With the sudden ubiquity of cell phones, even Boy Scouts are no longer learning semaphore in case they get lost in the woods with only a flashlight. Sure, cell phones have a flashlight too, but most lost campers and hikers will wear down the battery trying to make calls and swearing instead of sending signals. Besides, even a simple SOS signal (three short flashes, three long flashes, three short flashes) depends on someone at the other end knowing Morse code. All of this makes the mysterious light signals coming from the surface of the Moon even more mysterious.

“The so-called transient lunar phenomena have been known since the 1950s, but they have not been sufficiently observed.”

That’s about to change, according to Hakan Kayal, Professor of Space Technology at Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg in Bavaria, Germany. Kayal headed the project to build a new lunar telescope specifically designed to study these mysterious “transient lunar phenomena” which was completed when the telescope went into operation in April 2019.

Located in a remote private observatory about 100 km (63 miles) north of Seville, Spain, (“There are simply better weather conditions for observing the moon than in Germany”), Kayal and his team control the telescope from Germany. As explained in a university press release, that primarily occurs when they get a message from the two cameras also at the telescope site scanning the lunar surface 24/7 for flashes. When both pick one up simultaneously, they sound an alarm at Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg and Kayal’s team springs into action — analyzing the photos and videos automatically sent to them by the observatory via. Email? Really?

“Among other things, Kayal wants to use artificial intelligence methods: neural networks make the system gradually learn to distinguish a lunar flash of technical interference from objects like birds and planes that fly by in front of the camera. It is estimated that another year of work is needed by then.”

The lunar flash telescope is obviously a work-in-process. Right now, Kayal manually checks with the European Space Agency to see if their monitors have also observed the flash to confirm it’s legitimate before proceeding to the next step – trying to determine what the flashes might be before the next human expedition to the Moon.

“Anyone who wants to build a lunar base at some point, of course, must know the local conditions very well,” says Professor Kayal. What if such plans became concrete? At the latest then it should be clear what the mysterious flashes and luminous phenomena are about.”

Speculations on the causes of these mysterious lunar flashes range from meteors to lightning to seismic activity releasing gases that reflect sunlight (a strong possibility) to … aliens (a popular possibility).

While New Horizons leaves the solar system for more long-distance explorations, we still know very little about our closest neighbor. Professor Kayal hopes to change that with his lunar telescope and new programs at the University of Würzburg where there is a bachelor’s degree program for aerospace computer science, a master program in “Satellite Technology” and a degree in aerospace engineering in the Master’s program Computer Science.

Let’s hope we get answers on the “transient lunar phenomena” and other lunar mysteries before the Moon is closed off and exploited by those more interested in its minerals, rare metals and potential as a space military base.

Three shorts … three longs … three shorts.

{ https://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }

Tonight, the world gets its first glimpse of what To the Stars Academy of Arts and Science has been promoting for nearly two years as its new program Unidentified: Inside America’s UFO Investigation premieres on the History Channel. Ever since the 2017 disclosure of the shadowy Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program at the Pentagon, the world has learned that the U.S. Navy has encountered aerial phenomena in recent years that remain unexplained and unidentified. Some of these encounters sound far spookier than your everyday flying saucer sighting.

In the latest New York Times piece published this week, Navy pilots described encounters with cubes suspended inside spheres, giant spinning tops hovering at 30,000 feet, and incredibly fast-moving objects only visible on infrared sensors. Many of the pilots are baffled about how these objects are able to perform such incredible feats of flight while remaining in the air for over twelve hours a day. Are these visitors from afar, some sort of interdimensional entity or probe, an unknown natural phenomenon, or something stranger altogether?

The seemingly spinning-top-shaped object in the “GIMBAL” video.

Stranger doesn’t necessarily need to imply paranormal, supernatural, or extraterrestrial. As more and more descriptions about these Navy pilots’ interactions with these objects come to light, strange coincidences and curious details are starting to emerge. Could all of these sightings and the current wave of ‘disclosures’ actually be a way for the Navy to coyly admit it possess next-generation aerospace tech?

That’s all conjecture at this point, but there are a few pieces of evidence to support such a theory. Many observers have noted how curious it is that all of the sightings described in these recent disclosures took place in highly-controlled airspace in which the U.S. Armed Forces readily conduct exercises and drills or test new technologies. Many of the sightings took place in the military airspace near Naval Air Station Oceana in Virginia, while the infamous “Tic Tac” incident took place in special use airspace off the coast of California. Given that the Armed Forces regularly conduct Joint Strike Group exercises in highly-controlled waters and airspace, it seems pretty coincidental that so many high-profile encounters with unidentified aerial phenomena would occur within these spaces.

Particularly given the new technology that was being tested in these areas at the time of these sightings. In the 2004 Tic Tac sightings, the USS Nimitz supercarrier and its F/A-18F Super Hornets were testing a revolutionary new sensor fusion and data-sharing system known as Cooperative Engagement Capability technology. This system lets satellites, aircraft, and ships share real-time data gleaned from dozens of sources, enabling aircraft or other vessels to track and fire upon targets their own sensors aren’t even picking up. In a way, it’s a type of ‘hive mind’ allowing an entire Joint Strike Group to share data on the fly.

USS Nimitz

The 2004 sightings occurred as the Navy was testing this technology for the first time and had just completed training for the new system. What better way to test a new data-sharing system than to send some kind of crazy next-generation prototype up into the air to see if the USS Nimitz and all of its high-tech assets could track it? The 2004 sightings weren’t unique in this regard: in the recent New York Times story detailing incidents form 2014 and 2014, the F-A/18 pilots also described conducting exercises with the same Cooperative Engagement Capability technology in preparation for deployment when they began encountering strange objects as high as 30,000 feet in the air.

It seems like a pretty big coincidence that Navy pilots would encounter these seemingly superior aircraft while conducting drills in highly-controlled airspace while using revolutionary new sensor fusion and data-sharing technology. Could these encounters have actually been the Navy’s way of conducting real-world tests of some unknown type of new aerospace technology while keeping everyone, even their own pilots, in the dark about it? Of course, we don’t know how many other Cooperative Engagement Capability drills took place without any UFO encounters, so without other information, this is all speculative.

Still, the coincidence is glaring and has some wondering if it could have been by design. According to the most recent New York Times report, even many pilots “speculated that the objects were part of some classified and extremely advanced drone program” in the wake of these encounters. As aviation watchdog Tyler Rogoway at The War Zone points out, “it’s hard to overstress just how opportune the conditions would have been for this particular [Carrier Strike Group], or elements of it, equipped with the world’s best air defense capabilities to be tested against exotic and high-performance flying craft.”

F/A-18E Super Hornet

Allegations or speculation about the U.S. military muddying the waters surrounding UFO encounters in order to conceal revolutionary, secret, or prototype technologies are nothing new and are rarely supported by evidence. In the case of the Navy’s alleged UFO encounters, there is no hard evidence surrounding these claims, but there is a deal of ‘soft’ evidence, if you will. For years, several nations and scientific institutions have claimed to have created a radical new form of propulsionusing electromagnetic radiation inside resonant vacuum chambers. If ever constructed, this theoretical “EM Drive” engine could hypothetically enable aircraft to maneuver as the UFOs in the Navy pilots describe mysterious airborne objects behaving.

While the EM Drive remains a theoretical concept as far as we know, there is the strange addition of a few curious Navy patents which surfaced on the internet recently as the Navy UFO fervor has heated up. One appears to describe a polygonal craft which can “engineer the fabric of our reality at the most fundamental level” and “greatly advance the fields of aerospace propulsion and power generation.” The patent claims the inventor of this craft is a shadowy figure named Salvatore Cezar Pais, while the patent was filed by and assigned to the US Secretary of Navy. Other patents by the same Salvatore Cezar Pais/Secretary of Navy combo include a new type of room temperature superconductor which could allow for “the design and development of novel energy generation” and a “high frequency gravitational wave generator” which sounds suspiciously like the EM Drive and looks like a cube inside a sphere – the same description of an object seen by two Navy pilots in 2014 off the coast of Virginia. All of the patents were filed within the last three years.

Are these patents related to the Navy’s now-famous UFO encounters in any way? The craft they describe sure do sound eerily familiar alongside the descriptions of these recent Navy encounters. If the Navy does possess next-gen or next-next-gen aircraft, what better way to see what they can really do than to send them up in the air to toy with your best pilots, sensors, and aircraft? Are all of these recent ‘disclosures’ and the new History Channel series merely a way to get out in front of the story concerning radical new technologies? 

{ https://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }

Hundreds Of Alien Buildings On Dwarf Planet Ceres Southern Pole, UFO Sighting News.

Date of discovery: June 1, 2019
Location of discovery: South pole of Ceres
Source: 

• https://astrogeology.usgs.gov/search/map/Ceres/Dawn/DLR/FramingCamera/

Ceres_Dawn_FC_DLR_global_59ppd_Feb2016

I found not one, but hundreds of buildings on planet Ceres. The southern pole is littered with structures everywhere. I tried my best to find and report only the most clear of the structures. I will report the Northern pole tomorrow. This video I made is 18 minutes long with  new structures every half minute, so I hope you wont get board. Ceres...had life on it long before human life ever evolved on Earth. Perhaps these are our ancient descendants and they placed humanity on earth to create an experiment that would allow them to watch and learn from us...thus learning about their own early evolution. 
Scott C. Waring

{ https://www.etdatabase.com/ }

UFOs Are Real, But Don't Assume They're Alien Spaceships

By Mike Wall 

Aliens shouldn't be the default explanation for weird stuff in the sky.

In 2014 and 2015, pilots with the U.S. Navy reported multiple UFO sightings during training maneuvers.

(Image: © Copyright History 2019)

UFOs are very real, as we have recently seen — but that doesn't mean E.T. has been violating our airspace.

"UFO" refers to any flying object an observer cannot readily identify. And pilots with the U.S. Navy saw fast-moving UFOs repeatedly off the East Coast throughout 2014 and 2015, in one case apparently nearly colliding with one of the mysterious objects, The New York Times reported earlier this week. 

Those incidents were reported to the Pentagon's Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP), whose existence the Times and Politico revealed in December 2017. (Interestingly, those 2017 stories cited Pentagon officials as saying that AATIP had been shut down in 2012.)

Related: 7 Things Most Often Mistaken for UFOs

Former AATIP head Luis Elizondo, by the way, is involved with a new six-part series called "Unidentified: Inside America's UFO Investigation," which premieres tonight (May 31) on The History Channel. 

The Navy pilots said some UFOs reached hypersonic speeds without any detectable exhaust plumes, suggesting the possible involvement of super-advanced propulsion technology. Still, Defense Department officials aren't invoking intelligent aliens as an explanation, according to this week's Times story — and they're right to be measured in this respect, scientists say.

There are multiple possible prosaic explanations for the Navy pilots' observations, said Seth Shostak, a senior astronomer at the SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) Institute in Mountain View, California.  

He pointed out, for example, that the sightings occurred off the coast, as did a similar 2004 observation unveiled in conjunction with the December 2017 stories. (That previous sighting occurred near San Diego).

Coastal regions are where you might expect to find a rival nation's advanced reconnaissance craft, Shostak said, because incursions over the continental United States would be more obvious and easily detected.  

He also noted that, according to the recent Times story, the Navy pilots began spotting the UFOs after their jets' radar system was upgraded. That detail suggests the sightings might stem from some sort of software bug or instrument issue, he said.

"As anybody who uses Microsoft products knows, whenever you upgrade any technical product, there are always problems," Shostak said.

Such reasoning is bolstered by the current tendency of UFOs to manifest as blobs or blurs on the displays of advanced instruments rather than as crisply defined objects in cellphone photos.

"The sightings always recede to the edge of what technology allows you to do," Shostak said. "The aliens are kind of keeping pace with technology."

Common sense also argues against jumping to the E.T. conclusion. If these UFOs are indeed alien spacecraft, what exactly are they doing? Why were they sent here, across the vast gulfs of space and time?

"If the aliens are here, you gotta say they're the best houseguests ever, because they never do anything," Shostak said. "They just buzz around. They don't address climate change; they don't steal our molybdenum."

• Related: UFO Watch: 8 Times the Government Looked for Flying Saucers

But such skepticism should not be taken as a dismissal of the E.T. possibility, Shostak stressed. 

"It's not trivial to say what these things are," he said. And Shostak applauded a newly enacted classified Navy policy, as reported by the Times, instructing pilots on how to report UFOs (which the military, and many other people, now call "unexplained aerial phenomena," likely in an attempt to dodge the tinfoil-hat stigma associated with the term "UFO.")

"That's a good policy," he said. "Let them do it."

After all, we've learned over the past decade or so that our Milky Way galaxy is home to huge numbers of potentially habitable worlds. Observations by NASA's Kepler space telescope, for example, suggest that at least 20% percent of the galaxy's 200 billion or so stars likely harbor a rocky planet in the "habitable zone," that just-right range of distances where liquid surface water could exist.

So, while the odds may be long that any UFO witnessed to date was an extraterrestrial craft, it's far from crazy to suspect that intelligent aliens are out there somewhere (or at least were out there somewhere, at some point during the Milky Way's 13-billion-year history). That's why people like Shostak keep listening for signals from the sky.

• Why Is the Pentagon Interested in UFOs?
• 5 Bold Claims of Alien Life
• 10 Exoplanets That Could Host Alien Life

Mike Wall's book about the search for alien life, "Out There" (Grand Central Publishing, 2018; illustrated by Karl Tate), is out now. Follow him on Twitter @michaeldwall. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom or Facebook. 

{ https://www.space.com/ }

Former head of secretive government UFO program who claims to have seen mysterious supersonic craft that spun like a top set to reveal all in new documentary

• Luiz Elizondo will talk about helming a secretive government UFO program 
• In a documentary on the History Channel, Elizondo hopes to start a conversation 
• Included in the documentary are details on sightings of mysterious aircraft 
• The documentary moves the needle on a more frank discussion of UFOs 

By JAMES PERO FOR DAILYMAIL.COM

One of the former leaders of a covert government program meant to investigate the nature of 'unknown aerial phenomenon' is opening up about some of the strange and often unexplained accounts. 

In an upcoming History Channel documentary featuring former head of the Pentagon's Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP), Luis Elizondo details his involvement with the Pentagon's UFO research program in a blockbuster New York Times report from 2017.

In the Times' report, Elizondo revealed that he left the secretive $22 million government program after what he has termed excessive secrecy and internal opposition to the project.

Scroll down for video

Luis Elizondo, pictured above, headed a secretive government program meant to investigate the nature of UFO's and will open up about his involvement in a History Channel documentary

According to Elizondo, who spoke to Live Science ahead of the documentary's premier tonight at 10 pm ET, the goal of his participation is to kick start a frank conversation about the phenomenon witnessed by the now defunct program and other reports like it. 

Included in that discussion, are various puzzling reports of aircraft that seem to defy the laws of gravity as humans know them, traveling and maneuvering at speeds unparalleled by current technology.

In a recent New York Times report, a former Navy official described some of those sightings which he said occurred between 2014 and 2015.

The mysterious craft, which he said looked like a spinning top, had no visible signs of propulsion but were able to reach 30,000 feet at speeds well faster than sound.

'These things would be out there all day' Lt. Ryan Graves, an F/A-18 Super Hornet pilot told the Times. 

Unexplained aircraft often defy the laws of gravity, traveling at speeds well beyond the limits of human aerospace technology. In a New York Times report, a former Navy official described some of those sightings ( one shown) which he said occurred between 2014 and 2015

'Keeping an aircraft in the air requires a significant amount of energy. With the speeds we observed, 12 hours in the air is 11 hours longer than we’d expect.' 

Likewise, Elizondo said, these sightings of seemingly impossible aircraft were not uncommon. In an interview with Live Science, he said that some of the ships reported by the agency far exceeded the known limits of gravitational force.

While human technology tops out at about 16 to 18 G's, the craft seemed to ignore those rules.

'These things that we were observing were pulling 400 to 500 G's,' Elizondo told Live Science. 

'They don't have engines or even wings, and they are able to seemingly defy the natural effects of Earth's gravitational pull.'

Elizondo stops short of saying the unknown craft are the result of extraterrestrial beings, but underscores the need to investigate phenomenon, citing its implications on national security. 

Willingness to talk about unexplained phenomenon has seemed to broaden in the U.S. military with new guidelines on reporting sightings

'We trust the American people to know that North Korea has nuclear warheads pointed at Los Angeles, yet we don't trust them with the knowledge that there's something in our skies and we don't know what it is? That seems counterproductive to me,' Elizondo told Live Science. 

Elizondo's appearance in the History Channel documentary marks the latest step toward an increasing willingness on the part of the U.S. government and others to acknowledge and investigate the existence of UFO's.

Recently, the U.S. Navy also unveiled new guidelines on collecting information about UFO sightings which they said are designed to make it easier for sailors to report UFO sightings amid fears that the objects could actually be 'extremely advanced Russian aircraft.'

Earlier this month, a U.S. Department of Defense spokesperson reportedly confirmed the Pentagon's interest in UFO's to the New York Post, citing the agency's investigation of 'unidentified aerial phenomena' in an unprecedented use of UFO-like terminology. 

Read more:

• On the Trail of a Secret Pentagon U.F.O. Program - The New York Times
• Former Head of Pentagon's Secret UFO Program Has Some (Strange) Stories to Tell
• ‘Wow, What Is That?’ Navy Pilots Report Unexplained Flying Objects - The New York Times

{ https://www.dailymail.co.uk/ }

Private Companies Are Building an Exoskeleton Around Earth