaction of the particle with the light. Such devices have been used to trap small metal particles, but also viruses, bacteria, living cells, and even strands of DNA. For his contributions to developing optical tweezers, Arthur Ashkin was awarded the 2018 Nobel Prize in Physics.

However, optical tweezers are limited by distance and the size of the objects. Essentially, only very small objects can be manipulated with light in this fashion and only from close range.

“One can levitate a ping pong ball using a steady stream of air from a hair dryer. But it wouldn’t work if the ping pong ball were too big, or if it were too far away from the hair dryer, and so on,” Ognjen Ilic, a postdoc at Caltech and the study’s first author, said in a statement.

In their new study, Ilic and colleagues have proposed a radical new way to use light in order to trap or even propel objects. Theoretically, their method is not limited by an object’s size or distance from the source, which means macroscopic objects such a spacecraft could be accelerated, perhaps even close to relativistic speeds, using the force of light alone.

For this to work, certain nanoscale patterns need to be etched on an object’s surface. When the concentrated laser beam hits this patterned surface, the object should begin to “self-stabilize” by generating torque to keep it in the light beam. The authors say that the patterning is designed in such a way as to encode the object’s stability.

This would work for any kind of object, from a grain of rice to a spaceship in size. The light source could also be millions of miles away which would make this technology ideal to power a light sail for space exploration.

“We have come up with a method that could levitate macroscopic objects,” said Harry Atwater, Professor of Applied Physics and Materials Science in Caltech’s Division of Engineering and Applied Science. “There is an audaciously interesting application to use this technique as a means for propulsion of a new generation of spacecraft. We’re a long way from actually doing that, but we are in the process of testing out the principles.”

The findings were reported in the journal Nature Photonics.

{https://www.zmescience.com/ }

Controversial Book Argues: Humans Are Not From Earth

A researcher argues that humans evolved on a different planet and were eventually brought to Earth in the very distant past.

What if we are the aliens we’ve been searching for all along?

Despite the progress made in various branches of science like biology, chemistry, and astrophysics, we are still unable to say for certain how life started on Earth.

Was this a unique event across the universe? Or is it possible that there are out there planets eerily similar to Earth, which also harbor life, even if it is just primitive?

The truth is that we have theorized about the origins of life, ever since the human mind was capable of thinking.

Did life come from space? Or did life originate on the planet, without ‘extraterrestrial’ (Comets, Asteroids, etc.) influence?

If amino acids arrived with comet impacts, it would suggest, as some experts argue, that life may be widespread in our solar system.

But what if things are not so simple? What if the origins of life are anything but rational? And what if humans are NOT from Earth?

That’s a controversial subject touched by a book written by American ecologist Dr. Ellis Silver.

His book, titled ‘Humans are not from Earth: a scientific evaluation of the evidence‘ suggests that our species is not native to Earth and that it is very possible we’ve come from elsewhere.

Dr. Silver provides arguments based on various subjects like human psychology, arguing that mankind did not evolve alongside other life forms on Earth. Instead, the researcher indicates that humans came into existence on a different planet, and we were ‘brought to Earth’, in the very distant past.

The book offers five distinctive points:

• 53 factors that prove we couldn’t have evolved on Earth.
• Why we’re here on Earth, and how and when we got here.
• Where our true home planet is, and what it’s like to live there.
• Why valid evidence is ignored, denied and covered up by scientists and governments. (There’s actually a very good reason.)
• What we really know about extraterrestrials and their spacecraft.

The researcher explained that his book is based on the scientific differences between humans and other animals on Earth.

The Earth approximately meets our needs as a species, but perhaps not as strongly as whoever brought us here initially thought,” explained Dr. Silver in an interview.

The researcher points towards chronic diseases that affect the human race, like back pain, indicating it could be a sign that proves our species formed on another world, with much less gravity.

Dr. Silver also mentions other uniquely human traits: humans have 223 extra genes, not found in any other species.

The American researcher further suggests the human race has a number of ‘serious flaws’ that point to the possibility we are not from this planet.

“We are all chronically ill,” Dr. Silver explains.

“Indeed, if you can find a single person who is 100% fit and healthy and not suffering from some (perhaps hidden or unstated) condition or disorder (there’s an extensive list in the book) I would be extremely surprised – I have not been able to find anyone.”

{ https://curiosmos.com/ }

That’s not what Heath said he saw Dec. 16, 2018, but he’s glad there are other people talking about UFOs. Heath posted the video of what he saw on YouTube and immediately called his mom.

On Tuesday, he brought the video to The Herald.

He said he saw the flying object — a rotating silver orb with two lights on one side, and one on another — near his home, flying above the AMC Classic Rock Hill 7 movie theater on Cherry and Anderson roads. He said the object was just feet above the movie theater roof, but later flew higher in the sky.

Heath said he followed the object down Interstate 77 to Chester, where he lost sight of it over the treeline. He said it was difficult to get the object on video. His phone wouldn’t pick it up on camera, so he had to use a digital camera.

“My hands were shaking so bad,” he said. “Because I saw it up close. I was freaked out.”

Heath and the Kiawah Island woman aren’t alone. The National UFO Reporting Center database shows 76 reports of UFO sightings in South Carolina from 2018.

The UFO database lists 1,797 reports from South Carolina total, going back to 1939 and as recent as a report from Tega Cay on March 11, of three unidentifiable orange lights in the sky near Lake Wylie.

Some of the reports are pretty out there. One person in Lancaster reported seeing something that looked like a “jiggly ball of bright white vibrating jello” in the sky on Dec. 21, 2017.

Other reports have scientific explanations. The National UFO Reporting Center notes a report from North Myrtle Beach on July 15, 2018, of a “single fireball shape hovering high over the water” may have been a Mars sighting.

The organization said two reports from June 29, 2015m, one from Rock Hill and one from Chester, of space debris and a “fireball with a long tail,” respectively, were sightings of satellite debris re-entering the atmosphere. The American Meteor Society said the organization was sent 150 reports from Georgia and the Carolinas of “a bright fiery object” that day in 2015, which they also said was likely satellite debris.

Other South Carolinians have even reported seeing an orb with rotating lights, like Heath.

One person reported seeing three orange orbs that rotated in Myrtle Beach on May 15, 2017. Someone in Fort Mill reported seeing three objects rotating vertically and horizontally in the sky Oct. 18, 2014, according to the UFO Reporting Center database.

RICHARD HEATH

Dwayne Brown, head of NASA’s science communications office in Washington, D.C., said it’s common to see meteorites or objects re-entering the atmosphere. But he said the office hasn’t seen any recent reports.

NASA experts have not evaluated Heath’s video yet, but Brown said he would take a look.

UFO usually refers to supposed alien technology in common use, but UFO technically just means any “unidentified flying object.”

Heath said he’s never seen anything like the orb, which at one point seemed to change color and shape and do flips. He said he believes it was either extraterrestrial tech or a top secret government project.

Heath didn’t always believe in the unexplainable.

“I felt like anything was possible, but I was skeptical,” he said.

But now?

“To be honest with you, I think it had to be a UFO,” he said.

{ https://www.heraldonline.com/ }

More than one reality exists, shocking study says

By Chris Ciaccia | Fox News

Shocking study says more than one reality exists

A shocking new study suggest that, at a quantum level at least, two different versions of reality exist. The new study comes from the idea brought to the forefront in Eugene Wigner's friend scenario, which states that two people could see the same photon, or light particle, and have different observations of the photon. Even though the observations, and the conclusions drawn from those observations, are different, they would both be correct.

If you've ever questioned the nature of your reality, a new study suggests that there are actually two different versions of it — at least at the quantum level.

The pre-published study, found in arXiv, sheds new light on the complex idea that two people could see the same photon, come to different conclusions about the photon, yet still both be correct.

"In quantum mechanics, the objectivity of observations is not so clear, most dramatically exposed in Eugene Wigner’s eponymous thought experiment where two observers can experience fundamentally different realities," the researchers wrote in the study. "While observer-independence has long remained inaccessible to empirical investigation, recent no-go-theorems construct an extended Wigner’s friend scenario with four entangled observers that allows us to put it to the test."

• PHYSICISTS MAY HAVE FOUND A WAY TO 'UNTANGLE' INFORMATION TRAPPED IN A BLACK HOLE

They continued: "In a state-of-the-art photon experiment, we here realize this extended Wigner’s friend scenario, experimentally violating the associated Bell-type inequality by 5 standard deviations. This result lends considerable strength to interpretations of quantum theory already set in an observer-dependent framework and demands for revision of those which are not."

One of the study's co-authors, Martin Ringbauer, told Live Science that "you can verify both of them," adding that theoretical advances were needed before they were able to prove Wigner's hypothesis, which was first proposed in 1961.

"Theoretical advances were needed to formulate the problem in a way that is testable. Then, the experimental side needed developments on the control of quantum systems to implement something like that," he told the news outlet.

To test the idea, the researchers designated "two different laboratories, each involving an experimenter and their friend," introducing two pairs of entangled photons, which allowed for their fates to be intertwined. They also introduced "people" (who were not real, but rather represented observers) to measure one photon in the pair, record their results and repeat the process for the second photon using quantum memory.

• STEPHEN HAWKING SAID 'THERE IS NO GOD' AND THAT HUMANS WILL 'LIVE IN SPACE' IN FINAL BOOK

In 1961, when Wigner introduced the idea that would eventually become known as "Wigner's friend," only one scenario was used. With the new experiment, it was doubled and the results that Wigner had first discussed more than 50 years still rang true.

Quantum mechanics gives detail on how the world works at a scale so small that the rules of physics do not apply, Live Science added. With the new findings of the study, the field of quantum mechanics may change if measurements are not the same for everyone.

"It seems that, in contrast to classical physics, measurement results cannot be considered absolute truth but must be understood relative to the observer who performed the measurement," Ringbauer told Live Science. "The stories we tell about quantum mechanics have to adapt to that."

{ https://www.foxnews.com/ }

Flat Earthers Plan Trip Around Antarctica to Prove You Know What

Paul Seaburn

They’re ba-ack! OK, they never left us, but you might have thought they would after Flat Earthers had their core belief system destroyed by their own leaders in an attempt to prove their pancaked planet theory with a gyroscope and instead reinforced the fact that Earth is round, round, get around, it is a-round. They obviously don’t follow Brian Wilson either, but seem to be more prone to John Belushi’s Bluto in “Animal House,” who rallied fellow frat members into action with his battle cry:

“What? Over? Did you say ‘over’? Nothing is over until we decide it is! Was it over when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor? Hell no!… It ain’t over now, ’cause when the goin’ gets tough, the tough get goin’. Who’s with me? Let’s go! Come on!..”

Well, the “tough” Flat Earthers are getting going and they’re going to … Antarctica! For those not familiar with the theory, the continent at the bottom of the planet that’s round to the rest of us is different if a globe were flattened with the North Pole in the center. Then, the outer rim would be a thin band we’d all call Antarctica. For those who know their math, that’s also called a circumference. The circumference of the round Earth is about 24,900 miles (40,000 km) but that’s around the equator and there’s still the southern hemisphere to flatten out and add to the flat map. In an interview with Forbes, flat-earther Jay Decasby, who is developing a flat earth reality series, puts the white ring of Antarctica circling such a round map at over 60,000 miles.

“But, but, but!” you say … didn’t Colin O’Brady just complete the first-ever solo crossing of Antarctica on a trip that took 54 days and measured 932 miles from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific Ocean via the South Pole? Decasby scoffs at your question.

“They’ve made laws to not allow any kind of motorized equipment on the ice which would help us prove not only flat earth but what’s beyond the ice wall, but in reality, we don’t even need to get onto the ice to prove flat earth.”

That’s right. He claims the best way to prove the Earth is flat is to sail a ship around the circumference of Antarctica which should be 60,000 miles. Such a trip would also prove that the edge of the Earth is circled by a wall of ice 150 feet high. Captain James Cook did this first, although that claim is obviously disputed by flat earthers like Decasby who says there’s no way Cook sailed 60,000 miles (did you catch the flaw in this logic?), but still quotes Cook’s description of a high wall of ice in which the captain was never able to find an inlet that penetrated it. Never mind that Antarctica has since been circled many times and many inlets have been found.

Jules Verne’s Phileas Fogg strove to go around the world in 80 days. Viking Ocean Cruises is offering an Ultimate World Cruise that will circumnavigate the Earth and visit 59 countries in 245 days (for the low, low price of $93,000). Why not, in the name of science or the debunking of science, let these flat earth believers finance and sail a ship around Antarctica and prove their theory to the “the sun-worshipping cult of heliocentrism” or forever hold their peace?

Entertainment could be provided by bands singing flat versions of “I Get Around,” “Roundabout” and “Fat-Bottomed Girls (You Make the Rockin’ World Go Round).” The challenge will be to find a cruse ship with a big enough galley to stock a buffet for 60,000 miles. What would Bluto say?

“Let’s do it!!!”

{ https://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }

The Incredible Challenge of Landing Heavy Payloads On Mars

There are a bunch of challenges with Mars, including its lack of a protective magnetosphere and lower surface gravity. But one of the biggest is its thin atmosphere of carbon dioxide. 

If you were standing on the surface of Mars without a spacesuit, you’d freeze to death and asphyxiate from a lack of oxygen. But you’d also experience less than 1% the atmospheric pressure you enjoy here on Earth.

And it turns out, this thin atmosphere is making it incredibly challenging to get significant payloads safely down to the surface of the Red Planet. In fact, only 53% of missions to Mars have actually worked out properly.

So let’s talk about how missions to Mars have worked in the past, and I’ll show you what the problem is.

Landing on Mars Is the Worst

Historically, missions to Mars are launched from Earth during the flight windows that open up every two years or so when Earth and Mars are closer together. ExoMars flew in 2016, InSight in 2018 and the Mars 2020 rover will fly in, well, 2020.

The missions follow interplanetary transfer trajectory designed to either get there the fastest, or with the least amount of fuel. 

As the spacecraft enters the atmosphere of Mars, it’s going tens of thousands of kilometers per hour. It has to somehow lose all that velocity before landing gently on the surface of the Red Planet.

Here on Earth, you can use the thick Earthican atmosphere to slow your descent, bleeding off your velocity with a heat shield. The space shuttle’s tiles were designed to absorb the heat of re-entry, as the 77 tonne orbiter went from 28,000 km/h to zero. 

A similar technique could be used on Venus or Titan, where they have thick atmospheres.

The Moon, without any atmosphere at all is relatively straightforward to land on as well. Without any atmosphere at all, there’s no need for a heat shield, you just use propulsion to slow your orbit and land on the surface. As long as you bring enough propellant, you can stick the landing.

Back to Mars, with a spacecraft hurtling into its thin atmosphere at more than 20,000 kilometers per hour. 

Curiosity Is the Limit

Traditionally, missions have started their descent with an aeroshell to remove some of the spacecraft’s velocity. The heaviest mission ever sent to Mars was Curiosity, which weighed in at 1 metric tonne, or 2,200 pounds. 

When it entered the Martian atmosphere, it was going 5.9 kilometers a second, or 22,000 kilometers an hour.

Curiosity had the largest aeroshell ever sent to Mars, measuring 4.5 meters across. This huge aeroshell was tilted at an angle, allowing the spacecraft to maneuver as it hits the thin atmosphere of Mars, aiming for a specific landing zone.

At about 131 kilometers altitude, the spacecraft would start firing thrusters to perfect adjust the trajectory as it approached the surface of Mars.

About 80 seconds of flight through atmosphere, the temperatures on the heat shield rose to 2,100 degrees celsius. In order to not melt, the heat shield used a special material called Phenolic Impregnated Carbon Ablator, or PICA. The same material SpaceX uses for its Dragon Capsules, by the way.

Once it had slowed its velocity to lower than Mach 2.2, the spacecraft deployed the largest parachute ever built for a mission to Mars – 16 meters across. This parachute could generate 29,000 kilograms of drag force, slowing it down even more. 

The suspension lines were made of Technora and Kevlar, which are pretty much the strongest and most heat resistant materials we know of.

Then it jettisoned its parachute and used rocket engines to slow its descent even more. When it was close enough, Curiosity deployed a skycrane that lowered the rover down gently to the surface.

This is the quick version. If you want an extensive overview of what Curiosity went through landing on Mars, I highly recommend you check out Emily Lakdawalla’s “The Design and Engineering of Curiosity”.

Curiosity only weighed one tonne. 

Going Heavier Doesn’t Scale

Want to do the same thing with heavier payloads? I’m sure you’re imagining bigger aeroshells, bigger parachutes, bigger skycranes.

In theory, the SpaceX Starship will send 100 tonnes of colonists and their stuff to the surface of Mars. 

Here’s the problem. The methods of decelerating in the Martian atmosphere don’t scale up very well.

First, let’s start with parachutes. To be honest, at 1-tonne, Curiosity is about as heavy as you can get using a parachute. Any heavier and there just aren’t any materials engineers can use that can handle the deceleration load.

A couple of months ago, NASA engineers celebrated the successful test of the Advanced Supersonic Parachute Inflation Research Experiment, or ASPIRE. This is the parachute that’ll be used for the Mars 2020 rover mission. 

They put the parachute made of advanced composite fabrics, like nylon, Technora and Kevlar, onto a sounding rocket and launched it to an altitude of 37 kilometers, mimicking the conditions the spacecraft will experience as it arrives at Mars.

The parachute deployed in a fraction of a second, and fully inflated, experienced 32,000 kilograms of force. If you were on board at the time, you would experience 3.6 times as much force as crashing into a wall going 100 km/h wearing your seatbelt. In other words, you wouldn’t survive.

If the spacecraft was any heavier, it would need to be made of impossible composite fabrics. And forget about passengers.

NASA has been trying out different ideas to land heavier payloads on Mars, like, as much as 3 tonnes. 

One idea is called the Low-Density Supersonic Decelerator, or LDSD. The idea is to use a much larger aerodynamic decelerator that would inflate around the spacecraft like a bouncy castle as it enters the Martian gravity.

In 2015, NASA actually tested this technology, carrying a prototype vehicle on a balloon to an altitude of 36 kilometers. The vehicle then fired its solid rocket, carrying it to an altitude of 55 kilometers. 

As it was rocketing upwards, it inflated its Supersonic Inflatable Aerodynamic Decelerator to a diameter of 6 meters (or 20 feet), which then slowed it back down to Mach 2.4. Unfortunately its parachute failed to deploy properly, so it crashed into the Pacific Ocean.

That’s progress. If they can actually work out the engineering and physics, we could someday see 3 tonne spacecraft landing on the surface of Mars. Three whole tonnes.

More Propulsion, Less Cargo

The next idea to scale up a Mars landing is to use more propulsion. In theory, you can just carry more fuel, fire your rockets when you arrive at Mars, and cancel all that velocity. The problem, of course, is that the more mass you have to carry to decelerate, the less mass that you can actually land on the surface of Mars. 

The SpaceX Starship is expected to use a propulsive landing to get 100 tonnes down to the surface of Mars. Because it’s taking a more direct, faster path, the Starship will hit the Martian atmosphere faster than 8.5 km/s and then use aerodynamic forces to slow its entry.

It doesn’t have to go this fast, of course. The Starship could use aerobraking, passing through the upper atmosphere several times to bleed off velocity. In fact, this is the method that orbital spacecraft going to Mars use.

But then passengers on board would need to spend weeks for the spacecraft to slow down and go into orbit around Mars, and then to descend through the atmosphere.

According to Elon Musk, his delightfully unintuitive strategy for handling all that heat is to build the spacecraft out of stainless steel, and then tiny holes in the shell will bleed methane fuel out to keep the windward side of the spacecraft cool.

That said, Elon Musk thinks there’s a way. And before we discount his ideas, let’s watch the twin side boosters from the Falcon Heavy rocket land perfectly together. 

And pay no attention to what happened to the central booster.

A new study from the Aerospace Department at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign proposes that missions to Mars could take advantage of the thicker atmosphere that’s closer to the surface of Mars.

In their paper titled, “Entry Trajectory Options for High Ballistic Coefficient Vehicles at Mars”, the researchers propose that spacecraft flying to Mars don’t need to be in such a hurry to get rid of their velocity.

As the spacecraft is screaming through the atmosphere, it’ll still be able to generate a lot of aerodynamic lift, which could be used to steer it through the atmosphere.

They ran the calculations and found that the ideal angle was to just point the spacecraft straight down and dive towards the surface. Then, at the last possible moment, pull up using the aerodynamic lift to fly sideways through the thickest part of the atmosphere.

This increases the drag and lets you get rid of the most amount of velocity before you turn on your descent engines and complete your powered landing.

That sounds, um, fun.

If humanity is going to build a viable future on the surface of Mars, we’re going to need to crack this problem. We’re going to need to develop a series of technologies and techniques that make landing on Mars more reliable and safe. 

I suspect it’s going to be much much more challenging than people are expecting, but I’m looking forward to the ideas that will be tested in the coming years.

• A big thank you to Nancy Atkinson who covered this topic here on Universe Today more than a decade ago, and inspired me to work on this video.

{ https://www.universetoday.com/ }

Scientists create liquid metal that stretches like Terminator

Credit: American Chemical Society

Come with me if you want to stretch.

Paging Arnold Schwarzenegger, this liquid metal can stretch and move

Video screenshot by CNET

In good news, scientists have not created a remorseless Terminator-style killing machine for real. In other good news, they've figured out how to make a liquid metal that can stretch in all sorts of directions. It looks like a sci-fi visual effect made real.

The American Chemical Society released a video on Wednesday of the metal in action to go along with a paper titled Magnetic Liquid Metals Manipulated in the Three-Dimensional Free Space from the Applied Materials & Interfaces journal. 

Robert Patrick as the liquid metal T-1000 in Terminator 2: Judgement Day.

Video screenshot by CNET

The shiny liquid metal can be manipulated with magnets. It stretches like the fictional T-1000 robot from Terminator 2, and can also be used to complete a circuit. 

Scientists at Beihang University in China led the research project.

"They added iron particles to a droplet of a gallium, indium and tin alloy immersed in hydrochloric acid," the ACS reports. "A gallium oxide layer formed on the droplet surface, which lowered the surface tension of the liquid metal." This allows it to stretch out and move without breaking apart.

We're a long way off from morphing androids, but the researchers believe this sort of liquid metal could one day be incorporated into soft robotics. You can almost hear it whispering, "I'll be back."

{ https://www.cnet.com/ }