Ontdek de Fascinerende Wereld van UFO's en UAP's: Jouw Bron voor Onthullende Informatie!
Ben jij ook gefascineerd door het onbekende? Wil je meer weten over UFO's en UAP's, niet alleen in België, maar over de hele wereld? Dan ben je op de juiste plek!
België: Het Kloppend Hart van UFO-onderzoek
In België is BUFON (Belgisch UFO-Netwerk) dé autoriteit op het gebied van UFO-onderzoek. Voor betrouwbare en objectieve informatie over deze intrigerende fenomenen, bezoek je zeker onze Facebook-pagina en deze blog. Maar dat is nog niet alles! Ontdek ook het Belgisch UFO-meldpunt en Caelestia, twee organisaties die diepgaand onderzoek verrichten, al zijn ze soms kritisch of sceptisch.
Nederland: Een Schat aan Informatie
Voor onze Nederlandse buren is er de schitterende website www.ufowijzer.nl, beheerd door Paul Harmans. Deze site biedt een schat aan informatie en artikelen die je niet wilt missen!
Internationaal: MUFON - De Wereldwijde Autoriteit
Neem ook een kijkje bij MUFON (Mutual UFO Network Inc.), een gerenommeerde Amerikaanse UFO-vereniging met afdelingen in de VS en wereldwijd. MUFON is toegewijd aan de wetenschappelijke en analytische studie van het UFO-fenomeen, en hun maandelijkse tijdschrift, The MUFON UFO-Journal, is een must-read voor elke UFO-enthousiasteling. Bezoek hun website op www.mufon.com voor meer informatie.
Samenwerking en Toekomstvisie
Sinds 1 februari 2020 is Pieter niet alleen ex-president van BUFON, maar ook de voormalige nationale directeur van MUFON in Vlaanderen en Nederland. Dit creëert een sterke samenwerking met de Franse MUFON Reseau MUFON/EUROP, wat ons in staat stelt om nog meer waardevolle inzichten te delen.
Let op: Nepprofielen en Nieuwe Groeperingen
Pas op voor een nieuwe groepering die zich ook BUFON noemt, maar geen enkele connectie heeft met onze gevestigde organisatie. Hoewel zij de naam geregistreerd hebben, kunnen ze het rijke verleden en de expertise van onze groep niet evenaren. We wensen hen veel succes, maar we blijven de autoriteit in UFO-onderzoek!
Blijf Op De Hoogte!
Wil jij de laatste nieuwtjes over UFO's, ruimtevaart, archeologie, en meer? Volg ons dan en duik samen met ons in de fascinerende wereld van het onbekende! Sluit je aan bij de gemeenschap van nieuwsgierige geesten die net als jij verlangen naar antwoorden en avonturen in de sterren!
Heb je vragen of wil je meer weten? Aarzel dan niet om contact met ons op te nemen! Samen ontrafelen we het mysterie van de lucht en daarbuiten.
Berichten van 1 september 2019 tot 30 september 2019
SETI SCIENTIST: ALIENS MAY HAVE LEFT A SPY PROBE ORBITING THE SUN
IMAGES VIA PIXABAY/VICTOR TANGERMANN
DAN ROBITZSKI
Alien Spies
A physicist who’s on the hunt for extraterrestrial life says there’s a chance that an ancient alien civilization has been spying on Earth for millions of years.
That’s not to say that he’s suggesting they walk among us, but physicist and independent SETI researcherJames Benford suggests that aliens could have visited a rock orbiting the Sun in a path similar to that or Earth, according to Live Science. While such an extraterrestrial visit is extremely unlikely, it’s technically within the realm of possibility that alien tech is sitting on one of those so-called co-orbitals, waiting to be uncovered.
The Gist
Every so often — roughly twice every billion years — another star will venture within a light-year of Earth, per Live Science. Since Earth is a couple billion years old, Benford argues in research published this month in The Astronomical Journal that it’s technically possible that an advanced civilization could have come close enough to launch an expedition to our solar system.
“This is essentially extraterrestrial archaeology I’m talking about,” Benford told Live Science.
“How likely is it that alien probe would be on one of these co-orbitals, obviously extremely unlikely,” Arizona State University physicist and astrobiologist Paul Davies, who didn’t contribute to Benford’s research, told Live Science.
The footage, taken by a YouTuber who wants to remain anonymous, shows a long black object slowly moving along the horizon.
He notes in the clip that it is “slowly moving from left to right while tilting occasionally”.
“It’s elongated and cigar-shaped,” he continues.
“It is not a blimp, or big and fat and round.
The cameraman has since spoken to Daily Star Online about the bizarre sight.
“I have no idea what it could be,” he said.
The snake-like UFOs were first spotted in the same area in June(Image: PEN NEWS)
“One follower suggested it could be an unmanned drone, but I couldn't verify that.
“I was amazed that it was happening in broad daylight. I couldn't identify it so I recorded it.”
He told this site he had “never witnessed anything like that” before but added that there was an incident three years ago where a strange bright light appeared in the sky.
“One night without a camera in hand I watched a jet chasing a silent light object,” he added.
“The lighted object was toying with the jet and the jet was on afterburners trying to keep up.
“Since that time I never go outside without my smartphone and camera handy.”
If you’re a regular reader of this blog you’ll know that I don’t spend a lot of time on anything do to with the world of UFOs, alien conspiracies, or other dubious propositions about how the world works. I have plenty of my own borderline outrageous scientific extrapolations and hypotheses, but these are all (I hope) grounded in some element of reality as the majority of humans understand it. That other stuff, little grey aliens and so on? Let’s just say I’d rather spend more time on deciding what to have for lunch.
But that’s me: While a significant portion of humanity voiced demands this week for real changes in how we humans go about our lives – in order to try to avoid the absolute worst-case scenarios of near-future climate change – there was also a cohort whose attention was focused on a bit of arid terrain some eighty miles north of Las Vegas. Here, at the edge of the Groom Lake salt flats in Nevada, is a US Air Force facility known as either Groom Lake, Homey Airport, or Area 51, within the Nevada Test and Training Range.
Long a subject of just about every ‘theory’ about government conspiracies and extraterrestrial shenanigans since the 1940s, Area 51 still holds a powerful allure. So much so that some two million people responded to a (presumably satirical) proposal on Facebook in June 2019 to ‘storm’ Area 51 on September 20th 2019 and find out once and for all what it’s hiding. In the end about 40 people are reported to have shown up. Naturally the US military did not let anyone near the actual facility.
There’s plenty of readily available material to peruse on what probably takes place at Area 51 – mostly highly classified aeronautical research for military purposes, such as technologies for stealth aircraft. And, ironically, there are suggestions that people’s focus on wild alien conspiracies at this locale have been quite helpful in distracting from the real work at the base.
That distraction is actually worth considering. As a species we’re all pretty good at getting distracted. It doesn’t have to be with intricate conspiracies about other life in the cosmos, it can be about celebrities, gossip, or online videos on how to make turnip desserts (I don’t know, but that probably exists somewhere). Almost anything but the inconvenient truths about the nature of our existence. We are born, some things are okay, we suffer a bit, and we drop dead.
No wonder we have a hard time facing up to our complicity, no matter how modest, in a civilization-spanning set of behaviors that are unhealthy for us and the biosphere that supports us. Of course, we’re not all quite as bad as each other. The vast numbers of humans who still live moment-to-moment, struggling for food, clean water, and education, are hardly as culpable as someone like me, sitting here with my ridiculously environmentally unsound laptop and effectively limitless electrical power. But that doesn’t matter, to get out of this mess every person will end up having to behave differently, it’s simply a matter of degree.
The one thing genuinely interesting about Area 51 is how it reflects on our inability to snap out of a world of fanciful thinking and fanciful hopes. Maybe there’s a lesson somewhere in there; we don’t need to give up our love of the impossible, but we definitely need to do better at differentiating between fantasy and reality.
In fact, if you want to believe that Area 51 hides wonderous extraterrestrial technology secrets you should ask what another sentient species from across the galaxy did to get itself to such a point of sophistication. The answer, I suspect, would be to first figure out how to sustain its homeworld and itself in a way that enabled a glorious future of buzzing unsuspecting bipeds in the deserts of a distant planet.
They Discovered Something on Mars and Phobos that Cannot Be Explained ...
The now dubbed “Phobos monolith” is a large object on the surface of Mars's moon “Phobos”. The giant structure stands 90 meters tall. Only 3 meters less than that of the Statue of Liberty Monument in New York.
First discovered by “Efrain Palermo” who noticed the distinct shadow of the anomaly while analysing images taken from the “Mars Global Surveyor orbiter” lanched in November 1996. This peculiar and solitary large rock was also confirmed by “Lan Fleming”, an imaging sub-contractor at NASA Johnson Space Center. Also Noting the possibility that the monolith is artificial in nature.
Along with the mysterious Monolith photographed on the Martian moon “Phobos”.. A similar looking structure can also be seen upon the surface of Mars...
Featuring David Childress, Billy Carson, Mike Bara and Michael Salla
Ze hebben iets vreemds gevonden op Phobos en Mars, en niemand heeft er een verklaring voor
De ‘monoliet’ op Marsmaan Phobos is een 90 meter hoge structuur die enkele jaren geleden is ontdekt door een NASA-sonde. Ter vergelijking: het Vrijheidsbeeld in New York is 93 meter hoog.
Niemand kan met zekerheid zeggen wat het is en hoe het daar is gekomen.
De ‘monoliet’ werd voor het eerst gespot door amateurastronoom Efrain Palermo.
Schaduw
Tijdens het analyseren van foto’s gemaakt door de Mars Global Surveyor, gelanceerd in november 1996, stuitte hij op de schaduw van de structuur.
De vondst werd bevestigd door Lan Fleming van NASA’s Johnson Space Center.
Kunstmatig
Hij hield rekening met de mogelijkheid dat de monoliet op Phobos kunstmatig was en geen geologische formatie of rots.
Er is niet alleen een mysterieuze monoliet gefotografeerd op Marsmaan Phobos. Ook op het oppervlak van de rode planeet is een soortgelijke structuur vastgelegd.
We staan op het punt om buitenaards leven te ontdekken op Mars. Hoofdwetenschapper NASA zinspeelt op historische aankondiging
De hoofdwetenschapper van de NASA denkt dat het ruimteagentschap op het punt staat om buitenaards leven te vinden op de maan en Mars.
De wetenschapper waarschuwde echter dat de wereld mogelijk niet klaar is voor zo’n historische ontdekking.
In 2021 moet een nieuwe rover van de NASA aankomen op Mars. Het wagentje, ExoMars geheten, gaat in de bodem van de rode planeet boren en monsters verzamelen.
Sporen
Volgens dr. Jim Green, hoofdwetenschapper van de NASA, is de kans groot dat er sporen van buitenaards leven in de monsters zullen zitten.
Hij is echter bezorgd dat de wereld hier nog niet klaar voor is.
“Ik denk niet dat we voorbereid zijn op de resultaten,” zei hij tegen de Britse Daily Telegraph.
Veel vragen
Hij zei te denken dat de NASA op het punt staat buitenaards leven te ontdekken en daar aankondigingen over te doen.
De ontdekking van buitenaards leven zal veel vragen doen rijzen, aldus Green.
“Is dat leven zoals wij? Hoe verhoudt het zich tot leven op aarde? Kan leven zich verspreiden van de ene naar de andere planeet?” klonk het.
Beschavingen
Dr. Green zei te geloven dat er hele beschavingen bestaan op andere planeten.
“Er is geen reden om aan te nemen dat er elders geen beschavingen zijn, aangezien we overal en nergens exoplaneten ontdekken,” zei hij.
One of the first officially recorded sightings of the 1950 UFO wave occurred on the afternoon of 6th January at a little after 2 pm over the town of Howard in Kansas. Three United States Air Force crew were piloting a C-47 on their way to Offut Air Force Base in Omaha, Nebraska.
They would describe the object as between 30 and 60 feet long and “shaped like a football”. They would also note how it was a “bright silver color” which would shine in the afternoon sun. It was in their sights for around two minutes, moving between 300 to 500 miles per hour at an altitude of approximately 2,000 feet.
Whether there is a connection or not, later that day at 9:45 pm over Mundy Point in Virginia, two witnesses would report seeing a strange object moving through the sky, remaining visible for around 30 seconds.
Picture: Kaggle/UFO Sighters
Strange Sightings Over Air Bases Across America
The following evening, at around 10:15 pm at Holloman Air Force Base in Corona, New Mexico, another bizarre sighting occurred.
This time, several strange balls of light were seen traveling through the sky, changing color as they did so from yellow-white to a distinct orange. Bizarrely, as it approached the mountain ranges in the area it would “level off” and change color once again to a blue-green color.
Of course, this last detail would dismiss the notion that the objects were merely “falling” and were in fact under some kind of control. The lights would return on the evening of the 12th January, once more changing direction before disappearing out of sight.
Less than 24 hours after the initial sighting over Holloman Air Force Base, on themorning of the 10th January at a little after 10 am in Las Vegas, two civilian pilotsat the Las Vegas Air Force Base – a father and son – would observe two F-80 fighter jets approaching the base as they came in to land.
However, at an altitude of around 2,000 feet, each of the witnesses would also observe a strange round balloon-like object of “pure silver” and seemingly of solid metal. They would further estimate that the object was between 25 and 30 feet across and made no noise whatsoever. Furthermore, they could see no antennas or any other external fittings of any kind. It would move calmly through the skies, seemingly uninterested in the two fighter jets, and then began to accelerate somewhat before disappearing over a nearby mountain range.
On the evening of the 11th January at the Ohio Air National Guard at Norwood in Ohio, several members would happen to point their searchlight at a “space platform” in the night sky above the city.
The Gulf of Mexico Incident
On the evening of 12th January, at 11:25 pm, the crew of a B-29 aircraft would notice three strange objects on their onboard radar while flying over the Gulf of Mexico.
As an example as to the speed with which these strange objects were moving, the radar screen onboard covered a 100-mile radius. The objects would clear the screen from one side to the other in no more than 20 seconds. The overall estimated speed of these bizarre, metallic and most definitely solid objects was between 2,500 and 3,000 miles per hour.
While two of the objects would eventually disappear from sight, the other would continue to follow the B-29. Even more concerning were the two near approaches from the craft before it halted and hovered only 20 miles away. It would then move back into a pursuing position.
The object would disappear after around half-an-hour. However, the plane’s radar systems would remain jammed for around ten minutes after.
Interestingly, despite the wealth of radar information, no visual sightings of the object were made by any of the crew. This, of course, leaves open the possibility, however, remote it might be, that the incident was down to radar malfunction. A chink that many skeptics will point out.
Sightings Spreading Out Into Urban Areas
Sightings would continue throughout the United States following the incident, however. For example, in Peoria in Illinois on the evening of the 14th January, an aerial object was witnessed overhead. And while it didn’t move in a manner that would suggest it wasn’t a normal aircraft, residents would report “electromagnetic effects” as it passed.
Earlier the same day, just before 5 pm in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, several workers at the town’s nuclear facility witnessed a “fiery ball of light” hover for several moments over restricted military airspace.
Although further afield than the United States, the 15th January brought three more reports. A saucer-shaped object was witnessed hovering and rotating just off the coast of Newfoundland in Canada. On the same afternoon at Sierra de Comechingones in Argentina, a silver cigar-shaped object emerged from nearby mountains and remained visible for several minutes.
Later that evening, back in the United States, multiple witnesses would report “several strange objects” hovering over Tacoma, Washington. The following evening in Portland, Oregon, a husband, and wife would watch a similar object for almost two hours.
During the early evening of 17th January, just off the coast of Kauai Island in Hawaii, another silver disc-shaped object was reported hovering over the water. Then, it would shoot “straight-up” and vanish into the early evening sky. The following evening, on the other side of the United States in Summit, New Jersey, several witnesses observed a “spherical UFO” glowing a “reddish-orange” color moving slowly over the region.
On the same evening six military pilots, including Lieutenant Webb, would witness a “round reddish-white” object moving slowly through the evening sky over Denver, Colorado.
The Kodiak, Alaska Incident
In the early hours of 23rd January 1950 at around 2:40 am, Navy Patrol pilot, Lt. Smith was guiding his plane near the Bering Sea at Kodiak, Alaska in what was a routine security flight. He would pick up an unidentified object on his radar on two separate occasions.
When he radioed the control tower at Kodiak to enquire if there were other aircraft in the area, he was informed by the operator not only wasn’t there any other craft, but the interference on the communication line was some of the worst he had witnessed.
Around 20 minutes later, on board the USS Tillamock slight to the south of Kodiak, came the first visual confirmations of the incident. One of the on-duty personnel on the deck of the vessel would report seeing a “very fast-moving red glow light”. What’s more, the object appeared to circle the Kodiak region. Another member of the crew then came to the deck and also witnessed the bizarre object for around 30 seconds. Bizarrely, no sound whatsoever came from the glowing craft.
At 4:40 am – two hours after first noticing the strange activity – Lt. Smith was still experiencing problems with his onboard systems. However, he would notice another read on the radar. One that moved so fast that it “left a trail on the screen”. When Smith notified his crew, they would witness the object visually.
It made some bizarre maneuvers in the sky and appeared to be moving somewhere in the region of 2,000 miles per hour. General descriptions of the craft were of “two orange lights rotating around a common center”.
After heading toward his plane following a sudden sharp turn, the object disappeared from sight.
Photographer films cigar-shaped UFO that turns into ring-shaped UFO
On September 28, 2019 the photographer captured from an unknown location a long bright object in the sky when suddenly a flash of light illuminates the sky.
Directly after the flash the cigar-shaped object seems to have changed into a ring-shaped object.
Immediately after the flash on which the cigar-shaped object turns into a ring-shaped UFO object starts at the 1.47 mark in the video.
NASA Probes a Video Showing a UFO Rapidly Moving in a Spanish City
An interesting video that shows a UFO moving fast over the Spanish city of Alicante has reportedly attracted the attention of the primary state-run American space agency.
The footage was reportedly shot during an electrical storm that engulfed the city recently. Alejandro Molla, a local computer scientist, was the one who captured the video.
Molla reportedly suffered the bad weather, which resulted in his sleepless night. He decided to record the incredible lightning show in the sky instead. After creating some video files, he noticed he had recorded on video something mysterious rapidly moving behind the clouds.
The clip shows an apparent silver disc looping through the clouds. Spanish news outlet Agencia 6 broadcasted the controversial video and Molla claimed that NASA filed an official request for the original copies of the video to the Spanish news outlet.
NASA is now reportedly investigating the incident through the video.
Meanwhile, some UFO enthusiasts have suggested that this specific sighting is evidence of an extraterrestrial spacecraft approaching the Earth for regular recharging, using the storm’s electric energy.
According to numerous writings and oral legends of Native American tribes, a race of ‘White Giants’ existed in the distant past. Interestingly, similar accounts of Giants existing on Earth in the distant past can be found all around the world.
There are numerous legends among various Native American tribes, from the Comanches in the north to other tribes in the south, which speak of a mysterious race of white-skinned giants who inhabited North America thousands of years ago, before mysteriously vanishing from the face of the planet.
In his book “History of the Choctaw Indians, Chickasaw and Natchez” (1899), Horatio Bardwell Cushman writes: “The tradition of the Choctaws . . Told of a race of giants that once inhabited the now State of Tennessee, and with whom their ancestors fought when they arrived in Mississippi in their migration from the west. … Their tradition states the Nahullo ( a race of giants) was of wonderful stature.”
Cushman stated that, over time, the term “Nahullo” became common to refer to all white people, but originally, the term was used to designate a race of white giants with which the Choctaws fought after crossing the Mississippi River.
There is plenty of evidence today which suggests that Giant beings did, in fact, walk on Earth.
Interestingly, according to an account in 1857, Chief Rolling Thunder of the Comanche said:
“Innumerable moons ago, a race of white men, 10 feet high, and far more rich and powerful than any white people now living, here inhabited a large range of country, extending from the rising to the setting sun. Their fortifications crowned the summits of the mountains, protecting their populous cities situated in the intervening valleys. “They excelled every other nation which was flourished, either before or since, in all manner of cunning handicraft—were brave and warlike—ruling over the land they had wrested from its ancient owners with a high and haughty hand. Compared with them the palefaces of the present day were pygmies, in both art and arms. …” (source)
According to the Comanche chief, a Great Spirit wiped out the White Giants when they forgot all about justice and mercy, becoming too proud.
The Navajo are another ancient tribe that offers evidence of Giants walking the Earth. The Navajo speak of a rave of ‘white giants’ called the Starnake people, describing them as a “regal race of white giants endowed with mining technology who dominated the West, enslaved lesser tribes, and had strongholds all through the Americas. They were either extinguished or ‘went back to the heavens.’”
The mysterious Starnake were either extinguished or “went back to the heavens.” The name may be a corruption of the Biblical race known as Anakim (Num. 13:33, Deut. 1:28). The name Og (Hebrew “chief”) appears to be characteristic (see Zimmerman, pp. 188-91). The ogham alphabet is attributed to this cultural founder. (Source)
However, more stories of White Giants can be found in numerous other accounts of ancient North-American tribes. The Choctaw also happen to mention the mystery giants. According to the Choctaw tribe, in that, is now known as Tennesee, a race of giants dominated the land in the distant past. It is said that their ancestors fought against them when they arrived in Mississippi during their westward migration.
Interestingly the Paiutes have oral legends that speak of red-haired giants, white cannibals that stood above 10 feet in height inhabiting the Lovelock Cave, in Nevada. Interestingly, in the past, archaeologists have discovered remains of people with red hair in the region.
In what is now modern-day Mexico, Ancient Aztec legends also happen to mention the existence of a race of giants.
NASA Simulation of Asteroid Hitting NY Predicts Mass Destruction
00:3101:10Now PlayingNASA Simulation of Asteroid Hitting NY Predicts Mass DestructionGreen ‘Christmas Comet’ Is Visible This Month1:00First Image of a Blackhole Is Captured by Astronomers1:16Russian Scientists Warn A Massive Asteroid Could Strike Earth In 20681:20AI Tech Can Identify Genetic Disorders From a Person’s Face1:02NASA’s Spacecraft Beams Back Image Of Farthest Object Ever Visited By Mankind1:20Elon Musk’s Starship Is Coming Together — And New Images Reveal What It Will Look Like1:33Over One Million Plants and Animals Could Soon Be Extinct1:28Harvard Astronomer Still Believes ‘Oumuamua May Have Been An Alien Space Probe1:23Scientists Successfully 3D-Prints Heart From Human Cells1:24Powered by
In Aztec mythology, these giants are referred to as the Quinametzin.
The ruler of the Giants was, according to some versions of the myth, the god Tlaloc. Interestingly, the Quinametzin were believed to be the builders of the city of Teotihuacan and Tlachihualtepetl. The ‘Tlaxcaltecas’ recounted that, near the time of the Spanish Conquest, they themselves had fought the last Quinametzin on Earth.
If we travel to South America, we will find that the ancient Manta people of Peru, speak of a race of giants that in the distant past, coexisted with them.
Their legend says that: “There arrived on the coast, in boats made of reeds, as big as large ships, a party of men of such size that, from the knee downwards, their height was as great as the entire height of an ordinary man, though he might be of good stature.
Their limbs were all in proportion to the deformed size of their bodies, and it was a monstrous thing to see their heads, with hair reaching to the shoulders. Their eyes were as large as small plates.” (Source)
Mars rovers being launched next summer WILL find life on the red planet, Nasa's chief scientist predicts - but he warns Earth is not prepared for the 'revolutionary' discovery
Europe's ExoMars Rover and NASA's Mars 2020 rover will be launched in March
The vehicles will drill down in to rock formations to search for organic matter
Dr Jim Green, a scientist working on both rovers, says Earth is not prepared
Alien life could be discovered in less than two years but the world is 'not prepared for the results', NASA's chief scientist says.
Europe's ExoMars Rover, which has been named Rosalind in memory of British chemist Rosalind Franklin, will be launched with NASA's rover Mars 2020 in March.
They will search for extraterrestrial life and organic matter by targeting rock formations, with the ExoMars drilling 6.5ft in to Mars' core to extract samples.
Signs of life could be found within months of their arrival on Mars in March 2021, Dr Jim Green, a scientist working with both missions told the Sunday Telegraph.
Europe's ExoMars Rover, which has been named Rosalind in memory of British chemist Rosalind Franklin, will be launched with NASA's rover Mars 2020 in March. Pictured, an artist's impression of the ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter and its entry, landing and descent module
But the 'revolutionary' discovery will 'start a whole new line of thinking' and Dr Green says: 'I don't think we're prepared for the results.'
Questions about whether humans can move between planets and what other life is like will be sparked by the breakthrough.
When Europe's ExoMars rover lands on Mars the core samples it extracts will be broken up and examined for organic matter.
NASA's rover will drill in to rock formations on the surface of the planet before sending test tubes filled with these samples back to earth.
Signs of life could be found within months of their arrival on Mars in March 2021, Dr Jim Green, a scientist working with both missions told the Sunday Telegraph
It will be the first time Martian matter is brought onto this planet.
Scientists will be specifically looking for the 300 minerals that can only be created by life and will focus the search around the site of the ancient Martian ocean.
'When environments get extreme, life moves into the rocks,' Dr Green added.
Earlier this year scientists detected the first geological evidence of a system of water reservoirs deep beneath the surface of Mars.
The study on data from the Mars Express satellite revealed the extent of the former underground lakes based on features at the bottom of deep craters.
‘Early Mars was a watery world, but as the planet’s climate changed this water retreated below the surface to form pools and “groundwater,”’ said lead author Francesco Salese of Utrecht University, in the Netherlands.
‘We traced this water in our study, as its scale and role is a matter of debate, and we found the first geological evidence of a planet-wide groundwater system.’
In the study published to the Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets, researchers investigated 24 deep, enclosed craters in Mars’ northern hemisphere.
Each of these craters dip down to roughly 4,000 meters below Martian ‘sea level’ – which scientists have defined based on elevation and atmospheric pressure.
Numerous features seen on the crater floors at depths of 4,000-4,500 meters are suggestive of water, with evidence of pools and flows that changed over time.
This includes channels, valleys, curved deltas, ridged terraces, and fan-shaped deposits of sediments.
According to the researchers, the levels indicated by the crater features line up with predictions for the shorelines of a Martian ocean that’s thought to have existed three to four billion years ago.
The European Space Agency's ExoMars rover being prepared to leave Airbus in Stevenage. The ExoMars 2020 rover Rosalind Franklin is Europe's first planetary rover and will search for signs of past or present life on Mars
'The bottom line is where there is water there is life', says Dr Green. Scientists believe if there used to be water on Mars then there could also have been life.
It comes just a week after never-seen-before bursts of magnetic energy on Mars puzzled astronomers.
The magnetometer fixed to the cutting-edge NASA InSight spacecraft detected a bizarre jump in pulsations on the surface of the planet at nighttime.
Since November 2018, the InSight capsule has been harvesting information from the Red Planet - including recording the ferocity of so-called 'Marsquakes' and taking the temperature of its upper crust.
And scientists have not yet determined the causes behind the sudden magnetic pulses, which were 20 times stronger than previous observations, according to National Geographic.
A working prototype of the newly named Rosalind Franklin ExoMars rover at the Airbus Defence and Space facility in Stevenage, north of London
However the baffling aspect of these most recent findings was the clockwork-like frequency of the midnight pulses.
The InSight lander is currently placed on Mars's equator. On Earth's equator, no such pulses have ever been recorded.
A team from California University presented their paper at the European Planetary Science Congress annual meeting.
They wrote: 'The nighttime continuous pulsations found by InSight FluxGate are unexpected because they are distinct from what are typically observed on the Earth's surface at the same local time.'
The lander expedition also revealed there is a two-mile thick layer deep below Mars's surface capable of conducting electricity.
It is thought this could be a body of water, but that has not been confirmed.
Boeing's planned hypersonic airliner could fly from NYC to London in two hours
The ultra-fast plane would be capable of flying five times the speed of sound.
Boeing says the first passenger-carrying hypersonic plane could be ready to fly in 20 to 30 years.Boeing
By Denise Chow
Boeing has unveiled plans for what could be the world’s first hypersonic airliner, a sleek, futuristic-looking craft that the Seattle-based company said would be capable of flying five times the speed of sound, or about 3,800 miles per hour.
At that speed — Mach 5 in aviation parlance — it would be possible to travel from New York City to London in about two hours instead of the eight hours the trip takes on a conventional airliner.
That means someone could conceivably fly overseas for a meeting and return home in a single day.
“Humankind has always wanted to go faster — always wanted to do things faster,” said Kevin Bowcutt, chief scientist of hypersonics at Boeing. “People cannot make time, so there’s an inherent value in time.”
The as-yet-unnamed plane would be much faster not only than conventional airliners, which cruise at about 550 miles an hour, but also the supersonic Concorde aircraft that flew routes across the North Atlantic Ocean from 1976 to 2003. Concorde, produced by a British-French consortium, could reach Mach 2.04, meaning the New York City-London trip took just under four hours.
Boeing’s proposed plane, described in broad strokes at an industry conference in Atlanta this week, could be used for military applications as well as commercial aviation. But it might take 20 to 30 years to take to the skies, Bowcutt said.
Supersonic and hypersonic (meaning five times the speed of sound or faster) have been hyped as the next era of commercial aviation since at least the 1950s. But with the exception of the Concorde, which was permanently grounded three years after a deadly crash in France, building such airplanes has proven to be an elusive goal.
“It’s been a dream for a while now,” said Stuart Craig, an assistant professor of aerospace and mechanical engineering at the University of Arizona, who is not affiliated with Boeing. “We’ve been striving for this hypersonic technology for the better part of half a century, but in recent years, advances in computational technology and materials technology have made it much more in grasp.”
One key question for Boeing and other aircraft manufacturers will be whether airline passengers would be willing to pay the higher ticket prices that hypersonic air travel would command.
High prices, along with limited routes, played a role in the demise of the Concorde, said Mike Sinnett, Boeing’s vice president of future airplane development. “We can do all kinds of cool things, but those cool things have to lead to something that creates value, or at the end of the day it’s not going to be all that successful,” he said. “In general, people flew on [the Concorde] as a novelty — it didn’t change the world, and the economics weren’t right.”
But Craig said new technologies and designs for supersonic and hypersonic aircraft are making high-speed air travel more attractive to travelers.
The Concorde’s routes were limited in part because regulators barred supersonic travel over populated areas to protect people on the ground from hearing the loud sonic booms that the plane created. But in the years since the Concorde’s retirement, Craig said researchers at NASA and elsewhere have made significant strides in mitigating sonic booms caused by supersonic and hypersonic craft.
As for what it would be like to experience a hypersonic flight, Bowcutt said it would be a lot like flying in a conventional jet — but with a few key differences.
Rather than cruising at 30,000 to 40,000 feet, as is typical for conventional airliners, a hypersonic craft like the one proposed by Boeing would cruise at 90,000 to 95,000 feet.
“At that altitude, you’re going to see the curvature of the Earth below you,” Bowcutt said. “You won’t see the entire Earth, but you will see the curvature — and above you, you’ll have the blackness of space. It’s also a very smooth ride because there isn’t atmospheric turbulence at that altitude.”
But while there would be less turbulence, more time would be needed to accelerate to Mach 5. On a conventional airline flight, passengers feel the sensation of being pushed back in their seats for about a minute or so during and shortly after takeoff. On a hypersonic flight, Bowcutt said, that sensation would last for about 12 minutes.
NASA proof of aliens? Did NASA photograph a flying bird on Mars? UFO expert stunned
NASA’S Curiosity Mars Rover has photographed an unexpected anomaly amid the Red Planet’s rocky surface – an terrestrial bird seemingly in flight, which a UFO expert claims could be proof Curiosity is not on Mars at all.
US space agency NASA has been exploring the Gale Crater on Mars since 2012 via its car-sized Curiosity rover. The NASA rover’s comprehensive mission involves examining the apparently arid Martian climate and geology and even assessing whether microbial forms of alien life ever existed on the Red Planet. Now a prominent UFO conspiracy theorist believes the NASA Curiosity Rover has captured a flying bird in one of its Red Planet photos.
Well-known alien life hunter and UFO conspiracy theorist Scott C Waring took to his etdatabase.com blog to broadcast his outlandish claims.
He wrote: “This flying bird on Mars was found by Marcelo Irazusta who actually found a bird flying across the surface of Mars captured last week by the Curiosity Rover!
Either animals exist on Mars or ... the rover might not be on Mars at all, but on Devon Island
Scott Waring
“This is impossible, and yet, there it is … captured in a photo on a NASA website.
“The Curiosity Rover has a 13 minute delay from the time they push the keys on Earth to the time rover gets it.
“So if this is a large bird, then it was taken by accident and was probably not in that area for long.
NASA proof of aliens? A UFO hunter claims to have spotted a bird in flight on Mars
(Image: NASA/Getty)
NASA proof of aliens? The so-called sighting is little more than a black speck
(Image: NASA)
“Of course it could be a UFO – aliens like to use nature to inspire their structures and ships.’
The so-called sighting is little more than a black speck showing up against a great sky in the black and white photograph taken on Sol 2446.
Mr Waring speculated about the potential ramifications of such a dubious find.
He wrote: “It looks like a soaring eagle … which if this is true, it may mean one of two things.
“Either animals exist on Mars or – and I hate this idea, but it needs to be considered – the rover might not be on Mars at all, but on Devon island in Canada.
“Devon is a desolate island area with only a handful of people and NASA has gone there many times to test the rovers in a environment similar to Mars.”
Devon Island is the world's largest uninhabited island selected by NASA for testing its Mars exploration technology.
This is because Devon Island’s harsh climate mimics the environmental conditions on Mars and other planets.
Unexpected anomalies on photographs taken on Mars and the Moon and beamed back to Earth for further examination by NASA are nothing new.
NASA proof of aliens? Curiosity rover has roamed 13.38 miles (21.58km) on Mars
(Image: NASA)
NASA proof of aliens? Ironically, NASA is confident of discovering microbial forms of life on Marsl
(Image: Getty)
However, the reality of the anomaly is far more prosaic.
Camera lens flares, cosmic rays or just reflected sunlight are the most likely candidates for the Mars anomaly.
Cosmic rays are formed by highly charged atomic particles, often travelling from outside the solar system, which are capable of producing tricks of the light on impact.
Cosmic rays are more common on Mars than on Earth due to the Red Planet's thin atmosphere which offers little resistance to such cosmic radiation.
AFP‘The Starship’ moet mensen tot bij de maan, Mars en ook nog verder brengen.
WETENSCHAP & PLANEET Ruimtevaartpionier Elon Musk heeft op zijn lanceerbasis in Texas een SpaceX-prototype gepresenteerd van een ruimtetuig dat op termijn onder meer een bemande reis naar de maan of naar Mars moet kunnen maken. Volgens Musk kan de eerste proefvlucht van zijn ‘Starship’ al over één of twee maanden plaatsvinden.
Starship ziet eruit als een roestvrijstalen kogel met twee vinnen aan de onderkant en drie motoren. Het ruimteschip is bijna 50 meter hoog, 9 meter breed en zou voorlopig tot zo’n 20 kilometer hoogte kunnen vliegen. Binnen een half jaar moet een hoogte van 200 kilometer kunnen worden gehaald, waardoor officieel sprake is van een ruimtevlucht. En op termijn moet het tuig mensen en vracht naar pakweg overal in ons zonnestelsel kunnen brengen.
De bedoeling is dat Starship ook weer veilig terugkeert op aarde en hergebruikt wordt. Volgens Musk is dat de enige manier om ruimtevaart rendabel te krijgen.
APElon Musk presenteert zijn nieuwe ruimtevaartuig. De presentatie werd gehouden op de elfde verjaardag van de eerste lancering van de Falcon, de eerste commerciële ruimteraket van Musk.
Starship zal tot honderd - jawel, honderd - mensen naar de maan, Mars of andere bestemmingen kunnen brengen. En terugbrengen. Ook vrachtvervoer is mogelijk, wat de bouw van een basis op de natuurlijke satelliet van de aarde, of Mars, al wat dichterbij brengt.
Het ruimteschip kan niet zelf de ruimte in gaan. Het heeft daarvoor een enorme eerste trap nodig die de naam Super Heavy kreeg (eveneens herbruikbaar), en die uiteindelijk zelf ook de bekende commerciële ruimteraket Falcon naar de geschiedenisboeken kan verwijzen. Naargelang de aard van de missie is het aantal Raptor-motoren van het gevaarte aan te passen, tot 37 stuks als het nodig is, en minimaal wellicht 24. Met als nieuwigheid ook dat die op methaan draaien.
AFP
AFP
Vanaf 2025 al naar Mars?
SpaceX maakt zich sterk al vanaf 2025 mensen naar de rode planeet te kunnen brengen, terwijl het Amerikaanse ruimtevaartbureau NASA pas ten vroegste in de jaren dertig een bemande missie naar Mars voor mogelijk acht.
Nog veel dichterbij hoopt het bedrijf volgens de gezaghebbende website space.com al binnen een half jaar een prototype van Starship in een baan rondom onze planeet brengen. Indien het testprogramma naar wens verloopt, kunnen al volgend jaar of zo mensen ermee reizen.
SpaceX✔@SpaceX
11 years ago today, we launched our first successful mission. To date, we’ve completed 78 launches and have developed the world’s only operational reusable orbital class rockets and spacecraft—capable of launching to space, returning to Earth, and flying again
Starship at our launch facility in Cameron County, Texas. Watch as @elonmusk gives an update on the vehicle today at ~7:00 p.m. CDT → http://spacex.com/webcast
Why does Venus’ upper atmosphere circle the planet in just 4 Earth-days, while the planet itself takes 243 Earth-days to spin once? Japan’s Akatsuki spacecraft probed the mysterious “super-rotation” of Venus’ clouds.
Venus dayside in false color via PLANET-C Project Team/ EuroPlanet.
Japan’s Akatsuki spacecraft – aka the Venus Climate Orbiter – got off a rocky start but has been sending back useful data from Venus for several years now. Akatsuki launched in May, 2010, but failed to enter orbit around Venus in December of that year. Space engineers saved the day with a 20-minute firing of the craft’s attitude control thrusters, placing the craft into an alternative orbit around Venus – albeit a highly elliptical one – five years later, in 2015. This month, at the EPSC-DPS Joint Meeting 2019 in Geneva, Switzerland, Kiichi Fukuya of the University of Tokyo reported on new insights into the mysterious super-rotation of Venus’ atmosphere, made possible by Akatsuki’s data. That is, the upper atmosphere of Venus rotates around the planet much faster than the planet spins; the atmosphere rotates around the planet in just 4 Earth-days, while the planet itself takes 243 Earth-days to spin once.
Fukuuya said:
The most exciting discovery is the frequent occurrence of equator-ward motions [of the atmosphere] on the nightside. This is in contrast to the strong poleward circulation on the dayside we have observed previously at other wavelengths.
Overall, these scientists reported that data from Akatsuki show:
… striking variety in wind speeds year-on-year and between the planet’s northern and southern hemispheres.
Takeshi Horinouchi of Hokkaido University, Japan, and Yeon Joo Lee of JAXA/ISAS and TU Berlin also detected planetary-scale atmospheric waves at the cloud tops, which may interact with the super-rotation. For these studies they used:
… advanced cloud-tracking and quality control techniques to analyze with high accuracy the direction and speed of cloud top winds using data collected by [Akatsuki’s] Ultraviolet Imager instrument over three years.
And they said the difference they observed in Venus winds between the planet’s hemispheres might be linked to a second mystery at Venus: an as-yet unidentified chemical in the atmosphere that strongly absorbs ultraviolet radiation from the sun. You might know that Venus is considered Earth’s “twin” in size and desnity. It’s a world very similar to Earth in many ways, but its atmosphere sets it apart. The atmosphere of Venus – which is mostly carbon dioxide – is extremely dense and hot; atmospheric pressure on Venus’ surface is some 90 times that of Earth. This as-yet-unknown ultraviolet absorber in the atmosphere is interesting to these scientists because its variability in Venus’ atmosphere might cause the asymmetry in wind speeds between the planet’s northern and southern hemispheres. Thus the scientists commented:
Our results provide new questions about the atmosphere of Venus, as well as revealing the richness of variety of the Venus atmosphere over space and time.
Artist’s concept of Akatsuki in orbit around Venus.
New insights on Venus’ cloud-tops and super-rotation
Venus
The article here notes that: ‘The atmosphere of Venus – which is mostly carbon dioxide – is extremely dense and hot; atmospheric pressure on Venus’ surface is some 90 times that of Earth.’ An extremely dense atmosphere with enormous atmospheric pressure is always going to be hot, regardless of its composition. Just a thought, but maybe it needs a lot of convection (wind) to offset the heat.
Why does Venus’ upper atmosphere circle the planet in just 4 Earth-days, while the planet itself takes 243 Earth-days to spin once?
Japan’s Akatsuki spacecraft probed the mysterious “super-rotation” of Venus’ clouds, reports EarthSky.org.
The spacecraft – aka the Venus Climate Orbiter – got off a rocky start but has been sending back useful data from Venus for several years now.
Akatsuki launched in May, 2010, but failed to enter orbit around Venus in December of that year. Space engineers saved the day with a 20-minute firing of the craft’s attitude control thrusters, placing the craft into an alternative orbit around Venus – albeit a highly elliptical one – five years later, in 2015.
This month, at the EPSC-DPS Joint Meeting 2019 in Geneva, Switzerland, Kiichi Fukuya of the University of Tokyo reported on new insights into the mysterious super-rotation of Venus’ atmosphere, made possible by Akatsuki’s data.
That is, the upper atmosphere of Venus rotates around the planet much faster than the planet spins; the atmosphere rotates around the planet in just 4 Earth-days, while the planet itself takes 243 Earth-days to spin once. Fukuuya said:
The most exciting discovery is the frequent occurrence of equator-ward motions [of the atmosphere] on the nightside. This is in contrast to the strong poleward circulation on the dayside we have observed previously at other wavelengths.
Overall, these scientists reported that data from Akatsuki show:
… striking variety in wind speeds year-on-year and between the planet’s northern and southern hemispheres.
Takeshi Horinouchi of Hokkaido University, Japan, and Yeon Joo Lee of JAXA/ISAS and TU Berlin also detected planetary-scale atmospheric waves at the cloud tops, which may interact with the super-rotation. For these studies they used:
… advanced cloud-tracking and quality control techniques to analyze with high accuracy the direction and speed of cloud top winds using data collected by [Akatsuki’s] Ultraviolet Imager instrument over three years.
And they said the difference they observed in Venus winds between the planet’s hemispheres might be linked to a second mystery at Venus: an as-yet unidentified chemical in the atmosphere that strongly absorbs ultraviolet radiation from the sun.
You might know that Venus is considered Earth’s “twin” in size and density. It’s a world very similar to Earth in many ways, but its atmosphere sets it apart. The atmosphere of Venus – which is mostly carbon dioxide – is extremely dense and hot; atmospheric pressure on Venus’ surface is some 90 times that of Earth.
This as-yet-unknown ultraviolet absorber in the atmosphere is interesting to these scientists because its variability in Venus’ atmosphere might cause the asymmetry in wind speeds between the planet’s northern and southern hemispheres.
Weird blue UFO lights moving through the sky over Louveciennes, France
On September 25, 2019 a resident of Louveciennes in France noticed unidentified blue lights moving through the sky on which she started to film the weird phenomenon.
Like many other people who have been witnessed a similar phenomenon, also the resident of Louveciennes wonders what it might have been.
This sky phenomenon has been going on for a while and nobody knows where it comes from or what it could be.
Some of the weirdest and most controversial supposed ancient artifacts of the world are the numerous crystal skulls of Mexico and Central America, mysterious items that have spurred all kinds of debate amongst scientists, archeologists, and indeed those in the field of the paranormal. The skulls themselves are typically life-sized and fashioned in great detail out of clear or smoky colored quartz crystal, often with movable jaws and painstakingly carved and ground, and their origins are just about as mysterious as their appearance. One of these crystal skulls in particular has long been associated with magical powers, curses, and mysteries, and has remained debated and discussed to this day.
Typically, crystal skulls are said to have been made many thousands of years ago in pre-Columbian Mesoamerica, mostly said to come from the Aztec or Maya civilizations, and there is supposedly much legend and lore surrounding them to drive their mystique. One of the most popular legends regarding the crystal skulls is that they were forged not from human hands, but through thought alone, and that they contain vast stores of mystical knowledge, receptacles for the ancient wisdom of the gods. It was said that these skulls could speak, sing, and project telepathic thoughts, and that they also held great magical powers beyond comprehension. According to this legend, there are 13 original crystal skulls, each containing the souls of the ancients, and that if they are ever brought together they will teach us the answers to the great mysteries of the universe.
While this sounds like just a bunch of spooky legend and myth, there are indeed many crystal skulls in collections which are said to have paranormal powers orbiting them. By far the most well-known individual crystal skull was purportedly discovered in 1924 inside the ruins of a pyramid in the ancient Mayan city of Lubaantun, in what is now called Belize. The skull was allegedly found by Anna Mitchell-Hedges, the adopted daughter of famed British adventurer F.A. Mitchell-Hedges, as they were exploring an ancient Mayan pyramid in what was then called British Honduras. She would claim that she had snuck out to climb up the pyramid, and that as she had reached the top she had spied something glinting down in the darkness of a crack in the pyramid.
After telling her father of what she had seen she allegedly went with him the next morning to see what it was. Since the crack could not be accessed easily, they went about moving stones until there was enough of an opening to send young Anna to squeeze into a gloomy passageway leading into a collapsed temple, where she could see something glinting in the light of her lamp. When she examined it closer she could see that it was an exquisite skull made of scintillating pure crystal, almost completely transparent, which she described as unreal and “the most beautiful thing I had ever seen.” The skull itself, when examined, was found to be about the size of a small human skull, measuring 5 inches (13 cm) high, 7 inches (18 cm) long and 5 inches (13 cm) wide, and was thought to be extremely old. F.A. Mitchell Hedges would later write of what he called “The Skull of Doom” his 1954 memoir Danger My Ally:
It is at least 3,600 years old and according to legend it was used by the High Priest of the Maya when he was performing esoteric rites. It is said that when he willed death with the help of the skull, death invariably followed. It has been described as the embodiment of all evil. I do not wish to try and explain this phenomenon.
In the years after its discovery, the skull was said to have various supernatural powers, such as glowing in the dark or projecting images as if it were a film projector, or to even implant visions directly into the mind, and is was also said to have healing abilities and to be able to read the future or manipulate the emotions of those who gazed upon it. Anna would over the years make several bold and incredible claims, such as that the skull could be used to kill a person with a thought, that it could cure cancer, and even that she had predicted the assassination of John F. Kennedy. When her father died in 1959, Anna took the mysterious skull on tour, where its ethereal, unearthly quality mesmerized throngs of curiosity seekers, and it became a popular topic for TV programs, newspaper articles, and books. This new found popularity launched the crystal skull into the popular consciousness, and all manner of wild theories swirled, such as that it was an artifact from the lost continent of Atlantis or that it had been made by aliens. However, by this time there had never really been any scientific analysis of it done.
Anna’s crystal skull
Despite the years of mystery it was providing, it was not until the 1960s that any careful analysis would be done on what was by then called the Mitchell-Hedges skull, when it was examined by art restorer and expert in quartz crystals Frank Dorland. He carefully looked at the skull and determined that it had been crafted without the use of any noticeable metal tools, as it displayed no scratch or buff marks at all. He theorized that it had been first roughly shaped out of a lump of quartz and then painstakingly sanded away by hand over a period of 150 to 300 years, speculating that it could be over 12,000 years old.
This was curious enough, but an even more in-depth analysis would be carried out in 1970, when the skull was submitted for testing by Hewlett-Packard’s crystal laboratories in Santa Clara, California. They found that the skull was composed of a single large piece of quartz, and that it was devoid of markings from machine tools except for some grinding on the teeth. It was deemed to be a work of art that would be very difficult to recreate even with modern technology, which only further deepened the mystery. The skull was also found to have some other odd properties, such as that it had positive and negative polarity and could produce an electrical charge under mechanical stress, as well as that it harbored strange optical qualities that caused light shone under it to project from the eye sockets and for reflections of the surroundings to be contained within it. Indeed, these phenomena convinced Dorland that through its electrical and optic capabilities the skull “triggered certain reflexes in the brain,” which could explain some of its supposed supernatural powers.
Anna would go on to continue to stand by the skull’s authenticity and magical powers all of her life, and many New Agers also stood by her, believing the skull to have been fashioned by some ancient advanced technology or even aliens. Anna frequently gave interviews about the skull, and maintained that she received potent visions through it, that spirits used it to communicate to her, and that it had extended her life. Indeed, she would live to the ripe old age of 100, after which the skull would fall under the ownership of her younger husband, Bill Homann, who continued to keep the mystique and legend of the crystal skull alive.
Anna Mitchell-Hedges and her crystal skull
It is all a very strange odyssey for a very unique artifact, but in more recent years there has been quite a lot of skepticism aimed at the purported powers and origins of the Mitchell-Hedges skull, and indeed the phenomenon of crystal skulls in general. Pertaining to Anna’s skull, the story becomes immediately suspicious when one realizes that her father, F.A. Mitchell-Hedges, makes only one mention of the skull in all of his writings, that single passage in Danger My Ally, and there is no mention of where or by whom it was found or what had happened to it. Considering he wrote extensively and enthusiastically about his exploits at Lubaantun this seems like an odd omission. In fact, there is no actual mention of the skull by any of the others present at the dig, and there is doubt that Anna was even ever at the dig at all. Furthermore, in later years it would be found that the crystal skull had likely been purchased by her father from a Sotheby’s auction in London on October 15, 1943, after which his well-known penchant for telling tall tales of the mysterious had gotten the better of him.
This is all pretty damning evidence against Anna’s claims of having found it in a collapsed chamber of a mysterious ancient Mayan pyramid, and it is thought that she more or less made the whole thing up. Considering that the tales only really started to come out after F.A. Mitchell-Hedges’ death, it is very likely that she merely crafted this amazing tale around her father’s crystal skull, with further embellishments added over the years. Further unraveling the whole tale is the fact that it seems that the skull was almost definitely not a pre-Columbian artifact at all, but a modern fake.
Crystal skull at the British Museum
Although we have been mostly focused on the Mitchell-Hedges skull there are others in museums around the world as well, such as one at the Musée del’Homme’s in Paris and also at The British Museum, among others, and in more recent times these have been analyzed with more advanced techniques such as electron microscopes, X-ray crystallography, and CT scans. The results have shown that the skulls do indeed seem to have been worked with some sort of modern jeweler’s rotary tool, which would use an abrasive substance such as corundum or diamond spun at high speeds with a metal tool to polish and carve the object, and this analysis puts them at no older than the 19th century. It has therefore been supposed that the Mitchell-Hedges crystal skull is the same way, possibly even a direct copy of the skull at the British Museum, although widely regarded as of better craftsmanship. It is thought that these skulls were probably fashioned in Germany in the 19th century and then later found their way to Mexico, where they were sold as curios and the legends subsequently took off around their otherworldly weirdness. This fits in with the fact that none of the known skulls on display are from recognized excavation digs, and there is additionally no verified ancient legends associated with them, meaning that there is a very good possibility that every single one of them is not pre-Columbian at all, but rather faked using modern techniques.
This has not stopped some people from believing that these are in fact ancient artifacts crafted by advanced lost civilizations or aliens. The fact that crystal cannot be dated through usual means males it so that it is impossible to know the true age of these skulls, and the presence of machine working to the believers only means that someone had access to such technology long before modern times. Therefore, the modern analysis has done little to discourage those who really believe, and there is still much talk of the crystal skulls, their origins, and there powers to this day. Who made these artifacts? Is it, as mainstream science asserts, that they are clever medorrn fakes? Or is there something more mysterious going on here? The debate goes on.
FOSSILS of the earliest known life on Earth have been discovered, according to a new study.
The mind-blowing 3.5billion-year-old fossils were found in the Australian desert but experts have struggled to confirm their identity until now.
The ancient fossilised microbe formations are called stromatolites and have finally been shown to contain traces of organic matter.
Geologist Raphael Baumgartner from the University of New South Wales (UNSW) in Australia explained: "This is an exciting discovery - for the first time, we're able to show the world that these stromatolites are definitive evidence for the earliest life on Earth."
Searching for fossilised microbes is so difficult because it's hard to tell whether you're looking at fossilised microbe formations or just natural folds in the rock.
The fossils in question were discovered at the Dresser Formation fossil site of the Pilbara region in Australia back in the 1980s.
The rock formations contained organic matter, which indicates that small living microbes made themCredit: Baumgartner et al / Geology
However, without modern technologies it was hard to prove the fossils weren't just plain old rocks.
A recent study in Greenland wrongly claimed to have found 3.7billion-year-old fossils, which turned out to just be rock creases.
The Australian study is different because it has definite evidence of organic matter to back it up as something must have been living in the rocks to produce it.
Baumgartner said: "The organic matter that we found preserved within pyrite of the stromatolites is exciting - we're looking at exceptionally preserved coherent filaments and strands that are typically remains of microbial biofilms.
"I was pretty surprised - we never expected to find this level of evidence before I started this project."
Perhaps the most exciting thing about the ancient microbe fossils is that they could point us to evidence of life on Mars.
This is because the deposits in the region of Australian desert in question are the same age as the crust of Mars.
Nasa has been investigating the Pilbara region to try and learn more about the geological signatures that could pinpoint the presence of stromatolites on the red planet.
It is likely that the fossilised organisms found lived in hot springs when they were alive and Mars does show evidence of its own ancient hot springs.
Signs that the organisms once lived include air bubbles created by the gases that they produced.
It can be difficult to tell whether stromatolite rock structures like this one were made by organisms or just occurred naturallyCredit: Getty - Contributor
Baumgartner concluded: "Understanding where life could have emerged is really important in order to understand our ancestry.
"And from there, it could help us understand where else life could have occurred – for example, where it was kick-started on other planets."
This research has been published in the journal Geology.
A timeline of life on Earth
The history of the planet in years...
4.6billion years ago – the origin of Earth
3.8billion years ago – first life appears on Earth
2.1billion years ago – lifeforms made up of multiple cells evolve
1.5billion years ago – eukaryotes, which are cells that contain a nucleus inside of their membranes, emerge
550million years ago – first arthropods evolve
530million years ago – first fish appear
470million years ago – first land plants appear
380million years ago – forests emerge on Earth
370million years ago – first amphibians emerge from the water onto land
Earliest life on Earth from billions of years ago has been discovered in an ancient Australian desert. What’s even more incredible is that it could have also lived on Mars.
The rock formations contained organic matter, which indicates that small living microbes made them
Credit: BAUMGARTNER ET AL / GEOLOGY
It can be difficult to tell whether stromatolite rock structures like this one were made by organisms or just occurred naturally
Credit: GETTY - CONTRIBUTOR
The 3.5 billion-year-old fossils were discovered at the Dresser Formation fossil site of the Pilbara region in the 1980s but only recently did the experts finally confirm what they actually were. There were small traces of organic matter found in the stromatolites (which are ancient fossilized microbe formations).
“This is an exciting discovery – for the first time, we’re able to show the world that these stromatolites are definitive evidence for the earliest life on Earth,” stated geologist Raphael Baumgartner who is from the University of New South Wales.
Pilbara Region, Australia
One of the biggest challenges in looking for fossilized microbes is that they look very similar to natural folds that are often found in rocks. In fact, that’s exactly what happened in Greenland when researchers claimed to have found 3.7 billion-year-old fossils but were instead just creases in the rock.
The discovery in the Australian desert has been proven to contain organic matter which means that something would have been living inside of the rocks in order to create the matter. “The organic matter that we found preserved within pyrite of the stromatolites is exciting – we’re looking at exceptionally preserved coherent filaments and strands that are typically remains of microbial biofilms,” explained Baumgartner. Their researched was published in the journal Geology and can be read in full here.
He went on to say that he was quite surprised at the evidence they uncovered. Another surprising fact is that this evidence suggests that there could be life on Mars because the crust on the Red Planet is the same age as the deposits found in the Australian desert. In fact, NASA has even been studying the geological signatures in Australia’s Pilbara region in order to get a better understanding of stromatolites possibly being present on Mars. It is believed that the fossilized organisms found in Australia once lived in hot springs and there has been evidence found that strongly suggests that Mars once had hot springs.
The fossils discovered in Australia suggest that Mars could also have life.
Baumgartner finished off by saying, “Understanding where life could have emerged is really important in order to understand our ancestry,” adding, “And from there, it could help us understand where else life could have occurred – for example, where it was kick-started on other planets.”
Since Earth was formed 4.6 billion years ago and the earliest life form has been found in Australia from 3.5 billion years ago is quite an astonishing discovery.
A timeline of life on Earth
The history of the planet in years...
4.6billion years ago – the origin of Earth
3.8billion years ago – first life appears on Earth
2.1billion years ago – lifeforms made up of multiple cells evolve
1.5billion years ago – eukaryotes, which are cells that contain a nucleus inside of their membranes, emerge
550million years ago – first arthropods evolve
530million years ago – first fish appear
470million years ago – first land plants appear
380million years ago – forests emerge on Earth
370million years ago – first amphibians emerge from the water onto land
This newly discovered species of nematode is considered an extremophile--it thrives under high-salt, high-pH, arsenic-rich conditions that are otherwise hostile to life. But it is surprisingly versatile because it can also live in "normal" conditions in the laboratory.
Credit: Caltech
‘Alien’ Worm With Three Sexes Discovered in Hostile California Lake
Before you start screaming, “How do you known it’s an alien?”, tell me what other Earth species has three sexes? And can survive 500 times the lethal human does of arsenic? And can live in a lake with only two other species in water three times as salty as the ocean? And gives birth to its young like a kangaroo? Go ahead … google away. I’ll wait.
Finished? Find anything? Then it’s an alien, right? Or at least an “alien.”
“Arsenic resistance is something we can study in the lab, but maybe that’s not the most interesting part of the story. The most important thing is that there’s this diversity of life in extreme environments that we just haven’t appreciated before.”
Paul Sternberg, Bren Professor of Biology at CalTech, is so respected in the field of nemotodes that he has a lab named after him, and that’s where he led a team of researchers in a search for any type of weird tiny worms that could live in the harsh waters of California’s Mono Lake — a salty, alkaline, arsenic-rich body of water known to be home to just two species: brine shrimp and diving alkali flies.
Mono Lake
Mono Lake has the world’s highest concentration of alkali flies – another strange species that takes its head off to emerge from its pupal stage and then puts it back on to become a fly. This didn’t bother the native Kutzadika’a people whose name means “fly eater” and … you can figure the rest of it out.
Back to the aliens. Researchers at the Sternberg lab like to look for extremophiles — organisms that live and thrive in conditions unsuitable for most other life forms. Since nemotodes (roundworms) are the most abundant creatures on Earth, and since those are their specialty, that’s what Paul Sternberg and his lab assistants looked for in Mono Lake. While they expected they might find one, they were surprised to find eight different species of nemotodes. And they were shocked at the unique characteristics of one of them.
“One species, Auanema sp., is new, culturable, and survives 500 times the human lethal dose of arsenic.”
As the study, published in Current Biology and described in a CalTech press release, points out, Auanema sp. has three sexes – male, female and hermaphrodite – and gives birth to its young live instead of in eggs. It’s now the most dominant species in a lake so hostile, it only has two others.
So, is it an alien?
“Understanding biodiversity is important for so many reasons: many organisms can act like canaries in a coal mine, alerting us to danger. Others can teach us how to thrive under what seem to be harsh conditions: chemicals, temperature, acidity or alkalinity, salt, radiation, you name it. Also, there are so many mysteries about life: each species has an interesting story to tell us.”
Sternberg hints that we don’t yet know the whole story about Auanema sp. It sounds like the kind of tough survivor like tardigrades that can survive in outer space – making it a prime candidate for panspermia … traveling to Earth from another planet.
Tardigrade
Did they? Who knows? In the meantime, the researchers at Sternberg lab will certainly be watching them to see how the three sexes have sex, not to mention trying to figure out how they survive. And we should be watching them too because … if something starts killing off the toughest creatures on Earth who can have sex three ways, what does the future hold for us?
One of the largest craters in our Solar System is found on the far side of the Moon’s south pole and it’s called Aitken basin. While it was previously thought that a large impact billions of years ago caused the crater, scientists now say that it couldn’t have been created by a meteor.
The gigantic oval-shaped crater that’s nearly the size of the United States is leaving scientists completely baffled as to how it got there. The crater has a depth of 8.1 miles, making it approximately six times deeper than it is wide.
The original theory was that a huge, fast meteor slammed into the Moon billions of years ago which caused huge chunks of the lunar’s mantle to be thrown across its surface. However, a new study conducted by the Chinese seemingly disproves that theory.
Aitken basin
When China’s Yutu-2 Moon rover landed in the Aitken basin in January, it collected six soil samples from the bottom of the crater. After analyzing them, the researchers believe that the soil samples were made up of crust and not from the Moon’s mantle. If their theory is correct, it would mean that the meteor that created Aitken basin did not hit hard enough to cause parts of the mantle to be scattered across the lunar surface.
“We are not seeing the mantle materials at the landing site as expected,” stated Dr. Hao Zhang, who is a planetary scientist at the China University of Geosciences. Their research has been published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters which can be read in full here.
Had the Moon been hit by a large, fast meteor, chunks of the mantle would still be scattered across the lunar surface even to this day. But since scientists are arguing that theory, what do they think caused Aitken basin?
Scientists now claim that a meteor couldn’t have caused the Moon’s Aitken basin.
Researchers have not given an alternate explanation as to what caused the gigantic crater, but the idea of a meteorite colliding with the Moon is the most likely reason. Instead of a full on impact to the Moon, the meteorite could have grazed the lunar surface hard enough to cause a crater but not so hard as to cause chunks of the mantle to be thrown across the surface.
This isn’t the only question surrounding Aitken basin, as just a few months ago, it was announced that a large chunk of metal five times bigger than Hawaii’s Big Island had been discovered embedded in the crater.
What's the difference between an asteroid, meteor and comet?
Here's what you need to know, according to Nasa...
Asteroid: An asteroid is a small rocky body that orbits the Sun. Most are found in the asteroid belt (between Mars and Jupiter) but they can be found anywhere (including in a path that can impact Earth)
Meteoroid: When two asteroids hit each other, the small chunks that break off are called meteoroids
Meteor: If a meteoroid enters the Earth's atmosphere, it begins to vapourise and then becomes a meteor. On Earth, it'll look like a streak of light in the sky, because the rock is burning up
Meteorite: If a meteoroid doesn't vapourise completely and survives the trip through Earth's atmosphere, it can land on the Earth. At that point, it becomes a meteorite
Comet: Like asteroids, a comet orbits the Sun. However rather than being made mostly of rock, a comet contains lots of ice and gas, which can result in amazing tails forming behind them (thanks to the ice and dust vapourising)
I was using the World Wide Telescope and discovered this strange object near Canis Major constellation. The object seems to be a fake sun with huge structures built at its center long cable like structures entering and exiting the glowing sphere. What I found here is a Dyson Sphere, a once hypothetical megastructure that completely encompasses a star and captures a large percentage of its power output.
A civilization might create such a sphere starting with one or two rings around the star. As time passed, a civilization might continue to add Dyson rings to the space around its star, creating a relatively simple, but incredibly powerful, Dyson sphere. Scott C. Waring
NASA Fails To Report Giant Donut UFO Fleet Near Sun, UFO Sighting News.
Date of sighting:2006, but reported today Location of sighting: Earths sun Source:Helioviewer A youtube user going by the name of Terrys Theories found some interesting donut UFOs near our sun. It looks like a fleet of three UFOs and they are huge. You can clearly make out the donut shape with the whole in the middle. This is a common UFO seen near our sun and still has never received an explanation from NASA. The fact that he found this going through the archives and its dated 2006 is evidence that giant UFOs have been recorded by NASA and have gone unreported for a long time. Scott C. Waring
Nasa’s Chief Scientist Dr Jim Green warns “It will be revolutionary,” he said. “It’s like when Copernicus stated ‘no we go around the Sun’. Completely revolutionary. It will start a whole new line of thinking. I don’t think we’re prepared for the results. We’re not. I’ve been worried about that because I think we’re close to finding it, and making some announcements."
Ok, sure a NASA scientist says this...but if he is replaced in a few years, the announcement may never be made. NASA was not created to find alien life and tell the public...it was created to pretend to explore the universe while gathering a lot of top secret intel about alien life...all while drop feeding the public boring scientific facts in order to get continued public support and funding by the government. NASA has a 100 years mission for this...and for the scientist to say this now...when NASA is only 61 years old...make me suspicious that they have something else up their sleeve for the public.
Two years ago Russian astronauts were cleaning the solar panels on the space station, and were first to discover alien life on the space stations outer hull on the solar panels. They found giant plankton growing using the suns energy to grow...plankton that were living in space! Which came from space and landed on the panels! That is the historic first encounter of alien life. But Americans don't want to give Russia credit for this...but doesn't change the fact that its true.
The NASA scientist Dr Green didn't say they would announce intelligent alien life, only life, which means a fungus, moss, grass blades or a bacteria. They have no intention to announce intelligent alien life. It basically fake news...NASA is learning from Trump. Scott C. Waring
Astronomers have found evidence for a possible exomoon orbiting a gas giant planet 550 light-years away. If they’re interpreting the evidence correctly, this moon would be a place of destruction, even more volcanically active than Jupiter’s famous volcanic moon, Io.
Artist’s concept of the moon orbiting WASP-49. The observations are similar to what’s seen with Jupiter and its moon Io in our own solar system. Researchers found sodium gas near WASP-49b, but far enough away that the gas is unlikely to be due to winds on the planet. Is this moon like Io on steroids?
Astronomers may have discovered a “hyper-volcanic” exomoon – an extreme version of Jupiter’s moonIo– orbiting a distant planet. A new study suggests that this possible moon, 550 light-years away, is even more volcanically active thanIo, the most volcanically active body in our own solar system. An amazing discovery, if true.
The new peer-reviewed findings were published by researchers from the University of Bern in Switzerland, and a draft version of the new paper was posted on arXiv on August 29, 2019.
Apurva Oza led the new study, and described what this Io-on-steroids world might be like:
It would be a dangerous volcanic world with a molten surface of lava, a lunar version of close-in super-Earths like 55 Cancri e, a place where Jedis go to die, perilously familiar to Anakin Skywalker.
The possible exomoon would orbit a hot Jupiter gas giant planet – WASP-49b – that orbits its sun-like star, WASP-49 in the constellation Lepus. WASP-49b orbits its star in less than three days.
The exomoon hasn’t been confirmed yet, but there is good circumstantial evidence for its existence. The researchers found sodium gas near WASP-49b, but far enough away that it is unlikely to be due to winds on the planet. The observations are similar to what is seen with Jupiter and Io in our own solar system. According to Oza:
The neutral sodium gas is so far away from the planet that it is unlikely to be emitted solely by a planetary wind. The sodium is right where it should be.
Artist’s concept of WASP-49b, a hot Jupiter exoplanet 550 light-years from Earth.
If confirmed, this would be an interesting analog to the Jupiter-Io system, but a more extreme version.
An earlier study in 2006 had also shown that large amounts of sodium near an exoplanet could be evidence for a moon, and that compact systems of a star, planet and moon – like with WASP-49 – could be stable for billions of years. According to Oza:
The enormous tidal forces in such a system are the key to everything. Sodium and potassium lines are quantum treasures to us astronomers because they are extremely bright. The vintage street lamps that light up our streets with yellow haze, are akin to the gas we are now detecting in the spectra of a dozen exoplanets.
While the researchers think that an exomoon is the most likely explanation, there are still other possibilities such as a ring of ionized gas around the planet. More data is needed, Oza said:
We need to find more clues. While the current wave of research is going towards habitability and biosignatures, our signature is a signature of destruction.
WASP-49b is located in the constellation Lepus, just below the larger constellation Orion.
Image via IAU/Sky & Telescope/Roger Sinnott/Rick Fienberg/Wikipedia.
Exomoons by nature are extremely difficult to detect, and there has been only one other good candidate so far, a possible Neptune-sized moon orbiting the giant planet Kepler-1625b, 8,000 light-years away in the constellation Cygnus. Confirmation of the moon of WASP-49b would be exciting, not only because of it being a moon orbiting a distant planet in another solar system, but also because it would be a discovery of “destruction” in a planetary system. As Oza explained:
The exciting part is that we can monitor these destructive processes in real time, like fireworks.
The possible moon orbiting WASP-49b would be similar to Jupiter’s moon Io, but a more extreme version. That’s a remarkable finding, since Io is the most volcanically active body in our solar system, even more than Earth. Io has hundreds of sulfur volcanoes, many of which are erupting at any given time. The moon’s multi-colored surface is covered in new and old lava flows, including lakes of molten silicate lava, and its appearance is often compared to a pizza. The volcanic activity is so intense and persistent, the moon is essentially always “turning itself inside out.” It also has a very thin atmosphere of sulfur dioxide.
Volcanic plume from Pillan Patera on Io, the most volcanically active body in the solar system.
Io’s volcanism is the result of its being continuously tugged at by Jupiter’s immense gravity, which keeps its insides molten. The process would probably be similar for the moon orbiting WASP-49b, which is also a gas giant planet. Io has been visited and observed by the Voyager, Cassini, Galileo and New Horizons spacecraft, but its volcanic eruptions are big enough to be seen by large telescopes on Earth.
If the moon is confirmed, it will be an incredible discovery: a tiny, distant world whose presence was given away by volcanic eruptions more powerful than any seen in our own solar system.
Bottom line: Astronomers have found evidence for a possible exomoon orbiting the gas giant exoplanet WASP-49b. If it’s real, this moon is an incredibly destructive place, even more volcanically active than Jupiter’s moon Io.
NASA Detects Mysterious Green Light that Disappeared Days Later
As if the universe did not tire of surprising the specialists, now NASA detected a mysterious green light in the Fireworks galaxy that disappeared days later .
The experts of the space agency were surprised that the phenomenon appreciated suddenly disappeared, as Hannah Earnshaw, lead author of the investigation, revealed that this huge green light spot took her team’s dream away:
“Ten days is a really short time for such a bright object to appear. It was an exciting experience.”
As the Actualidad RT portal reported, NASA’s NuSTAR space observatory caught a burst of blue and green X-ray light that illuminated a part of the Fireworks galaxy.
The light spots, which disappeared within a few days of being detected, found an explanation this week in a statement from the agency based on a recent study.
At first the researchers did not know what the phenomenon was and rejected the theory that it was a supernova. In addition, the flashes suddenly disappeared ten days after the first observation.
The team of specialists named this phenomenon ULX-4, as they concluded that it was a source of ultra-bright X-rays (ULX). This space event is the fourth that is identified in this galaxy, but what intrigued the experts was the brevity of its appearance.
Around this mysterious green light a theory was created that indicated that the illumination could come from a black hole that consumed a star, since it is known that the gravity of this star separates any object that gets too close.
However, the time when black holes ‘eat’ dense space objects like stars usually has a long duration, so this brief appearance could be something else. The specialists suggested that the hole probably destroyed the star.
Other theories indicate that the ULX-4 was generated by a neutron star that acts just like black holes, feeding on cosmic material and ‘forming a disk of debris around it that moves quickly.’
Many conspiracy users claim that these lights are proof that aliens are manifesting now because they know the next prophecy of the End of the World, which will take place on September 23, 2019, would you like to know more about this theory?
NASA JPL✔@NASAJPL
Smile for the flash
An abrupt and rare energetic event from the aptly named Fireworks Galaxy (NGC 6946) was captured by NuSTAR: https://go.nasa.gov/2NPmZhH
Mysterious Black Object Recorded over Detroit Lakes, Minnesota, 'Can't be a Bug,' Says Newscaster
The mysterious object seemingly moving behind the clouds.
(Todd Mitchell / WDAY)
A mysterious black object captured on camera by a Detroit Lakes man in Minnesota “can’t be a bug,” according to WDAY newscaster Tyler Ziegler.
“Now, originally I thought this was just a bug, but the figure comes back, and this time it flies through a cloud, guys,” Ziegler said. “It’s flying through the clouds, it can’t be a bug.”
The video was sent to WDAY News by Todd Mitchell, who, along with his wife, owns and operates the Country Campground just south of Detroit Lakes.
Mitchell said that he was trying to record the lightning from thunderstorms moving through the area on September 20th.
But, when he later watched the video, he had captured a mysterious black object flying around in-frame.
The object seems to appear from behind the treeline before zipping around in the sky, even appearing to move behind some clouds before disappearing.
The Singular Fortean Society’s photograph and video analyst Emily Wayland said she is unable to satisfactorily explain the phenomenon.
“What gets me is that it appears to come from behind the treeline,” she said. “If it was an insect close to the screen, you’d expect to see it flying in front of the landscape in the foreground, but you don’t. I’m not certain it’s really disappearing behind the clouds, though; it looks like that could actually be a trick of the eye caused by the object and the cloud’s similarity in transparency and blur. A trail behind an object is often seen in videos with a slow frame rate, much like a long exposure photograph, but the lightning in the video looks to be at a normal speed—so I don’t know that this could be a large object seen from far away and shot with a slow frame rate.”
“I have to consider that it could be a deliberate hoax, although it would take a certain amount of technical skill to create,” Emily continued. “If it was an overlay of an animation or something else inserted in Photoshop, the creator would have had to line that up pretty carefully to have it appear from behind the trees.”
Adam Benedict of the Pine Barrens Institute told the Singular Fortean Society that it reminded him of the engine to a model rocket.
"Right away to me, it looked like the engine to a model rocket. Without the actual rocket body, they zip all around in the sky with no clear path until running out of powder. You can get them with different colors of smoke as well," he said. "We used to light the just engines all the time as kids because we thought it was hilarious how they flew around like that."
Anyone in the area experimenting with model rocket engines on September 20th is encouraged to contact the Singular Fortean Society to help solve the mystery.
To report your own encounter with the impossible, reach out to us directly at the Singular Fortean Society through our contact page.
If you enjoyed this article and would like to support the Singular Fortean Society, please consider becoming an official member by signing up through our Patreon page—membership includes a ton of extra content and behind-the-scenes access to the Society’s inner workings.
UFO RESEARCH GROUP IMPLIES IT HAS OBTAINED ALIEN ARTIFACTS
STEVE JURVETSON/VICTOR TANGERMANN
VICTOR TANGERMANN
Exotic Materials
Former Blink-182 singer Tom DeLonge has pulled off an astonishing career change. In 2017, after quitting the band, he co-founded a group called To the Stars Academy of Arts & Sciences, an organization committed to researching aliens.
And he may now have something extraordinary to show for it. In a recent Q&A with TheNew York Times, a reporter asked whether the group had obtained “exotic material samples from UFOs.” The spokesperson’s response: “certainly.”
Aliens Exist?
It’s still unclear what precise materials the Academy has gotten its hands on, and whether they relate in any way to the three videos it obtained of “unidentified aerial phenomena” that a spokesperson for the Navy recently revealed to be legitimate.
“What we have been doing is trying to find the most qualified individuals at the most respectable institutions to conduct scientific analysis,” Luis Elizondo, the director of global security and special programs for DeLonge’s group, told the Times. “That scientific analysis includes physical analysis, it includes molecular and chemical analysis and ultimately it includes nuclear analysis.”
Dammit
And it might be a while until we learn more about the group’s activities.
As Elizondo puts it, “the last thing we want to do is jump to any conclusions, prematurely. Ultimately, the data is going to decide what something is or what something isn’t.”
Black hole breakthrough: NASA captures its first-ever black hole tearing a star to shreds
The violent black hole was spotted by NASA’s planet-hunting TESS space probe and confirmed by ground-based observatories. Astronomers were alerted to the event when a star monitored by TESS unexpectedly grew brighter. The event, known as a tidal disruption, causes black holes to consume entire stars or stretch them out like spaghetti dough. Stars fall prey to these destructive tidal disruptions when they venture too close to a black hole.
In this particular case, the event was dubbed ASASSN-19bt after the All-Sky Automated Survey for Supernovae.
ASAS-SN is a global network of 20 robotic telescope observatories with headquarters at the Ohio State University in Columbus, Ohio.
The telescope network, together with NASA, the European Space Agency (ESA) and observatories in Chile validated TESS’ discovery.
Dr Thomas Holoien, from the Carnegie Observatories in Pasadena, said: “TESS data let us see exactly when this destructive event, named ASASSN-19bt, started to get brighter, which we’ve never been able to do before.
“Because we identified the tidal disruption quickly with the ground-based All-Sky Automated Survey for Supernovae (ASAS-SN), we were able to trigger multiwavelength follow-up observations in the first few days.
“The early data will be incredibly helpful for modelling the physics of these outbursts.”
Dr Holoien and his team found the tidal disruption caused the star’s temperatures to drop from 71,500F to just 35,500F degrees (40,000 to 20,000 degrees Celsius).
Events like this are incredibly rare and only occur once every 10,000 to 100,000 years in a galaxy like the Milky Way.
Supernova eruptions, by comparison, are much more frequent at one every 100 years or so.
To date, astronomers have only observed about 40 tidal disruptions.
NASA’s TESS or Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) watches swathes of the night sky to detect stars briefly dipping in brightness.
The dips are caused by planets passing in front of stars and is NASA’s main way of discovering exoplanets in distant solar systems.
But for the first time in TESS’ mission, the space telescope observed the opposite of that.
The discovery was published on September 27 in The Astrophysical Journal.
Patrick Vallely, the study’s co-author from Ohio State University, said: “The early TESS data allow us to see light very close to the black hole, much closer than we’ve been able to see before.
“They also show us that ASSASN-19bt’s rise in brightness was very smooth, which helps us tell that the event was a tidal disruption and not another type of outburst, like from the centre of a galaxy of a supernova.”
Mayan DISCOVERY: How find in 2,000-year-old city ‘reveals story of creation’
MAYAN archaeologists think they have uncovered the story of how human beings were created, according to the ancient civilisation, a documentary claimed.
The Mayans were a civilisation known for their architecture, mathematics and astronomical beliefs, who date back as far as 2000BC. However, thanks to a discovery made at the El Mirador site in northern Guatemala, historians are able to know more about their theories over how human beings ended up on Earth. Archaeologist Richard Hansen took Morgan Freeman to see a spectacular discovery deep in the jungles during the filming of “The Story of God”.
He told Mr Freeman in 2017: “We like to think of Los Angeles and New York as being modern cities, but these guys had the same perspective of their own city.
“They had water delivery systems. they had freeways – the very first in the world.
This is one of the most interesting excavations we have ever had.
“This is art that was carved in stucco hundreds of years before Christ and it has an incredible scene showing the entire pantheon of the Mayan religion.
Richard Hansen pointed out the strane artwork
(Image: NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC)
The team travelled deep into the jungles
(Image: NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC)
“This is the Mayan Bible, the Mayan Genesis story with all the deities that are needed to tell the story."
This is one of the most interesting excavations we have ever had
Richard Hansen
Mr Hansen went on to reveal what he believed the stonework represented.
He added: “This is the oldest version of the Mayan’s sacred story of creation that has ever been found.
“The focus is on two swimmers carrying a severed head.
“It’s this head right here that gave us the clue who this might be a the first place.
The site is home to ancient Mayan structures
(Image: NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC)
“We think this is Hunahpu – one of the hero twins that serves the whole process of creation.”
The Mayan Hero Twins are the central figures of the oldest Mayan myth to have been preserved in its entirety.
Hunahpu and Xbalanque are portrayed as complementary forces – life and death, sky and Earth or day and night.
The pair need each other to balance out the other and balance out the two sides of a single entity.
In 2012, there was a brief frenzy after it was claimed that December 21 would mark the end of the world because it was the end-date of a 5,126-year cycle on the Mayan calendar.
However, thanks to the discovery on a stone slate in Tikal, Guatemala, archaeologists are able to understand more about this key date.
Stanley Guenter, a world-leading decoder of Mayan inscriptions, revealed during the same series: “This is stela 10, you can see we’ve got a king – there is his head and big headdress full of feathers, [his] shoulders, all of his jewellery and down to his feet.
“If you look down below, we can actually see we have a captive and we can see his hands and even legs – all tied up for sacrifice.
“[On the back] we have a date that gives us a specific point in time – 11 years and 360 days, then we have three katuns – which are 20 years each.
“So that is another 60, and then we have nine b’ak’tuns, because this is a date of about 525AD.
“So if you remember we had 13 b’ak’tuns ended in 2012, but the really interesting thing is the monument does not stop there.”
Mr Guenter then went on to reveal how the entirety of the discovery reveals the 2012 prediction was just a single cycle inside a number of bigger cycles.
Archaeologists believe it is one of the Mayan Hero Twins
(Image: NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC)
He continued: “It tells us there were 19 of the higher unit – the pictun – and even higher, 11 at the next unit.
“Each one of those units is 20 times larger than the previous, so what we see on this monument is that 13 b’ak’tuns was not the end of any calendar – just one cycle.
“It was just the start of a new cycle, a new beginning, that would go on for almost eternity.
A GROUP of explorers set on solving the mystery of a long lost pyramid hidden deep in the Guatemala jungle, rumoured to be larger than the Great Pyramid of Giza, received the treat of their lives.
Mayan discovery: 2,000-year-old carving uncovered
El Mirador is a pre-Columbian Mayan settlement, located to the north of El Peten in Guatemala, first photographed from the air in 1930, but its remote location meant further exploration was limited. In 2003, Richard D. Hansen, an archaeologist from Idaho State University, initiated a major investigation and, although his team discovered that the area contained striking examples of the Preclassic Maya civilisation, its location prevented extensive documentation. However, 16 years on, digital media company Yes Theory have changed that, uncovering two large pyramids in the complex.
Thomas Brag, Ammar Kandil and Matt Dajer trekked for four days on foot through the Guatemala jungle, alongside seven other creators to fulfil Mr Kandil’s dream to climb a pyramid.
Documenting every step of their experience, they released “Finding the Lost Largest Pyramid in the World” on their website and later on YouTube on September 15, 2019.
First uncovering the colossal structure, Mr Dajer exclaimed: “We’ve just arrived at the very, very bottom base of a pyramid.
“You would never guess just walking through here, but this entire thing is limestone underneath and this is part of the pyramid.
The pyramid was hiding in the Guatemala jungle
(Image: GETTY/YES THEORY)
The Yes Theory crew
(Image: YES THEORY)
Mayan discovery ‘reveals story of creation’
The Mayans were a civilisation known for their architecture, mathematics and astronomical beliefs, who date back as far as 2000BC. However, thanks to a discovery made at the El Mirador site in northern Guatemala, historians are able to know more about their theories over how human beings ended up on Earth.
Archaeologist Richard Hansen said: “We like to think of Los Angeles and New York as being modern cities, but these guys had the same perspective of their own city.
“They had water delivery systems. they had freeways – the very first in the world.
“This is one of the most interesting excavations we have ever had.” CONTINUE READING
“You can’t even grasp fully in your mind how huge this must have looked when it was for real.”
The group then begun making the monumental 50-minute-long journey up thousands of steps.
Mr Brag told the camera: “So these are the steps to the second platform and this entire thing that we are on is man built.
“So once they started digging up the soil from what’s been layered up on top of this over thousands of years, they’re actually discovering the giant construction and the insane labour that it was to build this.
“This is just the steps up, I can’t even see the top from here.
“This is way bigger than I expected, it is insane.”
Eventually they made it to the top, and the whole crew were left taken back.
The pyramid can be seen pocking out the jungle
(Image: GETTY)
You can’t even grasp fully in your mind how huge this must have looked when it was for real
Matt Dajer
Drone footage shows the pyramid like never seen before.
An emotional Mr Kandil reflected during the film: “This is all to do with a dream I had.
“Everything about Yes Theory is saying ‘yes’ to those dreams that you think are so far-fetched.
The team trekked for four days
(Image: YES THEORY)
It was Ammar’s dream to climb a pyramid
(Image: YES THEORY)
“It’s being constantly in the pursuit to go after those dreams, to go after the things that matter the most to you in life.
“As you’re in the pursuit to do something you love and to do something that you dream of, you never who that inspires or what that ends up contributing to your life.
“Sometimes we end up achieving the dreams we never even knew we had.”
There are roughly 35 “triadic” structures in El Mirador, consisting of large artificial platforms topped with a set of three summit pyramids.
The most notable of such structures are the two huge complexes explored in the documentary, one is nicknamed “El Tigre”, with height 55 metres, while the other is called “La Danta”.
The group climbed the pyramid for 50 minutes
(Image: YES THEORY)
The team were cut-off from the rest of the world
(Image: YES THEORY)
The La Danta temple measures approximately 72 metres (236 ft) tall from the forest floor, and considering its total volume (2,800,000 cubic meters) is considered the largest in the world by many archaeologists.
For comparison the Great Pyramid of Giza is 139 metres tall, but 2,583,283 cubic metres in volume.
That has not stopped one of the Seven Wonder of the Ancient World from making headlines too, though.
Recently, archaeologists opened a mystery box from Tutankhamen’s tomb on camera for the first time during Bethany Hughes’ Channel 5 show “Egypt’s Greatest Treasures”.
However, the pair did not quite get the find they were hoping for inside.
Mayan mystery: Archaeologists piece together cave remains
Dr Hughes added: “Sadly, the box is empty.
“But, you can smell it though, can’t you?
“You can smell the wood and the resin, it’s empty, but you can smell the history coming out of it.
“It still is the most remarkable thing and it’s tantalising us with its secrets.
“It is not letting us know why it was put in the tomb, but I like that.”
In the 1930s, a Swiss astronomer named Fritz Zwicky noticed that galaxies in a distant cluster were orbiting one another much faster than they should have been given the amount of visible mass they had. He proposed than an unseen substance, which he called dark matter, might be tugging gravitationally on these galaxies.
Since then, researchers have confirmed that this mysterious material can be found throughout the cosmos, and that it is six times more abundant than the normal matter that makes up ordinary things like stars and people. Yet despite seeing dark matter throughout the universe, scientists are mostly still scratching their heads over it. Here are the 11 biggest unanswered questions about dark matter.
2. What is dark matter?
Image credit: Shutterstock)
First and perhaps most perplexingly, researchers remain unsure about what exactly dark matter is. Originally, some scientists conjectured that the missing mass in the universe was made up of small faint stars and black holes, though detailed observations have not turned up nearly enough such objects to account for dark matter's influence, as physicist Don Lincoln of the U.S. Department of Energy's Fermilab previously wrote for Live Science. The current leading contender for dark matter's mantle is a hypothetical particle called a Weakly Interacting Massive Particle, or WIMP, which would behave sort of like a neutron except would be between 10 and 100 times heavier than a proton, as Lincoln wrote. Yet, this conjecture has only led to more questions — for instance…
3. Can we detect dark matter?
(Image credit: Xinhua/Getty)
If dark matter is made from WIMPs, they should be all around us, invisible and barely detectable. So why haven't we found any yet? While they wouldn't interact with ordinary matter very much, there is always some slight chance that a dark-matter particle could hit a normal particle like a proton or electron as it travels through space. So, researchers have built experiment after experiment to study huge numbers of ordinary particles deep underground, where they are shielded from interfering radiation that could mimic a dark-matter-particle collision. The problem? After decades of searching, not one of these detectors has made a credible discovery. Earlier this year, the Chinese PandaX experiment reported the latest WIMP nondetection. It seems likely that dark-matter particles are much smaller than WIMPs, or lack the properties that would make them easy to study, physicist Hai-Bo Yu of the University of California, Riverside, told Live Science at the time.
4. Does dark matter consist of more than one particle?
(Image credit: Maria Starovoytova/Shutterstock)
Ordinary matter is made up of everyday particles like protons and electrons, as well as a whole zoo of more exotic particles like neutrinos, muons and pions. So, some researchers have wondered if dark matter, which makes up 85 percent of the matter in the universe, might also be just as complicated. "There is no good reason to assume that all the dark matter in the universe is built out of one type of particle," physicist Andrey Katz of Harvard University said to Space.com, Live Science's sister site. Dark protons could combine with dark electrons to form dark atoms, producing configurations as diverse and interesting as those found in the visible world, Katz said. While such proposals have increasingly been imagined in physics labs, figuring out a way to confirm or deny them has so far eluded scientists. [Strange Quarks and Muons, Oh My! Nature's Tiniest Particles Dissected]
5. Do dark forces exist?
(Image credit: Shutterstock)
Along with additional particles of dark matter, there is the possibility that dark matter experiences forces analogous to those felt by regular matter. Some researchers have searched for "dark photons," which would be like the photons exchanged between normal particles that give rise to the electromagnetic force, except they would be felt only by dark matter particles. Physicists in Italy are gearing up to smash a beam of electrons and their antiparticles, known as positrons, into a diamond, as Live Science previously reported. If dark photons do exist, the electron-positron pairs could annihilate and produce one of the strange force-carrying particles, potentially opening a brand-new sector of the universe.
6. Could dark matter be made of axions?
(Image credit: Marcel Clemens/Shutterstock)
As physicists increasingly fall out of love with WIMPs, other dark-matter particles are starting to gain favor. One of the leading replacements is a hypothetical particle known as an axion, which would be extremely light, perhaps as little as 10 raised to the 31st power less massive than a proton. Axions are now being searched for in a few experiments. Recent computer simulations have raised the possibility that these axions could form star-like objects, which might produce detectable radiation that would be quite similar to mysterious phenomena known as fast-radio bursts, as Live Science previously reported.
7. What are the properties of dark matter?
(Image credit: NASA)
Astronomers discovered dark matter through its gravitational interactions with ordinary matter, suggesting that this is its main way of making its presence known in the universe. But when trying to understand the true nature of dark matter, researchers have remarkably little to go on. According to some theories, dark-matter particles should be their own antiparticles, meaning that two dark-matter particles would annihilate with one another when they meet. The Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS) experiment on the International Space Station has been searching for the telltale signs of this annihilation since 2011and has already detected hundreds of thousands of events. Scientists still aren't sure if these are coming from dark matter, and the signal has yet to help them pin down exactly what dark matter is.
8. Does dark matter exist in every galaxy?
(Image credit: Shutterstock)
Because it so massively outweighs ordinary matter, dark matter is often said to be the controlling force that organizes large structures such as galaxies and galactic clusters. So, it was strange when, earlier this year, astronomers announced that they had found a galaxy named NGC 1052-DF2 that seemed to contain hardly any dark matter at all. "Dark matter is apparently not a requirement for forming a galaxy," Pieter van Dokkum of Yale University told Space.com at the time. However, over the summer, a separate team posted an analysis suggesting that van Dokkum's team had mismeasured the distance to the galaxy, meaning its visible matter was much dimmer and lighter than the first findings and that more of its mass was in dark matter than was previously suggested.
9. What's up with the DAMA/LIBRA results?
(Image credit: Pigi Cipelli/Getty)
A long-standing mystery in particle physics are the puzzling results of a European experiment known as DAMA/LIBRA. This detector — located in an underground mine below the Gran Sasso mountain in Italy — has been searching for a periodic oscillation in dark matter particles. This oscillation should arise as the Earth moves in its orbit around the sun while flying through the galactic stream of dark matter surrounding our solar system, sometimes called the dark matter wind. Since 1997, DAMA/LIBRA has claimed to see exactly this signal, though no other experiment has seen anything like this.
10. Could dark matter have an electrical charge?
(Image credit: Shutterstock)
A signal from the beginning of time has led some physicists to suggest that dark matter might have an electrical charge. Radiation with a wavelength of 21 centimeters was emitted by stars in the universe's infancy, just 180 million years after the Big Bang. It was then absorbed by cold hydrogen that was around at the same time. When this radiation was detected in February of this year, its signature suggested that the hydrogen was much colder than scientists had predicted. Astrophysicist Julian Muñoz of Harvard University hypothesized that dark matter with an electrical charge could have drawn heat away from the all-pervasive hydrogen, sort of like ice cubes floating in lemonade, as he told Live Science at the time. But the conjecture has yet to be confirmed.
11. Can ordinary particles decay into dark matter?
(Image credit: Shutterstock)
Neutrons are regular matter particles with a limited lifetime. After around 14.5 minutes, a lone neutron unmoored from an atom will decay into a proton, an electron and a neutrino. But two different experimental setups give slightly different lifetimes for this decay, with the discrepancy between them about 9 seconds, according to experiments cited in a July study in the journal Physical Review Letters. Earlier this year, physicists suggested that if 1 percent of the time, some neutrons were decaying into dark-matter particles, it could account for this anomaly. Christopher Morris from the Los Alamos National Laboratory, in New Mexico, and his team monitored neutrons for a signal that could be dark matter but were unable to detect anything. They suggested that other decay scenarios might still be possible, according to the study.
12. Does dark matter actually exist?
(Image credit: NASA)
Given the difficulties that scientists have faced trying to detect and explain dark matter, a reasonable questioner might wonder if they're going about it all wrong. For many years, a vocal minority of physicists have pushed the idea that perhaps our theories of gravity are simply incorrect, and that the fundamental force works differently on large scales than we expect. Often known as "modified Newtonian dynamics," or MOND models, these suggestions posit that there is no dark matter and the ultrafast speeds at which stars and galaxies are seen to rotate around one another is a consequence of gravity behaving in surprising ways. "Dark matter is still an unconfirmed model," wrote physicist Don Lincoln in an explainer for Live Science. Yet the detractors have yet to convince the larger field of their ideas. And the latest evidence? It also suggests that dark matter is real
Scientists just debunked the most popular explanation for one of the solar system's largest craters.
The South Pole-Aitken basin (represented by the shades of blue at the center) stretches 1,550 miles (2,500 kilometers) across and is one of the solar system’s largest craters. The dashed circle indicates the spot where researchers found a weird material beneath the basin that contains metal.
Billions of years ago, something slammed into the dark side of the moon and carved out a very, very large hole. Stretching 1,550 miles (2,500 kilometers) wide and 8 miles (13 km) deep, theSouth Pole-Aitken basin, as the tremendous hole is known to Earthlings, is the oldest and deepest crater on the moon, and one of the largest craters in the entire solar system.
For decades, researchers have suspected that the gargantuan basin was created by a head-on collision with a very large, very fast meteor. Such an impact would have ripped the moon's crust apart and scattered chunks of lunar mantle across the crater's surface, providing a rare glimpse at what the moon is really made of. (Spoiler: It's not cheese.) That theory gained some credence earlier this year, when China's Yutu-2 rover, which settled into the bottom of the crater aboard the Chang'e 4 lander in January, discovered traces of minerals that seemed to originate from the moon's mantle.
Now, however, a study published Aug. 19 in the journal Geophysical Research Letters throws those results — and the crater's origin story — into question. After analyzing the minerals in six plots of soil at the bottom of the South Pole-Aitken basin, a team of researchers argues that the crater's composition is all crust and no mantle, suggesting that whatever impact opened the crater billions of years ago did not hit hard enough to spray the moon's innards onto the surface.
"We are not seeing the mantle materials at the landing site as expected," study co-author Hao Zhang, a planetary scientist at the China University of Geosciences, said in a statement. These findings all but rule out a direct collision with a high-velocity meteor and raise the question: What, if not a head-on meteor strike, created the largest crater on the moon?
Lighting up the dark side
In their new study, the researchers used a technique called reflection spectroscopy to identify specific minerals in the lunar soil based on how individual grains reflected visible and near-infrared light.
Using equipment aboard the Yutu 2 rover, the team conducted reflectance tests on six patches of soil in the first two days following Chang'e 4's landing, venturing about 175 feet (54 meters) away from the lander. With the help of a database that identifies lunar minerals based on a variety of factors — including size, reflectance and degradation due to solar wind — the team estimated the mineral concentration in each of the plots.
Yutu 2 found a strangely colored substance in a crater on the far side of the moon.
(Image credit: China Lunar Exploration Project)
A crystalline rock called plagioclase was by far the most abundant mineral in each sample, accounting for 56% to 72% of the crater's composition, the researchers wrote. Formed as primordial oceans of lava cool, plagioclase is extremely common in the crusts of Earth and the moon alike, but it's less abundant in their mantles. Though the team detected other minerals in the crust that are more common in the moon's mantle, such as olivine, these rocks made up too small a fraction of the soil samples to suggest that part of the mantle had broken through the crust.
This mineral makeup complicates the theory that a giant, high-velocity meteor created the South Pole‐Aitken basin billions of years ago, as such an impact almost certainly would have scattered chunks of mantle over the lunar surface.
So, what, then, created the crater? The researchers did not speculate in the new study. However, prior research has suggested that a renegade space rock is still the culprit, but the hit may not have been so direct. A study published in 2012 in the journal Science argued that a slightly slower-moving meteor could have struck the back of the moon at an angle of about 30 degrees and resulted in an appropriately large crater that never disturbed the moon's mantle. However, those researchers had only simulations to go on.
If nothing else, the new research suggests that there's a lot more exploring to do in the South Pole‐Aitken basin before an answer becomes apparent. See you on the dark side of the moon.
As the amount of orbiting space junk increases, what happens when it drops from the sky? German scientists are trying to find out.
By Richard Hollingham
“This is not the crazy stuff,” says Sebastian Willems, as the researcher leads me past a glass case full of futuristic models of sleek silver spaceplanes at the German space agency’s (DLR) wind tunnel facility in Cologne. Nor is the crazy stuff to be found in the magnificently retro control gallery with its giant console of gauges, switches and knobs.
We enter a windowless room through a giant blast door, where the walls are charred and the air is rich with the disconcerting smell of explosives. This is where they test the aerodynamics of rocket engines.
But this isn’t the crazy stuff either.
No, Willems’ “crazy” experiment involves using one of the centre’s wind tunnels to simulate what happens when satellites re-enter the atmosphere.
Could sections of dead satellites survive re-entry to hit something or, worse, someone?
“There are a lot of satellites in orbit and they will come down sooner or later,” he says. “They’ll probably break up and the question for us is: what is the chance of an impact?”
In other words, could sections of dead satellites survive re-entry to hit something or, worse, someone?
The wind tunnel being deployed for Willems’ experiment resembles a giant deconstructed vacuum cleaner attached to a pressure cooker, arranged across a concrete floor. The gleaming machine is covered in a mass of pipes and wires. Capable of producing air currents of up to 11 times the speed of sound, the wind tunnel is used for testing the aerodynamics of supersonic and hypersonic aircraft designs.
At its heart is a two-metre-high spherical metal chamber where the test objects are held in special clamps. Instead of using these restraints, however, Willem is releasing objects through the airflow – set at around 3,000km/h (1,860 mph) (more than twice the speed of sound) to simulate atmospheric re-entry.
Most satellites break up into smaller pieces when they re-enter the atmosphere
(Credit: Getty Images)
“The idea is to let objects fall through the flow of air,” says Willems. “We want to look at them in free flight as they drop through the flow.
“We only have a test time of 0.2 seconds,” he says, “but in this time we can take a lot of pictures and measurements.” Data from the experiments will be fed into computer models to improve predictions of how satellites descend to Earth.
Watch how DLR predicted how its Rosat satellite would break up
The 500,000 or so lumps of space debris surrounding our planet range from tiny fragments of metal to entire bus-sized satellites, such as the European Space Agency’s Envisat spacecraft that fell unexpectedly silent in April 2012.
“As a general trend it’s fair to say the number of objects we’re tracking in orbit is going up,” says Hugh Lewis, senior lecturer in aerospace engineering at the University of Southampton in southern England.
It’s going to be a persistent problem for a long time to come – Hugh Lewis, University of Southampton
As the amount of debris in orbit grows, the chances of a piece of space junk hitting other satellites or a crewed spacecraft increases. In fact the International Space Station has to be regularly moved to new orbits to avoid possible collisions.
“We’ve seen objects re-enter the atmosphere since the beginning of the space age,” says Lewis. “Typically one big object re-enters the Earth’s atmosphere every three-to-four days – it’s going to be a persistent problem for a long time to come.”
Although entire satellites cannot survive the fiery return to Earth, many of their larger components do. “You can see things such as propellant tanks,” says Lewis. “These lozenge-shaped objects can be around the size of a small car.”
Most failing satellites are controlled to crash over empty oceans
(Credit: Getty Images)
Willems is not dropping any small cars through the DLR wind tunnel but he does want to examine how larger objects behave as they come apart, to determine which bits survive to reach the ground.
“The airflow around one component will interact with the air flow around other parts,” he says, “which means they might survive differently than if they re-entered on their own.”
So with all this material falling from the skies on a regular basis, why aren’t chunks of space junk littering our landscape, falling through our roofs or hitting us on the head?
The odds of being struck by a chunk of old satellite are tiny
In most cases, the answer is because mission controllers plan how their dying satellites return to Earth – using remaining fuel to push them out of orbit on controlled trajectories to burn up over remote areas of ocean. However, it is the unplanned re-entries of dead spacecraft that are of greater concern.
One of the most recent unplanned re-entries was Nasa’s Upper Atmosphere Research Satellite (UARS) in 2011. Even taking into account that 70% of the Earth is covered in ocean and large areas of the world are still sparsely populated, Lewis says there was still a 1 in 2,500 chance that UARS could have caused a casualty somewhere on the planet.
“We start to get concerned when the risk to population is 1 in 10,000,” he says. “That’s not the chance of you being hit – which is obviously extremely remote – but the chance of someone being hit.”
With more satellites, there will be more re-entries
– Hugh Lewis
Given that more than a million people die in road crashes each year, the odds of being struck by a chunk of old satellite are tiny. It still matters, however, as the nation that launches the spacecraft is legally and financially responsible under UN agreements for any damage. Space agencies are therefore keen to keep the risks of objects falling from the sky to a minimum. The experiments at DLR will be used to help better understand and track space debris, so even unplanned re-entries can be more accurately monitored.
With launches getting cheaper and satellites smaller, in the coming decades more and more spacecraft will be launched. “The benefits we can get from utilising space are increasing but the space debris situation is getting worse,” says Lewis. “With more satellites, there will be more re-entries.”
So although you are extremely unlikely to be hit by a plummeting spacecraft, the number of objects falling from the sky will rise. Nothing launched into orbit is gone forever.
If you liked this story, sign up for the weekly bbc.com features newsletter, called “If You Only Read 6 Things This Week”. A handpicked selection of stories from BBC Future, Earth, Culture, Capital, Travel and Autos, delivered to your inbox every Friday.
The search for extraterrestrial life has so far assumed our cosmic neighbours are organic. What if we’re dealing with artificial intelligence?
For more than a century we have been broadcasting our presence to the cosmos. This year, the faintest signals from the world’s first major televised event – the Nazi-hosted 1936 Olympics – will have passed several potentially habitable planets. The first season of Game of Thrones has already reached the nearest star beyond our Solar System.
So why hasn’t ET called us back?
There are plenty of obvious answers. Maybe there are no intelligent space aliens in our immediate cosmic vicinity. Perhaps they have never evolved beyond unthinking microbial slime or – based on our transmissions – aliens have concluded it is safer to stay away. There is, however, another explanation: ET is nothing like us.
One theory is that the aliens that may have created intelligent algorithms are no longer with us
(Credit: iStock)
“If we do find a signal, we shouldn’t expect it’s going to be some sort of soft squishy protoplasmic alien behind the microphone at the other end,” says Seth Shostak, senior astronomer for alien-hunting organisation Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (Seti).
Seti has been actively searching for signs of intelligent extraterrestrial life for more than half a century. Despite tantalising signals (such as this recent one), it has so far drawn a blank. But Shostak believes we should consider looking to our own future to imagine what aliens will be like.
“Perhaps the most significant thing we’re doing is to develop our own successors,” says Shostak. “If we can develop artificial intelligence within a couple of hundred years of inventing radio, any aliens we are likely to hear from have very likely gone past that point.”
The big question is whether the AI goes on to become conscious and define its own goals and decide it doesn’t need the biological creatures that developed it – Stuart Clark
“In other words,” he says, “most of the intelligence in the cosmos, I would venture, is synthetic intelligence and that may disappoint movie goers who expect little grey guys with big eyeballs, no clothes, no hair or sense of humour.”
The argument assumes that the creatures who built the first AIs – grey guys, hyper- intelligent pan-dimensional beings, sentient trees or whatever – are no longer around.
“Well they might be,” Shostak concedes, “but once you develop artificial intelligence you can use that to develop the next generation of thinking thing and so on – within 50 years you not only have a machine that’s far smarter than all the previous machines but certainly smarter than all humans put together.”
Anyone expecting the grey-skinned aliens from sci-fi films may be disappointed
(Credit: iStock)
“The big question,” says astronomer and author of the Search for Earth’s Twin, Stuart Clark, “is whether the AI goes on to become conscious and define its own goals and decide it doesn’t need the biological creatures that developed it.”
From the self-aware death machines of the Berserker books to the cyborgs of Battlestar Galactica or The Terminator, science fiction certainly has a rich seam of AIs taking over and wiping out their inferior biological creators. It is not, however, necessarily the inevitable path of any technological civilisation. Artificial Intelligence – truly thinking machines with synthetic super-brains – may not even be possible.
“It’s very unclear to me that this is inevitably going to happen,” says Clark. “But the key point is we are looking for something we imagine to be a bit like us and we’re limiting the search as a result.”
Seti could be looking for ET in the wrong place
Seti uses an array of radio telescope dishes in California to search for signals. The receivers are aimed at star systems where planets have been discovered by Earth or space telescopes such as Nasa’s Kepler observatory. These are planets which might have liquid oceans and life-supporting atmospheres – habitats that have made human evolution possible. But machine intelligences could live anywhere.
“That’s the whole problem,” says Shostak. “Not only could they be anywhere, it would make sense for them to go to places in the Universe where there were big sources of energy – if you’re going to do a lot of thinking, a lot of energy helps so maybe that’s the place to look.”
If this is the case, then Seti could be looking for ET in the wrong place. “Instead of having their own fields of radio telescopes,” says Clark, “maybe that money would be better spent equipping every observatory with piggyback equipment that looks at every signal that’s been received and look for repeating patterns.”
Should we be sending signals as well as listening for them?
(Credit: iStock)
Whether every observatory would agree to host a Seti sensor is a matter for debate. The technology might, however, reveal some other surprising astronomical discovery. We now know that pulsars are rapidly rotating neutron stars. When Jocelyn Bell discovered the first of these oscillating signals in 1967, only half-jokingly did the University of Cambridge team label it LGM1 for Little Green Men.
In the short term, Seti is likely to continue its search for life on Earth-like planets. “But,” says Shostak, “over the course of time if we can come up with some ideas of where you might find synthetic intelligence, I think they’ll be more and more experiments aimed at doing that.”
Another approach would be to broadcast messages from Earth to target regions of the cosmos. It is a controversial strategy that Stephen Hawking has warned could leave the Earth vulnerable to attack and exploitation. "We only have to look at ourselves to see how intelligent life might develop into something we wouldn’t want to meet,” he warned in 2010.
So are we any closer to discovering whether we are the lone intelligence – AI or not – in the Universe?
“I don’t agree,” Shostak says. “But Seti has no broadcasting capability and the other thing about broadcasting is that even if you do it, it might be a very long time before you get a response – depending how close the aliens are.”
So are we any closer to discovering whether we are the lone intelligence – AI or not – in the Universe? “I don’t think you can ever say there’s nothing there, you can’t prove that negative,” Shostak says. “What you can say is that there’s something wrong with our approach so, for me, it’s very, very early days to think about giving up.”
Clark agrees. “I think Seti should generalise its search as much as possible,” he says. “An answer to ‘yes there’s intelligent life in the Universe’ has profound implications for us and that alone qualifies Seti to carry on.”
If you liked this story, sign up for the weekly bbc.com features newsletter, called “If You Only Read 6 Things This Week”. A handpicked selection of stories from BBC Future, Earth, Culture, Capital, Travel and Autos, delivered to your inbox every Friday.
Boules orange au-dessus de l’A23 le samedi 14: les avez-vous vues?
Samedi 14 septembre, aux alentours de 22 h 40, cinq boules orange ont été aperçues par Julien (1) alors qu’il roulait sur l’A23 à hauteur de Rosult. Afin d’identifier ces boules, la MUFON, réseau d’enquêteurs et chercheurs sur les OVNI, lance un appel à témoignages.
Par Angèle Bayeul
Julien n’a pu filmer le phénomène que quelques secondes.
« J’étais sur la route pour aller à Lille avec mon épouse, quand nous avons aperçu dans le ciel cinq boules orange avec un point noir au milieu, au-dessus de l’A23. Elles se déplaçaient, stagnaient, puis repartaient. Il était environ 22 h 40. »
Mais qu’a vu Julien (1) ce samedi 14 septembre au soir dans le ciel ? Événement paranormal ? Arrivée discrète des extraterrestres ? Le quadra lillois serait plutôt du genre terre à terre mais confie avoir emprunté la première sortie d’autoroute pour mieux observer l’étrange phénomène qui se déroulait sous ses yeux. Sa route le mènera à Rosult près de Saint-Amand-les-Eaux.
« Je ne pense pas qu’elles dépendaient du vent, puisqu’elles allaient dans un sens et retournaient dans l’autre »
« Quand nous sommes arrivés à Rosult, il n’y en avait plus que trois boules. Je ne pense pas qu’elles dépendaient du vent, puisqu’elles allaient dans un sens et retournaient dans l’autre » analyse Julien, ce qui élimine, pour lui, la possibilité d’un vol de lanternes thaïlandaises. «L’une des boules s’est arrêtée au niveau d’une maison où se tenait une fête, comme si elle observait ce qu’il se passait, et quand j’ai voulu zoomer et en illuminer une avec mon téléphone, elle est partie. J’ai cru à des drones. » Mais qui pourrait bien espionner ces joyeux fêtards ?
Pour éclaircir ses eaux troubles, Julien a contacté le Mufon (Mutual UFO network), réseau de 14 enquêteurs et de chercheurs pour identifier les objets volants non identifiés (OVNI) « tout à fait respectable » selon le Geipan, organe officiel équivalent. Pascal Fechner, le directeur national, affirme que son travail est de récolter des témoignages et essayer de reconnaître les objets non identifiés de manière « rationnelle » et « factuelle ». « Le plus souvent, les phénomènes observés sont des lâchers de lanternes thaïlandaises, des astres, des planètes, des météorites et des drones. » Pas de Jupitériens à l’horizon, donc.
Appel à témoins
Pour permettre à l’enquête d’expliquer l’origine de ces boules orange vues dans la nuit du 14 septembre, le Mufon lance un appel à témoins avec, si possible, vidéos à l’appui.
PUBLIC INVITED TO VIEW A 100-DRONE AERIAL LIGHT SHOW
A musically choreographed flock of 100 drones will take to
the sky on Friday, September 20, at approximately 9 p.m. just east of the iHotel and Conference Center in Champaign. The special aerial performance is in celebration of the 75th anniversary of the Department of Aerospace Engineering at the University of Illinois.
Photo provided by Firefly Drone Shows
“When the department was founded in 1944, unmanned aerial vehicles—drones, were the stuff of science fiction. Today, they’re used in all sorts of applications and represent one of the cutting-edge technologies our researchers and students are working on in the department,” said Professor and Interim Head of the Dept. of Aerospace Engineering Greg Elliott. “As we kick off a year-long celebration of aerospace at Illinois, we are particularly excited to be able to share this professional drone show with the community.”
The show is produced by Firefly Drone Shows and will be customized with a nod to the department's 75th anniversary.
The show soundtrack will be simulcast on WPGU radio at 107.1 FM. Audio can also be heard through WPGU app or TuneIn Radio, both of which are available on the App Store or Google Play.
If it rains on the evening of Sept. 20, the drone show will be reschedule
Elliott mentioned another public event scheduled for April 11 as part of the 75th anniversary year. The department will co-host a showing of the movie Apollo 13 at the Virginia Theatre with a panel of aerospace experts following the film.
Riverbanks Center Marikina successfully pulled a first in the metro to do a fully automated light drones show in public. Enjoy the show! Kaway-Kaway fellow Marikenos! Kakaiba din eh..
A fleet of 1,180 unmanned drones put on a show like no others in south China's Guangzhou. The drones altogether weigh over one tonne. But they are controlled by just one engineer with one computer.
Intel dazzled its Folsom audience on July 15, 2018 with a spectacular light show designed to feature 1,500 drones, in an effort to outdo its previous world record of 1,218 Intel Shooting Star drones. The performance displayed multicolored choreography including bright, fireworks-like orbs.
Avengers Endgame Malaysia drone show with 300 drone by marvel studio and drone programmed by Intel. Avengers drone show location was 300M around Kuala Lumpur tower.
Its a well known fact among UFO researchers that these long clouds with perfect dimensions are tunnels for UFOs to travel through safely and unseen by human eyes. The 1989 Rapid City, South Dakata event of four such clouds all starting over the city documented over 25 727 size glowing foreseen balls of light appearing at the beginning of each of the four tunnels, as if taking turns...as one began moving down the cloud tunnel...another would appear in a cloud tunnel two tunnels over and begin to pulse and then move slowly thought the tunnel, easily seen due to its powerful light hitting the edges of the tunnel from within. Each sat still for about 10 seconds, then began its journey slowly...increasing speed as it moved until it was moving at the speed of a jet as it disappeared over the horizon within the tunnels. This UFO tunnel cloud over Huntington, California is the same. It allows UFOs to rise up our of under ground and under water bases and to move across the sky unseen so that they can reach another alien base in a different location on Earth. Scott C. Waring
Eyewitness states:
Taken from the HB pier. This strange cloud came from Newport, and was gone as quickly as it arrived. It brought a lot of wind with it. Was very pretty though! Never seen anything like it in my life. Rare occurrence?
This photo was in false color...to make the red planet red..so thoughtful of NASA. So I put it back into normal color. This is what Mars really looks like.
I found a face unlike any I have ever found before...understand I've found thousands. This face is part buffalo and part baboon. Its very big, about 2 meters across. Its sitting upright and looking to the distant hills. The nostrils of the face are big and flat like a baboon nose. The ridges over the eyes are muscular and powerful...showing its aggression and strength. It almost seems like the head of an ancient greek godlike creature. Its open mouth as if it were about to say something...its ears seem to curl like small horns on the side of its head. Not a creature you would like to come face to face with in a dark alley. Faces are important to search for. They tell us more about the species that once lived on Mars than any other artifact ever could. Never in history has a more precious and more significant discovery been made than that of the face of an ancient person. Scott C. Waring
Mysterious blue beam in the sky lights up the trees in Tasmania, Australia
Strange things happen in our sky, the following images show a strange blue beam in the sky illuminating the trees in Tasmania, Australia, photographed on April 28, 2019.
It seems unlikely that the phenomenon is a camera lens flare since underneath the blue beam of light you can see some sort of energy field that lights up the trees.
Original image of the strange blue beam in Tasmania, Australia submitted to Mufon.
Could it be that this beam of light, whether man-made or extraterrestrial, is a directional projection of energy coming from an unknown source in our atmosphere?
videos peter2011
Those Mysterious Blue Lights Are From NASA.
NASA assures that the chemicals – called vapor tracers – are as harmless as fireworks. In fact, in the mix of barium, lithium and trimethylaluminum in the vapor tracers are the same ingredients found in fireworks.
WETENSCHAP & PLANEETEen langsvliegende satelliet heeft foto’s genomen van de zuidkant van de maan, waar eerder deze maand een Indiase maanlander moest neerkomen. Zonder resultaat.
Tijdens de landing werd het contact verbroken met het onbemande tuig, en tot nog toe is het onduidelijk wat er met het apparaat is gebeurd. Ook de foto’s die het Amerikaanse ruimtevaartinstituut NASA nu heeft vrijgegeven, verschaffen niet echt meer duidelijkheid.
Lees ook
India verliest vlak voor maanlanding contact met ruimtetuig
Volgens NASA heeft het betrokken team de lander tot nu toe niet kunnen lokaliseren of fotograferen. “Het was schemer toen het landingsgebied werd gefotografeerd en daarom bedekten grote schaduwen een groot deel van het terrein; het is mogelijk dat de Vikram-lander verborgen ligt in een schaduw”, klinkt het nog. De satelliet van NASA zal in oktober nogmaals langsvliegen, als er meer licht is, en opnieuw foto’s nemen.
De lander, met aan boord een rover (Pragyan), steeg op 22 juli op vanaf aarde en op 7 september verloor het controlecentrum het contact. Volgens NASA is de lander gecrasht. Het was de bedoeling dat Vikram en Pragyan samen de bodem bij de zuidpool van de maan zouden gaan onderzoeken. Daar is misschien waterijs te vinden.
AFP
NASA✔@NASA
Our @LRO_NASA mission imaged the targeted landing site of India’s Chandrayaan-2 lander, Vikram. The images were taken at dusk, and the team was not able to locate the lander. More images will be taken in October during a flyby in favorable lighting. More: https://go.nasa.gov/2n03HuV
NASA recently announced the Artemis lunar exploration program, consolidating its plans plans to land humans on the moon by 2024 and establish a sustainable base there by 2028. This ambitious initiative revives an old question: Will the unique qualities of the lunar surface enable new frontiers in astronomy?
A few decades ago, astronomers had already begun to contemplate different ways their observations could benefit from the absence of an atmosphere on the moon. First, energetic particles such as gamma rays, x-rays,ultraviolet photons or cosmic rayswould not be blocked by an atmospheric blanket as they are on earth, and hence they would reach telescopes with large collecting areas mounted to the lunar surface.Second, observatories sensitive to optical, infrared, millimeter or radio waves could reach their diffraction limit without the blurring or absorption associated with passage through turbulent air.Arrays of detectors could therefore constitute giant interferometers with unprecedented angular resolution.
Third, the lack of an ionosphere would allow radio observatories to receive signals at very low frequencies, below the terrestrial cutoff of 10 kilohertz.This would open a new spectral window into the universe, allowing to map the three-dimensional distribution of hydrogen atoms from their first appearance 0.4 million year after the big bang and through the cosmic dawn, using the highly redshifted 21-centimeter line. Although exciting and path breaking in their own right, these visions were all formulated well before the emergence of the frontier of astrobiology associated with the search for extraterrestrial life.
Can the moon provide clues for extraterrestrial life? A new paper I wrote with Manasvi Lingamanswers this question in the affirmative. The idea is to consider the moon’s surface as a fishing net for interstellar objects collected over time and potentially deliver building blocks of life from the habitable environments around other stars.
The lack of a lunar atmosphere guarantees that these messengers would reach the lunar surface without burning up. In addition, the geological inactivity of the moon implies that the record deposited on its surface will be preserved and not mixed with the deep lunar interior. Serving as a natural mailbox, the lunar surface collected allimpacting objects during the past few billions of years. Most of this “mail” comes from within the solar system.
But the solar system also intercepts objects from interstellar space, ranging from dust particles to free-floating planets and stars. A detection of the first interstellar object, ‘Oumuamua, with a size on the order of 100 meters was reported in 2017.This year, ‘Oumuamua’s cousin was tentatively discovered in the form of a meter-size meteor from outside the solar system that burned up in Earth’s atmosphere in 2014. And most recently, yet another interstellar visitor may have been identified.
Given the search volume and duration of the surveys that made these detections, it is now possible, for the first time, to calibrate the flux of interstellar objects (assuming they enter the solar system on random trajectories). With this calibration at hand, one can calculate the amount of interstellar material that has collected on the moon’s surface over its history. The buildup of interstellar matter can also be observed in real time; another new paper with my undergraduate student, Amir Siraj, showed that a two-meter telescope on a satellite in orbit around the moon can observe interstellar impactors as they crash.
In case some interstellar impactors carry the building blocks of extraterrestrial life, one could extract these biomarkers by analyzing lunar surface samples. Moon rocks delivered to Earth by the Apollo mission were likely contaminated by terrestrial life and are not a viable alternative to a dedicated experimental base on the moon.
Identifying biomarkers from debris of material that originated in the habitable zone around other stars would inform us about the nature of extraterrestrial life. The fundamental question is whether distant life resembles the biochemical structures we find on Earth. Similarities might imply that there exists a unique chemical path for life everywhere or that life was transferred between systems. Either way, a lunar study shortcuts the need to send spacecraft on extremely long missions to visit other star systems.
Getting similar information from a trip to the nearest star system—Alpha Centauri A, B or C—would take nearly nine years round-trip, even if the spacecraft were to travel at the maximum speed allowed in nature, the speed of light;the first half of this period is required for reaching the target and the second half for the information to get back to us.With chemical rockets, this journey would take about 100,000 years, on the order of the timethatelapsedsince the first modern humans began migrating out of Africa.Excavating the lunar surface for physical evidence of extraterrestrial life is dramatically faster.
Based on the newly calibrated flux of interstellar objects, their debris should constitute up to 30 parts per million of lunar surface material.Extrasolar organics might amount to a fraction of an order of a= few parts per 10 million. Amino acids, which serve as the building blocks of “life as we know it,” could amount to a few parts per hundred billion. Standard spectroscopic techniques can be employed to examine individual grains within the lunar regolith and search for signatures that would flag them as extrasolar before unraveling the building blocks of extraterrestrial life within them.
How can extrasolar origin be identified? The simplest flag would be a deviation from the unique solar ratio for isotopes of oxygen, carbon or nitrogen. Laboratories have already demonstrated the feasibility of this method at the required sensitivity levels.
But there is also the exciting opportunity for detecting biosignatures of extinct extraterrestrial life. On Earth, the oldest microfossils, with unambiguous evidence for cells that lived about 3.4 billion years ago, were discovered in the Strelley Pool Formation in Western Australia. It would be tantalizing to find microfossils of extraterrestrial forms of life on the moon. Even more exciting would be to find traces of technological equipment that crashed on the lunar surface a billion years ago, amounting to a letter from an alien civilization saying, “We exist.” Without checking our mailbox, we would never know that such a message arrived.
The opportunity to discover signs of extraterrestrial life provides a new scientific incentive for a sustainable base on the lunar surface. The moon is well known for its romantic appeal, but astrobiology offers a twist on this notion. Here’s hoping that the moon will inform our civilization that we are not alone and that someone else is waiting for us out there.
The views expressed are those of the author(s) and are not necessarily those of Scientific American.
Maan mogelijk bezaaid met organismen en technologie van buiten ons zonnestelsel. Harvard-astronoom waagt zich aan opmerkelijke theorie
Een astronoom van de Harvard-universiteit heeft gezegd dat er mogelijk bewijs van buitenaards leven op de maan kan worden gevonden.
Volgens Abraham Loeb is de maan om diverse redenen de ideale plek om te zoeken naar sporen van aliens.
Omdat de maan geen atmosfeer heeft, zullen ruimtereizigers het maanoppervlak bereiken zonder te verbranden.
Natuurlijke brievenbus
Daarnaast is er geen geologische activiteit op de maan, waardoor alles wat in het verleden is neergekomen op het hemellichaam, bewaard zal blijven.
Loeb stelt dat het maanoppervlak een soort ‘natuurlijke brievenbus’ is die allerlei soorten materialen bevat, waaronder materiaal dat mogelijk afkomstig is van aliens.
Denk daarbij aan biomarkers die ons iets kunnen vertellen over hoe dat buitenaardse leven eruitziet.
Helemaal fantastisch
Er zouden zelfs microfossielen of buitenaardse levensvormen op de maan kunnen zijn, aldus de astronoom.
Maar het zou natuurlijk helemaal fantastisch zijn om sporen van technologische apparatuur te vinden die een miljard jaar geleden op het maanoppervlak is neergekomen.
Daarmee zegt een buitenaardse beschaving eigenlijk ‘we bestaan’, stelt Loeb.
Basis
Hij pleit voor een basis op het maanoppervlak om te kunnen zoeken naar buitenaardse levensvormen of voorwerpen.
Vorig jaar suggereerde de Harvard-astronoom dat een interstellaire bezoeker in ons zonnestelsel genaamd Oumuamua een buitenaardse sonde was.
Is it possible that aliens are not just visiting us, abducting us and learning about us, but also eating us (albeit in a very weird way)? As disturbing and as nightmarish as it might sound, that may well be exactly what is going down. Over the years I have come across cases involving people who have crossed paths with the dreaded Men in Black – only to find themselves falling sick, ill and weak in incredibly short periods of time. It’s as if the MIB are predatory, vampire-like entities. The main difference: one is a fictional entity that feeds on blood and the other is an all too real figure in black. It’s very much the same with the creepy Black-Eyed Children: if you dare to let them in your home, they will drain you dry of your energy. The Shadow People, the Hat-Man, and the Grinning Man fall into this particular category, too. In the world of sci-fi, however, such a thing has occurred in a fashion that mirrors some of the claims concerning what may be afoot in the real world. A 1985 movie, Lifeforce was directed by horror legend, Tobe Hooper – who also directed the groundbreaking 1974 movie, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and the acclaimed 1979 TV mini-series version of Stephen King’s novel, Salem’s Lot.
That the movie featured many well-known actors, including Patrick Stewart (who, in 1987, took on the role of Captain Jean-Luc Picard in Star Trek: The Next Generation) should have made Lifeforce a big hit. Unfortunately, it was not a hit. At all. Cinema-based earnings didn’t even reach half of the $25 Million budget that had been allocated for the production of the movie. That said, for zombie fanatics, Lifeforce – based on Colin Wilson’s novel, The Space Vampires – should not be missed.
The movie begins in outer space, in 1986, the year that Halley’s Comet made its most recent appearance. A team of astronauts embark on a mission, in a NASA Space Shuttle called the Churchill (named after British Prime Minister Sir Winston Churchill), to rendezvous with the gigantic comet. On doing so, the crew is shocked to find that deep within Halley’s Comet there is a huge spacecraft of alien origins. Not only that, the ship is filled with numerous, dead, winged monsters and three very human-looking beings: two men and one woman. Unbeknownst to the astronauts, the three entities are not, as is first suspected, fellow Homo sapiens that have been abducted by the gargoyle-like creatures. They are one and the same. In other words, the aliens have the ability to morph into human form and back again. It isn’t long before all three are secretly brought to London, England for study at the fictional European Space Research Center. Despite being heavily guarded by British Army personnel, that’s when the trouble begins.
Clearly not dead, the trio of non-humans appears to be in a collective state of deep, suspended animation. Until, that is, they wake up. The woman, using what might be termed a form of extraterrestrial hypnotism, entrances one of the troops and – utterly naked – moves towards the man, seemingly to kiss him on the lips. This is no normal kiss, however. As the alien female embraces the soldier, she drains his body of its vital energy – the life-force, in other words, of the movie’s title. His body falls to the ground, as a withered, shrunken husk, and the alien escapes from the facility. A couple of hours later, a shocking development occurs. While the military team overseeing the project – and acting to keep everything under wraps and away from the public and the media – tries to figure out what is afoot, word comes in that the body of a woman has been found in nearby woods. She, too, is as withered as an old, leathery Egyptian mummy. When her body is brought to the space center for study, it reanimates – as does the body of the dead soldier. They, too, are now crazed undead entities needing to feed on vital life-energy. A doctor is then violently attacked and bitten. He also dies and returns as a savage monster. And with the morphed alien on the loose, it’s not long before London is engulfed in an epidemic, one in which the living first become the dead, but who then mutate into something far worse.
In a neat twist, the team comes to believe that these energy-sucking aliens – and the people they infect – are responsible for our centuries-old legends and folklore of bloodsucking vampires. But, in reality, it’s energy, and not blood, that the reanimated so badly need. And they don’t dress like cloaked Count Dracula, either. One hundred percent zombie-like in appearance, the ragged dead rise up in violent style, rampaging around the streets of London in huge throngs, attacking the living, sucking them dry, and ensuring their victims soon become marauding killers, just like them. The fate of the entire human race is now precariously hanging in the balance. It’s accurate and fair to say that Lifeforceis an unusual and highly alternative production that blends together three, distinct genres that are generally kept poles apart from each other: zombies, vampires, and science-fiction. Notably, however, all three are successfully fused into what is an entertaining – but unfortunately much under-appreciated – production. A movie that parallels reality? Maybe…
While the great unwashed Facebook hordes were storming Area 51 in Nevada, something equally strange transpired over Minnesota in an area known locally as “Spot 51”. Friday, September 20th, Todd Mitchell, owner of Country Campground in Detroit Lakes, MN, ran his 24-hour security video camera just like any other evening. But this night he wondered if it might document something more exciting than camper arrivals, perhaps some dramatic lightning strikes from an incoming thunderstorm. What he didn’t know was he had recorded something even more extraordinary.
Later when Mitchell reviewed his footage, he forgot all about the lightning when he noticed what appeared to be a fuzzy, black object flitting erratically among the storm clouds, trailing what could be easily mistaken for dark fumes behind it. To the viewer’s eye, it sure looks like a skybound smoke monster, repeatedly performing feats of aerial acrobatics before it vanishes into thin air. Or perhaps it’s an alien spaceship suffering the effects of a faulty exhaust system. Or maybe someone just let the air out of one prime specimen of Charles Fort’s normally invisible sky jellyfish. Any of those options qualify the strange object as Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP).
Mitchell provided the footage to his TV news station, noting that on a local map, the Detroit Lakes Chamber of Commerce identifies Country Campground as “Spot 51”. The video combined with that revelation resulted in yucks and ample banter at the end of WDAY’s Sept. 25th evening news broadcast. But at least they didn’t play the X-Files theme music.
Looks like I spoke to soon! They saved the X-Files theme music for the second report. To their credit, the TV crew visited the scene, interviewed Mitchell, and even delved into the county’s UFO-related history.
Some may propose that the object Mitchell captured is merely a bug on the lens or some other equally pedestrian explanation. I contacted witness Todd Mitchell and he provided a link to three video clips, which he has uploaded to YouTube for your examination.
Mitchell acknowledges that some of the office to the back of the camera is reflected by the double pane window he shoots the video through. He identifies the small lights to the left and the center of the screen as the reflection of his “Dish Network rack system”. To the far right side, there is additional room reflection.
In Part 1, the video seemed perfectly normal until Mitchell drew my attention, about 10 seconds in, to a tiny, barely perceivable black dot off to the right of the screen, in the part of the sky just above a small tree. The dot moves slowly upward in a more-or-less straight line. Of all three of the objects appearing in these video clips, this one most clearly seems to demonstrate the crawling movement of a bug. It traverses the screen smoothly, seemingly unaffected by wind shear or changes in sky composition, as if creeping across a perfectly flat surface.
In Part 2, we see much more erratic moment, that is also consistent with bugs flying close to the lens. However, the smokey trailing effect following the movement is interesting, but may just indicate video blurring caused by extreme speed.
Part 3, is the most curious because at the last moment some commenters point out that the object seems to weave through a cloud.
When I asked Mitchell if he had ever experienced anything strange or paranormal before his response was, “Oh, heck, no!” “There’s a lot of things that you can generally explain or guess at. But for this I have no guesses,” he says.
When Mitchell’s footage went public, a Native American man stopped by the campground for a visit. He came to share with Mitchell the possibility that perhaps the mysterious sky dweller Mitchell captured on video was a sacred Thunder Being — a bringer of life, a protector of humanity, and an important part of the man’s native heritage. Mitchell intends to review past footage to see if there is any correlation between thunderstorms and the appearance of the strange objects. If there is some relationship to thunderstorms, perhaps that will help explain the similarities between Mitchell’s footage and another strange object spotted in Nebraska during a thunderstorm in 2015.
So what’s your take, is this simply the work of displaced insects attracted to the lights of the campground or could it be something far stranger?
The Sahara Desert is vast, generously dusty, and surprisingly shy about its age. New research looking into what appears to be dust that the Sahara blew over to the Canary Islands is providing the first direct evidence from dry land that the age of the Sahara matches that found in deep-sea sediments: at least 4.6 million years old.
“People have been trying to figure it out for several decades,” said Daniel Muhs, a geologist with the U.S. Geological Survey in Denver, Colorado. “More recent studies said it was the beginning of the Pleistocene (about 2.6 million years ago). Then others say a few thousand years ago.” Added to this is a model suggesting the Sahara Desert first appeared as far back as seven million years ago.
Desert dust from Africa is transported west to the Canary Islands and
the CapeVerde Islands every year. Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) image of “Calima” (dust storm) event on 8 March 2006, taken from the Terra satellite.
Image courtesy of Jeff Schmaltz, MODIS Land Rapid Response Team at NASA/GSFC.
There is also other evidence that the desert has taken breaks and had wetter, greener periods interspersed with arid times. It’s this sensitivity to climate—and the Sahara’s role in global climate—that makes the region so interesting to researchers.
The new work by Muhs and his colleagues in the Canary Islands focused on thick layers of fine reddish-brown soil found among layers of volcanic rocks and dune sands on Fuerteventura and Gran Canaria islands. The islands are off the west coast of North Africa, at the mouth of a spigot that seasonally pours windblown dust off of the Sahara and across the Atlantic Ocean. Muhs is presenting the results tomorrow at the annual meeting of the Geological Society of America in Phoenix, Arizona.
View from the ground on the Canary Islands on 8 March 2006, when the Calima arrived.
Credit: Daniel Muhs.
Muhs’s and his colleagues’ mission was to find, identify, and date any layers of ancient African dust in what are called paleosols, or buried, ancient soils. In one coastal location studied, they found layers of dunes made from local shells of sea animals; in another, there were layers of lava from the volcanoes that built the islands. Both of these geologic archives contained paleosols made of very fine-grained minerals rich in quartz and mica—minerals that do not reflect the local geology of the islands. They do, however, reflect the minerals found on the nearby African mainland.
Luckily for the geologists, the lava flows that sandwich the windblown fine-grained quartz and mica layers made it possible to nail down approximate ages of the Saharan dust. This is because volcanic rocks contain minerals with what are essentially isotopic clocks that start ticking when the minerals in the lava cool and solidify. And since the layers of lava, paleosols, and other local soils are stacked chronologically with the youngest on top, the lava flows provide some boundaries of when the Sahara was dry enough to launch massive dusty storms out over the Atlantic.
A paleosol on the island of Gran Canaria, sandwiched between basalt flows dated to 3.0–2.9 million years ago—to the Pliocene.
Credit: Daniel Muhs.
In all, the researchers report eight paleosols that record African dust piling up in the Canaries between about 4.8 and 2.8 million years ago, 3.0 to 2.9 million years ago, and at about 400,000 years ago. The oldest paleosols agree with the deep-sea cores, which put the earliest Sahara dust to the Atlantic at about 4.6 million years ago.
That’s not to say the Sahara is 4.6-million-years-old. That’s only as old as Muhs and his colleagues could determine based on the paleosols and lavas they found.
“We could take it further back in time if we can find the paleosols,” Muhs said.
Muhs’s presentation is entitled The Antiquity of the Sahara Desert: New Evidence From the Mineralogy and Geochemistry of Pliocene Paleosols on the Canary Islands, Spain (Paper No. 76-1; https://gsa.confex.com/gsa/2019AM/webprogram/Paper335207.html). It is scheduled for Monday, 23 Sept., at 8:05 am in Room 221AB, North Building of the Phoenix Convention Center. It is part of a session titled T2. Geomorphology and Climate Change in Hot Deserts.
Field work in this study for Muhs was supported by the Farouk El-Baz Award of the Geological Society of America
Contacts and sources:
Daniel Muhs, USGS Christa Stratton, Geological Society of America (GSA)
On Tuesday, April 25, 2001, a very strange object is reported by civilians and law enforcement officers in the evening skies near Waynesville, Ohio in Warren County.
From their residence near the 4600 Block of Wilkerson Road, a husband and wife are the first to report a circular lighted object hovering silently in the sky to the south of their location.
The big light of the UFO, pulsating or changing in both color and brightness, was said to be encased within a structure that resembled gridwork or cabling.
The couple advised the Lebanon City Police Department of the object around 10:15 p.m. and the Warren County Communications Center dispatched a Waynesville police officer to the location.
Upon arrival at the scene, the Waynesville officer confirmed the unidentifiable nature of the object and also reported that a second UFO was also in the area.
LOCAL: WHAT IS IT!
Unit #2W30: I have NO IDEA, and you wouldn’t believe it if you came out and saw it! There’s two of them, just sitting stationary and blinking, I mean about five different colors, right here on Wilkerson, just off of South Main Street…
FEMALE OFFICER: This is 480-16
Unit #2W30: I’m not kidding! Go ahead.
FEMALE OFFICER: Okay, we’re on the backside of that, here in the lot because I couldn’t stand it no more. Where is it at, is it in the air?
Unit #2W30: In the air! Okay? He’s got the owner of the house has some binoculars and we’re looking at these things and uh, it’s just I don’t know what they are!
They’re high up, they look like uh, they’re up there but with our binoculars though, the ones he’s got here, you can see them pretty clearly. There’s probably five different colors, there’s two of them and they’ve stayed in the exact same spot the whole time.
They’re not stars, I can tell you that.
As other officers respond to the location and continue to view the abnormalities, dispatchers at the Warren County Communications Center telephone a base operator at Wright Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton/Fairborne, Ohio and also places a call to Airborne Express at the Wilmington Airport in Clinton County, Ohio.
Both flight control facilities deny any knowledge of or responsibility for air traffic in the Waynesville, Ohio vicinity during the incident.
While the Waynesville police officers view the object from Wilkerson Road looking south, a police dispatcher also observes the same object from her position at the Warren County Communications Center in Lebanon, Ohio, looking north toward Waynesville. From review of the police tapes, it can be estimated that the primary object may have been in a general location between Waynesville and Lebanon near the intersections of Pekin Road and Route 42.
An officer with the Caesar’s Creek State Police also notes the UFO from his location to the east of Waynesville. A third UFO is sighted in the area during the event, and the police witnesses repeatedly affirm a cogent distinction between the suspected UFOs and routine stars and airplanes. The objects move off by receding further into the distance as other officers from the Ohio State Patrol arrive on the scene.
Dispatchers at the Ohio State Patrol and the Warren County Communications Center express frustration at having to handle this situation and their inability to address the reports and eyewitness confirmation from their officers.
The next evening, Wednesday, April 25, UFOs are again reported in the same area at 9:48 p.m., viewed from Wilkerson Road and also by officers observing from a location near the Waynesville Airport. Disturbingly, another unusual object is seen in the area seven hours later and reportedly pursues a motorist near Genntown, Ohio (about 5-miles from Waynesville).
A female complainant advises the Ohio State Patrol of her ‘extreme concern’ regarding a triangular object with “super bright lights” that pursued her automobile while traveling on Route 122 at 5:00 a.m., April 26.
These and other details were acquired from eyewitness interviews, analysis of various police reports and evaluation of police tapes acquired through the Warren County Director of Emergency Services. Additional data was gathered through field investigation conducted on April 27th and April 28th.
Consideration has been given to the possibility that this situation was engendered by a misperception of routine stars and planets by both civilians and police officers on both evenings. This theory was first advanced by Peter Davenport of the National UFO Reporting Center, who was advised of the incident by the Ohio State Patrol while the sighting was in progress.
The star ‘Sirius’ was identified by Davenport as a likely candidate for misperception, but after sober review of the police tapes acquired from the Warren County Department of Emergency Services, this attempt at explanation is not looked upon favorably.
UFO Sightings Not Less, But Reporting Them Is...But The Time Of Change Is Nearing, UFO Sighting News.
A lot of people around the world are noticing a significant drop in UFO sightings, but thats not true. The sighting numbers are the same. Its just that most of American news agencies became extremely frightened when Trump was elected US president in 2016...the world changed, not just for the US, but world wide news agencies...they stopped reporting UFO sightings. Why you ask? Because Trump was carrying on about news agencies pushing fake news...not UFO or alien, but in politics. But US news agencies took this personal...and apparently Trumps two words "fake news," that he uses to deflect political news he hates...worked, but not in the political area. It hit the UFO research area hard. It cut 95% of the UFO news coming out of news agencies in the USA almost immediately. He also influenced Facebook, Google and Youtube to change their algorithms to begin to give less attention and less views to UFO and alien related discoveries.
By 2017, world news agencies globally began to stop reporting UFO sightings and alien structures that were discovered. They learn and copy the US in the way that they do things...and sadly adopted this negative trait...and so the world currently believes sightings are getting less and less. But you and I know thats not true.
Even I have slowed down...not because I'm burning out or getting tired or can't find anything to report, but honestly I'm waiting for Trump to exit his presidential office. Its that moment in time that UFO news will stand a chance to begin to get back into the US and world news. But right now...many reporters seem to admire Trump too much and take his words to heart too much. Its like giving a kid a hammer...everything becomes a nail. So...UFO news takes the biggest hit, which leaves real sightings unreported and leaves many eyewitnesses not reporting too, because they see world news is frowning upon such things.
So...I have been waiting...since last year when I was thinking about this...and I am still waiting, holding back. Saving my energy and passion for the right moment in the race. Saving some of my best discoveries. The time is getting near.
Meer van UFO'S of UAP'S, ASTRONOMIE, RUIMTEVAART, ARCHEOLOGIE, OUDHEIDKUNDE, SF-SNUFJES EN ANDERE ESOTERISCHE WETENSCHAPPEN - DE ALLERLAATSTE NIEUWTJES