Mysterious Hum Driving People MAD! Researchers Have the Answer Why 

By Lisa Haven

Since the early 1970’s numerous reports of a humming nose have been reported across the world. Original reports began in the United Kingdom and spread to the US in the early1990’s. Reports include a type of diesel engine noise heard at a low-frequency indicating some type of electromagnetic energy noise that some people hear due to sensitivity, while others do not. People have speculated that the sound could be due to cell-towers, delusions, local noises in the area, HAARP, UFO’s, and more. But most of the research has led people to dead ends….until now!!!

A geoscientist by the name of David Deming has done some intense research on this subject and may just have the answer you’re longing to know. The video below dives through some of Deming’s research and I believe you will be shocked when you find out the true source…..

GET THE MORGAN: https://historicsilvercoins.com/

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For More Information See:

• http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.518.9056&rep=rep1&type=pdf
• https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2019/mar/13/what-is-the-mysterious-gl-hum-and-is-it-simply-noise-pollution?f
• http://www.thehum.info/

{ https://beforeitsnews.com/v3/ }

Every claimed alien abduction case is weird by default, but the 1973 abduction of Calvin Parker and Charles Hickson in Pascagoula, Mississippi is weird even by those standards. The two men were fishing on the west bank of the Pascagoula river when, they said, a UFO appeared hovering above the ground. Three creatures disembarked from the craft, paralyzed Parker and Hickson, and brought them aboard. According to the men, the creatures were pale with remarkably wrinkled skin, “lobster-like” claws for hands, and carrot-shaped growths where their eyes and ears should have been. The creatures seemed to each have one thick leg, like two legs had been fused together.  On the ship, the creatures allegedly performed medical procedures and levitated them back to their original position 20 minutes later.

The story drew international attention and became one of the most well-known alien abduction cases.  Through the course of the investigation, some of the big guns of the UFO world were brought out, with Hickson and Parker being interviewed by James Harder and J. Allen Hynek (of Project Blue Book fame), who concluded that Parker and Hicks had “a very real, frightening experience.” While some small details changed over the course of time, neither man ever recanted their stories. Charles Hickson passed away in 2011, and to the end of his life he maintained that the story was true.

Now 46 years later, a couple from the Pascagoula area has come forward claiming that they too saw something that night, but never before went public with their testimony for fear of ridicule. According to the Sun, Maria and Vernon Jerry Blair were sitting in their car looking out over the Pascagoula river, on the opposite bank from Parker and Hickson, when they saw strange blue lights begin circling around the area. Maria Blair says:

“I thought was an aeroplane because of its bright lights flashing. And it just kept going back and forth across the sky. I told my husband there’s something wrong with that plane, it’s like he doesn’t know where he wants to go.”

The couple allegedly watched the lights for approximately 40 minutes, before stepping out of their car and walking down the pier towards the water. Maria says that’s when she saw one of the creatures emerge from the water:

“We started walking down the pier and something came up out of the water. It was like a person. I told Jerry ‘There’s somebody out there’. They came up out of the water, then went back down. So I’m standing there waiting for this person and the water rippled out.

[Jerry] said ‘Come on – there’s nobody out there’. I know I saw it.

I walked down to the boat and it was about 11.30pm to 12pm before I came back down the pier. I was by myself. I ran back to the car.”

The impetus for the Blairs coming forward was apparently the recently published book Pascagoula-The Closest Encounter by Calvin Parker, who had previously remained largely hidden from media attention since the incident. Calvin Parker met with Maria and Vernon last Wednesday for the first time and says he felt an immediate connection to the couple:

“It was a very emotional meeting from the beginning. It started out with both of us tearing up and automatically bonding. I felt like I had known [Maria] for years. It started off with her telling me that she saw the abduction on October 11, 1973, but didn’t know who was involved until the following day.

Mrs Blair then set out on a quest to find me so she could see if we were okay. But she had no luck because I was in hiding away from the media attention. Her husband told her she would be a fool for coming forward and that everyone would make her out to be crazy.

So, she kept this to herself telling me she would think about it every night and worry about me. Just like me – she had secrets that would haunt us for the rest of our lives.

Thank God I wrote the book as it has helped us come together. Although we have just met we have had a connection for over 45 years.”

It’s a weird case. The aliens are weird. The witness testimony is weird. There are weird holes in the descriptions of events. And everyone involved is weirdly earnest. Witness testimony is never proof of anything, but it’s yet another layer in one of the strangest encounters with the paranormal that’s ever been recorded.

{ https://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }

UFOs have always been paradoxical — viewed from the corridors of power as a tangible national security concern warranting decades of secret investigations, they  are also frustratingly impalpable cultural artifacts. As real phenomena, they continue to flit in and out of our perception, sometimes profoundly affecting individual lives. Meanwhile, they permeate our culture as iconographic entertainment products. UFOs are real, and they are unreal. This dichotomy demands some focused attention.

Art by Andreas M. Wiese.

The literary critic and philosopher Walter Benjamin saw in the cinematic medium a “unique faculty to express by natural means and with incomparable persuasiveness all that is fairylike, marvelous, supernatural.” Benjamin died in 1940, seven years prior to the birth of the modern UFO phenomenon. Had he lived to experience the age of the flying saucer, and of saucer movies, his observation would likely have been extended to include the “alien.”

The transcendent, actualizing power of cinema has been similarly noted by the artist Valie Export, who suggests that films are “expansions of our structures of time and space, of our experiential structures… they are expansions of our reality and our independent consciousness.” Through cinema, says Export, “the past is made visible, space and time can be transported… the boundaries between artificial and natural reality, between actual and possible reality… between man and object are transcended.”

The spectacle and the hyperreal

The social theorist Guy Debord spoke of the “spectacular society,” in which “the real world changes into simple images… and the simple images become real.”  In our spectacular society, said Debord, “the image matters more than the object, in fact, much more so than mere objective truth.” The image replaces the truth – it is truth, it is reality. The resultant state, in postmodern theory, is “hyperreality.”

By its most popular definition, hyperreality is:

An inability of consciousness to distinguish reality from a simulation of reality, especially in technologically advanced postmodern societies… [it is] a condition in which what is real and what is fiction are seamlessly blended together so that there is no clear distinction between where one ends and the other begins.

Something that is hyperreal, then, is simultaneously real andunreal, fact and fantasy.

The key words in the above definition are “technologically advanced.” Technologies of reproduction (mechanical and digital) have ushered in the age of the hyperreal, an age where simulations of reality threaten to dissolve the boundaries between “fact” and “fantasy,” between “true” and “false,” “real” and “imaginary.” It is my contention that cinematic simulations of UFOlogical history have all but consumed the history itself through the process of replication, just as humans were consumed and replicated as pod people in genre classics such as Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) or John Carpenter’s The Thing (1982).

The power of cinema

Cinema has an essential mystical ability to completely detach us from our physical environment and transport us to another, more vivid, realm of perception; a realm where everything is at once illusory, yet strangely real.

In film studies, anything that exists within the world of the film is known as diegesis. The cinema screen separates their fictional world from our “real” world. But, actually, the diegesis seeps through the screen into our world, into our subconscious. It becomes part of our reality.

Key to cinema’s power is that movies, in their slick, neatly packaged, self-contained way, serve to narrativize and contextualize the events, debates, and processes that constitute our frustratingly non-narrative world. Life rarely makes sense, but movies usually do, and in that we take comfort and, therein lies the problem: movies, no matter how realistic they are in the events they depict, are not real life. They are, at best, reflections of our reality, snapshots of it, simulations of it, skewed and distorted through the ideological framework of those who have made them.

Movies masquerade as the final word on a given topic. No matter what the subject, and regardless of how much that subject has already been written about and debated, once it is committed to film – once it has received the full Hollywood treatment – it is embedded firmly and forever into the popular consciousness. Imprinted on our psyche. Plunged into the deep wells of memory and imagination.

UFO reality

Unidentified Flying Objects are “real,” which is to say they exist independently of cinema, and of pop-culture more broadly. UFOs have been investigated by governments around the world for seven decades. What the phenomenon represents is open for debate, and various theories have been propounded, from secret military aircraft, to natural phenomena, otherworldly intelligences, and even untapped human potential. The point is that even in a world without movies, people would continue to report UFOs. People were reporting UFOs, and flying saucers specifically, long before Hollywood got in on the act.

UFOlogy informs Hollywood more than Hollywood informs UFOlogy, which is to say that Hollywood engages with UFO lore in a parasitic fashion, sucking dry the pulsing veins of a seventy year old subculture. The industry grabs hold of fringe ideas and popularizes them through the science-fiction genre: Men in Black, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, The Fourth Kind, Area 51. Hollywood didn’t create these terms, they were all part of the common language of UFOlogy decades before Hollywood lifted them.

In Hollywood’s UFO movies, broadly speaking, art imitates life. If the opposite were true, then following the release of James Cameron’s Avatar,  the highest grossing film of all time, we might reasonably have expected thousands of people to have begun reporting ten-foot-tall blue aliens. This did not happen; just as Hollywood’s forceful projection of the ‘little green men’ meme has failed to result in mass sightings of little green men (although reports of such entities do lightly pepper the UFO literature).

When it comes to UFOs, Hollywood produces depictions, albeit not entirely faithful ones, of what people actually report. This is not to say that what’s reported is necessarily true or accurate, but merely that Hollywood sees dramatic potential in these reports.

My position is this: Hollywood draws extensively from fact-based discourse on UFOs – a phenomenon whose existence is already rejected by consensus reality. The presentation of this UFO discourse onscreen — and particularly within the context of the sci-fi genre — serves to blur the boundaries between UFO fact and fantasy.

UFOs and the hyperreal process

Cinematic simulations of UFOlogical history (UFO movies and TV shows) simultaneously actualize and fictionalize their underlying subject matter – it becomes hyperreal, both real and unreal. We can unpack this concept into what I consider to be the three phases of UFOlogical hyperreality:

Phase one

SIMULATION

In which a film or TV show is produced that reflects a basic UFOlogical reality.

Phase two

RECEPTION

In which the basic UFOlogical reality is screened as spectacle for mass consumption, and, in the process, is masked and perverted through the cultural value of the medium (in this case film or TV, but we could also extend it to video games, comic books, etc.).

Phase three

HYPERREALITY

In which reality and simulation are experienced as without difference, or rather, the image has come to mean more to us than any underlying reality.

Essentially, then, the hyperreality of the UFO phenomenon has arisen primarily through processes of mass media simulation. The blurring of true and false, real and imaginary, through that most magical of mediums (cinema), and within the context of that most fantastical of genres (science fiction), engenders our acceptance of the UFO as just that: a fictional media construct with little or no grounding in our lived historical reality. And yet, thanks to their permanent residency in the popular imagination, UFOs are no less real to us as a result.

UFO tourism: The Little A’Le’Inn near Area 51 in Nevada.

It boils down to this…

In our hyperreal world, a world where Roswell is better understood as a plot device and Area 51 is a tourist attraction – a UFOlogical Disneyland – debates surrounding official “Disclosure” of UFO reality (whatever that reality might be) are meaningless. How does one Disclose what is already hyper-real? The hyperreality of the UFO phenomenon in the popular imagination nullifies its potential to be either real or unreal, because it is now, and perhaps always will be, both.

Of course, this hyperreality model does not offer a solution to the UFO enigma, because it does not address what UFOs are at an ontological level. But it does, I believe, go a very long way towards explaining why UFOs continue to defy acceptance within our consensus reality.

And so, again, if you care about UFOs, you should care a great deal about UFO movies. They have shaped your perceptions of the phenomenon, often without conscious intent, but sometimes wilfully. With this in mind, when next we encounter a silver screen saucer, let us all take a moment to peer up from our popcorn, and to separate the fact from the fantasy. We can but try.

{ https://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }

Pareidolia: the tendency to perceive a specific, often meaningful image in a random or ambiguous visual pattern.

Mars: a red planet covered in pareidolia.

The Opportunity Mars rover may be dead, but the phenomena it helped propagate is alive and well and continuing to cause odd news stories about creatures, humanoids and strange out-of-place objects on the surface of the fourth rock from the Sun. The latest can be seen in a photograph making the usual romp across the paranormal and weird news side of the Internet showing what appears to be a piece of metal with a perfectly round hole cut into it lying on the surface of Mars as if it: a) fell off of an alien spaceship; b) was left by humans who secretly visited the planet; c) is part of an abandoned alien city slowly rising up as the soil is blown away. Or it could be a rock.

Credit: NASA

The photo was the star of a video uploaded this week on the WhatsUpInTheSky37 YouTube channel, which attributes it to a “Shamus” who apparently found it at a really cool site called Gigapan for SOL 2013 which shows panoramic views of the Martian surface that can be moved and zoomed. All of that could be more impressive than the object itself, which indeed looks like a triangular piece of metal with a perfect circle cut out that skeptics know from looking at other pareidolia-fied photos from Mars and the Moon could very well be a rock whose image is distorted by shadows and angles.

Or it could be something else.

On the “piece of a human Martian probe” side, commenters point out that it could be debris from the lander that brought Curiosity to Mars or it could have fallen to the surface from another successful or failed Mars mission. Adding a little imagination, it could be a piece of a spaceship or vehicle or other equipment from a secret mission – you know, the NASA missions to land humans on Mars that no one can talk about. There are no tire tracks or footprints around the piece, but those could easily have been blown away by the strong Martian winds, although they somehow didn’t cover up or pile sand against the object, which seems to be resting unobstructed on the Martian ground.

Going full pareidolia-plus-enhanced-imagination, commenters speculate it could be from an alien spacecraft – assuming their spacecraft crash or fall apart like ours do, even after successfully navigating accident-free for light years. Again, that panoramic view from Gigapan shows no other objects in the immediate area. Yes, that’s the case with many fossils found on Earth, but those are tissue that can deteriorate, decay and disintegrate … this is allegedly a piece of metal that survived a trip of light years.

Or a rock.

In the end, unless a rover with an arm, a robot with an arm or a human astronaut with an arm can pick up the object, inspect it closely or bring it back to Earth, we’re unarmed to do more than just speculate what this thing might be. For now, the needle on the meter is very close to ‘rock’.

Pareidolia … you’re a cruel friend.

{ https://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }

Over the years there have been numerous investigators of the Men in Black phenomenon, such as UFO researchers Gray Barker, Jim Keith, and Harold Fulton – all of whom are now long gone. None of them, however, came anywhere close to Albert K. Bender. He was the man without whom our knowledge of the MIB and their agenda would be sorely lacking, and who created the International Flying Saucer Bureau (IFSB). Born in 1922, Bender was someone who served his country during the Second World War in the United States Army Air Corps. Post-World War Two, Bender lived in Bridgeport, Connecticut, in a somewhat creepy-looking old house that stood at what was, at the time, the junction of Broad Street and North Frontage Road. Today, the house is no more, the secrets it once held now being just memories and stories in books.

Adding to the creepy atmosphere, Bender lived in the attic. Of course! Where else? As a fan of the worlds of sci-fi-, fictional horror (H.P. Lovecraft was one of Bender’s favorites), and the real world of the paranormal, Bender radically altered his attic-room into what he termed his “Chamber of Horrors.” Paintings of grotesque monsters filled the walls. Imagery of skulls and black cats abounded. A Gothic-style painting of an old cemetery dominated the room. And, plastic spiders hung from the ceiling. Then, there was Bender’s altar – it was at the foot of that unsettling place of worship that Bender would engage in infernal rites designed to provoke a supernatural response from…well…who knew what? Bender didn’t care what “it” was, he just wanted that reply. He got it, alright. He opened the kind of door that it’s never, ever wise to open. And, something came through.

As Albert Bender noted in his 1962 book, Flying Saucers and the Three Men, in practically no time after he called forth something supernatural from the other side, he was paid a visit. Yes, the Men in Black had picked up on Bender’s request for communication – and they responded in kind. Bender was replying to a mountain of mail from the readers of the latest issue of his Space Review magazine when he received his first visit of what, finally, amounted to several. It was late one night in 1953 when the MIB turned up. There was no slow, loud, knock at the door, though. Nor were any U.S. Government ID cards flashed. Bender’s Men in Black walked through the walls and door of the attic. They were shining-eyed, pale monsters. Their mode of dress was black suits, black fedoras, skinny black-ties, black shoes, and crisp white shirts. Imagine a 1950s-era member of the Mafia mixed in with a liberal amount of a resurrected zombie that has seen better days, and the image swirling around your mind won’t be too far off what it was that Bender encountered.

As the Men in Black got closer, so Bender got weaker. His energy levels plummeted like those of a diabetic who has missed breakfast, lunch and dinner. He was freezing cold and the shakes had suddenly set in. Even in his hazy, sickly state, Bender couldn’t fail to see something which chilled him to the bone: the weaker he got, the brighter and more fiery the eyes of the terrible trio got.  Weaker, brighter. Weaker, brighter. You get the picture. Bender certainly did. In a macabre and terrifying way…Albert Bender was, bit by bit, being eaten; devoured, even.

With Bender sprawled out on the bed, and as helpless as a newborn puppy, the Men in Black telepathically warned him to leave the UFO subject well alone. If he didn’t only something terrible would befall the man himself. The three turned on their heels (black, of course) and dematerialized as mysteriously as they had first appeared. Bender was no fool: he knew that if he didn’t quit chasing flying saucers that the MIB were surely likely to turn his life into a living hell. But, the allure of the space-beings and their silvery, saucer-shaped craft was way too strong. So, it was all but inevitable that Bender would get another visit. And another. He did. Things got worse and worse: like those ghoulish drivers who can’t keep their eyes off of a fatal car accident on the highway, the MIB couldn’t keep away from Bender: they would always arrive at night and hover over the bed, as Bender fell into that same state of sudden illness and weakness that hit him on the first occasion.

By the second visit, Bender’s health was suffering significantly: he had gotten progressively weaker. He started to develop stomach problems. From his descriptions, it may have been ulcers and a dose of ulcerative-colitis. His energy levels had fallen off the scale and he lost weight. He was constantly out of breath. And migraines plagued him day and night. As for those MIB? Well, their eyes just proceeded to get brighter and brighter with every visit. It didn’t take Bender long to realize that he was effectively being bled dry. It was, in a strange way, very similar to the actions of those black-cloaked vampires who drained bevies of buxom babes of their blood in the likes of Universal Studios’ 1931 version of Bram Stoker’s classic novel, Dracula, starring Bela Lugosi. In a very strange state of twisted irony, the movie was one of Bender’s all-time favorites.

Come the third visit, Bender was not in a good condition at all: he was now seeing the MIB in the darkened streets of town. They would stand on the street-corner, leering at him – entities that no-one but Bender could see. The stomach problems were getting worse. He was losing more weight.  Bender knew he had to do something. And, he did. Bender, albeit somewhat reluctantly, walked away from UFOs and closed down Space Review. Bender shut the doors on the International Flying Saucer Bureau, too, and quit the subject. He made a very brief reappearance in 1962, to write the aforementioned Flying Saucers and the Three Men, after which he left the subject behind and never returned. From the 1960s, and until his death in 2016, Bender was, when it came to UFOs, permanently AWOL.

{ https://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }

Your GPS Devices May Stop Working on April 6, 2019

Your GPS devices may stop working on April 6, 2019 and if If that sounds familiar, it’s because the situation is basically the same as the “millennium bug” behind the infamous Y2K scare.

April 6 is the day millions of GPS receivers will literally run out of time, rolling over their time counters back to zero, thanks to limitations in timekeeping for older GPS devices. Many navigation systems may be affected, such as on ships or older aircraft, although your smartphone will be fine.

But because GPS satellites are also crucial to digital timekeeping used by websites, electrical grids, financial markets, data centers and computer networks, the effect of April 6 may be even more wide-ranging.

Although an information-security expert during a presentation at the RSA 2019 security conference in San Francisco said "I'm not going to be flying on April 6," thankfully, no one is hyping the GPS bug to an exaggerated degree - but it could still cause problems.

  

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

Two Mile Alien Structure Found On Earths Moon, March 2019, Photos, UFO Sighting News.

Date of discovery: March 13, 2019

Location of discovery: Earths Moon

Source photo: 

• http://ser.sese.asu.edu/MOON/CLEM_COLOR/moon.tiff

I found this alien structure near the edge of crater in an old NASA photo today. The structure looks like an oval sphere with two thick arms coming out of it. It also appears to have a few antennas or thin structures coming out of its top center. The shininess indicates it is absolutely a metallic surface. 

 

The NASA photo loads slowly, its 21MB in size, so give it a few minutes to load. 

 

The main question on most peoples minds is probably how big is it? Thats a bit tough, but I would estimate to be close to 1.5-3 miles across. How can they hide such a large object? Come on guys, its NASA, we only see photos that NASA or other organizations who are secretly controlled by NASA (ESA & JAXA & world wide network of telescopes funded by...who else...NASA). So we only know and trust what NASA says. It mental manipulation. We only know what they tell us, what they teach us, what they chose to tell us about. But have you ever asked yourself...what does NASA chose to not tell us about?

Scott C. Waring

 

 

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

Ten Mythological Creatures in Ancient Folklore

{ http://trailer.web-view.net/ }

Water Hops All Around the Moon Over the Course of a Lunar Day

By Meghan Bartels

An image captured by NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter shows areas scientists suspect to be covered with frost.

(Image: © NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center/Scientific Visualization Studio)

Water molecules are hopping around the moon as the lunar surface warms and cools throughout the day, new research suggests.

That research is based on observations gathered by NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, which has been studying our planet's close companion since 2009. A recent upgrade to an instrument onboard the orbiter called Lyman-Alpha Mapping Project (LAMP) has allowed scientists to keep a closer eye on where the moon's surface shows signs of water.

"This is an important new result about lunar water, a hot topic as our nation's space program returns to a focus on lunar exploration," Kurt Retherford, a co-author on the new research and the principal investigator of the LAMP instrument at Southwest Research Institute in Texas, said in a NASA statement. 

Water on other planetary bodies could be a valuable resource not just for human explorers to drink, but also to serve as fuel for future robotic exploration, since water can be split to form rocket fuel, saving missions from having to carry that fuel from Earth.

But it was only in 2009 that scientists were able to confirm that there was water locked up in ice on the moon's surface. Now, they have tracked how individual water molecules bind and release from the rocky regolith as temperatures change over the course of the moon's monthlong daylight cycle.

According to the researchers' observations, water molecules remain stuck to the surface throughout the lunar morning. As the neighborhood warms up around lunar noon, some of the molecules lift off into the moon's puny atmosphere and migrate around the moon's surface until they stumble upon someplace cold enough that they can settle back down to the surface.

"More work is needed to fully account for the complexities of the lunar surface, but the present results show that [this] work is definitely worth doing!" Michael Poston, a co-author on the new research and a research scientist on the LAMP team at Southwest Research Institute, said in a statement.

The research was described in a paper published Feb. 21 in the journal Geophysical Research Letters. 

• Mining Moon Ice: Prospecting Plans Starting to Take Shape 
• Photos: The Search for Water on the Moon 
• NASA Is Studying How to Mine the Moon for Water 

 Email Meghan Bartels at mbartels@space.com or follow her @meghanbartels.

Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook.

{ https://www.space.com/ }

Where did the “Seven Seas” come from?

 BY ALEXANDRU MICU

What does this idiom mean and who did we inherit it from?

Image via Pixabay.

Some idioms weather the years with grace. Their meaning keeps them relevant even after cultural context leaves them in the dust. We advise our friends against “beating a dead horse”, for example, or point out that you can take it to water but not make it drink — despite the fact that almost nobody today has even interacted with a horse.

Then there are those idioms that aren’t only removed from the modern way of life but are also factually incorrect. Yet they persist. “Sailing the seven seas” is one such idiom. Today, we’ll take a look at how it came to be and which seas, exactly, it harkens to.

Nowadays the term “seven seas” is a shorthand for “all the seas and oceans”; sailing the seven seas, then, means you’re quite the accomplished sailor. But, these “seven seas” carried various meanings throughout history and across cultures. Each civilization understood it differently, through the lens of their religion, culture, and the places they knew. Keep that in mind as we delve into the seven depths of this idiom.

Seven degrees of mystical seas

The earliest use (that we know of) is religious in nature. It comes from the ancient Sumerians, the first people to inhabit Mesopotamia, today’s Iraq. Enheduanna, a high priestess of the goddess Inanna and the moon god Nanna from the city-state of Ur, and the first poet to have their name recorded in history, refers to ‘seven seas’ in a hymn written around 2300 BC. Betty De Shong Meador provides a translation of these hymns in Inanna, Lady of Largest Heart: Poems of the Sumerian High Priestess Enheduanna (University of Texas Press, 2000, page 73), which reads (note that I’ve added all the commas and breaks between verses based on how I interpret the text):

“[….] O, house / Your shining face is the great snake of the reed marsh / Your foundation, o, shrine / The fifty abzu’s, the seven seas, has plumbed the inner-workings of your prince / Decision maker / Crown of wide heaven / He, Ashimbabbar, king of heaven, o , Ur / Shrine has built this house on your radiant and placed his seat upon your dais.”

Ashimbabbar seems to be a normalized, alternative spelling of Nanna’s name; Nanna was a moon god and “the tutelary deity of the city of Ur”, according to Oracc. In this context, abzu’s — from ‘ab’ meaning waters and ‘zu’ meaning deep in Akkadian — are probably fresh underground waters, such as those from springs or dug wells. The Sumerians believed underground waters came from the primordial sea and held an important religious significance.

Ok, hardhats on, it’s time to go on a limb here. In the Babylonian creation epic, Abzu morphs into a key deity. It’s possible they/it has been so all along. But, the fact that Enheduanna cites ‘fifty’ abzu’s suggests to me that this wasn’t the case while she lived, or that the two concepts were similar but already separated. Abzu, as a deity, represents a primordial freshwater ocean which, after coupling with Tiamat, a primordial saltwater ocean, essentially leads to the creation of the Universe. The two birth younger gods, who eventually usurp & murder them and create the world as we know it from their corpses.

Fresh- and salt-water seem to play a central part in the Sumerian religion and culture. The fifty abzu’s (which are fresh, Abzu’s domain) and the seven seas (seas tend to be salty, Tiamat) may have symbolized the primordial, raw stuff of which reality was born from in Enheduanna’s eyes. These ‘seven seas’, then, may have symbolized knowledge, creation, or the essence of both the mundane and the godly — not a stretch of the map. Possibly; that’s my take on it.

Seven western seas

Western cultures likely inherit the idiom from the ancient Greeks and Romans (who basically exported Greek culture throughout Europe). NOAA states that “the Seven [Greek] Seas were the Aegean, Adriatic, Mediterranean, Black, Red, and Caspian seas, with the Persian Gulf thrown in as a ‘sea'”. This fits well with the world as known to the ancient Greeks, who were quite the accomplished sailors themselves. Although they never moved out of the Mediterranean and its connected seas in large numbers, that still places them within a reasonable distance of Mesopotamia, its culture, and our known source for the idiom.

Another reference to the seven seas comes from Pliny the Elder, a Roman writer and admiral. Writing in his book The History of the World (the quote below is taken from Chapter 16, or ‘XVI’ in Roman numerals) these ‘seas’ were, in fact, the navigable salt marshes that the river Po forms when it meets the Adriatic sea.

“And there is not a river againe, that in so little a way, groweth to a greater streame [than the Po]: for over-charged it is and troubled with the quantitie of water, and therefore worketh it selfe a deepe channell, heavie and hurtfull to the earth under it, although it be derived and drawne into the other rivers and goles, betweene Ravenna and Altinum, for 120 miles: yet because he belcheth and casteth them out from him in so great abundance, he is said to make seven seas.”

“[….] All those rivers and trenches afore-said, the Tuscanes began to make first out of Sagis, carrying the forcible streame of the river acrosse into the Atrian meeres, which are called the seven seas, and made the famous haven of Atria a towne of the Tuscanes; of which the Adriaticke sea tooke the name afore time, which now is called Adriaticum.”

Here too we see that the ‘seas’ themselves weren’t necessarily seas per se, but the idiom has at least moved firmly into the realm of geography by this time.

The ‘seas’ in seven seas change over time, keeping pace with the most up-to-date maps. NOAA goes on to explain that in medieval European literature, “the phrase referred to the North Sea, Baltic, Atlantic, Mediterranean, Black, Red, and Arabian seas”. On the Arabian side of the cultural divide, these seven seas were the waters on the Eastern trading routes — the Persian Gulf, the Gulf of Khambhat, the Bay of Bengal, the Strait of Malacca, the Singapore Strait, the Gulf of Thailand, and the South China Sea, according to LiveScience.

As Europe crawled out of the middle ages and reached for cultural dominance through exploration (and sadly, colonization), the seven seas changed to mean the Arctic, the Atlantic, the Indian, the Pacific, the Mediterranean, the Caribbean, and the Gulf of Mexico (when Europeans first reached the Americas), and then the Banda Sea, the Celebes Sea, the Flores Sea, the Java Sea, the South China Sea, the Sulu Sea, and the Timor Sea as trade in spices and tea between Europe and Asia intensified.

In other words, the ‘seven seas’ idiom evolved over time to mean ‘a faraway place’ rather than a particular area or group of seas — probably under the combined efforts of sailors and captains looking to impress land-locked ladies. Maybe it’s an old-timey equivalent to ‘in a galaxy far, far away.’

But this still leaves one part of the puzzle unanswered:

Why is it always ‘seven’?

This is a trickier question to handle.

It may be a vestige of Enheduanna’s hymns. Ancient Sumerians regarded the heavens as being formed of seven domes, each made of a different type of precious stone. It’s possible, then, that each of the seas she refers to could have spawned one of the domes, and the wording just stuck.

Another possible explanation, in my view, has to do with the number itself. One of the most cited papers in psychology today, published in 1956 by George A. Miller, a Harvard psychologist, reports that the average memory span of young human adults is approximately 7 items. Whether this is the cause or not, I cannot say for sure — but the number seven pops up time and time again in all manners of places and contexts.

Rome was built on seven hills, and the world, according to Christian mythos, was made in seven days — although technically the last one was a cheat-day. Christian traditions also tell us of seven deadly sins and seven virtues, of Noah being told to bring seven pairs of every animal aboard his ark, of Jericho’s walls falling on the seventh day after seven priests with seven trumpets march around it seven times. Hinduism tells of seven different chakras, Islam of seven hells and seven heavens, and Mahatma Gandhi lists Seven Blunders of the World — to name a few. A massive poll carried out by writer, mathematician, and broadcaster Alex Bellos a few years ago found that 7 was the most-voted ‘favorite number’ (10% out of some 44,000 voters).

Do I believe that the number 7 is magic? Of course not — the only magic I believe in is Santa Claus and that booze can make me dance. But, seeing the number pop up so often definitely suggests something is special about it.

“Seven is the only number among those we can count on our hands that cannot be divided our multiplied within the group [it’s a prime number]. [It] is the only number between two and ten that is neither a multiple nor a factor of the others. In this way, “lucky number seven” stands alone—and we grasp this implicitly,” Bellos told Brandon Specktor for Reader’s Digest.

“It’s unique, a loner, the outsider. And humans interpret this arithmetical property in cultural ways.”

“By associating seven with a group of things, you kind of make them special too. The point here is that we’re always sensitive to arithmetical patterns, and this influences our behavior—even if we’re not conscious of it.”

One voter from New Zealand even told Bellos in his comments that “People don’t usually tend to pick 7, and I like to be different,” humorously supporting his hypothesis.

{ https://www.zmescience.com/ }

Earth's magnetic field is weakening and breaking down, EARTH TO BECOME LIKE MARS?

• From End of the World Times

The Earth’s magnetic field is responsible for blocking dangerous and deadly solar winds, radiation and cosmic winds from reaching the atmosphere and surface of the Earth. It has been noted that since early 2014, the magnetic field has been decaying at least ten times faster than usual. Not only is it decaying at a very rapid rate, but it is also experiencing many anomalies and is shifting.

The magnetic pole has been moving away from Canada and towards Serbia and it has been moving so quickly that it has forced the world’s geomagnetism experts to take action. All of this will lead to many severe changes on a global scale, including the weakening of the Earth’s atmosphere as solar winds will strip it away. Weather patterns will change and hurricanes, tornadoes and thunderstorms will become more severe. The Earth will absorb more solar and cosmic particles which will further destabilize it’s geological structure and earthquakes and volcanic eruptions will become far more prevalent. Massive amounts of radiation will cause cancers and sterility. Power outages and damages to electronics and EMPs will occur. Overall, nearly all life on Earth will die off from the magnetic field weakening.

Sources and references:

• Earth’s Magnetic Field Is Weakening 10 Times Faster Now
• Earth’s magnetic field is weakening – but it’s not about to reverse
• 6 Horrible Consequences of Earth Losing its Magnetic Field
• Earth’s magnetic field is acting up and geologists don’t know why

{ https://beforeitsnews.com/v3/ }

SLECHT NIEUWS VOOR AANHANGERS PLATTE AARDE THEORIE ( VIDEO )

Al jarenlang is er een discussie gaande over de vorm van de aarde en de groep mensen die gelooft dat de aarde plat is, groeit gestaag. 

Echter, voor deze groep is er slecht nieuws, want een platte aarde aanhanger die probeerde te bewijzen dat de aarde plat is, bewees het tegenovergestelde.

Het volgende verhaal zal de fervente aanhangers van de platte aarde waarschijnlijk niet afschrikken en zij zullen blijven geloven dat de aarde plat is. Echter, voor veel aanhangers van de ronde aarde is het volgende verhaal een overtuigend bewijs dat de aarde wel degelijk een ronddraaiende bol in het heeal is. 

Voor de duidelijkheid: Wij hangen niet een specifieke mening aan over de vorm van de aarde en brengen nieuws op dit gebied wanneer het zich voor doet. Tenslotte is onze complete 3D wereld een illusie en als zodanig is uiteraard ook iedere vorm mogelijk. 

Het volgende verhaal speelt zich dan ook af in deze illusoire 3D werkelijkheid en betreft het verhaal van de fanatieke platte aarde aanhanger Bob Knodel. 

Bob Knodel is een bekend figuur binnen de wereld van de platte aarde theorie en zegt dat hij een achtergrond heeft als ingenieur en piloot. Vanuit die ervaringen is hij ervan overtuigd dat de aarde zo plat is als een pannenkoek en loopt hij al een tijd te piekeren over hoe hij dit kan bewijzen. 

Knodel en zijn volgelingen slaagden erin om 20.000 dollar bij elkaar te krijgen om een zeer nauwkeurige lasergyroscoop aan te schaffen. Met een dergelijke gyroscoop kan zonder enige twijfel worden aangetoond of de aarde om haar eigen as draait of niet. 

Wanneer dit wel het geval is dan draait de aarde in 24 uur 360 graden rond, hetgeen betekent dat er per uur 15 graden wordt afgelegd. 

Wanneer de aarde plat is en niet om haar eigen as draait, zal de gyroscoop geen drift (verschuiving) vertonen, wanneer de aarde wel in 24 uur om haar eigen as draait, dan zal de gyroscoop een drift van 15 graden per uur registreren. 

Met andere woorden, Bob Knodel en zijn volgers waren ervan overtuigd dat deze nieuwe dure gyroscoop voor eens en voor altijd zou bevestigen dat de aarde plat is en niet om haar as draait. 

Wat er vervolgens gebeurde zie je in de volgende video: 

Duidelijk is dat dit geen goed nieuws is voor de aanhangers van de platte aarde theorie en het is misschien ook veelzeggend dat het populaire videokanaal van Bob Knoder, Globebusters genaamd, opeens geen video’s meer bevat. 

In de achtergrond zijn ze nu waarschijnlijk druk bezig met het zoeken naar bewijs dat er iets niet goed zou zijn met de test of de gyroscoop of een verklaring waarom de gyroscoop ook met een platte, niet roterende aarde een drift laat zien van 15 graden per uur. 

Maar vooralsnog is dat nog niet gelukt en het wachten is nu of Bob Knodel alsnog een konijn uit de hoge hoed kan toveren of dat het vanaf nu stil blijft bij Globebusters.

{ http://niburu.co/ }

Artist’s concept of Tabby’s Star. It’s possible that dust causes its mysterious dips in brightness, which are similar to those in a newly found star, called VVV-WIT-07.

Image via NASA/JPL-Caltech.

Aside from the curious interstellar visitor ‘Oumuamua and the ongoing quest to identify fast radio bursts, one of the most mysterious astronomical stories of the past few years has been the saga of Tabby’s Star. In 2016, astronomer Tabetha Boyajian spotted bizarre light patterns coming from the distant star KIC8462852. Something appeared to be causing the star to periodically dim, leading to speculation that it may be surrounded by a massive alien “megastructure.” In the nearly three years since then, astronomers have gathered enough data to now believe that the more likely reason for the dimming behavior is that the star is surrounded by dense clouds of cosmic dust.

An artist’s depiction of Tabby’s Star

Artist’s concept of VVV-WIT-07, which has been observed dipping in brightness in a manner similar to Tabby’s Star.

Image via NASA/JPL-Caltech.

That doesn’t mean all astronomers are ready to give up on the hope that Tabby’s Star might be home to an alien civilization. SETI astronomers are currently scanning the planet for any signs of laser activity. While none has been found, the study has provided scientists with a wealth of data and methodologies for carrying out similar research in the future in the search for alien life.

To add to the growing body of data concerning mysteriously dimming stars, an international team of astronomers has just published a study of a new star, EPIC 204376071, found a galactic stone’s throw from Earth just 440 light-years away. EPIC 204376071 has been observed to dim by up to 80 percent for an entire day. The researchers still aren’t sure what may be making the star’s light dim, but their leading suspicions are a cloud of dust or a ring of cosmic debris.

Could star-sized alien megastructures actually exist? Given the unimaginable size of the universe, it would be foolish to rule out any possibility.

Naturally, alien megastructures have already been ruled out, because how dare scientists acknowledge the possibility, however small, that there may yet be truly awesome left things to discover in the universe? While neither EPIC 204376071 nor Tabby’s Star are the extraterrestrial smoking gun we’ve all been waiting for, their discoveries suggest that any day now, we may stumble across the one to change everything in a strangely dimming star far across the universe. Will it be written off as cosmic dust, stuck in an academic journal somewhere, and forgotten about? It’s time we take the search for extraterrestrial life seriously, and studies like this one are just the site for such bold thinking. 

Light curve of VVV-WIT-007 from 2010-2018. The star dipped in brightness an incredible 80 percent in 2012 (shown in more detail in inset).

Image via R. K. Saito et al.

{https://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }

Alien Abductee talks about UFOs, Mantis Beings and Shadow People

Paul Shishis had dreams of being abducted as a child that at the time he shrugged off as just nightmares but throughout the years his increasing UFO sightings began to indicate to him that perhaps he had been in touch with extraterrestrials his whole life and that they weren't, in fact, dreams but real alien abductions.

In recent years he has begun trying to document them with his camera. Most of Paul's sightings have occurred in and around Scarborough Ontario, Canada.

More on his abduction dreams in Part 2, the Mantis Beings and Shadow People.

  

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

Three Mile Long UFO Over Mount Fuji Volcano, Japan On March 10, 2019, Video, UFO Sighting News.

Date of sighting: March 10, 2019

Location of sighting: Mount Fuji, Japan

 

Wow, its not often you see a UFO of this size. This is about three to four miles across! Its huge. This awesome UFO was caught over Mount Fuji two days ago. The UFO has actually left a cloud trail behind it moving from the horizon, then zig zagging its way to the Mountain. This UFO is creating and controlling the smoke around it so that it appears like a cloud. However the the UFO outline is becoming very apparent here giving away its hiding place. 

 

It has long been believed by me that most aliens that created bases on Earth did so under the floors of the ocean and under volcanos. Why? Because those are the two places that humans are least likely to bother or even discover them. The less humans, the less chance of being discovered. 

 

Awesome video of a large UFO near Mount Fuji. I only wish that the 51 seconds of footage was a bit longer so that we could see how the UFO left the area. Absolute evidence here that aliens do in fact visit volcanos. 

Scott C. Waring

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

Antarctic Mountain Rumoured to be 'Earth's Oldest Pyramid' Built By Aliens

While some conspiracy theorists and UFO hunters explore theories about aliens building pyramids in ancient Egypt and Mesoamerica, others now claim that the oldest pyramids in existence may have been erected by extraterrestrials amid the frozen wastes of Antarctica, the Daily Express reports citing the History Channel’s Ancient Aliens TV show.

© COURTESY OF NASA

Hunting Aliens: UK to Pour £25Mln Into New Effort to Search for Extraterrestrial Life

As the newspaper notes, one Antarctic geological feature in particular draws the attention of conspiracy theorists: a "pyramid-like structure" located near the Shackleton mountain range, whose "four steep sides" make it look somewhat like the Great Pyramid of Giza.

David Childress, an American author and the owner of Adventures Unlimited Press, even speculated that this so called "Shackleton pyramid" might be "the oldest of its kind" on the planet.

"If this gigantic pyramid in Antarctica is an artificial structure, it would probably be the oldest pyramid on the planet and in fact it might be the master pyramid that all the other pyramids on planet Earth were designed to look like," he said.

Dr Michael Salla, an ET research expert and author of the "Exopolitics: Political Implications of the Extraterrestrial Presence", even ventured a guess that this rocky formation may be merely one node in a "global network of power-generating pyramids strategically places around Earth".

"One of the theories is that pyramids are power generators and so, if you have these pyramids strategically placed around the world generating a charge, it’s possible to create a general standing wave around the world that is a wireless transmission of energy," he noted.

• READ MORE: All Along the Babel Tower: God Sent Aliens to Scatter People, Documentary Claims

However, Dr Mitch Darcy, a geologist at the German Research Centre for Geosciences in Potsdam, offered a much less exciting explanation, arguing that the “pyramid” in question is merely a nunatak – an exposed rocky peak or element of a ridge, some of which can be natural pyramidal peaks.

"The peaks are clearly composed of rock, and it’s a coincidence that this particular peak has that shape. It’s not a complicated shape, so it’s not a special coincidence either. By definition, it is a nunatak, which is simply a peak of rock sticking out above a glacier or an ice sheet. This one has the shape of a pyramid, but that doesn’t make it a human construction," he said.

{ https://sputniknews.com/ }

MOON WATER

{ https://futurism.com/ }

Egypt REVELATION: Great Pyramid of Giza's ‘correlation to Orion PROVED'

EGYPT’s Great Pyramid is at the centre of a pseudo-scientific hypothesis that shows the Giza-Orion correlation theory is accurate, the "New Egyptologist" has claimed.

By MATTHEW KIRKHAM

Conventional archeology tells us the great pyramids at Giza were built as tombs for the pharaohs of ancient Egypt. Constructed during the Old Kingdom’s fourth dynasty 4500 years ago, the monuments have been shrouded in mystery for millennia. Built with incredible accuracy and containing many puzzling features, the true purpose of the pyramids has inspired endless speculation.

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In the 1980s, an extraordinary theory emerged that attempted to explain why the pyramids were built with such accuracy. 

The theory claims there is a correlation between the position of the three largest pyramids at Giza and the three stars comprising the belt in the constellation of Orion. 

It is thus claimed that there is a purposive relationship between the pyramids of the 4th Dynasty on the Giza Plateau and the alignment of three stars comprising, which is commonly referred to as Orion’s belt.

The theory, originally proposed by the "New Egyptologist" Robert Bauval in 1983, noted how the smallest of the three pyramids at Giza  –  The Pyramid of Menkaure, was offset slightly from the other two.

Great Pyramid Giza's ‘correlation to Orion PROVED’ 

(Image: Getty)

Publishing his findings in a book in 1994, "The Orion Mystery: Unlocking the Secrets of the Pyramids", Mr Bauval said the similarity between this and the offset in the third star of Orion’s Belt.

Mr Bauval overlaid the stars of Orion over an aerial view of the pyramids and was astonished to discover they matched almost exactly.

He said: “It substantiated my theory that the three pyramids of Giza were symbols of Orion’s Belt.

“My next step was to find further visual evidence. I had a good photograph of the three stars of Orion’s Belt and was able to place it against the aerial shot of the three Giza pyramids.

“The correlation was stunning. Not only did the layout of the pyramids match the stars with uncanny precision but the intensity of the stars, shown by their apparent size, corresponded with the Giza group.

A correlation between the position of the three largest pyramids at Giza and the three stars 

(Image: Getty)

“There were three stars, three pyramids, three Osiris-Orion kings."

Not only did the three pyramids match Orion’s Belt, Mr Bauval argued that the Great Sphinx mirrored the constellation of Leo, and the monument’s alignments to the Nile matched the stars positions relative to the Milky Way.

Using astronomical computer programs, Mr Bauval dialled back the skies over Giza to the supposed date of the construction of the Pyramids  –  2500BC. Disappointingly they could find no match.

But 2500BC was during the astronomical Age of Taurus  – represented by a bull. 

Dialling the starfields back thousands of years, Robert Bauval was able to find an amazing match — in 10500BC, whilst the pyramids matched Orion's belt, the Sphinx was looking directly at the constellation of Leo.

10500BC marked the dawning of the Age of Leo and, even more astonishingly, the date the pyramids and Sphinx’s position relative to the nearby River Nile matched Orion and Leo’s position relative to the Milky Way.

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{ https://www.express.co.uk/ }

Project Blue Book finale preview: Is our nation under attack?

UFOs: Mysterious lights captured over the Outer Banks

Tons of Pressurized Oxygen Could Be Hiding Out in Earth's Molten Iron Core

By Rafi Letzter 

How Much Water May Be Tucked Away in Nearby Asteroids?

By Meghan Bartels 

Scientists on NASA's OSIRIS-REx mission proved shortly after arrival at this near-Earth asteroid, called Bennu, that it carries hydrated minerals.

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

In addition to the scientific drive behind understanding how life came to be on Earth, mapping water across the solar system is important because water — which can be split into hydrogen and oxygen — might also be used to make rocket fuel. If that scenario becomes common, it would dramatically reduce the price tags of round-trip journeys to space, since rockets leaving Earth would no longer need to be powerful enough to lift the weight of their homebound fuel.

To make their calculation, the team relied on ground-based telescope observations of these asteroids. But those observations are tricky, because the signature of water in Earth's atmosphere can interfere with asteroid measurements. So, the team used a slightly different signature — one that doesn't actually represent water but has only been found in conjunction with the signature that does.

By combining those observations with other measurements as well as data about meteorites that have fallen to Earth from asteroids, the team calculated a basic estimate for how much water could be trapped inside near-Earth asteroids. According to that estimate, there may be between 100 billion and 400 billion gallons (400 billion to 1,200 billion liters) of water spread among these space rocks.

Ideally, the team would like to run similar calculations based on data gathered from space, where Earth's atmosphere won't interfere with the direct signature of water. But those measurements would rely on the launch of the James Webb Space Telescope, which is currently planned for 2021.

The research is described in a paper published in December in the journal JGR Planets.

• Watch Japan's Hayabusa2 Grab a Piece of an Asteroid in This Incredible Video!
• NASA Will Need Your Help Mapping Asteroid Bennu
• Photos: Asteroids in Deep Space

Email Meghan Bartels at mbartels@space.com or follow her @meghanbartels.

Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook.

{ https://www.space.com/ }

New gravity earthquake detection method might buy more time for early warnings

 BY TIBI PUIU

Scientists from Japan, one of the most seismically active regions of the globe, claim that a new earthquake detection method based on gravity could provide an earlier warning than traditional methods.

Contour maps depict changes in gravity gradient immediately before the earthquake hits.

Credit: Kimura Masaya.

In 2011, a magnitude-9 earthquake hit eastern Japan, along a subduction zone where two of Earth’s tectonic plates collide. The tremor came as a one-two punch, generating a huge tsunami in the process which led to the meltdown of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. The effects of the powerful quake were devastating, with more than 120,000 buildings left in rubble and $235 billion-worth of incurred damage.

Japan handled the onslaught bravely and admirably. Thanks to its sophisticated network of sensors, Tokyo residents were given a minute warning via texted alerts on their cell phones before the city was hit by strong shaking. These sensors also recorded a wealth of data that is still keeping researchers busy with work that might lead to improved earthquake detection.

Exactly 8 years after the Tohoku earthquake, a team of researchers from the University of Tokyo’s Earthquake Research Institute (ERI) used some of this data to argue that a new detection method based on gravimeters could theoretically detect earthquakes earlier than seismometers.

At the moment, the researchers are working on a new kind of gravimeter called the torsion bar antenna (TOBA), which aims to be the first instrument specifically designed to detect earthquakes by gravity. A network of such devices could theoretically warn people 10 seconds before the first seismic waves arrive from an epicenter 100 km away. These precious extra seconds could mean the difference between life and death in many situations.

“SGs and seismometers are not ideal as the sensors within them move together with the instrument, which almost cancels subtle signals from earthquakes,” explained ERI Associate Professor Nobuki Kame. “This is known as an Einstein’s elevator, or the equivalence principle. However, the TOBA will overcome this problem. It senses changes in gravity gradient despite motion. It was originally designed to detect gravitational waves from the big bang, like earthquakes in space, but our purpose is more down-to-earth.”

The findings appeared in the journal Earth, Planets and Space.

{ https://www.zmescience.com/ }

Ultima Thule Pops in 3D in This Incredible New Horizons View

By Meghan Bartels 

To make this image appear in 3D, stare "through" the computer screen and then focus on the ghostly image that should pop up between the two halves of this picture.

(Image: © NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute/National Optical Astronomy Observatory)

The New Horizons spacecraft is speeding away from its recent flyby target, a distant icy space rock nicknamed Ultima Thule, but the view from Earth is only getting better.

The mission team has released a new 3D image based on photographs the New Horizons spacecraft snapped while it was as close as 4,100 miles (6,600 kilometers) to the Kuiper Belt object, which is officially known as 2014 MU69. The images are part of the team's continuing work to better understand the object and how it may have formed.

If you prefer Kuiper Belt objects appearing to dance across your screen, New Horizons has you covered there, too.

(Image: © NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute/National Optical Astronomy Observatory)

"These views provide a clearer picture of Ultima Thule's overall shape," New Horizons principal investigator Alan Stern, a planetary scientist at the Southwest Research Institute in Colorado, said in a statement, "including the flattened shape of the large lobe, as well as the shape of individual topographic features such as the 'neck' connecting the two lobes, the large depression on the smaller lobe, and hills and valleys on the larger lobe." 

If you have a pair of red-blue 3D glasses, this image should pop.

(Image: © NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute/National Optical Astronomy Observatory)

To fully appreciate the 3D nature of the images, you'll need to track down a pair of red-blue 3D glasses or prepare for some eyeball gymnastics. (In addition to the options available here, there's a version tailored to those who can cross their eyes available on NASA's website.)

Although the New Horizons spacecraft completed its flyby in the wee hours of Jan. 1, the probe will need about 20 months to transmit all of its data back to Earth and the scientists who are eagerly awaiting it. 

• Watch Ultima Thule Spin Like a Propeller in This Awesome New Horizons Flyby Video
• New Horizons' Historic Flyby of Ultima Thule: Full Coverage
• Queen's Brian May Releases 'New Horizons' Single to Celebrate Epic Flyby
• Email Meghan Bartels at mbartels@space.com or follow her @meghanbartels.
• Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook.

{ https://www.space.com/ }

Meet 'The Blobs': Two Continent-Size Mountains in Earth's Deep Mantle That Nobody Understands

The Alien Observatory: “Artificial Intelligence Is Already Out There, and It’s Billions of Years Old”

BY JEREMY E MCDONALD

{ https://stillnessinthestorm.com/ }

There are a lot of things we’re uncomfortable talking about. Ritual child sacrifices is one of them. Giving children elongated skulls by binding their soft young heads is another. Yet any discussion of the Aztecs or the ancient pre-Inca culture known as the Chimú of Peru requires discussing these gruesome practices. A new study adds another uncomfortable talking point to this horrific yet historical discussion – climate change. Researchers studying the remains of over 140 children and 200 llamas found in northern Peru have determined that their sacrifice was the only way this culture could think of to stop a climatic event we now call El Niño.

“The Huanchaquito-Las Llamas mass sacrifice opens a new window on a previously unknown sacrificial ritual from fifteenth century northern coastal Peru.”

In a new study published in PLoS One, archaeologists Gabriel Prieto of the National University of Trujillo and John Verano of Tulane University offer a new explanation for the child sacrifices which occurred arounf 1450 CE at the site now known as Huanchaquito-Las Llamas (HLL) in the Province of Trujillo, 350 meters from the shore and 2 miles north of the ancient city of Chan Chan. At the time, this was the largest city in South America, the capital of the Chimú state and an area on its way down, as evidenced by other recent mass executions and human sacrifices. However, none were quite like what archeologists discovered in 2011.

“Stratigraphy, associated artifacts, and radiocarbon dating indicate that it was a single mass killing of more than 140 children and over 200 camelids directed by the Chimú state, c. AD 1450. Preliminary DNA analysis indicates that both boys and girls were chosen for sacrifice. Variability in forms of cranial modification (head shaping) and stable isotope analysis of carbon and nitrogen suggest that the children were a heterogeneous sample drawn from multiple regions and ethnic groups throughout the Chimú state.”

Over 140 children from many different areas, some with elongated skulls from cranial binding, were found with broken bones indicating their hearts were removed while they were still alive. Buried in plain cotton shrouds in groups of three, their ages ranged from 5 to 14 with most between 8 to 12. In addition to the gruesome sight, the archeologists found something else they couldn’t explain: the bodies were buried in a thick layer of mud, which was a sign of massive rainfall and flooding. Could the sacrifices and the mud be linked?

“While the correlation between heavy rains and the sacrifice may be coincidental, it is tempting to hypothesize that the two events are associated, and that the mass offering of children and camelids may have been an attempt to appease the gods and mitigate the effects of a major ENSO event that occurred around 1400–1450 A.D. The sacrifice of such a large number of children and camelids constituted a significant investment of resources for the Chimú state, whose massive capital city Chan Chan lies less than a kilometer away from the Huanchaquito Las Llamas sacrifice site.”

This is at least three times more in number than any other child sacrifice ever found (and hopefully never found again) in the New World, so this El Nino must have been catastrophic. In addition to attempting to appease whatever god was causing it, the child sacrifice was meant to show the panicking populace that their leaders still had the power to order them to perform what had to be an emotionally wrenching task.

In the end, the sacrifice didn’t save the Chimú. Weakened by the catastrophe which affected both fishing and agriculture, and the loss of so many future warriors, the Chimú were conquered by the Inca emperor Topa Inca Yupanqui around 1470. If that hadn’t done them in, the Spaniards arrived just 50 years later with their diseases, destruction and dominance.

A desperate culture sacrificed a generation in an attempt to stop climate change. Isn’t it also sacrificing a generation if a culture ignores it?

Asking for a young friend.

{ https://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }

I have in my files more than twenty reports from people who claim to have seen black helicopters flying in complete silence, no less. If that was not weird enough, in most of those same cases the helicopters did something astounding and almost unbelievable. What that might have been? Well, I’ll tell you. Those same ‘copters morphed into (A) the shapes of classic 1950s-era flying saucers, (B) small balls of light, and (C) large, blinding balls of light. Such reports stretch credulity to the absolute max; even I have to admit that much. But, such reports are surprisingly widespread within the field of Ufology. You just need to know where to look for them. So, what on Earth is going on? I certainly don’t have the answer to that question, but, here is one such case, from my files, which dates from February 1982. It absolutely typifies the angle of the silent, shape-shifting helicopters:

The town of Dulce, New Mexico has become infamous in UFO circles, chiefly because it is said to be the home of a massive underground base. It is alleged to be manned by hostile, dangerous aliens who engage in nightmarish genetic experiments on human abductees. So the sensational and highly unlikely story continues, the U.S. Government knows all too well what goes on under Dulce, but lacks the sufficient power or ability to eject or destroy the alien hordes. That there has been an undeniable mass of so-called cattle-mutilations in the area is an issue which cannot be denied. Certainly, the FBI has declassified a sizeable number of reports of such mutilations from the very same area. There is good evidence to suggest that the Dulce tales were created by disinformation experts in the military. That doesn’t take away the fact, though, that high-strangeness and Dulce go together, hand in glove. They certainly do.

All of this brings us to that February 1982 story of a man named Bruno. On the day in question, he saw a squadron of black helicopters hovering over Dulce’s Archuleta Mesa – below which, so the story goes, the extraterrestrial installation is carefully hidden. As Bruno watched with amazement, the helicopters – yes, each and every one of them – inexplicably morphed into bright balls of light. It was a jaw-dropping situation which led Bruno to conclude that the E.T.s of Dulce can camouflage their craft to resemble our aircraft; thus ensuring that, for the most part, they are never seen by us for what they really are.

Another answer, of a very strange sort, has also surfaced. Back in 2007, I interviewed Ray Boeche, a priest and a former Mutual UFO Network (MUFON) State-Director for Nebraska. In 1993, Ray met with a pair of U.S. Department of Defense physicists who, at the time,  were working on a classified program to contact what many of us would call aliens. The program, however, referred to them as something very different: as Non-Human Entities, or as NHEs. As the project continued at a steady pace, and as runs of bad luck, ill health and even death blighted the research, the members of the secret group came to believe that the NHEs were not E.T.s, after all. Rather, they concluded they were dealing with literal demons from an equally literal Hell. In 1994,  one year after Boeche’s meeting, those same two DoD physicists stated the following: “Regarding the phantom helicopters, while many are direct NHE ‘productions’ (craft is not an appropriate term as they do not need to travel via a propulsion device) many are related to our program, especially regarding running checks and surveillance on mutilation sites and so-called abduction victims.”

It’s very difficult to understand (partially or completely!) what is afoot when it comes to the matter of silent, shape-shifting helicopters of the black variety. All I can say for sure is that despite the infinite weirdness that surrounds such cases, the witnesses are highly credible. They are genuinely mystified by what they have seen. All they want are answers. So far, there are no verifiable answers at all. Unless, that is, you buy into the claims of those two Department of Defense personnel who briefly surfaced in the nineties to give their views on the matter. The creations of supernatural entities? Of aliens? Of demons? Or, of the U.S. military, employing highly advanced “stealth”-type technology? All of those? Who knows? I can say something: that this is an all too real phenomenon, despite the fact that most people will probably ignore it or dismiss it out of hand. Unless, of course, those same people one day become exposed to the matter itself. Then, things take on a whole new angle. And a new appreciation of the morphing, silent mystery, too.

{  https://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }

Security Cam captures Triangle UFO over Simi Valley, California

A security cam has recorded a strange triangular light anomaly that suddenly appears on the slope of a hill in Simi Valley, California. Then the anomaly moves upwards away from the hill.

The owner of the security cam said: It rained last night 3/5/19 at 7:30 pm. This is my backyard camera facing south/west in Simi Valley, Ca.

This is the night we had a big thunder and lightning storm. Look on the left behind the hill and you will see the light come up.

Weird shape and not a plane. Planes are a small dot. A plane that low would be crazy flying around in a lightning storm.

The camera time posted is not correct. I never set it. I got the time off my Blue Iris program.

  

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

Ancient Alien City Discovered On Mars Shows Complex Primitive Culture, Faces, Pyramids, Statues, March 2019, UFO Sighting News.

Date of discovery: March11, 2019
Location of discovery: Mars
Source photo: 

• http://www.gigapan.com/gigapans/214405

When you find one alien artifact on Mars, its thought provoking, but when you find dozens of artifacts in the same photo...it becomes indisputable evidence. Well...that happened today. 

At first, I had only found one interesting object in this photo...a white object which could easily be...a living species...of the Mars. I believe the white object is actually a freshly made statue, which means a sparse population of this alien species still live here. 

Then...I let my eyes adjust to the photo and slowly I saw the doorway to the right of the white object. A few seconds later I noticed the pyramid...and then when I thought I had found it all...I noticed the lion face near the doorway. And yet a few seconds later I noticed the second doorway to the left of the white creature. Needless to say...I realized that I had just discovered an ancient city in this location. 

Further out in the photo were a lot of other alien artifacts, proof that aliens existed once on Mars, but they were scattered and often half buried in Mars soil. I'll put a few of the artifacts below. 

This one photo of Mars...is enough to change the beliefs of most non believers instantly and yet, most of the world will never get to see it. So I ask you, please share this post. Reposting it on any social site or news site you can find. We need to let the public know the truth...that intelligent life once existed on Mars. 
Scott C. Waring

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

Mysterious Illuminating Object Baffles NASA Mission Control

NASA Mission Control was left out of sensible words after a mysterious object flew past the International Space Station (ISS), according to conspiracy theorists.

On September 8 2000, NASA launched the STS-106 spacecraft from Kennedy Space Centre to fly Space Shuttle Atlantis to the ISS. The activity is in preparation to permanently man the low-orbit satellite.

However, two bright objects were seen flying across the screen during the Atlantis pass-by over Chicago, Illinois, which fuelled wild conspiracy theories after it appeared to startle the flight controller back at Mission Control in Houston.

The bizarre event left Jeff Challender, and some other conspiracy theorists convinced NASA had just caught something they shouldn’t have.

Mr Challender revealed that two strange objects were spotted flying below just as the shuttle was passing over Chicago.

He said that the first object seemed smaller and further away but the second one was very bright and flew at speed. Mission Control tried to follow its progress and zoom in until it was out of sight. According to Mr Challender, the Mission Control perhaps realised that the video goes out to the public.

Mr Challender believes the anomalies are not ice crystals sparkling in the sun as the announcer says the sun will rise in a few minutes. He thinks the objects were self-luminous as the sun has not even risen yet.

Mr Challender also revealed he spotted four more unusual objects appearing to fly in formation during the same mission.

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

What really happened in Roswell, New Mexico

OLIVIA HECKER

During the summer of 1947, a severe thunderstorm hit Roswell, New Mexico. Out of this storm, an unexpecting rancher by the name of Mac Brazel recovered unusual objects in the debris. Metal sticks that were held together by tape, pieces of plastic and foil reflectors were amongst the debris Brazel recovered.

Not knowing what to make of the debris, Mac Brazel contacted Roswell Sheriff’s office. The sheriff’s office then contacted the Roswell Army Air Force base, who sent out soldiers to sweep the area and collect the unidentified scramble of objects.

Weeks later, public information officer Lt. Walter Haut issued a press release stating that the Roswell Air Force base had a flying saucer in their possession.

Despite this, the next day another press release was issued, claiming that it was just a weather balloon they had recovered from the site. This was the beginning of the conspiracy of a UFO government cover up that became well known as “The Roswell Incident.”

On July 8, 1947, the Roswell Daily Record newspaper released the article “RAAF Captures Flying Saucer on Ranch in Roswell Region.”

Although the Air Force claimed that it was only a weather balloon, the pictures of the recovered debris showed it was clearly no weather balloon. During the time, people grew suspicious and argued that the mysterious debris must have came from another planet.

These skeptics grew even more suspicious during the 1950s when the Air Force began conducting an undisclosed series of “dummy drops” over deserted fields in New Mexico. The Air Force claimed these experiments were to test ways for pilots to survive falls from high altitudes.

The “dummy drops” included dummies with latex skin (looking similar to what people expected space aliens to look like) that would fall from the sky.

The people that were already skeptic became even more suspicious over the dummy drops, many believing the dummies were actually kidnapped space aliens that were being used by the government for science experiments.

These skeptics turned out to be somewhat right with their suspicions. The government did know more about the recovered debris in Roswell than they were letting on.

Apparently, since World War II, a group of scientists specializing in geophysics and oceanography from prestigious universities in the United States such as New York University and Columbia had been working on a top-secret project named Project Mogul.

Project Mogul was a highly confidential atomic espionage task. The scientist involved in Project Mogul thought that by sending microphones into a specific part of the Earth’s atmosphere where sound can travel thousands of miles without intrusion, they would be able to eavesdrop on nuclear tests from countries as far away as the Soviet Union.

Considering how classified Project Mogul was, even the Roswell Army Air Force base wasn’t aware of its existence.

The “weather balloon” story was made up like people had suspected. Many people in Roswell and across the world still believe the government is involved in covering up what really happened in the summer of 1947. The crash site is now a popular tourism site in Roswell, New Mexico.  

Face on Mars - Matteo Ianneo Italian Researcher

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4401_bzsfG0

Mars. A planet still full of life today. Vegetation, water, seas, lakes, rivers and many forms of life still present today. Many activities take place in the subsoil, but there is still oxygen outside to breathe even if not abundantly. On this celestial body millions of years ago there were peoples who later moved here on our world as on other worlds. Mars is still inhabited by different life forms, including humans. In this study image I found a head of an ancient monument present on this surface. Thanks for your patience.

MATTEO  IANNEO  Italian  Researcher

{ https://beforeitsnews.com/v3/ }

Klaar met alle meningen over klimaatverandering? Dit zijn de feiten - HLN.be

Chris van Mersbergen & Annemieke van Dongen 

Bron: AD.nl

1. Is het echt waar dat de aarde opwarmt?

Ja, daar bestaat geen twijfel over. Op de hele aarde is het sinds 1900 gemiddeld 1 graad warmer geworden. Die opwarming is niet gelijk verdeeld, blijkt uit metingen van duizenden weerstations op land en in zeewater. In Siberië is de temperatuur zelfs al 3 graden gestegen. Rond de tropen en boven de oceanen gaat de opwarming minder hard.

Wat ook onomstotelijk is vastgesteld: door die opwarming smelt het ijs rond de polen, vooral op Groenland. Zo is het oppervlak van de Noordelijke IJszee dat in de zomer bedekt is met ijs, sinds 1979 bijna gehalveerd.

Ook weten we zeker dat de zeespiegel stijgt: sinds 1880 met ruim 20 centimeter. Dat komt deels door het smeltwater van gletsjers en de ijskappen in de poolgebieden, deels doordat zeewater bij een hogere temperatuur uitzet. 

2. Waar komt die opwarming door?

Door broeikasgassen. De concentratie CO2 in de atmosfeer is sinds het begin van de industriële revolutie (1750) met 40 procent toegenomen. CO2 (koolstofdioxide) en andere broeikasgassen zoals methaan, lachgas en waterdamp vormen een deken om de aarde. De zonnestraling die de aarde opvangt, wordt daardoor niet meteen terug het heelal in gekaatst, maar blijft deels onder die deken hangen.
Dat broeikaseffect is niks nieuws. Aan de broeikasgassen die van nature in onze atmosfeer zitten, danken we het dat deze planeet leefbaar is. Zonder zou het gemiddeld 33 graden kouder zijn. Naarmate de concentratie CO2 in de atmosfeer stijgt, wordt de deken dikker. En wordt het op aarde warmer.

3. Klimaatverandering is toch van alle tijden?

Zeker. Maar dat betekent nog niet dat het argument ‘klimaatverandering is een natuurlijk proces, dus mensen hebben er geen invloed op’ klopt. Van grote klimaatveranderingen in het verre verleden is bekend dat ze samenhangen met CO2.

Bij de laatste grote ijstijd, zo’n 20.000 jaar geleden, zat bijvoorbeeld nog niet de helft van de huidige concentratie CO2 in de atmosfeer. Een hevige opwarming 56 miljoen jaar geleden, rond de tijd dat de eerste aapachtige wezens rondliepen, werd waarschijnlijk veroorzaakt door een enorme bel van het sterke broeikasgas methaan dat vrijkwam uit de zeebodem. Daardoor steeg de gemiddelde temperatuur op aarde zo’n 5 graden.

Rond de polen was toen geen ijs te bekennen. Langs de Noordelijke IJszee groeiden palmen, zo bewijzen fossielen. De tropen werden zo warm, dat veel organismen het loodje legden. Die prehistorische warmte-uitbarsting had een natuurlijke oorzaak. Waarschijnlijk gaven vulkaanuitbarstingen de eerste zet: de CO2 die daarbij vrijkwam, zorgde voor een kleine opwarming, waardoor methaanhydraten in de zeebodem smolten. Uit die enorme ijskristallen ontsnapte het methaan, wat de verhitting verder aanjoeg.

De huidige temperatuurstijging gaat veel sneller dan alle opwarmingen die in de geschiedenis van onze planeet door dergelijke natuurlijke processen zijn veroorzaakt.

De concentratie CO2 in de atmosfeer is de afgelopen eeuw al meer gestegen dan in de tienduizend jaar waarin de aarde na de laatste ijstijd ontdooide. “Dat klimaatverandering van alle tijden is, zou de zorgen erover juist moeten vergroten”, zegt de Nederlandse prehistorisch klimaatonderzoeker Appy Sluijs.

“We hebben ervan geleerd dat telkens wanneer de CO2-concentratie omhoog gaat, de planeet er heel anders uit gaat zien. Zelfversterkende effecten zoals enorme hoeveelheden methaan die vrijkomen uit de zeebodem en ontdooiende permafrost (bodems die nu nooit helemaal ontdooien, nvdr.), kunnen ervoor zorgen dat het leven hier op aarde sterk verandert.”

 Hollandse Hoogte / Siebe Swart luchtfotografie

4. Waarom zou de mens dan nu de oorzaak zijn?

Aangetoond is dat de recente toename van CO2 in de atmosfeer grotendeels is veroorzaakt door verbranding van fossiele brandstoffen. Fossiele brandstoffen zoals steenkool, olie en aardgas ontstaan uit planten waarin koolstof (C) is opgeslagen. Bij verbranding komt dit vrij als CO2. Door het type CO2 te meten, is aangetoond dat de extra CO2 in de lucht niet afkomstig is uit bijvoorbeeld oceanen of vulkanen. De broeikasgassen zijn hoofdzakelijk afkomstig van de fossiele brandstoffen die sinds de industriële revolutie in hoog tempo door onze fabrieken, automotoren en cv-ketels zijn verbrand. Ook door ontbossing komt CO2 vrij.

De hoeveelheid methaan in de atmosfeer is sinds de achttiende eeuw eveneens flink toegenomen: met 150 procent. Methaan is na CO2 het belangrijkste broeikasgas. De extra uitstoot van methaan hangt ook samen met fossiele brandstoffen en met afvalverwerking, landbouw en veeteelt. Zo boeren koeien veel methaan op. Dat komt bij het verteren van gras vrij in hun pens en is als broeikasgas ongeveer 25 keer sterker dan CO2.

A Flourish chart

5. Over de invloed van de mens op het klimaat is toch veel twijfel?

Volgens het IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change), het klimaatonderdeel van de Verenigde Naties dat onderzoek van duizenden wetenschappers uit de hele wereld samenvat, is het “extreem waarschijnlijk” dat menselijke broeikasgassen de dominante factor in de opwarming van de aarde zijn. Extreem waarschijnlijk is niet hetzelfde als 100 procent zeker.

Bij Nederlandse onderzoeksinstituten als het KNMI en het Planbureau voor de Leefomgeving (PBL) wordt door geen wetenschapper meer betwijfeld dat de mens verantwoordelijk is voor de huidige klimaatverandering. Alle andere mogelijke factoren zijn afgelopen decennia uitgebreid onderzocht, zegt klimaatonderzoeker Geert-Jan van Oldenburgh van het KNMI. “Voor wetenschappers is er geen grotere uitdaging dan een gat slaan in een bestaande theorie. Als je een nog onbekende oorzaak voor klimaatverandering vindt, sta je meteen in het toonaangevende wetenschappelijke tijdschrift Nature. Alle mogelijke oorzaken – veranderende sterkte van de zon, oceaanstromingen, schommelingen van de aardbaan, vulkaanuitbarstingen – zijn dus afgepeld. Telkens blijft maar één oorzaak overeind: de door mensen veroorzaakte CO2. Geloof me: er is geen verborgen x-factor in klimaatverandering.”

Zeker 90 procent van de wetenschappers wereldwijd is het daarover eens, blijkt uit metastudies. Onder de wetenschappers die het klimaat als vakgebied hebben, ligt dat percentage hoger dan onder wetenschappers die zich er zijdelings mee bezighouden.

Dat betekent niet dat onder klimaatwetenschappers geen onzekerheid bestaat. Integendeel. Hóe gevoelig het klimaat precies is voor CO2, is bijvoorbeeld nog de vraag. In modellen die voorspellen hoe sterk de aarde opwarmt, zit dan ook een behoorlijk grote onzekerheidsmarge.

6. CO2 zorgt toch juist voor een groenere aarde?

Klopt. Een kwart tot de helft van het aardoppervlak is de afgelopen 35 jaar groener geworden, blijkt uit onder meer satellietbeelden van de Amerikaanse ruimtevaartorganisatie NASA. Die vergroening is aanzienlijk: de extra blaadjes aan planten en bomen bedekken een gebied twee keer zo groot als de VS.

Dat komt deels door de verhoogde concentratie CO2 in de atmosfeer. Om te groeien halen planten immers CO2 uit de lucht, die ze omzetten in voedingsstoffen en zuurstof - zoals u zich misschien herinnert van de les biologie over fotosynthese.

Door de opwarming zijn groeiseizoenen bovendien langer geworden, vooral in het hoge noorden. Op toendra’s groeien bijvoorbeeld meer struiken.

Daarnaast zorgt de aanplanting van nieuwe bossen, bemesting en efficiëntere landbouwmethodes voor meer bladgroen. Ongeveer een kwart van de 10 miljard ton CO2 die de mens per jaar in de atmosfeer brengt, wordt tijdelijk opgeslagen in planten (en daarbij nog eens een kwart in de oceanen).

Andere effecten van klimaatverandering doen dat positieve effect deels teniet. Bij bosbranden en droogtes – die vaker voorkomen door klimaatverandering – komen juist veel broeikasgassen vrij. Zo deed de droge zomer van 2003 in Nederland de CO2-opname door bossen van vier jaar teniet, doordat bomen massaal hun blaadjes lieten vallen.

7. Wat merken we nu al van het broeikaseffect?

Eén hete zomer of ronduit lenteachtige februarimaand wijst nog niet meteen op een veranderend klimaat. Maar de langetermijnstatistieken zijn zonneklaar: er is sprake van een opwarmende trend. In Nederland is de gemiddelde temperatuur afgelopen honderd jaar al 1,9 graden gestegen - bijna dubbel zoveel als de gemiddelde opwarming wereldwijd. Het aantal zomerse dagen per jaar nam met bijna twintig toe, het aantal vorstdagen met ongeveer hetzelfde aantal af. De hoeveelheid neerslag is met ruim 20 procent gestegen; hevige stortbuien komen veel vaker voor.

Wereldwijd is de kans op droogte, hittegolven en overstromingen toegenomen. Dat zorgt nu al voor schade aan ecosystemen, meer mislukte oogsten en gezondheidsproblemen.

8. Wat kunnen de gevolgen zijn van grote temperatuurstijging?

Voorspellen is natuurlijk altijd gevaarlijk. Maar mocht het ergste doemscenario van het IPCC – 6 graden opwarming – uitkomen, dan duidt alles er volgens internationale klimaatwetenschappers op dat het leven op grote delen van de aardbol erg onaangenaam, zo niet onmogelijk, wordt. Weerpatronen raken compleet ontregeld. De zeespiegel stijgt in een paar eeuwen 10 tot 12 meter.

Subtropische gebieden en steppes zullen verwoestijnen. Grote delen van de wereldbevolking zullen kampen met watertekorten. In de tropen wordt de hitte ondraaglijk: wie zich bij temperaturen van meer dan 40 graden en hoge luchtvochtigheid enigszins inspant, kan binnen een paar uur sterven aan oververhitting.

Bij een temperatuurstijging van meer dan 2 graden sterven koralen op grote schaal af. Bij verdere opwarming sterven ook andere dieren en planten uit. In Zuid-Europa en andere gebieden richting de evenaar daalt de voedselproductie. Eten wordt duurder. Ondervoeding, infectieziekten, diarree, hart- en ademhalingsziekten nemen toe. Overstromingen en droogtes maken meer slachtoffers en leiden tot burgeroorlogen – met vluchtelingenstromen tot gevolg.

Positieve gevolgen zijn er ook: zo kan in het hoge noorden meer voedsel worden verbouwd. En scheepsroutes worden korter doordat de Noordelijke IJszee ijsvrij wordt.

Een grote zorg is wat er kan gebeuren als bepaalde keerpunten (‘tipping points’) worden overschreden. Boven een nog onbekende temperatuur kunnen Groenland en West-Antarctica zo snel smelten dat het proces niet meer te stoppen is. Ook dreigen uit de smeltende permafrost enorme hoeveelheden methaan vrij te komen, die opwarming kunnen versnellen. Net als CO2 die vrijkomt als het Amazonewoud zou afsterven door droogte. Waar sneeuw en ijs smelten, blijven donkere aarde en zwart zeewater over die zonlicht absorberen en niet reflecteren. Ook dat effect kan de opwarming aanjagen. Niemand weet precies bij welke temperaturen zulke processen optreden.

De afbeelding hieronder laten zien wat er gebeurt met Londen als de wereldwijde temperatuur met meer dan twee graden stijgt.

9. Kunnen we die gevaren nog afwenden?

Dat kan, volgens het IPCC. Maar dan moet de wereld nu wel heel snel in actie komen. Zonder klimaatbeleid kan de gemiddelde temperatuur in 2100 stijgen met 3 tot 6 graden ten opzichte van het pre-industriële niveau. Want de wereldbevolking, de welvaart en dus de verbranding van fossiele brandstoffen, groeien zonder ingrijpen nog wel even door.

Je hoort vaak dat de opwarming van de aarde beperkt moet worden tot “1,5 tot maximaal 2 graden”.

2 graden is de min of meer veilige bovengrens om de aarde zoals we haar kennen nog prettig leefbaar te houden, aldus de wetenschap. Inmiddels is het ook een politiek compromis. Bijna alle landen hebben zich drie jaar geleden aan dat doel gecommitteerd. Dat is vastgelegd in het Klimaatakkoord van Parijs.

10. Kunnen we het tij sowieso nog wel keren?

Het zal in elk geval knap lastig worden. In het verleden leidden mooie woorden over een beter milieu er niet toe dat de wereldwijde uitstoot van broeikasgassen structureel daalde, integendeel. We zitten op recordhoogte. Traditioneel welvarende landen vinden het al moeilijk genoeg om hun eigen uitstoot stabiel te houden, laat staan terug te dringen. We zijn een luxe leven gewend: we vinden het normaal om te kopen en eten wat we willen, om te pas en onpas het vliegtuig te nemen.

En dan is er nog het vraagstuk van de verdeling van de koek: hebben opkomende economieën, die historisch veel minder hebben bijgedragen aan de opwarming van de aarde, in de toekomst recht op meer uitstoot? En is de gevestigde orde met al zijn miljardenbedrijven bereid om daarvoor een stapje terug te zetten?

Als we morgen per direct zouden stoppen met het uitstoten van broeikasgassen stijgt de temperatuur nog met 0,1 tot 0,3 graden door, verwachten wetenschappers. In landen als China en India, die bekend staan om hun vervuilde lucht, zal een schonere industrie in eerste instantie leiden tot een stuk hogere temperaturen. De luchtvervuiling dempt daar namelijk de kracht van de zon.

De opslag van CO2 zou een steuntje in de rug kunnen zijn om opwarming van de aarde tegen te gaan. Er wordt wereldwijd druk onderzoek gedaan naar deze ‘tussenoplossing’. CO2 wordt hierbij afgevangen en opgeslagen onder land of de zeebodem. De vraag is echter of er genoeg ruimte kan worden gevonden voor de enorme hoeveelheden CO2 die moeten worden afgevangen om de temperatuurdoelen te halen.

11. Wie zijn wereldwijd de grootste vervuilers?

De grote olie-, gas- en steenkolenreuzen, veruit. Internationaal onderzoek uit 2017 wijst uit dat honderd (staats-)bedrijven verantwoordelijk zijn voor 71 procent van de CO2-uitstoot sinds 1988, met als koplopers het Chinese staatssteenkolenbedrijf, Saudi Arabian Oil Company en het Russische Gazprom. Shell staat op plaats negen.

Bekijk je het per sector, dan wordt een kwart van de wereldwijde uitstoot veroorzaakt door opwekking van warmte en elektriciteit. Land- en bosbouw (24 procent) en industrie (21 procent) volgen op korte afstand, voor transport (14 procent). Gebouwen – en dan vooral het verwarmen daarvan – nemen 6 procent voor hun rekening.

Zo’n 64 procent van de totale uitstoot van broeikasgassen is CO2 die afkomstig is van verbranding van fossiele brandstoffen. 11 procent is het gevolg van bossen en andere natuurgronden die sneuvelen ten koste van met name de landbouw, waardoor de natuur minder CO2 kan ópnemen. Methaan zorgt voor 16 procent van de totale uitstoot, lachgas is de derde boosdoener met 6 procent.

12. Kan China niet beter wat minder kolen stoken?

Het is een schrikbarend percentage: de Chinese steenkolenbedrijven zijn sinds 1988 verantwoordelijk voor bijna 15 procent van de wereldwijde uitstoot van broeikasgassen. In 2017 nam het land ruim de helft (!) van de wereldwijde kolenconsumptie voor zijn rekening.

Sinds 2014 lijkt zelfs de schier onstilbare honger naar kolen in de volksrepubliek gestild. De Chinese overheid probeert kolen in elektriciteitscentrales te vervangen door het minder vervuilende aardgas. Er is bovendien geen land dat meer windmolens en zonnepanelen heeft. Ruim een derde van de windenergie ter wereld wordt geproduceerd in China. 60 procent van de fabricage van zonnepanelen is in Chinese handen.

13. Het is toch vooral aan de industrie om in actie te komen?

Dat is makkelijk gezegd. Je kan ook stellen dat bedrijven maken waar wij als consument om vragen. Een relatief beperkt deel van de broeikasuitstoot wordt direct veroorzaakt door consumenten. Een paar procent is het gevolg van het verwarmen van huizen, een groter deel komt door reisgedrag. 

Daarom, zeggen economen, kunnen de belangrijkste slagen worden gemaakt bij de industrie en in mindere mate de landbouw. Maar moet de industrie zélf overgaan op milieuvriendelijker produceren? Is de overheid aan zet? De burger?

Iedereen een beetje, is het logische antwoord. Op de manier waarop Tata Steel in IJmuiden staal produceert, of Chemelot in Zuid-Limburg chemicaliën, hebben we weinig invloed. Die bedrijven zullen zelf de handschoen moeten oppakken, eventueel onder druk van belastingmaatregelen. Maar wat als pensioenfondsen hun miljarden vaker investeren in vernieuwende technologie in plaats van in producenten van fossiele brandstoffen? En als de automobilisten massaal overstappen op elektrisch rijden? Shell móet dan wel een omslag maken, en is daar ook al mee begonnen.

Zo is het ook in de veeteelt. Eet de consument minder vlees, dan zal de intensieve veehouderij vanzelf een stapje terug doen. Goed voor de methaanuitstoot, maar ook voor tropische regenwouden in de Amazone, die kleiner worden door oprukkende sojateelt.

De vijf kolencentrales in Nederland zorgen voor 10 procent van de CO2-uitstoot. Maar kunnen we dat een bedrijf als RWE kwalijk nemen? Zelf stelt RWE van niet, omdat er nog niet genoeg alternatieven zijn, mede door het versneld afbouwen van de aardgaswinning. In 2030 wil het kabinet overigens een verbod op het verbranden van kolen bij het winnen van elektriciteit instellen.

16. Niet meer vliegen of vegetariër worden?

Op wereldschaal is de klimaatschade van bosbouw, landbouw en veeteelt (bijna een kwart van de totale broeikasuitstoot) een stuk groter dan die van luchtvaart (zeker 2 procent). Maar dat is een vertekend beeld. Wereldwijd eten veel meer mensen vlees dan dat er vliegen.
De topman van Boeing stelde in 2017 dat meer dan 80 procent van de wereldbevolking nog nooit het vliegtuig heeft gepakt. Conclusie: regelmatige vliegers zorgen voor grote milieuschade. In Nederland neemt de luchtvaart nu al 7 procent van de uitstoot voor haar rekening (bron: factsheet klimaat van het CBS).
Wie een keer een retourtje Thailand neemt, moet volgens voorlichtingsorganisatie Milieu Centraal vijf jaar vegetarisch eten om dat te compenseren. Heen en weer vliegen naar Zuid-Frankrijk staat gelijk aan een jaar geen vlees. Deze vergelijkingen zijn glibberig. Over de precieze uitstoot van de veeteelt is bijvoorbeeld nog steeds veel discussie en de veeteelt leidt ook tot andere problemen zoals aantasting van de natuur. Maar ze geven wel een indicatie.
De luchtvaart is een groot punt van zorg. Waarschijnlijk zal het aantal vluchten de komende tientallen jaren fors stijgen, vooral in China en India. En aangezien de kerosinemotoren maar mondjesmaat milieuvriendelijker worden en er nog geen concreet alternatief in zicht is, zal het aandeel van luchtvaart in de mondiale CO2-uitstoot fors stijgen, tot misschien wel 22 procent in 2050.
Behalve minder vliegen, is met de trein naar je werk gaan ook een effectieve manier om CO2 te besparen. Ook met elektrisch rijden, het isoleren van spouwmuren en zonnepanelen op je dak valt veel te winnen. En met een waterbesparende douchekop compenseer je pas na ruim dertig jaar de trip naar Bangkok. Maar alle beetjes helpen.

17. Wat gaan de maatregelen kosten, en wie betaalt?

1000 miljard euro. Het is het bedrag dat Forum voor Democratie-politicus Thierry Baudet poneert in de klimaatdiscussie. Volgens Baudet zou het 1000 miljard euro kosten om in 2050 95 procent minder broeikasgassen uit te stoten, de doelstelling van het klimaatbeleid. Volgens de FvD-voorman zal het klimaatbeleid ‘onze hele economie ineen doen storten’.

Deskundigen weerleggen de berekening die Baudet op zijn partijwebsite heeft staan. Het Planbureau voor de Leefomgeving (PBL) stelt dat Baudet subsidies, belastingen en investeringen op een hoop gooit om zo hoog mogelijk uit te komen. Het PBL komt uit op een jaarlijks bedrag dat oploopt tot zo’n vijf miljard euro in 2030. In 2050 zouden de jaarlijkse kosten tussen de vijftien en vijftig miljard uitkomen, afhankelijk van de keuzes die worden gemaakt. Maximale CO2-opslag is bijvoorbeeld een stuk goedkoper dan het volledig terugdringen van de uitstoot aan de bron. Het PBL komt in totaal grofweg uit op ongeveer een derde van het door Baudet berekende bedrag. Andere schattingen komen hoger uit. Geen enkele benadert de 1000 miljard. 

En, stellen deskundigen: het hele klimaatproject biedt ook grote economische kansen. Het bedrijfsleven kan oplossingen bedenken waarmee het (ook over de grens) veel geld kan verdienen. Niemand zal het echter aandurven om garanties af te geven bij de totale kosten van zo’n reusachtige langetermijnoperatie.

Hoe je het wendt of keert: het gaat veel geld kosten. De vraag is wie het gaat betalen. Een arm gezin betaalt nu in verhouding al 3,5 keer meer aan energiekosten dan een rijk huishouden, becijferde onderzoeksbureau CE Delft. Als toekomstige extra kosten op dezelfde manier worden verdeeld, zou een arm gezin in de toekomst tot 17 procent van het inkomen aan ‘klimaatkosten’ moeten uitgeven. Als een van de oorzaken noemt CE Delft het feit dat de industrie de dans ontspringt, terwijl ze relatief een groot aandeel hebben in de uitstoot van broeikasgassen. 

Daarom pleit een groep van zeventig Nederlandse economen voor invoering van een CO2-heffing, waarbij bedrijven betalen voor de uitstoot die ze veroorzaken. Landen als Zweden en het Verenigd Koninkrijk hebben zo’n heffing al. Ons kabinet wil er nog niet aan. Premier Mark Rutte voelt meer voor het stimuleren van innovaties die de uitstoot terugbrengen, en het uitdelen van boetes als er niets gebeurt.

18. Hoe ziet de wereld eruit als we de doelen halen?

Nogmaals: een toekomst voorspellen is lastig. Wat warmer dan nu wordt het hoe dan ook; zelfs als we nú stoppen met uitstoten stijgt de temperatuur nog een jaar of dertig door en de zeespiegel zelfs nog een eeuw of wat langer. Ook warmt de aarde nog wat verder op doordat de luchtvervuiling minder wordt (fijnstofdeeltjes houden nu de zonnestraling deels tegen). Want de wereld wordt een stuk schoner. Zonder de uitstoot van kolencentrales, dieselmotoren en brommeruitlaten verdwijnt de vieze deken van luchtvervuiling die nu boven de steden ligt. Goed nieuws voor de zeven miljoen mensen die naar schatting van de Wereldgezondheidsorganisatie (WHO) jaarlijks sterven aan gevolgen van luchtvervuiling.

Zwerfafval, vuilnisbelten en de hoeveelheid plasticsoep in de oceanen kunnen slinken als plastic niet meer wordt geproduceerd uit aardolie. Wat niet betekent dat ze verdwijnen: plastic uit biomassa is (nog) niet altijd afbreekbaar. Of ons landschap mooier wordt, hangt ook af van politieke keuzes: hoeveel windmolens en zonneparken gaan we plaatsen en waar?

In een broeikasgasvrije toekomst hebben we in ons land straks dus schonere luchten en een bijna Zuid-Europees klimaat. Dat klinkt nog best aangenaam. Met een kans van één op twintig jaar wordt de mogelijkheid dat we nog eens een Elfstedentocht meemaken weliswaar nóg kleiner. Maar áls de Tocht der Tochten komt, is-ie wel extra bijzonder.

Een kleurgecodeerde kaart van Nasa laat de verandering van temperatuur zien van 1880 tot 2018:

{ https://www.hln.be/ }

Great Sphinx Riddle: Evidence of HIDDEN DOOR Beneath Legendary Monument Revealed

{  https://sputniknews.com/ }

New Mars Discovery Of Sheet Metal With Perfect Circle In It, March 2019, NASA Link, UFO Sighting News.

Date of discovery: March 2019

Location of discovery: Mars, Sol 2312

Source photo 1:

• https://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl-raw-images/msss/02312/mcam/2312ML0123470750606117C00_DXXX.jpg

Source photo 2: 

• http://www.gigapan.com/gigapans/214363

This sheet metal with a perfect circle through it was posted on Youtube by the alien researcher WhatsUpInTheSky37. This object has the perfect appearance of sheet metal with a perfect circle in it. The circle has not been cut, but rather designed into it as we see the smooth edges. NASA has a photo editing team at the Johnson Space Center that edits out any anomalies that could have been created by aliens, however they miss this one. I can't say they missed it by accident, since its so obvious, but probably did this on purpose to sneak the truth out. Awesome discovery that is indisputable proof that intelligent aliens existed on Mars. 

Scott C. Waring

 

Video states: 

I was going through the Anomaly groups today on facebook and came across a post by Shamus that had Neville Thompson's Gigapan for SOL 2013 and this odd piece of what looks to be a Manufactured item all twisted up and destroyed as most of the stuff we have seen on Mars is. I was all setup to start a video on another great find when I decided I had to share this with everyone and see what they think. I can tell its not from the rover since there are not tracks around it. In the full gigapan you can see that even clearer. So tell me what you think this is?

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

UFO Caught On Wildlife Game Camera On Eureka, Montana, Photos, UFO Sighting News.

Date of sighting: 9-25-2018 6:14 PM but reported today

Location of sighting: Eureka, Montana, USA

Source: MUFON #98995

 

This UFO was caught by a game camera in Eureka, Montana just a few months ago. The UFO has the classic disk shape seen for many decades. Its not a bird since it has no wings, no head or tail or legs. The craft appears to be made of a metallic substance since judging from the sunlight reflecting off of it. The eyewitness appears to have taken a photo of the UFO off of his computer screen, thus the lines we see are those of the screen itself. 

 

Funny it was a forest camera that caught it. I bet those aliens thought they had gotten away with exploring the back woods of Eureka...but I would love to see their faces when they see this hit the Internet. 

Scott C. Waring

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

Google Has Edited Out 2 of 3 Photo Indexes Of Alien Base At Zeeman Crater, moon, March 2019, UFO Sighting News.

Date of discovery: 2006-2007 abouts
Location of discovery: Edge of Zeeman Crater, Earths moon
Source: Google Earth Map (push moon button)

I was exploring Google map (free to download) when I found the infamous ET base at Zeeman crater. I was astonished that Google had not deleted it yet. Google had already deleted the ET base from both the VISIBLE IMAGERY and theCOLORIZED TERRAIN photo map. Lucky for us the Lunar Orbiter Mossaic map has less editings...so far, but I'm sure this wont last. So I made this video which is 100% proof that Google is working with the US government to hide the existence of alien life from the public. Google is part of the problem, not part of the solution. Google is making a covert war that the public doesn't know even exists right now under our noses...the war on information. A war that fights to keep the public in the dark, and the information out of our minds. That is something I cannot allow. By editing what information the public sees and doesnt see...Google is taking part in THOUGHT CONTROL. The information the public knows is like programming code, it determines the future actions of those with it. Thus...by editing out certain alien info...they control the public by making them passive. 
Scott C. Waring-Taiwan

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

Footage of spooky spinning UFO in Wales declared GENUINE by expert

EERIE footage showing mysterious lights in the sky has been declared genuine evidence of a UFO by an expert.

By Sophie Jones 

Video released for the first time shows the UFO which appeared in the sky around 3am on January 3, 2012 in Denbigh, North Wales.

Brothers Nathan and Alex Thomas saw several lights rotating in a circular formation out of the window of their home.

Nathan, then aged 14, was watching TV when he heard a loud bang from a bin being knocked over in a storm so decided to investigate.

To his bemusement, he saw the bright lights flashing in the distance over a farmer's field.

{ https://www.dailystar.co.uk/ }

Water on Mars May Have Been Triggered by Meteorite Impacts

By Charles Q. Choi 

NASA's Mars Odyssey orbiter captured this topographical and infrared image of the massive Huygens Crater in 2011.

(Image: © NASA/JPL-Caltech/Arizona State University)

Cosmic impacts on young Mars may have triggered deluges, potentially explaining why the Red Planet was once covered in water, a new study finds.

Although Mars is now cold and dry, scientists have for decades found evidence suggesting that the planet's surface was once covered with rivers, streams, ponds, lakes, and perhaps even seas and oceans. Since there is life virtually everywhere on Earth where there is water, this history of water on the Red Planet raises the possibility that Mars was once home to life and might host it still.

However, despite the evidence for Red Planet water, scientists haven't been able to figure out how Mars could have possessed this water during its early days. During the Red Planet's youth, the sun was cooler than it is now, and previous climate models suggested that Mars may have lacked enough greenhouse gasesto trap enough heat to generate significant amounts of rainfall.

• Related: Curiosity Rover Finds Ancient 'Building Blocks for Life' on Mars

New, not-yet-peer-reviewed research analyzes one potential answer to this mystery: that cosmic impacts heated Mars by generating enormous amounts of molten or vaporized rock and steam. That, the paper said, would help explain the signs of a warmer, wetter past Mars. To explore this possibility, scientists analyzed the environmental effects of cosmic impacts on computer models of the climate and geology of Mars.

"Using sophisticated three-dimensional global climate-model simulations similar to the ones used, for example, to simulate global warming on Earth, we were able to simulate for the first time in three dimensions the climate change induced by the very large impacts that hit Mars about 4 billion years ago," lead study author Martin Turbet, a planetary scientist and climatologist at the Sorbonne University in France, told Space.com.

The researchers focused on impacts from the largest rocks to ever hit Mars, ones more than 60 miles (100 kilometers) across. These are big enough to explain the largest craters seen on the Red Planet, basins more than 370 miles (600 km) wide. 

The scientists found that one of those impacts would make the atmosphere so hot that, for about half a Martian year, water would be unable to last on the Martian surface. After that, constant rain would fall for about a dozen Martian years. During this time, the water that was initially vaporized by the collision would return as deluges flooding the Red Planet, with an average of about 8.5 feet (2.6 meters) of water covering Mars per Earth year. (One Martian year is equal to about 1.88 Earth years.)

After these rains, Mars would quickly cool, with all its surface water freezing solid in 1,000 to 100,000 years. Over the course of another 10,000 to 1 million years, solar radiation would turn surface ice directly into water vapor, permitting water to migrate to and freeze at the Martian poles and other cold parts of the Red Planet.

The researchers calculated that an especially big impact — say, of a rock about 180 miles (300 km) wide, leaving a crater about 930 miles (1,500 km) in diameter — would, in addition to all these global consequences, create a local hot spot on Mars that could survive for tens of millions of years. Although, for most of its existence, this hot spot would not be warm enough to melt water on the Martian surface, it could help keep water liquid underground and at the bottom of any overlying ice deposits.

But the new findings don't explain some of the most notable water-created features on Mars: major valley networks south of the equator. Impact-related storms, however, likely peaked near the Martian equator. Previous research has also suggested that valley networks and the largest basins on Mars appear to have formed at different periods in the planet's history.

These findings also suggest that these deluges may have caused the crater erosion that scientists have identified in images of the Martian surface gathered by missions such as Mars Global Surveyor, Mars Express and Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, Turbet said. In addition, the cosmic-impact-triggered deluges may have led to the formation of ancient clays on the Red Planet, consistent with the suspected ages of these materials, he noted.

The research is described in a paper posted to the pre-print site arXiv.org and submitted to, but not yet accepted by, the journal Icarus.

• Photos: The Search for Water on Mars
• Water on Mars: Exploration & Evidence
• Where's All the Water on Mars? Scientists (and Future Astronauts) Need to Know

Follow Charles Q. Choi on Twitter @cqchoi.

Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcomand on Facebook.

{ https://www.space.com/ }

What Voyager 1 Learned at Jupiter 40 Years Ago

UFO alert! Mysterious black ring hovers in the sky above a Montana ranch - but can you guess what it is?

•  A perfect black circle hovers in the air for a several minutes before dispersing
•  The footage was taken in Lambert, Montana, U.S. above a farmer's field
•  Caused by an 'oil well burp' - a smoke ring caused when pressure is released

By MILLY VINCENT FOR MAILONLINE

Bizarre footage shows a black ring hovering in the sky above snowy fields in Montana.

The baffling phenomenon was captured by farmers as they fed the cattle on their ranch.

The smoky hoop floats in the air for several minutes before breaking up and vanishing

The farmers said they might have mistaken the spooky apparition for an alien visitation – had they not known its real identity.   

They said: 'While feeding our cows on a very cold evening on our farm and ranch north of Lambert, Montana, my husband and I noticed a black ring floating in the sky. 

Leading them to ask: 'Aliens or an oil well burp?' 

However the experienced farmers had heard of the phenomenon before, living over the hill from an oil well and were quick to guess where it had come from.

They said: 'Had we not known it was a smoke ring that came from one of the oil wells over the hill, we would have thought we were being visited by aliens. 

The warm smoke in the ring rose in the sky as it became larger and less pronounced

'This smoke ring was caused by an oil well worker that was blowing out the regulator in oil well flare.' 

Excess natural gas brought to the surface while collecting oil is burnt, or flared, to prevent it pressurising the system.

This flaring process is used to relieve pressure, effectively 'burping' the system while creating dark smoke which can sometimes form the rings seen in the video. 

'The cold, still air provided the right environment for the exhaust to make this smoke ring. 

'The ring stayed intact for several minutes before breaking up and dissipating.'

The farmer takes a break from feeding the cows to film. Her husband can be seen looking up at the spectacle in the field below

The ring begins to dissipate with dark smoke leaving the circle formation

The ring was in fact caused by a combustion of crude oil in a nearby oil well.

Conditions on the day, cold and still air, meant that the warm smoke stayed intact in a ring as it rose into the sky before eventually dissipating.  

This is not the first time a ring like this has appeared in the skies internationally, causing confusion as to where it has come from. 

Others have appeared in the UK, China, Argentina and U.S. and have been explained as a byproduct of fireworks, cannon fire and other pollutants. 

The last remnants of the smoke ring as it disappears into thin air in seconds

{ https://www.dailymail.co.uk/ }